Cartoon Shows the Truth About Trump Derangement Syndrome

If it seems like everything the media reports on President Donald Trump is negative, that’s because it is. If it weren’t for Fox News, the number of positive stories about the Trump administration would be close to zero. Various studies have estimated that roughly 90% of the mainstream media’s coverage of the Trump administration is negative.

Ironically, that’s done more to erode trust in the media than in Trump. AF Branco’s cartoon (below) illustrates that humorously – and he’s right. A PBS poll found that Americans trust the Trump Administration over the mainstream media by a 37-30 margin. For as unpopular as they make Trump out to be – they ain’t doing much better! His poll numbers continue to rise in the face of overwhelmingly negative coverage, and Democrats odds of taking back Congress in the midterms continue to dwindle. (RELATED: Kristin Tate Talks Millennial Trump Support and 2018 Midterms).

Counter-intuitively, the negative coverage actually makes most people less likely to believe negative stories about Trump.

Think about it – how often do you see a negative headline on an article alleging to expose something damning about the Trump administration, and not even bother to read it knowing that it’ll be debunked within 24 hours?

Just to cite one recent example (and there are hundreds…. or maybe thousands), Rachel Maddow made the claim that when uploading footage of the Helinski summit onto the White House website, the Trump administration edited out the part where Putin said he preferred Trump over Hillary for President in 2016. (In 2012 Putin said he preferred Obama over Romney, by the way).

Take a look:

Of course, the problem is that the video on the White House’s website includes the exact segment that Maddow says was edited out. The offending tweet was shared over 11,000 times. But the correction? Not even 200 times:

This does appear to be a new tactic for the fake news media; push a bogus story knowing that it’ll spread like wildfire to millions of readers, and then issue a correction only a couple thousand people will read. You can tell that’s the strategy because Maddow still hasn’t removed the fake story from her twitter feed. She knows very well that people are continuing to be misled by her reporting, but if she’s called on it, she can just claim she issued a retraction (even though nobody saw it).

Here’s another example, where a reporter attempted to make Trump look clueless about what countries are part of NATO…. and then realized that Trump was actually right. Still, his fake claim got 3,000+ shares, while his correction for fewer than 100.

The media truly have missed the lesson of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” When Trump actually does something worth criticizing, people won’t know to take the media’s word for it. After all, they play Chicken Little in response to everything Trump does – so why believe that the sky actually is falling the thousandth time around?

When the media isn’t lying, they’re holding Trump to a standard they wouldn’t have held Obama to. The issue of child separations from illegal immigrants is exhibit A when it comes to a policy that was in effect during Obama’s entire presidency, yet didn’t receive one iota of coverage until Trump was in office (and midterms were approaching). Another recent example comes to the astounding 4.1% GDP growth reported for the second quarter. When Obama saw 2.6% GDP growth, the economy was “pulling ahead.” When Trump sees 4.1% growth, it’s growing “too fast” (yes, really).

What a selling point.

“Vote Democrat!”

“Why?”

“The economy is too good!”

Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and well, and it’s not going to help Democrats in November.