There are many who will or should engage in some soul-searching, following the U.S election, in which for the first time in the country’s history, someone came from no background in public office or military command and seized control of a major political party, running against all those who had led it for the last 20 years, then defeated the incumbent party, defeating all the Clintons, Bushes and Obamas together.
The Clintons and Bushes and Obamas are finally finished. Their entire era, though it had its moments, has been a worsening disaster as the United States has been in absolute and relative decline. The media have been exposed in their biases, their overwhelming hostility to Donald Trump, as not just irrelevant, but the object of hatred as intense as that which overwhelmed the political elites who failed the nation and imperilled the alliance America founded and led for many decades.
The public’s loathing and distrust of the media is richly deserved and indicative of one of Western society’s greatest failings: the free press has failed. Only the fact that there is no alternative keeps it going.
Few people now pay much attention to the common misrepresentation of public issues and people; nor should they. The American media turned itself inside out trying to portray Trump as a misogynist, a racist and an authoritarian populist whipping up mobs and inciting violence. All this was unmitigated rubbish. President Barack Obama strutted about the campaign trail in a last-ditch effort to salvage the Clinton campaign (despite the notorious absence of any affection between the Obamas and the Clintons), and accused Trump of being a sympathizer of the Ku Klux Klan.
The president would have his listeners believe that Trump, who has an unblemished record as an equal opportunity employer, approves of thugs surging about in hoods and bedsheets, burning crosses on the lawns of African-Americans, Jews and Roman Catholics (most of whose 30 million voters cast their ballots for Trump).
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