ABC News’ White House correspondent Karen Travers approvingly tweeted out a paragraph of a front-page Washington Post rant written by Philip Rucker, Robert Costa, and Rachel Bade. The paragraph comes from their cri de coeur headlined “Trump’s Ukraine Call Reveals A President Convinced Of His Own Invincibility.”
While the article matches the headline in its extreme bias and shrill outpouring of opinion — seemingly written by the Democratic National Committee’s newest batch of enthusiastic interns — it is presented as if it’s news, a common problem with our current media culture. Here’s the paragraph:
Every single assertion of this paragraph isn’t just wrong, but the opposite of right. In each sentence, Trump is being blamed for things his political opponents have done. Let’s take a look at some examples.
Trump’s sense of himself as above the law has been reinforced throughout his time in office.
In fact, the main problem during the Trump administration has been the way the self-annointed “Resistance” in the media, unelected bureaucracy, and political institutions have treated Trump as if he were below the law. Traditionally, hard-fought losses are usually followed by an acceptance of the reality of election results, even if grudgingly.
In the case of Donald Trump, his campaign was spied on prior to the election by the intelligence services and government apparatus controlled by the opposing party. They used wiretaps, national security letters, human informants, and other surveillance. His transition was undermined by leaks suggesting that the FBI took seriously an uncorroborated and ludicrous collection of tall tales, “research” later determined to have been secretly funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
President Trump has yet to be treated as the legitimate winner of the free and fair election he won in 2016. Some 70 Democrats refused to go to his inauguration in protest. The weaponized opposition material from Trump’s political enemies was used to get his national security advisor terminated, his attorney general sidelined from any oversight of his agency, to scare foreign leaders from effectively engaging in foreign policy discussions, to keep good people from serving in his administration, and to ruin the lives of anyone who worked with Trump to secure his victory.
Much more of this at The Federalist