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The volume of sustained, emotive, one-dimensional reporting on the Trump collusion with Russia story has no parallel. It occupied every platform, from the smallest blog, to Twitter, Facebook, cable news, newspapers and mainstream broadcasters (in Canada as well as the U.S.), almost every day for nearly three whole years.
If its underlying premise was correct this was perfectly justified. For since the founding of the greatest republic in the world, the United States of America, there has never been such a charge brought against a sitting president — that he was an agent, an instrument of, a conspirator with the leader of its principal enemy. Such was the charge against Donald Trump. That he was a tool of Russia’s grim leader, Vladimir Putin, that Putin with sovereign deviousness had infected U.S. democracy, and with serpentine brilliance installed into the absolute highest office of the world’s most powerful country a pawn and a stooge.
This carried the corollary that Trump, by all and every standard, was the most conniving, greedy and utterly despicable human being ever to have exited the womb of an American mother. Compared with Trump, Benedict Arnold was a Boy Scout, Eagle class.
This, in full, was the premise of the Russian collusion story. It stirred a mass journalistic frenzy, and any contribution to its narrative, which even tendentiously supported that narrative, was ravenously picked up and breathlessly fed into the great journalistic machine.
And it was all garbage. Collusion was a delusion. A willing delusion, I would maintain. Willing because every bien pensant journalist felt not just driven, but authorized by his or her social, intellectual and moral superiority to the vulgar Donald Trump, to find and scatter every hint, rumour, leak and — in some cases — outright lies that could lead to his political and personal ruin.
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