By Christian Schneider
Thursday, October 09, 2025
Over the past few decades, any Republicans who lived to
hear something favorable about themselves from the legacy media would know they
were near death. That’s because in order to hear your name uttered in a
favorable light by the liberal media, you had to be dead.
It happened to all the conservative stalwarts; as soon as
Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Antonin Scalia left the earth, the
instant respect from publications that hammered them during their tenures
commenced. The New York Times article on Richard Nixon’s death managed
to scare up some words of praise, noting that his presidential tenure
“wrought foreign policy accomplishments of historic proportions that had proved
beyond the reach of his Democratic foes.”
(The paper even called Nixon a “victim of Watergate,”
which is a bit like saying Bill Clinton was a victim of the White House intern
program.)
In the Trump years, however, the mainstream press has
identified a new brand of Republican worth spilling ink (or pixels) over. It is
the “Republican Who Criticizes Donald Trump.”
Sure, there have always been Republicans who knew they
could crowbar their way into news stories by criticizing their own party. John
McCain rode this strategy to national prominence until the press turned on him during his 2008 presidential campaign against
media favorite Barack Obama.
But turning on Trump seems to make someone especially
newsworthy, given that the president demands undying fealty from members of his
own party. That means Republicans once reviled by the media are granted
newfound respect because of their willingness to express disgust at actions
that are, by definition, disgusting.
Remember George W. Bush, the president who took us to war
in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that never turned up and who was for
years deemed a “war criminal” by the left? One scatological reference to a Trump speech, and his
entire administration took on a different hue in retrospect. Dick Cheney, whose
very name made liberal cerebellums boil, seemed much more reasonable when he
was defending his congresswoman daughter, Liz, from Trump’s attacks.
And then, of course, there was Mitt Romney, vilified for
a full summer because he dared to express an interest in promoting women within
his Massachusetts gubernatorial administration. The phrase “binders full of
women” was purposely misconstrued by Obama supporters and the media (a single
circle in a Venn diagram), contributing to Romney’s loss in the 2012
presidential election. But when Trump hit the scene and Romney made his
comeback, the Utah senator became a media darling because of his principled opposition
to Trump’s ludicrous behavior.
Romney is a decent person with values, so it made some
sense that the media would cling to him to represent their values. But the
national media now have a new plaything of the indecent variety.
In July, Zaid Jilani wrote in the Washington Post that former
QAnon adherent and continuing national embarrassment Marjorie Taylor Greene is
“winning his respect.” Last week, the New York Times ran a glossy feature piece on the
Republican congresswoman from Georgia, the style of which the paper normally
reserves for unserious Democrats. For her criticisms of Donald Trump,
writers at other outlets (including this one) have labeled Greene a “firebrand,” which must be
a flattering euphemism for “once spread conspiracy theories about school
shootings and believed that on 9/11 the Pentagon was hit by a missile, not a
plane.”
Memo to the national media: treat MTG with the skepticism
you would have if your child came home from college and announced she were
engaged to someone she met on a dating reality show. In both intellect and
consistency, MTG makes George Santos look like JFK.
While she has apologized for her years of following QAnon
and its users’ belief that the world is run by a cadre of billionaire
pedophiles, just weeks ago she suggested America was in the midst of a
“Muslim takeover” and warned that American women would soon be living under
“Sharia law.” She ruminated that the 2025
death of Pope Francis was an example of “evil . . .
being defeated by the hand of God.” In 2024, she suggested that the government
controls the weather and that Hurricane Milton was geo-engineered to harm
Republican areas.
In 2023, she called for a “national
divorce,” suggesting that Americans should separate by red states and blue
states. It is likely because of her actions that your eyeballs were poisoned by
the phrase “polyamorous tantric sex guru.” In 2024, she mourned
America’s deceased war heroes on Memorial Day by posting a photo of herself in a
bikini. (A shrewd political move no doubt first executed by Rutherford B.
Hayes.)
The New York Times brushes that all aside, saying
those days are all now behind her. It is now attempting to sanewash her because
she is taking positions more consistent with Democrats than with traditional
Republicans. For instance, she has been critical of Israel in its ongoing
conflict in Gaza, often spouting Hamas propaganda to make her
point. She has criticized Trump for bombing Iran. And now she is swimming in
newfound mainstream respect for urging Republicans to support the extension of large Obamacare subsidies to keep health-care premiums down.
And, of course, she hasn’t quite shed her QAnon roots.
MTG has continued to press Trump on releasing
the “Epstein files,” a list purported to expose a clan of rich pedophiles (some
of them friendly to Trump himself).
Yet in pitching this lunacy-spouting politician as some
sort of voice of reason within the Republican Party, the media are engaging in
the same mental bargaining that traditional Republicans use to justify their
support of Donald Trump. They engage in a cognitive compartmentalization that
allows them to recognize the thimble of things they like about a politician
while ignoring a Mount Vesuvius of malignancy.
This is not how the world works. We don’t get to pick a
handful of sane things a person has said and declare them fit. This would be
like renaming the Tony Awards after one of America’s greatest stage actors,
John Wilkes Booth.
Nonetheless, because she now suits their purpose, Greene
is being pitched by the media as newly making sense. But the media’s effort to
memory-hole her past shouldn’t be allowed to succeed. Just because she has
strung a few sentences together that they agree with doesn’t mean she should be
built up to respectability.
So just remember, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but
the enemy of your enemy might also believe the Jews are in control of space lasers.
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