President Trump, who dreamed of being a movie producer, seems to have written the ideal script for confronting the media's biased, knee-jerk responses to every move he made.
In my new book and film, Citizen Trump: A One Man Show, I dig deeper than the shallow "Duhlemonized" nonsense and expose the rigid mainstream media's determined constant attack and equal lack of judgment.
The media prides itself on being a watchdog, but instead, it had become Pavlov's Lapdog. Obama/Hillary could say anything, and the Snarling dog in Trump could say nothing.
No matter what he did, he was attacked, dismissed, called names, discredited. Now that the page has turned in the White House, we see he was right, right, and right again on policy.
The many scenes in the Trump saga write themselves:
Trump resumes his campaign rallies this month, chuckles, rolls his eyes, holds out his arms, and shrugs: "Can you believe it? Can you believe it?"
The media buried the story, and only the respectable journalists are admitting it. Trump must be giddy as he plays the actual news clips showing the mainstream media and his early announcements of "the China virus."
Way back in January 2020, Dr. Fauci received an email from the director of the country's largest biomedical research facility about "unusual features" of COVID-19, showing it was "engineered." Fauci replied that he would call him.
By April 2020, the peak of the crisis, Dr. Francis Collins, the widely respected director of the National Institutes of Health who cracked the human genome two decades ago, was emailing Fauci with an ominous subject line: "conspiracy gains momentum."
What? The two most respected scientists were writing about a conspiracy gaining momentum as the media was routinely saying there was no basis for the conspiracy theories?
The phrase "words matter" seems like a cliche, but throughout a pandemic, when accurate information could have saved lives, how do you justify dismissing the President of the United States just because you don't happen to like him?!
Trump was treated with disdain by the press and universally mocked by chattering foreign leaders and more right than wrong when it came to his call on the Wuhan Virus, admittedly a term that might encourage bias and misinformation.
In Citizen Trump, we reveal the moments when Trump the Showman turned President, took over TV with his daily show, but looking back now, how much of his stance was defensive?
After years of defending himself against the court system, the Democrats (two impeachments), media, big tech, and even much of his own party's establishment, Trump was placed solidly in the role of being the only natural leader trying to stop the pandemic.
The media laughed and rolled its eyes at Operation Warp Speed and the idea that a vaccine could be ready by fall 2020 – until it happened. And note, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump were among the first to roll up their sleeves to each grab the Pfizer shot.
The final draft of the COVID story, like the history of 9/11, may yet again show a media "rush to judgment" got everything wrong, including a media cover-up and delay that quite likely cost thousands of American lives.
It is true , Trump's handling of the pandemic was problematic. His news conferences went on for hours, day after day, a streaming flood of thinking out loud, with some ("bleachy" blanking moments), as if we were part of his national brainstorming sessions.
He was certainly the opposite of a slick scripted politician, and the "reality" was riveting at first but led to missteps as they went on day after day after day. We learned from the Bob Woodward tapes that Trump knew this was a dead deal from the start, far more than he let on.
Trump did not always use the right rhetoric, and at times, he was competing for the limelight (and credit) with his scientists, especially Dr. Fauci.
But the Covid panic might all have been another "boy who cried wolf" syndrome like the never-found weapons of mass destruction George W. Bush promised and never delivered in Iraq. The media seems to forget such things, but voters don't.
He tried to work with the governors but should have organized a federal task force playing a leading role.
Suddenly, the very people who ridiculed him in 2020 for using xenophobic rhetoric are coming to learn that bats and the fish and meat in Wuhan markets did not cause the spread of the virus.
While critics contemptuously touted Trump as a racist for calling the COVID-19 pandemic the "Chinese virus," the "Wuhan virus," and especially the "Kung Flu," he never let woke sensibilities dilute that belief.
And the much more insidious prospect that China was indeed experimenting to gain future dominance is not off the table.
To bolster the Trump argument, two scientists in the UK claimed “prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China," and claimed scientists there reversed engineered the origin of the virus to cover up their tracks.
For an entire year, the scientists, British Professor Angus Dowglesh and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen's findings were dismissed by academics, social media companies, major journals, and global Media.
The ultimate result: It all backfired on the media, sowing distrust and causing ratings to hit t new lows. Ultimately, people don't listen to boys who cry wolf.
Editor's note: To learn more about the book and film visit www.citizentrumpfilm.com
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