Civilization
Trump the Triumphant vs. Trump the Destroyer
The legacy media insist on portraying Trump the Destroyer instead of Trump the Triumphant, but the country knows better than they do.
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It’s a tale of two Donalds.
Triumphant or Destroyer?
One saga stars a triumphant leader slaying the progressive dragons that attacked our land during the last four years through an inexhaustible arsenal of executive orders.
The other narrative features a lawless usurper destroying all that is right and good in our Republic, dragging us from enlightenment into darkness.
Which story ultimately prevails will determine the success of the Trump presidency.
So far, the version featuring Trump the Triumphant is carrying the day. The president’s assault on open borders, DEI, gender ideology, climate change mandates, and all the rest is receiving support or shrugs from most Americans. There are no riots or even peaceful protests. Democrat leaders are largely holding their powder as Trump reverses much of the Biden administration’s agenda – just as Biden spent the first weeks of his tenure unraveling many of Trump’s initiatives.
In a normal world, this would hardly be worth noticing. Trump won. Elections have consequences. He is merely doing what voters wanted him to. It’s how our democracy is supposed to work.
But things, of course, haven’t been normal since Trump emerged on the scene in 2015. If his first term, marked by phony scandals and scurrilous personal attacks, hovered near the fourth circle of hell, his second promised to be closer to the ninth after his opponents managed to ratchet up their damning rhetoric against him during the 2024 campaign. You don’t play nice with Hitler.
So far, actually more pleasant
Remarkably, that has not happened so far. Instead of the vitriol of personal invective, most Democrats have responded to Trump’s aggressive efforts to dismantle Biden’s policies merely with fierce criticism, which is their right and proper role as the opposition in our two-party system. It feels like a return to normalcy.
If a single moment encompasses this happy change, it was that most unlikely scene at Jimmy Carter’s funeral on Jan. 9. There was former president Obama, who many saw as the Wizard in Biden’s progressive Oz, chatting and laughing with Trump, like two old friends. The pair even seemed to throw shade at Kamala Harris, who pointedly ignored them when she took her seat.
Can anybody explain this? No one can doubt that Obama is a true believer who fiercely opposes Trump’s agenda. But there he was, treating the president like, well, a normal human being. Given all that has transpired, it was downright transformative, signaling a sharp break from the ugly past.
It is too soon to tell if we are returning to a form of partisan politics based on disagreement rather than demonization. It is way too early to write the obituary for Trump Derangement Syndrome. But we, the people, and Trump himself, should savor and cultivate this inkling of hope.
Legacy media refuse to consider Trump triumphant
Unfortunately, one corner of American society – the legacy media – is unpersuaded. Where Democrats seem aware that many of Trump’s actions are broadly popular, and they are probably hoping he will undermine his power through overreach, the folks at MSNBC, NPR, AP, and all the rest have no such restraint. Their dispatches continue to paint Trump in the darkest colors. Instead of Trump the Triumphant, they are continuing to churn out narratives featuring Trump the Destroyer.
Peter Baker of the New York Times, for example, described Trump’s actions as the “norm-shattering, democracy-testing assertions of personal power that defy the courts, the Congress and the ethical lines that constrained past presidents.”
Susan Glasser asserted in the New Yorker that Trump “loves to drown us in outrage. The overwhelming volume is the point – too many simultaneous scandals and the system is so overloaded that it breaks down. It can’t focus. It can’t fight back. The distractions are just too damn distracting.”
During her ABC News interview with Politico’s John Harris, Martha Raddatz sympathetically remarked, “You said he has everything his supporters hoped for and everything his adversaries feared.”
The divide is not so pronounced
Such claims illuminate the legacy media’s central role in ginning up our partisan divide. For years, they were at the center of efforts to portray Trump as not just beyond the pale but an existential threat to our democracy. It worked for a while. Then, not so much. Simply put, nobody who has read and believed their coverage of Trump could possibly have voted for the man. And yet, here he is embarking on a second term. Their scorched-earth coverage wasn’t just rejected by half the country that voted for Trump, but by many of those who opposed him but now seeming willing to give him a chance.
Yes, we are a divided country, but not as viciously and uncompromisingly as we once were and as the legacy media still claims we are. Most Americans appear to have rejected their calls to the barricades, embracing an attitude of let’s see what happens. As a result, their stories read like dispatches from people caught in a fever that has broken for much of the country.
Will it last?
Given our recent history, it is hard to know if this movement toward normalcy will last. What does seem certain is that the legacy media will not change; they seem determined to go down with the ship. They will continue to cast every action of the Trump administration as a violent assault on our moral standing.
The good thing about life is that as much as we are shaped by stories, by our ability to interpret and make sense of the world through a variety of narratives, there is an underlying dynamic that corrals this power: reality. Ultimately, Trump will be judged by the results of his efforts – indeed, their conclusion that his first term was much better than Biden’s powered his against-all-odds reelection. Despite the best efforts of legacy media, the American people seem willing to let the president write his own story. Here’s hoping it’s triumphant.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
J. Peder Zane is a columnist for RealClearPolitics and an editor at RealClearInvestigations. He was the book review editor and books columnist for the News & Observer of Raleigh for 13 years, where his writing won several national honors, including the Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He has also worked at the New York Times and taught writing at Duke University and Saint Augustine’s University. He has written two books, “Off the Books: On Literature and Culture,” and “Design in Nature” (with Adrian Bejan). He edited two other books, “Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading” and “The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.”
Note: the profile image by Ellen Whyte is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-alike 4.0 International License.
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