Clutch your pearls, ladies. It’s Trump-hate phony scandal time again.

This time, The Washington Post leads the charge with The New York Times on harmony. They report the president made unspecified promises to an unnamed foreign leader, possibly Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, on an unmentioned topic so terrible that an anonymous whistleblower reported them to the intelligence community inspector general, who somehow passed the information to members of the House.

Shortly thereafter, the well-orchestrated mob showed up, howling for blood and egged on by the usual suspects in Congress and the scribbling classes. Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe, who considers President Donald Trump one of America’s “carnival barkers and fantasists and pathological liars,”said the president’s actions were “treachery if not treason” and urged he be removed from office “as soon as possible.”

Tribe hadn’t the slightest idea what Trump said. Neither did anyone in the press. Which stopped not a single one of them from wriggling and panting like a boxful of puppies waiting for treats and pets at the fanciful idea that at last, they have him. This time, there’s proof. This time, he’ll be removed from office, and they can all go back to talking nonstop about what an awful place America is. If it’s true that …

Ah, if. The word on which the entire scheme hangs. To date, we know only that an unnamed “intelligence official” tattled about what he/she saw as “serious misconduct” by the president during a phone call. What it was, we don’t know. How the tattle got to Congressional Democrats and the media, we don’t know either — but we can guess. Remember, this is the same intelligence community that surveilled candidate, and later president, Trump based on a phony “dossier” created with help from Russian contacts, who used foreign agents to entrap Trump campaign advisors, who coordinated with the FBI to erase the problem of Hillary Clinton’s classified emails.Yeah, that intelligence community.

So one has the right to suspect the whistleblower’s politics and motives. We know the motives of the political classes currently squealing to high heaven about the president’s malfeasance and crimes. From Adam Schiff to Gerald Nadler to Mitt Romney, they loathe the president because he has consistently bested them, proved impervious to their slanders and in general exposed them as the gaggle of spoiled, ignorant brats they are.

Most of the media has similar hatred for the man because try as they might — and they have — they cannot bring him down. Trump has shown that much of what passes for mass media journalism is actually liberal propaganda and hackery. Witness the recent New York Times’ scurrilous slander of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, based on a witness who refused to be interviewed and whose friends said she remembered nothing of what was alleged. It was simply a fabrication, the latest in a long series of fabrications published in an attempt to damage the president and anyone who might be associated with him.

The current phone call kerfuffle also exposes the ignorance or hypocrisy — or both — of those in politics and the media currently having an attack of the vapors over this president’s conversation with a foreign leader. These sorts of talks are part of the essential nature of the executive, as explained by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist No. 70. He noted that elements of the office included “Decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch …” adding that a strong executive was necessary to protect the nation “against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government.”If that doesn’t remind you of certain Democratic members of Congress, you haven’t been keeping up on current events.

The principle danger posed here isn’t to the president. The phone call scandal is just as flimsy as the one before it, and the one to follow. It doesn’t threaten the careers of Trump-hating politicians, whose constituents will return them until hell freezes, out of spite. The real danger is to the institutions of government, particularly of national security, and to the politicized media whose mischaracterizations, exaggerations, fabrications and outright lies continue to be exposed. When none of these can muster a scintilla of trust in the general public, the work of those who have toiled for decades to topple the republic will almost be done; it will then require the merest nudge to send it over the brink.

Well done, all.

Morgan Liddick’s column “On Your Right” publishes Tuesdays in the Summit Daily News. Liddick spent 27 years working for the U.S. Foreign Service, primarily living abroad. He also spent 12 years teaching U.S. history and Western civilization at community colleges in Colorado and Texas. He lived in Summit County as recently as 2015. Contact him at mcliddick@hotmail.com.