The Patriot Post® · Media's Constant Attacks on Trump Backfiring
Donald Trump is the modern-day Dread Pirate Roberts.
In the movie classic “The Princess Bride,” the hero, Wesley, is captured and forced into servitude by the Dread Pirate Roberts, only to assume the role of Roberts when the actual Dread Pirate Roberts decides to retire.
Roberts/Wesley discovers a plot to kill his beloved by the prince who will marry her, and sets out to find and defeat the criminal band hired to do the killing. After defeating the giant brute and the master swordsman, Wesley then engages in a battle of wits with Vizzini, the genius behind the plan. Wesley pours two glasses of wine, poisons one with iocane powder, and leaves the genius to use his deductive reasoning to determine “who is right, and who is dead.”
After the genius makes his decision and they both drink, Wesley reveals that both glasses were poisoned; Wesley has actually spent years taking small doses of iocane powder in order to build up an immunity.
Thus it is with Donald Trump. The media, by spending the better part of the last two years in a state of perpetual outrage at Trump, have unwittingly immunized Trump from their hysterical criticism. Their Outrage Meter is eternally pegged at 100, unchanged whether screaming about Trump’s immigration policies or his latest tweet. No matter what he says or does, it is officially The Worst Thing Ever™.
But sane, normal people can’t sustain that level of interest, much less outrage. It becomes a tsunami of whining and accusations that regular Americans just tune out. So, ironically, in a desperate attempt to destroy Trump, leftists have immunized him from their attacks.
Of course, their perpetual outrage is not just a result of their hatred of Trump. It’s calculated to increase profits — the greedy capitalist pigs!
A recent report revealed The New York Times, the bible of the Left, has done quite well as the anointed mouthpiece for anti-Trumpers. Since Election Day 2016, the NYT has seen its stock value skyrocket 141% (netting its largest shareholder, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu, a cool $423 million in profits).
Late-night comedian Stephen Colbert struggled in the ratings before he repackaged himself as a vicious (and often vile) anti-Trumper, with a nightly onslaught of criticism and mockery of the president. And without Trump’s tweeting criticism of them, poor CNN, which recently dropped below Nickelodeon and HGTV in cable ratings, may be lost from the American consciousness altogether.
It seems that CBS Chairman Les Moonves was half right when, in 2016, he said that Donald Trump’s candidacy “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” The greedy One Percenter continued, “The money’s rolling in and this is fun. … It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
One wonders if the Leftmedia appreciates the irony that the president they now seek to take down was made possible by the estimated $2 billion in free media coverage they gave him during the primaries (calculating that Trump was the weakest Republican candidate).
However, there is growing evidence that the constant barrage of vitriol directed at Trump by the press is focusing the intensity of his detractors, but it is not expanding the number of critics. In fact, not only is the criticism not hurting Trump, it may actually be helping him.
According to the Real Clear Politics polling aggregate, in recent months Trump’s approval rating on the economy has risen to 51% (higher than Barack Obama ever achieved), with just 36% disapproving, and his overall approval rating has risen to 41%, with a 10-point drop in his negative ratings. This is even after the non-stop coverage of the border situation of some children being separated from their illegal alien parents, and the press depicting Trump as cruel and heartless. Surprisingly, Trump’s handling of that situation had little effect at all on the polls either way.
It almost seems the opposite of Obama, whose personal likability was high with the American public while his policies were frowned upon. Many Americans may not like Trump’s tweeting or his street-fighter style, but they sure do like the prosperity his policies are bringing.
Paradoxically, the more the media attacks Trump, the less credibility it has with the public. In 2016, more Americans believed media bias was a problem than big campaign contributions. That was before the 24/7 Trump-bashing began in earnest, and that percentage is likely higher now as Americans become more and more numb to the “Pollaganda Effect” (agenda-driven polling masquerading as news).
There are signs that the Democrats are getting worried, and rightfully so. Their endless attacks on President Trump are failing. An astute observer will notice that Democrats no longer talk of impeachment, and the Russia investigation has yielded little of substance other than exposing a coordinated effort by senior FBI officials under Obama to sabotage Trump.
November is a long way away, and anything can happen between now and then (like Trump’s plan for tariffs undermining his pro-growth policies). But for now, that predicted Blue Wave is looking less like a tsunami and more like a leaky faucet.
And the biased, anti-Trump media deserve at least some of the credit for that.