Spending aside, there is much that conservatives ought to substantively like about the way that President Donald Trump has thus far governed. The president has delivered on (mildly) cutting taxes and curtailing excessive regulation, stacking the lower federal courts with principled jurists, prioritizing religious liberty concerns, toughening the nation’s posture against the murderous Mexican criminal cartels, enforcing sovereignty at the southern border against the backdrop of the erroneous Flores consent decree, boldly challenging Obamacare in the courts, toughening American resolve against Putin’s Russia, taking a jackhammer to the Chinese Communist Party authoritarians in Beijing, exiting the harrowing Iran nuclear deal, and standing up more strongly for the Jewish state of Israel than has any president in the history of the republic.
Yet Trump’s most remarkable accomplishment, to-date, defies the realm of political/policy/legal substance in its entirety. More so than any particular policy or administrative fiat or legal decree, what Trump has accomplished more boldly and triumphantly than he has anything else is his exposure of the various vessels of the mainstream media — that most supercilious and intellectually sheltered of institutions — for being the barely veiled partisan hacks that they so manifestly are.
Consider the Russiagate hoax — the much-ballyhooed “collusion” narrative that folded like a cheap suit with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s unveiling of his dud of a 2016 election interference report Democratic Party impeachment research document. The media’s gross complicity in the Russiagate caper amounted to a bi-coastal ruling class attempted silent coup. The attempted coup was built on a bed of deceit and false innuendo and is something that simply must not be forgotten anytime soon by a citizenry that hopes to remain virtuous and self-governing. As I wrote back in March:
Leading media bastions at CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times willfully allowed themselves to be transmogrified into information warfare mouthpieces for the Democratic Party’s scurrilous agenda. An agenda, that is, that sought nothing more than to gaslight Americans into questioning the integrity of their electoral system and all the leading institutions of their body politic. …
In a well-functioning republic, We the People would hold our irredeemably corrupt media to account for their central role in the attempted subversion of the American system of governance. Trump may not have “colluded” with Russia, but it was instead our mainstream media and other fellow travelers of the Democrat-Media Complex that intentionally carried out the Kremlin’s will: To undermine Americans’ confidence and faith in the over-arching institutions that support and secure the United States of America.
The most recent Trumpian scandal du jour — the president’s comments about Jewish Democrats evincing a “great disloyalty” — is further clarifying. The president’s remarks were gauche and ham-fisted, to be sure: It is best not to invoke themes of “loyalty” when discussing Diaspora Jewry. Yet insofar as Trump merely meant that Jews are “disloyal” to Jewish self-interest when those Jews vote for a political party increasingly brazen in its promotion of overt Jew-hatred, he is on very solid ground.
Against the backdrop of Trump’s standing as the most emphatically pro-Israel president ever and the most genuinely philo-Semitic president in well over a century, there is simply no comparing his slipshod quip with the vile anti-Semitism routinely espoused by the likes of Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — they of “Jews serve a dual loyalty to Israel” and “thinking about the Holocaust gives me a calming feeling” fame, respectively. There is a profound distinction between the president (however sloppily) accusing some Jews of “disloyalty” for failing to sufficiently support the most pro-Jewish administration in the history of the republic, on the one hand, and Jew-hating BDS supporters invoking millennia-old “dual loyalty” canards, on the other hand.
Yet large swaths of our media clerisy have purposefully conflated the two, oftentimes clutching their pearls and feigning intensive outrage toward Trump. These would, of course, oftentimes be the same disingenuous jackals who have been so manifestly content to tut-tut the increasingly bald-faced anti-Semitism that is mollycoddled and nourished by the Democratic Party politburo.
Throughout the Trump presidency, our media overlords have continually carried water for revanchist leftism. They have been aiders and abettors of many of the great gaslighting misinformation campaigns of the decade. And the exposure of them as precisely that has been, to-date, Donald Trump’s single most under-appreciated accomplishment as president of the United States. Truly, this president excels at nothing more than he excels at making purportedly reasonable people lose their damn minds.