Anti-Trumpism Is Driving the Media to Cheer Hostile Powers

There's a specific pathology on display when a network anchor starts sounding relieved that Beijing or Tehran scored a diplomatic point off Washington, and it's worth naming plainly: some people in American media have decided that anything bad for Trump is automatically good, even when "anything bad for Trump" means a hostile government notching a win against the United States. That's not skepticism of a president. That's rooting against your own country's hand at the table because you don't like who's holding the cards.

You can see the shape of it in how differently the same event gets covered depending on who benefits. A tariff standoff, a naval incident, a summit that doesn't go our way, suddenly gets framed with a strange warmth toward the foreign government's position, so long as the American figure looking bad is Trump. Nobody's saying press criticism of him is illegitimate. He's given plenty of material over the years. But there's a difference between covering him harshly and quietly cheering for Xi or Putin or the mullahs to come out ahead, and that line keeps getting crossed by people who'd never admit they crossed it.

The irony is that this habit does more to validate Trump's core argument than anything his campaign could buy in ad time. His whole pitch has always been that the establishment press cares more about beating him than about the country. Every time a headline reads like it was written in Beijing's press office because Beijing's press office would enjoy watching Trump squirm, that pitch gets a little more credible to a lot more people. You don't have to like him to see the problem. Hating one man that much shouldn't require rooting for the other guy's adversaries.