The other day, the Washington Post worker bees celebrated over their eggnog, tweeting out a ‘Merry Impeachmas’ greeting for what they were sure was the final demise of President Trump.  The story from the picture was that this was it, the final chapter in their three-year-long dream of removing the hated president who had the temerity to win the election just as their heroine Hillary Clinton was about to shatter that glass ceiling.

But 2019 is not 1973, and the Posties who celebrated would be well-advised to recognize that their desperate attempts to bring down another president will never be Watergate, Part II.  They got away with bagging Nixon, but Trump is no Richard Nixon.  Nixon caved under the intense pressure brought to bear on him for what, for a Democrat, would have been no scandal at all.  A non-stop propaganda campaign, starring intrepid ‘reporters’ Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, successfully convinced the American people that Nixon needed to be removed for the bugging the DNC headquarters, a crime done by his campaign without his knowledge.  The reporters were fed a stream of information by FBI upper echelon agent Mark Felt, who was out to get Nixon for personal reasons.

The irony is lost on the clueless anti-Trump press of today that this time around, it was the FBI who was bugging the president and his associates.

With the passage of time, the Watergate scandal was revealed more and more to be little more than a successful coup attempt, which many of us suspected from the beginning.  The left hated Nixon, not so much because he was conservative, which he wasn’t, but because early in his career he helped bring down a hero of the Soviet Union, a communist spy named Alger Hiss.

Alger Hiss was so highly placed in the Franklin Roosevelt administration that he was whispering advice in the president’s ear as he negotiated the treaties that would carve out the post-war world with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill.  All along he was literally reporting back to Stalin.  Fortunately, a Time magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers, who was also a Soviet spy for a time, decided to switch sides because of the atrocities of the murderous communist regime.  Chambers had acquired hard evidence of Alger Hiss’s treason, but needed someone high up in government to back him to expose Hiss.

 Nixon was that man, and for that the left never forgave him.  They fumed when Nixon won in 1968 after the fiasco of the Lyndon Johnson years, and they despised him even more when he won re-election in a landslide in 1972.  When Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post, realized that there was a source at the FBI feeding his reporters derogatory information about Nixon’s underlings, he realized this could be turned into a potent weapon against his hated enemy.  Other newspapers joined in the campaign, followed by then-esteemed TV news departments, who blanketed the airwaves. 

There being no Internet, and no alternative media to expose information the mainstream reporters were covering up, it had a devastating effect.  Nixon’s support among the public dwindled after the long, drawn-out televised hearings which turned the whole thing into a made-for-TV crime drama where everyone knew who the perp was from the beginning.   After being abandoned by most of his fellow Republicans in Congress, Nixon decided to resign rather than face a formal impeachment trial.

The mainstream media, especially those at the Washington Post, gloated in the afterglow of having brought down a president.  If they hadn’t realized it before, they certainly knew now how much power they possessed in the ability to shape the narrative by hammering on the information they wanted the public to think was important, and ignoring the information they didn’t want people to know about at all.  It was a short step from there to the ‘Fake News’ which we have now come to expect from the media. ‘Reporters’ nowadays have no qualms about cooperating with leftist politicians in the manufacture of fake news, as was done in the case of the Steele dossier and the FISA warrants, and then allowing themselves to be used as conduits to channel the lies to the public.

How exciting it must have been for those ‘reporters’, remembering the greats of Watergate fame who destroyed Richard Nixon, and imagining that they would be able to do the same to Donald Trump. 

Since only racists and deplorables supported Trump, it should have be easy to knock those props out from under him, considering how smart and sophisticated the media were in the Resistance.  But the left miscalculated, and violated an important rule of warfare – know your enemy.  With the easy availability of information on the Internet, the truths that the media had always been able to cover up in the past was now widely available and reported by Trump supporters.  Millions were aware that the Mueller investigation was a sham and a witch hunt, and that the dossier was a pack of lies, even though the media was gob-smacked when Mueller crashed and burned.  Millions rolled their eyes when the media immediately followed the instructions issued to them by the Democrats, and began hyping the Ukraine phone call as a crime committed by Trump, even after the transcript revealed it was not.  After repeatedly being lied to by the media, after the media’s preposterous invented narratives collapsed one after the other, and millions no longer believed them. 

The employees at the Post can fantasize all they want about reenacting Watergate and destroying Donald Trump, but a simple glance outside of their beltway bubble should inform them this is not happening.  Donald Trump is more popular than ever, and the vast majority of his supporters are wise to the falsehoods being peddled by the media in league with the Democrat party. 

Image credit: Brianna Privett,via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0