Here are some signs your journalistic efforts toward neutrality may be going too far.
For better or worse, Donald Trump supporters might be the most passionate voters in American politics today. They bring costumes, spit in the faces of protesters and sneer at the reporters in the press pen.
Let's just pause right there. In which context would those things be for better? I'll give you the costumes—knock yourself out with the costumes—but still feel relatively confident that the spitting and the sneering is indisputably for worse. When you're starting out with "Well, at least the spitting shows they're passionate," it seems both a clear admission that you can't find anything nicer to say about your subject and a declaration you're still going to pretend you did.
Their signs might say it all: The Silent Majority Stands with Trump
The Trump campaign makes those signs and passes them out to crowds. Nobody at those rallies had any say about those signs; Trump appropriated the old Nixon line because he liked the sound of it. I think that says it all, personally: mass-manufactured proclamations of mass support handed out by a mass-marketed billionaire, signifying nothing. They are meant to dupe gullible people into thinking the silent majority stands with Trump because, after all, there was a sign saying so. Also, Trump has what plants crave.
Trump events are electrified by the feeling that these people, too—many white, working- and middle-class—can be marginalized, and they’re tired of the muzzling effect of political correctness that keeps them from saying so.
Well maybe that's what should be on the damn signs, then. Racist Lives Matter. If they are aware that working and middle class people can and are being marginalized in our economy in favor of policies that weaken their ability to remain in the middle class and which gut the services they rely on in favor of tax cuts to whoever cut the biggest donor check, good for them, but "political correctness" has long since been the buzzword bigots and sexists use to grouse about the looks they get when they say vile things in public anymore.
I have to stop now. It's only Monday—it's too early for this. I have long suspected that as Trump built electoral successes the press narrative would follow him, beginning to paper over his inherent sack o' crapness and the distinctly twitchy nature of his supporters in favor of more conventional and omnipresent both-sides-do-it-isms and the portrayal of his fans as salt of the earth types, in much the same way Cliven Bundy was a real salt of the earth type when he and his buddies were waving guns around and threatening to shoot the feds for being feds. If we start getting fluff pieces on NPR about the Trump supporters who spit and/or sucker punch protesters and/or just happen to cover themselves with pro-Hitler white supremacist tattoos, I'm out. I'll drop you a line from Canada when I get there.