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I never understood this either. There's an argument that I've heard that the media is biased precicely because they don't go after Trump hard enough. I can't compute it. As a reasonably disinterested American, all I've seen for 15 years is the media constantly going after him, but in the last few months, basically since he was shot at, the media kinda, sorta treats him like he's a presidential candidate--while also reminding us how terrible he is at the same time. The idea that "Trump has been normalized " is so far beyond my perception of reality I don't even know how to engage with it.
What? Who says that?
Trump has been normalized only in the sense that what would have been shocking for another candidate is blasé for him. He’ll do something scandalous, the media will insist it’s a scandal, and then everything will continue exactly as it was.
I remember not too long ago, a bunch of conservatives got excited because the audience for whatever show Colbert hosts now, booed when the CNN affiliated host said something about them being impartial. It was amusing to me, because the conservatives took it to mean, even this progressive audience knows how biased (against Trump) CNN is. Of course, the reality was that they were booing CNN for being biased in favor of Trump, because this was within about a month of the debate and that was the normie progressive take, that CNN was basically in league with Trump.
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I've seen the claim a few times on notes on Substack and shared posts from Twitter. Along with things like, "If Trump is elected we will literally be killed!"
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I'm not sure if you're objecting to the claim that the media is saying Trump is being normalized or that people are complaining that media has been normalizing Trump. Both have happened a lot.
How Not To Normalize Trump
Fallon: I Didn't Mean to 'Normalize' Trump
The Case for Normalizing Trump
Don't Normalize Trump's Vision for America
Normalizing Trump: An Incredibly Brief Explainer
How We Normalized Trump
We are Normalizing Trump. Again.
Protesters Outside of New York Times demand newspaper "Stop Normalizing" Trump
This has been going on since 2016. I mean the media obviously aren't normalizing him, in my opinion and experience, but people are certainly claiming that it's happening.
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At least one progressive has said something like that to me directly. In particular, there were quite a few examples of this attitude in the recent aftermath of Trump/Biden debate, where I saw quite a few tweets to the effect of "Why is the media being so harsh on Biden when Trump said/did XYZ" etc.
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I've seen it said, or maybe heard it said. But I can't point to anything specific.
Usually when I see or hear it I just realized I'm living in a totally different information environment than whoever said it, and I give up most hope of discourse with them.
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