For nearly a decade, Democratic Party elites, Never Trump Republicans, and legacy media personalities have warned that the “walls are closing in” on President Donald Trump.
Yet seven months into Trump’s second term, the establishment, rejected in 2024, canceled by networks, and unmasked by scandals, teeters on the brink of collapse.
Last week, two establishment pillars suffered death blows: Congress defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, gutting 1,500 National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service stations, while CBS slated The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for cancellation amid falling viewership and revenue.
And in a perfect encapsulation of this decline, The Late Show hosted former Vice President Kamala Harris for a lackluster conversation about her new book last week. Their performance mirrored the fading relevance of an establishment that now clings to a dim remnant of its former glory.
This palpable decline, highlighted by recent events, is the culmination of years of eroding public trust. For decades, a pattern of fabrications and falsehoods has systematically gutted the elite’s credibility and sealed their downfall. While countless examples could be cited, four specific narratives stand out for their profound effect in hastening the old guard’s demise.
1. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
The 2003 Iraq War was sold as a preemptive strike to protect the United States from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Bush administration officials, who later became the base of the Never Trump movement, and establishment media figures pushed this lie onto a public still reeling from 9/11.
Then-Vice President Dick Cheney claimed in August 2002 that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” That same month, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice warned on CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” New York Times writer Judith Miller reported, citing anonymous officials, that Iraq was acquiring aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment, a key step toward nuclear weapons.
Then, in February 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, the highly respected Operation Desert Storm hero, told the U.N. Security Council that Iraq had active chemical and biological weapons programs, that it was pursuing nuclear weapons, and that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda.
Yet United Nations inspectors, led by Hans Blix, found no WMDs in 2002 or 2003, and the Iraq Survey Group’s 2004 report confirmed Iraq’s WMD programs ended in 1991. Bush and his allies attempted to shift the war’s rationale away from preemptive self-defense and toward “spreading democracy,” but all moral authority was lost with the WMD lie.
Years later, then-candidate Trump used this lie to pry the GOP away from the establishment’s grip.
“The war was a big, fat mistake,” he said on the debate stage in South Carolina. “We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. We should have never been in Iraq. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, and there were none, and they knew there were none.”
2. Russia collusion
The lie that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election dominated the national news cycle for the first three years of Trump’s presidency. And despite the Mueller report’s conclusion that it “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government,” and the subsequent Durham report’s scathing critique of the FBI’s initiation of the investigation, the establishment clung to the false narrative, using it to undermine the administration’s legitimacy and disrupt its ability to govern.
Today, we are finally beginning to uncover the shady machinations that allowed this hoax to spread. In recent weeks, newly released documents by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard detailed the Obama administration’s attempts to manipulate and manufacture evidence to take down the newly elected Trump.
Regardless of whether any officials are brought to justice — CIA Director John Ratcliffe said Sunday that former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could face indictments due to their involvement — the Russia collusion hoax severely diminished public confidence in the establishment, especially the media. Gallup’s latest poll shows trust in mass media plummeting among Republicans and independents around the time the Mueller report was released, dragging down overall trust in media numbers to record lows.
3. COVID-19 falsehoods
Establishment politicians and journalists reached new levels of dishonesty during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who became the de facto leader of the establishment during this era, engineered a manipulation campaign against the public as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
His misdeeds included telling “noble lies,” such as in March 2020 when he assured people that masking was useless before reversing course a month later. The reason for the shift? At the time, Fauci said it was because of evolving science. But a year later, he admitted to advising against masking because of a mask shortage among healthcare workers.
He similarly fibbed about the percentage of the population that would need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70% to 75%,” he said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60% or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
But Fauci’s biggest lie was orchestrating a cover-up of COVID-19’s origins, likely to hide his role in funding Wuhan lab research. Unearthed emails between Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, revealed a scheme to promote the natural origin theory and discredit the lab-leak hypothesis despite a lack of evidence. They commissioned a paper to this end, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” later published in Nature Medicine, edited it behind the scenes, and then cited it at a press conference as if it were independent evidence.
It was revealed later that one of the paper’s key authors, Dr. Kristian Anderson, received an $8.9 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID soon after.
Establishment media, with cooperation from social media companies, ridiculed proponents of the lab-leak theory. New York Times COVID-19 reporter Apoorva Mandavilli posted that the COVID-19 lab leak theory had “racist roots.” Today, it is the accepted explanation of COVID-19 by the FBI, CIA, and the Energy Department’s elite “Z Division.”
The many COVID-19 lies cratered public trust in governmental institutions, especially in public health, during times of crisis. The political and media establishment’s role in perpetuating COVID-19 falsehoods fostered widespread skepticism, making future efforts to address national challenges significantly more difficult.
4. Biden cognitive cover-up
The most recent of the four exploded spectacularly before the eyes of the nation at the first presidential debate last summer, when the leader of the free world appeared at the debate alarmingly frail and confused.
In the months preceding the now-infamous debate, establishment politicians and media blasted videos of then-President Joe Biden wandering, shaking hands with the air, and exhibiting other behaviors of cognitive decline as “cheap fakes.”
CNN’s chief media analyst, Brian Stelter, explained that the videos of Biden were designed “to trick people into believing something that’s totally false” and that they were “just distorted, out-of-context videos chopped up in certain ways, constructed in certain ways. That’s what we’re seeing.”
Ironically, Stelter’s CNN colleague Jake Tapper, long seen as an emblem of establishment journalism, wrote the defining book on the cover-up, detailing how Biden’s inner circle concealed his deterioration from the public and how legacy media journalists played along out of partisan loyalty and fear of being denied access.
The book registered as a political earthquake inside the Beltway, but for the general public, it only confirmed long-held suspicions about Biden’s fitness for the presidency. And with that confirmation came a slew of uncomfortable questions. For instance, who exactly was running the country during the Biden administration? And what exactly was the level of cooperation between the White House and establishment media to keep Biden’s health a secret?
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We are only beginning to learn the answers to these questions, and with each new revelation, the public is reminded of the arrogance and malignancy of the elite class.
The establishment attempts to spin its downfall as a byproduct of Trump’s rise, against which they’ve cast themselves as the “resistance.” But the reverse is more likely true. Trump rose against the lies of the establishment. His Make America Great Again movement was the resistance to their misdeeds. Let it warn future establishments: Truth, not deception, builds lasting authority.