Donald Trump’s two unforgivable ‘sins’

You would be hard-pressed to find a neutral voice when it comes to opinions about Donald Trump. People either hate him, really hate him, or love him. 

With that in mind, even trying to analyze with facts the pros and cons of his various policies while president would be a waste of time. Those who hate him would denounce any positive policy and those who love him would denounce those denouncers. 

This is simply one theory on how Trump came to be president and why he is so reviled by so many from the liberal and neocon punditry class today.

We can make the argument, as others have, that the tipping point in Trump’s mind to run for president came soon after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, hosted by comedian and talk-show host Seth Meyers.

During that dinner, Meyers, with an able assist from President Obama, repeatedly went after Trump, then a private citizen, with cutting one-liners. For example, Meyers said: “Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican — which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”

The slams against Trump kept coming. The problem was that Trump was seated not far away from Meyers and Obama as they enthusiastically demeaned him. Some described Trump as sitting there stone-faced, but many believed he was fuming inside. The liberal-leaning news site Vox called the routine “vicious” and The Daily Beast termed it “merciless.” After the event, Trump said the attacks were “nasty and out of order.” 

So, did that repertoire of jokes cement Trump’s decision to run for the presidency? Only Trump really knows for sure, but Meyers acknowledged to Jimmy Fallon that it may have played a role.  “It’s not the outcome I wanted,” he said, “but that’s history. I got a man elected president.” But, in 2016, Trump denied that the event prompted him to run, calling it “a false narrative.”

With regard to Obama’s role in going after Trump that night, Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on Trump’s show “The Apprentice,” and later an official in the Trump White House, has said, “It just kept going and going, and he just kept hammering him. And I thought, ‘Ohhhh, Barack Obama is starting something that I don’t know if he’ll be able to finish.’”

Trump first alluded to running for president in 1987 in his bestselling book, “The Art of the Deal.” A year later, when he was a guest on “Oprah,” the talk show host asked him to expand upon the idea.  

So, despite his denial in 2016, the seed of running may have been germinating in Trump’s mind for many years but the insult-fest at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner may have fed that seed and eventually propelled him to file his candidacy.

Then, in 2016, we come to the two unforgivable “sins” that Trump committed. First, there is little that’s more fragile than the pompous egos of the elite Washington punditry class. 

Many from this class literally laughed out loud at the prospect of Trump running for president, obtaining the Republican nomination, or getting elected president. There are videos of these liberal journalists and pundits daring Trump to run and laughing at the idea of it. Big tech may have suppressed some of these videos but I managed to find at least one that aired on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show in 2018.

During one part of the clip, highlighting a July 26, 2015, segment from “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC News, then Democratic congressman Keith Ellison, now attorney general of Minnesota, said, “We’d better be ready for the fact that he [Trump] might be leading the Republican ticket.” No sooner does he get the words out than Stephanopoulos and the other panelists openly laughed at the idea.

To his credit, Ellison politely reminded Stephanopoulos and the others: “You know, George, we had Jesse Ventura in Minnesota win the governorship. Nobody thought he was going to win. I’m telling you, stranger things have happened.”

As history tells us, Trump proved those in the video, and others who mocked him, embarrassingly wrong. Good for Trump — but also bad for Trump. As it turned out, thin-skinned pundits and reporters don’t like to be made fools of in public by a man they mocked. That was his first “sin.”

Soon thereafter, in what seemed to be a coordinated effort, those on the left and the neocon right brewed up a toxic cauldron of criticism of Trump, which has been on high boil ever since. They still ladle out portions daily.

After Trump won the GOP nomination, the rallying cry from these entrenched elite pundits and journalists seemed to morph into: “Big deal. He beat a weak and boring Republican field. No way he can beat Hillary Clinton in the general election.” And so, they continued to mock and belittle him. Whoops — unforgivable sin No. 2: He did win.

Whether Trump ends up running in 2024 or not — and those now laughing at the prospect of his winning again might want to dial up Attorney General Ellison — many on the left and from the neocon class will never forgive him for his two “original sins.” Of course, he might never have committed those “sins” if a liberal talk show host and a liberal president hadn’t disparaged Trump into a corner in 2011.

Douglas MacKinnon, a political and communications consultant, was a writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon during the last three years of the Bush administration.