You managed to author new trade deals with Canada, Mexico, China and the European Union. You brought NATO to heal by demanding other member nations pay their fair shares. The border with Mexico was strengthened and we were on a concrete plan to better regulate and control illegal immigration.

The economy was perhaps your greatest accomplishment. Usually, the president has little power to deeply affect economic cycles but you lowered taxes and eliminated draconian regulations, essentially removing the tourniquet off of the economy’s blood flow. It absolutely erupted. In fact, I would argue that the economy – running like a greased locomotive going downhill by early 2019 – was better able to shoulder the initial economic shut down due to COVID.  Had Hillary been in the White House, I have no doubt that her weak economy would have tanked with a COVID shuttering. 

But once COVID hit, you implemented that shutdown and you seemed – at least initially – on top of the crisis. Always remember that politics is perception. And, fair or not, the media helps shape perception. Once the summer of 2020 came, you stopped acting like an active leader. You never directly addressed the people, as Reagan or the Bushes would have done. You never inspired confidence in our ability to defeat the virus. Instead, you endlessly moaned about the media and tried to shape perception via Twitter, which was largely unsuccessful.

I have no doubt that the media single-handedly destroyed your presidency with all the misinformation it monolithically propagated. From Charlottesville, VA, to COVID, you never could use the media for your own purposes. Instead, you antagonized it by fighting with Jim Accosta, Chris Cuomo, and other talking heads with whom you had no business arguing, like a child on a recess playground. 

George W. Bush understood that you will never gain the full support of the media and so when it was critical, he ignored it. He placed the media beneath himself and his office, which is absolutely proper.

Your ego would not allow you to be gentlemanly, empathetic or kind. I think this is one reason why the media hated you so much. And instead of leading the people through the COVID crisis, you were viewed by most Americans as petty. If you would have just been nice, pleasant and active for the media, you’d be president today.

Also significant, you never could give others credit when things went well or take the blame when they did not. Reagan was always the first to admit when he was wrong and when he was right, he credited others instead of himself. George H. W. Bush and his son did the same. Obama and Clinton were mixed with this – I saw them give and take credit. But you? You always took credit for everything, without exception. And what’s worse, when things went haywire, you blamed everyone else. What you did to Jeff Sessions was completely wrong. And you ended up doing the same thing to James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, William Barr and many others. During your four years you had four chiefs of staff, five Deputy Chiefs of Staff, four national security advisers and three secretaries of defense. The rate of turnover in your administration was higher than any other president.

Lastly, you manufactured what now seem to have been completely untrue stories about election fraud. You did this in complete dismissal of the truth and most damning, you willfully lied about it for over eight weeks while you should have been focused like a laser on Georgia.

When Republicans tried to legally and constitutionally stand against the electoral votes in certain swing states on January 6 (a largely symbolic gesture), you encouraged your supporters to march on the capitol, which they did. And when they overran the capitol police, ultimately causing the deaths of six Americans and the vandalism of our capitol building, you sat and watched, like Nero playing his fiddle, for hours and hours.

You never made it clear that this was illegal, violent, murderous and destructive. You, it seems to me, tacitly approved while the capitol was ransacked. This is pathetic. You sir do not deserve to be our president. I do not support impeachment or removal because it is essentially a fait accompli. 

However, your dithering on 6 January absolutely and concretely confirms that your time in Washington is over, forever. I will never vote for you again because you placed yourself above your office and the Constitution. 

Your actions have probably destroyed the Republican Party in its present form. And the damage that Biden-Harris will inflict on the nation will further illustrate the depths of your failure. Perhaps worst of all, the media’s false claims about gun-toting, redneck, racist conservatives that have been made for years have now been given a real example, the damaging results of which will not be known for a long time.

Goodbye, Mr. Trump. Go into that good night silently, please. Someday I will forgive you, but I don’t know when.

In the 4th century BC, Aristotle theorized that a thing is real if it can be detected with sensory perception. To touch, hear, see or smell a thing means it’s real. Then in the 17th century, Rene Descartes theorized that there is not only sensory perception but also the conscious mind. “I think, therefore I am,” or cogito ergo sum, described his supposition that human consciousness helps interpret reality. His wax test was evidentiary. When we see a burning wick change wax from solid to liquid, it is still wax – it physically changed according to perception, but our conscious thought tells us it is still the same thing.

Our collective perceptions of the world changed more with three developments in the early 20th century – Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and World War I. Freud weakened the moralistic Judeo-Christian world by authoring the ideas of psychological inquiry into childhood experience. His id and ego became the new satans, so to speak. But his supposed answers were not scientific at all, but instead subjective and even mystical.

Einstein’s theory of relativity revised Newton’s linear views of the universe. The linear and unlimited power of the scientific revolution seemed a relic of the past. Archimedes’ quote, “If you give me a lever and a place to stand, I can move the world,” no longer held sway. The world in the 20th century was becoming not more known, but instead more ambiguous.

Add to that the unmitigated human disaster of World War I that killed over 17 million people and absolutely annihilated Victorian ideals of progress through technology. Dadaism and cubism in artistic expression reflected this new chaos in the 1920s and 1930s as did the Lost Generation in literature whose stories reflected a perceived lack of meaning in a materialistic and flawed world.

Finally, the emergence of post-modernism opened Pandora’s Box to the extent that one’s own perception of anything gives that thing legitimacy. What is red, is pink to me. What is male is actually female, vice versa or even neither. College costs money. But wait, if I perceive that the government can pay for it that makes it free to me – that’s my perception, therefore that’s my reality. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and their ilk are evidence of thinking things into existence in their own ontological process. The Green New Deal is a compelling example of this alternate reality.

Universal truth, scientific inquiry, logic and reason are dead to these people. And the most damning example of this is the media. Facts and truth are lost to the news channels. Jim Accosta, Jake Tapper, Chris Cuomo and on and on – they are so obsessed with damning Donald Trump that they have lost all integrity and reality. Their news coverage is beyond biased, it is propagandistic to its core.

The American, French and Russian Revolutions were all highly influenced by the press. Revolutionaries seized the papers first – the Jacobins in 1792 in Paris, the Bolsheviks established Isvestia and Pravda in Moscow in late 1917 and lastly newspapers and pamphleteers, namely Thomas Paine, supported Washington, Jefferson and Adams from 1775-1783. Having a compelling voice in media is paramount, especially in a republican democracy.

Traditionally, our own media has been regulated, generally speaking, by an academic urge to inform the people. That’s not to say that early republican newspapers were not biased – they were. Editors shilling for a certain party were commonplace. But into the mid-20th century, a clear line existed between editorial and news or journalism and the latter was a product sold in a competitive market. People needed to trust that product and so journalists needed to strive for honesty. Then three things occurred that forever changed that: the 1960s counterculture movement, the Vietnam War and Watergate.

The counterculture movement is the seed of the radicalization of the Democrat Party. The baby boomer generation, coming of age in the 1960s, rebelled against their parents, social norms, the government and anything else they deemed unjust. The Vietnam War seemed to legitimize the radicals’ theory that the government was by nature conservative, secretive and most of all, self-serving to the point of seeking its own ends at the cost of the people.

The Defense Department under Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson lied to Americans many times – initially saying that the US was decisively winning the war. This all changed in 1968 with the Tet Offensive, which was a strategic defeat and a shock to the folks at home because of the claims of the Johnson administration. On Febraury 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite delivered his editorial stating that the war was unwinnable. While Cronkite was right in his characterization, this event on CBS was a turning point when the media began to create its own subjective reality.

Then came Watergate, an absolute paradigm shift in American History. After Watergate, Americans and especially the media no longer trusted the government and especially the president. The lies of Vietnam and Richard Nixon catapulted Americans into a new reality. And journalists discovered the “gotcha” moment for which they would collectively thirst – a career-making event that could earn them a Pulitzer, a la Woodward and Bernstein.

Today, this news media – now in a 24/7 cycle and all over the internet – is influenced by these formative events as well as some new ones. Postmodernism, political correctness and identity politics are now their guiding lights. A rabid progressivism has been unleashed and freedom of speech is under attack daily. Saying or writing anything that is illogically deemed racist, judgmental or insensitive can be deemed as “violent” by the left and result in professional censure. The press is the new Jacobin guillotine and their reign of terror has only just begun.

Cushman’s ideas of cross-pollination are noble and well-meaning, but unrealistic. In order for one to debate in the realm of ideas, the participants must agree on what is real, what is indeed factual. Right now the media is so explosively and virulently blinded by its own rage and monolithic group-think that facts are no longer tangible. They are phantoms. Consult any of a hundred interviews by Dale Jackson of Clete Whetli on WVNN … the latter will never acknowledge simple facts and so he is not housed in the arena of ideas (The same could be said of Dr. Waymon Burke).

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a perfect example. After a distinguished career in jurisprudence, Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court. Enter Christine Blassey Ford. Her story defied logic and ran counter to all other evidence about Kavanaugh’s past. Indeed, he had been investigated several times in previous nomination processes and his past was “uneventful.” But, because he was Trump’s nominee and because the left is irrationally protective of Roe vs. Wade, all logic and reason died along with Kavanaugh’s reputation.

The media seems to think, if I print it, it is so, or scribo, ergo est, or I write, therefore it is.

Here are some hard facts. Donald Trump can be megalomaniacal. He often acts like a petulant child. His lack of decorum can be embarrassing. He often acts unpresidential, if that is even a word. But he was preferred in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of State can absolutely be considered responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya. She also clearly violated the law governing the safeguarding of classified information and then later attempted to hide it. These facts are incontrovertible.

However, Democrats and the media continue to write their own agenda into what they consider to be fact. And though they may look friendly, cheerful, well-meaning and truthful on their countless news shows on all the different channels, they are actually Robespierre holding the trigger line to drop the heavy blade, delivering their own tyranny of virtue, their own liberal reality. Their true nature is clear to see to anyone willing to think, as Aristotle and Descartes may say if only they were here.

Kenneth B. Moore is a missile defense engineer and college history teacher