If Donald J. Trump wins reelection today, it will make David’s defeat of Goliath look like a foregone conclusion. “Goliath got his ass kicked,” said the Philistine, “big deal.” Never in American history has a presidential candidate faced such committed, sustained, and malicious opposition from such formidable opponents. One could credibly argue that a Trump victory would be nothing short of miraculous considering the headwinds against which our 45th President has struggled. Buster Douglas defeating Mike Tyson was ho-hum compared to Trump’s challenges. Harry Truman’s defeat of Thomas Dewey was a walk in the park. The “resistance” to President Trump and his administration has been monumental, and if he indeed defeats it once again, it will have been the single-most remarkable electoral accomplishment our country has ever seen.
Even before Trump had been elected, the hostility began. The infamous 35-page Steele Dossier — which purported to document salacious details of various Trump misdeeds involving Russia, but was ultimately no more credible than an E.L. James novel — was published by Buzz Feed ten days before Trump’s inauguration on January 10, 2017. But the dossier’s origins date back to well before Trump’s election, showing the lengths to which his opponents were prepared to go in defeating Trump and his agenda.
The Steele Dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and was used to acquire FISA warrants by the FBI to spy on the Trump Campaign in what has become known as Spy-Gate. The Steele Dossier was published and promoted by our mainstream media to undermine our president before he had even taken office, and was then used to propel a three-year effort to portray Trump as a traitor to his country. Yet, after years of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, we ultimately found out that the Steele Dossier was fiction, and the entire narrative by the Left and their media was nonsense. That vindication, however, doesn’t change this fact: the Russia Hoax was unprecedented, and was quite possibly condoned by the highest levels of the administration of the previous sitting president; Barack Obama.
Fast forward to earlier this year, when our esteemed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, along with various cronies including Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), attempted to overthrow President Trump in what can only be described as an attempted political coup d’état. While the impeachment of President Trump may not have been unique, with both Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson having been impeached previously, there is one critical aspect of Trump’s impeachment that is indeed unprecedented. Donald Trump was the first to be impeached without being accused of an actual crime.
President Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act, which would have been a crime. President Clinton was impeached for obstruction of justice and perjury, which are both crimes. But President Trump was impeached for “obstruction of congress” and “abuse of power,” neither of which are actual crimes with actual statutes. The justification for Trump’s impeachment was essentially this — we don’t like you, Trump, and we’re going to throw you out.
The aspect of the Trump resistance that has been the most daunting, however, has to be his treatment by the media; both the mainstream media and social media. Every step of the way, Trump has dealt with relentless aggression from both. According to a studyby the Pew Research Center, through October 2017, only 5% of the coverage of President Trump at the time had been positive, compared to President Obama who enjoyed an incredible 42% percent positive treatment from the media. To put it another way, Obama’s media coverage was 840% more positive than that of Trump. The coverage of Trump had been more negative than any other recent president, and, if anything, that media coverage has become even more negative.
Add the behavior of social media to that of the mainstream media, and the degree of antagonism begins to truly come into focus. In what has become a regular and almost revered Senate tradition, last week we saw leaders of Big Tech testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. What was different from last week’s spectacle, however, was the level of defiance we witnessed.
Both Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey were asked to explain their actions regarding their censorship of the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s email scandal, and Dorsey’s testimony was particularly unapologetic and revealing. Neither Dorsey nor Zuckerberg could cite a single example of proof that there was anything legitimate to justify their actions, but they had done it anyway. Just weeks before a presidential election, the two biggest players in social media were caught red-handed with their fingers on the scale of the electoral process.
In September, The Atlantic ran a story that claimed President Trump, while in France, had called soldiers who had died in World War I “losers.” That story cited only “anonymous sources” and has been totally debunked by every person who was there to witness Trump’s actions, but that didn’t stop the mainstream media from aggressively running with the story. When President Trump earlier this year called the media coverage of his COVID-19 actions “a hoax,” the Washington Post, of all people, called out the Biden campaign and others with a “four Pinocchio rating” for their claims that the President had actually called the virus itself a hoax. That hasn’t stopped, however, talking heads on CNN and MSNBC to continue lying about the President’s comments to this day. Indeed, we have never seen anything like the abhorrence and combativeness that our media outlets have exhibited for a sitting president as we have seen for the past four years.
In spite of the militancy of our media’s coverage of President Trump, here we sit on Election Day with the quite realistic possibility that he could still win. He has dealt with an investigation by corrupt members of the FBI, and a subsequent Mueller Investigation that dragged on for years. He was impeached by elected representatives for the crime of being opposed to their majority’s agenda and for being un-presidential in their eyes. President Trump has battled with resistance on a level we’ve never seen before, and one that no president should ever have to endure again, no matter what the ultimate results from today are. If President Trump is indeed elected today, it will be the most extraordinary and courageous political victory in our nation’s history.
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