Enemies of Which People?

A brave young White House intern protects her president from an unruly cable (fake) news reporter, November 7, 2018

A brave young White House intern protects her president from an unruly cable (fake) news reporter, November 7, 2018

Our president has called the media dishonest, hypocritical, purveyors of fake news, disgusting, sleazy, traitors, the scum of the earth... And those are the good things he has said about us. He has run through the thesaurus part of his twitter brain, calling us everything but “ink-stained wretches.”

Still, I keep wondering whom he has in mind? It certainly couldn’t be me. As a pundit I have gone out on the limb and said he was the best president we have. I admitted his election in 2016 was a miracle. Who would have ever dreamed that a totally inexperienced, unqualified real estate developer could convince a minority of we the people he could make America great again, especially when it already was pretty good? His election was yoooge, as he would put it.

True, I had been guilty of occasionally checking my facts, distinguishing what some people called “true facts” from “alternative facts” and “no facts,” the president’s favorite kind. I had been known to source, or even double source, my flattering essays about the groper-in-chief, identifying my usually reliably informed sources. Sometimes they were unreliably informed sources or even unreliably uninformed sources, but all highly placed. You can’t be too careful.

I was the one who rejected the charge that the president was “a moron,” as Rex Tillerson may or may not have called his boss, his most noteworthy achievement as Secretary of State. I suggested that the peripatetic ex-CEO of ExxonMobil might have called him “a Mormon,” blaming jet lag.

And I went to bat for the President when his closest adviser, Gen. John Kelly, used the I-word, defaming the nation’s idiots. Trump may be a moron, an imbecile, or simply intellectually challenged, as my defense ran. If he was an idiot, he was America’s Idiot, a sizeable constituency, judging by the election. There was one in every village, sometimes two or more.

Some may have thought there was something corrupt or un-American in the way the president and the first family seemed to be profiting while in office, theoretically banned by the Emoluments Clause. But that was the floundering fathers fault. Article I, Section 9, Clause 8, the Santa Clause, was so badly written a Mack truck could be driven though its loopholes. Anyway, the Prez probably hadn’t read the document. The facts would only confuse him.

Without meaning to further blow my own flugelhorn, I was the one who said we should give the man a break. It isn’t easy being president, especially when it all began as what satirists call a caper, a stunt, perhaps research for his next book or a movie--a horror movie. The premise: Could a totally inexperienced, unqualified real estate goniff actually win an election for the top job in the country?

Once he won, I said we should mark his performance on a curve while he is getting the hang of the job in the next four or eight years.

It must have been the other guys the President had in mind. The cable news networks were the real enemies of the people. They were the ones who gave the first real estate mogul $2.4 billion in free airtime, according to the Washington Post (“The Most Trusted Name in Fake News” ) or The New York Times (“All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print”). They were spending 24/7 covering every wild and crazy thing he said and did in 2016, followed by panels the next two or three nights discussing what it meant, thus sucking the air out of the other 15 candidates’ campaigns.

With the courage of their lack of conviction, the guilty parties can argue that they were under the influence of that powerful drug, money, which can make a broadcast outlet do anything. The clown act gets the highest ratings.

Yes, Mister President, some of us are as guilty as sin. The Rupert Murdoch Fake News Brigade should apologize for hurting a president’s feelings. Yes, we are sleazy, disgusting, untrustworthy traitors. If this be treason, so be it. And if this rallying to the flag doesn’t get a true patriot like me on the president’s official enemies list, the nation’s highest honor (established in the Nixon administration), I will tell you what I really think of the 45th president.

FOOTNOTE
To further show my support for the best president we have, I am planning to donate my fee for this paean of praise to the Donald J. Trump Library, an establishment the size of the latest Apple cell phone, which will house the Official Collected Tweets of the President of Some of the People All the Time.


 

--
Marvin Kitman,
Nov. 13, 2018
 

This transmission originally appeared in the Silurian News, a pro bono publication dedicated to furtherment of responsible journalism.

Marvin Kitman is the author of “The Making of the Preƒident 1789.” “George Washington’s Expense Account” by Gen. George Washington and Marvin Kitman PFC (Ret.) was the best-selling expense account in publishing history.