Gage Skidmore
Like most mainstream conservative commentators of that era, Peggy Noonan abandoned both her conservative and journalistic principles to devolve into a rabid hater of President Trump.Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan during a recent conversation with journalist Bari Weiss made some startling revelations.
Noonan calls herself a conservative and was once a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. But like most mainstream conservative commentators of that era, Noonan abandoned both her conservative and journalistic principles to devolve into a rabid hater of President Trump.
She believed the hoaxes against President Trump, particularly the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. When she was proven wrong, instead of accepting her mistake, she claimed she didn’t “know what to think of Trump/Russia” and wasn’t “satisfied we’ll ever fully understand it.”
In such cases, there are no greys. Trump was cleared by probers despite their deep bias against him and their lack of basis for the investigation. But Noonan purposefully tried to leave the door open instead of admitting this obvious fact by feigning confusion.
Noonan’s recent utterances proved how deeply she erred while covering Trump. But the sanctimonious seldom possess self-awareness, hence Noonan bragged about her mistake because she thought she was following journalistic ethics.
Noonan claimed when Trump decided to run for president his aides reached out to her for interactions. She claimed that she was hesitant to meet President Trump because she “had a feeling that up close he would be charming and funny, and that there would be something endearing, and that it would mess with my swing as an observer.”
“I didn’t want to see him up close. I didn’t want to see him far away. I wanted- had this intuitive sense [to] see him at a middle distance. And I felt I saw him clearly at a middle distance.”
Noonan was conflating intimate relationships with professional interactions. If Noonan had a romantic affair or a friendship with President Trump it would have been inappropriate and would render her unable to report on him objectively. But merely having interactions is not wrong, it is an essential component of covering any leader. Personal interactions present the opportunity to probe the thinking and understand the perspective of the leader. It is not just the words but body language which is often quite revealing. Purposefully not meeting Trump was a gross dereliction of duty on Noonan’s part.
Noonan then revealed her experience when she recently met President Trump. “So two or three weeks ago, he came to the Wall Street Journal for an editorial board meeting, and my instinct kicked in again. ‘Don’t go.’ But then I corrected myself,”
Noonan said. “I’ve been writing about him for eight years. I have occasionally clubbed him like a seal. He has occasionally clubbed me. And it would be so wrong if he came to my newspaper, and he couldn’t go there and take retribution or do whatever he wanted to do. It just struck me as the fair, right thing. And so I went.”
“So anyway, at a certain point, the doors fly open and the entourage comes in, and there’s Trump, who in person in that blue suit and the tie is huge, and the hair is huge, everything is huge. And he, like, blows by others, and he just says to me, ‘You are wonderful. You are the most remarkable woman.’”
“…He went on and off the record. But off the record, he was hilarious, rude, inappropriate, said things about foreign leaders that should not be said to a bunch of journalists.”
“And I just sat back and thought by the end, ‘Honey, your intuition was right. If you’d met him in 2015, you would have loved him and not seen him'” Noonan concluded.
<img alt captext="Gage Skidmore” class=”post-image-right” src=”https://conservativenewsbriefing.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/noonans-downfall.jpg” width=”400″>Noonan inadvertently actually confessed she was in awe of Trump. She also admitted her inadequacies as a journalist i.e. she is unable to be objective when the person is warm, affectionate, charming, and funny. But most top elected officials possess star quality and journalists must be able to look beyond the charisma and blandishment to cover the individual as objectively as possible.
What Noonan also unknowingly revealed is that most of these journalists who suffered from ‘TDS’ weren’t doing so out of principle or reason.
The first possible explanation for their inconsolable rage against Trump was that he won landslide mandates and remained popular despite their coordinated campaign against him. With every election, Trump managed to increase his voter base, which is rare in politics. Before Trump, the media was able to destroy individuals, particularly Republicans or conservatives, with a few attacks. They successfully destroyed the political careers of Sarah Palin and the Presidential candidacies of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Because these individuals never had a deep connection with the public. Hence a few hitjobs caused instant abandonment. Trump had rendered the media impotent and irrelevant.
The second possible explanation for the rabidity against Trump is they are acting on orders. This seems plausible because any given day ‘experts’ across outlets have identical opinions and even individual phraseology for any given incident. These media assassins know Trump isn’t Hitler and a threat to democracy but repeat relentlessly because they are operating on orders from nefarious forces in Democrat leadership.
Noonan’s trepidation minutes before meeting Trump also revealed that spending prolonged periods in the echo chamber causes divorce from reality. Noonan began to believe her falsehoods that Trump was a vicious beast who would deal with her with extreme brutality. But the opposite occurred.
So what do we make of this?
Since Trump entered politics not a day has gone by in which the mainstream media hasn’t behaved irresponsibly or reprehensibly or immorally. They have accused Trump of some of the worst that any human can be accused of — treason, bigotry, dishonesty, etc. Noonan is a leading member of this odious group of propagandists.
Trump’s reelection proves that they cannot sway a majority of Americans. But the bumbling word salad chef still received 74 million votes, proving the media still influences a significant number of Americans.
Human nature is such that unfairness, baseless targeting, and a defeat due to manipulation cause rage, which causes an individual to be in battle mode which results in the individual being perpetually alert. However, victories bring elation and elation causes people to ease into a relaxed mode and forget about past unfairness.
President Trump must be cautious while dealing with these media vultures.
Noonan may not have revealed the specifics of Trump’s off-the-record comments, but even divulging that he made ‘inappropriate’ remarks about foreign leaders” was a breach of trust and journalistically unethical. In the future, specifics of the utterances could revealed and that will cause an unnecessarily difficult situation especially while conducting diplomacy.
For fair-minded and independent-thinking Americans, abandoning this corrupt and mendacious mainstream media in favor of alternative media is a worthy option.
As always, consumers must be deeply skeptical while consuming any content from any media, and treat everything false until proven true following homework.
Image: Gage Skidmore
