For decades the media carefully cultivated an aura of “objectivity” in order to preserve its propagandistic authority. It was always a sham, but it worked as long as Republican presidents paid homage to it. Trump hasn’t, and the media hates him for it, even as its unhinged behavior confirms the truth of his stance.

How dare you treat us as liberal partisans, they pout, before trotting off to the latest anti-Trump gala. Guess who is one of this year’s winners of the “Walter Cronkite Award”? Jorge Ramos, the open-borders activist who pretends to play a news anchor at Univision. Perhaps Rachel Maddow can snag the award next year.

Her debacle this week threw more light on the liberal partisanship of the media, not least because the “Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist” who received Trump’s stolen tax documents chose Maddow’s show as the place to feature them. In the past, mainstream media reporters went to more circumspect outlets to retail their work. Now they promote their work on the most explicitly Democratic network and on its most aggressively anti-Trump show. And they wonder why Trump calls them members of the “opposition party”?

Of course, the reporter in question, David Cay Johnston, isn’t even remotely objective. Though you would never have known it from Maddow’s reverential reading of his résumé, Johnston is less a reporter than a left-wing hack who used to write columns for the socialist rag The Nation. (Keep that in mind whenever he cranks up his wind machine about “Trump and taxes.”)

It was amusing to see the two descend into conspiracy theories — Johnston recklessly speculated that Trump had leaked the documents himself — as they tried desperately to pump life into a useless and backfiring segment.

Maddow, fresh from lecturing Trump on his “unproven” claims, had no problem peddling her own. The next day Joe Scarborough, given to lecturing Trump on intemperance and the dangers of conspiracy theories, confidently tweeted out that Trump had leaked the tax documents to make himself look good. Maddow claimed the next night that Trump had cleaned up his returns so that Melania could pass an immigration test.

One would think with all the egg on her face she might have suspended her usual eye-rolling and mugging for the camera, but she couldn’t. It is almost as if the twisted partisanship in her is so feverish that words alone can’t express it. It spills over into her face, her eyebrows, her hands. Particularly her hands. They chop the air in a partisan spasm.

Watergate-era reporters used to laugh at Nixon’s parting line from the White House, “Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.” It didn’t occur to these reporters that they are as susceptible to this self-destruction as any politician.

Look at the pitiful rantings of Carl Bernstein, who out of hatred for Trump beclowned himself by hyping a Trump-Russia “dossier” that turned out to be a fraud. Shortly thereafter, Bernstein’s son Jacob, a New York Times reporter also in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome, disgraced himself by calling Melania Trump a “hooker” at a party.

Trump is pulling the curtain back on the charades of the media, but often they pull the cord before he does. Instead of taking a pause in their partisanship, they plunge more deeply into it. Correspondents like Christiane Amanpour openly brag about their lack of neutrality. Editors rebuke other editors for not calling Trump a “liar” on their front pages. Schools of journalism fete the most virulently anti-Trump pundits. In a way, it is all wonderfully clarifying. The mask of phony neutrality is off and their partisan faces are visible for all to see.

The ruling class in all of its rot will be on full display when Jorge Ramos shows up at the National Press Club in April to pick up his “Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Journalism,” given by the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Let’s add this up: a journalism center named after a liberal partisan will be giving to an amnesty advocate who calls himself an anchor an award named after a late CBS newsman who used to conceal his liberalism in the ludicrous conceit, “That’s the way it is.”

The age of media phoniness, epitomized by such events, is coming to a close, and the public can now see the media for exactly what Trump calls it — an opposition party dying under the fevers of its own fanaticism.