"Imagine you're a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a Trump candidacy?"

The NYT asks a panel of political writers (along with other questions), in "He Has Nothing Else': Our Writers on Trump and the 2024 Election." From the answers:

David Brooks He makes the right enemies. He brought us peace and a good economy. 

Frank Bruni It’s an age of rage, and no candidate will tap into that as shamelessly and with as little regard for the consequences as the madman of Mar-a-Lago.... 

"Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys."

"They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin—and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty 'white supremacy' narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of 'hate,' even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill."

So wrote Andrew Sullivan (Substack) in a passage quoted by Jonathan V. Last in "Andrew Sullivan and the Narrative of the 'MSM Narrative'/The narrative on MSM narratives is false" (Bulwark).

Last calls Sullivan's attack "nonsense," his point being that "the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion that 'they' are feeding 'us' false narratives." 

And it's easy for Last to dish up the false narratives Sullivan himself has served up: He called "people skeptical of the Iraq War as the 'Hate-America-First crowd,' he asserted "that Barack Obama would put an end to America’s culture wars," he pushed the notion "that Sarah Palin had faked a pregnancy and that 'the media' was complicit in this coverup."

Last writes:

The MSM is like a giant peer-review system, but where the peer-reviewing takes place after publication. Jonathan Rauch talks about this at length in The Constitution of Knowledge—that the scientific enterprise and the journalistic enterprise have similar modes of operation. Is the journalistic mode great? No. Like democracy, it is the worst system there is—except for all the others.