Why Trump drives the Left crazy

By Jonathon Van Maren

In the wake of Trump’s excellent speech in Warsaw earlier this week, the Left promptly lost its mind. As I noted in my column on the speech, Trump eloquently outlined the threats posed to Western Civilization, explained the necessity of the Judeo-Christian values undergirding it, and held up the long struggle against the suffocating enforced secularism of Communism behind the Iron Curtain as an inspiration for all. Journalists like Peter Beinart over at The Atlantic immediately claimed that the speech was a white nationalist screed, and that Trump was huffing and puffing on his dog-whistle.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s nuts. I’ve been writing about the alt-right for a couple of years, and have had the pleasure of hosting entire squadrons of trolls on my Twitter feed and experiencing the breadth and depth of their semi-literate vulgarity. For a journalist at a respected publication to claim that a speech in which Trump advocated Judeo-Christian values, which the majority of the alt-right believe to be weak and limp-wristed, and praised the rich Jewish community of Poland and somberly reflected on the orgy of murder that nearly wiped it out—is actually an alt-right speech simply highlights the fact that such journalists genuinely do hate Western Civilization.

The morons over at Vox jumped on the bandwagon, too, calling the speech an “alt-right manifesto,” which simply proves that these people cannot discern between nationalism and ethno-nationalism and are so triggered by any approving mention of the traditions, cultures and beliefs that created the society they spend their careers trashing that the frothing commences immediately. There were some writers who pointed out that Trump seems a woefully inappropriate candidate to laud values he has declined to live by for nearly his entire life—a point I made throughout the election—and fair enough. But that simply means he’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. Would those writers prefer that Trump not celebrate these things?

Trump’s nasty habit of getting into name-calling wars with journalists drives me crazy, too. But the media is at this point so thoroughly discredited on the issue of Donald Trump that even when they’re right, it’s hard to take them seriously. They tried to destroy his candidacy, and they’re trying to destroy his presidency. They would hate him even if he wasn’t bumbling around and making stupid mistakes. They constantly characterize his every interaction as a massive screw-up of some sort, including falsely claiming that he was snubbed by the First Lady of Poland, for example. And the sheer hysteria that characterizes their responses to things—like the WWE video of Trump pouncing on a guy with a CNN logo superimposed over his face and body-slamming him. The press immediately emitted wails and warnings that he was encouraging violence against the media. Seriously? Are they saying that professional wrestling is real and actual violence? Come on. This is WWE, people, not UFC.

Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative—who despises Trump to the point of regularly writing that he is unfit for office—nailed the attitude of many conservatives towards Trump perfectly:

As is often the case with conservatives and Trump, no matter how much you may despise him and his pomps and works, in the end, you know that he doesn’t hate your beliefs, and that he and his government aren’t going to use the power of the State to suppress you as a threat to public order and all things good and holy.

That’s not nothing.

A bit further on, Dreher describes the choice between the radical sexual revolutionaries and Trump as “a case of defending the King of France against the Revolutionaries. As rotten as the system was, the Revolutionaries represented something far worse. At least within the ancien régime, conservative reform was possible. Similarly with Tsarist Russia vs. the Bolsheviks. Tsar Donald is a badly flawed man, and his imperial court is an embarrassment … but who else is there? Every time I reach the point of no return with him, the left reveals its hand, and its contempt for ordinary people and what they love, and compels me to consider the alternative.”

That’s precisely it. I’d rather take a flawed man who is willing to defend things I hold to be precious than his howling critics who want to tear everything down. Many of the media elites don’t understand why so many ordinary people don’t care that Trump spends so much time trashing them, but the reason for that is simple: The media has spent the last couple of decades trashing ordinary people as homophobes, transphobes, and bigots. It’s also nearly impossible for many conservatives to get a fair hearing in the media, especially when the elites circle the wagons to protect one of their sacred cows.

Take one recent example: the media went to extraordinary lengths to ignore the revelations of David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress, stressing instead in every story that the videos were “deceptively edited” or “discredited” and nearly salivating with glee when bought-and-paid-for attorney generals threw whatever criminal charges they could find at the undercover investigators. You can bet that if Daleiden beats the charges, there will barely be whisper. After all, it took months and a social media campaign to get them to cover Kermit Gosnell, America’s most prolific serial killer.

Trump is vulgar, and impetuous, and often embarrassing. But the Left is worse. Much worse. And as we see with the Warsaw speech, they take every opportunity to prove it.

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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.