From glancing at the headlines (or even ♔at entertainment news), you could be forgiven for thinking a full-blown Watergate is upon us.
“Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg find parallels to Nixon era,” . Spielberg has said he made the movie “The Post” because the dawn of the Trump era was exactly the right time for an uꩵnabashed prequel to “All the President’s Men” that ends with the Watergate burglary. Hanks added that if President Trump invited him to screen the movie at the White House, he’d decline and be more likely to lead an anti-Trump revolution. “We have to decide when we take to the ramparts,” Hanks said, promoting his new 1971-set film about The WaPo’s and The New York Times’ decision to print classified deliberations about the Vietnam War.
Back then, “The Nixon administration tried to stop the stꦕory from being published,” Hanks said. “They took on the Fi🎀rst Amendment by saying: ‘You can’t tell that story, and if you do, we’re going to threaten you.’ That is going on, of course, right now.”
Actually, the Nixon administration didn’t just “threaten” the media but via its Justice Department secured an injunction to forbid The Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers. This is not “going on, of course, right now.” What is going on is that, like the flabby 59-year-old who can’t stop telling you how he scored the winning touchdown in high school, liberals can’t stop reliving ღthe Watergate era. To them, Watergate stands for the twin milestones, never approached since, of taking out a Repu✃blican president and making heroes out of liberal reporters.
Today, after a year of breathless coverage of what still looks like an evidence-free Beltway urban legend about supposed criminal collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians to s𝔍way the 2016 election, there is still no reason to think the president is going to be impeached anytime soon. And last month a devastating , 39 percent believe the media simply makes up stories about the president and only 54 percent trust the media more than Trump to tell the truth.
“Oh, well!” say lefty activists and their all𝔉ies in journalism and the arts. Let’s just make believe.
“The Post” is one of sev⭕eral Watergate-inspired works Hollywood is pumping out to troll the Trump administration. HBO’s documentary “🔜Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee,” debuted this month, while George Clooney just announced he is developing and executive-producing an eight-hour Watergate miniseries for Netflix.
Meanwhile, the headlines keep on coming. “,” ran a story in the Chicago Reader. (This, back in March). “,” screamed a Huffington Post headline in May. “,” ran an October headline in Slate. “This is moving sooooo much faster than Watergate investigation did,” on Dec. 1. Trump is at a “Watergate moment,” Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said on MSNBC the same day. John Dean, the former Nixon White House counsel who helped bring down the administration, waited until only four months into Trump’s tenure before making the rounds to tell anyone who would listen (Samantha Bee, the LA Times, even a Tennessee boys’ school called Montgomery Bell Academy💫) that Trump was worse.
For the Trumpsistance, “The Post” is not just an absorbing newspaper procedural but more like another “Lord of the Rings” outing upon which they imagine themselves slaying orcs with Frodo and Aragorn. Don’t be surprised to see them lining up to ౠwatch “The Post” in their cosplay finest — pussy-bow blouses for the Katharine Graham fangirls, 4-inch-wide ties for the Ben Bradlee wannabes. Except Ian McKellen never encouraged his fans to think he shared their delusions about actually venturing into Mordor to do battle with supreme evil.
Hanks is, of course, free to prove me wrong by “taking to the ramparts,” ordinarily understood to mean participating in an armed insurrection against tyranny, not just giving speeches on awards shows and inte🐼rviews to Stephen Colbert. (Which is the kind of stuff Hanks does even wheꦇn he doesn’t think the republic is in danger.)
The truth that Spielberg, Hanks, co-star Mery꧑l Streep and the rest of the enraged left can’t quite admit (because it would damage their chances of winning awards) is that Trump’s incessant Twitter attacks on the media may be unprecedented (and counterproductive, and childish) but they don’t actually endanger the Constitution and they aren’t impeachable offenses. There’s nothing in the First Amendment that says, “The president shall tweet no tweet abridging the freedom of the press by typing “FAKE NEWS!!!” at dul♛y accredited journalists or even Wolf Blitzer.”
Trump may share President Nixon’s habit of losing his temper, but if being tantrum-prone were a disqualification from high office we’d have needed a congressional committee to investigat🍰e that lamp Hillary Clinton reportedly threw at Bill during the Monica Lewinsky 🐽crisis.
Kyle Smith is critic-at-large at National Review.