Trump unleashed

Tim Pool thinks Donald Trump is on his way to a Reagan-style landslide victory for his second term. The left seems utterly unable to un-crazy itself; the economy, while still buried under trillions in debt, is doing substantially better than it did under Obama, and the US's geopolitical position is shifting away from global laughingstock to Power to be Viewed Cautiously. What do the Democrats have, really? Not a single viable candidate has emerged—yet—unless you count Joe Biden, who as of this writing still isn't officially running.

So Trump is getting a second term, which makes him, for the moment, the opposite of a lame duck. Others have sensed this, too, which is why The Epoch Times has written an article titled "Now You Will Finally See Trump Fully Unleashed." Here's the lede:

Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has submitted his final report to Attorney General William Barr, stating he and his crack team of investigators discovered no evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the 2016 election, a key page has been turned in the story of Donald Trump’s presidency.

It was expected by many—especially in the Fake News media—that Mueller’s final report would prove devastating to Trump and would come with a slew of long-expected and hoped-for indictments of members of his inner circle.

But it was not to be. Not only would there be no further indictments by the special counsel, but Barr also informed Congress in a summary letter that Mueller had found no evidence of collusion by any U.S. citizen—affiliated with the Trump campaign or not.

Until now, due to the mainstream media feeding fake news to the American public for more than two years about the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the president has essentially been governing with one arm tied behind his back.

[...]

And now, it’s over. Whatever stories the media may want to write about Trump going forward, they won’t be basing them on supposed anonymous sources “close to the Mueller team,” spinning vivid fantasies about forthcoming indictments of key Trump associates that are based on lots of Russian collusion evidence Mueller supposedly is collecting.

While Democrats and the DNC Media Complex struggle to cope with the fallout from the Mueller report, Trump will move forward quickly and press his advantage.

Trump’s other arm is now free. And he’ll quickly begin using it, especially on immigration.

Trump is now fighting for sane immigration and border policies with both hands instead of just one. That’s why he’s suddenly talking about closing the southern border along with withdrawing aid from countries that won’t stop sending illegal immigrant caravans.

The article strikes me as too triumphalist, though, when it crows:

Lee Smith wrote in Tablet Magazine that this exposure of the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax is an “extinction level event” for the Fake News media, and he’s right. The release of Mueller’s report will only be the beginning of the extinction event, however.

The Fake News media is going to spend the next several weeks desperately trying to spin why they fell for the Trump-Russia hoax. I expect Trump will fulfill his vow to declassify of all the FISA documents, catching them in their own lies. That’s because the truth is that many of these news outlets didn’t “fall” for the hoax, they were willing participants in creating and spreading it.

The Fake News media’s present spin cycle is loudly complaining that Mueller’s final report is being “hidden” from them and demanding access to it, while simultaneously asserting that Trump and Attorney General William Barr are trying to purge damaging information from it.

They’ve been set up.

That’s because the Mueller report is going to fully expose just how much of a fraud the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax really was. Far from finding anything that could be used against the president, the entire Trump-Russia narrative is going to be exposed as a farce.

I can see how the Trump-Russia narrative is a farce, but exposing it as a farce isn't likely to turn aside the tsunami of stupidity that's been heading the right's way for a while. We live in an era of shamelessness, in which hate-crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett can have a mountain of evidence against him yet still walk free. Evidence means nothing. Exposure means nothing. Minds simply cannot be changed, these days, because we're long past the time when people could be persuaded by facts and logic.

As for Trump's exoneration by the Mueller report being an "extinction-level event" for the mainstream "fake news" media: again, nah. The article correctly points out that the media are already desperately re-spinning the Mueller report and rewriting history such that leftist journalists don't look like a bunch of dupes, but these days, all journalists have to do is petulantly insist, against all evidence, that they're right, that they're seekers of the truth, and a large sector of the gullible public will give them a pass.

I agree with the article's basic thesis that Trump now has more room to breathe and to act. As to whether recent events have somehow crushed the news media, I seriously doubt it. It's true that about half the country mistrusts the media as things stand, but I don't see that fraction growing anytime soon because trust and mistrust are, these days, functions of political ideology, which is one short step away from saying they're religious points of view.