Press Gallery, Peanut Gallery

As an Australian citizen, the result of November’s US Presidential election means a hell of a lot to me.  And I am an unabashed fan of Donald Trump. But the result won’t be decided in the Australian media, so the lack of balance in the local media coverage shouldn’t be enough to get me onto the keyboard.  So, take this as primarily a commentary on the parlous state of Australian journalism.

I have noted a reluctance on the part of any Australian journalist to give Trump any credit for his accomplishments, or acknowledgement of the manifest injustices that have been piled upon him since his inauguration in 2017, without an accompanying arse-covering swipe at his personal failings – generally unspecified.  It’s as if the writer expects that unless he makes this disclaimer, his readers will brand him with the mark of Satan Donald. This is almost universal.  For example, this from Greg Sheridan, who make sense on most topics but not this one:

But this prosecution is so blatantly political that tens of millions of Americans will now lose trust in the judicial system. In the unravelling of American society, the loss of faith in institutions has been central.

Trump has contributed to that by many gross and reckless statements and dubious actions.

And:

By the time of his re-election bid in 2020, Trump had a presidential record that had good and bad in it.

He had a good economic record. He had increased defence spending more than any Democrat would have done. He had overseen the historic Abraham Accords in the Middle East, by which Israel and several of its neighbours established diplomatic relations. And of course for four years he had also behaved like a boorish lout, very strange for an occupant of the Oval Office.

And recently, Peter Jennings, in an otherwise good article in The Australian, opined:

It will surprise few that Trump’s professional lifetime as a showman and grifter finally saw some charges stick.

My online comment to that article:

The Oxford Dictionary defines a grifter as ‘person who engages in petty or small-scale swindling’.   Might not Donald Trump, if he read this description of him as a professional lifetime grifter, regard it as defamatory?

Inevitably, the Oz moderators spiked it.

I could go on, but I won’t because I want to get to Tom Minear, the US correspondent for the Herald Sun, and the headline of one of his recent articles: “The contradiction in felon Trump’s key campaign claims”.

Accepting that this would have been written by a sub-editor, it nonetheless gave me an inkling about this bloke’s alignment on this issue. Even were Minear writing an op-ed, rather than a news report, it would seem gratuitous, a trifle over the top.  I read on (my comments interspersed):

Donald Trump is trying to convince Americans of two things so they will return him to the Oval Office as a convicted felon.

Both cannot be true. He has little evidence they are. And yet, in what should spark alarm bells for President Joe Biden, plenty of voters still believe him.

The former president’s first proposition is that the case against him was orchestrated by Biden himself. Almost every day at the Manhattan Criminal Court, Trump declared it was the “Biden trial”, a claim he and his allies have tried to back up in multiple ways.

Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the trial, donated $US15 to Biden’s 2020 presidential run. The judge’s daughter is a political consultant who has worked on Democratic campaigns. And Matthew Colangelo, one of the prosecutors, was part of Biden’s Department of Justice before joining Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team.

Trump has successfully used these facts to undermine the case, at least in the minds of his supporters, who are now furious he has been convicted.

And a righteous anger it is too, since the case is and has always has been a politically motivated stitch-up of no legal merit, as high-profile Democrat lawyer and author Alan Dershowitz, along with many others on both sides of the US legal fraternity, has argued.

These facts have been seeded in fertile ground – the business of public prosecutions is inherently political in the US, given people like Bragg are party members who are elected.

But they do not offer any proof that Biden had anything to do with the hush money trial.

Whether or not Biden, or more to the point, the White House was directly involved is immaterial.  This is the Democratic Party machine doing what it has done repeatedly since 2016 — using any means, fair or foul (mostly foul) to hound Donald Trump out of public life and do whatever it can to ensure the re-election of the most feeble, and arguably most corrupt, president in US history.   It does not require a personal, smoking-gun go-ahead from Biden. All it needed was acquiescence from the White House. If this trial was as corrupt as most right-thinking people know it to be, the twin facts that the White House did not disavow Trump’s charge and that it was being done in their president’s name, means that Biden owns it as much as anyone.

And furthermore, Minear’s earlier implication that lead prosecutor Mathew Colangelo’s arrival on the scene was mere coincidence looks a little shaky when you know that DA Alvin Bragg, having been elected on a specific campaaign promise to ‘get Trump’, initially declined to pursue this case until, presumably, his spine was stiffened by reinforcements from the Department of Justice.  Be interesting to see where Colangelo ends up. Will he be content to remain a prosecutor for the District of Manhattan, I wonder?

This leads to Trump’s second proposition, that his 81-year-old opponent is the “dumbest” and “most incompetent” president in history. Trump, who is 77, is careful not to say Biden is too old, although he regularly claims he is cognitively impaired.

Again, there are facts that appear relevant. Biden’s verbal and physical slips and stumbles are increasingly common and undoubtedly an issue for his re-election bid.

As for his record as president, that is squarely up for debate – immigration and inflation are weaknesses, while he has struggled to communicate his equally significant achievements.

Significant achievements?  What are they? This is in the same league as Trump’s non-specific failings.

Is Biden dumb and incompetent? I would argue not, although many Americans disagree. But this is the essential point: how could someone so dumb and incompetent also be capable of arranging a plot to put his opponent in jail in a jurisdiction where he has no control?

Biden is just a player in this, but it’s reasonable for Trump to put a convenient label on this conspiracy.

As Trump raged about his conviction, even he seemed to concede this stretched credulity.

“This is all done by Biden and his people,” he said, before adding: “Maybe his people more importantly. I don’t know if Biden knows too much about it, because I don’t know if he knows about anything.”

In other words, Trump is not claiming, as it turns out, it’s a plot  mounted by Biden himself. So, what was the point of this article — other than missing the point.