We’ve discovered the line at which Donald Trump fans in the conservative media will finally break, at least a little, from their candidate. It’s not his defense of Corey Lewandowski, though.
Trump has faced a barrage of questioning and criticism for his decision not to fire Lewandowski after the Trump campaign manager was charged with battery against former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields on Tuesday. But this is apparently OK by many of his biggest conservative media backers.
On Tuesday’s episode of his Fox News program, for example, Sean Hannity seemed to parrot the Trump line that the incident between Lewandowski and Fields was no big deal. “I’ve looked at it a hundred times,” Hannity said during an interview with Trump, “I don’t see any jerking, I don’t see any pulling.”
Fox News contributor and occasional Trump booster Newt Gingrich on Tuesday also defended Trump for his Lewandowski position. “And you have never been in a scrum in a presidential campaign where people were shoved around, including by the way the press?” Gingrich asked Megyn Kelly. Gingrich also said the charges seemed to be fueled by “very partisan politics.”
Rush Limbaugh, another pro-Trump conservative media voice, also painted the charges and the uproar around the story as political posturing and questioned whether the video showed simple battery. “They’ve been unable to take Trump out using everything at their disposal,” Trump said of the media and the Republican establishment. “So this is the latest effort, this is the latest event that has presented itself, to maybe take Trump out of this.”
Finally, on Twitter, Ann “I don’t care if Donald Trump wants to perform abortions in the White House” Coulter sent out a series of tweets mocking Fields and the battery charges.
What do all of these conservative pundits and talkers have in common, aside from their pasts of supportive words for Trump? Just days earlier, each of them had expressed frustration with Trump for a retweet he had sent out mocking Sen. Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi’s physical appearance.
“Our candidate is mental! Do you realize our candidate is mental? It’s like constantly having to bail out your sixteen-year-old son from prison,” Coulter said of the tweet in a podcast clip released on Monday. To Coulter, nothing else he had previously done to insult women or anyone else, was a real gaffe, aside from mocking John McCain’s war service, which Coulter dismissed as a joke. (Coulter also suggested she’d like to “get electrodes into” into Trump’s “schlong” and give him a shock every time he did something like the “lobrow” Heidi Cruz remark.)
Similarly, on his show last week, Limbaugh pointed to outrage among his listeners against Trump for the Cruz tweet and tried to analyze why this verbal attack might not just be, as he would put it, an overreaction from Democrats and liberals in the media. “Most women don’t like pictures of themselves, and every woman has seen a bad picture of herself and no way wants anybody else to see it,” Limbaugh said, repeating an explanation of why the bashing of Heidi Cruz’s appearance was one step too far. “And that’s why this is different. I thought that makes some sense.”
Finally, Hannity and Gingrich also went after Trump for his attacks against Heidi Cruz in Hannity’s show on Monday.
What made the Heidi Cruz attack different from Trump sticking up for alleged batterer Lewandowski, or hinting that Megyn Kelly was on her period, or calling Carly Fiorina ugly, or any other number of horrible things he has said on the trail? As Jim Newell pointed out on Tuesday, not backing down from his ugly remarks and positions after these other incidents were a big part of Trump’s appeal with his base, providing them with further evidence that he was a fighter against political correctness and the establishment. But Limbaugh seemed to get at what was different about the Heidi Cruz thing in his radio show, describing the “inordinate volume” of responses he had been getting of listeners saying they were turned off by that tweet.
So the line at which conservative media will stop defending Trump seems to be the line at which their audience will stop loving Trump. And that line seems to be calling women who, so to speak, didn’t have it coming—unlike, say, Rosie O’Donnell and Fiorina—ugly. The good news for Trump, in terms of maintaining his base as he heads into the next round of primary contests, is that his hit on Heidi Cruz appears to be in the rearview mirror thanks to the Lewandowski story.
