TOOTHLESS GARBAGE PEOPLE
The left’s unhinged hatred for Trump extends to the president’s associates as well as his everyday supporters. Disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok—the lead investigator of the Russia collusion hoax until he was removed and later fired for exchanging profane anti-Trump text messages with his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page—complained to Page about a trip he took to Walmart where he said he “could SMELL the Trump support.”57 Along the same lines, after watching a video of rowdy Trump supporters at a rally in Tampa, Politico reporter Marc Caputo referred to them as toothless “garbage people.”58
Jimmy Kimmel also has a low opinion of Trump supporters, ridiculing those who raised private funds for a border wall as “dopey people.” “People, this is what people do with their disposable income when they don’t have loans from college to pay off,” explained Kimmel. “Donating money for a wall that will never exist. It’s like starting a college fund for Harry Potter.… A more useful thing to do with your money would be to go outside and feed it to a bird but you do have to admire the sacrifice they’re making. I mean, a lot of these people are dipping into their meth money for this.”59
Trump haters play for keeps. They want to make Trump administration officials permanent outcasts from mainstream culture and the workplace. When Dancing with the Stars announced former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer would compete on the show, the left was thrown into spasms of rage. “The apoplexy was immediate,” noted Kevin Williamson in the New York Post, “calls for ABC-Disney boycotts by Democratic activists, the Independent demanded Spicer be put on a ‘permanent blacklist’—even Variety, which still exists, got in on that hot outrage action.”60 Dancing with the Stars’ famed integrity, you see, cannot be sullied by the appearance of a former Trump official.
In their trademark thuggish style, leftists want to ensure everyone understands that working for Trump will impede their future job prospects. So a coalition of leftist groups is pressuring companies not to hire former Trump administration officials. When DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned from her post, Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Epstein tweeted, “Nielsen’s next stop will be carefully watched. If any major companies hire her, pay her to speak, etc., expect to see major outcry from immigration and civil rights groups and beyond.” In a Bloomberg piece Epstein referred to an open letter signed by forty-one groups and sent to CEOs of all Fortune 500 companies, warning companies against hiring Trump officials. “They should not be allowed to seek refuge in your boardrooms or corner offices,” the letter cautioned. “Allowing them to step off of the revolving door and into your welcoming arms should be a non starter.” The letter names thirty current and former officials including Nielsen, John Kelly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and others. The groups purchased an ad in the New York Times warning corporate America not to “let hate into your boardroom” and featuring a photo of a MAGA-looking hat that reads “Put Kids in Cages.”61
SATAN HATES TRUMP TOO
Satan worshippers are apparently not big fans of President Trump—then again, satanists are generally on the political left. Lucien Greaves, cofounder of the Satanic Temple, said, “For me, it seems kind of obvious that there’s been a complete reversal in the roles of who’s ostensibly the good guys and who are the bad guys. Right now, we have evangelical nationalists pushing a theocratic agenda in the United States and making great headway to take away people’s reproductive rights, endorse corporal punishment in schools, spread pseudoscience of or otherwise reject the scientific point of view, and really undermining liberal democracy.” Penny Lane, director of the film Hail Satan?, shares these views. Speaking of Trump, she says, “You know, the evangelical Right really did a lot of work to elect him. So he’s repaid them in various ways. And so I feel like the work the Satanic Temple is doing is particularly resonant now. I also think that we’re in such dark political times that people who—maybe typically—wouldn’t care what the satanists have to say might be a little more open-minded in their desperation for answers.”62 You have to love satanists complaining about “dark” times.
In the next chapter we’ll see how Trump Derangement Syndrome has infected and largely destroyed the mainstream media.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Trump Derangement Syndrome: The Media
“GETCHO HAND OUT MY POCKET”
The mainstream networks are openly hostile to Trump. Having monitored and analyzed every moment of coverage of President Trump on ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts in 2017 and 2018, the Media Research Center found that an astounding 90 percent of their coverage was negative, with the Russia collusion hoax rating as the most-covered topic.1 Furthermore, after NBC reported in February 2019 that the Senate Intelligence Committee had found no material evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, none of the three major news networks gave it one second of coverage in their evening newscasts over the next two days. This compares to 2,202 minutes of airtime the Russia probe received from January 21, 2017 to February 19, 2019.2
The networks’ anti-Trump bias transcends their newscasts. On ABC’s The View, cohost Ana Navarro encouraged furloughed federal workers to steal meals from Trump hotels. “Listen… there are 800,000 federal workers,” said Navarro. “I have a suggestion for these federal workers. Since Donald Trump says that people will know them and will work with them, I think federal workers should show up at Trump properties, eat and eat and eat and eat and then say to the people when the bill comes, you know, the President said he’d work with me. I’m here to eat for free and get room and board for free!”3 A Boston Globe columnist went even further, calling for waiters to contaminate the food of Trump administration officials.4
During Trump’s 2019 State of the Union speech, The Atlantic sportswriter Jemele Hill expressed a Trump assassination fantasy, tweeting that AOC should yell, “Getcho hand out my pocket”—the words used to distract the audience in the Manhattan Audubon Ballroom in 1965 to facilitate the assassination of Malcolm X. Hill later said she was joking, but imagine the uproar if someone had “joked” about assassinating President Obama. Donald Trump Jr. condemned the tweet and challenged The Atlantic to take action.5
The Trump-loathing media are far nastier in their shots at Trump and his family than Trump has ever been in a locker room among friends. They castigated him for not meeting with U.S. troops in a war zone, and then when he and the First Lady met with soldiers in Iraq during Christmas, they denounced him for signing their MAGA hats. Trump shot back on Twitter, exposing their pettiness: “CNN & others within the Fake News Universe were going wild about my signing MAGA hats for our military in Iraq and Germany. If these brave young people ask me to sign their hat, I will sign. Can you imagine my saying NO? We brought or gave NO hats as the Fake News first reported!” Oozing hypocrisy, the media also mocked Melania for wearing “out of touch” Timberlands, when just six days earlier they swooned over Michelle Obama’s $3,900 thigh-high designer glitter boots.6
Former First Lady Michelle Obama responded to a photo of Melania at the prompting of NBC’s Jimmy Fallon, who asked her what she was thinking when she and former President Barack Obama were departing from the White House after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. “Bye, Felicia!” she said, invoking a phrase from Ice Cube’s 1995 movie Friday, which means to smugly dismiss a person or situation. Michelle Obama said elsewhere that at some point during that day she “stopped even trying to smile.”7 I thought Trump was the ungracious one!
Indeed, the left is strikingly vicious toward Melania, blasting her over the most trivial details imaginable. In Vogue, Bridget Read mocked her White House Christmas decorations, sarcastically noting that they were pointedly designated “Christmas” rather than the generic “holiday” decorations. “It seems that FLOTUS has chosen a theme more inspired by hell than a holly, jolly Christmas,” writes Read.… “This year’s decorations have taken a different dystopian tack: Walking through a strange assemblage of bloodred trees, Trump looks to be channeling The Handmaid’s Tale. All they’re miss
ing are the bonnets worn by the handmaidens in Margaret Atwood’s patriarchy-cum-totalitarian Gilead.”8
Could leftists be any more spiteful—while attacking the Trumps for their alleged maliciousness? A few weeks later, as if to prove its mean-spiritedness was no one-off fluke, Vogue bitingly panned the White House Christmas portrait as “surreal.” “The photo, which was reportedly snapped before the first couple headed to the Congressional Ball last Saturday, shows FLOTUS and POTUS looking almost like cardboard cutout versions of themselves. And they are very, very smiley—despite this season of indictments, and the dissolution of their flagrantly fraudulent charity organization. They are also holding hands, a move that is famously out of character for them.”9
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel went further into the gutter in attacking Trump’s family, ridiculing President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, and throwing in a sexual slur against Ivanka. “I guess the thinking of [Trump] is: if he’s good enough to screw my daughter, he’s good enough to screw the country,” said Kimmel.10
The media’s bias against Trump comes in all shapes and sizes, all colors and flavors. It’s not just their direct barbs at him on their opinion shows but also in their “news” reports, which are thinly veiled opinion shows. The print media incorporate their biases throughout their reporting—in headlines, the placement of pieces, and the structure of stories, such as omitting facts that reflect well on Trump or burying them deep in a piece.
Broadcast media use similar tactics. Columnist Quin Hillyer, no fan of President Trump, showcases CNN’s practice of dressing opinions as facts, calling such presentations “fake news.” After criticizing Trump for hyperbole in calling the news media the “enemy of the people,” Hillyer writes, “[I]t would surely help matters if the media maintained at least a modicum of objectivity and fairness. Day after day, CNN’s bottom-of-screen chyrons during its supposedly straight-news shows make that network one of the worst violators of the journalistic ethic that once mandated separating news from opinion.” Hillyer cites CNN’s on-screen graphics on the morning of January 8, 2019, before Trump’s scheduled address to the nation that evening on the border crisis. One chyron read, “Trump faces credibility crisis in prime-time address tonight”—an obvious editorial comment by CNN. “Who decided it’s a ‘credibility crisis’?” asks Hillyer. “Is that a universally, or even widely, agreed-upon analysis? Even if so, if it’s analysis at all, why is it a news headline—and if it is a headline, shouldn’t the source of the judgment somehow be named?”11 We see similar examples each day on cable and broadcast news networks as they deviously cloak opinions with a veneer of factuality.
The media’s hostility to Trump should be no surprise in light of the uniformity of thought in today’s newsrooms. Former CBS News reporter Lara Logan noted that 85 percent of America’s reporters are registered Democrats and have largely lost all objectivity, which leads to propaganda. Logan explained to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the major players at the liberal news and cable outlets prefer to make news rather than report it. As Beth Baumann observes at Townhall, many so-called “journalists” despise President Trump because he has called them out on their “fake news” and more of the American public is on to their game.12
“STOP FACT-CHECKING NORMATIVE CLAIMS”
Another sleazy tactic the media use to discredit Trump is their meticulous yet utterly bogus “fact-checking” critiques of his statements and speeches. Being in cahoots with the Democrats, the mainstream press showed no interest in fact-checking their ridiculous denial that a border crisis existed. But once the White House announced Trump would give an Oval Office speech on the subject, they geared up for battle. CNN’s Alisyn Camerota warned, “Fact-checkers are eating their Wheaties and getting extra rest since they will be working overtime tonight to separate fact from fiction on this border situation.” Afterward, CNN barking Chihuahua Jim Acosta said that Trump’s speech “should have come with a Surgeon General’s warning that it was hazardous to the truth.”
As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway observed, however, most of the alleged “fact” checks were actually critiques of opinions. Many critiqued topics Trump didn’t even discuss, and sometimes they dinged him for completely truthful statements. One egregious example was Politico’s Ted Hesson declaring “not true” Trump’s claim that there is a border crisis. Hemingway responded with a simple request: “Stop fact-checking normative claims and subjective, value-based assertions! It degrades the entire enterprise of fact-checking!”13
It’s ludicrous for the liberal media to conduct fact checks when they are obviously agenda-driven, not facts-driven. They are in lockstep with Democrats against border enforcement and diligently slant the “news” to promote their opposition to a border wall and other enforcement proposals. KUSI, a local TV station in San Diego, California, reported that CNN declined an interview with its reporter Dan Plante because he was prepared to say the San Diego border wall is effective. While CNN unconvincingly denied this, the channel heavily relied on reporting from Jim Acosta, who naturally disputed the wall’s effectiveness—an opinion CNN knew wasn’t shared by at least some informed locals.14
Along the same lines, two of the foremost border security experts in the nation, former acting ICE director Tom Homan and National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd, told the Daily Caller that Fox News was the only cable news network that offered to interview them during the government shutdown over border wall funding. “I don’t think that aligns with the stories [the other networks] are trying to tell,” said Homan. “You know, the president being a racist and anti-immigrant, and I give facts about what’s happening at the border that just don’t fall within their talking points because I think immigration enforcement should be colorblind.” Judd said, “All I want to do is, I want to get a truthful conversation out. I just want people to have all of the facts and then they can make their opinion based upon the facts and if their opinion is disagreeing with me, that’s perfectly fine. But disagree with me on the facts.… Normally, when we’re on CNN, we don’t fit [its] narrative and we’re able to express from a law enforcement standpoint what’s really happening on the border and… because we’re going to challenge the people to think differently I think that’s why you don’t see us on those networks.”15
Tax cuts are another issue the media grossly distort. They often deny that Trump even cut taxes at all for the middle and lower classes, which echoes a Democratic narrative. For example, Senator Kamala Harris claimed that the average American’s tax refunds have decreased, so Trump’s tax cuts are actually a “middle-class tax hike.” To the contrary, the Heritage Foundation’s Adam Michel says that some of the biggest cuts are benefiting the lowest-income Americans—at least those of them who still pay income taxes. A typical family of four, said Michel, got a $2,917 tax cut in 2019. Besides, one’s refund may have nothing to do with the amount of one’s tax cut. Heritage projected that the average household could expect about $26,000 additional take-home pay over the next ten years from the Trump cuts.16
“THE ONLY GROUP WHO CAN’T PUT THEIR RAGE AND BILE AWAY FOR A SINGLE DAY”
Like a Pavlovian dog, the media reflexively convert every story into an opportunity to bash Trump, even when he has no connection to the topic whatsoever. While monitoring a livestream of President George H. W. Bush’s funeral, ABC News’ Terry Moran turned his attention to the current president. “Probably a different tone in that funeral,” Moran said, speaking of Trump’s future funeral. “First, he’s going to choreograph it, so there might be more trumpets and fanfare. Yes, he would do it bigger, one would imagine,” ABC correspondent Devin Dwyer added. “It will be the best presidential funeral ever,” said Moran. “No one will ever have seen anything like that funeral.”17 This is news? Do these frustrated comics not see the irony in displaying their own classlessness while trashing Trump for his?
Commentator Andrew Klavan captures this trenchantly. “There’s this narrative going around that the funera
l and the tributes to the grace and dignity of President George H. W. Bush were an inherent rebuke to Trump, who obviously is a rough neck and has this boorish style,” said Klavan. “But I think the true narrative is exactly the opposite of that. I think that the Bushes had a very graceful funeral in which they included President Trump, President Trump behaved very well, and in doing that, it isolated the only group of people in the country who cannot put their rage and bile away for even a single day. Namely, the media.”18
Not a “single day” is right. Daily Beast writer Corbin Smith denounced the New England Patriots as “Team MAGA,” “MAGA scum,” and “the preferred team of white nationalists.” Bizarrely, Smith attacked quarterback Tom Brady for leading Patriot fans in a chant of “We’re still here.” While most sane Americans would view that as a fun but unremarkable event, Smith perceived nefarious political meaning, comparing Brady to a “square-jawed grifter throwing red meat to the hogs at an alt-right rally, screaming at the libs who thought Nancy Pelosi and her gender warriors were gonna keep decent american folks from being here.”19
Showing public support for Trump with MAGA hats, lawn signs, or bumper stickers is risky. “Having to feel so afraid to express our political views is outrageous,” writes Lloyd Marcus. “Democrats and fake news media have so twisted the meaning of ‘MAGA’ and generated such hatred for Trump that citizens are afraid to publicly support the president of the United States. This is still America. Thugs who physically attack us for expressing our First Amendment right to free speech must be prosecuted.”20
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