After calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump since before he was even inaugurated, the House Democrats have finally gotten the inquiry they’re hoping will result, finally, in the end of Trump’s presidency. While the Democrats’ zeal to see “the walls closing in” and the “beginning of the end” for Trump isn’t surprising, what has been unprecedented during his first term is that the mainstream media has so openly demonstrated its own fervor for the demise of the Republican president’s reign.
A new supercut video efficiently highlights, in just 2:20, just how committed the media has been to the narrative of Trump’s removal from office — since his first weeks in office.
“Dear members of the media, if you want to understand why no one cares about impeachment and minds are not being changed, watch this and understand,” writes The Resurgent’s Erick Erickson, who tweeted out the video Thursday.
“Today was a turning point, today was history,” an MSNBC analyst declared in February of 2017, within days of Trump’s inauguration. As the video demonstrates, that supposed “turning point” would occur again and again and again with each new supposedly Trump-upending “bombshell” reported, month after month.
“The beginning of the end for the Trump presidency,” says MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell in April 2017. “Mike Pence might have to assume the office of the presidency,” an analyst on Fox News states in May 2017. In the same month, a Bloomberg host speaks ominously of “rumblings of the impeachment of the president” along with a chyron reading, “Comparisons To Watergate.” “I believe this is the beginning of the end,” another impeachment-minded MSNBC analyst pronounces that month.
As the video documents, the declarations of Trump’s imminent demise continue month after month, year after year. WATCH:
Dear members of the media, if you want to understand why no one cares about impeachment and minds are not being changed, watch this and understand. pic.twitter.com/TmMKLddr0k
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) November 21, 2019
Erickson’s comments about the role the media has played in numbing Americans to all the “bombshell” reports on the “impeachment” and the process in general appears to be playing out in the polling, with surveys finding that a majority of Americans say their view of Trump will not change regardless of what happens with the inquiry. Other polls have shown a growing distaste for the idea of impeaching Trump for the elusive “quid pro quo” altogether — as if the more the media hypes it, the more Americans resist the narrative.
The Daily Wire’s Joseph Curl addresses the mainstream media’s impeachment conundrum in a recent op-ed. Why do most Americans seem to be tuning out what the media is so ardently trying to promote? Part of it is many Americans simply believing the charge is nonsense, that Trump “was well within his rights to withhold foreign aid as he asked the president of Ukraine to look into possible criminal activities by former Vice President Joseph R. Biden and his son Hunter,” Curl argues. But another key component is general exhaustion with all the “BREAKING” stories that turn out to be duds:
[T]he 24-hour news channels aren’t helping viewers make heads or tails of the daily flood of information.
“It’s harder now — they want to grab you with those headlines,” Jerre Corrigan of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, told The New York Times last week. “Trump did this, Trump did that. You have to go in and really research it. And I don’t think a lot of people do that. I just don’t know what to think. You would have to know the facts, and I don’t know that I’m getting the facts from the media right now.”
How does anyone know what’s true? Simple answer: They don’t. A poll released last week found that 47% of Americans find it hard to know whether the stories they hear are true. Just 31% find it easy, the poll by The Associated Press found.
Meanwhile, Trump — who’s still in office despite two and half years jam-packed with “bombshells” and “turning points” — is declaring victory in the latest manifestation of the Democrats’, and the “fake news” media’s, “witch hunt.”
“The Republican Party, and me, had a GREAT day yesterday with respect to the phony Impeachment Hoax, & yet, when I got home to the White House & checked out the news coverage on much of television, you would have no idea they were reporting on the same event,” Trump tweeted early Thursday. “FAKE & CORRUPT NEWS!”
The declaration followed a series of tweets about Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony in which the key witness stated unequivocally that Trump told him he wanted “no quid pro quo” from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky:
Impeachment Witch Hunt is now OVER! Ambassador Sondland asks U.S. President (me): “What do you want from Ukraine? I keep hearing all these different ideas & theories. What do you want? It was a very abrupt conversation. He was not in a good mood. He (the President) just said, “I WANT NOTHING! I WANT NOTHING! I WANT NO QUID PRO QUO! TELL PRESIDENT ZELENSKY TO DO THE RIGHT THING!” Later, Ambassador Sondland said that I told him, “Good, go tell the truth!” This Witch Hunt must end NOW. So bad for our Country!
Related: Impeachment ‘Is Now Over’: Trump Highlights Key Testimony That Strikes At Heart Of Dems’ Case