By Rod Dreher
Friday, October 14, 2016
Mollie Hemingway is no fan of Donald Trump. She says he
deserves the public roasting that he’s getting for his lecherous behavior. But
she finds it more than a little suspicious that despite Trump’s known
reputation as an alpha male sexual aggressor, the news media didn’t manage to
turn up any of this stuff until right here in the final weeks of the election.
Excerpt:
Enter yet another #NeverTrump guy on Twitter, who goes by the handle
@PoliticalMath. He wrote a lengthy series of Tweets that I’ll reproduce here:
To my liberal friends: I know you think
this is paranoid & conspiratorial but let me try to paint for you how it
feels to be on the right. For a year, we’ve been saying ‘the press has massive
dirt on Trump but they won’t release it until after the nomination.’ Every
anti-Trump person said this over and over ‘they have so much dirt on him,
they’re not telling you what they have’ and we got mocked. ‘Hey if we had a
dirty Trump story, we’d publish it before the [nomination].’ ‘We’re doing our
job, your voters are just dumb.’
The more realistic of us on the right
suspected the press wasn’t ‘holding’ a story so much as not really looking too
hard into Trump. So Trump got to be on every cable channel non-stop, oppo was
very thin, investigative pieces were weak sauce for months & months. We on
the right accused the press of not doing their job & we just got laughed
at, people saying we were ‘blaming’ the press for Trump. Which is kind of true,
we did blame the press (I tried hard to say that this was the fault of MANY
actors). But it’s been months of this.
After a year of saying ‘they have dirt on
him.’ After there is no chance he’ll step down. All this comes out. This
*could* be a coincidence. It’s totally possible that the press discovered a
decade old story JUST IN TIME for the election. In which case, I suppose we are
lucky they didn’t discover it 4 weeks too late. Whew. We dodged a bullet on
that one, didn’t we?
It’s possible that it’s just an uncanny coincidence. But, as
PoliticalMath continues, “this fits EVERY theory about a dishonest, vicious,
conniving press. Down to the last prediction & detail. Make your excuses
about how the press MIGHT not be culpable but know that this was predicted in
detail by media skeptics on the right. And when you predict something to this
level of granularity & it comes true, you can’t just call the people who
predicted it ‘crazy.’”
To put a fine point upon it, unless you claim to believe that every
single person involved in these allegations just happened to be spurred at the
same exact moment to go public and only because Cooper just happened to force
magic words out of Trump’s mouth, we have three explanations for the current
timing of the opposition research dump. None of them looks particularly good
for the media.
1) The media had the information, but chose not to write about it until
now. 2) The media didn’t bother looking for any of the information until after
Trump had clinched the GOP nomination. Or 3) the media didn’t look for the
information during the primary and didn’t look for the information during the
general, and only used what the Clinton camp gave them over the last few weeks.
Even a combination of those answers doesn’t look too good for them.
It’s important to emphasize that Mollie says Trump
deserves what he’s getting. She’s not claiming that he’s a victim:
Perhaps if the target weren’t someone as reprobate and immoral as Donald
Trump one could muster some sympathy. But he chose the wanton, unscrupulous
lifestyle and bragged about it.
And she is unsparing towards Trump supporters who are
shocked by this:
Again, if you thought anything other than this would happen to Trump,
you are an idiot. I’m sorry, but you are.
Nevertheless, Mollie is making what I think is a very
good point about the appearance of collusion between the media and the Clinton
campaign. There’s no smoking gun here, but it do make a man think, don’t it?
The media’s behavior will all be a part of the
post-election “stab in the back” myth (the Drumpßtosslegende)
that we all know is coming from Team Trump. The candidate is already laying the
groundwork:
Trump’s remarks, which he read from a teleprompter, were laced with the
kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right,
white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also
heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that
Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of
U.S. sovereignty” and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless
cabal out to destroy “our great civilization.”
“It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic
decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its
wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations
and political entities,” Trump said.
Republican politicians in Washington will be especially
eager to embrace the media portion of the legend, because a) there’s probably
some truth to it, but more importantly b) they will hope it will deflect
Trump’s fire against them towards a scapegoat that’s already unpopular with
Republican voters. And, c) conservatives, even those who did not vote Trump,
will be eager to direct their own despair and rage over the return of the
Clintons and the Aleppo-ization of the Republican Party, to some outside force.
These next four years of Clinton government are going to
be one gaping wound. The nation won’t soon heal from this. Nobody should look
forward to what’s to come, even if your candidate is going to win.
(And by the way, as many on the Right are now asking,
what the hell were the GOP primary candidates’ opposition researchers doing re:
Trump, if they didn’t gather this and dump it on him back then? Whatever it
was, they weren’t doing their jobs.)
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