Townhall Review | Commentaries

The United States of America isn’t defined by Beltway or Manhattan elites, nor by those in Los Angeles or Silicon Valley. The mainstream media gets its cues from the collective consciousness of these four isolated reserves of great power, wealth and fame.

Donald Trump’s sparring with elites, though, is deeply satisfying to much of the rest of the country that doesn’t live in those four sectors… at least that sparring is satisfactory most of the time. There’s a limit, however, to how much good the president does by dominating media. The president met and exceeded that limit with the escalation of his war with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski via tweets. These tweets were wrong because they were cruel. They don’t energize the base, except at its far fringes. They shrink it.

Americans do love contact sports. We swoon for heated rhetoric. If Trump can resolve to stay combative but back off cruel, it won’t matter whether he tweets once or 100 times a day.

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President Trump and his supporters are absolutely right that there’s a glaring contrast between the way media treat this president and way the press handled his predecessor, Barack Obama.

With Obama, potentially devastating scandals—Benghazi, the IRS, Fast and Furious, the VA—never gained momentum; the press never blamed Obama personally when things went wrong in his administration. For Trump, he’s blamed personally for every embarrassment or disappointment under his watch. But conservatives are wrong to suggest that the treatment of Trump is exceptional. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also got rough handling by the press; it was the always-forgiving, generally glowing treatment of Obama that was exceptional, extraordinary, in fact.

Maybe it was his image as a “hip cool dude,” or his historical status as the first non-white president, but media infatuation with Obama set a dangerous precedent that distorts press-relations with the current administration.

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The California State Senate recently passed legislation creating a government-run, single-payer health care system in the Golden State. The idea is so bad that even Governor Jerry Brown has expressed concerns about it.

What’s wrong with the idea?

It replaces the existing, largely private-sector system and will force people out of the health care plans they currently have. It will lead to the rationing of care and give to government the most intimate and sacred of our health care decisions. And left-wing lawmakers in California want to pay for their socialized health care system with mammoth tax increases, because the cost of their program is estimated to be more than the entirety of the state’s current budget.

Public opinion polls reveal that most Californians are actually opposed to a single-payer health system. Yet, some politicians are following the lead of left-wing demagogues like Bernie Sanders, and pursuing policies that will literally bankrupt the state. Ultimately, California’s voters are the ones who have to say that enough is enough.

Here’s to hoping that they do.

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