Thanks to a Monday 9-0 Supreme Court decision, Donald Trump is back on the ballot in Colorado, making March 4, 2024 one of the best days on record for watching CNN and MSNBC contributors fight the urge to cry on national television.
A few weeks ago when even unserious MSNBC analysts agreed that the oral arguments had gone disastrously for the election tampering enthusiasts, the media began bracing themselves for a ruling in Trump’s favor. But the decisive 9-0 decision wound up being a bit too much for some journalists to handle:
In fact, some talking heads found the decision’s unanimity so devastating that they started rewriting history minutes after it happened. On Inside Politics, CNN’s in-house parody of a Supreme Court analyst Joan Biscupic exclaimed: “It’s five to four! This is a 5-4 ruling on part of it, in terms of, will there ever be any way that Donald Trump could be kept off any ballot in the future.”
Meanwhile on MSNBC, Muller investigation prosecutor Andrew Weissmann brought the same spin: “On a variety of issues, this is actually a 5-4 decision.”
A couple of hours later on the same network, Andrea Mitchell Reports fill-in host Katy Tur scored a big interview with Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. A visibly distraught Griswold remarked: “My larger reaction is disappointment… Ultimately, it will be up to American voters to save our Democracy in November.”
In searching for a less depressing soundbite, Tur posed such leading questions as: “Do you have confidence in the Supreme Court?” and, “Do you think this court is partisan?”
But surprisingly, it was the decidedly left-wing CNN, and not the spacetime-warpingly left-wing MSNBC which took home the trophy for the most overwrought reaction. During the final segment of the 10 a.m. EST CNN Newsroom, Jim Acosta brought on a very sullen Larry Sabato, who grumbled:
In the end, Jim, you can’t save the people from themselves. If they’re determined to re-elect [Trump] after he organized that insurrection — arguably our first coup d’état — then there’s nothing to stop the people from doing that. In particular, the legal system may intervene, but I doubt it…. And that’s the way it is.
Thus ends another emotionally charged attempt to get Trump. There’ll certainly be more in the lead-up to the 2024 election, but for right now the corporate media will have to scramble to find some good news for their disappointed audiences.
