Could Media Please Stop Publishing The Exact Same NeverTrump Column Over And Over Again?

It is said that the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result. In media, NeverTrumpism is writing the same column over and over and expecting the Orange Bad Man to disappear.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: President Donald Trump is unraveling. Oh, you’ve heard it eleventy billion times from the same half dozen “NeverTrump” pundits? Yeah, so has everyone. It’s the same column from the same people published with alarming frequency.

It’s not the pundits’ fault, necessarily. They are who they are, and clearly Trump has broken the part of their brains that used to be able to synthesize new information and develop interesting and compelling arguments. It is, however, the media outlets’ fault for publishing the same dreck over and over.

Media outlets treat conservative Americans as second-class citizens whose arguments don’t need to be listened to or engaged with. Instead, they take the vanishingly small number of column inches or pundit panel seats they have and give the “conservative” slots to people who repeatedly disparage conservative elected officials, their voters, and their policies.

In some cases, the supposed “conservatives” have long ago renounced their conservatism. The Washington Post’s Max Boot, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and Twitter’s Bill Kristol receive a great deal of mockery for their boring obsession with Orange Man Bad, an obsession that has led them to renounce every one of the policy positions they once held.

Even as their positions change in response to whatever Trump has said, NeverTrump is known for writing the same column over and over again. It’s usually headlined something like “Why Trump And His Voters Are So Awful That They Forced Me To Leave the GOP But Also Remember To Please Continue Calling Me A Republican To Preserve The TV/Column Gigs That Depend On Me Claiming I’m On The Right Even Though I Am Now Aligned With Democrats, Write Columns About How I Vote For Them, And Generally Work To Help Them Gain More Political Power.”

Within the small crew of people who hold the media’s many “NeverTrump” positions, the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Pete Wehner doesn’t get enough credit for writing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. When he’s not monomaniacally obsessed with Trump or pushing debunked conspiracy theories related to the Trump administration, Wehner is capable of good and thoughtful sentiments. But the recent years have mostly seen the former at the expense of the latter. Month after month, year after year. And mostly for the same two publications that are using him to attack Americans for electing Trump.

Every few weeks or months, The New York Times and The Atlantic drag out ol’ Pete to melodramatically lament that Orange Man Is So Very Very Bad and to claim that Trump is unraveling. One of these columns would have sufficed. By the 87th, one begins to wonder if maybe a new approach should be tried.

This week’s Atlantic column is headlined, I kid you not, “The President Is Unraveling.” It posits that “we are witnessing the steady, uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of an American president.”

It’s very similar to everything Wehner’s written about Trump, including his March 25 column asserting that Trump is “intellectually or temperamentally” unsuited for the moment. Wehner harrumphs that Trump is “erratic, impulsive, narcissistic, vindictive, cruel, mendacious, and devoid of empathy.” There was March 13th’s column claiming that Trump was unraveling so much that “The Trump Presidency Is Over.”

Lest you think these columns are the result of Wehner’s considered evaluation of how Trump has handled the global coronavirus pandemic, be assured that this had no effect on his columns. Back in September he wrote a column headlined “Trump Is Not Well.” A June 18, 2019 column that praised Jake Tapper (of Russia collusion hoax fame) as an “exemplary journalist” and truth teller, lamented that Trump should not be mean toward his critics.

In that same column, Wehner said the world had to be protected against Trump’s “assault and degradation” and his “pernicious and dangerous” rhetoric in the “dismal, demoralizing” era of his presidency. “Trump is not only unable to lay out a coherent argument; at times he’s unable to string together sentences that parse,” worried Wehner, nicely. In March of 2019, Wehner argued “His condition is getting worse, not better.”

It’s the same story over at The New York Times, where Wehner has written even more attacks on Trump and what he represents. Typically the only way for a conservative to be published at the Times is to attack the Republican Party or some subset of its coalition. Over the years, many “conservative” pundits eagerly accepted this tradeoff of trashing their allies in order to claim a Times byline.

Wehner’s first column was a critique of the Tea Party’s desire that Republican elected representatives fight harder against leftist politicians. His first anti-Trump column was headlined, “President Donald Trump? Just Say No,” and ran July 8, 2015. January 2016 gave us “Why I Will Never Vote For Donald Trump.” On and on it went. He lamented the “indelible stain” of Trump by June 2016.

“Is There Life After Trump?” he wondered on the eve of Trump’s victory. That was followed by “One way not to be like Trump,” a month later. The next month’s entry was a real shocker: “Why I Cannot Fall In Line Behind Trump.” By April of 2017 he was telling us that his sources indicated that Trump’s “dysfunction knows no bounds.”

When Trump fired James Comey, a key perpetrator of the Russia collusion hoax, Wehner lost it. He called the firing of the corrupt and conniving bureaucrat an “abuse of power” and doubted Trump’s claim that Comey had told him three times he was not under investigation. While it was a lie to say the FBI wasn’t investigating Trump, Comey did admit under oath to doing exactly as Trump claimed, thrice. “In fairy tales this is known as ‘the power of three,'” the very wrong Wehner wrote.

“Behold Our ‘Child King’” was an article riddled with errors that began “Republican lawmakers have seen the Trump disaster coming for a while now.” It argued for a “comprehensive, consistent case by Republican leaders at the state and national levels that signals their opposition to the moral ugliness and intellectual incoherence of Mr. Trump.” On, and on it went.

By March 2018, Wehner wrote “Trump’s White House Is A Black Hole.” An article disparaging Republicans for not falling for the Russia collusion hoax in their questioning of Michael Cohen “says more about the degradation of my former party than anything they said.”

Wehner’s function, though, isn’t to provide any sort of helpful analysis. It’s to provide liberal journalists who wish to look less biased than they are a nominal Republican as a cudgel to attack their enemies. Consider these tweets from CNN’s John Harwood here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

During the 2016 campaign, editors and bookers at media outlets claimed they couldn’t find any good writers or TV pundits to discuss the appeal of Trump. That was always a lie. But the repeated publishing of the exact same anti-Trump arguments over and over again from the same few people shows the lie to have been even more ridiculous than it already was.

Publishing identical NeverTrump columns about Trump “unraveling” month after month and year after year is yet another way to treat conservative Americans as second-class citizens. And failing to air and engage with the substantive arguments of tens of millions of people is also a form of election interference, albeit one engaged in by a wide variety of our media.

It’s not the immediate result, it’s the noise. Americans, in general, are stupid. They don’t like to hear the negativity, it’s an irritation and distracts from finding masks and hoarding toilet paper.

I think the hope, a reasonable one, is that many Americans will vote for anyone but Trump to make the noise go away.

The walls are closing in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ab6uxg908

Mockingbird Media curtesy of the CIA. They all have the same message at the same time.

I watched Mollie on FOX last night at 6pm with Brett, they had on the ABC psycho (WHY??) Rick Karlson or something.

What I saw was Mollie who appeared like a graduate studies student and Karl who talked like a 5th grade intellect - amazing. She is great.

The media have never been able to figure out President Trump. They continue to throw as much mud as possible, hoping and praying (to whatever they pray to) that something will stick. They’re going to REALLY come unglued on November 3rd.

Recent nights saw the premiere of the GW Bush hagiography on PBS which merely an anti-Trump screed with a different coat of paint. It would probably be instructive to do a deeper dive on this guy Wehner to find out if he was among the crowd using the “Chimpy” Bush appellation. This same group that now praises Bush, mostly because he’s not Trump, were among the Bush critics on taking out Saddam and being President when the Dem-woven fabric of lies in the mortgage banking industry unraveled.

One of the best things Trump has ever done is to push these anti-American globalist, neo-con, fake conservatives to the fringes and often outside of the Republican party. I only hope his changes to the party are permanent, and these sort never get a foothold again. I’d exchange a patriotic, reasonable working class Trump Democrat any day for ten of these sort of “Republicans” (or all of them actually).

I remember when the left used to refer to GW as the “boy king”. It was meant as an insult for a variety of reasons, none of which were remotely logical or accurate.

When Øbama came along the term suddenly had meaning and relevance and I referred to him as boy king a few times. He was always treated with deference although he never earned it. He didn’t earn his place, never worked for it (or anything), and was exempt from criticism. It was presumed that he was an expert on any topic upon which he opined - even though he routinely demonstrated that he knew very little about anything.

Trying to tie Trump to that moniker is the height of silliness. It doesn’t fit. Sure, Trump was raised the son of affluence. But he worked his butt off to earn his wealth. And Trump exempt from criticism - it is to laugh.

I’m sure there were the equivalents to Never-Trumpers with other presidents - but never to this extent. It stands as a testament to his character that he doesn’t wither from the constant barrage, but seems to actually thrive on it.

There will never be another one like him - I’m glad he’s on my side!

One aspect of the decline of local newspapers has been the shriveling of the locally-produced content. It’s cheaper just to cut and paste news and editorials from their national syndication source (usually AP), which consists of shrill liberals discussing liberal topics, for other liberals to read.

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