A Great Capitulation

In 33 days, Trump returns as president

The New York Times calls it the Great Capitulation as Trump’s critics and defamers are resisting a resistance this time. He’s the president and if you want to do business with him, you had better fly down to Mar-a-Lago—just as you visited Rehoboth Beach four years ago.

The press for some reason never seemed to say who visited FJB. In my Andy Rooney voice, I wonder why that is.

People are actually normalizing Trump this time. They are treating him like a real president. This time there will be no Little Red Hen throwing Sarah Sanders and her family out. A DC restaurant fired a waitress who said she would not serve Trump administration officials.

This outrages NYT.

Michelle Goldberg, the Paul Krugman of a new generation, wrote, “Since Trump won re-election—this time with the popular vote—many of the most influential people in America seem to have lost any will to stand up to him as he goes about transforming America into the sort of authoritarian oligarchy he admires. Call it the Great Capitulation.”

She is displeased with Time making him Man of the Year, an honor given FJB and Kamala four years earlier. She did not like the CEO of the owner of the magazine tweeting, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation.”

Every presidential winner brings great promise. It is normal to be optimistic after the election is settled. America has not acted this normal since 2012. Part of the reason is Republicans pinned the blame on Romney and not on the Russians.

Goldberg wrote, “Most shocking of all, last week ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, made the craven decision to settle a flimsy defamation case brought by Trump.”

Flimsy? Saying a man was found liable for rape when he was not seems rather serious to me. Disney’s ABC agreed to pay Trump $15 million and his lawyers $1 million. The network ordered George Stephanopoulos to apologize on the air.

This came days before Trump’s lawyers would depose Stephanopoulos. $16 million is a lot to pay to avoid such a grilling.

Rolling Stone reported, “Among the rank-and-file of the network, however, the settlement is raising hackles. Within ABC News—among a number of its producers, editors, and other journalists involved in investigative and political coverage—the move was immediately met with quiet anger and frustration, an ABC News reporter set to cover the second Trump presidency, and two other sources with knowledge of internal reactions, tell Rolling Stone.”

They were so upset that none of them quit or even used their names to trash their employer.

Meanwhile at NYT, Goldberg had other butter knives to grind:

Different people have different reasons for falling in line. Some may simply lack the stomach for a fight or feel, not unreasonably, that it’s futile. Our tech overlords, however liberal they once appeared, seem to welcome the new order. Many hated wokeness, resented the demands of newly uppity employees and chafed at attempts by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate crypto and A.I., two industries with the potential to cause deep and lasting social harm. There are C.E.O.s who got where they are by riding the zeitgeist; they can pivot easily from mouthing platitudes about racial equity to slapping on a red MAGA hat.

Didn’t FJB wear a MAGA hat during Calamity Kamala’s campaign? In my Andy Rooney voice, I wonder why that is.

As readers recall, two days before the presidential election, the Des Moines Register reported as a fact that Kamala was ahead by 3 points in Iowa, according to the poll it paid Ann Selzer and her company. The story spread like wildfire through the media.

Politico (and others) declared the Iowa Poll the gold standard of polling.

Politico gushed, “Even if Harris doesn’t win Iowa next week—and with a combined 9 percent choosing another candidate or undecided, it’s certainly possible things could change—the poll could presage greater-than-expected strength for the Democratic nominee in states with similar demographic profiles that are part of the battleground mix, like Wisconsin.”

The media largely ignored the Emerson College poll released on the same day because it showed Trump ahead by 10 points in Iowa.

He won by 13. He carried Wisconsin and the six other battleground states.

On Monday, Trump’s lawyers filed a civil lawsuit in Polk County, Iowa, seeking millions from Selzer, the Register and Gannett, the newspaper’s owner. He’d better be careful or he’ll wind up owning that chain of newspapers because it is a money pit run by white elephants.

Trump is suing CBS and other media outlets for their defamations and election interference.

My suspicion is Selzer wanted to go out in a blaze of glory with her final poll and deliberately tanked the numbers to raise morale for Kamala’s supporters. We shall see.

The newspaper’s spokeswoman a month later told HuffPost, “We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer. We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit.”

The poll was off by 16 points. The paper stands by its story. That’s like a surgeon sawing off the wrong leg and not apologizing.

On Saturday, New York magazine tried to mock the severity of the Register’s rigged poll, headlining its story, “Trump Threatens to Sue Iowa Pollster Who Annoyed Him.”

It said, “the standard Trump is proposing for stipulating criminal intent in any adverse poll he doesn’t like would shut down the entire polling industry. Who is going to publish a poll with unusual results if the candidate who didn’t get favorable numbers will immediately threaten a civil lawsuit or a prosecution by their government allies?”

The polling industry is safe because the big money for pollsters comes from candidates. Trump’s pollsters were accurate. The media’s were not. In my Andy Rooney voice, I wonder why that is.

The magazine said, “Perhaps Trump is just bluffing about going after the Des Moines Register through the courts; long before he entered politics, he was notorious for using the threat of litigation to make adversaries and critics weigh the ruinous costs of battling his lawyers versus just doing as he wished. But when it’s the president of the United States firing these brushback pitches, a lot of people are going to retire from the game.”

I should hope so because a lot of people in the media and in the government are awful people who have been in the game too long.

Clarissa Ward of CNN is far from retirement age but she should voluntarily find another line of work after staging a story in which she somehow liberated a man from prison with her camera crew in tow.

India Today reported, “CNN frees Syrian prisoner. He turns out to be Assad regime's torturer: Report.”

But we already knew the American media is crap. That’s why they are losing advertisers and readers and listeners.

Savvy business executives curry favor from presidents, no matter who he is, which makes this a great capitulation. Knees are for bending.