You almost have to admire the commitment to the bit.
During a recent White House press briefing, CBS News correspondent Ed O'Keefe decided to ask Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt what may go down as one of the most out-of-touch questions of the year:
Where or when does the president believe he's been falsely called a racist?
I'm sorry, what?
Leavitt didn't even try to hide her reaction.
You're kidding, right?
At that point the White House Press Corps burst out laughing unable to contain themselves.
That's not satire. That's real life.
Because whatever you think about Donald Trump, the idea that he hasn't been repeatedly labeled a racist by politicians, pundits, activists, cable hosts, late-night comedians, and half of corporate media for nearly a decade is … laughable. Apparently even the press room knew it.
In case you need a refresher:
Take your pick, Ed.
This is the ongoing problem with legacy media elites. They live in a curated ecosystem where certain narratives are so assumed, so baked in, so second nature, that they lose all sense of how normal people hear these things.
Average Americans have heard the word "racist" attached to Trump more times than they've heard the national anthem. It's been a staple of headlines, monologues, chyrons, and campaign speeches since 2015.
And yet here's a senior CBS reporter acting as if Trump just invented the accusation last week. A CBS reporter that, if he really wanted evidence of this, could have just looked to his own tweets:
Moments like this matter because they expose something deeper than partisan sniping.
It's not about whether you like Trump. It's about whether the press can pretend, with a straight face, that one of the most common political accusations of the last decade just … didn't happen.
