I & I Editorial BoardWe had to laugh, because what else can you do, at the media’s reaction to the handwritten letter that Donald Trump left for Joe Biden on his way out of the White House in January 2021.
The New York Times scratched its collective head about “how discordant it is with Mr. Trump’s public comments about Mr. Biden and the 2020 presidential election.”
The Washington Post noted that, during his campaign in 2019, “Trump called Biden ‘the worst candidate’ in American history, warned that a Biden presidency would unleash violence in American cities, questioned his mental acuity and accused him of corruption.”
(All of the things Trump listed, it goes without saying, turned out to be true.)
The press is surprised that Trump can be a genuinely warm and affectionate person only because it has turned him into a Frankenstein’s monster. Anything that fails to fit that caricature gets ignored. (We noted this in another context recently, “Say, Whatever Happened To All Those Claims That Trump Would Cancel The Midterms?“)
Biden, too, seems surprised by the tone. In his memoir, Biden also describes his shock when Trump came back to the White House after winning a second term. “Trump was immediately chatty and surprised me by adopting a tone so friendly that I thought he might be putting me on,” Biden wrote.
Related: “The One Thing Democrats Will Never Admit About Trump”
All this reminds us of the reaction from the same cast of clowns when Ronald Reagan’s handwritten scripts for radio broadcasts he made in the 1970s, and the diaries he kept after entering the White House, became public.
After decades spent crafting an image of Reagan as a bumbling, contrived, heartless half-wit, his critics were forced to confront the fact that Reagan was an intelligent man who had thought extensively about issues, had deeply held views, and that his folksy manner and plain-spokenness were genuine.
As then New York Times columnist William Safire put it: “These handwritten documents prove (to the dismay of all speechwriters) that the original revolutionary was Ronald Reagan. … (They) reveal a writer adept at marshaling a philosophical argument in a listener-friendly, conversational style.”
After reading “Reagan, in His Own Hand,” Christian Science Monitor columnist Godfrey Sperling admitted that: “I now feel certain that Reagan was in no way the puppet he has been portrayed, by his critics, with others doing his thinking. He was, indeed, a thinking man who searched out his own answers to complex problems.”
When his diaries were published, one commentator described “an appealing earnestness” in them that “delivers an unvarnished accounting of his days in power.
“In fact, Reagan was a master of the art of summary. Where other diarists prattle on, unsure of what is important, he found it easy to identify the salient point of a meeting or a conversation, leaving the irrelevant details aside. He was also a fairly facile writer.”
Of course, Reagan’s critics never admitted that it was they themselves who’d created that caricature, or that they did so because they hated Reagan’s policies, just as they have done with Trump for the same reason. Nor will they ever admit it when the leftist politicians they lionize are loathsome, corrupt, incompetent, hatemongers (which countless of them are).
The public was able to see past the cartoon version of Reagan. But not so much with Trump, who is often his own worst enemy. (We blame him entirely for the Republicans’ midterm election wipeout.) But the side of Trump that TDS sufferers refuse to acknowledge is that of a man who truly loves this country and wants the best for her and for us.
Which is why they, and not we, are surprised by the letter Trump left for his successor.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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