[Translated from GegenStandpunt 3-18]
Some more lessons from Trump’s America about democracy
I. Trump and his media The struggle against the establishment media
and for the establishment of a new one1. “The fake news media is the enemy of the American people” (D. Trump, about once a week) – he means the “failing” New York Times, the “Amazon” Washington Post, “fake news” CNN, and several other establishment media outlets in the USA. The supreme representative of the people has been waging battle against them for two years now. Their crime: they refuse to accept, especially as a fixed premise of their reporting and criticism, that Trump is right, he’s the right one – the greatest election winner and president of all time. So they spread lies and, together with Trump’s many political rivals, even try to bring down the president. They should therefore be destroyed – morally bankrupt as they already are, they should go out of business. Trump leaves their constitutionally guaranteed freedom untouched, but repeatedly asserts his right to impose certain restrictions. In any case, he denies their competence and legitimacy as credible sources of information and respectable opinion, and thus their status as competent representatives of the citizens’ right to an accountable leadership. He restricts their customary official ‘access’ to the corridors of power, their daily glimpse into the motives and backgrounds of government activities.
Trump significantly enhances the status of other media outlets. As a positive counterpoint to the ‘fake news’ of the others, Fox News – the propaganda arm of the Republican Party with its slogan “fair and balanced” and if nothing else the most successful news channel in the USA – is regularly showered with praise: “Fox gets it!” The boss grants some members of the Fox News team unprecedented access and considerable influence over how he conveys his governance and attacks his opponents: Sean Hannity, currently the network’s most popular host, apparently talks to his friend Donald on the phone several times a week – which is often mistakenly confused with a decisive influence on Trump’s politics. Experts on the subject point to a striking concordance between the comments made on Fox’s morning show (“Fox & Friends”) and subsequent tweets from the White House, as well as the conspicuously direct manner in which the show’s hosts address the President – knowing full well how attentively their fan in the Oval Office is watching. In return for the interviews he grants almost exclusively to Fox journalists, they thank him with correspondingly benevolent questions, suggested answers, and obsequious chumminess. In addition, various right-wing extremists on the internet who see Trump as their man, as well as some conspiracy theorists from the fringes of the far right, enjoy a level of official recognition they probably never expected.[1] After all, Trump appointed the former head of the far right Breitbart News Network, Steve Bannon, as his ‘campaign manager’ in the final stages of the election campaign and subsequently as chief advisor in the White House; Bannon was then able to exert influence on official policy – for six months, at least.
Trump, however, actually prefers to simply bypass all professionals of the public sphere, hostile as well as friendly, so he can tweet at any time to his people without mediation, thus without distortion – a kind of closeness between ruler and subject that only the wonderful world of the internet provides. Trump’s way of expressing himself there is also absolutely consistent with the discursive conventions of an online community: even in his new career as leader of the superpower, Trump cultivates the mannerisms and word choices of a private person surfing the internet, speaking freely and straight from the heart to like-minded people and boorishly to his community’s opponents. The brief format is more than enough – for Trump's ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’, that is, for declarations of friendship and especially animosity to his opponents, which is what makes this community so cohesive in the first place. On the other hand, Trump’s personal messaging does not refrain in the slightest from exercising the political authority granted to him by the state’s highest office. When he speaks to his followers and his people as an equal, it is always with grand pronouncements and demands that come from the very top. With his openly self-aggrandizing manner and his cell phone, Trump takes the cynicism of the highly respectable democratic ploy called ‘closeness to the people’ to an extreme – and thereby sums it up: it’s a closeness that lives entirely on a relationship of rule that passes itself off as a mere question of distance. This distance can’t ever be overcome by any twitter-like communicative bridge building, but it does creates a level conducive to understanding – for the political measures and guidelines that are constantly under discussion, but not for a second up for debate.
2. All of this makes abundantly clear what Trump demands of the press, that is, exactly that which he is constantly being accused of: pure propaganda. And in the most beautiful form for a ruler – as the free act of an independent authority that neither lies nor agrees with the president on every point, but clearly must stand behind him because and so that the people do. The daily journalistic strengthening of the state’s most powerful man – that’s the clear order from the White House.
This may cause a lot of public outrage – but it’s not misconduct. Because Trump’s unique approach provides a valuable clarification about the relationship between politics and the press in a democracy: the much vaunted ‘fourth estate’, its status as a quasi-component of state power that serves the governed people, is and remains one that is authorized by the sovereign. The respect that the press insists on is based on its subordination – after all, it’s not just anyone who is being critically questioned here, but a ruling power. This authorization is therefore subject to a condition imposed on the unofficial fourth estate by the official, authorizing power – and this condition in turn includes a sovereign assignment that the press must fulfill: Its criticism must be constructive, which might go without saying for a modern and responsible democratic press, but is by no means a given. After all, this means that critics have a universal obligation to provide those in power with suggestions for improvement, which is also the main purpose and indeed the whole reason for their critical ethos as guardians of the people against those in power. In its critical push for the people’s ability to consent to a policy, the press renders an outstanding service to their consent – it is only appropriate that the government itself decides whether it is in compliance with the condition of the assignment and fulfills it. It is nothing less than this general truth about the relationship between the democratic state and the democratic press that Trump sums up in his particularly blunt way: the consent of the people to the ruler – the effect that, from the standpoint of rule, media institutions should always have when they freely report and criticize – Trump demands of the press as its own act; it should exemplify the consent it is supposed to generate among the people, and specifically to him personally. Otherwise, as was said, its working basis will be taken away, and its usual access to the main policy makers will be restricted.
This is a major scandal for the press, and even a mortal blow for the affected press outlets, because they – as they loudly proclaim – live on this privileged interaction with the country’s most powerful people. Even this does not go without saying, though it seems to be taken for granted. In any case, this gives a pretty clear insight into how the established “serious” media sees itself: it may well go around in the consciousness that it is confronting a ruling force whose exercise of power it judges and criticizes impartially, incorruptibly, objectively, ‘inconveniently’, and in opposition. But that alone would obviously mean far too much distance from the powerful people whose activities the press reports and comment on; such a downgrading to mere opinion would be tantamount to a condemnation of irrelevance, which contradicts their entire self-image and business needs as authorities of responsible democratic journalism. When they hold themselves up as representatives of the citizens’ right to truth with all their objective reporting and detached criticism of those in power, their aim is to truly establish the closeness of above and below which politicians cultivate merely as a more or less sophisticated ploy. They want to mediate between the state and the people in whose name it rules, to communicate policy to the people and vice versa – citizens should be able to have understanding for the actions of those in power, and those in power should have understanding for the situation of those affected. The professionals of the public sphere therefore intervene between the two sides as the authority that turns this relationship of subordination into a relationship of mediation in the first place. And that – meeting the demand on both sides for this mediation service better, faster, more comprehensively and reliably – is precisely what the various journalistic providers compete to do: they do their business with a vicarious dialog between those in power and their subjects, and the more direct this dialog is, the better, so they must maintain as direct and comprehensive an exchange as possible with the wheelers and dealers of politics who create the material for this dialog with their policies in the first place. This then also determines how the agents of the democratic media view the state: when it grants the press access, regularly holds itself accountable for its governance, respects its important status and its criticism – usually in the form of maintaining a respectful, privileging treatment of a critical press while rejecting its criticism – subordination in effect no longer exists. If the elected leadership team allows itself to be regularly questioned by the critics on duty, then it serves the public as a contractor of the contracting people, who have a reliable advisor and representative in the press, which also keeps a close eye on the empowered contractors.
So it’s no wonder that the much maligned media doesn’t know how to deal with Trump’s clarification, that they see this power holder, who wants nothing to do with any such conditionality on his authority and his right to approval, as a serious threat. And not just to their own business, but to the beautiful system of popular rule in general, which supposedly depends entirely on them. Yet Trump does not fire the press; on the contrary: this president takes the function of a free press in a democracy very seriously; with all his polemics against it, he insists – as mentioned – on it fulfilling its assignment, that it approve of him personally as the people’s leader.[2] And precisely with his persistence on this issue, the currently demonized media is clearly getting the fundamental ideal of the journalistic profession upside down: it is not the free media that decides on the legitimacy of the ruler who grants them their freedom, but vice versa. They have an affirmative function for power when they take a critical and admonishing relationship toward it. With their whole oppositional self-image, they are the state’s know-it-all servants.
3. Trump has the strongest imaginable – because officially valid – democratic argument on his side for his demands and hostility toward the establishment media, and he invokes it at every opportunity: the vote of the people. How much the voters are calling out for Trump was proved by the recent election; the press has already proved how little it wants to hear these voters with its certainty that Trump would never win the election, then even more so with its constant complaining about his measures, his style, his past, etc., even though the people demonstrably love him. It may seem to the criticized critics as nothing but outrageous arrogance for Trump to claim in his fight against the journalistic representatives of the people that he is carrying out the will of those very people when he refers to his electoral victory. Even so, there is no other way for the people to make its voice heard in a democracy. And he certainly didn’t invent the art of speaking in the heart of the capital as the chosen leader of ‘the American people’, ‘the heartland’ or the ‘silent majority’ who are not given enough of a voice by a press obsessed with criticism and scandal.
The vehemence with which Trump insists on approval from the press has a political reason and content beyond his notorious vanity: Trump is certain that when a people speaks, especially the American people, it is always calling for a strong leader. The people need a leadership that asserts itself, that does not put up with constraints or dependencies or foreign claims of any sort, and certainly not the insolence of domestic critics. And this is a need that a responsible democratic press, despite all its demonstrative aversion to authoritarian figures, not only knows very well, but also recognizes. This is exactly what the US press demonstrates, by the way, when it measures Trump by exactly this criterion of strong leadership and gives him a bad grade: too sensitive to criticism, not sovereign, isolated abroad, perhaps even compromised; in other words: an extremely weak man at the top – which, of course, only serves to further antagonize the president. In doing so, the media is failing its entire mission: to contribute to his strength.
II. The right-wing alternative media and its TrumpIt may be an historic irony that Donald Trump, the former reality TV star, long-time darling of the establishment media and reliable ratings guarantee for their sensationalism departments, now appears as their worst and most powerful enemy, but it’s perfectly okay in practical terms. The right-wing movement that brought him to power has always seen itself as an alternative media sphere, as a defender of the true will of the people against the mainstream media: “The [establishment] media is our true opponent.” (Steve Bannon, shortly after Trump’s election victory while still in his position as chief advisor). The fact that Trump has made the slogan of this movement part of his program is celebrated by the movement as a victory over its main enemy.
1. The right-wing alternative media’s verdict on the establishment media is simple: it makes the nation weak. The bewailed weakness is of a kind that only the American superpower could suffer from: the inability to impose America’s will on the rest of the world of states without exception, while at the same time setting its own business world so free that companies turn profits, the national budget is in the black, lots of jobs are created, and welfare cases are no longer causing problems because they don’t cost too much. So one is dealing with a patriotic self-confidence that is worthy of a superpower: a love of the nation that is based on the triad of unrivaled military power over an obedient world of states, first-class business success for some, and a livelihood and hard work for others. And all this is idealized as the expression of a magnificent breed of humans who are free, thus born for capitalistic and imperialistic success. It’s a very small logical step from this lofty patriotic self-image to sharp self-criticism of the nation’s situation: wherever this nation, of all nations, shows weakness, the typically strong American will has obviously been weakened. Of course, the blame lies primarily with those at the top: weak politicians, mostly in the Democratic Party, who are too considerate of friends and enemies outside its borders, too negligent of the vested rights of some inside them, and too suspicious of the freedom of others, the entrepreneurs. But the problem goes much deeper than that: the morale of the people is obviously in bad shape it elects such weak politicians and doesn’t even turn its back on them when they undermine the strength of the nation.
And elsewhere in the country there are increasing signs of a disastrous abandonment of traditional attitudes about political, economic, and moral strength. So the misconduct of the authorities responsible for this is being targeted: the institutions of democratic public life. It is taken for granted that they are something like authorities with a quasi-sovereign function in terms of correct thinking and living. However, the exercise of their freedom to do business with information, commentary, and entertainment must therefore also result in an attitude that the nation needs for its strength. In this respect, a rather broad delusion is cultivated about the role and power of these institutions within the democratic power structure. For these right-wingers, the public sphere is much more than what it actually is – the sphere in which politics and the competitive society it governs are legitimated, but certainly not determined. To quote Andrew Breitbart, the founding father of Breitbart News: “Politics is downstream from culture” (meaning: whoever controls the culture controls politics). For these moralists, the sphere in which the people form their attitudes toward the state and capitalist competition is the very foundation of all politics itself. It is there, where the people let off steam intellectually and form their opinions, that they decide what will become of a nation in the material world of competition – and the whole world of capitalism and imperialism is a single ‘clash of cultures.’ Anyone who wants to change the American nation for its capitalistic and imperialistic betterment must therefore free the American people from their intellectual abductors and deliver them back to themselves.
The corrupters of the people can be found in academia and among intellectuals, but much worse than these dangerous people, who at least stay for the most part in their ivory towers, is the so-called “mainstream liberal media.” In Hollywood and especially in the country’s establishment press, a politics of weakness is promoted – in accord with the propaganda mission of the Democratic Party – by the promotion of a morality of weakness that undermines the strong people within. There is too much critical distance from the nation’s wars and the social consequences of competition, too much recognition for various minorities as victims of the American way of life who can therefore claim special respect and a certain amount of special treatment, and too much openness or even support for deviations from the ‘family values’ that have made the nation so strong. In all these areas which are so crucial to the life and prosperity of the nation, both the greatness and the necessary costs of freedom, which are voluntarily paid by honorable citizens, are belittled: the exemplary sacrifices of global military assertion, of self-reliant coping with the hardships of competition which are merely the toughening downside of the wonderful opportunities of the market, and of a family life that requires not the base selfishness of one’s own preferences, but – as the God who blesses America has commanded – a sense of duty. Even worse from the point of view of these right-wingers is the idea that it is precisely recognition of divergent attitudes and lifestyles that is the true realization of the freedom promised to all citizens by the Constitution and really makes the country so great. So it leads to the historic irony that it is precisely the staunch right wing citizens of a country where freedom is celebrated like nowhere else and elevated to a national moral code who use ‘liberalism’ as a dirty word – for the immoral and dangerous rot that is spreading throughout the nation thanks to the degenerate media landscape.
2. Activists from the right wing alternative media have been waging the necessary culture war against the establishment ‘liberal’ media for more than thirty years now, literally on all channels. From the get-go, they have done so in the certainty that they must also exploit new channels in order to bypass the establishment media. Not only in that respect, but also in their presentation, this alternative media is highly reminiscent of the practices known from the ‘new media’ of the internet. And it offers – to say the least – a wonderful example of the harmony between nationalism and the love of free speech. Here’s a few historical stages of this rise.
a) At the end of the 1980s – after a loosening of US broadcast laws that made it so that political broadcasters were no longer required to offer a certain balance of opinions – a radio frequency that had gone out of fashion was revived to appeal to a commuter audience, i.e. people stuck in traffic jams for hours every day, and their need for strong leadership and strong morals. Rush Limbaugh, considered the godfather of conservative talk radio and right-wing alternative media in general, quickly became the most popular talk show host in a genre that grew in popularity in his wake. He began his shows by attacking doubters of the first American Gulf War and advocates of special treatment for women and minorities in the competition for education and employment. And because Limbaugh and his associates were concerned with asserting a valid, quintessentially American set of principles, they immediately dispensed with arguing in any true sense against their opponents and for the downsides that the beautiful American system inevitably entails. Instead, they offered a self-confident demonstration of a righteous attitude – and they did it the way its always done in a vibrant democracy: one exposes opponents who claim morality for themselves and their point of view as hypocrites. A small sample of this art form which is extremely popular in democracy: those who doubt the wisdom, purpose, and benefits of the American wars that our good Republican presidents deem necessary portray themselves as angels of peace, but are merely betraying our brave boys over there in the desert; they, not the Commander-in-Chief, let others fight and die for them and don’t even acknowledge the sacrifice. Those who complain about the drastic social situation of the poor, especially among minorities, or advocate for more social services or special treatment, portray themselves as Mother Teresas, but merely betray the hard-working Americans with or without jobs who make sacrifices every day in line with the principle of ‘personal responsibility’ and don’t complain; it is they, not some greedy entrepreneur or stingy statesman, who exploit people and let themselves be fed by other, taxpaying Americans. The best way to show just how much you are on the side of the good American morality is to point out the moral depravities of the moralists of the other side – which, by the way, is why the sexual escapades and shady dealings of the ‘liberal’ chief executive Bill Clinton provided enough material for at least a decade of airtime.
The whole thing is presented as a series of brilliant achievements in the genre of “You should be allowed to say it!,” as a struggle for suppressed truths against the unpatriotic thought controls of liberal dictators. The feeling of oppression does not come out of nowhere – and is only partly due to the fact that these right-wingers understand the freedom promised in the Constitution as a license to cultivate precisely those time-honored beliefs and customs which, in their estimation, make the nation so free in its business and violent in its dealings with the rest of the world. The other part is due to the way in which the ‘liberalization’ of national morality is actually taking place in the democratic public sphere, namely in the form of a series of rules and prohibitions concerning respect for minorities, deviants, and victims. Against this practice, firmly established in modern democracies, of imposing a national sense of community through a prescribed hypocrisy among competitors who know their rights – a.k.a. ‘political correctness’– right-wing talk radio uses its own hypocritical stylistic device: ‘breaking taboos.’ In this way, it presents the nationalistic bigotry, moral narrow-mindedness, and fanaticism of the competition as a courageous adherence to principles in the face of a totalitarian ban on speaking truth.
The daily repeated exposure and denunciation of the indecency and hypocrisy of the ‘liberal’ paragons of virtue proves above all what a virtuous figure the accuser is. It’s a perfect circle of an admirable personality and exemplary attitude in the form of a public opinion leader: the relentless demonstration of one’s own right-wing views raises the credibility of the person above all doubt; conversely, the credibility of the person proves the exemplary quality of the demonstratively cultivated right-wing views, and thus also the truth of everything that the credible man of conviction says. The audience is also invited to participate in this event; they can call the radio station and publicly express their personal opinions on the issue – an opportunity they usually use to act like fanatical supporters, agreeing with the talker-in-chief and each other in turn. For listeners/callers to the Rush Limbaugh Show, this takes the time-saving form of simply shouting “ditto!” into the phone, calling themselves “dittoheads” and – taking advantage of the beautiful double meaning offered by the English language – having the motto “Rush is right” printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers. This was the analog model for the notorious ‘echo chambers’ of the online world: here, self-confident, opinionated citizens who won’t let themselves be fooled or manipulated come together to form a moral community around a strong opinion leader who tells them every day what they mutually confirm to each other.
b) This mobile echo chamber wasn’t the only factor at work– not just because a politically ambitious tycoon named Rupert Murdoch decided in the mid-1990s to conquer the ‘cable news’ sector, which until then had been dominated by CNN, for the right wing. The offer of a strict morality of strength and hostility to doubts about the nation’s military assertiveness is precisely what a nation apparently needs in a global war. In this sense, after September 11, Fox News took the lead in the general patriotic upswing in the wake of the global ‘war on terror’ and the country’s massive domestic rearmament – and, using all the above-mentioned means and methods of conservative talk radio, became the most popular news channel in the country, hence a formidable counterweight and, at the same time, thorn in the side of the establishment media. And even when the opposition’s candidate won the White House, Fox continued to expand its lead in the crucial arena of public opinion under the hated Obama. Hated because in his entire foreign and domestic policy, his character and his rhetoric, he embodied the self-weakening that is ruining the nation: ashamed of America’s power in the world, despising the freedom of competition, acting like an intellectual and disregarding the hard-working majority in favor of noisy minorities, which he also embodied in his person. For American patriots, this raised the question of whether the black man in the White House was even an American. One should be allowed to ask that too.
c) By focusing on the questionable character of those in power, another faction of the right-wing alternative media – on the internet, where the mission to be free from the domination of ‘liberal media’ found its perfect medium – celebrated its own particular triumph. The rise of this faction began at the same time that Fox launched its conquest of television: here resourceful right-wing activists began to exploit the freedoms and possibilities of the internet to pursue an autonomous journalistic agenda with a great deal of revolutionary self-confidence.
A certain Matt Drudge, who has since become the godfather of right-wing media warriors, made a successful start with a so-called news aggregator called Drudge Report. He offered his online subscribers his own collection of news items published daily by other media outlets, compiled according to his own criteria, and delivered daily. This was technologically new for its time, but the objective could not have been more traditional. Because this is the already the first core business of democratic journalism, which was supposed to be roughed up here, from the tabloids to the stock exchange newspapers: the sorting and selection of the many ‘topics’ that the state and the society it rules puts on the agenda in light of its self-ascribed responsibility to shape the opinions of its readers. In this case, they were sorted into important and unimportant – this is also quite traditional – strictly according to the need of decent patriots for strong leadership by decent leaders. And in line with this need, the website really created a stir with another core journalistic activity, namely the exposure of scandals or the scandal of the decade – the so-called Lewinsky affair. One snoops around and harps on the reports of other snoopers long enough until the establishment media, in the interest of its own role as mediator, can no longer avoid putting the topic right at the top of its agenda, and keep it there for several years. This shining moment of investigative journalism provided the activists of the right-wing alternative media with compelling proof – beyond confirming the moral depravity of the Democrats – that the ‘alternative’ media had the power to push ahead of the establishment outlets and force them to pursue their own business more consistently. By directly addressing an interested readership that couldn’t be ignored due to its sheer size, it was possible to exert significant influence on the topics covered by the establishment media and thus on the subjects of public opinion formation and political-moral agitation – which quite prominently includes the decency of those in power, the greatest right of democratic subjects.
This art of setting the agenda ‘from below’ and using the tools of the internet to ‘make’ the news that people should form their patriotic opinions about really experienced a revival under the Obama presidency thanks in large part to the achievements of Breitbart News – a right-wing website that became notorious after the rise of its editor-in-chief, Steve Bannon, to Trump’s chief advisor. In doing so, Breitbart made both minor and major advances over its competitors and predecessors. The smaller advance was in the method: the site started uninhibitedly and candidly inventing scandalous events and – with the more or less organized mobilization of an entire army of ‘trolls’ on the internet – harping on them until the respective stories, although refuted, had irretrievably ‘entered public consciousness’ and thus become freely accessible to reinforce existing enemy stereotypes – e.g., most prominently with the claim that Obama is not actually American, but a Kenyan Muslim.
In the words of Breitbart/Bannon/the entire modern social sciences: “The narrative is everything.” The bigger advance concerned the goal: it was no longer just about destroying the ‘liberal’ Democrats and their intellectual supporters and accomplices in favor of the other party, the Republicans, but about a struggle by right-wing citizens of firm conviction against the entire party landscape, which they scorned as the ‘establishment’ – including the Republicans who, it was said, always make lazy compromises with the godless Democrats. With the proven power of autonomous media, the aim was to conquer real power in the country from the commanding heights of culture: using tried and tested methods, they did their utmost to support a ‘Tea Party revolution’[3] for several years, thereby promoting a staunch right-wing faction of the Republicans into the mainstream until, in the course of the 2016 election campaign, they found the right man for the job in Donald Trump: he impressed this right-wing with his firm nationalist go-for-it stance which was later summed up in the slogan “America first!”, but above all with his willingness to disregard all the conventions and unwritten rules of the party competition and dealings with the media and to rhetorically blast political rivals, Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as the ‘liberal media’ that ridiculed him. He had already proven this years earlier with his own activism in the right-wing alternative public sphere: early on – this was the start of his political career – he positioned himself at the forefront of those questioning Obama’s citizenship and never really let up, not even after Fox News refused to give any more airtime to the rumor. The success of his election campaign, which he styled as an explicit battle against the political and journalistic establishment, proved once and for all that Trump is the right man to put an end to the national moral self-weakening caused by the corset on opinion and behavior imposed by the liberals. The beloved people also seemed to find him to be the right man.
* The whole thing has also given rise to the widespread rumor in America that Trump – at least at the beginning of his administration – is nothing more than an arrogant but clueless vehicle, even a puppet, of sinister intellectual masterminds who want to seize power in the country from the public sphere. This is how Steve Bannon himself sees it, someone who, with his right-wing agenda and the power of the media, is now setting out to win over Europe’s right wing as well. From his point of view, Trump is really just a powerful tool, an ‘avatar’ for a ‘clash of cultures’ in which the rulers of right-wing culture are calling the shots. The truth about the relationship between Trump and this public sphere is, however, quite the opposite: in the various outlets and activists of the right-wing public sphere, Trump has his means to have the power of the media work for him from the real commanding heights, as an intermediary of the programs he prescribes to the nation. So far, everything is still in order in American democracy.
Footnotes[1] For example, the website “Info-Wars” by Alex Jones, who has become the most ardent defender of Trump on the internet. According to Jones, the World Trade Center was blown up by the US government and the killing spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staged by gun control advocates inside and outside the government; Hillary Clinton also leads a child prostitution ring and Trump is threatened by a “deep state” of Democrats/communists, not least in the intelligence services. Jones on Trump: “What you do is epic – you’re on the level of George Washington.” Trump on Jones: “Your reputation is amazing.”
[2] This is also the reason for Trump’s notorious insistence on what his Counselor at some point dubbed ‘alternative facts’ – for example, the number of people at his inauguration. Trump does not simply ignore the democratic media, whose activities he is rather obsessively preoccupied with, but insists on the correct results of their ‘reporting.’
[3] See the article “The New Tea Party: A Second American Revolution to Restore the Health of the ‘Land of the Free’”