I’m NeverTrump, but, even as we are living though another of the media feeding frenzies related to Trump comments, we should remember that his reputation will be upwardly revised by media liberals.
For media liberals the pattern of among Republican nominees is an eternal decline as to both morality and policy. Romney was worse than the compassionate McCain, and Trump is worse than the personally decent Romney (whose decency wasn’t that obvious to liberals in 2012.)
I don’t think that pure, conscious partisanship is the sole cause of this. Most media liberals are embedded within upper-middle-class liberal social networks. Those social networks tend to amplify and radicalize the existing liberal tendencies of those reporters.
Whoever the 2020 Republican nominee is, media liberals and their friends are going to spend their leisure hours upsetting each other with social media posts and Daily Show/John Oliver/whoever video clips about the horribleness of the Republican nominee. Trump will start looking better in retrospect.
Imagine that the 2020 GOP nominates a Harvard-educated war hero like Tom Cotton. By September of that year, media liberals will be arguing that:
1. At least Donald Trump wasn’t a backwoods religious fanatic.
2. At least Donald Trump wasn’t a crusading warmonger.
3. At least Donald Trump accepted the need for universal health care coverage.
That doesn’t mean that liberals are wrong about Trump being an unusually terrible nominee. It just means that, to the extent they are right, it is entirely by accident.