Michael Wolff and the Death Rattle of Trumpophobia
He has shamed the sane opponents of Trump into separating from the bloodless assassin.
David Brooks, a civilized and erudite commentator in the New York Times, led the way out of the inferno for the conservative anti-Trump intelligentsia. He is far from the grace of conversion, but Mr. Brooks wrote:
The anti-Trump movement, of which I’m a proud member, seems to be getting dumber. It seems to be settling into a smug fairy tale version of reality that filters out discordant information. More anti-Trumpers seem to be telling themselves a “Madness of King George” narrative: Trump is a semi-literate madman surrounded by sycophants who are morally, intellectually and psychologically inferior to people like us. I’d like to think it’s possible to be fervently anti-Trump while also not reducing everything to a fairy tale.Bingo! Mr. Brooks is on the up escalator. When he has a little altitude, he will recognize that what he has left behind him is not a fairy tale but a fictional horror story.
Trump has mannerisms and foibles that are legitimately unattractive to many, and that is certainly adequate reason to disapprove of him, if there is a better alternative. There isn’t. And as Mr. Brooks and kindred spirits, including another old friend with whom I have parted company on this subject but retained cordial relations, Bret Stephens, now also of the New York Times, acknowledges, what this president has done is actually quite good, and a vast improvement on his post-Reagan predecessors. Wolff had his three days of national prominence, like so many other Trumpophobes who have had cameo roles, from Khizr Khan to Gloria Allred, but the anti-Trump coalition fragmented. Alan Dershowitz, a Clinton voter in the last election, warned that the effort to escalate perfervid Trumpophobia from criminalization of policy differences (as well as sour grapes over the lost election) to “psychiatrization” was even more sinister and anti-democratic. The leftist media had a few vocal psychiatrists whom they have been trotting out from time to time to claim Trump is mad, and in the last few days they swanned through parts of the lockstep circuit of CNN-MSNBC-CBS-ABC-NBC (which briefly declared itself in favor of Oprah Winfrey for president on January 8, before retracting).
But then, as is his habit, the president sortied out of what David Brooks calls the “Potemkin White House” and dealt his enemies a shattering rebuff. He had the cameras present in the cabinet room for almost an hour as he led, rather magisterially, as all admitted, a discussion of immigration issues with 22 Democratic and Republican leaders of both congressional houses, and sat himself next to leading Democrats Senator Richard Durbin and Representative Steny Hoyer. The country saw that Donald Trump is reasonable, persuasive, and knowledgeable. To prove to skeptics that miracles occur, CNN’s ne plus ultra of fake-news authorship, Wolf Blitzer, uttered words of respectful admiration for the president. On a higher plane, relatively pro-Trump commentator Mollie Hemingway wrote in the Federalist (January 8) that the effort to portray Trump as mentally unbalanced and stupid and incompetent was an attempted “coup.”
That is exactly what it is.
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