President Trump is many things to many people, a walking, tweeting Rorshach. He is a fascinating character with a unique ability to elicit either blind, irrational hatred or blind, irrational loyalty. Most people, unfortunately, are utterly incapable of being remotely objective about this man. This is due to his personality but also, in larger part, to how he is portrayed in the mainstream media.
Of all the aspects of Trump that I find so interesting, perhaps the greatest of all is how the media, in their insatiable quest to slander and destroy Trump, have almost universally missed the biggest story in the history of modern American politics, the stuff that journalists fantasize about, the stereotypical Woodward-Bernstein moment amplified by a great order of magnitude. It was right there in front of them. And they missed it. Entirely.
To put this into a different light, let's imagine what it would have looked like if the election of Donald Trump, and the investigations associated with that event, had instead been the 2008 election of Barack Obama. What would that have looked like?
It's 2007. A political neophyte begins an improbable campaign for the presidency. He is at first considered a long shot, but it soon becomes clear he may actually capture his party's nomination and then the presidency. As his chances of election seem to improve, members of the Bush administration become concerned, as they, the divinely appointed guardians of the republic, understand that Barack Hussein Obama simply can not be allowed to become president.
The John McCain campaign pays foreigners for completely unverified rumors than Barack Obama is a Manchurian Candidate, secretly in the pay of, or under the sway of, Saudi Arabia. On the basis of this picture:
The McCain campaign brings these slanderous rumors, provided by paid foreign actors, to the Bush administration. The Bush administration uses this "information" to secure warrants to surveil the Obama campaign.
As the Obama campaign gains strength, George W. Bush's FBI director and CIA director urge their inteligence officers to use whatever means they can to prove that the potential future president is a treasonous interloper.
Members of George W. Bush's Department of Justice exchange texts and emails in which they frantically assure themselves that Obama can't possible win, while also working feverishly to fabricate an "insurance policy" for the unlikely event that this incredibly dangerous man is actually duly elected to the presidency.
Obama wins. The Republicans in Congress, and the mainstream media, spend the next two years investigating Obama-Saudi collusion. George W. Bush's former FBI and CIA directors appear hundreds and hundreds of time on cable news outlets, sternly assuring viewers that they have secret information that proves the President's treason, and that said treason will be revealed in due time.
When the investigation ends, it becomes clear that there was no Obama-Saudi collusion. The media and members of the previous administration had used all the combined power of the deep state (yes, there is such a thing) and the public airwaves to try to unseat a duly-elected president who they claimed had commited treason, a crime punishable by death.
How would the media have covered George W. Bush's administration spying on the Obama campaign? How would they have covered the McCain campaign's use of paid foreign actors' gossip? How would they have covered FBI agents desparetely pursuing an insurance policy to protect the deep state from the American electorate?
If this had happened to Obama in 2008 instead of Trump in 2016, the media would have gotten it right, I suspect. They would have reported the truth: that a sitting Republican administration and a current Republican nominee had conspired to slander and persecute their political rivals, and that the American people speaking via their votes did absolutely nothing to halt or slow this conspiracy.
That scenario would have been reported, rightly, as the biggest scandal in American history, as an attempted coup d'etat orchestrated by elected and un-elected members of the government, with the collusion of the mainstream media. It would have shaken Washington, indeed the whole country, to its core. So why did they miss this?
Two reasons. Hatred of Trump and love for Obama. They knew Trump was a traitor. And they knew that the Obama administration could never be involved in such sordid skuldugery. The rabid, fanatical, dead-eyed hatred of Donald Trump blinded the media to a degree that is impossible to exaggerate.
Suddenly, the intelligence communities could do no wrong. Suddenly, reporters did not require verification, or named sources. "If True...." became a go-to, but soon even that faded away. Suddenly, it became legitimate to spy on political opponents.
Because of their absurd prejudice, their collective narcissism, their grotesque self-regard, and their crippling confirmation bias, the media missed an unprecedented opportunity to earn the respect of the American people by actually doing their jobs.
During the 1970's, the media breathlessly reported on a president who spied on his political opponents, on American intelligence agencies illegally spying on American citizens of all stripes, from college students to reporters to presidential candidates.
Thanks to this reporting, the American people learned that intelligence agencies are inherently a threat to a free people, and that we must be on guard against presidents using these agencies for domestic political espionage. We learned this lesson. The media taught us this lesson. Then the media willfully ignored this very truth because....Orange Man Bad.
They have destroyed their credibility. This is very bad for the country. But it's not Trump's fault. He was actually the victim in all of this, no matter how unsympathetic a victim he is. How did Trump get the media to commit reputational suicide? He criticized them. This, they could not abide. And in their incandescent juvenile rage, they proved that Trump was right, more right than anyone, including Trump himself, could ever have imagined.
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