Following the high-profile indictment of former President Donald Trump this week, conservatives fear that biased media coverage may attempt to convict the president in the court of public opinion rather than in the courtroom. This has been supported by at least one major case from ABC News supports this argument.
Major news networks offered wall-to-wall coverage of the Manhattan arraignment this week. For many Republicans, the bias against the former president was apparent.
During an address by Trump about the charges against him this week, ABC News blurred out the text “TEXT TRUMP TO 88022” written on the podium underneath him. It does not appear that other networks carrying Trump’s address from Mar-a-Lago did the same.
For many Republicans, the effort against the former president is more of the same. They argue that during Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns and during his four years in the White House, much of the national media was aligned against him.
The most recent case, conservatives argue, extends this same bias.
ABC News Accused of 'Election Interference' After What It Did During Trump Speech https://t.co/yLqgCYJsiu
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 6, 2023
Trump called the indictment an example of election interference. The former president also stated that he believed there were conflicts of interest regarding Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and presiding judge Juan Merchan.
Bragg’s campaign was supported by donations by billionaire left-wing activist George Soros. Merchan donated to the Biden 2020 campaign. Merchan’s daughter also volunteered in the 2020 presidential bid of then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA). Harris would later become vice president under President Joe Biden in 2021.
“I never thought anything like this could happen in America,” the former president said.
Trump compared the indictments to a number of other accusations by the left against him since he announced his first campaign for president in 2015.
This included accusations that the 2016 Trump campaign worked with the Russian government as well as the two impeachment hearings against the former president. He said that the FBI and Department of Justice were “relentlessly pursuing Republicans.”
He said that his “only crime” was “defending our nation from those who seek to destroy it.”
