Why the Media Is Pro-Trump (yes, you read that right)

A lesson in how civilizations declines

There’s a little-remembered scandal from the Obama administration that I would like to bring to the attention of readers. I hope you’re sitting down, because it is truly shocking, and the fact that nobody talks about it today shows how biased journalists are.

During Obama’s second term, Attorney General Loretta Lynch was overseeing the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. In June 2016, she and Bill Clinton happened to be at the Phoenix airport at the same time. The former president approached Lynch’s plane and boarded for what both said was a brief, impromptu conversation. They later described it as a personal chat about grandchildren and golf. A DOJ Inspector General report found that there was no evidence of interference with the criminal case. Nonetheless, FBI Director James Comey later wrote that the outcry over the meeting was one of the factors that contributed to him deciding to bypass DOJ leadership and independently announce the FBI’s findings of the Clinton email scandal, which he did days later.

Got that? The FBI was looking into Hillary Clinton. Her husband briefly spoke to the attorney general. No wonder people voted for Trump! Such corruption at the highest levels of government! You don’t hate the media enough!

Alright, that’s enough sarcasm. I hope while reading this, you connected the story to more recent events and figured out something, which is that Trump has completely changed the meaning of the word “scandal.” He goes around publicly telling his subordinates who to go after, signs executive orders targeting specific individuals, and has even pushed out prosecutors for not bringing cases against people he wants to see arrested. Something like the Loretta Lynch meeting with Bill Clinton wouldn’t even register today. We’re not even talking about a president being involved in that case, but a brief chat between a suspect’s husband and the attorney general.

Or take the Hunter Biden scandal. He would allegedly go around using the family name in order to get placed on boards and find new business opportunities. Between 2013 and 2018, which covered the period his dad was vice president, Hunter made $11 million in business dealings. Despite Republican investigators in Congress looking for evidence that Joe Biden himself was in on it, and despite eventual access to Hunter Biden’s laptop, no concrete evidence has emerged that he was. Occasionally, Hunter would suggest to business associates that his dad was involved in his dealings, but given the absence of anything found to the contrary, it is most likely that the son was bluffing. Under oath, Hunter denied his father ever played a role in his projects. At one time, Congressional Republicans hyped up a supposed whistleblower, who conveniently emerged in time for the 2020 election claiming that he had direct knowledge of Joe Biden engaging in corruption, but that man was eventually sentenced to six years in prison for lying to the FBI. Before the 2020 election, Biden made 22 years of tax returns public, and there were no payoffs from Hunter listed on any of them. Rightists eventually had to settle for gawking over pictures of Hunter smoking crack that were on his laptop, which, again, notably did not include any evidence of wrongdoing by his father.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump personally profits off his position, and does so straightforwardly through his social media account and events he attends. The brazenness and extent of the sums involved are without precedent. Trump netted over $600 million in 2024 by, among other ventures, selling “Bibles, watches, perfumes, shoes, and NFTs”. His stake in Truth Social, a company that exists for no other reason than to host Trump’s posts, was worth $2.1 billion as of June, though to be fair that number would collapse if he ever sold his shares. As The New Yorker has written,

Many payments now flowing to Trump, his wife, and his children and their spouses would be unimaginable without his Presidencies: a two-billion-dollar investment from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince; a luxury jet from the Emir of Qatar; profits from at least five different ventures peddling crypto; fees from an exclusive club stocked with Cabinet officials and named Executive Branch.

Putting the numbers together, the author calculates that Trump and his family have made $3.4 billion off his time in politics. As many of the projects involve foreign investors and crypto, there are direct conflicts of interest involved. After a Chinese businessman pumped $75 million into crypto tokens backed by the Trump family, for example, the SEC stopped pursuing civil fraud charges against him.

You’ll often hear Trump supporters say they were radicalized by how the media treats him. Yet one needs some background knowledge before we can discuss how seriously we should take such declarations. Imagine that someone was going through news stories, and found that the media reported on murders committed by men three times more often than murders committed by women. Our researcher decides that the media is biased against men. Obviously, there is a problem here, as one has to at the very least consider the ratio of male to female murderers.

The media certainly reports on Trump like he is more corrupt and dishonest than other politicians. Yet there’s nothing to indicate that they are biased against him, in the sense of exaggerating his flaws. Again, the Trump family has profited to the tune of $3.4 billion, versus $11 million for Hunter Biden, or a 309x difference. Have Trump corruption scandals been treated as 309x worse than the Hunter Biden story? Just a pure monetary comparison undersells the difference, since Trump has been directly involved with his various family ventures while no credible evidence has emerged linking Joe Biden to Hunter’s activities. Maybe direct presidential involvement makes a scandal three times as bad. So we need Trump profiteering scandals to get at least 900x as much attention as Hunter Biden for the media to be unbiased.

But that’s not all! The Trump administration has other officials and their family members who are profiting off their roles in government. David Sacks works for a crypto firm at the same time he is the White House crypto czar. Steve Witkoff’s son is involved in the Trump family crypto business. So we’re up to what, Trump financial scandals being 2,000x worse than Biden’s?

It’s hard to imagine how it would even be possible to give the scandals of one administration 2,000x more coverage than those of another. It’s like a criminal justice system that has a maximum prison sentence of 25 years. Someone kills an individual, they get 20. Another criminal murders ten people, and he receives the maximum. Our second criminal did something ten times worse, but he only spends 25% more time in prison, because we’re reaching the upper limits of what is possible in sentencing. The New York Times publishes roughly 150-250 stories a day. If they had say one story a day on Hunter Biden when that scandal was pertinent, and we take that as the baseline level of how much any particular scandal should be covered, the NYT needs to now run at least maybe 2,000 articles a day on Trump’s corruption. In other words, they’d need to expand their newsroom approximately tenfold and then devote 100% of their efforts to investigating Trump corruption scandals. Obviously, they haven’t done that. Trump is like the guy who murders a hundred people in a country where the maximum sentence is a decade in prison.

Maybe the amount of coverage shouldn’t necessarily increase linearly, but logarithmically. So if Trump’s scandals involve two to three orders of magnitude more money than those of Hunter Biden, and we still think that the president himself being involved makes things three times as bad, then Trump scandals should get maybe six times more coverage. I don’t think that the media is biased against Trump even by that standard.

The point here is that our media ecosystem, and our institutions more generally, weren’t built to deal with anything this bad. Trump by being an outlier on awfulness gets away with much more than any other politician. So far, I’ve even ignored conservative media, which hypes every scandal involving Democrats and completely ignores Trump’s corruption. The idea that there is a pro-Trump bias in the media seems unquestionably true to me even if we pretend that Fox News, etc. don’t exist and that the liberal MSM comprises the entire press.

It’s not just Hunter. The numbers involved in every previous presidential scandal or semi-scandal in the years before Trump were orders of magnitude smaller. Jimmy Carter famously put his peanut farm in a blind trust. By the time he left office, it was $1 million in debt. Bill and Hillary Clinton were dogged by the Whitewater investigation, which centered on a failed Arkansas real-estate investment that lost money. Kenneth Starr was appointed as a special prosecutor to investigate the matter. He found no criminal wrongdoing, but shifted his focus to looking at Clinton’s sexual escapades, ultimately culminating in Republicans impeaching the president over lying about a blowjob. It’s fun reading the Wikipedia page of the Whitewater scandal and laughing at the absurdly puny amounts involved from the vantage point of our era of tech bros and crypto scammers buying the government.

During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run, he was asked by New York Times reporters about the failure of the Whitewater development.^[19] The subsequent New York Times article, by reporter Jeff Gerth, appeared on March 8, 1992.^[1] The Clintons acknowledged that on their 1984 and 1985 tax returns, they had claimed improper tax deductions for interest payments made by the Whitewater Development Company. Due to the age of the mistake, the Clintons were not obligated to rectify the claim, but Bill Clinton announced that they would do so.^[20]

On December 28, 1993, almost two years after the original Times report, the Clintons made a reimbursement payment of $4,900 to the Internal Revenue Service. The payment was made without filing an amended return and included full interest on the amount of the error, including the additional two-year delay.^[20] Files which were later publicly released in August 1995 showed that the Clintons were aware that the interest payments in question were paid by the corporation and not them personally.

Slick Willy literally went back and repaid $4,900 owed to the IRS. This was something the media actually cared about. It was something that mattered in American politics. Trump has so warped our standards that we can only look back at Bill Clinton and long for how pure and innocent we once were.

Bigger sums were involved in the case of the Clinton Foundation, which raised roughly $2 billion in total contributions as of late 2015, much of it from foreign governments and wealthy elites. Critics argued that these donations blurred ethical lines while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State. Now we are finally getting into Trump territory, if all you're looking at is the numbers. Yet the Clinton Foundation is run pretty well according to groups that judge the effectiveness of charities, with the vast majority of the money going to help people in the developing world. Nobody in the Clinton family has taken a salary, though they sometimes fly on private jets while doing work for the organization. There have of course been indirect benefits in terms of prestige and good PR, and after Hillary lost in 2016, donations plummeted relative to when she was running for president. So there seems to have been corruption in the sense of rich people giving money to get goodwill from a politician. But Hillary herself did not directly profit, and there isn’t a straightforward connection between donations and payoffs, like when David Sacks invests in crypto and then becomes the crypto czar. Note that rich people give money to prominent charities all the time, and they don’t always expect to get something tangible back. And the Clinton Foundation does actually save lives! Meanwhile, no one becomes involved in Trump crypto ventures as an investor or trader for any reason other than they’re being scammed or trying to get something out of it.

We might also note here that recent presidents have been able to cash in by making hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech after leaving office. You can give a speech for $400,000 each day for an entire year, and only make a fraction of what Trump has made off crypto while he’s been running for president or in the White House. The fact that these appearances occur after presidents have left politics means that the practice lacks the quid pro quo element of what Trump has been doing.

So the only pre-Trump alleged scandal you can point to that didn’t involve orders of magnitude less money has been the Clinton Foundation, which is an actual charity that does good work and mostly only brought indirect benefits to Hillary.

How does he get away with this? It seems that caring about corruption and being able to put scandals in perspective is kind of an elite thing. The masses don’t look into the details of each scandal, or dig into the evidence behind specific allegations or the sums involved. This is part of the reason why Trump does so well with the misinformed, including podcast hosts like Joe Rogan and Tim Pool, along with their audiences. When less educated and knowledgeable voters hear the media being anti-Trump, they may start with the premise that all politicians are corrupt and dishonest, and therefore wonder why journalists treat this guy so much worse than others. Data of course shows that Trump’s base is composed of those who follow the news less, and read less serious reporting.

I’ve been focusing on profiting off the presidency, but this analysis also applies to other behaviors that are often considered scandalous. I’ve previously written about Joe Biden letting Hunter get prosecuted and how unthinkable it would have been for a similar situation to unfold under Trump. Or take lying. Before, the press would always report on things politicians said that turned out not to be true, like Obama promising “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” which was named lie of the year by PolitiFact. But given the marker that was set with Obama, what do you then do with a guy who says ten things that are just as false if not more so in every press conference or speech he gives for his entire presidency? Considering how much the media covered Obama’s false statement about health care, Trump’s lying, as with his corruption, would need to be on every page of every newspaper for it to get the amount of attention it deserves. Of course, the lies and the corruption compete for coverage, so if one is being reported on the other is being ignored.

I had a Trump supporter recently tell me that it’s worse when Democrats lie because people actually expect them to tell the truth. What a confession! It reminds me of a GK Chesterton quote that I used to hear conservatives cite: “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession.”

Chesterton’s point was that the socialist philosopher was worse than the thief. The MAGAs have twisted this on its head. They say that the Democrats are the real liars because they go around still believing in truth. Trump doesn’t even pay lip service to the idea, so he’s…better somehow? It’s kind of amazing the knots you have to twist yourself into in order to defend this man.

We can go through this same analysis with incivility and how a politician speaks about his opponents, but Trump’s failures in that regard are so obvious it would be tedious to dwell on this. Years after the comments were made, we still recall “basket of deplorables” and “cling to their guns and religion,” which Hillary and Obama both soon apologized for. MAGA snowflakes were so hurt by Hillary’s words that they held a DeploraBall soon after Trump’s first inauguration, which I attended back when I was a rightoid. Meanwhile, I haven’t checked Truth Social this morning, but there’s a good chance he’s called his political opponents sick, fat, or criminals who deserve to be locked up.

Before 2016, I was a big believer in the idea of mainstream media bias. I thought that the press was much friendlier to Obama than Romney. Maybe the two men were about equal in their levels of honesty and corruption, and if the media treated Romney as 50% worse on these measures, it was a sign that journalists were being unfair. I could recite exact instances where the press treated a Romney statement as a gaffe while something similar or worse said by Obama was ignored. But when Trump came along, the man was so outside the norms of what we were used to that journalists lacked the ability to convey how bad he was. Critiquing the media for “Trump Derangement Syndrome” makes sense to the misinformed because if you simply describe the man objectively and put his behavior into its proper context, you do in fact sound deranged. The media turned its criticism up to 11, but if Trump’s flaws are a hundred or thousand times worse than what came before, then the press has to be classified as pro-Trump.

I’m not at all sympathetic to the idea that because the media and Democrats treated Republicans like Romney unfairly, they “deserve” Trump. If people in American politics were squirting each other with water guns before, Trump is heavy artillery. And if you want to play that game, I’d argue that the Clinton scandals were ridiculously overblown by Republicans in Congress. This game of “who started it” is for children anyway. But you especially can’t use what your opponents did to you as an excuse for your own behavior when what you're doing is much worse by every conceivable measure. The whole structure of the argument depends on the Big Lie that there is some degree of moral equivalency between Trump and his opponents, when there simply isn’t.

Ironically, Trump has managed to both make the media more anti-Republican, while at the same time “solving” the problem of liberal media bias by being so corrupt and dishonest that it’s impossible to sufficiently stress the degree to which he behaves outside of accepted legal standards and norms.

The concerning thing here is I think we’ve all been learning a lesson in how civilizations decline. Just like how a criminal justice system that was built with a law-abiding population in mind struggles to deal with an influx of people with different norms and cultural values, MAGA takes advantage of the fact that American institutions have traditionally functioned based on widespread agreement that corruption is bad and facts matter, independent of partisan concerns. Republicans have tossed such ideas out the window. It seems that the true threat to American culture and institutions wasn’t from immigration, but Low Human Capital finding its political voice.

Personally, I’m a lot less anti-corruption than a lot of people. I can tolerate a crook who is pro-market over a politician who observes all ethical standards but supports NIMBYism, Social Security, and labor unions. The problem here is that no one else is as good at decoupling. Practically no Trump supporter I talk to says “yes he is way way way more corrupt and dishonest than his opponents, and nothing liberals ever did justifies how bad my side behaves, but I support him because X.” Rather, most need to either delude themselves into believing that Trump is better than he is, or more commonly, develop an exaggerated sense of how bad the left is in order to make them comparable to Trump. Sometimes, you come up with galaxy brained takes like “Trump lies so much that nothing he says counts as a lie.”

The mental gymnastics required mean that your whole movement becomes full of people who are disconnected from reality. Instead of focusing on the left’s real sin, which is economic collectivism, you believe that they’re all a bunch of corrupt liars, which they are not, and since all major institutions tilt left, you in effect become a radical who wants to tear down Western Civilization. Maybe with Trump we still end up with more pro-market policies by accident, and that will be a good outcome. But if things like cultural norms, which conservatives pretend to believe in, matter, then one has to take seriously the fact that Trump has completely redefined what it means for a politician to be dishonest and corrupt.