It is a long and venerable tradition among those on the left side of the political spectrum, or at least they treat it as such: hating on whatever Republican makes it to the top of the political food chain.
In fact, it has become so common, and so egregious in the case of Donald Trump, that we take progressives’ radiating hate for granted. And we thus become prone to forget that their Trump derangement is simply the latest and most odious iteration of a decades-long tradition of leftist vilification of Republican presidents.
As the saying goes, haters gonna hate, and leftists become furious when the voters decide to elect any candidate of a party given over to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia — and likely several additional phobias. And they get their media echo chamber, animated by the same faux moral superiority, to drive home the message to the masses.
Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon was the devil incarnate, dripping with evil. They succeeded in forcing him to resign, but six years later, after the docile presidency of Jimmy “I Will Never Lie to You” Carter, Ronald Reagan showed up and was openly depicted by the left and its supplicants in the media as a racist at home and warmonger abroad. We were told that he was a serious threat to strip black people of basic rights and start a nuclear war. But the project proved difficult because of Reagan’s enduring personal popularity.
The left took a brief hate respite with Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush. He was not worth targeted antipathy because he was wedded to, or arguably even created, the post-Soviet uniparty, globalist worldview and was not the least bit threatening. He was in many senses the GOP version of Joe Biden.
Ah, but then along comes the dastardly duo of George W. Bush and — gasp — Dick Cheney. We knew from the start that 43 would be depicted as a dolt, a know-nothing Texas hayseed somehow born as the unworthy scion of a family of wealth, privilege and power. Lest we forget in the wake of the Trump era, the attacks on Bush 43 were vicious, scurrilous, and unrelenting. Unlike Trump, Bush refused to respond in kind, and his approval numbers were successfully driven into the toilet by the time he left office and yielded to Barack Obama.
As much as George W. Bush was reviled by enemies on the left, it was almost impossible to believe that the left could adopt a hatred of even greater magnitude while the 43rd president was holding down the Oval Office. But they did. And in Richard Bruce Cheney, they saw the embodiment of every dark and sinister force on the planet. He was the evil mastermind, pulling the puppet strings on Bush, the unwitting stooge. The mere mention of the name Cheney would send leftists screaming from the room in uncontrolled rage.
Of course, all of that was just a dress rehearsal for the main event: Nixon, Reagan, Bush 43, and Cheney rolled into one neat, oh-so-hateable bundle named Trump. Leftists rode the wave of their media wing and perfected their scorched-earth schemes to the point that a majority of Americans believed in the run-up to the 2020 election that the 45th president is a racist. Never mind his unprecedented outreach to black voters and record-low black unemployment. No wonder he lost.
The left will continue its demonization of Trump for a while. But as time marches on, and we come to expect the current president to stop blaming Trump for everything wrong in the world and put some actual points on the scoreboard for the American people, at whom will leftists direct their fire? With no Trump to kick around, who will progressives target and demonize as the latest embodiment of conservative evil? With a bow to LibertyNation.com’s Pennel Bird, who coined the expression on a recent edition of LN’s Conservative 5, who will fill the left’s hate vacuum?
And that takes us to the heart of the matter. Leftists’ need to not just disagree with but vilify conservatives is an admission that they cannot win on the strength of their own ideas and have been reduced to the assertion of raw power. They have sought not to debate but to end debate. It is far easier to simply dismiss the arguments of the enemy as so twisted that they are not worthy of response than to engage in a battle of ideas. Their summary judgments are that anything proposed or implemented by any Republican with a spine — especially Trump — is not just wrong but wicked. And feeding at the trough of Jan. 6 outrage, they are in the process of attempting to shut down the ability of Americans to even receive the conservative message.
But the most frightening part is that their latest, most virulent message of hate succeeded beyond the left’s wildest dreams. Having achieved its objective, the detestation machine seems sure to continue. And it will surely remain unchecked by a disgraced media that years ago surrendered its journalistic integrity at the altar of running Trump out of town on a rail by any means that availed themselves.
So who’s next in the left’s hate parade? Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Republican Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Josh Hawley (MO), someone else who dares to carry forward the MAGA/America First message? We’re not yet sure who it might be, but rest assured that with Trump disappearing slowly into the rear-view mirror, the left’s hate vacuum will soon be filled afresh.
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