Say this about President Donald Trump: He’s not cowering in his basement, forbidden by his handlers from sitting down mano a mano with a tough journalist.

His opponent certainly is, though. And one wonders how long it’ll be before the voting public realizes they’re being played. The man who might be our next president is trying to run out the clock — and the mainstream media is aiding and abetting him.

This weekend, the current president sat down with Fox News’s Chris Wallace for a 40-minute interview. Much of it was predictable: tough questions from Wallace followed by forceful and unapologetic answers from the president. But Wallace let the media mask slip for a moment when the topic turned to law and order, and it reminded us that Trump is not only taking on Joe Biden but the Fourth Estate as well.

As the Washington Examiner reports, “If there was any doubt left that it would be completely suicidal for President Trump to agree to a general election debate with live ‘fact-checking,’ as some dim liberals have proposed, his interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace just removed it.”

Whether it’d be suicidal remains to be seen, but many folks underestimate the deep and lasting damage Trump has done to the media’s credibility in the past three years with the repeated utterance of just two simple words: fake news.

During the interview, Wallace asked Trump about the racial unrest and the spike in violent crime in our nation’s major urban areas, and the president correctly noted that those areas are, in every case, run by Democrats — and have been for decades. “They’ve run them poorly,” said the president. “It was always bad, but now it’s gotten totally out of control, and it’s really because they want to defund the police, and [Joe] Biden wants to defund the police.”

To which Wallace reflexively interrupted, “No, he — sir, he does not.”

But Wallace is wrong, and demonstrably so — as are all of his colleagues who likewise tried to cover for Biden’s stated position on police funding. How so? “In a very recent interview,” the Examiner reports, Biden was asked whether he agreed that “we can redirect some of the funding [to police departments].” To which he replied, “Yes, absolutely!”

Can we all agree that to redirect funding away from one thing and toward another thing is to at least partially defund the former thing? If we can agree on this straightforward interpretation of the English language, then we can also agree that Chris Wallace is carrying Joe Biden’s water.

Regardless of this semantic dispute, though, there’s a voice that speaks much more loudly on this issue than either the president or Wallace: that of the National Association of Police Organizations. As The Hill reports, the organization, “which represents more than 1,000 police units and associations across the country, announced Wednesday it is endorsing President Trump in his reelection bid.”

Remember: This is an organization that endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and again in 2012.

So what changed? Well, Biden and the Democrats changed. “Our endorsement recognizes [President Trump’s] steadfast and very public support for our men and women on the front lines,” said the NAPO’s public letter, “especially during this time of unfair and inaccurate opprobrium being directed at our members by so many.”

Between now and Election Day, look for Trump to draw a clear distinction between himself and his opponent: he as the “law and order” president, and his opponent as the enabler of rioters and statue-topplers.

For patriotic Americans, the choice couldn’t be more clear.

“You’ve got to feel at some point [Joe Biden is] going to come out from the basement … he’s gonna have to be more exposed and take questions just as tough as the ones I asked this president,” Wallace said in an interview earlier today with Fox News’s Bret Baier. “He’s gonna have to do it with a bunch of people and, of course, he’s going to have those three debates with the president and you know that the president can handle himself in these debates… I think there is an open question there, can Joe Biden do the same?”

“The fact is, the president is out there,” continued Wallace. “He’s out there in this broiling heat with me for an hour, he took all the questions. You can like his answers or dislike them but he had answers and Joe Biden hasn’t faced that kind of scrutiny, hasn’t faced that kind of exposure.”

(Updated.)