Commentary

ABC’s 75-Person Hit Squad: The Media’s 2016 War on Trump Was Never News – It Was a Straight-Up Political Hit Job

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

Reports confirm it now, straight from the horse’s mouth. Billy Bush, the guy who got torched alongside that Access Hollywood tape, just spilled the beans: ABC News stood up a full seventy-five-person division in 2016 whose sole mission was digging up dirt on Donald Trump and destroying his candidacy. This was not some scrappy investigative team chasing stories. This was a dedicated opposition research unit operating inside a major network, funded by Disney’s deep pockets and aimed like a rifle at one man. Other networks ran the same playbook, just without the exact head count leaking out. Call it what it was: an abomination. Journalism died in 2016, replaced by a coordinated campaign to stop Trump at all costs. The American people saw through it and elected him anyway. The media has never forgiven him for that.

The Billy Bush Revelation That Changes Everything

Bush dropped the bomb recently on national television. He knew the guy running the operation. ABC had seventy-five people whose only job was to get Trump. Not to cover policy. Not to report facts. To unearth scandals, amplify accusations, and feed the narrative that he was unfit, dangerous, and unelectable. This was not organic outrage. It was engineered. The Access Hollywood tape that ended Bush’s own career was part of the same ecosystem. Networks treated Trump like a threat that had to be neutralized, not a candidate to be covered. When he survived every hit, they doubled down. The seventy-five-person squad was the visible tip of a machine that turned newsrooms into war rooms.

This was not journalism. It was activism with corporate backing. Networks poured resources into opposition research while pretending to be impartial observers. They coordinated leaks, hyped unverified claims, and buried anything that made Trump look strong. The public caught on because the bias was so blatant it became self-parody. Polling at the time showed trust in media cratering among everyone outside the coastal bubble. Americans knew they were being played.

How the Networks Turned Into the Democrat Opposition

ABC was not alone. CBS, NBC, and the cable outlets ran parallel operations. They embedded reporters with the Clinton campaign while treating Trump rallies like hostile territory. Stories flowed one way: every Trump gaffe got wall-to-wall coverage, every Clinton scandal got a shrug. The Access Hollywood tape dominated the airwaves for weeks. Meanwhile, Clinton’s email server and the pay-to-play Clinton Foundation got polite questions at best. Networks dispatched teams to fact-check Trump in real time during debates while giving Clinton a pass on her record.

The weaponization did not start in 2016. It accelerated when Trump rode down the escalator in 2015 and refused to play the game. The media had grown comfortable as kingmakers, anointing candidates who courted them and punishing those who did not. Trump mocked them to their faces, called out their bias on live television, and connected directly with voters through rallies and social media. That broke their monopoly. So they declared war. By the general election, the coverage was ninety percent negative across the board. It was not subtle. It was scorched earth.

The Russia collusion hoax was the crown jewel. Networks ran with every anonymous leak from the intelligence community that conveniently aligned with the Clinton campaign. They treated the Steele dossier like gospel even after it was obvious it was opposition research paid for by Democrats. When Trump won anyway, the same outlets spent years flogging the lie that he stole the election with Putin’s help. The seventy-five-person squad at ABC was just the most honest admission of what everyone else was doing in secret.

The Long-Term Damage to Trust and Truth

This coordinated assault did real damage. It convinced millions of Americans that the press was no longer in the news business. It was in the regime-change business. Reporters stopped pretending to chase facts and started chasing narratives. Sources inside the government fed them stories designed to hurt Trump, and they printed them without skepticism. When those stories collapsed, the corrections came in fine print or not at all.

The result was a media that lost the American people. Trust ratings for major networks hit historic lows. Viewers fled to alternatives that did not treat them like idiots. The legacy outlets responded by doubling down, calling anyone who questioned them a conspiracy theorist. They still do. The 2016 hit squads set the template for everything that followed: two impeachments built on nothing, relentless lawfare, and endless claims that Trump was a threat to democracy while they ignored actual threats like open borders and inflation.

America First Reality Check

This is not how a free press is supposed to work. The First Amendment protects the media so it can speak truth to power, not so it can become the power that tries to rig elections. ABC’s seventy-five-person operation and the rest of the networks’ efforts were an attack on the republic itself. They tried to disenfranchise voters by poisoning the information environment. They failed because Americans are not as dumb as the coastal elites think they are.

Trump’s victory in 2016 exposed the rot. The media’s war on him since then has only proven the point. They are not guardians of democracy. They are foot soldiers in one party’s permanent campaign. The seventy-five-person hit squad was the smoking gun. It showed the public exactly what they were up against. Americans rejected it at the ballot box then, and they will keep rejecting it every time the media tries the same garbage. The press can keep digging for dirt. The American people keep voting for results. That is the only verdict that matters.

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