Who do you believe when everyone is a proven liar?
That's exactly the prospect facing Americans asked to choose among Donald Trump, Omarosa Manigault Newman and members of the mainstream media. Trump, of course, fibs routinely, on matters both great and small. Manigault Newman has been wildly reviled as a liar—she was fired twice from the Clinton White House, three times on The Apprentice and once more from the Trump White House. And the members of the media, who purport to tell us the truth in objective fashion, are now dutifully parroting every allegation from her—a woman who, just a few months ago, was directing her diatribes at the members of Celebrity Big Brother (which could now be graced with the presence of another stellar moral exemplar, Stormy Daniels).
At that point, she suddenly benefited from that oft-invoked Strange New Respect™—the phenomenon that occurs the minute that any purported Republican turns on his or her former colleagues. We've already seen such Strange New Respect™ accrue to characters ranging from Michael Cohen to Jeff Flake.
Manigault Newman is no exception. This week, the same members of the media who called her a pathological liar suddenly decided that she was Patient Zero in the Trump racism outbreak. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, who spent much of the Republican primary season pumping up Trump with free airtime, now suggests that Trump terming Manigault Newman a "dog"—a term Trump has used routinely for years, on figures including Hosni Mubarak and Kristen Stewart—could bring about "genocide" (yes, seriously). Democrats far and wide declared Trump's use of the "dog" terminology racist, even though Trump has dropped it on white people with alacrity.
Nobody trusts Trump. Nobody trusts Manigault Newman. And nobody trusts the media. More important, nobody trusts their motives.
All of which is why Trump could even survive an n-word tape. He survived the "pussy grab" tape because no one was trustworthy—not Hillary Clinton and certainly not the media that had tut-tutted far worse about Hillary's husband. Furthermore, that tape did nothing to our image of Trump, a man who had always treated women as piece of meat—a fellow who bragged about bedding married women, likened his sexual experiences in the 1970s to the Vietnam War and called the New York Post to brag about his inflated sexual exploits.
Now, Trump should pay the price for an n-word tape, if any exists. The n-word is the most egregious word in the English language in the United States, as it should be. Use of it in derogatory fashion would immediately shift Trump from "racially tinged" into outright racist territory. It would become absolutely toxic for undecided or tepid Trump supporters to voice their support for him under those circumstances. The party of Lincoln would become the party of the n-word, and Trump defenders spending months loudly proclaiming the virtue of a president caught on tape using such a term would be doing inestimable service to the Democratic Party. That's why the media are drooling at the mere possibility of such a tape existing.
But perhaps even an n-word tape wouldn't stop Trump. Too many Trump supporters see the media's thirst for such a tape as evidence that they will stop at nothing to destroy Trump pre-emptively. Too many Trump supporters will point out that the media treated the racism of Democrats with kid gloves for decades. And they won't be wrong.
Hence the great tragedy of the media's behavior over the course of the Trump administration. Trump is in the business of defending Trump; Manigault Newman is in the business of boosting her profile. The media, theoretically, are in the business of purveying truth. But every time they tout her over Trump, they undercut their own core mission. It's simply too obvious that the media want to see Trump go down, for any reason whatsoever. That's why they're parroting every allegation by Manigault Newman; it's why they're spending hours debating the merits of a tape that probably doesn't exist. (If it did, we likely would have heard it by now.)
And it's why Trump still has the advantage here. In a battle of credibility between a bunch of dishonest actors, people will simply believe that which they find most comfortable.
Ben Shapiro is editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire and host of The Ben Shapiro Show, available on iTunes and syndicated across America.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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