We might hope the latest of three assassination attempts against President Trump, which saw attendees at the 2026 White House Correspondent's Dinner fearfully crouching under tables, will have aroused broader awareness of real dangers, the president, and those close to him, face.
Those dangers take the shape of routine characterizations, such as a "dictator," and "threat to democracy," and "king," by a more than hostile partisan media.
Additionally, our nation's 47th commander in chief has dominated hostile national and global public and social media attention, since 2015. At that time, you may recall, he and Melania descended into a cut-throat political scene via Trump Tower's golden escalator, to initiate his first presidential campaign.
Few mainstream pundits gave him any real prospects for winning the primary, much less beating Hillary Rodham Clinton: a former first lady, senator, and secretary of state.
No press honeymoon upon taking office was emergent either.
The mainstream (or legacy press) immediately took to carrying water an endless blitzkrieg of weaponized legal actions, with the goals of discrediting and removing him.
There has been virtually no legacy media follow-up, in the form of clarification - that the high-profile Robert S. Mueller investigation into charges claiming Trump's 2016 election victory was influenced by collusion with the Russian government, was ultimately found to be unsupported by evidence.
Allegations claimed it was a contrivance on the part of Hillary a "campaign scheme," perhaps in an effort to direct attention away from the deletion of about 30,000 unauthorized emails, including classified documents, on her private server while serving as secretary of state.
Next came blockbuster-featured impeachment trials.
The first involved a Trump telephone call with incoming Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, asking him to check on reports that former Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter had been paid a million-dollar annual salary as a no-show board member of Burisma, a questionable Ukraine energy company.
Little mainstream media attention was directed to a C-SPAN video of then-Vice-President Joe Biden openly bragging before the Council on Foreign Relations about having threatened to hold back a billion dollars in authorized U.S. aid to the country unless they fired Burisma’s government prosecutor.
A second failed impeachment which began just a week before the end of Trump's first term in office involved politically stacked banana republic style kangaroo court U.S. Senate hearings which allowed no cross examination of witnesses regarding the chaotic Jan. 2020 Capital riots to be falsely branded as an "insurrection."
Again, mainstream reports and pundits omitted showing available televised coverage of President Trump telling protestors, "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
Following his first term of office the nation's 45th president was indicted four more times; twice by federal grand juries and once each in the bright blue jurisdictions of Manhattan and Fulton County Georgia.
Those efforts at legal maneuvering were transparently aimed at disqualifying him as a felon from a 2024 repeat candidacy with a complicit Biden Department of Justice and legacy media fully onboard with that goal.
Take, for example, the first federal indictment charges centering on the ugly spectacle of an early morning Aug. 2019 FBI raid on Trump's private Palm Beach, Florida Mar-a-Lago residence for classified documents — he as former president was fully authorized to declassify — whereas those discovered at multiple Biden properties including his unsecure garage (with no such legal presidential privilege) were somehow considered no big deal.
Meanwhile, the FBI sat on demons lurking in Hunter's "Laptop from Hell" for nearly a year throughout the 2020 election and even advised media companies to dismiss any upcoming rumors of Biden family scandals as Russian disinformation.
They complied.
In addition, the White House reporters and other insiders withheld information that they witnessed directly . . . Joe Biden's rapid cognitive deterioration which became inescapably apparent to the public during his shockingly confused debate with Trump heading into the 2024 election.
So, is concealing the fact that the leader of the free world and U.S. commander in chief has objectively determinate mental issues a national defense issue?
Not a tough question to answer.
Meanwhile, how is Donald Trump doing as a global leader?
Think, for example, that thanks to his administration's led joint U.S.-Israeli mission "Midnight Hammer," the Iranian Islamic Republic is no longer days or weeks away from having produced enough weapons grade uranium and rapidly growing its long-range ballistic delivery systems to exercise their "Death to the Great Satan, America!"
Three decades of past presidents since Bill Clinton, Republican and Democrat alike, have condemned Iran's role in terrorism against American citizens, interests, and allies but have accomplished nothing to stop it.
Nevertheless, after but a few weeks, The Washington Post claimed, "Trump’s central war objective remains unmet," and defeatist New York Times scolds asserted that his actions have resulted in a "blow to American credibility."
Dare to compare this with Barack Obama's "Lead from Behind" strategy that unleashed chaos in Libya permitting Syria to cross his chemical weapons red line, or Joe Biden's catastrophic exit from Afghanistan representing a truly epic U.S. humiliation.
Rather than cheer for U.S. defeat, wouldn't it be refreshing to see Democrats and partisan media finally put country above politics and credit Trump for courageously doing so with his life on the line throughout three assassination attempts?
Maybe by vilifying him less, more civil anti-Trump media and others won't need to scout ahead for closest tables to dive under for safety from assailants when attending his events.
(A related story may be found here.)
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read more Larry Bell Insider articles — Click Here Now.
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