It wasn’t a good week for President Donald Trump, but it could have been a lot worse. For all his faults – and there are many – the president is blessed with one important thing: opponents so unhinged, so irrational, that even when compared to him, he comes off better.
The ham-handed and, frankly, classless way in which the president fired FBI Director James Comey could have and should have been handled better. The White House can find out where the head of the FBI is at any given moment, so wait until he’s in the office to fire him or pick up the phone and do it right. Instead, Comey saw it on TV.
That said, he had to go. But media reports suggest the White House was shocked at the reaction. If true, that itself is shocking. If Donald Trump saved a puppy, the media and Democrats would complain about it, so firing the head of a department currently investigating the Trump campaign and being shocked about blowback is amateurish.
Luckily for the president, “worse than amateurish” is the perfect way to describe his opponents.
Democrats who days or even hours earlier had been hyper-critical of Comey spun on a dime to proclaim his firing an affront to justice. They declared he had no credibility, then expressed outrage at his no longer “leading the investigation into President Trump.”
Of course the head of the FBI was not “leading the investigation” any more than the CEO of a car company leads the investigation into a faulty brake pad. But why let the facts stand in the way of a good freak-out?
Nearly every Democrat, journalist, and cable news personality clutching their pearls over Comey’s firing has a trail of pronouncements expressing disgust at one or more of his actions in the recent past.
Which leaves these leftists having to argue that a man they repeatedly declared unsuited for the job should not have been removed from it.
But that’s not all. Not even close.
President Trump is known for, shall we say, contradicting his staff and himself. Previous statements are regularly deemed inoperative, many times within the same day. Normally, that would be fatal for a politician. But nothing in the age of Trump is normal.
Liberals appear to have a lack of self-control when it comes to all things Trump. Every move, every tweet is a threat to democracy, an affront to humanity, and surely will lead to the end of life as we know it. There’s no proportionality. When a 5 would do, they turn it up to 11. They can’t help it.
Simply shutting up would serve them better than what they’re doing, but they’re incapable.
No conspiracy, no anonymous source is too far-fetched to be believed about the president.
This week saw the media fall flat on their faces time and again. Anonymous sources wove conspiracies of Comey requesting more money to expand the Russia investigation just before being fired and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein threatening to resign if his letter was used as justification for its sole purpose for being.
The funding story was undercut by Interim Director Andrew McCabe’s testimony before the Senate, and the resignation tale was destroyed from the mouth of Rosenstein himself.
Anonymous sources, it seems, are the order of the day. One Washington Post story involved 30 of them; 30! That’s five more than a major league baseball roster.
As if whispers from the shadows weren’t enough, many have taken to simply lying. The truth is bad enough sometimes, but to be compelled to lie on top of it must be some sort of disorder.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, for example, could have just played a full clip from Trump’s interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt and pointed out his inconsistencies. But she couldn’t just do that; she had to turn it up to 11.
Maddow played the President saying, “Regardless of recommendation (from Rosenstein), I was going to fire Comey, knowing there was no good time to do it. And in fact, when I decided to just do it (fire Comey), I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.” She then mugged for the camera for a couple of seconds like the Muppet Beaker caught in headlights.
After her comedic pause, Maddow feigned outrage and talked about how Trump had just admitted to removing Comey because of the Russia investigation and how he should be impeached because of it.
But of course, that’s not at all of what the president said in that answer. Context, which was all the rage with liberals during the Obama years, has gone out the window, it seems, and been replaced with rage and lies.
What the president said, completely, was, “And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should've won. And the reason they should've won it is the Electoral College is almost impossible for a Republican to win. It's very hard because you start off at such a disadvantage. So, everybody was thinking they should've won the election. This was an excuse for having lost an election.”
He continued from there, but did you notice the difference between what Maddow showed her audience and the truth? He wasn’t talking about why he fired Comey, he was talking about the Russia investigation. He went on to say. “But I said to myself I might even lengthen out the investigation. But I have to do the right thing for the American people.”
If you got your “news” from Rachel Maddow you were lied to; you were misinformed.
But liberals don’t care. No lie is too much, no conspiracy too extreme to be believed as gospel truth. They’re irrational.
And those irrationals are helping Donald Trump. If they could control themselves, be honest, or even just silent and rational for a while the president could find himself in trouble. But they can’t.
The juxtaposition between anything Trump does or says and dozens of journalists and cable news talking heads screaming “the sky is falling” is no contest.
There is no media monopoly anymore. When reporters lie, people find out about it. The old model just doesn’t work. Even people who don’t like Trump like irrational Chicken Littles less. They may be Donald Trump’s greatest asset.
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