Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan during a recent conversation with journalist Bari Weiss made some startling revelations.
Noonan calls herself a conservative and was once a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. But like most mainstream conservative commentators of that era, Noonan abandoned both her conservative and journalistic principles to devolve into a rabid hater of President Trump.
She believed the hoaxes against President Trump, particularly the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. When she was proven wrong, instead of accepting her mistake, she claimed she didn’t “know what to think of Trump/Russia” and wasn’t “satisfied we’ll ever fully understand it.”
In such cases, there are no greys. Trump was cleared by probers despite their deep bias against him and their lack of basis for the investigation. But Noonan purposefully tried to leave the door open instead of admitting this obvious fact by feigning confusion.
Noonan’s recent utterances proved how deeply she erred while covering Trump. But the sanctimonious seldom possess self-awareness, hence Noonan bragged about her mistake because she thought she was following journalistic ethics.
Noonan claimed when Trump decided to run for president his aides reached out to her for interactions. She claimed that she was hesitant to meet President Trump because she “had a feeling that up close he would be charming and funny, and that there would be something endearing, and that it would mess with my swing as an observer.”
“I didn’t want to see him up close. I didn’t want to see him far away. I wanted- had this intuitive sense [to] see him at a middle distance. And I felt I saw him clearly at a middle distance.”
Noonan was conflating intimate relationships with professional interactions. If Noonan had a romantic affair or a friendship with President Trump it would have been inappropriate and would render her unable to report on him objectively. But merely having interactions is not wrong, it is an essential component of covering any leader. Personal interactions present the opportunity to probe the thinking and understand the perspective of the leader. It is not just the words but body language which is often quite revealing. Purposefully not meeting Trump was a gross dereliction of duty on Noonan’s part.
Noonan then revealed her experience when she recently met President Trump. “So two or three weeks ago, he came to the Wall Street Journal for an editorial board meeting, and my instinct kicked in again. ‘Don’t go.’ But then I corrected myself,”
Noonan said. “I’ve been writing about him for eight years. I have occasionally clubbed him like a seal. He has occasionally clubbed me. And it would be so wrong if he came to my newspaper, and he couldn’t go there and take retribution or do whatever he wanted to do. It just struck me as the fair, right thing. And so I went.”
“So anyway, at a certain point, the doors fly open and the entourage comes in, and there’s Trump, who in person in that blue suit and the tie is huge, and the hair is huge, everything is huge. And he, like, blows by others, and he just says to me, ‘You are wonderful. You are the most remarkable woman.’”
“…He went on and off the record. But off the record, he was hilarious, rude, inappropriate, said things about foreign leaders that should not be said to a bunch of journalists.”
“And I just sat back and thought by the end, ‘Honey, your intuition was right. If you’d met him in 2015, you would have loved him and not seen him'” Noonan concluded.
Gage Skidmore
