Most Trump supporters have a list of reasons for supporting him.  America first, stopping illegal immigration, economic resurgence, better trade deals, nominating conservative judges, taking the country back – any and all of the issues he championed will do.  Those are part of the great agenda, and he has actually moved the ball forward on most issues he fought for.

Less commented on but every bit as important are those things you might call the unintended, and simultaneously very surprising, consequences of Trump's presidency.

These start with the media exposing themselves.  Most of us knew about left-leaning media bias, but the fawning press given to Saint Barack got a lot of us to see just how bad this problem was.  Sean Hannity was entirely accurate in 2008, pronouncing that journalism is dead.

But now they have self-immolated.  Trump drove them crazy.  Unintentionally.  Believe it or not, it was never his intention to have them commit hara-kiri live for the world to watch – heck, they even do it live on Facebook daily.  Yes, he used his knowledge of the media, and branding, to further his campaign.  Early on, the media inadvertently helped him gain his audience.  It's pretty clear he knew they were biased, but Jim Rutenberg of the Times let the cat out of the bag on August 7.

If you view a Trump presidency as something that's potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you've ever been to being oppositional. That's uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I've ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.

It was a quantum leap for journalism.  They thought it was a giant step for mankind, telegraphing to all their liberal "journalist" friends that they could now say anything and do anything about Trump because, after all, he is a dangerous man.  Unlike St. Barack, he actually liked America and what it once stood for.  So now they were allowed to break every rule journalism had heretofore used in order to defeat him. 

And they have broken and broken.  They continued to report anti-Trump insanity, rumor, falsehood, and innuendo.  Every day.  As did the entire "woke" media.

After Trump won, the NYT's fearless leader, Arthur Sulzberger, actually wrote an apology to his readers, admitting how the Times had willfully broken the public trust, how it willfully ignored what Trump was saying, and how it had tried (and failed) to warp the public mind against him.  He promised that his staffers would return to accurately reporting the news and regain the public trust by being real journalists

But they didn't, and neither did the rest of the leftist media.  Yes, they all went wild during the campaign trying to live up to the standard set by the Times.  It was embarrassingly biased coverage, filled with outrage, angst, and virtue-signaling.  But that was nothing compared to their reporting since the election.

Imagine, if you would, a world where the media made up a narrative out of nothing, with no evidence, and then got many of its viewers to believe it.  Imagine an entire media world making up stories of a candidate colluding with a foreign nation to take over the U.S. government.  The only collusion that was provable was the media groups colluding with each other.  Imagine a psychosis so deep that editors and producers actually went after the ratings they could get from a troubled group of people who could not believe that their candidate lost – all the while hoping they would damage Donald Trump in this Faustian bargain.

For all of the power the leftist media had amassed, they didn't have the power to see themselves clearly.  They didn't realize what they were doing to their revered profession.  They also didn't have the power to imagine anyone, let alone the man whom they reviled so much, Donald Trump, would be able to fight them so well.

And fight he did.  At every one of his rallies, he would always point to the cameras and where the journalists were sitting, reminding the audience how much the media lied, and how so many of them were just bad and untruthful people.  The audience booed heartily, and most of the journalists there, and elsewhere, deserved it. 

The media had gone over the edge, way beyond the edge.  They were in free fall; they just didn't know it yet.

The U.S. media haven't had a high trust rating since the Kennedy halcyon days.  They chose sides with the Democrats long ago, but now it's far worse, and their trust ratings have fallen for decades.  Lately, the drop is huge.  By most good polling outlets, the media now have a lower trust rating than used car sales and Congress.  Yep, they've earned that rating.  They just don't understand that they have only themselves to blame.  They soiled their own nests; now they have to live there.

It likely never was Trump's intent to drive them this crazy, nor to make them look so unfit, nor to demonstrate that they don't have the temperament for their job, nor to make a narrative about them colluding, nor to show them up as charlatans lying to the public.  That was what the media tried to set as narratives for him, but it all became a giant boomerang.

Late fall, when they started to invent the narrative that "fake news" from Russia helped elect him, Trump immediately turned it on them.  Fake news was such a perfect branding for what the media had done, they didn't know what hit them.  I think they rue the day they came up with that phrase, because they are now the butt of fake news jokes, a ridiculing they invited.  Trump's joke about changing CNN's brand from fake news to really fake news was Reaganesque in the annals of one liners.

And now their nine-month jihad about Trump colluding with Russia has collapsed.  It has failed and has put the final nail in their coffin.  Over half the country has tuned them out and literally turned on them.  Yes, they have their core leftist support that continues to make them money, but with that narrative quickly falling to the nothingness it deserved, they are going to be in big trouble with their own leftist base of supporters.  Eventually, even they will know it was all a lie.

The press secretary recently nailed it as the nation watched :

I think what the bigger question is, everybody wants to try to make this some story about misleading. The only thing I see misleading is a year's worth of stories that have been fueling a false narrative about this Russia collusion and a phony scandal based on anonymous sources[.] ... And I think that is, if we're going to talk about misleading, that's the only thing misleading I see in this entire process.

You guys are focused on a meeting that Don Jr. had, no consequence, when the Democrats actually colluded with a foreign government like Ukraine; the Democrat-linked firm Fusion GPS actually took money from the Russian government while it created the phony dossier that's been the basis for all of the Russia scandal fake news.

Perfect.        

Good historians are likely writing about what happened to the media.  Recently, Sean Hannity interviewed Camille Paglia, left-leaning feminist.  Here is what she had to say about the media's fall:

It's obscene. It's outrageous. Okay? It shows that the Democrats are nothing now but words and fantasy and hallucination and Hollywood. Okay? There's no journalism left. What's happened – okay – to The New York Times? What's happened to the major networks? This is an outrage.

I'm a professor of media studies, in addition to a professor of humanities, okay? And I think it's absolutely grotesque the way my party has destroyed journalism. Right now, it's going to take decades to recover from this atrocity that's going on, where the news media have turned themselves over into the most childish fraternity, kind of buffoonish behavior.

Thirty years to recover?  Awesome.  It's a welcome unintended consequence of Trump's presidency, the passing of media charlatans.  Marvelous indeed.