As we get closer to the election, I will probably be doing more political posts, especially because this is an absolutely unprecedented election. My speculation on 2008 and 2012 was things like, “What if McCain has a health issue on the campaign trail?”, or “What if Romney’s tax returns reveal a historically low tax rate?”; my speculations on this election are, “If the GOP invokes Article 9 to try to kick Trump off the ticket and he sues them, would a judge have to try to figure out the monetary value of the Presidency to estimate damages?” and “Is it possible that Trump is actually hooked up to some sort of ‘Twitch Runs for President’ livestream somewhere, and 4Chan is really running his entire campaign?”
Today, I’ll be addressing one of the things I hear sometimes from my fellow liberals, which is that they don’t think the polls will stay this lopsided because the media has a vested interest in keeping people tuned in to the “horse race”, and so they’ll start diverting some media attention to Clinton’s scandals to drive things closer as we go into November. This is, according to some, what happened in 2012 when the post-debate coverage was slanted heavily toward praising Romney’s performance. It didn’t make a material difference, but it allowed pundits to pretend that Romney still had a shot, and some are thinking the same will happen with Trump.
I don’t think it will, though (with, again, the caveat that tomorrow Trump could declare himself God-Emperor of Cleveland and it wouldn’t be significantly more surprising than anything else that’s happened this year), for one main reason. Namely, the media already have a great story, the story of a madman collapsing not just his own political fortunes but those of an entire political party that’s been a force in US politics for over 150 years, and it’s getting amazing ratings for them. They can ride this all the way to election day as long as Trump keeps giving them material to feed this narrative.
And Trump, in turn, wants to do exactly that. His overriding need for attention has driven him to continually say controversial things in order to keep the spotlight on him, despite the fact that Hillary’s high negatives and his own high negatives mean that whoever has the most media attention is invariably going to do the worst. Basically, he can’t tell the difference between good attention, say for doing well in school, or bad attention, like picking a fight with a Gold Star family and insisting the President of the United States founded ISIS. Trump is more than happy to help a media-driven narrative that he’s the most controversial candidate ever, because a) it’s about him, and b) it’s about him being the most something something.
So no, there will be no point where Trump pivots to being boring and normal, and no, there will be no point where CNN gets tired of putting up footage of the latest crazy thing he says and saying, “Wow, isn’t that crazy?” (Or putting up Trump surrogates on TV and asking them, “Can you maybe explain why your candidate apparently called for military tribunals for American civilians?”) They are feeding off each other. The Crazy Train ain’t stopping, not unless the Republicans come to their senses and kick Trump off of it.
Which comes with its own set of craziness, but we’ll deal with that if it happens.
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I don’t see the GOP coming to their senses and kicking him out. Those who have openly spoken out against him and refuse to endorse him are still few and far between.
Problem is ‘crazy man says crazy thing’ isn’t a story.
‘Potential next president says crazy thing’ is. So no matter how hard trump tries, the degree to which he can self-sabotage his campaign is limited by the margin of uncertainty of the polls.
Is he seriously that crazy/childish?
He did manage to make a lot of money, so he must have something going for him I’d think….
He’s not actually crazy. Narcissistic as hell, but not actually crazy.
His main personal advantages are charisma, a complete lack of ethics, and a lot of skill at salesmanship. (Mostly used to sell himself.)
When you add that to his father’s money and connections, that gave him a pretty good leg up in the NYC real-estate business. He had some initial success there, overleveraged himself and his companies like mad to try to expand, and face-planted hard, only surviving because he owed so much money that the banks had as big a problem as he did.
Since then, he’s mostly operated by licensing his name to other people, and by building himself up as a celebrity. General consensus is that he’s nothing like as rich as he claims.
@JCG: He inherited a lot of money. Current consensus among financial experts is that he could literally have made more by just handing it off to a money manager and spending his time watching TV.
@William Kendall: But a lot of Republicans haven’t finished their primaries yet. They don’t want to challenge Trump if it means facing a challenge from their own right.
We might see a lot more Trump denunciations in September, when the Republicans are trying to win general elections and if Trump is starting to drag them down.
Ah,but if the media creates President Trump, they get eight years of good ratings (assuming civilization survives that long.,)
The media doesn’t want President Trump. Fox News is still stanning for him, because Fox News would busily explain how Voldemort’s tax plans would stimulate the economy, but most pundits are frankly shitting themselves over this guy.
It is crazy how pro-Trump most of the people at Fox News are. Even the ones who pretend to be objective call him Mister Trump and constantly find excuses to talk about how awful Hillary is. It’s like, “I know Trump is terrible but have I mentioned yet that Hillary is the antichrist? Compared to Hillary, Trump is just the false prophet from the Book of Revelation. Doesn’t that sound somewhat better?”
I seriously think that either Cruz or Rubio would have beaten Trump in the primaries if the cable news people hadn’t treated everything Trump ever said like major news and if Kasich would have had the good grace to drop out before he won some races. Instead, Fox was like, “Trump is just the worst. Isn’t that awesome? Go, closeted racist tea party types who like this guy for some reason! Keep watching Hannity!”
So it seems that it is Breitbart rather than 4Chan that’s running Trump’s campaign. Close but not quite, eh John?
Breitbart, 4chan, same difference.
Hell, Breitbart’s most famous writer admits he just cleans up 8chan threads and posts ’em because that gets him the same pay for WAY less work than actual writing would.
So uh, is this still your opinion? Or any recent events change your mind?