A few weeks before the election, Greg Gutfeld tweeted:

thought experiment: Hillarys a widow or divorced. would surrogates like Newt still defend trumps behavior without Bill around? answer: yes

Now, I am a big fan of Greg Gutfeld. I don’t have cable but I watch his monologues every day via Fox’s YouTube feed. His jokes are usually more insightful than straight news journalism. But he’s missing a very important point with this question:

If today’s politicians—and the media, for that matter—were the kind of people who would refuse to enable Democrats who act abusively and illegally, voters would have felt no need for someone who talked like Trump.

The problem was not that Hillary was married to Bill. It was that Hillary viciously attacked the people Bill abused. She was more interested in maintaining her fellow politician’s power than in helping her husband get well. We saw the same play out when the press initially tried to cover up for Andrew Weiner. And when the press tried to cover up for Hillary, first when WikiLeaks leaked evidence of her crimes and unfitness for office, and then when Project Veritas did.

The establishment is more interested in protecting their phony baloney colleagues inside the beltway than in speaking the truth. More interested in afflicting those who afflict the comfortable, and in comforting those who afflict the afflicted.

If Hillary Clinton had divorced Bill, if she had been the kind of politician who recognized wrongdoing, there would have been no Trump running against her. If DC hadn’t covered for Weiner and for Filner, there would have been no Trump. If the media hadn’t been in the habit of covering up scandals such as those uncovered by WikiLeaks, there would have been no Trump.

But that’s the kind of place the establishment media have turned DC into. If Bob Filner had never left DC, he would have continued abusing women with no pushback from beltway politicians or the media. That’s why we got Trump.

Trump is, potentially, an existential threat against an insider clique, and they are reacting as if this is some sort of 11/9. But the amazing thing about Trump vs. the media is how utterly incompetent the media’s lies are. I know that I’ve linked to Scott Adams’s praises of Trump as a master persuader, but deep down, I still can’t see it. It doesn’t make sense that someone this blustery keeps coming out on top.

And yet, he does. Trump keeps fighting, where your average Republican would back down, and it works.

Take the latest -gate, about the Obama administration bugging Trump’s communications. It sounds crazy and conspiracy-minded so of course the media jumped on it and called Trump out for being crazy and conspiracy-minded.

They had spent so little time checking out the allegations that Democrats had previously been making against Trump, that they didn’t know some of them relied on Trump having been bugged.

All of those claims, such as Democratic Senator Chris Coons’ that there were transcripts of Trump’s conversations proving that he conspired with the Russians? Or New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt? Now that the media narrative is that it’s crazy to claim Trump was bugged, they are now rescinding those claims.

Chris Coons has gone on the air and said, no, it turns out, I haven’t seen any transcripts of Trump talking to the Russians. As far as I know, they don’t exist. Yeah, I kinda lied, and so did the media who repeated what I said.

Is this Trump losing or Trump winning? Ignore for the moment the mealy-mouthed denials coming from Obama-administration officials, filled with weasel words, including from former President Obama himself. Your average Republican, faced with accusations of wrong-doing and McCarthyite claims of “and I have seen the papers proving it, though I can’t show them to you now” would at best issue a denial and let the accusations live, and at worst refuse to engage their attackers. Such as Romney and Harry Reid’s accusations about his tax returns, or George W. Bush throughout his presidency.

President Trump charges in with a claim just as wild or more than the media’s attacks¹, and they immediately back down and acknowledge that there is no evidence for what they’d been reporting, that it was, as far as television viewers can see, all a lie, fake news.

And of course, if the media and the left were lying then about having proof, they’re probably lying now about not having tried to get proof.

Think about that. Two weeks ago, Democrats and the left were making wild accusations against Trump. The media was eating it up, with no attempt at fact-checking. Trump makes one tweet, and suddenly the same people are going crazy walking back everything they said two weeks ago.

When was the last time that happened to a Republican?

This is more proof that Trump succeeded because the media and the left created a void that only a Trump could fill. Trump succeeds because he stands up against the left’s lies, and despite all the clumsiness of his attacks on the left’s lies, their lies are so fragile that they immediately crumble. The left has gotten so used to Republicans who cave to their lies, they pop like a balloon when faced with someone who fights back.

Is Trump crazy or a master persuader? And just how stupid is the left to back themselves into a conspiracy corner like that?

If the left and the media continue to lie about Trump so blatantly and unbelievably that even Trump’s clumsy tweets send them backtracking, they will also ensure that Trump wins reelection.