As the whole world knows, CNN reported last Thursday that Michael Cohen was prepared to testify that Donald Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Russian emissaries supposedly bearing dirt on Hillary Clinton. And ever since then, the atmosphere around the Russia scandal has changed. If there is any real evidence that Trump knew about that meeting and approved it, it goes a long way toward proving one element of a criminal conspiracy that includes the president of the United States, and confirms many other suspicions surrounding that event.

To hear the voices of American media tell it, Donald Trump’s base supporters are working-class whites. Article after article details this mob, who cheer Trump’s racist, sexist, xenophobic pronouncements, as members of Rust Belt communities who, having lost their high-paying factory jobs to outsourcing, now look to scapegoat anyone and everyone they feel may have been responsible for the diminution of America on the world stage. Donald Trump stokes their anger against an elite that looks down on them.

But reporters’ views of the working class confirm the very bias that Trump exploits. Each time that the press refers to the working class as a voting bloc that is mindlessly voting its “feelings,” it also reminds its audience of Trump’s notorious statement to his audience at a Nevada rally, “I love the poorly educated.” Since then, the press has taken that statement as permission to conflate the categories “working class” and the “poorly educated” as if they were one and the same.