You're not going to beat me in an argument by insisting I explicitly argued for only your personal interpretation of my words.
Maybe you're missing most of the message here, and fixated on the "97% negative" coverage portion alone. Read the first Gorf sentence you quoted: they're strategy has been smearing and censorship rather than real consideration of what policies they have that appeal to voters. When I say about "telling people to hate this man", that is referring to the smearing and censorship, which were done in place of convincing people to support them with their vision of America. The central strategy for Democrats was "You can't vote for Trump because he was indicted, and impeached, and mocked by all the late night shows, cause he's Hitler and a threat to democracy." Their campaign was a cudgel, and the cudgel failed.
Ok, for starters:
1) You are now trying to deflect by claiming that I was focused more on another user than your own characterization that "the mainstream media, social media, and all 3 branches of government
all worked in concert to try to tell people to hate this man", which you are now dishonestly trying to paint as limited to Democrat campaign strategy (Which is especially rich coming from you, Mr. "Democrats and the Media, but I repeat myself").
And:
2) You are still turning one
hell of a blind eye to Republican rhetoric which has consistently been painting Democrats as infiltrators, saboteurs, and in the pocket of foreign powers (communists, Arabian Muslims, Mexicans, etc) for more than four decades now (which can go up to 80+ if we count the whole 'Left == commy traitor' equivocation that McCarthy kicked off in the 1940s) never mind how heavily Trump et al's own rhetoric took the form of telling people to hate his political enemies and vote for him out of
raw spite for Democrats (which he further equivocates with the "Deep State"), with Trump having built his entire political persona around tossing schoolyard mockery at the myriad people he wants to disparage. MAGA's entire political identity is built around Trump's narrative to his constituents that they should be outraged by anything and everything that isn't to his explicit advantage, which he spins as being "unfair" to him and any criticism of him (no matter how minor or severe) is necessarily illegitimate, and demanding that everyone treat anything and
everything that he didn't like as a travesty brought about by his ideological opponents (such as treating the Women's Soccer team winning bronze
in the Olympics as disgraceful and blaming that on "Leftist Maniacs").
That throws a monkey wrench into you assertion that these same voters were - let's say it directly - free thinkers who "rejected the narrative" that they had been fed, as that pointedly overlooks that the very thing you're arguing was itself
the very same narrative that Trump et al had been feeding them for nearly a decade, and moreover that his supporters have long since come to define themselves by that same narrative (it's literally their marker for "consciousness of kind"), in a way not at all dissimilar to the antivaxxers, 9/11 Truthers, and "teach the controversy" crowd. In each case, the narrative that they have been fed and embraced is that "the narrative" is unfairly against their position, that by rejecting it they are proving themselves to be free thinkers, and furthermore that means that propagating their belief will be a victory for truth/science/democracy, etc. Hence why I say that your championing of that exact same narrative is lacking in self-awareness and ultimately self-aggrandizing.
With that out of the way, your bit about "beating you" also strikes me as lacking in self awareness. What I think you have sincerely never understood or respected about argumentation is that - to borrow court terminology - as a participant you are neither the judge nor the jury. You're one of the attorneys arguing your case. You are not the arbiter of your own performance. And the people you're arguing with don't have to convince
you that you're beaten (in fact, anyone with any faculty with the discipline will tell you that trying to convince your opponent is a fool's errand), they just have to convince the people reading along that your arguments are less compelling. And as we've seen, people are not finding your waffle to be compelling.
Having said that, however, as this is turning into a debate over you rather than being topical to the thread, going any further down that rabbit hole would amount to little more than an exercise in ego for both of us. And that's not worth pursuing. I've said my piece about Trump being held to a lower standard and your characterization of events being very self-serving. I don't particularly feel the need to venture further down the rabbit hole of proving what you said and implied.
Outside of Fox News, what mainstream media was in Trump's favor? Harris even got all the celebrity endorsements. Even late night talk shows are all liberal besides the one on Fox. Johnny Carson made it a point not to say who he was voting for whereas it's really fucking obvious with Colbert or Kimmel that was literally crying that Trump won.
Top of my head? Fox, Sky News Australia, Breitbart, Washington Examiner, New York Post, OAN, the Washington Times, the Boston Herald, the New York Observer...
Though let's cut out the middle man, skip past the "oh you namedropped a few things but that doesn't matter" waffle, cut to the heart of your contention (which was that Trump didn't have meaningful support and therefore had the deck stacked against him), and start breaking out the lists of who was stumping for him, shall we? You know, the politicians, the businessmen, musicians, writers, actors, influencers, organizations, etc.
List of Donald Trump 2016 Presidential Campaign endorsements
List of Donald Trump 2020 Presidential Campaign political endorsements
List of Donald Trump 2020 Presidential Campaign non-political endorsements
List of Donald Trump 2024 Presidential Campaign political endorsements
List of Donald Trump 2024 Presidential Campaign non-political endorsements
And mind you, that's just the official endorsements.
Again: By no stretch of the imagination was Trump a dark horse candidate in this race.
