However, as McGurn also notes, his opponents are at least as bad, if not worse, yet they never seem to receive more than a slap on the wrist from the media. One recent egregious example was the article published by The Atlantic which accused Mr. Trump, based entirely on anonymous sources, of calling our war casualties "Losers" and "Suckers."
To print such serious allegations, based on nothing more than anonymous testimony, is a flagrant violation of journalistic ethics, a dereliction The Atlantic would never commit had similar allegations concerned Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Yet most progressive media have given the magazine's editor a pass, presumably because the article wounded Trump.
McGurn writes:
The Trump-justifies-the-means rationale has been as poisonous for the nation as anything the president has done. Start with this: Has there ever been a norm violation more grievous than the way the Justice Department and FBI were politically weaponized to intervene in an election and then take down an elected president, built on a salacious Russian dossier commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and lies to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court?He goes on to list about a dozen other examples, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi's infamous ripping up of the president's State of the Union speech, Congresswoman Maxine Waters' encouraging people to harass Trump officials in restaurants and shops, Hillary Clinton's urging Joe Biden not to concede if he loses the election, and the prolonged harassment of Mr. Trump via an absurd impeachment proceeding.
Not to mention intelligence chiefs such as CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who publicly painted the president as a Russian agent while privately testifying to Congress they’d seen no evidence for such a claim.
He could've also mentioned the absolutely baseless slander, repeated frequently by his opponents, that Mr. Trump, should he lose in November, will refuse to vacate the White House and will need to be forcibly removed. What evidence do they have that such a claim is true?
McGurn continues:
Where was the press skepticism about the Steele dossier or the whole Russia collusion narrative? Can anyone remember headlines about norm busting when Americans learned the FBI agent accused of altering a document for a FISA court had declared himself part of the “resistance”?Almost any breach of decorum and civility has been justified if it'll hurt the president and diminish his chances of winning in November. The media simply loathes the man, not because of his intemperant behavior - indeed, were he a Democrat they'd busily be making excuses for it - but for what he's doing to roll back the massive progress the left has made over the last fifty years toward establishing a socialist, centralized state in America.
Or when a text revealed the FBI’s lead investigator into the Trump and Clinton campaigns telling his FBI lover that they will “stop” Mr. Trump from becoming president?
Against this, the standard rhetorical excesses likening the president to murderous totalitarians— Trump is Hitler, Trump is Stalin, Trump is Mussolini— look almost quaint.
The left can't abide the fact that President Trump has appointed hundreds of lower court judges and a few Supreme Court justices, all of whom believe the role of a judge is to interpret the law, not to impose a law of their own creation on the American people.
They resent that his low tax, low regulation policies had created, until the pandemic broke out, the best economy in living memory and that, for all the progressive talk about concern for the working poor, Mr. Trump's policies actually put more poor minorities back to work than anything any of his predecessors had done.
In other words, the left despises Trump primarily because he's showing the world that the big government nostrums they've advocated since the 1930s don't work in the real world and that free people and free markets do.