Why liberal reporters cover up for Donald Trump

A prim journalistic elite can’t cope with populism

Like court painters for an absolute monarch, American journalists prettify Donald Trump. They brush over his darkness and mendacity and, as is becoming increasingly evident, his senility as well. 

It is not America’s conservative journalists I am talking about - they learned to bend the knee in 2016 -  but supposed liberals, who go to enormous lengths to deny what is in front of  their eyes.

“Paint me warts and all” Oliver Cromwell is meant to have told his portrait painter Sir Peter Lely.  (Actually, that is a misquote. Cromwell said “remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything; otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it”. )

Liberal American journalists hide Trump’s warts, even though he hasn’t asked them to, even though he hasn’t paid them to do it, not even a farthing, and even though he hates them and denounces them as the fake news media at every turn. 

They do it because they want to, not because they have to. And it is worth asking why they grovel before  a man who supposedly represents everything they oppose

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