Op-Ed: Democrats' House of Cards Strategy
Long ago, political discussions and even disagreements were conducted with respect and tolerance. But as deferential political discourse has gone the way of dinosaurs and hula hoops, that is no longer so.
In many groups, viral policy disagreements have ended friendships, severed familial ties, and quarantined persona non grata offenders into out-of-sight, out-of-mind isolation.
But unlike COVID, the origin of that house-of-cards contagion should be little debated, for it surely began roughly 10 years ago and was fabricated, periodically amplified, and relentlessly spread by the legacy media.
Looking back, the infection began shortly before Trump’s first term, with the Russian collusion hoax portraying him as a Kremlin pawn. And when that fabrication ran its course, subsequent strains of that blight branded him a racist, an insurrectionist, and a felon.
It is easy to recall that for more than three years, the mainstream media broadcast “proof” that Trump conspired with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. And although the Mueller probe in 2019 and the Durham report in 2023 reached the same exculpatory conclusion that there was no direct evidence of Trump being beholden to Moscow, the damage inflicted by the establishment media was irreversible. He could not be trusted.
And with retractions of Russian collusion virtually absent from progressive newscasts, hatred for Trump festered and was reinforced by yet another progressive invention — namely that, even if he was not a Russian plant, he was definitely a racist.
While the collusion farce served as the opening act of the off-Broadway play “Destroy Trump or Else,” a shorter production ran concurrently. Media charges of Russian complicity were compounded by allegations that the president was also an unapologetic bigot after allegedly calling neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.”
In truth, responding to a violent clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, between groups supporting and opposing the removal of a Confederate statue, Trump said that ultra-right-wing groups should be “condemned totally” for their “egregious display of bigotry and violence.”
But of course, those words were largely omitted by legacy journalists because they undermined the narrative of Trump as a Klansman wannabe. As a result, the vast number of progressive viewers never realized that his “very fine people” comment referred only to some good people on both sides of the statue removal issue.
However, the most damaging attacks against Trump occurred after the 2020 election, when he challenged its outcome by telling supporters to protest its “illegitimate results” in Washington, D.C. This was certainly not Trump’s wisest decision because even without his direction, once demonstrators broke into the Capitol Building, left-leaning pundits accused him of fomenting an insurrection to violently overthrow the U.S. government.
It did not matter that Trump never told demonstrators to “storm,” “breach,” or “break into” the Capitol. And it did not matter that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs testified that Trump had requested additional National Guard support days before the demonstration “to make sure it’s a safe event,” but was ignored due to the “optics” of the military on Capitol grounds.
And most importantly, it did not matter that, on the morning of the protest, Trump had clearly told supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” All that mattered to presidential critics was that the “insurrection” proved his malevolence and that, if reelected, democracy would perish.
Yet, still unsatisfied with falsely accusing Trump of being a Russian shill, a racist, and an insurrectionist, progressives added yet another charge to that trifecta. And that was the dubious distinction of making Trump the first U.S. president to be convicted of a felony by convicting him of 34 bookkeeping offenses.
Simply put, Trump was found guilty of falsifying business records to conceal or commit another crime. And according to the local prosecutor, that crime was to hide reimbursements for a $130,000 hush money payment to an adult film actress during the 2016 presidential campaign.
But when reviewing the facts of Trump’s kangaroo-court conviction, any fair-minded person would have to agree that treating a 2017 bookkeeping misdemeanor as a felony by linking it to an unproven election law violation was a politically motivated weaponization of our legal system.
At the least, the bookkeeping misdemeanor had already exceeded its two-year statute of limitations. And besides, the law that Trump allegedly violated was a “zombie” statute that had almost never been enforced in modern New York state history.
And because Trump was never personally charged or convicted in federal court for any campaign violation, it was legally improper for a New York state prosecutor to treat hush payments as a proven federal crime, leading to his elevating an expired bookkeeping misdemeanor into a felony.
So intentionally driven or not, our widening political division has been ignited and fueled by the mainstream media. For as soon as a smear against Trump grows stale, it flips its house-of-cards script and launches another slander, dealing out exaggerations, half-truths, and outright lies from the bottom of a house-divided deck. And those ignoring that reality have not been paying attention.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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