The WSJ Tut-tuts That Trump Should Take the High Road–and End Up Road Kill

A Wall Street Journal supports McCabe’s termination, but then proceeds to lament:

All of which should have been cause for Mr. Trump to let the dismissal speak for itself, but the President is too self-involved for such restraint. Instead he tweeted on Saturday, “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy.” [Emphasis added.]

How clueless can they be? Facts speak for themselves? About Trump? Now? Give me a break.

The legacy media (to which the “news” sections of the WSJ firmly belongs) does not report facts and let people decide for themselves.  They spin these facts relentlessly, and in an outrageously biased way, especially where Trump is involved.

We saw this–and are seeing it–in the McCabe episode.  The stock media line is that Trump fired McCabe, and did so out of revenge as part of an attack on respected American government institutions. It was a classic case of the old expression about a lie making it half-way around the world before the truth puts on its shoes.  And this would have been the nearly universally accepted narrative had Trump remained silent, or delivered a temperate statement.

For better or worse, Trump feels obliged to fight fire with fire.  And it is understandable that he feels that way.  He is meeting rhetorical extremism with rhetorical extremism. This is war to the knife, and the WSJ treats it like croquet.

We are in a bad equilibrium.  We have a vicious and fundamentally dishonest media and political class that is out to destroy.  I can guarantee that the optimal response to this strategy is not “let the facts speak for themselves.”  The optimal response is something more along the lines of what Trump is doing.

A let the facts speak for themselves strategy would make more sense in a more balanced and less strident media environment where contending sides could keep one another relatively honest, and where there would be a penalty for flagrant and repeated misrepresentation by a particular media outlet–contending factions in the media would check and balance one another, and an intra-media adversarial process would facilitate the identification of facts.  But that’s not the environment we have now, with the overwhelming ideological hegemony in the politco-media class.  In such an environment, shouting louder and taking no prisoners is a best reaction.

This is yet another illustration of what I have been writing since Trump became recognized as a serious challenger for the Republican nomination: Trump is the creation of our current politico-media culture, not its creator.  Whether by accident or cunning, he has seized upon what may be the only strategy to succeed or even survive in opposition to the establishment political culture.  Anyone following the WSJ’s tut-tutting advice to take the high road  would be road kill in smack dab the middle of it.  Trump may end up as road kill, but he has a chance of survival and more by brawling and trash talking, and rallying his tribe to fight tooth-and-nail against the tribes attacking him.

If you hate his strategy, what you really hate is the game and the other players: because his is a response to them.

If you don’t like Trump, or his style, I can understand: but don’t be superficial about it.  Think a little bit more deeply about how he could ever emerge, if he is such a horrible human being.  If you do, you will  realize that he is but a symptom of a deep degradation of American political culture, driven largely by the homogenization of the media and the political class, and its isolation from and disdain for vast swathes of America.  And when those people condemn Donald Trump, they are really condemning themselves, for they made him–but they are just too absorbed in their own self-righteousness to figure that out.