The Washington Post ran a headline this week that read like a campaign memo: "Knives are out for Vance in the GOP. His allies say it's a coordinated 'op.'" Not an editorial. Not an opinion column. A straight news headline, complete with the word "knives," positioned as objective reporting on the Vice President of the United States.
It's July 2026. The midterms haven't even happened yet.
Jeffrey Lord at NewsBusters documented the pattern, drawing a line from the current media offensive against Vice President JD Vance to one of the oldest plays in the American press playbook. The Post itself acknowledged that "the vice president has faced a barrage of attacks recently that are unusual for their intensity and how early in the political calendar they are taking place." That's the Washington Post admitting this is abnormal — and then doing it anyway.
Lord's piece traces the template back to the late 1940s, when a young California Congressman named Richard Nixon took on Alger Hiss, a State Department official accused of Soviet espionage in the 1930s. Hiss was eventually convicted and imprisoned. Nixon's reward from the press for being right? The nickname "Tricky Dick" — a label the media welded to him for the next three decades. Nixon went on to win a U.S. Senate seat from California, the vice presidency, and eventually the White House, but the smear never stopped.
The parallel isn't subtle. Nixon proved the establishment wrong, so they made him pay for it with decades of hostile coverage. Vance committed the same sin — he came from outside the approved channels, aligned with Trump, and now sits a heartbeat from the presidency with a clear lane to 2028.
The media tried this with President Trump. They spent years and billions of dollars in free negative coverage trying to define him before voters could make up their own minds. It didn't work in 2016. It barely worked in 2020. It failed spectacularly in 2024. So naturally, the response is to start earlier.
That's what makes the timing so revealing. Nobody is running ads. Nobody has filed paperwork. Nobody has given a single stump speech for 2028. But the Post is already writing about "knives" — and framing Vance's allies as paranoid for noticing.
Lord points out that this pattern repeated through the media's treatment of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Every Republican who threatens Democrats chances of winning gets the same treatment: define him as dangerous before the public gets to know him as a candidate. The playbook doesn't change because it doesn't need to. It just needs to start early enough.
The tell is always the same. When the press runs negative coverage and then writes a second story about how the negative coverage is "unusual" and "intense" — as if they're observing weather instead of creating it — you're watching the machine build the narrative in real time.
Vance's allies call it a coordinated operation. The Post called that claim newsworthy enough to put in a headline. Which means either they think the accusation has enough weight to generate clicks, or they want to get ahead of it by framing it as a conspiracy theory before the evidence piles up.
They couldn't stop Trump after starting in 2015. So for Vance, they're starting in 2026. That's not a new strategy. It's the same strategy with a longer runway.