When it comes to anything related to Donald Trump, you simply can’t trust a word the corporate media says. You must judge him by his actions yourself.

Header image: Trump speaking at his second inauguration (Photo: The White House)

I never thought I would say this, but I am actually glad that Donald Trump is President of the United States again. Having started out as someone who never really liked the guy, I watched his original run for Republican Party nominee with amazement. Not paying much attention to TV shows, I only knew him from his short appearances at WWE events back then. In case you do not remember, this was a time when the corporate media in the US still pushed his candidacy heavily, mostly because it brought them great ratings and readership numbers and also, I suspect, because many journalists thought his campaign was pretty hilarious and he had no chance of winning anyway. This of course all changed when he won the nomination and was suddenly a real contender to actually becoming president. Suddenly, corporate media — which had built Trump up and, in many ways, only made his candidacy possible in the first place — panicked. Now, journalists everywhere turned on Trump and started a never-ending cycle of vicious attacks against him.

The more the corporate media attacked Trump, the more I found myself begrudgingly sympathising with him. This was mostly due to the unfair treatment he received by the press. They cut his speeches in a way that made him look like an idiot, they claimed he had said and done certain things when he hadn’t, and they constantly took him out of context. Most people bought these manipulations by the media hook, line and sinker, but as someone trained to check stories for factuality, I had this stupid habit of listening to his full speeches on C-SPAN and reading all the original source documents I could find in full. And doing that, it became obvious that many of my colleagues who were writing about Trump were full of shit. Which is also why I correctly predicted both his election and his re-election when pretty much all of corporate media was caught with their pants down.

I was already very much amused by the hypocrisy of trying to make Trump seem like the worst human being in history for the “grab them by the pussy” comment, when the husband of his rival candidate was famous for having his dick sucked by an intern in the White House and then boldly claiming that this did not constitute “having sex”. I might have found this kind of idiocy by the press initially funny, but when the infamous Zelensky phone call and the resulting impeachment debacle rolled around, I’d had enough. To me, it was plain to see that the charges were bullshit and the press, by and large, going with the story anyway made me mad as hell. Anyone who read the (pretty short) transcript in question could see that the charges were a joke. Journalists not doing their job actually got me more and more on the side of Trump.

The Russigate insanity didn’t help either, of course. This was another stupid theory that any sane person, who actually did some work and read a couple of pages of primary sources, could see was probably cooked up propaganda bullshit. I came to this conclusion early on, simply by using a bit of common sense and some basic reading skills — long before any of the official inquiries eventually finished and came to the same obvious conclusion that the underlying document was fake and that this premise was based on political propaganda instead of facts. It was an elaborate conspiracy theory … and not even a good one.

What finally sealed the deal for me, when it came to supporting Trump rather than his opposition, was the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. When the Democratic Party, the intelligence services, Big Tech and — worst of all — the press colluded to suppress a factual story that would have very likely lost Biden the election, I finally had enough. At that point, Trump was looking more and more like an actual saviour of US democracy rather than the lesser evil I’d previously come to see him as. Never mind the fact that what he did during his first term is actually quite good, if you look at what was actually done instead of what the press reported as having happened. Sure, Trump has done plenty of dumb things, the pandemic lockdowns and the push for vaccine passports top the list, but his anti-war policies and his stance on China were laudable. I even agree with most of his hostility towards the EU and the German government … and I live in Germany. In many cases I was glad that the US under Trump was a check on the more insane policies coming out of the EU parliament, NATO and from the German government.

I am hoping that a second Trump government will do away with the censorship-industrial complex that was established under Joe Biden. What we have seen of the collaboration between the FBI, major US universities like Stanford and the social media companies was mostly likely only the tip of the iceberg. This whole “industry” with its anti-disinformation people, fact checkers and NGOs will be the death of a functioning democratic system and I sincerely hope Trump can manage to root it out completely. Hopefully, in time, this will send signals to politicians and lawmakers over here in the EU to do the same. This kind of state censorship by way of law enforcement/intelligence agencies and private companies will sooner or later be the end of all ability to speak truth to power — and as such it is the natural enemy of a press actually interested in doing its job.

And maybe, as a bonus, Trump will even end the insane war in Ukraine and get us all to back away from the brink of nuclear annihilation. Wouldn’t that be something?

Of course, now that he’s in office again, it will be the job of people like myself to hold his feet to the fire and see if he actually does the things he’s been promising to do. This job will undoubtedly be made harder by the corporate media, who are not going to stop their baseless attacks and blatant propaganda. Delineating Trump’s real failures and successes from the imagined ones, the actual dangers from the made-up disasters, will probably be quite hard. But I promise I’ll try to do my best right here on the blog.