It seems like every day brings some new outrage from the media regarding some alleged misdeed by President Donald Trump. This is a much better outcome than I had expected last October!
In October of 2016, I was unhappily anticipating a future where the media conspired to advance a partisan agenda. During the campaign, I repeatedly pointed out to my friends that the best reason to vote for any Republican might be that the media would suddenly care about limits on the Executive Branch again.
And, boy, was I right!
Thank you, President Trump, for giving us a media that cares about engaging in oversight of the government instead of conspiring with it. More than anything else, the election of 2016 was a repudiation of the Orwellianism of the prior eight years. Now the media has a renewed enthusiasm for reporting any and every allegation made against President Trump, no matter how flimsy or baseless.
Former FBI Director Comey wrote that Trump said, “I hope you can let this [Flynn investigation] go.” The media immediately, and predictably, misreports this as Trump interfering in the investigation or engaging in obstruction of justice. Gone are the days of the media ignoring reports of Bill Clinton’s obstruction of justice, for which he was disbarred and impeached.
Now, everything Trump does is printed on the headlines of The New York Times or breathlessly reported on CNN. This is the media we’ve needed! This is the media we’ve been missing since they claimed George W. Bush was kidnapping Americans off the street and sending them to be tortured at CIA black sites for no reason other than talking on their cell phones. No more burying news about the IRS engaging in political targeting, as happened under Barack Obama. Paranoia is cool again!
The best thing about this is we can know that what’s being reported is the worst things they can find. If they had something more serious than “I hope you can let this go,” it would be on the front page. They’re not hiding negative news about Trump on page D-7. They’re not refusing to report anything in order to make him look good.
If Hillary Clinton had been elected, the media narrative of Republican obstructionism would have been left unchanged. Now it’s clear that Republicans can’t even pass a simple health care bill or tax cut. The media doesn’t even bother portraying Republicans as obstructionist anymore.
Now Democrats are engaging in “patriotism” by voting “no” on everything.
Thank you, President Trump, for making it no longer unpatriotic to protest the president.
Rodeo clowns were fired for making fun of the president just a few years ago. But now SNL does it every week! No one worries that they will lose their job for saying bad things about President Trump. That’s freedom! And that’s the kind of freedom that people can only enjoy when the president is Republican.
Thank you, President Trump, for catalyzing the distrust and skepticism spreading throughout the country. What a good thing that is! We must have a healthy distrust of the politicians who claim they have to take power from us to do the good that we won’t do ourselves. The more power that people take back from Washington, the more empowered we will be to do that good we want to do instead of lining the pockets of bureaucrats.
Americans are capable of so much more than our government is! Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently pointed out that our foreign aid is dwarfed by the charitable giving that Americans do every year. And Americans donate more than money, we donate our time and energy, too. Only the miserly believe that paying taxes is enough: the government squanders most of that. A true tax cut would allow us to give even more of our money to charity instead of politicians.
The hatred and hysteria spewed by the left-wing media will fade. Most people will tune it out, and it will eventually be relegated to late-night radio, The View, or follow Ancient Aliens on the History Channel. The media’s reckless reporting of baseless accusations, such as reports that Republicans legalized discrimination of rape victims by insurance companies, will fade into obscurity. Engineered news will be replaced by more reliable reporting and less partisan sources of news.
A full accounting of how the media discredited itself would fill volumes of books. But one need look no further than the leaked emails from the Clinton campaign discussing their strategy for helping Donald Trump win the GOP nomination. They believed his nomination would secure the election for Hillary Clinton. Their discussion of how and where to plant stories leaves no doubt that our media has been a willing accomplice to manipulation by far more than just Russia. But Donald Trump was able to beat the odds, the cynical machinations of the Clinton team, and the elites around the globe who opposed him.
Thank you, President Trump, for winning!
John J. Hickox is an Army veteran of the war in Iraq, graduate of the University of Alabama School of Law, and practicing attorney in Illinois.