Commentary
TRUMPENRFREUDE – The Urban Dictionary lists it as Donald Trump gaining pleasure from everyone else’s misfortune, and fellow blogger Don Surber used it as that feeling you get when you watch someone fall who tried to bring Trump down.
“This week – a year after Trump left office – was a spectacular week of Trumpenfruede,” wrote Surber. “It began with CNN firing Jeff Zucker. It continued with a jury convicting the Creepy Porn Lawyer (Michael Avenatti) of swindling Stormy Daniels. And now it ends with Chris Wallace whining about Zuck’s departure and having no staff in his new gig at CNN-plus.” Surber added that Wallace’s departure was the best thing to happen since Shepherd Smith left for CNBC.
Personally, I would have added Whoopi Goldberg’s suspension to the list.
“Oh, this is delicious,” wrote Surber, “Wallace, the man who promoted the Russian Collusion for years on Fox, is the one who feels the walls closing in,” as he notes that Wallace dislikes anchor Jake Tapper and Washington Bureau Chief Sam Feist at CNN.
SPEAKING OF SHEPHERD SMITH, his evening news program at CNBC attracted an average of just 197,000 viewers in June 2021, placing his show as the seventh highest rated program at CNBC, and eleventh in the key 25 to 54-year-old age group demographic. Each of the primetime news programs at Fox News Channel draw from 2.5 to 3.7 million viewers.
SPEAKING OF RATINGS, the Winter Olympics in China are a bust. Last Thursday’s primetime coverage garnered just 7.2 million viewers, an all-time low. Viewership plunged 55 percent from NBC’s first night coverage four years ago.
DAVID BROOKS – I understand if the name means nothing to you. The New York Times still considers him a conservative political and cultural columnist, but from his writing, you wouldn’t know it. Brooks lost most average conservatives long ago with his east coast elitist opinions, and a writing style that went over the heads of average readers. Like that of George Will.
For example, here’s one of his recent Tweets @nytdavidbrooks: “We’re entering a post-individualists age. America needs a liberal collectivism to compete with the nativist collectivism of the right and the multicultural collectivism of the left.”
You may recall, I previously wrote about Brooks’ embarrassing remark that Barack Obama won his endorsement after he viewed the sharply-creased pants of the candidate.
“I remember distinctly an image of … as I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks wrote, “and I’m thinking he’s going to be president, he’ll be a very good president.”
Brooks is an anti-Trumper, who is also horrified with his supporters. “He finds them childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America,” Glenn Harlan Reynolds once wrote.
Early in Trump’s tenure, in a bit of self-reflection, he described Trump voters as a “coalition of the dispossessed,” who have suffered lost jobs, lost wages and lost dreams, he wrote, “the American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for someone else.”
It was if he finally realized that it was Obama’s eight years that turned them to Trump.
In his column, Brooks conceded that “We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.
He hasn’t changed. He probably still has no idea how to get to Cedar Rapids.
Brooks’ view of Trump supporters mirror that of Hillary Clinton, who viewed them as “deplorable.”
Now, more than ever … may God continue to bless the United States of America.
