Republicans have already found their excuse for a Donald Trump rout

Donald Trump's ardent supporters and his strong Republican critics don't agree on much, but they're coming to agree on this: The media is out to get him. A bunch of liberal reporters, desperate to see Hillary Clinton get to the White House, are engaged in a common and intense effort to destroy Trump in the final stage of the campaign.

In a version of this story that is simultaneously subtle and conspiratorial, this plan supposedly had two stages. In the first stage, the media lifted Trump up during the primaries, bestowing unprecedented attention on him and not bothering to investigate his many failings. Then once they had helped Trump become the Republican nominee, they moved in for the kill, running one scandal story after another and bludgeoning him into submission.

This is what Republicans are going to tell themselves in the coming months and years. It has the benefit of a skeleton of truth, even if its assessment of how the press works and what motivates it is absurd. But everyone on the right has an incentive to believe it.

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It's true that during the primaries, Trump got an absolutely spectacular amount of media attention, particularly on cable news, where his rallies were often broadcast without interruption (a favor none of his opponents received). But the motive was simple: Trump was the most bizarre and fascinating political story in years. He attracted attention, which meant eyeballs, which meant advertising revenue. At the same time, however, journalists were investigating his business dealings and personal life, the kind of vetting they do for all candidates. If you're asking why you didn't hear nearly as much of it then as you have been lately, the answer lies in the dynamics of campaign reporting.

The most important reason most of those stories didn't explode into universal consciousness is that campaign reporters take their cues from the campaigns. So if an interesting new piece of information comes out about a candidate and his opponent decides to make a big deal out of it — issuing statements, talking about it at rallies, making ads about it — then it becomes a much bigger story. And in the primaries, right up until it was too late, Trump's opponents treated him with kid gloves. They all assumed that he'd flame out eventually, and didn't want to alienate his passionate supporters. So among other things, they seem to have done almost no opposition research on him, leaving them unable to push out their own negative stories about him to the press.

That's obviously no longer the case now that he's facing Hillary Clinton, and it's true that news organizations are devoting more resources to investigating both candidates than they were before. But I won't deny that reporters, as a group, find Trump appalling. You bet they do. That's because he is appalling, and he presents a unique kind of threat to many different democratic institutions. Not only that, they react negatively when they see him point to their colleagues at his rallies, call them all kinds of names, and encourage his supporters to rain invective down on them.

But journalists haven't reacted to all that is repugnant about the man and his candidacy by saying, "We must stop him." They've reacted by reporting as accurately as they can who he is, and what he's doing and saying. That, in the end, has been the most damaging thing for Trump. While there was plenty of superficial, "Holy cow, look at what's happening" coverage of Trump during the primaries, there was also a good amount of coverage of Trump's general and specific repugnance. But the electorate to whom he was appealing at the time didn't care, and they still don't. The difference now is that Trump needs to broaden his appeal beyond those who are already behind him, which he seems steadfastly determined not to do. So he's declining in the polls, making him ever more desperate, which makes him lash out, which then gets duly covered, resulting in more negative press.

But you can't have a conservative theory of media bias without another key element: Reporters must be biased because they're snooty coastal elitists, looking down their noses at the earthy heartland folk who make our country run. Consider this excerpt from a recent piece by The New York Times' media columnist, Jim Rutenberg:

The idea that the news media "missed the rise of Trump" is just spectacularly ludicrous. How many political stories in your lifetime have the media paid more attention to than Donald Trump? And from the moment he entered the presidential race, that has included copious coverage of his supporters: What motivates them, what they believe, what they love and what they hate, what they think about everything under the sun. The Trump phenomenon has spawned a thousand think pieces on the grievances of his fans. How many stories have you read about the psychology and motivation of Hillary Clinton's supporters?

And while it's true that few in the media predicted that Trump could be the Republican nominee, that has nothing to do with being coastal elitists disconnected from the heartland. Few people anywhere predicted that he could win. Let's take, for example, the aforementioned Rod Dreher, who has been an ardent opponent of Trump from the beginning. I don't know when it became clear to Dreher, with his intimate knowledge of everyday Americans, that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee. When I perused his blog from around the time of Trump's entry into the race last June, I found only a post directing readers to a spirited attack on Trump in the National Review — almost as though he "missed" the magnitude of the Trump story. I also found this post from a month later, in which Dreher responds to Trump's questioning of John McCain's heroism by writing, "The one good thing about this is it probably means the end of the Trump presidential-candidacy-as-clown-car-derby." Funny, that was the same judgment so many of those coastal elitist ignoramuses in the mainstream media made!

My point here isn't to pick on Dreher, other than to note that he missed the Trump story just like almost everyone else, if by "missing" it we mean not realizing that a reality TV star and world-class buffoon with not a day of political experience could capture a major party's presidential nomination. Once that became clear, everyone in the media scrambled to learn and report as much as they could about him, to create a fuller and more complex picture of this person who still could become the president of the United States.

That may look like they were working against him, but in practice, accurate coverage of Donald Trump and his campaign is going to be pretty negative. How do you write a positive story about a candidate bragging that he commits sexual assault, followed by the emergence of a dozen women saying he sexually assaulted them?

For years, the assertion of media bias has been a crutch on which conservatives leaned too heavily, a way to write off every presidential defeat as not the product of their candidate's shortcomings or the public's lack of enthusiasm for their program, but as the product of what Donald Trump would call a rigged system. It's comforting, because it assures you that you didn't do anything wrong and you don't need to change. If that's what Republicans tell themselves about the 2016 election, they're going to have a lot more losses to contend with in the future.