From Trump With Love

As Americans all over the country prepare for Christmas, The White House has promised the American people a very special Christmas present.  President Trump has promised the American people that he would sign the tax reform bill into law before Christmas.  The House has already passed its version; the Senate has yet to vote on its tax bill, which differs slightly from the House version.  Besides the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and about a dozen lower court judges, the Senate has yet to pass any consequential legislation into law.  Deficit-conscious conservatives, Never Trumpers and moderates threaten the passage of the Senate’s tax bill, which requires 50 votes to pass.  In the event of a 50-50 tie, Vice President Pence will cast the tie-breaking vote.  The Republicans hold 52 Senate seats; therefore they can only afford two Republican defectors unless they manage to get support from a Democratic Senator, a scenario which seems highly unlikely in this highly polarized era. 

 

Right now, about ten Republican Senators have expressed reservations about the tax bill as it currently stands; although that number dwindled when Rand Paul penned an op-ed where he announced he planned to vote yes on Tax Reform and urged his colleagues to do the same.  Senators Corker and Johnson had previously expressed reservations about the bill but both of them voted for it in their capacities on the Senate Budget Committee, allowing it to proceed to the full Senate.  Conservative Senators Steve Daines, James Lankford and Jerry Moran, Never Trumpers Jeff Flake and John McCain, and moderates Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski remain on the fence.  Should the bill pass the Senate, it will then head to a “conference committee” where reconciliation will take place to iron out the differences between the House and Senate versions.  Most Americans would probably appreciate the ability to fill out their taxes on a simple postcard more than anything else.  I sure hope the final version includes the postcard.   

 

While President Trump has promised the American people a big, beautiful tax cut for Christmas, he has no plans to leave his friends in the mainstream media high and dry.  As most Americans went back to work and school following the Thanksgiving holiday, the President tweeted out his intention to give away a “fake news trophy”, saying “We should have a contest as to which of the networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me).  They are all bad.  Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!”  The President probably believes most of the Grinches in the mainstream media deserve lumps of coal in their stockings but one lucky network will get a trophy instead.  The media has a tendency to focus on trivial matters of little importance to the American people such as how many scoops of ice cream President Trump has at his dinner relative to everyone else at the table, what type of shoes First Lady Melania Trump chooses to wear when departing the White House to visit hurricane-ravaged Texas or whether or not White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders actually made the chocolate pecan pie she posted a picture of on Twitter.  April Ryan, the reporter who started the #PieGate controversy, actually asked Sanders during a daily press briefing if the White House supported slavery.  This should prove beyond a reasonable doubt that reporters these days care more about the spotlight than in the truth.    

 

Unfortunately, it looks like the President declined to include print and online media in his list of contenders.  If Melania got to decide who deserves the fake news trophy, she would probably choose Vanity Fair; which published an article suggesting that she did not want to become first lady “come hell or high water.”  A spokesperson for FLOTUS blasted the Vanity Fair piece as a “story riddled with unnamed sources and false assertions.”   In my opinion, the battle for the Fake News Trophy comes down to a close contest between CNN and MSNBC.  At this point, CNN appears to have a slight lead over MSNBC in the battle for the fake news trophy.  MSNBC might have more of a shot if Keith Olbermann still had a show there.  The peacock networks got a glimmer of hope this morning when President Trump sent out a tweet asking “When will the top executives at NBC & Comcast be fired for putting out so much fake news.” 

 

Team Trump has had a particularly antagonistic relationship with CNN’s White House Correspondent Jim Acosta.  At a press conference the week before his inauguration, Acosta and the President-elect got into a bit of a truffle which ended with Trump telling him “You are fake news.”  At a press conference in February, the President notified Acosta that he had changed the network’s nickname to “Very Fake News.” 

 

As Senators Cotton and Perdue rolled out the RAISE Act, a plan for overhauling our legal immigration system that President Trump supports, Acosta suggested that the President was trying to engineer “a racial and ethnic flow of people into this country” that would only allow people from English-speaking countries such as Great Britain and Australia to emigrate to the country.  White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller responded to Acosta’s comments by saying that only his cosmopolitan bias would lead him to draw such a conclusion about the RAISE act. Cosmopolitan bias has become a major problem in the mainstream media, which overwhelmingly represents the viewpoints of “limousine liberals” living in the big cities.  Acosta’s cosmopolitan bias probably also caused him to see President Trump’s calling Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” as offensive.  President Trump’s nickname for Warren comes as a result of her contested claims of Native American heritage, which many believe she lied about in order to advance her career.       

 

In addition to its rocky relationship with President Trump, CNN had a cozy relationship with Hillary Clinton; as evidenced by the fact that former CNN contributor and future interim DNC chair Donna Brazile fed Hillary Clinton debate questions that her colleagues planned to ask the Former Secretary of State at an upcoming Presidential Primary debate.  CNN escalated their feud with President Trump by deciding not to attend the White House Christmas Party for the media this Friday.  What a shame; I could not think of a better place for the President to hand them their well-deserved fake news trophy.     

 

Fortunately for those networks who do not win the fake news trophy, we live in the snowflake era, a time where the Hot Chocolate song “Everyone’s a Winner” describes how our cultural elites feel about competition.  I feel quite confident that President Trump will reward the remaining fake news networks (and newspapers) with participation trophies.

 

I sure hope the American people get a well-deserved tax cut in addition to a much simpler tax code for Christmas.  I have no doubt that Chuck Schumer, the Grinch of the Senate, will do everything in his power to make sure that does not happen.  The media will probably not laud the President’s proposed Christmas present to the American people the same way they romanticized President Obama’s constant promises of “free stuff”; which led Rush Limbaugh to refer to him as “Santa Claus.”  They will probably use the same recycled Democratic talking points about how the plan only benefits the rich.  Fortunately, the American people see right through the mainstream media’s spin.  A poll conducted by Harvard earlier this year showed that a majority of the American people agree with the President that the mainstream media serves as a purveyor of Fake News.  Fortunately, one lucky news network will get a Christmas present of its own from the White House; a fake news trophy that will hopefully be signed “From Trump With Love.”