Note: That graphic illustrates the context of this post, not the topic.

Peter Baker, who has “covered Presidents at war since Bill Clinton’s intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s,” delivers a jaw-dropping example of dishonest Axis journalism in “Trump is the First Modern President to Take US to War Without Public Support.”(gift link). That’s its title on the Times home page: someone must have realized how slimy it was after the “analysis” was first posted, so now the article itself is headlined, “Wars Often Lose Public Support Over Time. Trump Started This One Without Much.” Either way, the sense that the Times, like the rest of the Axis of Unethical Conduct, is actively rooting for the President to fail is palpable. True, has been trying to make him fail regarding, well, everything, for a decade.

Baker’s rigged analysis hides the clear reason why Trump’s public approval of a bold military response to a rogue international evil-doer is low: “Traditionally, Americans stand behind their president when he first orders troops into battle,” he writes. Yes, he doesn’t write, and that was before, for the first time in American history, a President’s opposition and the mainstream media set out to strip a newly elected President of the traditional public approval of whomever is in the office from the moment this President was elected. Usually a new President has overwhelming support when he is inaugurated. Not Trump, in either term. Democrats and the media declared him an illegitimate President (that Electoral College thingy, and everyone knows Putin gor him elected) in 2016, and he had been tarred as Hitler and a “convicted felon” before his second term in 2024. That cloak of respect and honor had been a key feature in every President’s power since George Washington, and the Axis stripped it from Trump and, I believe, the office itself, permanently.