It’s 2023 and once again, we’re seeing civil unrest in the wake of the death of a black man at the hands of police.
Weird, isn’t it? The last time a story like this happened, the media said the president of the United States was responsible. It was the spring of 2020, and video of George Floyd being pinned down by a white police officer had gone viral. The media, Hollywood, and the Democrats shamelessly exploited Floyd’s death as part of their effort to make sure Trump wasn’t reelected. Some even went so far as to blame Trump for Floyd’s murder.
“How many more excuses do you need to make before you examine yourself and say, okay, maybe I need to wake up a little bit and take a good long look at what I’ve been doing,” CNN’s Don Lemon said. “Maybe I need to understand or realize that the environment that this President has trafficked in can help to lead to these sorts of situations.”
“Nobody wants to hear from the White House or the attorney general right now,” Lemon told Wolf Blitzer the following day. “Do you understand what I am saying? No one wants to hear from the person that they perceive as contributing to this situation – situations like this in this society. Not directly, but allowing people like that to think that they can get away from this.”
Lemon concluded his rant by saying, “Again, I said what I said about this President and the environment that he has contributed to in this country. And that is the God’s honest truth.”
Related: Tyre Nichols Killing Forces Black Activists to Change the Narrative on Police Racism
The media was so desperate to make Trump look bad that in the wake of a positive jobs report, some in the media bizarrely tried to link Floyd’s death with the economy.
When Trump took questions in the Rose Garden after announcing the latest employment numbers, NBC’s Peter Alexander asked Trump, “How would a better economy have protected George Floyd?” and PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor asked Trump, “Why don’t you have a plan for systemic racism?”
Hollywood also joined in on blaming Trump for George Floyd’s death, and for the violence that occurred afterward.
“Trump has shown himself to be a violent, moronic psychopath with a twisted vision for America,” actor Ron Perlman tweeted. “At this point, the only people still following him believe George Floyd got what he deserved. The rest of us ain’t having it.”
Keke Palmer accused Trump of “trying to incite a race war.”
Taylor Swift, who had once avoided being political, went bonkers as well and accused Trump of “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism” throughout his entire presidency.
Actor George Clooney went on a long rant against systemic racism and claimed that the only way to fix it was to vote Donald Trump out of office.
But Trump isn’t in office now and hasn’t been for two very long years. After we were all assured that the president was responsible for black men being unjustly killed by police, Joe Biden is curiously not being blamed for the death of Tyre Nichols or the riots that have since taken place. This is despite CNN’s Van Jones’s assertion that even though all the cops were black, they were still motivated by racism.
Now, let’s be clear: Joe Biden is no more to blame for the death of Tyre Nichols than Donald Trump was for the death of George Floyd — and that’s what makes the media’s actions in 2020 so disgraceful.