Everybody run, the Dread Tyrant Trump has been handed a gun!
Thanks to the Durham report released earlier this week, we now know that the “Russia collusion” accusations against Donald Trump were a fabrication—a lie—engineered by the Hillary Clinton campaign and dutifully leveraged by partisans within America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies and ultimately enflamed by a hysterically partisan media.
The FBI itself has acknowledged that “mistakes were made,” which is the closest a federal bureaucracy will ever come to a confession of misdeeds.
This is an enormous story, insofar as it illustrates the politicization of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies and underscores the extent to which the American media willfully suspended disbelief to prosecute a campaign of lies against a man whose politics they disliked.
It presents a wonderful opportunity for the media to acknowledge their gullibility (or duplicity) in serving as a megaphone for the Clinton campaign’s corrosive lies and to express their sincere desire to do better in the future. If the FBI could do it, surely the media can.
Naturally enough, however, the Danish media have almost completely inverted the story: in their telling, the worst thing about the Durham report is not the way American institutions were corrupted in the service of partisan politics, or the way the media “gatekeepers”—those brave souls whose pursuit of the truth is so heroic that they compare themselves to the guys who stormed the beaches of Normandy—no, to hear it from the Danish media, the worst thing about all this is… oh, come on, you know.
A May 16 article in Berlingske is headlined “Harsh criticism of the FBI is a victory for Trump. ‘He’s going to paint with this brush until the election is over’ ”. Its opening lines:
The US attorney general has just placed a new weapon in the hand of Donald Trump.
A weapon that Trump will pull out at every opportunity until the American voters have decided who will be the next President of the United States.
On the same day, Danmarks Radio (DR) ran an article with a less sensational headline (“The FBI is getting harsh criticism for its investigation into Trump’s 2016 election campaign”—notice it doesn’t do anything to inform the casual headline-skimmer that this has to do with the whole Russia collusion story), but dedicates a considerable portion of its text to arguing against Trump anyway.
Donald Trump was quick to respond to the report’s conclusions on his own social media site Truth Social.
“WOW! After thorough investigation, Special Investigator John Durham concludes that the FBI should never have initiated the Trump-Russia investigation. In other words, the American public was cheated by those who don’t want to make America great again,” says Trump.
But that’s not entirely true…
It’s entirely true.
DR wastes a few paragraphs trying to spin the report as not having fully exonerated Trump from the overhyped lies about Russian collusion, but ultimately comes back to concede the win for the Dread Tyrant.
But the report’s conclusions are still in Trump’s favor. That’s the opinion of Anders Agner, editor-in-chief of the website Kongressen.com, which deals with American politics.
“Trump politicizes everything, and every time there’s a case against him, he calls it a political witch hunt. Here he actually has a state attorney saying that in the case of the Russia investigation, there might actually be something to back that up.
“So Trump is celebrating this as a huge personal victory, and he’ll also use it in the future to say: see for yourself, it’s a witch hunt,” he tells (the DR-owned radio program) P1 Morgen.
The whole point of the Durham report is that Hillary Clinton was “politicizing everything” by spreading lies about her political opponent to distract from the very real, wholly substantiated, and deeply troubling saga of her having broken the law by using a private email server for highly sensitive government communications. The entire Democratic apparatus went into overdrive “politicizing everything” still further by promoting her lie, even though they all knew it was lie. And the entire establishment media ecosystem ate it all up, regurgitated it, and served it to the American people with shrieking headlines for more than three years.
Remember?
Garbage people spewing corrosive lies, none of them more obscenely than Hillary Clinton herself. Will she issue an apology and retire from public life?
Cackle.
Trump is well within his rights to make all the hay he can out of this report—and when you think about it, his doing so would actually serve the loudly avowed interests of Democrats, law enforcement and criminal justice partisans, and the establishment media. Haven’t they been pretending for years to care deeply about election interference? Isn’t this a story of democracy itself having been endangered? Only now it’s apparent that the interference and endangerment were coming not from Trump, but Clinton. . . so the klaxons go silent.
As if these people never really gave a damn about democracy after all.
Trump is celebrating this as a huge personal victory because it is a huge personal victory. So that’s not the story. The story is how badly off the rails the American government went to take down someone it didn’t approve of. It’s about how the media, big tech, and our cultural leaders were so easily manipulated into playing along. Manipulated? They volunteered. It’s chilling. It should make your blood run cold.
As Trump himself famously warned, “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you. I’m just in the way.”
DR concludes:
The FBI has issued a press release in which they admit that mistakes were made, but that they have since improved.
“Had the current improvements been present then, we would not have made the mistakes the report highlights,” writes the FBI.
“Mistakes were made” indeed. Forget patriotism: the last refuge of a scoundrel is the passive voice.
The mistakes that were made are largely responsible for the worst political polarization in America since the Civil War. You don’t get a Mulligan on that.
Meanwhile at TV2 News… no coverage at all. Not even a news service article.
I don’t honestly know what’s worse: Berlingske treating the whole thing as a “weapon” being placed in Donald Trump’s (little) hands, DR’s attempt to downplay the story and spin it as noteworthy mainly as something Trump will exploit vaingloriously until the end of time, or TV2’s total embargo.
What I do know is that with respect to coverage of American politics, the major Danish news media have once again proved themselves the country’s leading provider of misinformation, disinformation, and lies.
Afterthought: I don’t think this is unrelated to the civilizational madness engulfing us in so many other spheres. Naivete is dangerous, but cynicism is deadly: corruption has to be on its toes among the gullible, lest it be found out, but indifference gives it free reign.
Be careful what you shrug off.