In dissecting a Washington Post piece ostensibly on why people like President Donald Trump, but actually yet another “how dare those flyover country rubes pick that jackass Trump over our obviously superior magnificence?” piece, Ann Althouse hits the nail on the head:
WaPo’s Richard Cohen seems to be asking the right question, according to the headline, “Why people like Trump.”
But very little of the column even attempts to tell us why people like Trump. Nearly all of it is about all the things that seemingly should have already made everyone loathe Trump — he said “shithole countries,” he probably committed adultery, he failed to show faith in our intelligence community— and the confounding persistence of support for Trump.
A more accurate headline would be a question, “Why do people like Trump?,” not what looks like a promise to answer that question. Elite media people like Cohen should finally come around to asking the question humbly, confessing to their abject failure even to admit that they’ve needed to ask it and rejecting their imperious concentration on telling people what they should think. Look at all these reasons to loathe Trump. Come on, you idiots, you’re embarrassing yourselves by not loathing him yet. It hasn’t worked, and yet you continue to do it.
Cohen has exactly one sentence that tries to say why people like Trump, and it’s incredibly weak:
My guess is that it’s a low-boil rage against a vague and threatening liberalism — urbane, educated, affluent, secular, diverse and sexually tolerant.
Yes, yes, I know. You’re so sure you and your friends are the good people. Your unshakeable love for yourself and your friends is glaringly evident, as usual.
Our ruling elites seem unable to come to grips not only with President Trump pantsing them at every turn, but that their own smug sense of superiority and entitlement is what led to his rise in the first place. They don’t do “humble.”
Their smug sense of superiority shines through in every imperious announcement and self-satisfied Facebook post. That smug is the reason ordinary Americans love watching President Trump humiliate the media. What I said a year ago still applies:
While Trump does many things with his tweets, the latest controversy displays his masterful exploitation of the vast gulf between the borderline delusional self-regard of the media in general (and CNN in specific) and the public’s low opinion of same. It’s like watching Groucho Marx humiliate Margaret Dumont every morning. Normal people are laughing their asses off, while other stuffed shirt media pundits are aghast. “How dare he keep insulting that old rich lady!”
And here it is, a year and half or later, CNN is still declaring “Well, I never!” and wondering why everyone is laughing at them. Trump’s attacks are effective because average Americans hate the news media more, and trust them less, than they do Trump. And they feel that way because of the CNN and the media’s own self-inflicted wounds, and for obvious left-wing bias visible to pretty much any non-liberal observer.
The media keeps falling into Trump’s Twitter traps because their delusional self-love keeps leading them straight in. “Why surely fiend Trump’s latest attack on America’s sacred media outlets will finally rouse the populace to outrage!” Like Margaret Dumont’s characters, the media’s moral outrage never lets them realize they’re the butt of the joke.
Which, of course, always makes the joke that much funnier…
And here it is two and a half years later, and they’re still displaying the same arrogance and making the same stupid mistakes. Nothing can shake their faith in their own smug sense of superiority. And so, instead of reporting actual news, they continue to pimp Russian conspiracy theories and Stormy Daniels and wonder why we’ve tuned them out.
The same people love to conflate contempt for their biased selves into contempt for the freedom of the press and the First Amendment. This is patently false. Ordinary Americans love the First Amendment. It’s the current smug, biased, dishonest incarnation of the MSM that we hate.
Look in the mirror. We don’t hate the free press. We hate you. Personally. And our loathing for you smug pricks dates back to long before Donald Trump ever threw his hat into the ring…