Trump Derangement Syndrome at ‘The Atlantic’ Reaches a Fever Pitch
BY STEPHEN KRUISER
PJ Media
Trump Derangement Syndrome at ‘The Atlantic’ Reaches a Fever Pitch
The poor dears.
The Atlantic is a magazine that will be 163 years old two days before the presidential election this year and, lemme tell ya, it’s not aging well right now.
Unlike many venerable publications, The Atlantic transitioned rather well to new media. There was always some very good stuff on the site, which helped offset the usual knee-jerk liberal fare.
Those days appear to be gone.
After its almost universally debunked hit piece about Trump and the military last week, the site has taken extreme umbrage at the fact the President Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Staff writer Graeme Wood wrote a lengthy piece calling for an end to the prize because of this.
Trolls are a Scandinavian invention, straight from the frigid sagas of Norse mythology, but Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a Norwegian parliamentarian, swears that he is not one. Observers of his antics this week could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. On Wednesday, he announced that he had nominated Donald J. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
He’s got issues. As many with the man who nominated Trump for the UAE/Israel agreement as with Trump himself, it would seem.
Tybring-Gjedde is from Norway’s Progress Party, a right-wing populist answer to the established parties of the right and left. (National parliamentarians are entitled to nominate candidates for the prize. So are professors, past laureates, and various other bigwigs from international organizations.) His nomination of Trump strikes me as preposterous. “Other politicians don’t pick up the phone to talk,” Tybring-Gjedde said. “He has the ability to be down-to-earth and talk to people at all levels.” Tybring-Gjedde notes that Alfred Nobel listed as one of the criteria for the winners that they encourage “peace congresses”—and what is a peace congress but a conversation between people who are not at peace? In my view the deal between the Emirates and Israel is good for the region, but a deal between Israel and the absolute monarchs of a small Gulf state is not a deal between Israel and the people of the Emirates, let alone between Israelis and Palestinians. Trump’s main diplomatic maneuver is to adopt a lickspittle posture toward authoritarians, promising them decades in power in return for a smile and a condo development. Peace does not mean a web of personal agreements between rich psychopaths.
Wood seeks to delegitimize the nomination because he doesn’t like the person doing the nominating, the person being nominated, or the reason for the nomination.
Oops.
As we like to say in the world of stand-up comedy, timing is everything.
Wood’s timing was awful here.
He published his diaper-soiling ORANGE MAN BAD screed just hours before it was announced that President Trump had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for a second time this week, this time by a member of the Swedish Parliament, and for the Serbia/Kosovo agreement he brokered. I wrote about that here yesterday.
Just like that, two of Wood’s “nuke the Nobel” arguments unraveled. He probably spent most of the day curled up in the fetal position with juice boxes strewn all about the place after learning of the second nomination.
The recent descent by The Atlantic into Stage Five ORANGE MAN BAD dementia has been, as one friend of mine who used to be an Atlantic fan said, “Sad.” I agree. The Atlantic was one of the few publications that I could still respect, despite its obvious liberal bent.
The place has turned into BuzzFeed overnight.
When that same friend wondered why The Atlantic had gotten so bad so fast I replied, “The internal polling by the DNC must be awful right now.”
This has been a very good week for President Trump, as evidenced by desperate hot takes like this one in The Atlantic.
We’re all on the same flight but I think they may be feeling a little more turbulence where they’re sitting.