Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) told a death joke about President Trump this week. The left-wing crowd howled with laughter, and the establishment media have only shrugged.

“Do you know the difference between a crisis and a catastrophe?” Hastings asked the assembled crowd at a left-wing “Stronger Together” rally in South Florida.

“A crisis is if Donald Trump falls into the Potomac River and can’t swim, [while] a catastrophe is anybody saves his ass.”

In the YouTube video, the crowd is heard bursting out in laughter with approval.

The Sun Sentinel first reported Hastings’ joke but buried it under the headline “Congressman Alcee Hastings says ‘something is tragically wrong’ with Donald Trump’s mind.”

Also present at the event was U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, (D-FL), who is in a tough re-election bid with Republican Gov. Rick Scott and the five Democrats looking to replace Scott as governor.

Hastings has been a venomous and divisive critic of prominent Republicans going back years, but because of the “D” after his name, the national media have never made him pay any kind of price.

In 2008, Hastings said of then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, “Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So you just think this through.”

In 2016, Hastings called then-candidate Trump a “sentient pile of excrement.”

Scandal has swirled against the 25-year incumbent, going back to 1981 when Hastings, as a sitting federal judge, was accused of taking a $150,000 bribe. In 1989, by a vote of 431-3, the Democrat-controlled House of Representative impeached Hastings for lying about the case. Scandal has followed Hastings as a congressman, including a $200,000 sexual harassment lawsuit paid for by the taxpayers in 2009.

The media are once again protecting Hastings. After he “joked” about how it would be a “catastrophe” to save a sitting president’s life, other than dutiful coverage, there has been no outrage from the same media that destroyed the life and career of a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask.

This is not a surprise, though, coming from an establishment media that have spent the last three years normalizing, and even encouraging, the idea of violence against Trump and his supporters.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.