Guilty by Reason of Insanity

by David Limbaugh

  “IT REINFORCES EVERY BAD STEREOTYPE ABOUT THE MEDIA”

  Leftists routinely blame Trump for things he has nothing to do with, such as Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel implying Trump was responsible for the Jussie Smollett hoax. “The only reason Jussie Smollett thought he could take advantage of a hoax about a hate crime is because of the environment, the toxic environment that Donald Trump created,” argued Emanuel.21

  Similarly, Megan Garber of The Atlantic blamed the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal on Trump. Why were the sins of actress Lori Loughlin, who was indicted for a scheme in which her daughters’ athletic backgrounds were falsified to get them into college, Trump’s fault? Simple—because “the logic of the con—the perversity of it—is becoming normalized,” writes Garber. “… People talk about, and financially depend on, side hustles. An alleged grifter sits in the Oval Office, near a bust of Andrew Jackson and the nuclear codes.” When Fox News’ Ed Henry asked Republican senator John Kennedy to respond to the article, Kennedy replied, “Someone needs to tell whoever wrote that article that the voices [s]he’s hearing in h[er] head aren’t real. That is, to try to turn this into Trump’s fault, is to say it’s a bridge too far, is a gross understatement. It’s absurd.”22

  When Virginia governor Ralph Northam got himself in hot water over wearing blackface while in college, Today cohost Craig Melvin asked his panel why blackface seems “all of a sudden front and center in America again?”—as if leftists haven’t obviously turned everything into a race issue today. “I think it has something to do with what Donald Trump has unleashed,” replied Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr. “It has something to do with the reservoir that’s underneath our politics that can always be activated at any moment. So it’s not like it’s something new has happened. It’s always underneath. It’s the undertow.” MSNBC political analyst Zerlina Maxwell concurred, saying, “You know, young children of color are dealing with kids saying, ‘Build the wall.’ Donald Trump has normalized this overt display of racism.”23

  Likewise, Congressman Al Green tried to corral support for his impeachment motion by blaming Trump for the racial controversies involving Virginia’s Democratic politicians. Congress, said Green, needs to fight bigotry “starting at the top.” He described the refusal of Ralph Northam and Virginia attorney general Mark Herring to resign despite wearing blackface in the past as “a symptom of a greater syndrome that currently plagues our country as a result of not acting on President Trump’s bigotry.”24

  Sometimes the Trump-scapegoating is more sinister, such as when BuzzFeed reported, based on two anonymous sources, that Trump suborned perjury from his attorney Michael Cohen. But one of the story’s reporters told CNN that neither he nor his colleague had personally seen the evidence to back up their “bombshell.”25 Despite having no idea whether it was true, CNN and MSNBC ran with the story all day before later admitting they were uncertain. So the entire liberal media were gobsmacked when Mueller’s team, after witnessing this breathless coverage, pulled the rug out from under them and said it wasn’t true.26 “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate,” said Peter Carr, a Mueller spokesman.27

  CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin was concerned by the story’s collapse. “The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story,” said Toobin, “is that the news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they’re willing to lie to do it. I don’t think that’s true, but… I just think this is a bad day for us.… It reinforces every bad stereotype about the news media.”28 Everything Toobin says here is accurate except his denial that the media is as dishonest and biased as the public believes—which it is.

  The media also deliberately distort Trump’s words to villainize him. When a reporter told Trump that British princess Meghan Markle had referred to him as “divisive” and a “misogynist,” Trump responded, “I didn’t know that. What can I say? I didn’t know that she was nasty.” Anyone who listened to the exchange knew that Trump meant, “I didn’t know she had said those nasty things about me.” Yet the liberal media seized on Trump’s comment and in unison, dishonestly and maliciously, accused him of calling Markle a nasty person, which is an entirely different thing.29

  “JUST LIKE THE NAZIS?”

  The media can’t even give Trump his due where his record is clear. It’s hard to deny that as president, Trump has been a stalwart supporter of the pro-life cause. Yet Slate’s William Saletan accuses Trump of devaluing life. Apparently triggered by Trump’s call during his State of the Union address for legislation to outlaw abortion after twenty weeks of pregnancy, Saletan writes, “Abortion is a serious matter. People may disagree on when life begins, but everyone agrees, at least in principle, on the sanctity of human life. Everyone, that is, except Trump. He treats human life as expendable, not just in the womb or infancy, but in childhood and adulthood. He condones killing people in every context: capital punishment, counterterrorism, assassination, and crushing political dissent. He’s the least pro-life president in American history.” While acknowledging that other presidents have started or fought bloodier wars, what distinguishes Trump “is his malicious intent.”30

  Given the left’s authoritarian disposition and actions, it’s striking that it postures over Trump’s alleged authoritarianism, especially considering that his policies focus on decentralizing government power. As noted, the left confuses Trump’s strong leadership, decisiveness, and his background as head of his own business empire with political authoritarianism and tyranny. Unlike President Obama, Trump has shown no tendency to act lawlessly through executive orders or otherwise.

  In the summer of 2018, when the left was losing its mind over Trump supposedly persecuting the children of illegal immigrants, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said, “Children are being marched away to showers, just like the Nazis said they were taking people to the showers, and then they never came back. You’d think they would use another trick.”

  “Just like the Nazis?” asks media watchdog Brent Bozell. “Where was PolitiFact to calmly explain that Mexican and Guatemalan kids were not in fact being marched to poison gas chambers?”31 MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski declared Trump “will be forever remembered as the president who traumatized little children. That’s his brand now. He’s the president who purposefully traumatized babies and children, and he traumatized them for his political gain… or to look like Kim Jong-un.” Brzezinkski’s network colleague Joy Reid said, “The Republicans will fall in line… [T]hey’re the North Korean army marching behind the Dear Leader.” “Trump creates a mass sense of victimization amongst his base,” said Steve Schmidt on MSNBC. “And then he asserts extraordinary claims of power to protect the victims from the scapegoated populations and the nefarious conspiracy. That is fundamentally illiberal, deeply un-American, and, frankly, could be straight out of Munich circa 1928.” It’s noteworthy that these overwrought accusers never cite any authoritarian act that Trump has actually done to support their claims.

  The media wouldn’t quit carping about Trump’s “evil” actions on the border. During Christmas season 2018, Felipe Gomez Alonzo, an eight-year-old-immigrant boy from Guatemala, died while in the Border Patrol’s custody. The media went berserk, feeding off each other’s false claims that immigration authorities were responsible for the boy’s death. The DHS reported that the child’s father was offered but rejected medical treatment after the boy threw up. Far from being neglected, he was taken to the hospital twice and given prescriptions to treat his illness. There was no evidence that border officials did anything wrong, yet the media continued to portray them essentially as murderers.32

  CBS anchor Dana Jacobson indignantly asked U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan why officials let the sick immigrant child out of the hospital. “That’s a call made by the medical
professionals,” said McAleenan.33 Townhall’s Matt Vespa aptly noted that the media’s phony outrage was selective. They were silent when the Obama administration shot tear gas at migrants and separated children from adults at the border. Though eighteen migrants died under his watch, they never called Obama a Nazi.34

  SiriusXM talk radio host and MSNBC guest Mark Thompson found biblical inspiration for denouncing Trump, suggesting that Jesus might not have survived Trump’s rule. “If Jesus were today or Trump was back then, He would have been separated from his parents,” said Thompson to MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle. “Joseph and Mary would have been put in a separate detention center—He would have been put in a separate detention center, and He might likely have died in custody like another child did over the holidays.”35

  “THE TIMES IS WIDELY KNOWN TO BE LEFT-LEANING”

  The media also blamed Trump for illegal immigrants breaking the law. “More now than ever, these families are going to remote areas because it’s harder and harder to get in the legal way,” said MSNBC’s Julia Ainsley. “They’re having to wait weeks and months in some cases.” MSNBC contributor Maria Teresa Kumar said, “When they decided that they were going to start closing ports of entry—when they were going to teargas families trying to go through the legal channels, she (DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen) and the President forced individuals to go and make more dangerous areas to cross the border.”36 So it’s Trump’s fault for forcing migrants to approach this country and seek illegal entry?

  The media dwell on Trump’s alleged mistreatment of illegal immigrants but studiously ignore reports of illegal immigrants killing Americans, as if it’s their duty to protect the murderers. When the left exalts any group as a protected class, it allows nothing to interfere with the narrative. The media also cover up the many incidents of criminal alien DUIs in America, though every year, ICE takes thousands of illegals into custody. Illegals commit some 80,000 DUIs, 76,000 other traffic offenses, 76,000 drug offenses, and 50,000 assaults annually. Outrageously, leftists provide many of these criminals safe harbor in sanctuary cities.37

  The media’s scapegoating of Trump for every imaginable problem is particularly acute on the race issue. “Killing black people is an old American tradition, but it is experiencing a revival in the Trump era,” writes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

  One constant source of irritation for conservatives is the media’s denial of its bias. CNN’s Don Lemon suggested that his network should add a delay to Trump’s prime-time address on border security to prevent the network from “promoting propaganda.” “People will believe it whether the facts are true or not,” reasoned Lemon. “I guess that’s the chance you take with any president. But this one is different. And then by the time the rebuttals come on, we’ve already promoted propaganda possibly, unless he gets up there and tells the truth.”38 How can you deny being biased when you’re openly suggesting tactics to ensure people don’t believe what the president says?

  The conservative claim of liberal media bias was confirmed by an unlikely source when Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times from 2011 to 2014, admitted the paper’s news pages are “unmistakably anti-Trump.” She said the same holds for the Washington Post. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis,” said Abramson. “… Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.” But it’s more than just a matter of financial incentive. The younger Times employees—many in digital jobs—believe “urgent” times call for “urgent measures: the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,” says Abramson. Abramson’s admission was hardly unique, as Project Veritas caught Times senior home page editor Des Shoe on video admitting that the paper is “widely, widely understood to be left-leaning. Our main stories are supposed to be objective. It’s very difficult in this day and age to do that.”39

  “RUSSIA HYSTERIA SPRUNG FROM ONE PREDETERMINED OUTCOME”

  The media’s most shocking display of anti-Trump bias was its despicable conspiracy with the Democrats to overturn the 2016 election by advancing the false narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election.

  As the left hungrily anticipated the release of the Mueller report, MSNBC host Elie Mystal was elated in thinking that Ivanka Trump could be in legal jeopardy, which could spell the end for President Trump. “Look, we’ve talked a lot about Don Jr., we know now he was at the Trump Tower meeting,” he said, “we talked a lot about Eric, because he seems to be Fredo—this is the first time that we have Ivanka, which is like the only kid [Trump] likes, in the crosshairs.” Chris Matthews fantasized that President Trump could resign as part of a deal with Special Counsel Mueller. “But what if the prosecutor were to offer the president an alternative? What if he were to say he would let the children walk if the old man does the same? That would mean giving up the presidency in exchange for acquittals all around—not just for himself, but for all his kids.”40

  The Trump-hating media mob indisputably put all their hopes and dreams in Special Counsel Robert Mueller, fully expecting he would deliver the coup de grace and end the Trump nightmare. Nothing made the leftists salivate more than speculating about the long-awaited Mueller report, which they believed would lead to Trump’s demise and their salvation. Whether in conspiratorially inventing stories or deluding themselves with false expectations, they were out over their skis. Most of these reporters surely knew—and the rest should have known—that they were pushing a false narrative largely based on laughably asinine allegations funded by the Democrats and compiled by Fusion GPS in the Steele dossier. These collusion claims were expanded upon in an endless parade of reports quoting anonymous intelligence officials spinning stories about classified information, the veracity of which could not be independently confirmed.

  CNN contributor and security analyst Juliette Kayyem argued the entire Trump clan was in Russia’s pocket. “I personally think that what Mueller is heading to, is not only the indictments… but also a report that discloses the extent to which Trump and his family are compromised by the Russians,” said Kayyem.41

  Journalist Carl Bernstein asserted that Trump’s collusion with Russia was a provable certainty. He insisted that Trump’s “lies” all concerned Russia and that lawyers working with the White House informed him that Trump hadn’t told the truth on multiple issues concerning Russia. “Part of what I know comes from lawyers of some of the other defendants in this matter who have appeared before Mueller, including members of the joint defense team which collaborates with the White House, and those lawyers believe the president has been lying at every turn about his relationship with Russia,” Bernstein said. “Look, let us look at all of the lies, follow the money, follow the lies. They are all mostly and most vehemently about Russia.”

  Bernstein baldly asserted that Mueller already had the goods on Trump. “He has helped Putin destabilize the United States and interfere in the election, no matter whether it was purposeful or not, and that is part of what the draft of Mueller’s report, I’m told, is to be about,” Bernstein claimed.42 Since the report showed no such thing, one wonders who, if anyone, told Bernstein these lies. Of course, that goes for every reporter who knowingly advanced the false collusion narrative.

  When presidential historian Jon Meacham discussed the Trump-Russia investigation with MSNBC’s Brian Williams, he told Williams we’ve never had “a President of the United States who is considered to be possibly an asset of a foreign government.”43 That may be true, but we’ve also never had a press corps that spent years conspiring to falsely portray a president as a foreign asset.

  After this years-long hype, Mueller’s inability to find any collusion was a devastating blow to the media. “Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has delive
red his report on Russian collusion, it’s clear that political journalists did the bidding of those who wanted to delegitimize and overturn Trump’s election,” writes columnist David Harsanyi. “While bad behavior from partisan sources should be expected, the lack of skepticism from self-appointed unbiased journalists has been unprecedented. Any critical observer could see early on that Trump-era partisan newsroom culture had made journalists susceptible to the deception of those peddling expedient stories. Our weekly bouts of Russia hysteria all sprung from one predetermined outcome: the president was in bed with Vlad Putin.” Harsanyi correctly notes that the default position of true journalists should be skepticism, but there was none of that on the Russian collusion yarn.44

  During the investigation countless liberal media figures baselessly accused Trump of outright sedition. Cable network ratings rose in direct proportion to their sensationalism. Despite being humiliated by their errors, they never apologized. Some of them simply changed their allegation from collusion to the equally preposterous accusation of obstruction—that Trump illegally tried to thwart an investigation into a non-existent crime.

  The New York Times, one of the biggest, most influential purveyors of false collusion stories, decided on a slightly different tack. In a meeting with Times staff, executive editor Dean Baquet made the surprising admission that the paper “built our newsroom” to cover a single story—the Russia collusion hoax. However, after Mueller’s feeble testimony to Congress, “the story changed,” said Baquet—in other words, the collusion narrative the Times had been pushing for nearly three years collapsed spectacularly. So what to do? Instead of calling for an internal investigation to see how the paper had botched the most intensely covered story in decades, Baquet advised it was time to “regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.” That new story, any conservative could have guessed, would be Trump’s racism.45