President Trump does not accept that status quo. He fights back. And he and the media both know that if he continues to succeed in undermining the media's power to sway public opinion, a permanent shift in the political balance of power will be accomplished. It would be a structural change, in effect.

Yesterday's utterly compelling news conference by President Trump, held on short notice, signaled an entirely new era in relationships between a president and the major media. For decades, the ability of mainstream media to bully presidents has been part of the accepted landscape. In 2004, then-influential Newsweek journalist Evan Thomas admitted that media bias was "going to be worth maybe 15 points" to the Kerry-Edwards ticket, an estimate he later scaled back to 5 points – enough to swing most presidential elections.

The media detest this loss of power, of course, because the currency of Beltway life is influence and power, not money.

To see what the opposition mainstream is thinking, I usually watch at least the first few minutes of Morning Joe, the favorite morning show of political insiders, if not President Trump, who endorsed their competitor Fox and Friends yesterday (which has to be a presidential first). They were speaking in hushed tones, as if grieving, over the behavior of President Trump.

So what do leftists, ever since Stalin, do when a formidable threat arises domestically? Of course: They call him mentally ill. When they control the powers of the state thoroughly enough, they even lock up opponents in mental institutions. Christina Marcos of The Hill:

A growing number of Democrats are openly questioning President Trump's mental health. ... The Democrats justify their questions by pointing to Trump's habit of making demonstrably false claims. At a press conference Thursday, he said he'd had the biggest Electoral College win since President Ronald Reagan, for example, when his margin was lower than either of President Obama's wins. [Rep. Ed] Blumenauer [D-Ore.] told The Hill he started taking another look at the 25th Amendment because Trump had casually repeated easily disproven claims, such as stating that it wasn't raining during his speech on Inauguration Day when it was. "It's not normal behavior. I don't know anybody in a position of responsibility that doesn't know if they're being rained on. And nobody I work with serially offers up verifiably false statements on an ongoing basis," he said in an interview steps from the House chamber. Meanwhile, they gin up excuses to call Trump's claims "false," as in this bit of propaganda from "Politifact" (hat tip: Michael Nadler):

President Donald Trump repeated an incorrect claim on Thursday that Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20 percent of the United States' uranium while serving as secretary of State. The fact-checking website PolitiFact has determined that statement, which Trump first made on the campaign trail, is mostly false.

Sure, she didn't "give" them the uranium; they had to pay for it. (That's how influence-peddling works.) And the uranium went not directly to the Russians, but rather to a Canadian mining company in which the Russians had a controlling interest. Grown-ups familiar with the way corporate ownership works and how influence is peddled would agree that President Trump got the big picture right. But to partisans, it is "mostly false." So bring on a straitjacket, right? That's how they did it in Stalin's day.

While the left is apoplectic, Trump supporters are giving each other high fives. Rush Limbaugh and Howie Carr both see the game quite clearly. Howie does a masterful job explaining the fakeness of the NYT that Trump denounced.

Let's start with the Times story, which was a rehash of a story last month which was itself a rehash of a story in October. Third paragraph: "The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation." So Obama's stooges were tapping the phones of Trump aides during the campaign — imagine Nixon doing that to McGovern! But they turned up nothing. "So far." I like that, "so far." But wait, the FBI is "sifting through … troves of previous intercepted communications." Any conversations about Trump? "It is also unclear." The officials, the Times said, "would not disclose many details." Call me a cynic, but considering these tax-fattened desk jockeys were breaking the law in even leaking this nothingness, I'm guessing if they had any dirt they would have put it out, instantly. Then the Times brought up the discredited golden showers story, which grew from a report about a Russian dossier with "compromising" personal information about Trump from fake news CNN — which the president today renamed "very fake CNN." The alt-left always loads these tall tales with caveats. There's at least one graf that admits that there is no there there. Here's the Times' CYA on the golden-showers story: "The FBI has spent several months investigating the leads in the dossier, but has yet to confirm any of its most explosive claims." So far, I guess the Times would say. That CNN report, by the way, was authored in part by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. His son, Jacob, now works for the Times. The other night, at a fashion show in NYC, the younger Bernstein called First Lady Melania Trump a "hooker." A hooker. All the news that's fit to print, right? The Times "reprimanded" him. What if he'd called Moochelle Obama a "hooker?"

The times, they are a-changin'.