The President on Saturday made a serious, major compromise to get the government back open. In his compromise he
- Gave up the fiction that Mexico is paying for the wall;
- Abandoned his plans for a coast-to-coast wall;
- Offered to extend DACA and keep Dreamers from being deported
These are all significant reversals from the President’s long time position on the border. The Democrats immediately rejected it. The press decided to go back to focusing on BuzzFeed’s story and the story of the kids at the March for Life that the media got wrong.
To focus on the President’s most reasonable compromise offer, the media would have to admit the Democrats are now being unreasonable. The media would have to acknowledge that the President actually did offer up a serious compromise and a significant scaling back of his plans.
But the media, as we are seeing with the March for Life story, is far more interesting in telling narratives than telling truths. The narrative is that Donald Trump is unreasonable and solely to blame for a government shutdown over a wall that no one wants. The fact is that even Democrats have supported this in the past and DACA is a significant reversal of this Administration’s prior policies.
Increasingly, however, the media can’t let facts get in the way of their narrative so they rapidly moved on from the President’s compromise instead of challenging Democrats. The Democrats, no matter how unreasonable and unwilling to compromise, must be made the heroes by their friends in the press even if that means focusing on fake news like the March for Life and BuzzFeed stories.