Trump Falls Asleep, And So Does The Media
After Donald Trump was shot at in Butler, PA, the corporate media went into round-the-clock breaking news coverage about the assassination attempt, which was highly newsworthy in the first several hours, but it didn’t take long for curious decisions to be made.
It was curious when NBC News suspended its regular programming and went into breaking news mode for a story that was no longer breaking by the middle of Sunday morning. Donald Trump was fine, the shooter was dead, and there was no national crisis. The follow-up coverage should continue, but the breaking part of the story was finished.
The corporate press in the United States decided that the American people needed to rally around Trump, so what happened next set alarm bells off.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe is a program hosted by a former Republican congressman and moderate Democrat. It is one of the most-watched shows on MSNBC and one of the most establishment-friendly shows on corporate media.
MSNBC was so worried that the show might say something critical of Trump that pulled the program off of the air on Monday.
Host Joe Scarborough addressed this development on Tuesday morning and said that the network didn’t give the show a good reason for not airing.
Sarah has noted that this self-censorship is a characteristic of media caving to authoritarianism. It happened during the 2016 presidential campaign and during the Trump presidency, and it is happening again in 2024.
All of this set the stage for the convention itself, where Donald Trump, complete with a prop bandage on his ear, where he was reportedly hit by glass from his teleprompter, was set to make a big appearance at the Republican convention.
Lee Greenwood, who has to be close to setting a record by living off of one terrible song for four decades, finished his song as Trump sat down. The ex-president was speaking to his running mate J.D. Vance, and then it happened.
Donald Trump fell asleep. No one bothered him. It was as if Republicans are used to Trump just nodding off in the middle of things, so they left him alone.
Trump was awakened by crowd applause, which he joined as if to try to fool people into not noticing that he had been sleeping.
In the video above, Rachel Maddow was on the air at the time and said zip, but don’t worry, she was far from alone. The number of corporate media stories expressing concern that Trump can’t stay awake during his convention has been easy to count because the number is zero.
