He was unequivocally declaring war on Washington, D.C., vowing to take a blow torch to regulations, beginning with the greatest federal disaster ever, Obamacare. He understood that while robbing Americans of their freedoms, these regulations were choking the life out of her economy. America needed a presidential Heimlich maneuver, and Trump was going to apply it. After 16 years of anemic growth (at best), very good times were almost here again.
Trump the Traditionalist emerged and the evangelicals were born yet again. He called for judges that would interpret, not rewrite the Constitution. That’s standard fare for Republican presidential candidates, of course. But then he did what Romney never dared. And McCain never dared. And neither did 43. Ditto for Dole and before him Bush 41. In fact, not even candidate or President Reagan did it. Donald Trump announced, unequivocally, that he would name a pro-life Supreme Court justice, and even released his short list of candidates, all of them pro-lifers. It was the most significant pledge ever made to the pro-life movement (and one he would honor immediately with the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch).
Late into the night of November 8, Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest upsets in modern political history. The man who had told me nineteen months before, “I really do think I can win this,” and who registered 3 percent in the polls the day he announced his candidacy, was elected as the forty-fifth President of the United States.
It’s been only two and a half years, and President Donald J. Trump has changed America and stunned the world.
On the domestic front he has honored one promise after another. Trump first delivered Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, then Brett Kavanaugh, another strict constructionist. He’s cut taxes, the corporate ones dramatically, the domestic ones not so much, but combined the tax cuts have spurred a dramatic resurgence of the economy, aided also by an astonishing assault on the regulatory beast that has kept its paws firmly placed on the neck of corporate America, especially small business, for decades.
On the international front he’s all but declared economic war on the nations, along with the European Union, that have been abusing this country for decades with tariffs that have made a mockery of free trade. Simultaneously, in a striking reversal from the tepid, or in the case of Iran, astonishingly accommodationist policies toward America’s enemies, Trump has broadcast a desire to be confrontational, speaking loudly and carrying an even bigger stick. His successful push to increase defense spending speaks volumes.
This is not to say that he’s not had his share of defeats and promises unkept. The national debt is a national disgrace, and neither the GOP-controlled Congress, whose leadership and most of its members cannot be trusted, nor this administration have shown the courage to reduce it by a penny. All the posturing to the contrary, Obamacare still exists. The wall is unbuilt and underfunded. Planned Parenthood continues to receive money to kill babies. (It’s fungible, folks.) Free traders believe that tariffs are a monumental mistake. He’s now completed his second historic summit with Kim Jong-un and there’s no denuclearizing in sight. Evidence still points to “Rocket Man” in relentless pursuit of an ever-expanding military threat against the United States. And then there’s Russia, always Russia.
Trump should not be considered immune from valid criticism, and this book is not a whitewash. There are the policy and political shortcomings.
And then there are the unforced errors, mostly caused by his incessant—and so often plain obnoxious—tweeting. While his hardened base tends to embrace the tone of that which so readily offends the elites in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Tinseltown, even they shake their heads in disappointment at some of his targets. LeBron James? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Meryl Streep? The Freedom Caucus? Time and again we awake to read he’s just viciously assaulted someone from the immensely popular to the thoroughly irrelevant, even his own friends and staff.
At the head of the so-called Resistance is the national so-called news media. It is the height of dishonesty that these “journalists” deny they have joined the far left in common cause and with undisguised brio. Today they are simply incapable of just reporting the news. They must be judgmental at all times. This bias is found in many ways. It is found in the story selected and the story ignored. It is found in the spokespersons quoted and the ones silenced. It’s in the headlines and in the conclusions and everywhere in between.
Every elected Republican since Dwight Eisenhower—Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43—has been treated with nothing but hostility. (Ford doesn’t count. He was both unelected and too irrelevant for anyone to care.) The hostility extends to most GOP presidential candidates
But Trump is in a category of his own. The national news media were obsessed with the man from the start, laughing at the idea of this buffoon running and then, when his campaign was under way, ridiculing him at every opportunity, still dismissing any thought that he might win his party’s nomination as his numbers continued to climb. When he became the nominee and posed a threat even they couldn’t ignore, they waged scorched-earth warfare against him, breaking all the rules of journalistic ethics in a desperate attempt to change the outcome of the election. It wasn’t that they thought he could win (they didn’t). It was that he needed to be destroyed just in case. But he won, and they’ve been on a jihad ever since to remove him from office.
Trump is unique in another regard. As opposed to every other Republican who has ignored this enemy or, worse, fled for the tall grass in terror, from the start Donald J. Trump understood that the news media were his most powerful enemy, hell-bent on preventing his election and, when that failed, destroying his presidency.
So he went to war.
This is the story of a media that set out to destroy a president and his administration, but destroyed themselves instead.
L. Brent Bozell III
UNMASKED
1
The Inevitable Trump Loss
That Didn’t Happen
JOURNALISTS ARE THE SMARTEST people in the room, so smart that they can’t possibly be expected to just report the news. Thus, they grant themselves license to package it and analyze it with an intelligence only they seem to possess. They profess to believe in the power of facts, but what they really believe in is their power to proclaim facts. Facts exist to be bent to their will to further their narrative.
In 2016 that narrative was more an unequivocal declaration: Donald Trump must not win.
It was clear from the start that Donald Trump was itching for a fight with the media. He was going to put the entire profession on trial in the court of public opinion, and he did that by introducing two words that within a year had become part of the political lexicon: “fake news.” The media were aghast that they would be so rudely challenged and dismissed the charges—angrily. Perhaps they had a point. It was certainly unfair to paint an entire institution with this broad, ugly brush. But when Trump unmasked one truly fake news story after another, the self-righteous press met the evidence with stony silence. The institution was guilty of aiding and abetting fake news. It still is.
The campaign didn’t begin this way, however. When Trump descended the now-famous Trump Tower escalator and announced his candidacy to become the forty-fifth President of the United States, the announcement was met with ridicule. Trump wasn’t just dead on arrival. He was a joke.
MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell asked Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania: “Do you have any doubt that this is anything more than a carnival show?” Over on CNN, noontime anchor Ashleigh Banfield teased an upcoming segment on Trump’s announcement
