I personally feel that the President is more defensive and combative about inconsequential things than he needs to be. I think that's a fundamental part of his personality and one area where he could stand to improve.
However, I have no doubt that he is treated unfairly by the media, and in a way no other candidate or president has been before. I can list countless examples, but here are just a couple:
When Bill O'Reilly had his recent scandal, the Today Show, in reporting it, cited the President's support of Bill (done in a general way: "he's a good guy" or something similar). To me it's clear that the president was offering support to a friend during a trying time, and nothing more. The Today show used it as an opportunity to bring up Trump's own sexual harassment accusations, implying it was one offender supporting another. Outrageously unfair.
During the campaign, every time leftist agitators fomented violence at a Trump rally, the media would blame the victim, implying that the violence was the result of Trump's message. Unfair, and nothing like what would happen if skinheads descended upon a Hillary rally.
I think there's definitely a good deal of hypocrisy and I again agree with much of this. It was, in many respects, biased reporting (as Bill O'Reilly himself was often guilty of). I recall reading an editorial from an African American college student who attended a Trump rally, and she espoused how people were nice to her and polite. And then she stood up and started chanting her Anti-Trump messages, and how things changed. And I thought, "Well, what did you expect? The same thing would happen at a Clinton rally."
So, I do think there was a lot of biased reporting, and there still is. It's difficult to find un-biased reporting, but some attempt at critical thinking removed from propaganda is helpful. I, for instance, don't really bother with how much is being spent to protect the President during his weekly golf outings. To me, that's just the cost of doing business when you're president, and is as irrelevant now as it was when the right were doing flips and criticizing Obama's travel or his golf outings. It's hypocrisy, of course, but that's how it goes.
What I find fascinating, is the brazen-ness of the current hypocrisy. Job numbers that "were fake" before, change a tenth of a percent, and are still great, but now "they're real". And, it seems that while I "get the joke" a lot of people embrace this material as writ and real. It just isn't. I recall Trump (and the GOP) decrying the Unemployment numbers as "fake" and my response was "Fair enough, then let's come up with a new metric that is accurate, and apply it fairly across administrations." But of course, that wasn't what they wanted at all... it was just hypocrisy and politics, and my sliver of hope with Trump was that he wasn't going to fall into those tried and true tropes of Washington. Yet he is, and with vigor.
I also don't care if he "builds a wall" or not. I see the problems with budgeting it, but all it's going to do is throw a few billion in a hole that may or may not add some kind of border protections (it's not clear that it will actually solve the problems it is espousing to solve). But that's fine. Lots of programs end up not accomplishing much.
I have deeper problems with this man and the content of his character. I embrace unprecedented behavior by a President because one hopes for change in a system that seems loggerjammed. And I was intrigued by "Drain the Swamp". But I'm equally dismayed at going back on his tax returns campaign promise. And appointing his children to official White House positions with significant power. To me, in any other administration, it would have been a constitutional crisis, but now? Meh... There is more I find deeply troubling, but it's more of the same.
So, I don't believe I operate from a position of blind bias. I have bias, certainly, but also the ability to process new information, even if it is counter to my beliefs.
Wanted to add a 'for instance' to that: On China, Trump railed on them as a currency manipulator. And I think he believes they still are. Yet he seems to have indicated that he won't label them as such because they may be helping rein in North Korea. That sounded like a reasonable compromise to me and one I could support. I have other examples I could offer, but that is at least one.
I do think my unlikely hope that he would really bust down the flawed problems in Washington has already proven to be misled. I don't see him getting rid of lobbyists or fighting for Congressional term limits, or ending any of the corrupt-seeming issues with money controlling our political system. He seems uniquely unconcerned with such things, now that he is in office.
