Much Ado About Nothing, Anti-Trump Version

Media Democrats focus on a few non-scandals of surpassing triviality.

by Conrad Black

As the Democratic presidential campaign moves toward its last three months and narrows down to the false claim that the president has mismanaged the COVID-19 pandemic, accompanied by a deluge of misleading polls loaded in favor of the Democrats to show an impending Biden near-landslide, it is almost piquant to hear the most ancient and vociferous Trump-haters still peddling the worm-eaten chestnut of Trump’s moral odium. The historic division between those who approve and disapprove of the president is nowhere clearer than in the Sherlock Holmes–like assiduity of his media enemies excavating ludicrously trivial matters that they portray as monstrous ethical lapses that disqualify Trump from any responsible office. They give new meaning to the concept of the blindfold of justice by overlooking the fact that President Trump has been the victim of the most egregious constitutional illegalities ever committed in the United States. It need hardly be added that the same poisoned-tip spear-carriers of the Democratic media were among the most shameless peddlers of the Russian-collusion fraud and the asinine impeachment that surpassed even Kafka: Trump was not accused of “nameless crimes,” but of acts that not only are legal but for the commission of which by Trump no probative evidence was produced.

Thus we find the compulsively belligerent Rachel Maddow of MSNBC leading the righteous charge. She had breathlessly announced four years ago (having illegally received part of his tax return) that in 1995, Donald Trump paid “only . . . $38 million in federal income tax.” After a comparative hiatus to live down that fiasco, she has now claimed that he is guilty of a sequence of illegalities and improprieties in office that under any other administration would cause both houses of Congress to rise up and remove the miscreant. The amiable animated autocue of the DNC, Juan Williams, echoed the Maddow moral fervor, writing in The Hill on Monday that the fact that “Americans are not allowed to travel to Canada or Europe” is “due to President Trump’s failure to hold down the high rate of the coronavirus infections in the United States.” In fact, all of the larger Western European countries except Germany have had a higher COVID-19 fatality rate than the United States. America now leads the world in testing. Trump suspended direct travel from Western Europe to the United States in February and was much criticized by the Democrats at the time, as he had been at the end of January for suspending direct flights from China. It is amusing to see a Biden-campaign media mouthpiece such as Williams sadly executing such a clumsy pirouette.

Keeping in mind that Maddow and Williams are shock troops in the Democratic campaign, which is being conducted entirely by that party’s chatty marionettes in the media, in the absence of a viable or even remotely responsive designated nominee to perform that role, we may assume that these charges, leveled with the usual histrionic sanctimony, are the most grievous within the limited imaginations of the vast Democratic media mudslinging operation. Forewarned, the latest charges against Trump are: Someone who planned the wedding of one of the president’s sons holds a position as a federal regional housing administrator. Steady, also, the president fired an inspector general who was investigating the secretary of state. The thought that it might have been a frivolous and vexatious investigation for dubious motive, which is the official explanation that no one has seriously contradicted, is an inconvenience that need not be addressed. The Maddow-Williams Torquemada imitation recoils in outraged scrupulosity that Mrs. Trump allegedly advertised what was billed as her own line of jewelry on the White House website. Any of these, according to Maddow, would be “the biggest scandal to ever afflict any other presidency, but by virtue of the sheer number of scandals that surround Trump like flies around the pigpen, they have just become part of what we expect, right?” These are apologists for the regime that seems to have unprecedentedly politicized the upper reaches of the intelligence services and the Justice Department to influence a presidential election outcome, and then unleashed a spurious special investigation of matters it knew (including Joe Biden) to be legally unexceptionable.

The balance of the Maddow-Williams complaints were lifted from the New York Times, which concedes its unwavering hostility to the president, to the point of provoking the resignation of an editor two weeks ago (Bari Weiss, who denounced the Times’ editorial dishonesty). The Times complained that the administration contained a number of senior officials whose backgrounds indicated that they might not be altogether in sympathy with some constituencies who expected continued favoritism from the departments or agencies that they lead. Thus a lawyer now working in the White House had previously been a lobbyist for a firearms group that stood to gain from a regulatory change in arms sales, and the director of the EPA is alleged to be a former lobbyist for the coal industry, which the Democrats wish to eliminate. Defense Secretary Esper (who should be fired for other reasons), in addition to a number of greater qualifications for his office, is accused of being a former lobbyist for Raytheon. And as is now required from all the Democratic propagandists, Attorney General William Barr is ritualistically attacked for intervening to reduce the initial recommended sentence of Trump-campaign supporter Roger Stone. Readers will recall that Special Counsel Robert Mueller reenacted the invasion of Normandy, investing the Stone household in Fort Lauderdale before dawn from land, sea, and air after tipping off CNN, and then taking Mr. Stone, who does not own a gun or have a passport, into custody at machine-gun point in his night attire, disconcerting Mrs. Stone and the family cat. It was a straight political trial, a mousetrap perjury operation, and a customary outrage by the American prosecutocracy. Barr should be commended for urging reduction of the sentence and the president congratulated for commuting it and sparing Stone possible exposure to the coronavirus in prison. National Review called the president’s praiseworthy action “indefensible,” echoing the most deranged and contemptible Trump-hater of all, Mitt Romney, who condemned it as “an act of unprecedented historic corruption.” As a public service, someone should give the former Republican presidential nominee a brief tutorial in American history.

If this is the best the Democratic muckraking cheerleaders and Never Trump Republicans can do, then they have shot their puny bolt. It is time to induce a resumption of the decline of the coronavirus fatality rate and of the unemployment that it generated. The country must focus on the distinction between the administration that relaunched the economy, recognized the Chinese threat, and ended unemployment and almost all illegal immigration, and the quavering alternative pledged to enactment of the Biden–Sanders Marxist unity agreement. A Biden victory would be a catastrophic electoral result.

First published in National Review.