HOW THE LIBERAL MEDIA IS TRUMP’S BEST FRIEND AND WHAT AN ELDERLY PUERTO RICAN WOMEN TOLD ME ABOUT LIBERALS ON THE EVE OF THE 1980 ELECTION
HOW THE LIBERAL MEDIA IS TRUMP’S BEST FRIEND AND WHAT AN ELDERLY PUERTO RICAN WOMEN TOLD ME ABOUT LIBERALS ON THE EVE OF THE 1980 ELECTION
By
David Gottfried
In this presidential race, Trump and Biden, supposedly, are running against each other. However, it often seems as if Trump is running against the national media outlets and what some people refer to as the “liberal” establishment. However, the media and the so-called establishment, on closer examination, have been Trump’s biggest boosters. The allegedly liberal media and Donald Trump actually help each other. It is my contention that the liberal opposition, with the exception of the Bernie Sanders contingent, have been the handmaidens of Trump just as they boosted prior conservative regimes, including the Reagan and Bush regimes and the pseudo progressive regimes of Clinton and Obama.
1) HOW THE SO-CALLED LIBERAL MEDIA ELECTED TRUMP
They gave him endless hours of free airtime. There were times in late 2015 and in the first half of 2016 when CNN, several times per week, devoted several hours, each day, to non stop coverage of Trump’s speeches. Of course, most of the time he sounded like a psychotic moron or Archie Bunker on amphetamines. When he wasn’t telling utter lies, when he wasn’t amplifying and exploiting race-hatred and when he wasn’t exhibiting the intellect of a Sixth grader, he simply free associated like a raving schizophrenic. He said whatever popped into his airy, empty head and was at best disjointed along the lines of a little old lady who will talk about her pot roast, her bunions, her boobs and her shoes in the space of 30 incoherent seconds and at worst he sounded like a Mansonesque psychopath boasting that he could shoot people at random on 5th Avenue and get away with it.
If the media had had a shred of dignity, they would not have given him coverage. If he had not been given such pervasive media coverage, he would have dried up and died. There used to be an expression that one would use when one talked about obnoxious and crazy acquaintances: Don’t give him any attention. It only encourages him.
I doubt that Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite would have been Trump’s lackies. However, almost the entirety of the national news media were Trump’s whores.
Very simply, the media helped Trump and Trump helped the media. The more the East Coast media bashed Trump, the more popular Trump became in the rest of the country as so much of the country has always hated the Boston, New York, and Washington megalopolis. And the more outrageous Trump was, the greater the ratings received by news programs. And as news programs got higher ratings because they aired the Trump follies. they collected more and more advertising dollars. I would venture to guess that on election night 2016, very senior Trump people and very senior media people were partying together and laughing their heads off at how they deceived everyone.
2) HOW THE SO CALLED WASHINGTON ESTABLISHMENT AND DEEP STATE ELECTED TRUMP:
There has been so much coverage about Trump’s Russia connections, his numerous legal conflicts and the swirling cast of crazies that frequent Trump world, that I think most people have suffered information overload and stopped listening to, let alone analyzing, the news. Consequently, they miss the salient themes of Trump, Russia and his pervasive corruption. What’s more, what they think they know is often diametrically opposed to what is true.
There are, among other things, four facts regarding the FBI’s investigations of Trump and Clinton that, in the aggregate, prove that the establishment was out to trash Hillary, not Trump:
FACT ONE: The FBI was investigating Trump
FACT TWO: The FBI was investigating Hillary
FACT THREE: The FBI disclosed that it was investigating Hillary
FACT FOUR: The FBI did NOT disclose that it was investigating Trump
The inference gleaned by the politically innocent, ignorant and naïve American people: Hillary is ten times dirtier than Trump because she is being investigated and Donald isn’t.
Also about a month or two before the election, the FBI cleared Hillary and then, ten days before the election, the FBI announced that it was re-starting the investigation. Obama may have been in the White House in 2016, but if there is a deep state which pulls the levers of government, it certainly was working for Donald Trump.
3) THE LIBERALS ARE NOT THE LEAST BIT LEFT OF CENTER.
I distinctly recall a talking head speaking very excitedly and happily about how Trump had made the 2016 race more exciting. She purported to be liberal, she claimed that she was appalled by Trump but she seemed altogether delighted by the barbarism and inanity of Trump’s campaign. (And this reminded me that Doris Kearns Goodwin said, in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, that Johnson said that liberals are at their happiest when they are really furious about something). In any event, I was struck by her happy hatred and her manic and enthusiastic rendition of Trump’s transgressions. And this reminded me of a political epiphany I had on the eve of the 1980 presidential election.
A couple of days before the 1980 election, I was distributing Holtzman for Senator Campaign literature in lower Manhattan. When I tried to give a pamphlet to an elderly Puerto Rican woman, she refused, wearily claiming that liberal leaders don’t care because they are rich too. At the time, I, like a well-educated liberal fool, considered the woman’s comments stupid and childish. In succeeding years, I realized just how right she was.
I can remember that shortly after the 1992 race, Carolyn Maloney, who was recently elected to Congress from what used to be called New York’s silk stocking district (The affluent upper East Side), said she was opposed to Clinton’s plan to raise taxes on the very wealthy. During the campaign, she was all for spending money on AIDs and poverty etc., and we needed money to pay for these things, but after she won, she wanted to close the public purse. At the end of the day, she would always stand with the affluent denizens of her district over everybody else. Likewise, although conservative Senator Chuck Grassley denounced the tax gimmick that drastically reduces the tax burden of hedge fund managers, Chuck Schumer, whose smarmy manner suggests that he is as blue as Gainsborough’s painting “Blueboy,” has been an inveterate defender of this gimmick. New York Democratic politicians generally seem much more responsive to their Wall Street contributors in the Hamptons than the urban masses, sweltering in the subways, whom they purport to love. (Don’t get me started on the inherent conservatism of Bill Clinton and Obama.)
And when the liberal media bloviates, they say so many things designed to make most people, West of the Hudson River, vote Republican. Consider, for a moment, Jewelry, more specifically pearls.
Several years back, in one of Anna Quinlan’s OP Ed pieces in the Times, which was, like most of her pieces, a sickening mixture of feminism and prissiness, she said that when Ted Kennedy was great, he was perfect, like a statuesque Lady shimmering in pearls.
Her castrating attitude was guaranteed to make Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio vote Republican. A few years later, I heard a very wealthy liberal lady, and her fashionably sarcastic and effete son, excoriate the way Barbara Bush wore pearls. At length, they discussed something regarding the way proper New England ladies wore their pearls and Barbara’s barbaric departure from the norms of Miss Porter’s Finishing School.
Of course, most of the time the media does not sound that idiotic. But the liberal media comes pretty close. Although the media almost never delved into the economic royalism of George W. Bush, they made sure to tell us, again and again and again, that he was a crude cowboy, with poor pronunciation, who preferred spending time at his ranch to attending poetry readings given by fussy Harridans in Martha’s Vineyard.
Because of the shabby coverage of the allegedly liberal media, most people don’t know that because of Donald Trump more than a million Americans lost their right to time and half when working overtime (New regulations by the Department of Labor classify more employees as supervisory workers and hence not eligible for time and a half compensation), that the EPA, while still prohibiting the dumping of poisons into rivers, now condones the dumping of poisons into streams which will go into rivers, and that some investment advisors, who were once seen as having fiduciary duties to their clients, are now at liberty to rip their clients off with impunity.
But instead of talking about this, the media will talk about Stormy Daniels. As if we did not already know he sleeps around.
I UNDERSTAND YOUR POINT HOWEVER THE MEDIA NEEDS TO STAY FOCUSED ON HIS ANTICS; THERE ARE SO MANY...TRUMP HAS COMPLETELY REWRITTEN THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT IN POLITICS. NOONE KNOWS HOW TO HUMILIATE QUITE LIKE THE DONALD. HE USES THE POLITICS OF HUMILIATION AS A TOOL TO YIELD MEN OF POWER AND HIS MINIONS. HE DID IT TO CHRIS CHRISTIE, MITT ROMNEY, HILLARY...AS FOR HIS DEVOUT FOLLOWERS HE IS THE 2ND COMING. THOSE POOR FOOLS USE TRUMP AS A TOOL AS WELL. THEY FEEL THE RICH AND POWERFUL WASHINGTON ELITES LOOK DOWN ON THEM AND TREAT THEM WITH DISDAIN. THIS PERCEIVED HUMILIATION BY THOSE IN POWER HAS BEEN THE DRIVING FORCE FOR HIS MONIONS. NOTHING MOTIVATES PEOPLE QUITE LIKE HUMILIATION AND THE OPPORTUNITY TO GET BACK. THEY SEE HOW TRUMP PLAYS THE WASH ELITES LIKE FIDDLES AND SPEAKS IN CRASS TERMS. SO UNLESS WE CAN CHANGE THE DIALOGUE AND GET THE MASSES IN FLYOVER COUNTRY TO PUT VISINE IN THEIR EYES AND CLEAR THEIR VISION THEY WILL CONTINUE TO SUPPORT THIS MAN. THE MEDIA HAS A DUTY TO REPORT THE NEWS THE POLITICIANS ARE THE ONES THAT NEED TO SEE THE GAME TRUMP IS PLAYING AND BECOME BETTER PLAYERS. TRUMP IS NOT SCHOLARLY HES A SCRAPY FIGHTER. JOE NEED TO CHANGE THE NARRATIVE AND ENGAGE DIRECTLY WITH THE PEOPLE NOT JUST TALK ABOUT HIS WORKING CLASS ROOTS. GO TO TRUMP COUNTRY SIT DOWN AND LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE. HES GOOD WITH EMPATHY HE NEEDS TO WORK THE TRUMP CROWN NEVER MIND STROKING THOSE THAT ALREADY SUPPORT HIM.