It’s fair to say that former President Donald Trump is a polarizing figure. People either love him or hate him, and you’d be hard pressed to find an American who didn’t have a set opinion on him. Trump is a flawed individual, but his every action, word, and deed have been dissected by the carrion crows of the mainstream media (MSM). According to them, the guy can’t make a right move.

Trump, for his part, thrives on the conflict and is happy to fight back. When he was eventually kicked off Twitter and Facebook, he was largely silenced. The media felt the vacuum keenly. They quickly realized that their Trump Derangement Syndrome fomentation was their only good source of cash flow. CNN’s ratings have dropped so much that its attempt at a streaming platform, CNN+, flopped after a month.

So it was with great alacrity and anticipation that the MSM devoured and picked through Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign announcement on Tuesday. The speech unleashed the media gremlins who have been starving for the dollar signs his words represent.

CNN “fact-checkers” listed 20 examples of “false or misleading” claims in his Tuesday speech. The Washington Post — which changed its slogan in 2017 to “Democracy Dies in Darkness” in a direct declaration of war against Trump — reminded us that he allegedly made 30,573 false claims over four years. This is absolute insanity. Who the heck has time to count all the false claims someone says in four years (if they are in fact false claims)?

The truth is that many of these so-called “false claims” are actually hyperbole or satire, and that’s exactly what has endeared Trump to so many. But the rabidly deranged media cannot take a joke or countenance exaggeration of any sort — perhaps because they assume everyone is as literal and foolish as they are.

The biggest kicker of this “false claim” nonsense is that it is so cynical and hypocritical of the media to pick apart Trump’s jokes and hyperbole while ignoring Joe Biden’s juicy whoppers that he tells on a regular basis with the intent to mislead.

There is a world of difference between exaggerating the truth and outright deception. To lay out a perfect example, in Trump’s speech this week, CNN dinged him on claiming that we “surrendered $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world.” CNN says that we only surrendered “about $7.1 billion — a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021.” Trump should have been more accurate, but the exact number doesn’t really matter at the end of the day — that’s $7.1 billion of American taxpayer dollars. Trump’s point is that it was wasteful and a disgrace. The American taxpayer is at the heart of this point.

Then compare that to Biden’s lie that the Inflation Reduction Act will cost zero dollars. Or, speaking of zero, his lie that inflation had fallen to 0%. The average American is not at the heart of this inappropriately named bill or of Biden’s attempts to escape blame, but leftist cronies who fund the political machine certainly are.

Our Douglas Andrews has long been on the beat of Biden’s allergy to the truth. He lists the ones that are most egregious. Biden had to drop out of his 1988 presidential run due to plagiarism. He claimed that he marched in the civil rights movement. He did not. He claimed he attended a historically black college, Delaware State University. There is no evidence that this is true. He claimed he got arrested trying to meet Nelson Mandela. This is hysterically false. He claimed that his son Beau died in Iraq. Beau passed away in Delaware from cancer.

Then there are his policy lies. Biden claims he has the executive power to forgive student loans. He does not. He claims that puberty blockers are perfectly safe for gender-confused kids. Even The New York Times is backtracking on this lie.

The list goes on and on.

Perhaps the worst, most cynical lie our president tells is the slanderous claim he makes regarding the death of his first wife and baby daughter. As political analyst Kevin Williamson once put it: “The driver of that truck went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father. The casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.”

Trump’s embellishments are generally to crack a joke or to emphasize a point — primarily that he’s the best and his opponents are the worst. Biden’s lies are tools he uses to grapple his way to power. The MSM blithely ignores the liar-in-chief because Sleepy Joe does nothing for ratings. Trump, though, is the golden goose. Any opportunity to drag his name, his achievement, and his words through the mud, and the MSM happy obliges.

The double standard is so obvious, it’s no wonder the American people think the MSM is to blame for “democracy” being in danger.