President Donald Trump has been neck-deep in a series of scandals and outrages that would have ended the career of a Democratic commander in chief, or at minimum caused them a lot of political heartache.
For instance: Trump has gone on extend racist rants about Somalian immigrants like Rep. Ilhan Omar, tried to pardon a conspiracy theorist for state violations where he has no jurisdiction, demolished portions of the White House, and used the tragic murder of director Rob Reiner to advance his petty political grievances.
The mainstream media has treated all of these developments with kid gloves, making them at best one-day stories or mere blips on the media radar. Contrast this to onetime Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s singular scream that effectively ended his campaign in 2004 (Trump regularly screams at anyone within earshot) or the days and days of negative press former President Joe Biden received when he finally ended the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.
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To be sure, Trump has the benefit of a Republican establishment that backs him no matter how grave the embarrassment or outrage—House Speaker Mike Johnson always conveniently seems to have missed the latest news—but the press is perfectly capable of harping on stories that involve Democrats. That scrutiny just doesn’t apply to Rrpublicans—especially Trump.
Why does this happen, and with such regularity? The mainstream media has an institutional bias towards both-sidesism, which is the notion that the Democratic and Republican parties and the related liberal and conservative movements engage in outrages at the same pace. This simply isn’t true by any objective measure.
Leading Democratic figures like former Presidents Obama and Biden or congressional leaders like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer don’t operate at the same volume as figures like Trump and other MAGA-brand Republicans.
In all his time as a public figure, Obama never praised Nazis or argued that climate change is a Chinese hoax.
But it isn’t just an internal media problem.
The right has spent over six decades consistently and relentlessly going after the media, in what writer Eric Alterman dubbed “working the refs.” The notion is that by relentlessly putting the press on defense with allegations of bias, the right has preemptively pushed the mainstream press to bend over backward to disprove the right’s most dishonest and specious arguments.
After decades of this behavior the mainstream media consistently rolls over for the right—but conservatives never let up in their attacks. It’s never good enough, so even though former President George W. Bush referred to a member of the press as a “major league asshole” in 2000, Trump is still whining about the “fake news” in 2025.
Another reason the right’s scandals and outrages don’t linger is the lack of an outrage machine on the left that compares to the pearl-clutching energy on the right. Conservative leaders have message discipline and a disconnect from reality that allows them to make specious attacks on Democrats relentlessly.
These attacks are then regurgitated by right-wing media like Fox News, which turns national tragedies like the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi into a long-form narrative about Democratic incompetence, pulling in figures like Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who conveniently was preparing to run for president).
Yet in spite of these media failures, not everything can be ginned up to favor the right. Media complicity and weakness can only go so far, because everyday Americans have to live their day-to-day lives navigating the mess that Republicans so often create for them.
No amount of spin can turn back the effect of a cratering economy or a war claiming the lives of thousands.
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Republican media domination falters in the face of voter anger, over and over. We’ve seen this in elections rebuking GOP failures in 2018, 2020, and now in 2025.
And we are likely to see it again in the near future, because there’s only so much abuse and gaslighting that people can take before they reset the terms of the debate.
Oliver Willis
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