What Have We Learned?

What have we learned over 15 months of a Trump presidency? Precious little, I’m afraid.

We haven’t learned that Trump was a boor, an ignoramus, and a cad. Anyone who’d been paying attention already knew that.

We haven’t learned that Hillary Clinton is ungracious, self-pitying, and paranoiac. Anyone who’d been paying attention already knew that.

We haven’t learned that the Russians are engaging in espionage and disinformation campaigns against us. That was already common knowledge. I’ve always assumed it to be the case.

We haven’t learned that power is the primary motivating factor for the Republicans in Congress or that they’ll do anything including support Trump to hold onto it. That understanding is part of the very foundations of our republic so you would really need to be opposed to 200 years of the American experience not to recognize that. Or think that the Democrats don’t have precisely the same problem.

We haven’t learned that the Justice Department in general and the FBI in particular are corrupt and thoroughly politicized. Anyone who’d been paying attention already knew that.

We haven’t learned that the press hates Trump. Anyone who’d been paying attention already knew that.

Writing in the National Post Conrad Black observes:

The American media, joined by the fatuous imitative chirping of the Canadian media (not that Americans would be aware of or have the slightest interest in what the media or anyone else in Canada thought of anything), regularly imply or state that the U.S. government is being run autocratically by a thuggish individual unfit for his great office. Robert De Niro wants to send the president to prison in a comedy skit; Kathy Griffin, whose opening gambit was a still photograph of the president’s severed head, is now lampooning his entourage in predictable simulations. Desperately unoriginal and mouthy occupants of late-night purported comedy — Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Chelsea Handler — imagine that shouting rehashed denigrations of the president and his family are amusing. It is a bore; it isn’t working, and history moves on.

Pew Research Center and Harvard Media Studies surveys both confirm that 90 per cent of the national media coverage of Donald Trump is hostile, but he is accomplishing his stated goals, slowly. The asinine Dodd-Frank financial strangulation law, which enacted the bipartisan dual-branch official American pretence that private greed rather than unspeakable governmental incompetence was responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, is being repealed. The Secretary of State-designate has returned from a secret visit to North Korea that appears to presage the most ambitious American diplomatic activity since president Reagan’s arms-reduction talks with president Gorbachev (1988), or even president Nixon’s accord with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai (1972).

The economy is flourishing, illegal immigration is sharply curtailed. Assad has been smacked down and Putin faced down, and the gigantic canard of Trump collusion with Russia has collapsed. That investigation, generated by a fired FBI director illegally taking a doubtfully accurate memo and leaking it to the press, has now degenerated into an absurd handoff to New York prosecutors to see if the president’s lawyer committed a campaign finance offence when he paid off a rather peppy porn star for silence about an alleged one-evening encounter with Trump when no abuse or even ungentlemanliness was alleged, 10 years before he ran for president. Truly is America, the greatest nation in history, with all its complexities and shortcomings, mocked by the shallow bias of its free press and the absurdity of public discourse.

The arrogant façade of the fascistic American criminal justice system that had been infiltrated by the Clinton-Obama Democratic party has been torn down and the director and deputy director of the FBI revealed as potential felons who will possibly have their own day in the kangaroo courts they so delighted in sending less deservedly accused to face. There are many vicissitudes but the American leviathan is, however awkwardly and inelegantly, reviving. But the most salient aspect of it is not the war on and travails of Trump, but the fact that the national media have shot their bolt every day for 34 months since he announced his candidacy for president. The media threw their obligation to retain some element of fairness and detachment aside, and gambled everything on poisoning the wells and polluting public opinion so badly (as they did with Richard Nixon, but he had no idea how to deal with it) that the people’s choice (by the narrowest of margins and in a stunning surprise) would be overturned. They gambled and they have lost.

My point is not to promote Trump; it is the colossal failure of the press, and the widespread extent of this phenomenon.

Is any of that news? Or did we already know that?