“Gaslighting” is a term well-known in the psychological counseling community, especially among those dealing with narcissistic personality disorders. It refers to the technique used by a narcissist to convince his victim that what he sees with his own eyes is not true, and hence, he must be going crazy. If the victim catches the narcissist in the act of some foul deed or betrayal, the narcissist will deny his guilt with such passion and apparent sincerity that the victim is tempted to believe him, despite the evidence of his own eyes. The technique is especially effective as a long-term strategy -- the victim or enabler is worn down by repeated assertions that what he just saw or knows to be true is actually false, to the point where he doesn’t have the strength to resist anymore.

It is apparent that this is the strategy the Democratic party hopes to ride to victory in 2020. The truth is the Russian Collusion Hoax, which the Democrats in Congress and the media obsessed over for two long years was not just a fabrication, but a deliberate coup attempt aimed at bringing down the legitimate head of the executive branch elected by the American people. The truth is the nominee of the Democratic party for president, Hillary Clinton, bought and paid for the fake opposition research that was used by the corrupt Obama administration as a pretext to spy on an opposing candidate. A climate of hysteria was created about these false charges in the hopes that public pressure could be built up to force the removal of Donald Trump from office. These truths are so outrageous, so unprecedented in American history, that it defies belief that no one has been punished for these actions to this date.

Instead the Democratic party, through their mouthpieces in the mainstream media, immediately shifted the subject to the next attempt to get Trump, one equally ludicrous and self-evidently false by anyone with a modicum of understanding. Just like with the Russian Collusion Delusion, it involves blaming Trump for something a Democrat has actually done, in this case Joe Biden. Biden is on tape bragging about how he interfered in the Ukraine legal system by insisting that the prosecutor investigating his son Hunter for corruption be fired. Yet the Democratic strategy is to convince the voters that they didn’t actually hear Joe say that, they only imagined they did.

Anyone who tunes in to mainstream media ‘news’ broadcasts, a punishment I haven’t inflicted on myself in years, is subject to endless harping on these talking points seeking to pin some imaginary offense on Trump, and totally ignoring the elephant in the room -- the fact that the Democrats are generally guilty of the offense for real. Like the malignant narcissist, Democrats believe that voters are so stupid and easily manipulated that they can be made to believe an outrageous lie when the truth is staring them in the face. In a similar vein, the latest push for impeachment depends on the low-information voter being stunned by the word itself into abandoning support for Trump, without bothering to discover the fact that there are no legitimate grounds for impeachment, only frenzied partisan gaslighting going on.

The ‘mainstream’ media are no more than propagandists for the party. For years they have arrogantly taken upon themselves the label ‘gatekeepers.’ When you really think about what they mean by that, you should be furious. They think they have the right to feed you, the public, all the fake news they want you to have, and keep from you the truth about any subject they choose. And perhaps most importantly, set the narrative by obsessively whining about the mostly fake news stories that are important to them, and ignoring all others. In the pre-internet and pre-cable age, they largely succeeded in this mission. Today, fortunately, there are other means of obtaining truth about what is happening in the world, which is one reason why the election of Donald Trump was even possible. The media are especially angry that the deplorable public found a way around the gate that their betters previously used to corral them.

The beginning of the Trump administration has truly been an education on just how deeply the elites and the media have dug their claws into what was supposed to be a system of self-government, and how desperately and viciously they fight when someone who was elected by the voters to take away their power seeks to do so. But they miscalculated due to hubris, underestimating both Trump’s intelligence and his ability to withstand the whirlwind of lies they have generated against him. Their gaslighting efforts are not working for large segments of the population. We can expect the coup attempts and the tsunami of lies to increase leading up to the 2020 election, where I firmly believe the public will reject such manipulation by reelecting Donald Trump.