Along with its propensity to treat everything that a Democratic president wants as a MacGuffin and to subordinate every story with potential to embarrass the Left to the immediate reaction of the Republican party (“Republicans pounce on news that senator is serial killer!”), perhaps the most irritating habit displayed by our political news media is this one:
https://twitter.com/CillizzaCNN/status/1057335139401895936
It is not, of course, untrue that President Trump wants Republican voters to be scared when voting. He does, and how. But — and this is the bit that Cillizza misses — so does every other politician in the United States. “Fear,” it seems, conjugates in much the same way as do “politics” and “divisiveness”: I run on hope, you run on fear; I do what’s right, you do what’s political; If we all agreed with my plan we’d be united; that you want us to agree with yours makes you divisive. And so on.
One does not need to be a political junkie to have noticed that the Democratic party is, at present, somewhere close to fever pitch in its campaign against President Trump, whom, over the last couple of years, it has cast variously as the second coming of Adolf Hitler, George Wallace, Andrew Jackson, and more. Nor does one have to be especially switched on to have observed that, in 2018, hyperbolic language is by no means the sole preserve of the Republican party. Last year, Nancy Pelosi described the GOP’s proposed healthcare bill as “death” and its tax bill as “Armageddon,” while Hillary Clinton argued that “if Republicans pass this bill, they’re the death party” and Bernie Sanders predicted that 36,000 people per year would die yearly if Obamacare were repealed.
Just as I would fear to be in a car driven by a spoiled 5 year old throwing a temper tantrum, I fear the left gaining more political power.