Campaigns & Elections

Coming off a two-hour Hardball on Wednesday, MSNBC brought suffering viewers back to just one hour on Thursday, but host Chris Matthews made sure they got their money’s worth by presenting his closing Let Me Finish segment as “a Shakespearean choice facing Republicans this year” in “[t]o be a Republican or not to be” with presidential candidate Donald Trump.

During the upcoming presidential campaign, predicts David Roberts, the media will not acknowledge an inconvenient truth: that the difference in quality between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is comparable to the difference in potability between “Coca-Cola [and] sewer water.” “The campaign media's self-image is built on not being partisan,” wrote Roberts in a Thursday article. “How does that…

Speaking with host Erica Hill on MSNBC Thursday afternoon, Iowa conservative radio talk show host Steve Deace reiterated his commitment to the Never Trump movement and after comparing Donald Trump to Superman villain Lex Luthor, promised that he feels “no moral imperative whatsoever to help Lex Luthor finish off his memoirs.”

On Thursday's Closing Bell on CNBC, Rob Reiner repeated his charge that Donald Trump's supporters are "not all racists, but there is a strain there." Host Bill Griffeth wondered, "Don't you think just people are angry — they're angry at Washington; they're angry at their boss?" Instead of immediately pointing to "racism," Reiner admitted that "there is a big chunk of Trump supporters who are very…

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough faced off with Rob Reiner on Thursday's Morning Joe, after the liberal Hollywood producer/writer explained Donald Trump's base of support by underlining that "there are a lot of people who are racist in this country." Scarborough shot back, "Could this not be about working-class Americans being left behind by [the] Republican Party?" Reiner acknowledged that "they're not…

At the top of Thursday’s NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer proclaimed: “Game on. Clinton and Trump gear up for their likely general election showdown....They’re two of the most unpopular candidates in recent history.” He then promised an examination of the flaws of both candidates: “This morning, the major obstacles facing both campaigns.”

If it's sauce for the goose, it's sauce for the Hillary . . . Question for MSNBC's Katy Tur: of all the epithets Donald Trump pinned on his primary opponents, which was the first and arguably most effective? Bet you answered "low-energy," with which Trump of course famously jabbed Jeb. It stuck, and helped drive Jeb from the race. Did people suggest at the time that Trump was hitting below the…

Of everyone in the MSM, Joe Scarborough has been widely seen as the most ardent Trump supporter--starting from the day Donald descended that escalator with Melania. Scarborough would argue he was merely offering dispassionate political analysis--saying that Trump's chances should be taken seriously while others were disdainfully dismissing him. But for those of us who watched Joe day in and day…

MSNBC viewers were treated to two hours of Hardball Wednesday night following Donald Trump being anointed the presumptive GOP presidential nominee and while previewing the believed match-up of Trump and Hillary Clinton, host Chris Matthews and a guest mocked Hillary Clinton scandals as “garbage” and conservatives invoking the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi as deranged.

Not long before Ted Cruz left the presidential race, he inadvertently performed what Salon’s Marcotte suggests was a public service by clarifying that right-wingers are entitled authoritarians who readily inflict pain on kids. Last weekend at an Indiana campaign rally, a boy in the audience yelled “You suck!” at Cruz, to which Cruz replied, “In my household, when a child behaves that way they…

Appearing on Wednesday’s CBS This Morning, Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward declared that the defeat of Ted Cruz in the Republican primary revealed that “Conservatism in America, in the Republican Party, is in a crisis. It just does not sell.” He argued that Cruz lost because “his ideas have not taken hold and they were totally overwhelmed by the Trump campaign.”

Hillary Clinton gave her first interview following Donald Trump being anointed as the presumptive 2016 Republican presidential nominee Wednesday afternoon and in the midst of a classic softball, scandal-free interview by CNN's Anderson Cooper, Clinton demanded her liberal media friends “make the tough decisions” and “get serious” in attacking Trump.

On Wednesday, CNN's New Day touted Donald Trump becoming the apparent Republican presidential nominee, but quickly spotlighted many of the most controversial components of his campaign. David Gregory trumpeted the "incredible accomplishment for Donald Trump," but soon added that the billionaire is "an incredibly divisive figure — huge negatives, toxic policy proposals." The Daily Beast's Jackie…

Algo extraño sucedió en la cobertura en Telemundo del primer discurso de Donald Trump sobre política exterior: se preguntaban dónde quedó su propuesta de construir un muro en la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México.