Don’t Blame Regretful Trump Voters, Blame the Media

By Jacob Weindling | February 27, 2025 | 4:54pm

Photo of NYT Publisher A.G. Sulzberger by Knight Foundation

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Don’t Blame Regretful Trump Voters, Blame the Media

It is understandable to feel a lot of different emotions when reading about Trump voters expressing regret only a little over a month into the term they voted for. Incandescent rage, despair, an epistemic crisis–I feel all of them and more reading these profiles. This is not an anecdotal shift either, there is plenty of polling at this point indicating a significant chunk of voters have already turned on Trump. Those of us plugged-in to politics simply cannot see it like those who do not consume political news do, and some folks just have to touch the stove to learn that it’s hot. But we must try to understand all our fellow voters if we are to truly save our republic, because this widespread and justified malaise is a major part of American democracy’s collapse, which began long before there was a President Trump, aided along by a bankrupt and corrupt media class who abdicated their core responsibility to inform the public.

Political scientists describe this part of the electorate as low information and low trust voters, and this isn’t an insult despite many high information and high trust partisan liberals seeing it as one. It is merely descriptive of their level of engagement in politics and how likely they are to innately trust our existing institutions. Liberals’ immense faith in our political institutions blinds them more than anyone else to what a majority of the electorate sees, and is at the root of the liberal/left divide in the Democratic Party, as well as the bewilderment over Trump winning two out of the last three elections. As a man once said not too long ago, “change doesn’t come from Washington; change comes to Washington.” If there is one thing voters have consistently voted for this century, it’s change.

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The simplest way to frame the basic dynamic distorting American politics is that if you count “didn’t vote” as a vote in 2024, it beat Trump by 12 million votes, and Kamala Harris by 14 million. If you are reading this, you are in the electorate’s minority.

Trump’s superpower is that his political outsider credibility appeals to the low trust and low information voters who so often become non-voters, and it renders him impervious to traditional political gravity. High information folks are always understandably astounded by this, but it’s a fact: voters look at Trump as more moderate than they looked at Harris. She campaigned as a generic Democrat and so voters looked at her the same way they look at the party, but Trump is Trump and can invent his own reality. This fabrication of a moderate MAGA is aided by his greatest allies in the mainstream media portraying reality through Trump’s eyes, as demonstrated when they elevated his lies around Project 2025 last year.

There was plenty of straightforward coverage earlier in the year with good headlines like this from NBC and others in the mainstream media: “Trump disavows Project 2025, but he has long-standing ties to some key architects.” Project 2025 polled horribly and the widespread coverage pointing out that it clearly was part of his platform hurt Trump. But then he made a push to really distance himself from it, and the media began printing his lies as their own headlines, like this one from The Hill: “Trump calls attempts to link him to Project 2025 ‘pure disinformation.’” By the September debate, the waters had been muddied to the point where Axios was comfortable writing deceptive headlines like “Trump denies any link to Project 2025 under pressure from Harris.”

These were lies. Dutifully printed by a media who had already reported how they were lies, and now this month, the author of Project 2025 was confirmed by the Senate to run the Office of Management and Budget which is currently dismantling the federal government.

The both-sides instincts of so much of our political media is one of Trump’s best assets (it’s always worth stressing that this problem is concentrated far more amongst editors and management than the legions of excellent journalists underneath them, like those who began spearheading mainstream media’s Project 2025 coverage before it was an issue worth discussing in an editor’s meeting). As soon as Trump starts bloviating, the certainty of their own reporting takes a backseat to “Trump says” and “Democrats allege,” because the defining feature of mainstream media’s management class is to never assert the facts of the situation in any political conflict between Democrats and Republicans, even if the facts are objective and had been established by their own journalists prior to each party’s political posturing.

This intellectually and morally bankrupt belief has real-world consequences, exemplified in today’s profile of a regretful Trump voter who lost her job with the U.S. Forest Service. A lie by Trump, elevated by the media, made it to a second-time voter who cast her first vote for Joe Biden in 2020, as the Washington Post reported.

Besides, motherhood was her most pressing concern. Cooper, 24, and her husband were trying to get pregnant, but the doctor said that IVF might be their best chance. Trump had promised to make it free. That is what she thought about in the voting booth.

This is where the knee-jerk reaction comes in to ridicule low information voters who could believe something that doesn’t comport with reality. The problem with that rude and arrogant belief is that this distortion of reality wasn’t invented by this voter. NBC, CBS, CNN, NPR and countless others printed Trump’s lie that he would provide free IVF treatments even though as Reproductive Freedom for All points out, on page 461 of Project 2025, it says that IVF is “fully obsolete and ethically unthinkable.” This woman’s misguided vote is the logical conclusion of the mainstream media’s abdication of their journalistic principles in favor of political stenography.

the woman in the original profile here clearly lacks object permanence, but in fairness so did an enormous amount of the political coverage of Trump by professional reporters

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— BeijingPalmer (@beijingpalmer.bsky.social) February 27, 2025 at 8:44 AM

The media’s management class and their favored political stenographers refuse to treat Trump like a normal politician even as their journalists uncover vast amounts of corruption, and the people in charge typically frame his lies and illegalities as “challenges” to the established order–which is exactly what most of the electorate wants out of politics. In December, I detailed how A.G. Sulzburger’s New York Times produces fake news in a classic style of article where they portrayed support for RFK’s brain-wormed healthcare agenda as more widespread than the data they quietly referenced says it is. While the NYT is perhaps the most common repeat offender of this Trump voter trope, taking anecdotal evidence and making it more prominent than data suggesting otherwise is a very common way that the media normalizes Donald Trump. This is the same dynamic that allows NBC to produce detailed reports about Trump’s clear connections to Project 2025 in June, then a few months of political fights over it later, they let Trump write their headline on it for them.

If high information, high trust liberals want to understand why their side keeps getting rebuked from both the right and left, they must understand how isolated they are—especially with the mainstream media who is basically only trusted by liberals and centrists in the Democratic Party. High trust folks are not very common these days, as we are approaching something of a climax to a half-century long trend of political distrust that began in Vietnam. Personally, I am far more bewildered by those who still trust the establishment political media these days than those who voted for Trump and now regret it.

Trump’s appeal is rooted in the shared distrust of the system most voters have, and this fabricated image is exacerbated by a pliant political media who is more than happy to distort the truth to such a degree that some poor woman just trying to become a mother thinks she is voting for Trump in her child’s best interests. If you’re angrier at her than the doltish political media class who have worked tirelessly as de facto PR managers for Trump, then you’ll never truly understand why modern politics is so broken. As Dave Levitan so eloquently stated last week, legacy media doesn’t even speak the right language to describe all this.