No, She Didn’t

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 25, 2024

 

“You can’t let people get away with bulls****,” Donald Trump crudely fumed on Tuesday night in the wake of his eleven-point victory in New Hampshire. Despite his win, the former president was not in a celebratory mood — not with Nikki Haley refusing to surrender. “Let’s not have somebody take a victory when she had a very bad night, she had a very bad night,” he continued. “I’m up, and I’m watching, and I said, ‘She’s taking a victory lap,’ and we beat her so badly.”

 

Haley’s offense was a banal one. She had not declared victory. Rather, she spun her loss into something resembling a moral triumph that would allow her to continue to campaign against the former president. Indeed, Haley explicitly conceded defeat and congratulated Trump on his success before pivoting back to the campaign themes she had been retailing in the weeks leading up to New Hampshire’s vote. Save for Trump’s deeply insecure response to Haley’s refusal to kowtow, none of this is especially remarkable.

 

What is remarkable is the eagerness of the press to adopt Trump’s false framing of Tuesday’s events and broadcast them to as large an audience as possible:

A wire service on which many outlets rely, the AP’s framing was spread far and wide. But this is a misleading version of events that conveys to readers that something other than a wholly unexceptional exercise in face-saving political messaging was afoot. We can’t even attribute the AP’s concession to Trump’s version of reality here as a product of neurolinguistic programming because that implies conditioning over the span of something more than 24 hours. The media outlet jumped at the opportunity to retail Trump’s grievance and the alternate version of events that fuels them. Why?

 

Maybe because the AP is as eager to get this primary over with as Republican primary voters appear to be. Haley’s apparently deliberate effort to bait Trump into diverting his attention away from the themes that will dominate the general election and toward the former president’s general-election liabilities has worked on the former president. To survey his personal social-media network, it’s clear he can think about little else. Perhaps Haley’s refusal to supplicate before Trump, postponing the onset of the general-election campaign, frustrates the Associated Press as much as it does Trump.

 

At the very least, the AP has sacrificed a professional obligation. If its readers were operating under the erroneous assumption that Haley had tried to “claim victory” in any way other than symbolically, news media outlets should feel some obligation to disabuse them of that misapprehension. But they don’t. Why do you think that is?