Since November 8, 2016, many progressives have been pitching a collective hissy fit. Unable to believe that the shoo-in for office, that unsinkable-as-the-Titanic candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, lost the presidency to a “loser” like Donald J. Trump, they’ve lived in a perpetual state of denial—a state without a single electoral vote. Many see no irony whatsoever in waving a “Love Trumps Hate” protest sign while their faces are contorted into perpetual scowls. Progressive hysteria is real.
Rather than accepting political defeat with humility, Democrats and their progressive supporters appear to believe that if their temper tantrums are loud and hysterical enough, the rest of the country will capitulate and say, “Just kidding about that Trump thing. Hillary can be president now.” They’ve screamed that Trump is more evil than Satan, Hitler, Stalin, and Richard Nixon. Or they point to “facts” that Trump is a bigger liar than any other president in history. Or they say that his presidency is on its last gasp because the Russia collusion narrative and the Mueller investigation will eventually bear fruit.
The “Trump is as evil as all the villains in World and U.S. history,” the laziest argument of all, is easy enough to mock. So Trump is as bad as dictators who murdered millions of people in concentration camps and pogroms across Europe? Got it. Trump is Nixon? You can read my rebuttal to that facile analogy here, where I argue that it’s not Trump who may be facing Nixonian comeuppance but Democrats who engaged in their own dirty tricks during the 2016 campaign. More on that later.
At the moment, Trump voters are having a lot of fun with the “Trump is as evil as fill-in-the-blank” charge. Last week, The Babylon Bee, a Christian satirical website similar to The Onion, ran the following article: “CNN Report: Evil Trump Kidnaps Three People from North Korean Paradise.” Apparently, even evangelicals have a sense of humor.
Trump is the biggest liar of all time? Did these Rip van Winkles sleep through the last administration? Have they forgotten the “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” declarations of President Obama? How many times did our former POTUS utter that whopper on the stump? Moreover, thanks to Obamacare architect, Jonathan Gruber, we know that they were proud about lying their asses off. Here’s Gruber in his own words.
“A lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, that was critical to getting [the Affordable Care Act] passed.”
Also, let’s not forget that Ben Rhodes, one of President Obama’s national security advisors, bragged about how the administration easily manipulated the public on the Iran deal because of the inexperience and sycophancy of the media:
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus… Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing…“We created an echo chamber… “They [the seemingly independent experts] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
You’ll have to excuse conservatives for laughing when progressives suddenly become concerned about lying. We know how the media assisted the Kennedys in creating the Camelot fiction. We know how, at FDR’s insistence, the media kept the public in the dark about the president’s polio. We watched incredulously as Obama’s media cheerleaders yawned and ignored the administration’s dishonest antics in John Koskinen and Lois Lerner’s Internal Revenue Service and in Eric Holder’s Justice Department. Moreover, when they point to Trump’s statement that he could shoot somebody and not lose supporters as evidence that his voters are sheep, progressives never transcend their own confirmation bias to wonder what Trump actually meant.
Yes, we will cut Trump a lot of slack since they never held President Obama accountable for anything. It’s Obama’s supporters who often engaged in cult-of-personality worship, not us. We understand what a flawed individual Trump is, as are we all. We also know that if a well-funded team of federal prosecutors were dogging our every move and looking at our pasts, they could make even the most law-abiding of us look like criminals. Ultimately, though, what impacts the American people more, Trump’s exaggerations about the size of his inaugural crowds or Obama’s in-you-face falsehoods about the Affordable Care Act?
Then there’s the ongoing Russia collusion fiction. You’ve read here that “there is no objective doubt now about whether Trump’s team knew about Russian interference in the 2016 election. The evidence to support what the U.S. intelligence community has been saying all along is now available for everyone to see.” Yet the article offers zilch as proof of this assertion. It’s merely “available for everyone to see.” This is a not-so-clever bait-and-switch. The “you’re stupid if you don’t agree with me,” “it’s a fact that I’m right,” or “go investigate for yourself if you don’t believe what I’m saying” declarations are bombastic bluster light on specifics. Sadly, the rage and emotionalism demonstrated by those who wait breathlessly for Trump’s impeachment belie their pronouncements that logic and facts are on their side.
There is indeed a great deal of doubt about Trump’s so-called “collusion” with Russia. Republicans on House Intelligence Committee recently released a report stating that there is no evidence linking DJT to Russian interference in the 2016 election. Certainly, Democrats cried foul and accused the Republicans of partisanship, but that accusation cuts both ways. Are they being partisan for wanting the investigation to continue into perpetuity? Are we supposed to believe they are simply interested in the truth rather than the politics?
There’s as much evidence that Team Hillary colluded with the Russians when it partially funded the Steele Dossier than anyone in the Trump campaign did. Beyond that, there’s plenty of evidence that the Obama administration may have engaged in Nixonian dirty tricks in an attempt to submarine Trump. Just this weekend the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel reports that the FBI under the Obama administration may have infiltrated the Trump campaign to find out damaging information. Most conservatives believe if O’s team politicized the Justice Department, he did the same thing in the intelligence agencies. Is it so far-fetched to believe a presidential administration might over-hype intelligence? Progressives sure believed it during the era of Iraq and “Bush lied, people died.”
Moreover, just last week, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis criticized the Mueller team at the Paul Manafort fraud hearings, basically arguing that the entire endeavor is an investigation in search of a crime. Then when one of the alleged Russian troll farms called Mueller’s bluff and insisted on going to court, the special prosecutor’s team said it wasn’t ready to go to trial. The judge in the case agreed with the trolls–namely that if the feds come out with guns blazing, they better be ready to fight. A lot of political pundits believe that Mueller never expected any of the foreign nationals to show up and that the indictments were merely a publicity stunt to keep the Trump-Russia narrative alive.
All of this back and forth about which campaign is the more corrupt serves merely to help President Trump. In a National Review column last week, Heather Wilhelm made the following humorous observation:
“Every few days, some fevered news agency announces some variation of the following: “This is it! We have the smoking gun that will crack the Trump presidency, and it is completely different from the 1,326 purported smoking guns that we thought we had before!”… The story drifts, the supposed smoking gun sputters, and everything slowly morphs into a cable-news cartoon soap opera, narrated by a voice not unlike that of Charlie Brown’s disembodied and unintelligible murmuring teacher. Depending on the day, the tale in question will likely involve layers of campaign-finance law, the name-dropping of a Russian oligarch, 13 unintelligible memos (probably), Stormy Daniels and her lawyer (definitely), several acts of mind-boggling incompetence from both sides of the aisle, countless insufferable bureaucrats who are wildly overpaid with your hard-earned tax dollars, and at least one narrative element that you can’t appropriately discuss with children under the age of 23.”
Last year I predicted the following about the possibility Trump will be removed from office:
Hyper-partisanship will prevail, with the usual political and media pit bulls on both sides fighting to a bloody draw, without a change to the executive power structure. Meanwhile, public confidence in governmental institutions will continue to erode, a reality far more damaging to big-government progressives than conservatives who want the federal government’s role in our lives drastically reduced.
Trump’s opponents have confused their wishful thinking with reality. The president’s approval ratings are steadily improving, the tax cut has proved popular (I’m certainly enjoying the extra $250 every paycheck), and a lot of practical Americans are realizing that the U.S. is not becoming pre-World War II Germany under the thumb of a genocidal madman. Nevertheless, a significant number of die-hard Trump haters, miserable in their contempt of the 45th president, imperil Democrats’ chances in the mid-terms and beyond, as more reasonable voters observe the sore losers of 2016 wallowing in hubris and embracing more and more over-the-top hyperbole.
