June 5, 2018 --
"There's an existential threat to the presidency.", declared NBC's " Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd, on the May 27 program. Was he talking about a threat from outside the nation, from domestic terrorists inside the nation -- or from the current president? The tone of the program was clearly hostile to President Donald J. Trump. GOP Senator Jeff Flake, an anti-Trumper , for example, , interviewed by Todd, suggested that impeachment of the president could still be a possibility And on ABC's "This Week," May 27, moderator Martha Raddatz, encouraged Rep. Adam Schiff, a leading anti-Trump congressional figure,to suggest that all we needed for impeachment was an election, this November, that would give Democrats a House majority. Asking about the disclosures that the FBI installed an individual to keep an eye on the Trump campaign, Raddatz said that she disliked using the term "spy." Why? What do we call someone sent to a campaign from the outside to keep tabs on things? A secret volunteer? Republican Senator Marco Rubio, appearing on the ABC program, softly seemed to agree that the FBI involvement in the Trump campaign was understandable in a counter-terrorist context. Wasn't Rubio long hostile to Trump, indeed originating the comment about hand size. Those who point to Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a Republican -- signaling no political intent , ignore the political biases of Republicans like Sen. Flake and Sen. Bob Corker against Mr. Trump.
On Sunday tv political talk shows, then, the war against the presence of President Trump continues. The programs blare out anti-Trump sentiment, and so, suggest an existential treat to the media itself. The threat, that is, that the media is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the concerns and mood of the people at large. If impeachment, based on the fact of an election, is all the left has, doesn't that make the daily focus of the people irrelevant? |
Meanwhile, the president continues to defend himself when attacked.
The New York Times, May 31 front-paged reaction from the president to the cancellation of the Roseanne Barr tv program for her nasty comments about Valerie Jarrett. The president tweeted that he was never got an apology from ABC for anti-Trump remarks made by ABC figures. The story led that it was the absence of apologies for attacks on the president that made him angry, not Barr's comment about the former top staffer for President Obama. Perhaps, however, Mr. Trump was simply continuing his habit of defending himself when attacked, a trait that according to an old French saying, would make him dangerous -- to his critics.
That the president may have a sense of humor unappreciated by his critics was evident from the time he suggested, on the matter of the missing 33,000 emails from Hillary Clinton's server, that perhaps the Russians can find them. Indeed that was, as LPR recalls, the basis from the campaign alleging collusion between the Russians and President Trump. Nearly two years later, this unverified allegation continues to lead the anti-Trump campaign. Recently, President Trump, the Tweeting President, suggested that the Democrats plan to use Russian collusion as a campaign theme, this November, which, he wryly indicated, would amount to meddling in the political process, itself. After the November elections, then a second special counsel, to probe Democrat collusion to rig the election via the cabal of the Big Three -- former CIA chief John Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper and former FBI director James Comey.
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