If you thought Trump Derangement Syndrome was a tad excessive, as they say, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. To channel an old Pacino flick, opening now for Oscar season, it’s “Panic in Progressive Park.”
Reason for the panic — the dawning realization, repressed and often unrecognized though it may be, that Donald Trump may even a be a good president, possibly a great one.
Then what?
If anything could cause panic among liberals, progressives, and the media (apologies for the redundancy), that’s it.
And Trump has certainly hit the ground running with more “vigah” — this time to channel an old Kennedy phrase — than we have seen in a long while. And not just because of the Carrier deal, though that clearly caught America’s attention, as it should.
It also caught the attention of the media, which rushed to denigrate it — and demonstrate their “profound knowledge” of deal-making — by reminding us that Donald’s agreement did not keep all the Carrier jobs in America, just most of them. And they actually had to bargain with the directors of Carrier — imagine that!
For comic relief, the now completely ignored (as he should be) Bernie Sanders rushed to remind us of the same thing, as if anything of that sort (or any sort) could have been done under a Sanders presidency.
Indeed, Trump seems to be firing on all engines to a degree I have never seen in an American president, before he has even been inaugurated. His transition, once said to be confused, is rocketing along with a palpable sense of excitement that Trump and his team are deliberately sharing with the public, by-passing the media when necessary.
The Democrats, who have been floundering to an extent equally never before seen, are participating in a juvenile and over-priced recount while reelecting the terminally botoxed Nancy Pelosi to the House minority leadership even though that same chamber hemorrhaged Democrat members like a hemophilia victim under her rule. Topping that off, they’re considering Keith Ellison to helm the DNC, a man who, according to a recent report, “met with a radical Muslim cleric who endorsed killing U.S. soldiers and with the president of a bank used to pay the families of Palestinian suicide bombers” on a trip to Saudi Arabia organized by an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Talk about a party on a suicide run.
Meanwhile, the thing that Democrats, and many Republicans too, don’t get about Trump is that Donald is an upper. He’s a real optimist in a world of cynics. That’s a yuuuge part of his attraction, as that should be, and the catalyst that helps him get things done. The reaction to Trump is something of a Rorschach test — those who have a positive (even excited) view of the future tend to go for him. Those that don’t, don’t.
His victory speech in Cincinnati Thursday night — and the reaction to it — was an illustration of that. Watching the postmortem on Tucker Carlson’s excellent new show (prediction: it will soon be outstripping The Kelly File, if it hasn’t already), the optimistic Tucker himself was wildly positive about Trump’s speech. His two guests — Caitlin Huey-Burns of RealClearPolitics and Shelby Holliday of the Wall Street Journal — were much more cautious in their somewhat fearful approaches. While obviously intelligent women, the conventional wisdom they imparted was pessimistic by nature and unwittingly a minor part of the swamp that Trump seeks to drain. Perhaps they sensed that.
Most of the media doesn’t just sense it. They know it. They are at war with Trump and at this moment they are losing, badly. A wise person would change their tactics. But the media is not filled with wise people. These days they’re filled with wounded, entitled people who seem already to have forgotten the rest of us have read WikiLeaks. We know who they are even if they don’t know themselves.
Look for “Panic in Progressive Park” to run for a long time. It will, however, be more amusing than the original Pacino version.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already.
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