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When I was young my recurring nightmare was that I would die and be reincarnated as a polo pony. I squeezed in lots of polo in the years I played, at least three matches per week, mostly in Paris, and I felt that polo ponies had the kind of deal the mass media is handing Trump as I write. I wasn’t mad about the people I played with, either. Back then, in the ’60s and ’70s, fat businessmen who cantered hired good Argentines to carry the can, but picked up the cup after strolling around the field and yelling quite a lot.

Well, now I’m over it, but I have an even worse nightmare: that I might return as Trump’s White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, and have to face the outraged and hysterical so-called press corps each day. Never have I seen such a conspicuously bogus bunch of supposedly objective reporters as the rabble-rousers posing as the Fourth Estate. It is amazing that poor old Spicer can understand what they’re saying, as they foam at the mouth with phony indignation and ever-mounting spirals of hysteria.

Nah, give me a pony’s life any day—at least I’ll get some peace and quiet in the stables. Sure, the Donald gives the media quite a lot of ammunition to attack him with, but it’s mostly promotional puffery. He is, after all, a salesman, a man who is not constrained by exact facts, and one in whose lexicon the word “failure” is not included.

The press, of course, pretends to be holier than thou, and is not best pleased when its falsehoods and errors are pointed out. I managed to squeeze two American columns out of the item Charles Moore mentioned in his Spectator Notes a few weeks back about the double standard of Meryl Streep. (And yes, I did credit the great Charles.) One of my Yankee editors thanked me profusely. “How come we never heard of this?” he asked. “Does the ham like the knife?” was my answer.

American hacks are far worse than European ones because they take themselves seriously and are hypocrites like no others. They tend to quote highly expert professionals while constructing their hatchet jobs, like obscure professors in places of learning where basket weaving and women’s fashions are major subjects, scientists who couldn’t start a fire in a cafeteria if their lives depended on it, and other such bogus experts as economists like the late, unlamented “economics expert” Yanis Varoufakis, who is tragically still with us.

Yes, dear readers, there’s a clear bias against Trump these days, mostly emanating from the Fourth Estate, which simply cannot swallow the fact that he beat the hell out of them and got elected despite their nonstop efforts to the contrary. Starting with the phoniest of all newspapers, The New York Times, the accusation is that he used alternative facts to win. Well, I don’t know what alternative facts are, but I do know that if they exist, every person running for office uses them, especially in America.

The biggest laugh I had was the comparison of Trump to President Nixon. The latter no more liked the media and the Times than Trump does, but he had both houses of Congress against him. The Donald does not. Nixon was a great president brought down by a palace coup and the Washington establishment. He brought about a period of détente with the Soviet Union, providing an opportunity for Soviet Jews to emigrate; opened the door to China; preserved America’s ties with Taiwan; came to the rescue of Israel in 1973; and concluded the Vietnam War with honor while bringing home American prisoners of war. Washington thanked him by trying to impeach him for the cover-up of a bungled break-in he did not order or approve of. My unsolicited advice to Trump is to study President Nixon’s fall. I lived it, wrote about it, and am still bitter over it: A disgruntled FBI biggie leaking mostly false information that became fact overnight to two unscrupulous reporters. A Hollywood movie followed, end of story.