The fake news media are blaming President Trump for a Ukrainian passenger plane that was probably shot down by the terrorist state of Iran.

This is what you call trolling.

The media do not actually believe Trump is to blame.

Hell, the media don’t even know for sure yet how or why the plane went down.

None of that matters, though, because the media are no longer a news gathering institution. Rather, they are a trolling operation huddled in record numbers in the Deep Blue Bubbles of Manhattan and Washington, DC, where they spend billions of corporate dollars scheming to troll Trump.

We’ll start with the far-left Atlantic, by way of David Frump, a card-carrying member of Conservative Incorporated’s Never Trump Tribe. (Sorry, I don’t reward trolling with links.):

No American paid a price for President Donald Trump’s decision to kill Iran’s Qasem Soleimani. But it looks like 176 other people did, including 63 Canadian citizens and many more Iranian nationals en route to Canada.

Frum is also angry Trump targeted Iran’s terror mastermind, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani:

The Trump administration is telling an obviously false story about the decision to kill Soleimani. Instead of acknowledging that Soleimani was killed in reprisal, the Trump administration instead argues that the killing was necessary to avert attacks[.]

This, coming from the same guy who backed a pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein, is rich enough, but he’s so desperate to blister Trump, Frum would rather look like an idiot than not. Soleimani has literally spent decades plotting to kill Americans. Decades. That means taking him out was a way to “avert attacks” against Americans period, whether those attacks were imminent or not.

Here’s the far-left Associated Press:

As Iran and US take step back from the brink, Canada grieves … [W]hat had begun with a drone attack on Gen. Qassem Soleimani’s motorcade at the Baghdad airport had suddenly rippled outward until dozens of Iranian-Canadians, dozens of Iranian students studying in Canada, were dead.

To begin with, this is all guesswork. No one knows why Iran shot down the plane. It might have been a mistake as opposed to retaliation. After all, there were Iranians on board.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t matter why, at least within the context of Trump. America didn’t shoot the plane down; a terrorist nation did. All America did was look to protect itself from this terrorist nation after this terrorist nation killed an American contractor (a Muslim-American immigrant, I should add) and attacked our embassy in Iraq, which is an act of war.

For years, Iran has been escalating, escalating, escalating and Trump has stayed cool — at least until he could not stay cool anymore with the death of an American citizen and attack on our sovereign soil.

What would Frum and his media confederates have us do? Nothing?

Trump’s restraint in the face of these outrageous provocations has been remarkable, and his decision to target the serial mass murderer Soleimani is not only just; it is strategically brilliant. On top of stripping Iran of its most effective terror strategist, every Iranian official is now terrified the next drone will knock next on their door.

Trump hit these monsters right where it hurts: personally. Does anyone doubt Iran’s decision to lob a few ineffective missiles on Wednesday and then run off the battlefield like scared little girls wasn’t motivated by self-interest, out of the fear any one of them could be next for a drone strike?

As you will see below, the agreed-upon word to blame Trump is “crossfire,” which, as I’ll explain below, is a flat-out lie.

Deep State sycophant Anne Applebaum:

The Tehran plane crash is a terrible, sickening twist of fate: Ukraine once again sucked in to a geopolitical conflict created by others, along with Ukrainian, Canadian and other passengers caught – like the MH17 passengers – in the crossfire — Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) January 9, 2020

National security analyst for Fake News CNN Susan Hennessey:

176 completely innocent lives, killed in the crossfire of reckless escalation. Just an unbelievable tragedy. https://t.co/LTI0kfHPrx — Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) January 9, 2020

NBC correspondent Heidi Przybyla has since deleted a tweet that read, “176 people died that night and now we know it’s, at a minimum, related to the crossfire.

Okay, now ask yourself this…

How can it be a “crossfire” situation when only one side was, you know, doing any firing that night?

The passenger plane went down the same night Iran lobbed its missiles at one of our bases in Iraq, and on that night … America did not fire anything.

So where’s the crossfire?

How can there be a crossfire when only one side is firing?

Here’s the dictionary definition of “crossfire:” “lines of gunfire from two or more positions or combatants crossing one another, or a single one of such lines.”

“Two or more.”

So at least two — and only one party fired that night, and it wasn’t us.

Just more fake news, y’all.

The laughably named Reason came right out and blamed America:

If Iran Shot Down the Ukraine Jet, the U.S. Government Deserves a Little Blame … Regardless of why it may have shot down the plane, Iran is primarily responsible for the deaths of those 176 passengers. But it is not absurd to assign the U.S. some responsibility, given that Iran’s combat offensive was prompted by the Trump administration’s decision to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike.

They say weed doesn’t affect the memory, but need I remind these morons Iran killed an American contractor and then sent its militia to attack one of our embassies? Guess we were supposed to do nothing in response, except, you know, legalize weed.

And leave it to mean Little Mayor Pete Buttigieg to come up with something even lamer than “crossfire.” He described it as a “tit for tat.”

There was no “tat” Wednesday night.

Finally, as Breitbart News reported, here’s CNN openly parroting Iranian propaganda “conflating the shootdown of an Iran Air jetliner by a U.S. Navy ship in 1988 with this week’s Ukrainian jetliner loss.”

The comparison is absurd, but CNN doesn’t care.

CNN hates America and has to appease Iran for access, just like CNN coddled Saddam Hussein for access.

Appeasement and trolling, trolling… That’s all this is.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.