Leftist presidential candidates of all (correction: the same) stripes are preparing to do battle with President Trump in 2020, pushing their menu of spoiled and smelling Venezuelan-style socialist ideas for voters.

Trump will swat them away like flies, but he's not looking in their direction much.  His real target, according to the Atlantic Monthly, is going to be the press.  Instapundit has found a beauty from within the Atlantic Monthly report, noting that Republicans are raring to go after the mainstream media, using their atrocious strings of lies and "narratives" that fell apart after the Mueller report on the fake Russian collusion.  They will do it when the press starts reporting biased dreck about Trump himself, citing their tattered credibility.  Here's some of it:

"Any reporter who tries that will be hit with 30-second spots of all their ridiculous claims about collusion," said the source, who, like others interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to describe private conversations.  "Their tweets have all been screencapped.  It's all ready to go."  ("It's the same thing we've been doing the last two years.  We're going to hold the media accountable when we see fit," an RNC official clarified, adding that this would include digital clips shared on social media.)

This is kind of what a biased media cooperative deserves.

The fact is, the press did disgrace itself in its two or three years of news coverage, constantly beating the phony tin drum that Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.  Special Counsel Robert Mueller, armed with more than a dozen leftist, Hillary Clinton–donating lawyers, could find nothing to support that, and he finally threw in the towel this past week, releasing the report over the weekend in a futile bid to hope no one would notice.

Democrats in Congress continue to insist that something is there in the wake of it, but the reality is, they look like fools — but not as big of fools as the mainstream media, which acted as a Greek choir, chanting for years that Trump's end was imminent and the "walls are closing in."  Rick Moran noted that there was a hilarious video compilation of the spectacle here.

Do I think it will work?  Anecdotally, yes.  The Trump voters I know in San Diego say the mainstream media's continuously unfair treatment of Trump in the press — in itself — was the reason they chose to vote for him.  There may be internal GOP polls suggesting that the sentiment is widespread.

There's also the fact that the mainstream media are getting away with it.  Two years of lies, false leaks, fake sources, and artificially damping President Trump's popularity ratings, not to mention wrecking what could be an important Russia-U.S. relationship to check a rising and ravenous China that sees no accountability.  Nobody got fired in the wake of this performance; nobody criticized anyone else; nobody paid any price for it.  On the contrary, they seem to be praising themselves for it and awarding each other Pulitzers.  They have yet to get the memo that they have disgraced themselves again.

They could have stuck to the truth, that very truth that is required in their stated profession.  It might not have led to the facts they liked, but they wouldn't have suffered the reputational loss they are looking at now.  But it was so much easier to go with the stories they liked, their bias out there, yet their claims to objectivity intact in all those Pulitzers and conference engagements.  They had been getting away with it up until now.

Except that now, the price they will pay is that Trump has them, not the socialist cookie-cutter Democrats, in his electoral gun sights.

Nice planning, bozos.  Stick to objectivity, and you won't make yourselves a target.  Take some unfair advantages, and hear all about it told to the voters.  They made their choice.  And they chose poorly.