This is not to say that he’s not had his share of defeats and promises unkept. The national debt is a national disgrace, and neither the GOP-controlled Congress, whose leadership and most of its members cannot be trusted, nor this administration have shown the courage to reduce it by a penny. All the posturing to the contrary, Obamacare still exists. The wall is unbuilt and underfunded. Planned Parenthood continues to receive money to kill babies. (It’s fungible, folks.) Free traders believe that tariffs are a monumental mistake. He’s now completed his second historic summit with Kim Jong-un and there’s no denuclearizing in sight. Evidence still points to “Rocket Man” in relentless pursuit of an ever-expanding military threat against the United States. And then there’s Russia, always Russia.
Trump should not be considered immune from valid criticism, and this book is not a whitewash. There are the policy and political shortcomings.
And then there are the unforced errors, mostly caused by his incessant—and so often plain obnoxious—tweeting. While his hardened base tends to embrace the tone of that which so readily offends the elites in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Tinseltown, even they shake their heads in disappointment at some of his targets. LeBron James? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Meryl Streep? The Freedom Caucus? Time and again we awake to read he’s just viciously assaulted someone from the immensely popular to the thoroughly irrelevant, even his own friends and staff.
At the head of the so-called Resistance is the national so-called news media. It is the height of dishonesty that these “journalists” deny they have joined the far left in common cause and with undisguised brio. Today they are simply incapable of just reporting the news. They must be judgmental at all times. This bias is found in many ways. It is found in the story selected and the story ignored. It is found in the spokespersons quoted and the ones silenced. It’s in the headlines and in the conclusions and everywhere in between.
Every elected Republican since Dwight Eisenhower—Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43—has been treated with nothing but hostility. (Ford doesn’t count. He was both unelected and too irrelevant for anyone to care.) The hostility extends to most GOP presidential candidates
But Trump is in a category of his own. The national news media were obsessed with the man from the start, laughing at the idea of this buffoon running and then, when his campaign was under way, ridiculing him at every opportunity, still dismissing any thought that he might win his party’s nomination as his numbers continued to climb. When he became the nominee and posed a threat even they couldn’t ignore, they waged scorched-earth warfare against him, breaking all the rules of journalistic ethics in a desperate attempt to change the outcome of the election. It wasn’t that they thought he could win (they didn’t). It was that he needed to be destroyed just in case. But he won, and they’ve been on a jihad ever since to remove him from office.
Trump is unique in another regard. As opposed to every other Republican who has ignored this enemy or, worse, fled for the tall grass in terror, from the start Donald J. Trump understood that the news media were his most powerful enemy, hell-bent on preventing his election and, when that failed, destroying his presidency.
So he went to war.
This is the story of a media that set out to destroy a president and his administration, but destroyed themselves instead.
L. Brent Bozell III
UNMASKED
1
The Inevitable Trump Loss
That Didn’t Happen
JOURNALISTS ARE THE SMARTEST people in the room, so smart that they can’t possibly be expected to just report the news. Thus, they grant themselves license to package it and analyze it with an intelligence only they seem to possess. They profess to believe in the power of facts, but what they really believe in is their power to proclaim facts. Facts exist to be bent to their will to further their narrative.
In 2016 that narrative was more an unequivocal declaration: Donald Trump must not win.
It was clear from the start that Donald Trump was itching for a fight with the media. He was going to put the entire profession on trial in the court of public opinion, and he did that by introducing two words that within a year had become part of the political lexicon: “fake news.” The media were aghast that they would be so rudely challenged and dismissed the charges—angrily. Perhaps they had a point. It was certainly unfair to paint an entire institution with this broad, ugly brush. But when Trump unmasked one truly fake news story after another, the self-righteous press met the evidence with stony silence. The institution was guilty of aiding and abetting fake news. It still is.
The campaign didn’t begin this way, however. When Trump descended the now-famous Trump Tower escalator and announced his candidacy to become the forty-fifth President of the United States, the announcement was met with ridicule. Trump wasn’t just dead on arrival. He was a joke.
MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell asked Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania: “Do you have any doubt that this is anything more than a carnival show?” Over on CNN, noontime anchor Ashleigh Banfield teased an upcoming segment on Trump’s announcement by asking if it was “hilarity run amuck.” CNN commentator S. E. Cupp called it “a rambling mess of a speech. . . . I was howling. Howling!”
On Bloomberg’s daily political show With All Due Respect, co-host John Heilemann explained, “I do not hate Donald Trump, but I do not take him seriously. I thought, you know, everything that was garish and ridiculous about him was fully on display. . . . Will it get him anywhere close to becoming the nominee or the President of the United States? I think not.”
PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff calmly relayed, “So far, Trump has placed near the bottom in public opinion polls of the Republican presidential hopefuls.”
She was right to say that. He was tied for tenth at just 3 percent in a CNN poll of self-described Republicans (and independent-leaning Republicans), and that was where her colleagues thought he’d remain, too.
“He can’t win, but he can get a lot of votes,” Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, a former political reporter, predicted on MSNBC’s The Last Word. The Huffington Post’s Marc Lamont Hill agreed over on CNN: “Of course he’s not going to win.” CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes echoed that opinion: “No one expects Trump to get close to winning the nomination.”
The morning after Trump’s announcement, MSNBC Morning Joe pundit Mike Barnicle chortled, “Can we stipulate for the purposes of this conversation that Donald Trump will never be President of the United States?”
CBS This Morning host Norah O’Donnell reported that “some Republicans say they’re worried Trump will turn the campaign into a circus,” and the subsequent story by correspondent Nancy Cordes cautioned that “party leaders worry Trump’s presence will turn the primary into a joke.”
NBC’s Today relegated the news to a dismissive twenty-three-second brief but made sure to include this insulting sentence: “America’s largest Latino civil rights organization called Trump ‘an exceedingly silly man.’”
That night, NBC’s evening newscast took it to the next level, featuring a rare narrated piece by Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, who unloaded on Trump. “On the one hand, he’s a late-night joke,” he stated. “On the other, he’s the proverbial skunk at the garden party. How does the Republican Party handle a political streaker who knows how to get attention?”
With “moderators” like this, who needed left-wing Democratic Party spokespersons?
The Associated Press