ROGER KIMBALL: Donald Trump is a Great Man of History. Is he defining the Zeitgeist, or merely riding it? You might as well ask the same question of Napoleon or Caesar.
A year ago, Trump was finished. The swank people who tell us what to think had written him off. There he was, staggering under scores of indictments in at least four separate jurisdictions. Would he not be bankrupted, incarcerated, swept ignominiously into the dustbin of history?
Somehow, Trump not only survived but thrived. Did he merely ride the cresting wave of the Zeitgeist or also help define it? The same question might be asked of Caesar, Napoleon, FDR, or Ronald Reagan.
There are still some flaccid, hand-ringing mutterers who can’t absorb the reality of what Donald Trump represents. He represents beneficent change. The anti-Trump whiners congregate in their faculty lounges, their DEI workshops, their climate-change seminars in Aspen. Here and there one finds pods of sad people like Chris Mayes, the Attorney General of Arizona, who has vowed to resist aspects of Trump’s immigration efforts. One might as well vow to resist a tornado.
Elsewhere, in the real world, what had been an anti-Trump consensus is disintegrating. Even Politico has absorbed an inkling of the truth. Trump is, a recent column tells us, “someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match. In other words: He is a force of history.”
The title of that column is revealing. “Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He’s Still Trying To Be a Good One.” The charge that has most often been levelled against Trump is that he is a man of “bad character”. Even the patently absurd claims that Trump is a “fascist” (General Mark Milley reportedly called him that) or “literally Hitler” follow from the judgment that Trump is just too naff for words, an aesthetic determination that quickly shades into moral obloquy.
I think there are two things to be said about this. Let me turn to Horace Walpole for the first. “No country was ever saved by good men,” Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary”.
In his interview with the Daily Wire, Puck News’ Dylan Byers noted the change in tone at CNN:
You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump and should hold him accountable and be the truthtellers and build their business by being sort of the righteous truthtellers. Or you can believe that there should be a more neutral and dispassionate approach that feels a little bit more akin to, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, pivoting from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, and then Trump 2.0 in 2024, is going to be awkward. It is inevitably going to be awkward because you are going to have top talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once railed against the president, spoke out against him, who – after everything that they have reported on, everything that they have railed against, all of the warnings and the red flags and the alarm bells that they spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy back to power and acting as though he could be Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.
And that is, again — whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – that is a very, very awkward pivot. And it suggests one of two things: Either all of that hair-on-fire grandstanding of the first term was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, you should be auditioning for an Oscar for best actor, rather than a news Emmy. Or it suggests that you can be bought off and that in order to keep your business and to continue to go on TV and have the relative stardom and reputation that you do, you are willing to forego whatever concerns you had the last time around. And that does not reflect well, I think, on anyone at the network.
I hope their first term hysteria over Trump, compounded by four years of hiding Joe Biden’s senescence was worth it for all of the credibility the DNC-MSM lost: Nostalgia Time! Drew Holden Walks Down Memory Lane With the Media’s Hara-kiri on the Steele Dossier.