When Adam Ellwanger called me in May and asked me to play the part of the “Mainstream Media” in an intellectual exercise to explore just what could go wrong in the pivotal election of 2024, I had my doubts.

After all, my experience for the past 40 years has been working at a small community newspaper in Kalispell, Montana. I may have dreamed of working at the New York Times back in the era of Ronald Reagan, but at some point I came to the realization that the kind of straightforward journalism I practiced would be a career dead-end at a paper like The Times or The Washington Post, where a leftist political agenda was a key part of the journalist’s toolkit.

I told Adam that, but he quickly convinced me that my observations of the mainstream media for 40-plus years provided the perfect perch by which I could aid his project by mimicking the kind of reporting that could be expected to drive the narrative for the next six months in the 2024 election.

Ellwanger and I had met through a shared appreciation of our conservative columns, mine for RealClearPolitics and his for The American Conservative and other journals. He was living in internal exile as a professor of rhetoric at the University of Houston, surrounded by ideological enemies but still able to fire salvos at the radical left because he was armored with tenure.

Now he was co-director of the Transition Integrity Project 2024 along with Mike Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation, and Chuck DeVore, chief national initiatives officer for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

The new Transition Integrity Project is based on a similar effort prior to the 2020 election run by Democrats and Never Trump Republicans that concluded “with a high degree of likelihood that November’s elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape.” The 2020 report also declared that “President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold on to........

© RealClearPolitics