Trump’s tyranny? More like Time’s tired tirades.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” George Orwell’s “1984” was supposed to serve as a warning, not a how-to guide for journalists protecting the radical left. Unlike many 2016 media postmortems, the biased coverage of Donald Trump isn’t a result of cultural differences. It is by design.
In April, NPR editor Uri Berliner — no Trump fan — wrote a scathing op-ed outlining his outlet’s intentional anti-Trump bias. He was subsequently fired, his warnings unheeded. This week, Time magazine pulled an NPR and published an issue devoted to what happens, “If He Wins.”
Eric Cortellessa implies Trump will be a dictator even though he’s run cover for Joe Biden’s unconstitutional executive actions.
“He,” of course, is the Bad Orange Man himself. As part of the special issue, Time’s Eric Cortellessa provided analysis of the magazine’s two interviews with the 45th president and multiple interviews with his former advisers. The analysis reads more like a fever dream of a dystopian future under Trump than anything rooted in reality.
Cortellessa’s entire piece paints a distorted narrative. But the fifth paragraph is especially instructive to show how the media ratchets up the fear. Let’s take it point by point. Cortellessa starts:
What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.
An “imperial presidency,” that would “reshape America and its role in the world.” How sinister! Cortellessa is obviously trying to evoke images of absolute rulers in the mold of a Caesar, Putin, Hitler, or maybe even Sheev Palpatine rising to power from his humble beginnings on Coruscant. Every presidency of the modern era has bordered on imperial as the executive branch has gained more power and as the legislative branch has abrogated its responsibility as a check and balance.
Cortellessa implies Trump will be a dictator even though he’s run cover for Joe Biden’s unconstitutional executive actions. When it came to absolving borrowers of their student loan responsibilities, Biden acted in a dictatorial fashion. That’s when Cortellessa fell in line behind Biden and “fact-checked” criticisms of the plan later deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. When the tyrannical undemocratic powers are used for things regime stenographers like, “journalists” such as Cortellessa write: “It is easier to take a gamble when there’s reason to believe you can still win by losing.”
Here’s his next point:
To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.
The media elite push the narrative that securing the border is somehow tyrannical. Most Americans are not on their side. An exclusive poll released last month by Axios showed that a majority of Americans support the mass deportation of illegal aliens. Axios writes, “Americans are open to former President Trump’s harshest immigration plans, spurred on by a record surge of illegal border crossings and a relentless messaging war waged by Republicans.”
The nation is being invaded by a wave of illegal immigration never seen before in American history. It is funded by left-wing groups and carried out by cartels that act as human smugglers and traffickers. There is precedent in military action to stem trans-border incursions by paramilitary and criminal groups. Pancho Villa would like to enter the chat.
Cortellessa continues:
He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.
The Supreme Court said loudly in the Dobbs decision that absent a law passed by Congress and signed by the president, the issue of abortion is left to the states. If Cortellessa were playing it straight, he would simply acknowledge that Trump said he would uphold the law. To many Americans, even some who are pro-choice, abortion is the killing of a baby.
Cortellessa also has some scary things to say about perfectly constitutional actions that presidents have taken since the early 1800s:
He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers.
This is all perfectly normal. Trump, like many presidents from Thomas Jefferson through the modern age, would impound appropriated funds. Loaded phrases like “personal discretion” play to the hatred of Trump the media is trying to bolster. What’s laughable is yes, the president is a person and can use “discretion” exactly as his predecessors have.
What about Trump’s plans for the Justice Department? Cortellessa wants you to be very afraid:
He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.
The feigned shock here is brilliant in its effect. As Cortellessa no doubt knows, there is not and never has been “independent law enforcement” in this country. The notion is a myth. The Constitution gives the president sole executive power. Whether Cortellessa likes it or not, the president is the chief law enforcement officer of the country.
But never mind that. Trump is going to pardon “domestic terrorists”!
He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.
Notwithstanding that many of the convictions of the Jan. 6 defendants may be overturned by the Supreme Court, there is precedent of presidents pardoning FALN Puerto Rican nationalists who were convicted of crimes ranging from bomb-making to sedition. FALN was suspected in the bombings of multiple federal office buildings in New York.
As Blaze Media’s Steve Baker has reported at length, there is much wrong with the mainstream media narrative surrounding the events of January 6, 2021.
He won’t be a good ally!
He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense.
In 2014, when Barack Obama was president, NATO allies agreed to spend 2% of GDP for defense. NATO itself says, “The 2% of GDP guideline is an important indicator of the political resolve of individual Allies to contribute to NATO’s common defense efforts.” At that time only three of the members of NATO spent that much. The United States disproportionately bears the heaviest burden of funding the alliance.
Trump has been a long-standing critic of our allies not spending enough on their own defense. Back in the 1980s he took out a full-page ad imploring countries to pay their fair share for defense. This is neither a new nor especially controversial stance by the former president. Even the current front-runner to head NATO agrees with Trump.
Former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, the front-runner to replace the current NATO secretary-general, told Bloomberg at Davos earlier this year, “This was exactly Trump’s main issue, that we were not spending enough, and he was right. He was right.”
But never mind that. Trump will change the entire nature of government!
He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.
The civil service today is synonymous with the administrative state, the unelected shadow government that actually runs the country. The permanent bureaucracy is the unholy child of the Progressive Era, brought into being by Woodrow Wilson to “professionalize the government.” What it has done has shifted responsibility of governing from elected officials to career bureaucrats. Each year elected officials have less and less control over government.
“Democracy dies in darkness,” indeed!
As the chief executive officer of the United States, the president has the sole executive authority to fire government employees. The Supreme Court in Myers v. United States sided with the president’s power to do just that when it sided with Wilson in his decision to fire a postmaster in Portland, Oregon.
Returning control of the government to elected officials is something to be celebrated, not denigrated as tyrannical. “Freedom is slavery.” The left and its mainstream media acolytes have added to that more Newspeak: “Less government is tyranny.”
As for the claim that Trump would “staff his administration with acolytes who back” his 2020 election claims, the chief propagandist of the Biden regime, Karine Jean-Pierre, is a noted 2016 election denier.
Cortellessa’s analysis conclusively proves that distortion to fit narratives isn’t the result of some cultural disconnect. It is by design.
