Goldnadel: ‘The Moral Left Condemned Trump from the Start’

Before Donald Trump’s presidential term had even begun, the left was crying wolf. For a lawyer, the smallest excuse will do when it comes to making the U.S. president look bad, but that only increases his popularity.

Even the sharpest critics of the 45th president of the United States agree that the impeachment inquiry initiated by the Democrat-led U.S. House of Representatives could backfire on them. Recent U.S. public opinion polls show that Americans have hardly changed their minds following the attempt to remove Trump from office, which may come to an abrupt end.

In a way, the excessive hatred directed at the reviled U.S. president unites all of the people who naturally and instinctively — and regardless of their political propensities — want to protect the bullied from the bully.

When something is set out to be accomplished, a deadline eventually looms.

It so happens that I anticipated the impeachment inquiry in a previous article I wrote for Le Figaro nearly two years ago entitled “Donald Trump: Chronicle of a Lynching by the Media, Intellectual and Artistic Community.”

The time has now come for me to restate the warning I addressed to my readers on Jan. 23, 2017, a few days after the president’s inauguration. Below is an excerpt.

“This article intends first and foremost to establish that without having yet committed the smallest reprehensible act as president, the 45th president of the United States of America has already been condemned by people who claim to hate bias.

Regardless of his future successes and failures, honesty demands that we acknowledge that the top U.S. citizen — who is treated like its worst citizen — has been tripped up like no other elected president before him, even if he did not win the popular vote, which is nothing new in America’s Electoral College-based voting system.

The impeachment inquiry is not only a big parade of baseless accusations. Deep down, it represents a challenge to the elected president’s very legitimacy.

And this is not just the case in the U.S.; on French public radio on Friday morning, France Inter’s morning show guest Sylvie Laurent — a historian and regular contributor to French newspaper Libération — openly questioned Trump’s legitimacy.

When Patrick Cohen explained why the radio station did not feature any pro-Trump intellectuals on air, he artlessly said that he did not know any.

The tone was set by France Inter one week earlier, when the host of the news round-up mentioned unverifiable information, as reported in a semi-confidential blog, that led listeners to believe that the elected president was an ardent urolagnia fetishist. France Inter’s “humorist” Sophia Aram clearly could not stay mum about the claim for long and incorporated it into her segment.

The same media outlets that fling mud at uncouth fascist groups and those spreading fake news online do not hesitate to lower themselves to use their very same practices, as if challenging the impious president’s legitimacy warrants the worst means possible in the greatest geometric and inconsistent tradition of the moral left.

Firstly, let me establish the terms of the debate: A person can, as the author of this article, not like the style, remarks and mindset of the U.S. president, which can be characterized as vulgar, to put it simply. However, it is not forbidden and it is even necessary, to feel revolted by the movement challenging the election’s outcome — painting it as fascistic — and the form it has taken, which resembles the start of a civil war.

This civil war has been declared between the virtual world of Hollywood and the real world of the workers and the middle class that put Trump in power. Nobody knows yet how it will end, and nobody is able to say who will triumph; will it be the heralds of political poetry or the new hero of raw realism?

But on the eve of this merciless war, moral and intellectual honesty require me to point out that these so-called antifascists were the first to declare war and use nauseating fascistic methods to this end.

One such method became clear when Jennifer Holliday, an award-winning African American singer, appeared on television to explain why she ultimately refused, after initially accepting, the president’s invitation to sing at his inauguration. She thought it would be an occasion for unity but “didn’t realize that people weren’t really over the election.”

The day after Holliday’s acceptance of the invitation was announced, the singer was confronted with thousands of vengeful tweets calling her a “race traitor”* and the “N-word”: “I received death threats and was told to kill myself; it was terrible.”* [The French seems to have paraphrased her comments on "The View." I watched the complete video but she never says this exact quote all in one go] Holliday was saddened when she realized that many of these messages came from the black community, particularly from the radical Black Lives Matter organization, the very same group that President Barack Obama drew closer to toward the end of his term.

U.S. universities have also declared a civil war.

At Georgetown University, Professor April Sizemore-Barber went as far as giving students credit for attending an anti-Trump teach-in aimed at “sowing seeds for liberation.”

Another professor harassed her Muslim colleague, Asra Nomani, who publicly admitted that she voted for Trump, with messages in which she wrote, “I’ve written you off as a human being” since “your vote helped normalize Nazis in D.C.”

In the same anti-Nazi vein, worthy of the notions held by left-wing French politicians such as Vincent Peillon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, college students have protested the arrival of Hitler in America. In an excellent article published in Le Figaro on Jan. 20, 2017, Laure Mandeville described how black activists from the Revolutionary Communist Party were yelling out, “Don’t you see that Trump will do to Muslims what Hitler did to Jews?!”*

These excerpts give you an idea of what was being written and said about the democratically elected president before he had carried out the slightest act or committed the merest of blunders. Since then, a civil war has continued to be waged by the two camps, and the language used in reference to the reviled president has not changed. In addition, Trump has been called an anti-Semite and Nazi in spite of the fact that he has Jewish relatives and supports Israel. A number of women have accused him — without evidence — of sexual harassment and rape, and he was suspected of consorting with his Russian rival before ultimately being cleared of the allegations. Former porn actress Stormy Daniels, with whom he had an intimate relationship, tried to blackmail him once again after he had paid the price for her (expected) silence. Americans were not shocked by the controversy. She publicly joked about the size and shape of the president’s penis, which gave a certain set of normally puritanical Americans a good laugh.

Let's come back to the inquiry, which reproaches the president for having, based on disconcerting factual evidence, pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to dig up compromising information on the son of Trump’s most serious rival. The most nonpartisan legal experts are not sure that such behavior legally warrants impeachment proceedings.

The proceedings urgently conducted by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives were done with haste and deprived the president of legal representation. Now that the required majority for impeachment has been obtained, Democrats are balking at speedily referring the case to the Republican-dominated Senate, which is steadfastly awaiting their decision with similar impatience.

But this is beside the point. I am writing this article, which is an extension of the article I wrote two years ago, to argue that Trump’s opponents should have meditated on the story of “Peter and the Wolf.”

With Trump constantly being painted as the wolf, or worse still, the devil with a forked tail, nobody continues to believe what is being said about him. Even Trump’s undeniable economic successes have been ignored, minimized and ridiculed. The American mainstream media, which are dominated by the moral left, have acted like Peter and shot off all of their rounds. Nobody believes them because nobody is really listening to them in the first place.

However, on a deeper level, left-wing media have a more serious problem.

They are not only the victims of a "Peter and the Wolf" syndrome but also of a loss of interest. The moral left, precisely because of its methods and also the fact that many of its members have been mired in hypocrisy, beginning with Hollywood stars, has specifically lost not only its credibility but also its moral and intellectual leadership.

Denouncing Trump has gradually lost its effect.

I would go a step further and say that this phenomenon not only applies to the U.S. president, but to other leaders as well, such as Boris Johnson, Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orban.

The less the Hollywood set reveres populist leaders, the more their popularity increases among underserved populations.

Someone who is systematically demonized by biased elites cannot be entirely bad.

*Editor’s note: This quote, accurately translated, cannot be verified.