Opinion

A Very American Coup

REUTERS/Joel Page

David Krayden Ottawa Bureau Chief
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There’s a mini-series that deals with the hypothetical overthrow of the British government by unnamed but nefarious forces. It’s called “A Very British Coup” and presents the scenario that any illegal displacement of the electected parliament would not require massive civil unrest or military executions of the prime minister and cabinet ministers.

That would be too nasty, too untamed, too foreign to the expectations and sensibilities of a mature democratic nation. Instead, the enemies of elected government would subtly position themselves into power through coercion, blackmail and extortion.

I believe we are witnessing a phenomenon that has the potential to be a very American coup, one engineered perhaps with perfect collusion by the liberal mainstream media and the Democratic “resistance.” But it is the media’s participation in this sordid exercise that is most disturbing as media talking heads have convinced themselves that they have both the right and the obligation to take down Donald Trump as president of the United States.

This potential coup took on an eerie transparency when California Congresswoman Jackie Speier suggested last week that the 25th amendment be used to depose Trump due to his alleged mental incapacity. Nothing clandestine about this coup.

You see, nothing else had worked. First it was Russia and the imagined relationship between the president and the Krelim and how the two had conspired to steal the election from the hapless Hillary Clinton. Great story; it was always so unfortunate for the Democrats that that they had such an unworthy and unlikely victim in Clinton who was just too vulnerable on too many issues to make the narrative hold. Here was secretary of state with such a dismissive attitude towards basic security that to call it cavalier would be generous.

But that has not bothered the national media who relentlessly carried the Russian torch for months — even when that torch illuminated nothing of interest. But to see the media work themselves into spasms and gyrations over such an innocuous but unending story is like listening to the organ music crescendo of an old radio play that was meant to exaggerate the drama.

The blather about neo-Nazism and white supremacy or the sudden realization that slavery existed in America and how this has something to do with the Trump presidency is just as thin a political gruel. You can still find the Clinton-Gore campaign signs and bumper stickers with their names emblazoned over a Confederate flag but we are suddenly fighting the Civil War again and burying a century-and-a-half of reconciliation.

So they’ve said Trump committed treason; they’ve accused him of being a racist, a white supremacist, a Nazi; now they’ve moved on to suggesting he’s insane. The liberal media and the Democratic resistance remain in perfect synchronization. Did you catch the coverage following Trump’s rally in Phoenix this week? The commentary from CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the usual suspects was not just disappointingly biased, it was shockingly abrasive and thunderingly combative.

The liberal media has moved from being merely biased to a hostile activism that is bent on not only destabilizing Trump but replacing him. They described Trump as so unhinged, so bombastic, so insane that he had no right to be president. Just to prove it, that paragon of honesty, James Klapper, shuffled in front of a network camera to offer a jaundiced viewpoint that has been shaped by a disreputable tenure as the director of national intelligence.

You know, even the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has never been this reckless in wielding its partisan political axe. The CBC likes to say it’s a public broadcaster while conservatives in Canada are quick to insist it’s a state broadcaster. The CBC has been unabashedly liberal in its coverage of the news for decades; it gushes over current prime minister Justin Trudeau as much as it frowned upon forme Conservative PM Stephen Harper. But it at least tolerated Harper.

The folks at CNN and the rest of the media resistance have declared war on Trump and they want him declared too nuts to run the country.

It’s a very American coup.

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