By SKIP TUCKER, Alabama Daily News featured columnist
My turn in the barrel.
That’s the punchline to a very old, very off-color joke, but it sets up today’s effort, which I intend as a broadside into those meager “thought leaders” that whack Donald Trump when they find time on their hands, often for little more reason than that.
I never cared much for Mr. Trump over the years. I don’t watch reality shows much, to begin with, and the couple of times I watched him I found him rude and, well, smarmy.
He is also brilliant.
When Trump first entered the presidential campaign, mainstream media laughingly called him crazy. That is a prime psychological ploy – those who support a crazy must be crazy. It didn’t work.
So it was ramped up. Trump is an idiot, they said, with corresponding IQ.
Well, first, when one person calls another an idiot, it’s incumbent upon that person to reveal his or her perspective: just how bright is the person who called the other an idiot? What is that person’s IQ, which is the standard measure of intelligence? It amuses me to see the number of liberal looneys who insist that Trump is an idiot without giving their own credentials. Many are goofy as a Mickey Mouse movie.
It reminds me of the local self-proclaimed intellectual (college degree?) who wrote that “President George W. Bush is an idiot.” Bush graduated Yale and Harvard and, in military service, piloted an F-15, undoubtedly one of the most difficult planes to fly in the history of aviation.
Please.
It is well documented that Trump took a loan of several millions and turned it into $3.1 billion. Not every idiot can do that.
Trump, in order, whipped the mainstream media, all the best and brightest of the other Republican candidates for president, the Republican National Committee, TV and radio talking heads and all the network “news” people and the Clinton machine which reportedly had about $2 billion at its disposal.
Much of the Republican base in D.C. undermine Trump because the media, ninety percent of which is ultra-liberal, will love them for it and they want to supplant Trump as president. Last time I looked, Trump still was holding firm to a 45 percent voter base.
Among strong Trump supporters I personally know are six physicians, four lawyers, three multi-millionaires and a wide range of schoolteachers, professors, business people and community leaders. These are men and women from all walks of life.
Donald Trump graduated through the respected, distinguished Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics and anthropology. When a student at Wharton, it was possible to derive accurate IQ test scores from known SAT scores. Given the usual requirements for admission to a top school like Wharton, and based on his SAT score, it’s been estimated that he has an IQ range in the mid-150’s. That is a genius score.
Here’s what another genius, Henry Kissinger, had to say about Donald Trump, or at least it is attributed to Kissinger.
He said most of this on Face the Nation:
“Liberals will never admit that he is the one true leader. The man is doing changes like never before and does all of it for the sake of this nation’s people.
“Every country now has to consider two things: One, their perception that the previous president basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessments of their necessities.
“Secondly, the president is asking a lot of unfamiliar questions, and the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it.”
Then Kissinger puts it bluntly: “Trump puts America and its people first. This is why people love him and this is why he will remain in charge for so long.”
Still, liberal mainstream media continues to bash Trump and conservatives while their circulations, viewerships and revenues tumble down like the walls of Jericho. Most of these looneys don’t report news but simply write opinions (very simply).
Here’s a 2018 report by Pew Research, the standard for media:
The total estimated newspaper industry advertising revenue for 2017 was $16.5 billion, based on the Center’s analysis of financial statements for publicly traded newspaper companies. This decreased 10 percent from 2016.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Statistics, 39,210 people worked as reporters, editors, photographers, or film and video editors in the newspaper industry in 2017. That is down 15 percent from 2014 and 45 percent from 2004. Wages for editors and reporters, unfortunately, are scandalously below other industries.
There are all kinds of statistics that show a mainstream media industry in decline. It’s nothing to celebrate, but it is a cautionary tale in what happens when you replace real news with selective, salacious Enquirer-like guff from biased talking heads.
We don’t see much written or spoken (outside Alabama Daily News) about the strong U.S. economy, or Trump’s positive strides in foreign policy. Rather, we see harangues about personal matters (he’s not half the hound to match Slick Willie) and the occasional curse word (it was thought cute when Obama dropped the F bomb).
It’s not that Trump is faultless. He’s not. It’s that mainstream media minimizes his accomplishments and harps on any little mistake he makes, after it spent years glossing over major lies and ineptitude from liberals like the Obamas and the Clintons. It is my opinion that the Clintons have broken more laws than Bonnie and Clyde.
Meanwhile, Trump is winning and liberal mainstream media, overall, is in continual decline.
And Trump is the idiot?
Oh, please.
(Next week: I go where angels fear to tread.)
Skip Tucker was editor of the Daily Mountain Eagle in Jasper, then communications secretary for gubernatorial folks like George McMillan, Charlie Graddick and Jim Folsom. He ran Alabama Voters Against Lawsuit Abuse for in Montgomery for 15 years. He has published one novel, Pale Blue Light, a spy thriller set in The Civil War. He’s now a regular contributor for the Alabama Daily News at www.ALDailyNews.com.