The Media Will Re-Elect Trump

They would rather believe tall tales about Russia than hear what voters said in 2016.
                 
By  Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. 
Wall Street Journal
February 26, 2019             

 Donald Trump’s tenure has been a pleasant surprise compared to expectations, which isn’t saying much. His administration has been as chaotic as predicted, driven by his habit of saying unscripted things. But it also has been productive of a few things: corporate tax reform, curbing regulation, injecting a semi-useful ferment into our foreign policy.

The remainder of his term was always likely to be dominated by the enormous baggage he brought with him—his business and personal history.

What was not foreseeable is the extent to which the FBI’s meddling in the 2016 presidential race, using Russia’s meddling as an excuse, would become a counter thread in the narrative of alleged Trump corruption.
       
There is a humongous irony here. Not expecting to win, Mr. Trump allowed his organization’s desultory pursuit of a Trump tower in Moscow to continue during the 2016 campaign. Make no mistake, though a report that he instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about this matter has been debunked by none other than special counsel Robert Mueller,  it remains true that Mr. Cohen lied to Congress. The lack of any other crime will not stop this episode from being central in a Democratic House impeachment hearing resting heavily on hints that there is something fishy about Mr. Trump’s attitudes about Russia.

But what is true of Mr. Trump is also true of James Comey. He also expected Mr. Trump to lose. The FBI’s own highly questionable actions during the campaign, which inadvertently helped elect Mr. Trump, were also supposed to go unexamined.

Thus we find ourselves in a place where the Mueller report will settle nothing. It can’t prove a negative, so the hunt by Democrats and the media for collusion will go on. Read any liberal pundit: Collusion now means if Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin both wanted Mr. Trump to be president, Mr. Trump is guilty. (Never mind that this stance essentially gives Mr. Putin’s trolls and hackers a veto over who can be president.)

Under Democratic leadership, the House Intelligence Committee is well on its way to becoming a Warren Commission for an alternative universe in which JFK spent a nice day in Dallas. Rep. Adam Schiff has signaled that he intends to rake through Mr. Trump’s business and bank records searching for the motive for collusion crimes that exist only in his imagination.

All this will be cheered on by backward-rationalizing pundits in the New York Times, justifying their own hysteria by portraying the routine, predictable and typically opportunistic partisan opposition faced by Mr. Trump as somehow exceptionally heroic.

A more honest rendition would notice that Mr. Trump—in many ways an accidental president—is also an unusually inexperienced and weak president, lacking even meaningful institutional roots in his own party.
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It takes no heroism to oppose him. His statements are easily mocked for not conforming to the expected hypocrisies. He supplies his enemies more extracurricular targets than Bill Clinton did. He is universally reviled by elite institutions, including the media. Except for his knack for turning their hatred into lemonade, his only asset is his rapport with an unrich, unconnected voter segment that falls far short of a majority.
Indeed, it is hard to explain how Mr. Trump can simultaneously be such a menace and such a pushover that every Democratic officeholder in the country thinks, “If only I can stumble into the nomination, I’m sure to be the next president.”

The answer, of course, is pundit vanity: Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy because writers opposing him then are very important people.

Our wonderful English language gives us a perfectly good word for major media interpretations of the Trump phenomenon. That word is fatuous. When historians weigh his well-advertised nature vs. the fantastic overreaction to his election, their first question will be: How did he become president? Voters must have had something in mind when they pulled the lever for somebody so seemingly unsuitable.

But even deeper into the night they will wonder: How did so rich and complex a society as ours survive a pundit class so devoid of judgment, so incapable even of identifying what was interesting about the times they live in?

So here we are. The media will eventually take notice of the strange acts of the U.S. intelligence community and their role in the 2016 election. Either that, or the story of the decade will continue to be told by alternative media outlets that, for all their faults, at least provide a venue for ignored realities to be taken account of.
In the meantime, imagine you’re one of the millions who thinks four years of the Trump show is probably enough. You can only marvel at the obliviousness with which his enemies are working to assure (and even necessitate) his re-election.