Those of us who were lockdown sceptics right from the start will think the title of this piece is close to self-evident. For two-plus years our media, whose job it is to be sceptical of government and of society’s elites, turned themselves into lockdown cheerleaders and fearmongers extraordinaire. They questioned near on nothing, believed modelling over raw data, and went all-in on thinking that aping the approach of the Chinese communist politburo was the way to go for a liberal democracy. And not just the ABC and Fairfax as some would probably expect. Also the preponderance (not all, but most) of those on Sky News Australia and in the Australian were just as bad. By the end of the Covid saga journalists were amongst the least-trusted profession in US polls, for good reason.

But some readers will have half-expected things to improve since the Covid hysteria abated. Alas, they haven’t. The evidence is that Mr Trump has broken the brains of the vast preponderance of those working in the media. And to be clear, I include the bulk of those journalists and TV types who are conservative or work for right-leaning outlets.  Trump has broken their brains too. During the whole of the lead-up to last year’s US election, right up to the Biden-Trump TV debate, the media pretended that Joe Biden had a functioning brain. They made casuistry their middle names and found Jesuit-ical ways to ignore the 15 million or more illegal immigrants pouring over the border, saying again and again and again that there was nothing the President alone could do to stop it. They had virtually zero scepticism as regards the worst sort of lawfare I’ve seen in my life against a Western democracy’s leading opposition figure – treating the four risible cases the Biden Department of Justice brought against Donald Trump as perfectly defensible. Then when Kamala was parachuted in many either sang her praises or said she was likely to win. Wrong. Wrong.  Wrong. Wrong.

So let me skip forward to today and all the alarmist panic the legacy media is blasting out there about Mr Trump’s tariffs and the stock market and the supposed plight of regular citizens. To start, I have yet to hear any media talking head or journalist remind listeners and readers that the US S&P 500, the main stock market, was down from December 2021 to December 2023. There was two years of negative growth. And during that time, US inflation rose to nine per cent, not least because of Joe Biden’s laughably named ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ that pumped huge money into the economy, including the renewables rent-seeking game. When trying to sell Trump’s tariffs as catastrophic you might have thought a bit of comparison was in order. But as I said, the media (and many others) appear to have had their brains broken by Mr Trump.

Look, I am happy to predict right now that Trump’s tariffs will not deliver the US a stock market anywhere near as bad as the one Mr Biden delivered. (In fact, I’m going to buy into it because a year from now it’ll be way up.) The same goes for inflation. Remember, Mr Trump has also torn up the woeful Paris Accord and net zero. He’s pledged to ‘drill, baby, drill’. He’s cutting taxes. He’s made a point of going all-in on deregulating and taking on (what I consider to be there, and here) an out-of-control administrative and judicial state with its unaccountable spending of monies. US energy costs are between a third and a fourth of ours. And of Germany’s.  And of Britain’s. The US has sane labour relations laws, unlike Australia’s world-unique set-up that was obsolete everywhere on earth before the second world war – nowhere else empowers two-bit, pseudo-bureaucrat, pretend judge types to dictate to the parties what their wages and conditions will be, in awards so complicated the ABC can’t even get it right. Tell me again why you think the US economy is in trouble? Tell me why you believe the legacy media alarmism?

And don’t forget the democratic aspect of these tariffs. Trump promised voters myriad times during the campaigning that this is what he would do. What is illegitimate about keeping your campaign promises? (I know. In the rest of the Anglosphere conservative parties find it mightily tough to do anything they promise; making all of us a tad cynical.) Trump is trying to remake the US economy to bring back manufacturing. One can agree or disagree with that goal but it’s hardly apocalyptic stuff. Meanwhile, it is a fact that most countries have higher tariffs on US goods than the US puts on theirs. (This is a function, in part, of the way the World Trade Organization’s Most Favoured Nation rules work.) The EU countries certainly do, overall, have higher tariff and non-tariff barriers to entry than the US has for them. In addition, of course, the EU countries are total free-riders on the US military to defend them. This is a big implicit tax on US voters who don’t wish to pay it anymore to prop up bloated welfare states elsewhere. And if anyone believes the EU can win a trade war against the US that person is an idiot I’m afraid. Trump wants your tariffs to be no higher than his. That’s not the current status quo system which was fine in rebuilding Europe. But today it has seen manufacturing go off-shore, largely to a China that games the rules.

So here’s the thing. If a country wants to pay more to keep certain jobs and industries how is that some moral failing? To think money is all in life that matters to people is both a weird sort of reductionist Marxist worldview, as well as being simply wrong. I would take a hefty pay cut to have more conservative academic colleagues; to get rid of DEI and transgender lunacy; to see Australia leave net zero and massively cut immigration (all for the sake of my kids). Lots of things matter more to people than a bit more money in the pocket. (It’s different, sure, if you’re being impoverished.) Trump’s supporters aren’t high-end finance types or bankers or elite lawyers (most of whom don’t vote conservative these days anyway with the wealthiest tenth owning 90% of share wealth).  They like what Trump is doing. It’s the legacy media that dislikes, well, virtually everything Trump does.

Lastly, surely all of us should be highly sceptical of what the establishment economists are telling us anyway. Right?  Remember the hundred-odd distinguished economists who wrote a letter saying Maggie Thatcher’s reforms would fail? Roughly the same number who said Argentina’s Javier Milei’s would fail. All the Keynesian ‘experts’ who advised the massive Covid spending that is impoverishing us all. And who can forget those establishment types whose policies have delivered Australia seven quarters of per capita GDP decline and the biggest drop in living standards in close to a century?

Maybe a bit of scepticism and open-mindedness is in order.  But our media, most all of whom have been infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome, are no longer capable of it. Which is why they no longer move the needle. Remember, Trump won massively with virtually zero media support or endorsements. He does not care what the legacy media thinks. Nor do his supporters.