Instead, the stock market kept reaching all-time highs,213 black unemployment soon reached the lowest in history,214 and countless Americans were getting bonuses and taking more money home each week in their paychecks because of his new tax reforms,215 but still the liberal media kept nitpicking every little thing he did or said, trying to spin it as if it was the end of the world.
People’s tax refunds were technically “lower” under Trump’s new tax code because less money was being taken out of their paychecks; money that would have been returned to them once they filed their taxes at the end of the year. Headlines from NBC News read, “Under new Trump tax code, average refund is 8.4 percent smaller,” and they reported, “Frustrated taxpayers are using the hashtag #GOPTaxScam to vent about their smaller than expected tax refunds.”216 All the major news outlets piled on with similar reports, but this was only half of the story. The other half would put things into perspective.
An executive at the Tax Foundation, a think tank that studies U.S. tax policies, told a New Jersey PBS station, “What the Treasury Department did is they adjusted the amount of taxes that were withheld from your paycheck every time you got paid, say every two or three weeks. And so you actually saw a little bit more in every paycheck in terms of less taxes withheld, but that means your refund at the end of the year might be a bit smaller than you actually expected.”217
Why would you want to give the government more money than is required each paycheck and then wait until the end of the year to get it back? Taking less money from each paycheck is much more efficient, but since many people are too dumb to grasp this simple concept the media spun the news about lower refunds as if people were somehow having to pay more taxes to the government, when the complete opposite is true!
“Trump is Hitler”
We’ve never seen the American media be so slanderous, vicious, and dangerous when reporting on a president. They sound worse than a raving lunatic you would find standing in the streets ranting about the end of the world. CNN and MSNBC hosts regularly say that President Trump is acting like a dictator and often compare him to Adolf Hitler. Not even in the months and years after the weapons of mass destruction hoax fell apart did the liberal media stoop so low when criticizing President George W. Bush for the disaster that the Iraq War had become.
Just two days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, CNN’s Brian Stelter gave the impression that the country had just been hijacked by a dictator. “These are uncomfortable questions, especially these last ones, but it’s time to ask them,” he began. “Do citizens in dictatorships recognize what’s happening right here, right now? Are they looking at the first two days of the Trump administration and saying, ‘that’s what my leader does.’ What should we learn from them today?”218
Don Lemon opened his broadcast one night by declaring “This is CNN Tonight. I’m Don Lemon. The President of the United States is racist,”219 and often insinuates the President supports neo-Nazis and could become the next Hitler.220
In response to Trump’s speech at CPAC 2019 where he highlighted his America First agenda, CNN analyst Sam Vinograd said she felt “sick” after hearing it, because Trump talking about “preserving our heritage” to her, “sounds a lot like a certain leader that killed members of my family, and about six million other Jews in the 1940s.”221 Another CNN panelist said that President Trump has radicalized more people than ISIS ever did.222
The New York Daily News ran a headline reading, “Trump, Not ISIS is America’s Greatest Existential Threat,” and went on to say “This is not some bit of clickbait,” and claimed, “Trump can wreak far more havoc on America, its vaunted institutions and its people than a terror group on the other side of the world.”223 Keith Olbermann later said that Donald Trump and his family have done more damage to America than Osama Bin Laden and ISIS combined.224
MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch has said Trump is a dictator on several occasions and people need to hit the streets and start a “revolution” to overthrow him.225 Fellow MSNBC host Christ Matthews even compares Ivanka Trump and her husband Jered Kushner to Saddam Hussein’s two murderous sons, Uday and Qusay.226 In his commentary about President Trump’s inauguration speech Matthews said it sounded “Hitlerian.”227
Just before the 2018 midterms an MSNBC legal analyst hoping the Democrats would take back control of the House and the Senate said, “We’re going to see if this reign—that [Republicans] now have control over all three branches of government—we’re going to see if this reign lasts for 30 days or two years, or a thousand-year Reich.”228 The “thousand-year-Reich” was the Nazi’s name for their planned global empire.
In the past, if an unhinged guest on cable news would make such outrageous statements they would never be invited back and the host would apologize for their behavior, but it is a common occurrence in the Trump era to compare him to Hitler, and it’s not just guests who aren’t affiliated with the networks, it’s people on the payroll, from regular contributors, to the hosts themselves!
Calls to Assassinate Trump
The endless streams of fake news painting President Trump as a Russian agent or the reincarnation of Hitler have incited countless unhinged whack jobs to publicly make assassination threats against him on social media.229 There have also been numerous arrests of individuals who have made such threats (and taken specific action towards their goal), but the vast majority of them go unpunished.
Just a few weeks before he was elected, a Secret Service agent said she wouldn’t protect Donald Trump if someone tried to assassinate him.230 After word spread of her treasonous statements she was forced to retire. The New York Times even published several fictional stories by various novelists imagining how the Mueller investigation may end, and one of them depicted President Trump getting assassinated with the help of a Secret Service agent.231
The anti-Trump mania has even resulted in numerous high-profile celebrities uttering threats of violence or wishing violence against him. Madonna famously declared she “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House,” but that was just the beginning. Johnny Depp asked an audience, “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” answering, “it’s been awhile and maybe it’s time,” referring to John Wilkes Booth (who was an actor) killing Abraham Lincoln.232
Jim Carrey said he had a dream about killing President Trump with a golf club.233 Mickey Rourke said he wanted to beat him with a baseball bat.234 And Robert Di Niro said he wants to “punch him in the face.”235
Rapper Big Sean did a free style on a popular radio show about how he wanted to “murder Trump.”236 Snoop Dogg released a rap video depicting himself shooting Donald Trump in the head.237 Marilyn Manson made a video titled “Say 10” (a play on words to sound like “Satan”) which depicted him decapitating Donald Trump with a large knife.238 Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong shouted “Kill Donald Trump!” at one point when performing the song “American Idiot” at a concert in Oakland, California.239 And of course Kathy Griffin posted that infamous photo of herself holding Trump’s bloody decapitated head.240