Now that Donald Trump has finally secured the GOP nomination, we can look back at the last year and see unfolding events with greater clarity. The media frenzy surrounding this election, the 24/7 news-cycle, and Trump’s gumption ensure we’re constantly talking about him, analyzing his every move.
Although the most fascinating presidential election in decades, it can get rather exhausting, and there’s no end in sight. It will continue through the general election, Trump’s tenure as president, and beyond. Commentary on the Trump phenomena will outlive the man and all of us.
The spotlight on Trump has been so bright, often to the point of blinding and often intentionally so. Whatever you want to call them — the establishment, the mainstream media, the Consultant Industrial Complex, et al. — there has been a concentrated effort to undermine Trump even before he famously descended the escalator.
Fourteen months later, and the beat goes on. In an effort to prop up the Democrat’s pathetic candidate, that beat has become a clamorous gong — banging out the same notes we’ve heard all year: Trump’s kaput. Fini. Toast.
Angering the Arbiters of ‘Who We Are’
Aside from measured analyses coming from some quarters, many criticisms of Trump have been rather hysterical, sophomoric, and downright lewd. As if set on auto-repeat, headlines, tweets, and the like squeal XENOPHOBE! FASCIST! RACIST! DEMAGOGUE! PUDGY FINGERS! Eerily in sync, media outlets and Trump haters described his convention speech — and his soul! — as DARK!
The pile-on continues. Why, since the convention, he’s become Vladimir Putin’s lapdog (or is the other way around? I can never keep that straight), and his campaign is in shambles.
Trump’s critics have gone even further over the year, taking false narratives about the candidate and applying them to his supporters and staff: Corey Lewandowski is a thug; Hope Hicks is a thug-enabler; Paul Manafort does the bidding of tyrants; and Stephen Miller is the dark soul behind Trump’s dark soul.
How exactly did the fourth estate become such a third-rate mess? For these are all lies. If you’re Trump and you advocate an America First agenda more akin to the Founding Fathers’ positions than say, those of the Bushes, then you’ve made distinct claims and set yourself against enemies on multiple fronts. These are the formidable forces Trump is up against and says he must “punch through” to reach us. Since so much is at stake, Trump’s critics must repeat the lies and the snide asides. But whether promoting Hillary Clinton, a globalist agenda, or so-called conservative principles, their arguments all but bleat against the rise and roar of American populism.
Attempts to destroy Trump have exposed these self-appointed arbiters of “This Is Not Who We Are” to the derision of the American people. Much of America, that is, but unfortunately not all.
The Trumpian Narratives Contradict Each Other
False narratives, like parasites, have a tremendously powerful influence upon their hosts. In an intriguing article, “The Theory of Narrative Selection,” author Sarah Perry describes how stories behave like biological organisms. If a story is to be true and “successful” (i.e., memorable, repeated, adaptive, long-lasting), it must evoke curiosity, suspense, and surprise. But most important, it must be cohesive.
To meet such a high threshold, true stories are thus naturally and “heavily constrained.” False stories, by comparison, can pretty much run amok, be internally contradictory, and may or may not have some basis in fact. In short, anything goes as long as there’s something credible in the tale.
So we often hear contradictory claims about Trump such as how he will behave as president, even though he’s never held elected office. We are told on the one hand he’s a loose cannon, the village idiot who cannot be trusted with The Red Button or the Constitution. But no, wait! He’s cunning — the scheming King of Ponzis, able to hoodwink politicians, government bureaucrats, investors, and many others all in his effort to reach billionaire status.
Or how he hates women, even though he employs them in positions of power, often paying them more than their male counterparts in a male-dominated industry. Or how he hates Jews, even though his son-in-law, two of his daughters, and three of his grandchildren are Jewish, and he has been a vocal advocate of Israel for decades.
Or how he hates blacks, Hispanics, and foreigners, even though he employs them, befriends them, partners with them. Or how he engenders violence, even though the outbursts at his campaign rallies have been caused and encouraged by Soros-funded Bernie Sanders supporters, members of Black Lives Matter, and other leftist malcontents.
Or how he’s divisive and destroying the Republican Party, even though he’s earned more primary votes than anyone else in GOP history and is attracting new and crossover party members and people from a diverse range of demographics. I could go on.
We Believe the Narratives We’re Primed to Accept
Are there things concerning about Trump? Yeah, sure. That’s true of everyone — especially politicians — so that’s as useful a concession as, “No, I don’t agree with everything such and such person says.” Ever notice how disavowals are always demanded of Republicans about other Republicans and now even more so about Trump? Heck, even Ann Coulter doesn’t always agree with Trump, and it’s fair to say that outside of his family, she’s been his most vocal supporter from day one.
But the din of false narratives reverberates throughout society, and not only the ones about Trump. Take your pick, for the list is long (e.g., The Founders were evil, American women are oppressed, licentiousness is real freedom). We are saturated in them, particularly in our schools and in pop culture. Multiply these stories and their variants by days, years, decades, and it is axiomatic that they will affect our individual and collective psyches. Start them early enough in a child’s life, and — proceeding without intervention — he will grow up to hate himself and his country, completely inured to patriotism and the appreciation others feel on Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. This is the same sad sack who responds to Trump’s campaign slogan with, “When was America ever great?”
Make a society primed to believe that patriotic citizens — especially white ones — are repugnant at best and evil at worst, and what you have is an all-too-willing host for parasitic false narratives the media and others mercilessly repeat.
How to Break Through the Lies
But there is good news, sort of, getting back to Perry. She says we each have the capacity to develop what’s called memetic immunity to false stories. Through skepticism, logic, but especially life experience, we can begin to fight off their negative effects.
Building such an immunity can start small, and seemingly insignificant items can become a watershed moment. And it can happen in countless ways. Maybe it’s that wall surrounding the home of someone who favors open borders. Or when you listen to what Trump said about that crying baby instead of what someone else says he said. Or when you read the headlines that blame a truck — and not the human on a jihadist rampage — for killing 84 people on Bastille Day. Or when you read a tweet that arrests your attention, causing you to laugh and then think some more. Or it’s the person who challenges the meaning of a word, phrase, or policy you thought you understood but really had no idea what it meant.
Whatever may come in the months and years ahead, this nation has changed. We cannot see with clear eyes what happened in San Bernardino, Orlando, Dallas, Baton Rouge, Paris, Nice, Brussels, Bavaria, and far too many other places around the world and stay the same as before. We finally learned what really happened on the second floor of the Bataclan Theatre. It’s just too much, the utter depravity and horror. Something’s gotta give.
With Trump, there is a way out, at least a way forward. Just by being himself — talking plainly and unapologetically about the things that are broken in us and our country — he has described the American dilemma as it really is. Endless whining about his style, his tweets, or how many times he says “Constitution” is ultimately a distraction from the larger, more important issues. As Phyllis Schlafly so eloquently described it 52 years ago, we finally have a choice, not an echo.
One of the unusual features of this very unusual election year is that both candidates have made major trade agreements an important issue in their campaigns. Donald Trump has been particularly vociferous on the matter, blaming trade for hollowing out the middle class and promising to rip up existing agreements with other countries. Though his talking points are nothing more than hot air, he has struck a chord with millions of angry voters.
Hostility to trade — even misdirected rage — should not be taken lightly. While trade is not the cause of all or even much of the wage stagnation or increased income inequality in the past several decades, there are real problems with trade agreements, as Hillary Clinton and her former rival Senator Bernie Sanders have pointed out.
Polls show that many Americans, especially Republicans, believe that trade has hurt the country. The Great Recession, from which many families have not recovered, is partly responsible for this belief, as is Mr. Trump’s rhetoric. In a March survey, the Pew Research Center found that 53 percent of Republicans said trade agreements with other countries were bad while 38 percent said they were good — a big switch from May 2015, when 53 percent of Republican voters thought trade pacts were good for the country. Democratic voters have been consistently more favorable: In March, 56 percent said trade agreements were good, a slight decrease from the previous May.
The United States trades with most countries under the rules of the World Trade Organization. It also has preferential deals with individual nations or groups of countries, like the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, which go beyond tariffs and quotas and address issues like intellectual property rights.
Mr. Trump likes to blame these deals, and the World Trade Organization generally, for much of what is wrong with the economy. Mrs. Clinton has said she would review all trade deals, including Nafta. Both nominees are opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President Obama negotiated with 11 countries including Japan, Vietnam, Australia and Peru.
Trade generally benefits the economy, though there are winners and losers. Consumers benefit from cheaper clothes, electronics and other goods, while companies like Apple can sell more of their products overseas. But trade has hurt some factories and workers in the United States because they have not been able to compete with foreign businesses that enjoy lower-cost labor as well as subsidies and other benefits from their governments.
Even so, imports — including the surge from China — are not the only or even the most important cause of the loss of manufacturing jobs in America. Many economists believe that automation has had a much bigger impact. They point out that other industrialized countries like Germany and Japan have also lost manufacturing jobs even though they, unlike the United States, export more than they import. Between 1990 and 2014, the number of manufacturing jobs fell by 34 percent in Japan, 31 percent in the United States and 25 percent in Germany, according to an April report by the Congressional Research Service.
Mr. Trump’s proposals for increasing tariffs on Chinese goods or his threat to pull the country out of the World Trade Organization is unlikely to “bring back our jobs,” a favorite phrase of his. Such a policy would very likely cause other countries to retaliate by imposing tariffs on American exports, which would hurt American businesses and workers who produce those goods.
Though Mrs. Clinton opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, She is not inclined to yank the United States out of the global economy. She says trade deals must meet the “high standards for creating good jobs, raising wages, and enhancing our national security.”
Mrs. Clinton has not offered details of what that would look like, but her approach would mean more assistance for workers affected by trade than Congress has been willing to offer, as well as negotiating provisions that would require other countries to improve their labor and environmental standards. She also wants other countries to agree not to depress the value of their currencies in an effort to boost their exports and says her administration would crack down on nations that engaged in such manipulation. It won’t be easy to get other world leaders to go along. And American businesses with big overseas operations might also resist her proposed changes.
Trade isn’t the main force destroying good jobs, but at the moment, it serves as an easy target for an electorate anxious about the economy and looking for answers.
Now that Donald Trump is safely ensconced as the official Republican nominee for president, the mainstream media is running an intense around-the-clock operation to deprive him of the relatively unfiltered media exposure he needs to seal the deal with the American people.
Trump being silly and playful in front of TV cameras or utilizing his sense of humor is cast as evidence of a disordered, antisocial mind. The media is focusing on minor benign details and marketing them as the evil deeds of an evil man.
Preventing Trump from communicating effectively with Americans didn’t work so well during the primaries. That was when student radicals, union thugs, Democrat allies in Black Lives Matter, and the remnants of Occupy Wall Street were disrupting Trump rallies and intimidating would-be rally attendees by beating the New Yorker’s supporters up in broad daylight.
This was always less an effort to counter Trump or challenge his policy platform, than a fascistic push to simply suppress his message. With Trump, the master communicator whose outreach skills arguably mirror President Obama’s, the message is everything.
Squelch his voice and he’s finished.
The leftist narrative being deployed against Trump is based on lies, half-truths, and nothing-burgers. They don’t even have to make sense. All they have to accomplish is to hold Trump, the blunt, brash billionaire elitists love to hate because he’s from lowly Queens, the home of the fictional Archie Bunker, up to ridicule. Trump may own country clubs and golf courses but he doesn’t have the manners or the breeding the upper crust expects from those with money. New money is bad money unless you’re a left-winger who gives it to inane social justice-oriented causes, goofy charities, nonprofits pushing radical social engineering on people, and Democrat candidates for office.
So Americans are subjected to a buffet of stupid “news” stories that happen to help journalists make their case against Trump. Meeting the Donald head-on wouldn’t work so instead it’s death by a thousand cuts.
The fact that a veteran admired Trump so much he gave a copy of his Purple Heart medal to the candidate who made a lighthearted joke about always wanting to receive the medal (an obvious absurdity since you have to be injured during military service to get it) was twisted to make the case Trump was a draft dodger who hates military families that have lost loved ones in wars.
The media has been gleefully resurrecting the "chickenhawk" fallacy that was the rage during George W. Bush's presidency. It held that because Cindy Sheehan lost her son in Bush’s war she was uniquely qualified to pass judgment on matters of war and peace and in general to make a spectacle of herself.
Of course, once the fake dove Barack Obama was sworn in as president, Sheehan's antiwar yammering was no longer useful to the Left so blessed sister Cindy disappeared from media coverage. When the Left's favorite president of all time is in power, and he's a thuggish warmonger who can't even be bothered to consult Congress before launching an illegal, ill-advised war against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, having antiwar leftists dog the president at every turn is no longer a positive thing.
Besides, Trump sacrificed nothing, according to the wrathful Khizr Khan, so he needs to shut up. Trump’s run-in with the sleazy immigration lawyer is still receiving media attention. The lie that Trump attacked Khan’s hero son who died in Iraq getting his men to move away from danger won’t die. It’s taken on a life of its own and hardened into fact in the minds of many.
This “chickenhawk” fallacy gives rise to another fallacy that rears its ugly head whenever there is an opportunity to make Republicans look heartless. That is the idea that the words and actions of Gold Star families can never be questioned. Even though Khan, whose sketchy background has been emerging, used a prime speaking spot at the Democrat convention in Philadelphia last week to promote even higher levels of immigration that would financially benefit him as an immigration lawyer, he is supposed to be untouchable because the media wants it that way.
At the same time the media ignores the fact that Hillary Clinton let four men die in Benghazi, Libya, when U.S. facilities came under terrorist attack, and then lied to the surviving family members’ faces, blaming an anti-Islam YouTube video nobody saw. The media also avoids providing a body count for the Arab Spring that Clinton inflicted on North Africa and the Middle East.
“It’s funny to be lectured about respect for vets and the military by a party that’s spent years calling our soldiers rapists and baby killers,” tweeted Legal Insurrection contributor “Aleister.”
Contrast what happened to Trump with what happened when someone gave former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) a Purple Heart that she hadn’t earned. The gift came after she nearly died at the hands of a crazed shooter and it was treated as a heartwarming gesture from an appreciative citizen toward a public servant who had suffered so much for her country.
Trump gets creamed by the media no matter what he does.
After playfully tolerating an infant’s crying from the podium at a rally, Trump eventually asked the mother to remove the baby from an event. That’s what decent people do. It’s called politeness. It’s a non-issue if you’re a normal person with a healthy respect for social norms but rabid feminists seized on it as example of the Republican’s supposed contempt for babies and mothers.
At CNN’s website MoveOn mom Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner berates Trump, claiming he was mocking the mother. Trump doesn’t realize “that when he throws a baby out, the metaphorical bathwater can't be ignored.” This garden-variety humorless left-wing feminist used the opportunity to blather on about equal pay, how women outnumber men in this country, and the need for crazy-expensive big government programs like paid family parental leave.
To the Left what Trump did is a grievous offense against civility and social norms, yet Clinton’s communistic blueprint It Takes A Village, calls for the state “to teach, train and raise children,” adding that “[p]arents have a secondary role.” Put Hillary in the White House and she’ll solve the problem of crying babies by terminating parental rights. After all, that’s what she says in her book.
And don’t forget that the Left deems this crying baby incident to be far worse than Clinton’s strident, unconditional, unapologetic support for the taxpayer-funded human body parts trafficking concern known as Planned Parenthood.
During the Democratic National Convention last week CNN and the New York Times pushed out the lie that at a presser Trump had invited Russia to somehow hack Hillary Clinton’s emails which are far as anyone can tell no longer exist. The party of sedition and treason went nuts calling Trump a traitor. In reality all Trump did was offer a quip to reporters, urging Russia or any other governments that may have Clinton's mountain of missing emails in their possession to return them to the United States. Nor was Trump’s statement tantamount to asking Russia to interfere in U.S. elections.
The media left out the fact that Clinton is much closer to Russia than Trump is and that that nation’s government has compromised her. She even cut bad deals with that country to hand over a big chunk of American uranium to the Kremlin.
Journalists are engaging in all this mischief because they are acutely aware that if Trump can somehow penetrate the massive propaganda force-field the mainstream media has erected around his campaign, the party is over. The thinking among the media and the Left – but I repeat myself – is that if they can keep strategically placing nasty little booby-traps in the undisciplined candidate’s path they can keep him off-message and floundering long enough to get would-be federal inmate Hillary Clinton across the finish line Nov. 8.
If he can reach voters with his tremendously popular message of law and order, immigration enforcement and border security, and mostly pro-growth economic policies, he wins – convincingly – in a year of political populism and anti-establishment anger.
If Trump focuses on one issue, specifically, how truly rotten and anemic the Obama-Clinton economy is, he probably wins.
Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger said Clinton, whose class warfare-dominated platform calls for far-reaching, even punitive, tax hikes all over the place ought to doom her candidacy. “Trump should be killing her on that point,” he said on the most recent installment of the “John Batchelor Show.”
Despite polling showing Clinton ahead of Trump, seasoned political handicappers know that Hillary’s support is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even gung-ho leftists Michael Moore and Cenk Uygur think Clinton, the ultimate political insider, is such a lousy candidate that she’s destined to take a dive on Nov. 8.
Reporters are doing these terrible things because they are terrified that there will be no third Obama term and that Americans will have to wait a few more years for a president who has a uterus. And worst of all in their view, is the possibility that America just might have a future with Trump in the Oval Office. That is unacceptable to these ink-stained wretches and blow-dried talking heads who insist on influencing the news instead of merely reporting it.
The media is also trying to depict the Trump campaign as in a state of growing disarray, even though Democrats are experiencing unprecedented political meltdowns.
Top staffers were liquidated in a Bolshevik-style purge at the Democratic National Committee after leaked emails showed top Democrats engaged in unethical behavior, including waging war against second-place primary finisher Bernie Sanders.
DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz got the axe and was replaced on an interim basis by Gore-Lieberman 2000 campaign manager Donna Brazile. Brazile, in turn, gave the bum’s rush to DNC CEO Amy Dacey, communications director Luis Miranda, and chief financial officer Brad Marshall.
Although recent polls show Clinton’s lead over Trump growing in the wake of the businessman’s messaging problems, the admittedly subjective anecdotal evidence on the ground suggests Trump is doing fine. His fundraising has dramatically picked up.
Trump continues receiving rock star treatment at rallies around the country such as those held this week in Portland, Me., and Daytona Beach and Jacksonville, Fla. Trump speaks to overflow crowds while Clinton has great difficulty filling more modestly sized venues. There is no passion for Hillary. There are plenty of people who feel they have to vote for her because having a president with a uterus would be a world-historic moment.
But reporters still aren’t asking the Clinton campaign about the candidate’s fall in December 2012 in which she suffered brain damage. Her coughing fits at the podium, strange facial expressions at the Democrat convention as celebratory balloons were falling, and jerky body movements also don’t inspire confidence in her ability to physically endure the rigors of the presidency. Nor does the fact that she hasn’t held a press conference in 244 days. She is everywhere on TV and yet she says next to nothing of substance. She is hiding in plain sight and the media is protecting her from having to answer inconvenient questions.
It also should be noted that the Trump candidacy is also bringing out the worst in conservatives who refuse to get behind the GOP nominee.
At Mediaite, conservative talk show host John Ziegler is already pushing for Sean Hannity to be “punished severely” by having his Fox News Channel show canceled because he got on the Trump train early and proved influential among primary voters.
In a sophomoric, oddly written rant, Ziegler accuses Hannity of recently launching a campaign to cover his posterior for boosting Trump, whom he declares was obviously unelectable from the start. He calls Hannity “not at all a bright guy” and “the guy who married the obviously wrong girl, and now wants to try to blame his buddies, who tried to tell him she clearly wasn’t the right one.”
Ziegler is far from the worst offender among right-leaning commentators as anyone who has been following the recent adventures of Mitt Romney, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sens. Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham, George Will, and Bill Kristol can attest.
Meanwhile, the leader of a Republican anti-Trump group is moving her efforts against the candidate to a new level. Liz Mair, the founder of Make America Awesome, an anti-Trump super PAC, is now communications director for something new called Republicans for Johnson-Weld, the Libertarian Party’s presidential ticket.
Mair, a former Republican National Committee online communications director, called Trump a “loudmouthed dick” on CNN Wednesday, adding that she expects him to continue “basically acting as if he’s on a suicide mission and aiming to take the whole rest of the party down with him.”
Critics say the Libertarian ticket is working to elect Clinton by siphoning votes away from Trump.
Aside from politics junkies, most people think of Libertarians as vaguely conservative so it’s hard to argue with that critique.
The ticket this year consists of two former Republicans, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and his would-be vice president, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld.
Both men say nice things about Democrat standard-bearer Hillary Clinton. Weld said she was “by and large a good secretary of state,” and Johnson called her “a wonderful public servant.” Referring to the end run Clinton did around public records laws by maintaining private email servers, Johnson said “I don’t think there was criminal intent on her part.”
The two men are Clinton shills, Breitbart’s Patrick Howley opines.
“The Johnson-Weld team seems to think that libertarianism is mostly about admitting as many immigrants to the United States as possible. This is a far cry from Ron Paul’s pro-borders libertarian movement of a few years ago. The libertarian movement has shifted to the progressive globalist Left.”
Johnson even attacks religious freedom laws, likening them to a “black hole.”
Such laws might “open up a plethora of discrimination that you never believed could exist,” Johnson said. “And it’ll start with Muslims.”
While America is under siege by homicidal Islamofascists, Johnson and the rest of the nation’s left-wingers are worried that somewhere in the country a Muslim woman might have to take her veil off to pose for a driver license photo.
It’s a pretty piddling matter to be concerned about given that America’s future is on the line.
