Imagine If There Were No Anti-Trump Media
On September 9, 1971 John Lennon released one of his most famous songs, Imagine. He asked us to imagine a different world, a different reality. Today, I’m asking you to imagine something similar.
Imagine, if you can, that there is no CNN. No MSNBC. No New York Times or Washington Post.
Imagine that there are no anti-Trump media of any kind.
In that world, do you think we’d see a different Donald Trump?
Would he be more honest? Do you think he’d get fewer things so breathtakingly wrong, either intentionally or otherwise?
Do you think, without the media harassing him, he’d be kinder? Can you imagine that he’d stop bad-mouthing John McCain who has been dead for a while now?
Can you imagine a Donald Trump who wouldn’t be so thin-skinned? That he’d either watch Saturday Night Live having fun at his expense and laugh – or just change the channel without suggesting that the federal government should investigate the show?
Do you think that, absent all anti-Trump media, he would have refrained from suggesting that a female primary opponent was too ugly to be president? Can you imagine that?
Or that thousands of Muslims were on a rooftop in New Jersey cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center towers?
Do you think that Donald Trump, unburdened of pot shots from his many media critics, would stop resorting to calling his political opponents names like MS-13 Lover Nancy Pelosi, and Fat Jerry Nadler, and Little Adam Schitt?
Imagine, if you can, President Trump no longer saying people who have criticized him have low I.Q.s
Imagine that all the nasty anti-Trump journalists took a day off from picking at him. Do you think that Mr. Trump would not have said Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s brutal dictator, “wrote me beautiful letters” … “and then we fell in love”?
If the 2020 election is about the economy or about the socialistic tendencies of his opponent, Donald Trump might get lucky and pull another inside straight and win a second term. But if the election is about Donald Trump, about his character, about his behavior, even a wacky left-winger has a chance of defeating him.
Donald Trump surely has problems with a news media that detest him and would like nothing more than to see him out of the Oval Office and in a federal prison cell. But Mr. Trump has more problems than the press, starting with himself.
John Lennon was able to imagine a world he’d like to inhabit. Can you imagine Donald Trump being any different than he is today even if every anti-Trump reporter suddenly vaporized and was no longer a thorn in his side?
I can’t.