This column on October 7 said: “Coming on the heels of the failed Russiagate probe, the Democrats’ impeachment strategy over a July 25 presidential phone call will most likely ensure the re-election of the President.” The column concluded by saying: “the Republican-controlled Senate will veto impeachment”.
A week after Trump was acquitted on February 6, polling shows 51 per cent now believe he should not have been impeached, the Democrats looked like a rabble after booing a State of the Union address that outlined how Democrat constituents are the big winners of the Trump years and Pelosi’s impeachment strategy has blown up in her face. She behaved as petulantly as Trump’s critics say he does when she ripped up a copy of his address as he was delivering it. And still the Nine Entertainment newspapers and many on the ABC insist impeachment was the right course.
The object of Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, former Democrat vice president Joe Biden, has all but crashed out and socialist Bernie Sanders leads the race to challenge Trump in November. It could not have ended better for Trump.
Yet on the ABC and in the Nine Entertainment papers Trump’s critics have had to content themselves that failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney broke with his party on one of the charges Trump faced. A February 5 piece in The Atlantic, based on an interview by McKay Coppins with Romney, laid the foundations for the left’s escape route: the one truly moral Republican, Romney, has done the “right thing”.
Never mind venal motives Romney may have had after bucketing Trump’s candidacy even before he had the 2016 Republican nomination. Romney had even asked an elected Trump for a cabinet post as Secretary of State but was rejected. Like Romney, many on our ABC resorted to talk about God and personal faith to defend their support of impeachment.
It’s the media false narrative problem often discussed here. This column twice in 2016, including the day before the election, suggested Trump could win the presidency. It often argued before Boris Johnson’s December UK election win that journalists had failed to accept voters had three times supported Brexit: in the re-election of David Cameron who promised a referendum on the subject in July 2015, in that actual referendum in June 2016 and by re-electing Theresa May in June 2017, albeit to minority government.
Why aren’t journalists being punished for such misreading of politics? Yet readers and viewers seem to stick with the media they agree with even when those media gets the politics wrong.
The most glaring local example since the Trump acquittal was ABC’s The Drum, hosted last Friday week by Ellen Fanning. With a panel including former journalist and former NSW Liberal MP Stephen O’Doherty, AMP’s Ming Long, journalist Tory Shepherd and former Commonwealth Bank marketer Toby Ralph, Fanning and her guests agreed Trump should have been removed from office. Senate Republicans who stood by him (as senators have done in the only other two impeachment proceedings) were moral cowards and only Romney could claim moral righteousness. There was much discussion of an editorial in Christianity Today in December saying Senate Republicans should vote against Trump. Really? Republicans who doubted the charges were even impeachable under the rules set by the founding fathers were simply motivated by politics? No one on the panel, nor Hamish Macdonald and Matt Bevan discussing the issue on RN Breakfast that morning, could see the political motivation of the Democrats on the Ukraine issue and the earlier Russiagate hoax. Yet voters swarming to Trump can see what partisan journalists are missing.
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal belled the cat: “A sign of our hyperpartisan times is that not a single Senate Democrat broke ranks, not even on the “obstruction of Congress” article that sought to eviscerate the separation of powers and two centuries of presidential executive privilege”. In modern media, the partisanship of the left seems even more pronounced than in politics.
Why have so many in the media been unable to mention what the WSJ says is a good reason not to impeach?
Trump did not proceed with the quid pro quo he had suggested to the Ukrainian President. The transcript of his call did not read well for Trump. But wiser counsel in the administration had already prevailed.
The President had ticked off on US aid to Ukraine and there was no Ukrainian investigation of Biden or his son Hunter’s lucrative board role with Ukrainian energy company Burisma that was at the heart of an anti-corruption campaign being led by Joe Biden himself in 2015 and 2016.
Trump was foolish to make the call to Zelensky. Many in the administration had already leaked against him and after Russiagate he should have been alert to the dangers. Yet does anyone really doubt Biden, as vice president, should have done all he could to stop his own son working for a company the Obama administration regarded as corrupt? Wasn’t Trump just trying to do to Biden what the Democrats had been doing to Trump since 2016?
The Biden side of the saga has been played down by the progressive media. The Sydney Morning Herald was wise to publish a full-page piece on February 7 from The Los Angeles Times, “How Hunter Biden lit the Fuse”. ABC Planet America co-host John Barron told Sandy Aloisi on ABC NewsRadio on February 6 that Biden, perhaps the Democrats’ best chance of beating Trump, was now the biggest loser from the impeachment proceedings.
While the political class was appalled at what the Zelensky phone call says about Trump’s attitude to power, many swinging voters see it for what it was: a flawed response by a transactional businessman not operating by the usual rules of the political swamp. They look at Democrat women in white who could not cheer Trump’s successes during the State of the Union speech as people who put personal political self-interest ahead of the national interest. Those Democrats should applaud historically low unemployment rates across the US, job creation among African Americans and Hispanics, real wages growth, a booming economy and a President having a good crack at making America great again.
The semi-religious posturing of progressive media critics who dislike Trump’s many personal flaws perfectly reflects a social media climate in which ostentatious displays of moral virtue outweigh facts and cool-headed analysis.
People parading their good hearts should have a closer read of that Christianity Today editorial, which says: “ Let’s grant this to the President: The Democrats have had it out for him since day one, and therefore everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion.”
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