Bob Costas Is a Jerk

It doesn’t offend me a bit that Bob Costas hates Trump. A lot of people do, and as long as they aren’t jerks about it, I accept that they have a right to their opinion. 

Trump rubs people the wrong way, and not just in politics. He has the style of a showman–I often compare him to PT Barnum, who is a particularly American type of hype man–and it’s easy to see why he isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Trump’s political style is similarly grating for many people. Just as I find Gavin Newsom repulsive, others find his style attractive. 

And then there are Trump’s policies, and by this, I don’t just mean the ones that people with TDS invent through their unique mind-reading abilities. It’s no surprise that a lot of people are repelled by Trump’s hard-line approach to implementing policies they hate; having grown up in the Reagan era, I got used to people I knew and liked hating even a mild-mannered president with whom they disagreed. 

But Bob Costas, as with many people in the cultural elite, is a total jerk about it. People like him view themselves as moral paragons who have a responsibility to lecture to the rest of us about how much better they are. 

Bob Costas on Trump: “He is by far the most disgraceful figure in modern presidential history.

You have to be in a toxic cult to believe that Trump has ever been emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, or ethically fit to be POTUS.” * (2024)
pic.twitter.com/COkTecnlVo

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) April 19, 2025

The rise of American populism can mostly be attributed to the cultural dominance of people like Costas. It’s not just that their policy preferences differ so much from those of half the country. It’s the contempt they radiate for anybody who disagrees with them and their willingness to impose their views on everybody else. 

Damage already done by shameful & callous establishment propagandists like Jimmy Kimmel et al…#Ivermectin #covid
This, from Sep 2021, during the height of the psyop to forcefully inject as many Americans as possible with the experimental mRNA lethal vax:pic.twitter.com/4zZCkbMDD5 https://t.co/E9fFt1MCyA

— Ross Dyer (@RossDyerTV) March 22, 2024

Bob Costas resurfaced in the news today after giving a speech while accepting the Fred Dressler Leadership Award from Newhouse University. In his speech, he blasted the media for being too…easy on Trump because we all know that the media is way too easy on Donald J. Trump. 

He went on a rant criticizing ABC, Paramount (CBS), and other media outlets for allowing any MAGA voices to be platformed and treated seriously. 

Bob Costas Condemns Mainstream Press for Doing ‘MAGA Media’: ‘There Really Isn’t Two Sides’ https://t.co/dvKrhrjhnO

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) June 10, 2025

But if the answer to that is MAGA media, if the answer to that is Donald Trump’s view of the world, which is only through a prism of what benefits him, there are no higher ideals. There are no principles at work other than what benefits him. I’ll stay with where we are without correction if the correction is what Donald Trump represents.

And what also has happened here is that, because he is the president, to a certain extent, who he is and what he does, and what is done in his name, has been normalized so that responsible journalists have to pretend that there’s always two sides to this. There really isn’t two sides to much of what Donald Trump represents.

If someone says – and the idea that you have to find somebody who will not just defend Donald Trump, but valorize it, even on CNN or wherever else, just in the name of being balanced– look, if someone is contending that the Earth is flat, in order to appear objective, you are not required to say, “Well, maybe it might be oblong.” No, it’s not.

Certain things are just true. And regrettably, something that’s true in America right now is that the President of the United States has absolutely no regard, and in fact has contempt, for basic American principles and basic common decency.

And again, and I’ve heard this on occasion. “I used to love Bob Costas, but then when he turned political…”

And of course, when I did that, every good thing I did for 40 years was washed away. Now I suck. You know what? If that’s what you think, and that’s how you think, and you think it in defense of that guy, I wear that as a badge of honor.

You have to love that last line. He had to make it clear that he not only hated Donald Trump, but every single person who disagrees with him on the issue. 

I am passionate about my politics–I hide it well, but I am–but I pick and choose pretty carefully the objects of my contempt. There are plenty of liberals out there for whom I have respect. They still engage with people on the issues, don’t assume that differences between us are motivated by malice, and they willingly participate in the political process with reasonable integrity. 

There are too few of them, and I admit that we have entered a period of time where we have crossed the line between debate and discussion into full-fledged political warfare. I know plenty of conservatives who are total jerks as well, although liberal ideology tends to be more moralistic and less realistic about the fact that politics is the art of the compromise and that there are necessary trade-offs in the real world. 

To the extent that conservatives are less likely to be utopians than liberals, they are correspondingly less likely to be moralistic about politics. But there are, in fact, some cultists out there on our side. You don’t see them platformed in the way that Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Bob Costas, Madonna, every MSNBC host, and all the rest are, but they exist. 

They are all jerks. And they are the authors of our populist age. The revolt against the “experts,” the “97% of all scientists,” academia, the Pravda Media, and the Democratic Party is a reaction to the utter contempt in which they hold us. 

Donald Trump is not the author of this movement, although he leads it. His rise was the inevitable result of people being tired of enduring the constant assault on us. Republicans elected Ronald Reagan, George Bush, nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney, and each of them was derided as Hitler reborn, and their supporters as evil. 

The election of Trump was a statement: we are not going to take it anymore. The left is destroying our culture, the middle and working classes, and education, academia, and our churches. 

Republicans rose up, and the working class moved Trumpward, because the cultural elite hates us and our culture. 

It’s not just Bob Costas who is a jerk, but the whole lot of them. Not every liberal, of course, but every leftist.