Media Artificial Histeria

We’re living in a time of artificial hysteria, spread by what we call “the media,” as historian Victor Davis Hanson chronicles.

A month from now there will be a new manufactured news story that Donald Trump is savage, represents an existential danger, or is unhinged. We will hear of another Trump official cornered and driven out from a liberal-owned Beltway or New York City restaurant. An unhinged Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) will rant some more about impeachment.

And then the current hysteria over the border detainments will be filed, and go the way of the “s—hole countries” frenzy or Melania’s jacket melodrama.

We’ve already been through the dizzying odyssey of legal suits in three states over supposedly fraudulent voting machines, the nullification of the Electoral College effort, the meltdown on Inauguration Day, the Emoluments Clause tizzy, the 25th Amendment con, the various Russian collusion hysterias, the leaked phone call to the Australian prime minister, the Michael Wolff Fire and Fury fantasies, the Dudley Do-Right James Comey pre-indictment book tour, and all the surreal assassination chic stories, from Kathy Griffin’s beheading photo to the Shakespearean troupe’s ritual stabbing of Trump.

One day the president is supposedly going to blow up the world by calling Kim Jong-un “little rocket man,” and the next he is a partner in genocidefor not blowing up the world but reaching out to Kim.

One moment Trump will tank the economy and wreck the stock market, the next the undeniable Trump boom is not really his own but Obama’s. Give the media credit: it found a way to explain why 3.8 official unemployment and greater than 3 percent GDP growth is a bad thing (it will heat up the planet, lead to a crash, mask Trump’s crudity and make impossible impeachment, etc.)

Almost every Hollywood grandee has after 500 days weighed in on Trump to showcase his unique talents—the periodic “F–k Trump” rants from Robert De Niro, the Jim Carrey paint-by-numbers kindergarten drawings, the doped-up Johnny Depp hope of a John Wilkes Booth redux, or the Madonna foul-mouthed dream of an exploded White House. We cannot get much creepier than Stephen Colbert’s reference to “Putin’s c—holster” or Peter Fonda’s call for Baron Trump to be caged with pedophiles. The ossified Democratic grandees have had their say, from Joe Biden’s adolescent threat to beat up Trump and Eric Holder’s inane talk about a knife fight to Senator Kamala Harris’s “joke” about exiting an elevator alive, leaving a dead Trump behind in it.

NeverTrumpers have called for the GOP to lose the midterms, have castigated an “oily” Mike Pence, have called for the deportation of “contemptible Republican cowards” and the welcoming of illegal aliens in their place, and have suggested crazy theories about why Melania Trump was out of the public eye for weeks. Nothing they say on MSNBC or CNN shocks anymore.

So last week’s Holocaust/Japanese Internment hysteria narrative at the border will soon fade, too.

Despite all the sound and fury, the real people are unimpressed.