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Editor’s note: The following is an exclusive excerpt from “How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will” by Sen. John Kennedy. Copyright 2025 by John Kennedy. Published with permission from Broadside Books and HarperCollins Publishers.
For the first few months of 2017, as I struggled to find my footing in the United States Senate, the Democratic Party, most of the media, the left-leaning think tanks, the academics, and most of the bureaucrats – in short, all the permanent Washington types – commenced an all-out assault on the man who just won the White House. They accused him of everything except abandoning his children to wolves.
I’d been in politics for a while; I’d seen its dark side. But in all my years watching the mudslinging in Louisiana politics, I’d never seen anything like this. Rather than fading, the rumors of Russian manipulation of the election escalated from Russia meddled in the election to Trump actively colluded with Russia to win the election. Now the Russia collusion narrative took center stage and became an obsession, particularly with the media. For them, it was like Will Smith slapped Chris Rock every day. A manic frenzy.
Sen. John Kennedy speaks to members of the media after a closed briefing for Senate members May 21, 2019, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Every morning there was a new story, usually quoting anonymous sources. And because I like to read, I consumed almost every one of them. I was skeptical. My mother did not raise a fool, and if she did it was one of my brothers. You didn’t have to be a senior at Caltech to see that the reporting had a casual relationship with facts. It was almost all hyperbole and, as I said, anonymous sources. Terms like Steele dossier, pee tape, and FISA warrant may seem today like relics from another era, but back in my early days in the Senate, unsubstantiated rumors about these and other topics were accepted doctrine in Washington, D.C.
DEMOCRATS PULLED THE GREATEST POLITICAL CON JOB EVER ON AMERICANS. IT’S FINALLY UNRAVELING
It was around this time that I first began noticing just how thoroughly some of my Democratic colleagues had lost perspective. When the topic was Trump, everything they served up came with a side order of crazy. The politicians weren’t alone. The media, which had always leaned left, was in many ways worse than the Democrats. This time they took a hard left and kept driving. In giving up any attempt at objectivity or impartiality, they became an unrecognizable shell of their former selves. This media bias had, of course, been advancing in the American media for a while, but now it exploded.
Young journalists (and many old ones too) saw themselves as part of the resistance, a loose coalition of educated people who had little in common other than their utter disdain for Donald Trump. I’m not sure many of them appreciated that historically, the term resistance has been reserved for small bands of rebels operating in countries under foreign occupation, not a group of people who are upset about the outcome of a close election. Even after many years of seeing firsthand how ruthless politics could be in my home state, I was surprised at the vitriol that the media directed at President Trump and anyone who supported him. And the reporters were so smug about it. It made me want to stick my head in an oven.
THE MEDIA ARE TIME TRAVELING BACK TO 2017 TO FIND THEIR MOJO AND TALKING POINTS
Not that I didn’t have experience with media chauvinism. Once, in my second Senate race, when I was running against incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu, a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune sat me down and said, “Kennedy, I know we’ve known each other for a long time, but I have orders to really bust you up in this campaign.” And he did. That reporter, now deceased, was telling me that he had received a directive – one he intended to comply with – to do everything he could to see that Landrieu was re-elected and that I was beaten soundly. I think he thought he was doing me a favor or maybe he just felt guilty, but the whole thing triggered my gag reflex. I mean, pass me the sick bucket. I had seen this deterioration in the media for years, but to hear it spoken out loud disgusted me.
Sen. John Kennedy’s new book, “How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will.”
In Washington, things only got worse. We now know that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manufactured fake evidence of Trump collusion with Russia (the Steele dossier) and then fed it to the FBI, the rest of the Justice Department, and the media, which sucked it up like a Hoover Deluxe and then used that “evidence” to claim election fraud without investigating the facts. It’s no wonder the folks at The New York Times were so shocked, according to one insider account, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller dropped a report showing no evidence of collusion, but the facts didn’t matter. All that seemed to matter was emotion. So many journalists, especially young ones who were taught to feel contempt for America when they should feel gratitude and considered an angry Swedish teenager an icon, were pissed that Hillary Clinton lost and that Donald Trump had won. Trump simply triggered them in every way.
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There may also be other explanations. For one thing, Trump undermined the business model that the legacy media had grown fat and happy on. Cable and network news for years had had a growing monopoly as the internet devoured print media like a light snack, and while many of the TV folks were privately (and publicly, as time went on) contemptuous of Trump, they covered him because they wanted the ratings. Trump needed them too. They used each other for the same reason – to get attention. But Trump also adroitly used social media, particularly Twitter. Network television, cable TV, and, naturally, newspapers resented it. As journalist and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan once said, what’s good for cable news is often bad for America and humanity.
I’m not saying that the media, traditional and otherwise, is always the enemy. Much of the time, they are vital. There have been instances in Louisiana, where if it weren’t for the media, some politicians would have stolen everything that wasn’t nailed down. My point is that during the 2016 campaign and the first Trump administration, the media, led by its legacy members, went from watchdog to attack dog. Once-respected journalists reported lies, and treated them as facts. Real, objective journalism became an afterthought. The Russia hoax is only one example.
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My experience has been that many members of the media think that Trump is a threat to democracy, so he must be stopped at any cost, even if it means destroying democracy. Americans know all about Trump. They also know all about democracy, and they like it. The people who support Trump don’t support him because they hate democracy. They support Trump because they think people opposing him hate democracy. And when the press takes sides, the press squanders the people’s trust.
Was, or is, the media always wrong? Nope. But when your job is to report facts and you report opinion, or you use facts selectively to advance a narrative, or you continue to balance on your nose, like a trained seal, what “your” side tells you and you squeal with delight when the “other side” stumbles, or you rationalize that this is all OK because it’s for America’s own good, because Trump hates democracy, well, people stop believing you. Think I’m being a snowflake? How hard would it have been to find out that the Hunter Biden laptop was real? And couldn’t the media see that President Joe Biden couldn’t finish a sentence without taking a nap? Everyone else could.
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