Impeachment trial nears end
Reaction and analysis from Fox News contributors Ari Fleischer and Mollie Hemingway.
News coverage of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate was the Super Bowl of media bias. It pitted the two strongest teams against one another – the ridiculously biased left-wing news media vs. Team Trump.
And the best team is about to win – reminding the press of the phrase “the agony of defeat.”
President Trump is poised to remain victorious on the national stage after an almost impossible run of such successes. The anti-Trump media “experts” told us he wouldn’t really run for president in 2016; he wouldn’t win any primary states; he would drop out; he wouldn’t get the nomination; he wouldn’t and couldn’t win the presidency.
And every major news story since would supposedly be The One to finally take Trump down.
But now Trump is within a few days of hoisting the political version of the Lombardi Trophy, while left-wing journalists are whining and crying in their organic, decaf, artisan-crafted espressos.
CNN Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin summed up the Senate action nicely, declaring that “Trump won.” Anchors Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper looked on stone-faced as Toobin added that Trump is “going to get acquitted, and that’s how history will remember what went on here.”
The delay of the final Senate impeachment trial vote until Wednesday almost seemed designed to let the press have one last weekend where they could fantasize about removing Trump before reality set in.
But after the last-ditch attempt to secure more impeachment witnesses failed Friday night, many in the anti-Trump media nearly broke down in feral screams reminiscent of their protests on the day Trump was inaugurated.
Carl Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward famously covered the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post, went on CNN to say that “the Senate of the United States, through the Republican leadership and membership, has now joined hands with a tyrant.” Bernstein didn’t explain how he could express such views openly if Trump was the “tyrant” he claimed.
That view oddly wasn’t unique, as historian Jon Meacham told NBC that “President Trump is functionally a monarch at this point.”
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Those were far from the only goofy reactions. CBS “Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell reported on the terrifying threats against Maine schools, intended to intimidate Republican Sen. Susan Collins into voting against Trump. O’Donnell bizarrely concluded that those threats showed “the level we’re at in terms of the anger on both sides about this particular vote.”
I guess saying “both sides” is OK when journalists do it.
Washington Post “conservative opinion writer” Jennifer Rubin seems to outdo herself every week. Her reaction to this vote was simply: “I am totally rethinking the 17th Amendment.” For those who don’t have their pocket Constitutions handy, the amendment refers to the popular election of senators.
Apparently, Jen doesn’t like democracy or the Constitution. But that’s typical for the left. (And, yes, she’s on the left.)
Fellow Post columnist Dana Milbank joined Rubin with outrage so strange that he actually tallied how many Republican senators chewed gum at different points of the impeachment trial. Then he added this sartorial note: “Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), wearing cotton chinos for the occasion, perused a magazine.”
Milbank wove his freakout into an oddball column, wondering “who might be helping Trump’s campaign” in 2020. “Putin? Erdogan? Xi? MBS?”
Milbank didn’t mention how the Post and nearly every major media outlet would be helping Trump’s Democratic election opponent, funded by mountains of cash from Amazon billionaire and Post owner Jeff Bezos.
The liberal gang at “The View” was furious that the GOP wouldn’t vote for witnesses the Democrats hadn’t bothered to interview. Co-host Joy Behar worried: “God help America, and democracy!” Oddly, that was her response to a democratic vote in the Senate, just one she didn’t like.
Bloomberg Opinion Editor Francis Wilkinson, whose billionaire boss is running for president as a Democrat, slammed the Republican senators. (Shocking, I know.) “Murkowski is frustrated and disappointed ‘at all sides,’ both the criminals who committed the crimes and the cops who tried to stop them,” he tweeted.
Both The Washington Post and New York Times front pages seemed more deflated than a New England Patriot football. The Post almost sighed, “Senate set to acquit Trump next week after bid for witnesses is defeated.” The Times headline even uttered the dreaded word “Acquittal.”
Both papers’ editorial boards were angry in that haughty way only editorial boards can be.
The Post knocked the “cringing shamefulness of the Republican decision to block Mr. Bolton’s testimony,” referring to former National Security Adviser John Bolton. This is the same testimony House Democrats hadn’t pursued because they were racing to get impeachment done before it harmed their election chances.
The New York Times was more long-winded and stuffy, while still bashing Trump. The newspaper’s editorial complained about the “suffocating tautology” of the statement by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. It added a host of complaints it makes frequently about Trump – from racism to his filling of Supreme Court vacancies – before concluding: “Mr. Trump is the most corrupt president in modern times.”
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One could easily picture a harrumphing Times staffer typing angrily while listening to Joan Baez sing “We Shall Overcome” through tinny computer speakers.
Thursday night, Times editorial board member Mara Gay had channeled that outlandish ‘60s Fighting-The-Man vibe. Gay invoked “the Jim Crow South and in Jim Crow Detroit,” saying what Republicans had done “sounds very familiar to me and it's – it’s actually quite scary.”
That was bad enough. Then MSNBC anchor Brian Williams – the news guy who got demoted from anchoring “NBC Nightly News” for lying – responded: “I think you just spoke for metric tons of our viewers watching tonight.”
It’s hard to tell if that’s a stupid comment or an indictment of MSNBC viewers. Maybe both.
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Thankfully, this will soon blow over and the press will manufacture some new outrage.
To paraphrase “South Park”: Trump is Super, thanks for asking. And in a few days, he will spike the football as only Donald Trump can. Even the all-powerful anti-Trump media haven’t been able to stop him.
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