NYTimes: Talk Radio Stands-By Donald Trump

It has been a tough week for President Trump.

But, according to the NYTimes Thursday,  if his supporters were beginning to doubt him, there was no sign of it on conservative talk radio.

“There is no evidence for the primary assertion that is driving this entire attack on Trump,” Rush Limbaugh, the prominent conservative radio host, said on Wednesday afternoon. “This attack is coming from the shadows of the deep state, where former Obama employees remain in the intelligence community.”

Clint Bellows

On talk programs across the country, responses divided neatly along party lines. Liberals saw the resignation of the national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, as a sign that the administration was ethically compromised and playing fast and loose with national security. Conservatives saw a hostile elite arrayed against Mr. Trump.

Clint Bellows, talk radio host on The Answer 1420 AM / 94.5 FM in Omaha, said Wednesday that he had been disturbed by the “pretty serious leaks going on” in the government. He said his listeners were unmoved by Democratic arguments that the Flynn situation indicated a national security threat.

Matt Tompkins

“In the context of the last eight years, it’s a joke to conservative America, and it’s a joke” to Trump voters, Mr. Bellows said, adding that the mainstream press had “coddled” President Barack Obama.

Bellows said the current discourse signaled a threat to conservatives, who see evidence of a liberal effort to delegitimize Mr. Trump.

Another host in Omaha, Matt Tompkins, whose radio show on KOIL 1290 AM, does not claim a partisan viewpoint and who was critical of the Trump administration at times on Wednesday, bemoaned the loss of civility in public discourse.

Jeff Wagner, a talk show host on WTMJ 620 AM in Milwaukee, noted that during the presidential campaign, he was not a supporter of Mr. Trump, and said he believed that some of the administration’s actions so far should have been executed differently. But he defended the president on his show, denouncing the news media and the intelligence community for their roles in revealing that Mr. Trump’s campaign aides were in contact with Russian intelligence officials before the election.

Vicki McKenna, a talk show host on WISN 1130 AM in Milwaukee, dismissed the scandal surrounding Flynn as “hysteria.”

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