Losers And Suckers

Be skeptical of the "losers and suckers" consensus narrative - and others like it when it comes to Trump and the press

April 6, 2024

Dateline: The day after an earthquake, a couple days before an eclipse, nbd

Watching this week…

— Digging into the “losers and suckers” narrative

— Manufactured “DEI Mayor” outrage cycle

— Corporate media’s “Main Character Syndrome”

— How Did This Get Published: More Vaccine Spin

— Great Moments in TikTok Journalism

Be skeptical of the “losers and suckers” consensus narrative — and others like it

On Wednesday afternoon, Joy Behar was on “The View” talking about how former President Donald Trump “called American military members who died in wars ‘losers and suckers.’” The next night, “The Daily Show” co-host Desi Lydic made an almost identical comment. It was the same a few weeks ago on MSNBC, when Nicolle Wallace mentioned that phrase too, in a similar context, as part of one of her lengthy anti-Trump screeds.

The “loser and suckers” line has been around for years — and I’ll trace the genesis of it below. It has become simply conventional wisdom of the consensus elite at this point — just a bullet point for the corporate press when listing the long litany of Trump’s worst moments. Right up there with “very fine people” and “inject bleach” — which is actually the point. Those phrases that have become ubiquitous when those on the political or journalistic left are looking to highlight the severity of Trump’s evil… are actually outright false. The “losers and suckers” line exists in maybe a bit more of a gray area — a blend between innuendo and urban legend, perhaps. But certainly not something that rises to the level of “factual.”

And it’s important to dig into the circumstances of this phrase, because we know this will become a major talking point as we approach the final seven months ahead of Election Day this year. It has been a part of President Biden’s usual campaign speeches, when he makes them. And “Doctor” Jill Biden has repeated the line too.

But it’s not just the repeating of the line that has become a point pushed by the Biden campaign — and, by extension, the Acela Media. It is the insinuation that this phrase uttered by Trump had been “confirmed.” That’s the framing pushed by the Biden campaign’s active X campaign last month — which was republished by a prominent #Resistance account, and reposted by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough:

But after talking with several former high level Trump administration officials, I believe there are very good reasons to be skeptical of this story.

So let’s go back. This all started two months before Election Day 2020, when The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg published a rare byline himself with the truly shocking headline: “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’”

The sourcing was suspect at best. The anecdote related to a 2018 trip to France and a visit to a military cemetery, filled with soldiers who lost their lives in World War I. According to “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion,” Trump said to “senior staff members,” quote “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Then, “in a separate conversation on the same trip,” Goldberg writes Trump referred to those who lost their lives in a World War I battle as “suckers,” and then, out of direct quotations, Goldberg writes “for getting killed.”

So what can we infer here? First, “people with firsthand knowledge” is an odd framing, since he later references “senior staff members” who actually heard the comment, meaning his sources did not directly hear it. Separately, he uses the term “suckers” in quotes, but then adds his own description of what Trump was referring to, continuing with the incendiary and truly bizarre follow-up “for getting killed.”

This obviously became a gigantic story immediately. Trump vehemently denied it at the time, and more than a dozen Trump administration officials went on the record denying it too. But let’s not relitigate what happened then.

Six months ago, the story was thrust back into the news because of an “exclusive” report from Jake Tapper, where former Chief of Staff John Kelly provided a written statement that, according to the CNN report, “confirmed” what The Atlantic published in 2020. What Kelly said, contained in a lengthy list of anti-Trump grievances, was “a person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them’…and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

Now, there was almost instantaneous speculation that it was Kelly who was behind The Atlantic’s report back when it was published. And he’s happy to go on-the-record these days, as a foil to his former boss, like in this New York Times piece. But despite how CNN — and, subsequently, the rest of the media - tries to spin it, this is not Kelly “confirming” anything. He’s simply repeating what was in The Atlantic’s article, that hid behind anonymous sources barely even giving direct quotes on the matter. Kelly didn’t say “now I want to come forward and say I heard Trump say these things.” He just repeated the lines he read in the press, like so many do today.

You don’t have to be a MAGA superfan to be skeptical of the narrative that has hardened around this. "I have seen Trump say a lot of things that would not show him in a flattering light, but he would never say that," one former Trump administration official told me.

So what might have happened? Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin posted a long tweet-thread shortly after The Atlantic article that confirmed some elements of the reporting, but not others. Among the more nuanced framing was what one source told her — that in the past, while speaking about the Vietnam War, Trump said “it was a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker.”

Could that have closer to what happened? In this context, Trump would be using the term sucker not to criticize those who served or died, but the political-military establishment that got America into these doomed conflicts in the first place. Doesn’t that seem much closer to a scenario that makes logical sense? Donald Trump is not someone who bites his tongue in public — what you see is pretty much what you get. But it would make far more sense not that war heroes are suckers “for getting killed,” as was originally reported, but that, potentially, he was lamenting those who died fighting for a cause they believed in but were misled by the inept leaders that got them into that position in the first place.

This interpretation also makes more sense when you consider those who would be so outraged by it — people like John Kelly, a political and military lifer, who doesn’t want to see the leadership impugned that way. No, it would be far better to make it into an attack on the soldiers themselves.

But in the end — who knows? And that’s really the point. When you hear members of the press, or political operatives including the President of the United States, stating as a fact that Trump called dead American soldiers “losers and suckers,” just remember that it’s not nearly as clear as they make it out to be. (Don’t even get me started on the “inject bleach” lie, which I could spend another 2,000 words on. Maybe next time.)

Does the media really have a dearth of unimpeachable direct hits on Trump that it has to stoop to this nonsense? Surely not! And yet — they never seem to miss an opportunity to be exposed as the losers and suckers who keep falling into the trap of emotion over facts, laziness over nuance.

The “DEI Mayor” news cycle last week was manufactured for maximum outrage

It was spelled out right there in the chyron on Joy Reid’s prominent MSNBC show: “The Right Blames DEI For Bridge Collapse.” The “right” — the whole 50% or so of the country. That was how the interview with Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott was framed last week, shortly after the tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge (click the screenshot to watch the full interview):

As you’ll see from the interview, the main crux of the issue was not the blame for the bridge collapse but this insinuation that Mayor Scott was somehow a “DEI Mayor,” which was apparently something racist right-wing people were pushing. “Racists called Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott a ‘DEI mayor,” wrote the Baltimore Banner, a local digital outlet. Or take Don Lemon, who posted a video on his new digital show about how “DEI is the Newest Far Right SLUR” — which highlights an X post by a user named IamYesYouAreNo. That post was referenced in Joy Reid’s interview too. In fact, it’s interesting that it’s the only single post that is cited as evidence that there is a contingent of “far right racists” who are calling the mayor of Baltimore a DEI hire.

Lemon says this single X post has been viewed “30 million times.” And that’s basically true — 26 million right now. But why has it been viewed so much? Well it was quote-tweeted by Jemele Hill, whose post imploring the user to “just call him a” n-word has been viewed 5 million times.

Or MSNBC’s Chris Hayes’ post, writing “Calling the Black mayor OF BALTIMORE the ‘DEI Mayor’ is actually a useful illustration of what they actually mean by the term,” was seen 4 million times. Or a 1 million-view post from Jonah Goldberg. And on, and on. In other words, the post was seen so many times specifically because so many people were, for lack of a better term, dunking on it.

And rightfully so — it was an absurd, unnecessary shot at a mayor who had nothing to do with the events that brought down the bridge. But the point is, that’s literally the only evidence anyone can point to that there was this right-wing campaign against the mayor of Baltimore at all.

Instead, we have a manufactured media story, based on, as far as I could tell, a single random X post by an anonymous account that did go viral, but mainly because it had been amplified by major accounts with millions of followers criticizing it.

The entire narrative was pushed for maximum outrage — just further stoking the partisan flames in 2024.

(Speaking of Don Lemon — eventually I’ll write about his new podcast, but I’m going to give it some time. I’m immersed in a variety of conflicts of interest, including that my friend and former boss at CNN is Don’s EP. So for now, congrats to Don on his wedding today, where apparently Matt Lauer and Alec Baldwin were in attendance, to Tim Malone… who I was an NBC page with back in 2007.)

Corporate media’s “Main Character Syndrome” in the wake of the Ronna debacle

The night before Ronna McDaniel was fired by NBC, a mere four days after she was hired as a contributor, Chuck Todd took to his X account to make his case for why the entire network was engaging in a public meltdown. “The issue isn’t about ideology, it’s about basic truth,” he said, as if he was writing a diary entry or trying to convince himself of the facts at hand. “Those trying to make this a left-right issue are being intentionally dishonest. This is about whether honest journalists are supposed to lend their credibility to someone who intentionally tried to ruin ours.”

It was a good encapsulation of the debacle NBC found itself in when it dared to bring on the former head of the RNC who had previously been pushed out for being insufficiently Trumpian (or, perhaps, for spearheading lagging fundraising and consistently underperforming in election cycles). The whole episode was embarrassing for NBC — and the broader corporate press. And it’s for more than one reason. In fact, as I laid out in a TheHill column last week, there are three distinct ways NBC flunked the “Ronna McDaniel Test” — including bringing her on to represent the current state of conservatism to begin with.

But there’s a broader problem at play, which combines the Trump Addiction I often write about with an issue that existed before Trump hit the national political stage — due to the rise of social media as a mechanism for feedback, and influence, for today’s journalists. The whole combination has led to our media’s “Main Character Syndrome” — a concept that I wrote about this week in TheHill after thinking through it for the past year. Here’s some:

Democracy itself, you see, is at stake in 2024…At least that’s what the self-important, doom-scrolling, politics-brained Acela Media tells us — and most importantly, tells itself. The media has internalized these heightened implications — the threat inflation that comes from Trump’s third presidential run and the very real possibility of a second term. And they have convinced themselves it is their mission to quite literally save democracy…They can’t just report the news anymore — no, they must correctly guide our path so the course of history unfolds precisely as it should.

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❓How Did This Get Published❓: Pretending COVID vaccine problems are a GOP fantasy

We’re four years out from the start of the COVID pandemic, and I hear from friends on the left and right that no one wants to talk about it anymore. For long-time readers of Fourth Watch, you know COVID became one of the topics I wrote about more than any other, as it coincided with the launch of this newsletter. But COVID is over.

And yet, there remains an effort to rewrite history, and for those who are so ardently stuck in their past hysteria that they’ll never remove themselves from it or see any rationality, there are articles like this one, from Stat News. “People in Republican-voting states more likely to report Covid-19 vaccine side effects, study says,” read the headline last week, which got a “thinking-face” emoji from former journalist and current #Resistance X poster John Harwood.

The article highlights a JAMA study, that, according to the piece, suggests “that how people view their post-vaccine side effects or decide whether to report them may be shaped by their political views.”

A prominent COVID extremist doc Eric Topol is quoted: “The fact that they're reporting a significant increase in states that are Republican is just consistent with everything we've seen this pandemic.”

It is? Everything we’ve seen? This should be a red flag for any reader — nothing is consistent with anything we’ve seen this pandemic. But the implication is clear — vaccine side effects aren’t really that big a deal, they’re just a creation by those crazy conservatives.

So let’s dig into the JAMA report — what does it actually show? Well, first, it uses VAERS data — the self-reporting database for vaccine injuries. So this is hardly scientific — anyone can make any claim about a vaccine injury, and if we’re looking for an explanation, we know the VAERS database was much more of a topic in conservative media than in left-leaning media.

The correlation, even then, is small. The study found just a 5% increase in the odds that a COVID-19 vaccine “adverse event” would be taking place in a state that voted Republican in 2020.

And then there’s this chart, which pretty much should have been the final nail in the coffin that this is worthy of a journalistic report.

Why is Minnesota and Michigan so high, or Mississippi so low? Didn’t anyone stop to ask what the point of any of this was?

No, because it helps confirm, even ever so bizarrely, a preferred narrative. Stat News…how did this get published?!

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WATCH IT… I’m going to just go ahead and pencil in a Kyle Brandt video twice a year in the “watch it” slot. Brandt is a co-host of “Good Morning Football,” but he truly is one of the most unique media personalities working today. So as someone who has no idea what Dune 2 is about (and really doesn’t care), I still highly recommend Brandt’s deep dive into how Dune 2 is like the New York Jets making the playoffs.

HEAR IT… Megan Fox was a guest recently on “Call Her Daddy,” and the conversation was as intense as you might expect. But what kept me listening for the entire 90 minutes was how smart Fox comes across — clearly someone who has spent a great deal of time psychoanalyzing her role in our culture, her own persona, and fame in general. Really a fascinating episode.

READ IT… Freddie deBoer’s always-intriguing Substack has a sprawling, excellent encapsulation of a variety of aspects of media and culture in 2024. On who gets canceled, and who doesn’t, the effectiveness of “cancelation”-like journalism now, and more — it’s a look at how our culture has changed (for the better, he and I would say), and how the journalistic entities have adjusted, or not, to varying degrees of success.

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QUICK HITS

• Powerful piece in the Wall Street Journal on their reporter Evan Gershkovich’s one year of being jailed in Russia — outrageous.

• Interesting Axios look by two digital media veterans (VandeHei and Allen) on the “media’s 12 splintering realities.”

• Remember Life Magazine? It shut down in 2000, but is coming back thanks to former model Karlee Kloss and her husband, Trump’s son-in-law’s brother.

• Hadas Gold is returning to the media beat at CNN after spending time in the Jerusalem bureau — she’s one of the good ones, so good news for CNN’s audience.

• The Baffler has the Kara Swisher “Burn Book” review I’ve been waiting for someone brave enough to write — a total evisceration.

• Walter Russell Mead has a brilliant column in Tablet Magazine headlined, “Twilight of the Wonks.”

• Loved this Harry Siegel piece in “Vital City” on the need for a true New York City columnist in 2024.

• And finally the long-awaited Washington Post profile of LSU women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey hit, and it’s pretty mild and all over the place — definitely don’t think she’ll be suing, as she teased.

⏪ REWIND // FAST FORWARD: Zucker Comeback Edition ⏩

⏪ Former CNN president Jeff Zucker was trying to make his way back into the media world by scooping up The Telegraph and Spectator through his venture firm.

⏩ The plan got denied ultimately because it was being funded by the Saudis, but it did inspire a gigantic Michael Wolff deep dive in New York Magazine that is worth the read.

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MORE TK…

I remain convinced climate change is one of the most poorly-covered topics by the corporate media, all bluster and nuance-free — with a dearth of facts and reality-based journalism. I’m working on something about this, but in the meantime, watch this incredible exchange between the President of Guyana and a snooty BBC host, who brought his usual climate change talking points but wasn’t prepared for the fact-based pushback he received. Need more of this…

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GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISM

Joy Reid followed up her interview with Baltimore’s mayor with a bizarre post on TikTok. Which really leads me to ask a simple question — why are people in the media who are in their mid-50s posting on TikTok? I mean, it’s one thing to post show clips, but to be clout-chasing on TikTok as an MSNBC host?

Thanks for reading. Back early next week with a new “Show Your Work”…

-Steve