The Ratcatcher revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

You’ve probably noticed that a lot of people are writing what looks like post-mortems for the Trump campaign when there are still about three weeks left. Trump himself is even doing it, albeit in a sort of backwards way, in the form of a preemptive explanation that if he loses it’s because the election was “rigged.” That’s not surprising, since that was pretty much his reaction to any loss of his in the primaries, right from the very start. Here’s his response to his loss in Iowa, the very first contest of the primary/caucus season:

Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!

Among many other things that he is, Trump’s a very sore loser, and if (and when, in my opinion) he loses this election we’ll hear a lot about the betrayals and backstabbings and riggings that caused it, and we’ll hear it from Trump and from his most vociferous proponents. In fact, back in the first week April (shortly after I realized that Trump would be the almost-inevitable nominee), I wrote a draft for a post that I haven’t yet published, entitled, “Preparing the ‘stab in the back’ narrative for the Trump loss.” Here was the beginning of the draft (I didn’t get too much further than that):

Commenter “Rotten” writes: “Trump will win a general election if the GOP doesn’t knife him in the back.”

Yes indeed, that’s what will be said. If Trump is the nominee and he loses, it will not be because he is the worst candidate in modern memory and couldn’t even win over the GOP much less the general electorate. It will be because the GOPe “knifed him in the back,” despite the fact that his approval ratings and polls have been abysmal for the entire campaign.

For those aware of history, the phrase “stab in the back” has a historical significance. It was a widely-believed myth on the German right that was part of the complex chain of events that Hitler rode to power:

The stab-in-the-back myth was the notion, widely believed in right-wing circles in Germany after 1918, that the German Army did not lose World War I but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially the republicans who overthrew the monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918”“19. Advocates denounced the German government leaders who signed the Armistice on November 11, 1918, as the “November Criminals.”

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they made the legend an integral part of their official history of the 1920s, portraying the Weimar Republic as the work of the “November criminals” who used the stab in the back to seize power while betraying the nation. The Nazi propaganda depicted Weimar as “a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest ‘national opposition’””fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and ‘cultural Bolsheviks’, who had at last been swept away by the National Socialist movement under Adolf Hitler and the victory of the ‘national revolution’ of 1933”.

And no, Trump is not Hitler. But there are certain techniques of his that have a harmonic vibration, and in addition (as I pointed out last February), there is also a resonance in the emotional state of a certain angry and disgruntled segment of the population that’s been building in the US for many many years.

Which is not to say that people (and I include myself here) don’t have things to be angry about. But it’s always a question of how reasonable the anger is, who a person is angry with and whether that’s the actual culprit, who is whipping up the anger for his or her own purposes (and what those purposes might be), and to whom or what a person turns in his/her anger.

I have maintained in many posts here that the anger at the GOPe is valid but overwrought and exaggerated, and that those who are so angry at them often imagine the GOP in Congress could have and should have done certain things that were either impossible or would have been counterproductive. I have maintained that the left profits from this anger and that some people stirring it up are on the left, although most are on the right and have their own purposes for doing it. Some are sincere, but many have as their sole or partial goal their own self-aggrandizement and increased ratings and audience. And what is done as a result of that anger—the “to whom or what a person turns” part—never should have been the nomination of Donald Trump in 2016, for reasons that have been explained over and over again but can be boiled down to Trump being an unappealing (that is, actually repulsive to many voters) and amoral loose cannon who is out for his own power and is probably more of a liberal than he is a conservative.

Yesterday commenter Irv Greenberg linked to a piece entitled “Trump’s Invisible Shield.” Here’s a quote from the article:

The Trump phenomenon is better understood as a colossal F U to all of the lies and broken promises politicians have hoisted upon the masses over the years. It is the savage blowback to the money-sucking rules and regulations and taxes that heavily burden a broad range of the middle and upper middle classes. It is a YUGE “suck it” to the self-aggrandizement and pocket lining that goes on within the Beltway. It is a swift backlash against the swarm of Beltway wannabees who want in on DC action in order to enrich themselves on the backs of the people, to the detriment of the country. ”¦ The only fix is a virus and it just so happens, Trump is the virus…

The attitude of the average Trump supporter is that no matter how much of a buffoon he might be, he isn’t as bad as all of the other career pols out there who misstate, misspeak, and misremember but always get away with it because they claim to be above the fray, of impeccable character, or to soar high when others stoop low. Whether hard-core from the get-go or johnny-come-latelies, Trump supporters have such little regard for political elites, that they’ll support anyone who isn’t making his or her money off of their votes.

There’s much more in that vein.

And now we’ll have a compare and contrast. This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote in mid-February 2016:

The following is an excerpt from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free. The book, first published in 1955, is an exploration of Germans’ attitudes in the period leading up to WWII and including the war and its immediate aftermath. It features interviews with ten “typical” Germans, conducted a couple of years after the war’s end, and offers extraordinary and often relevant insights into how it was that Hitler came to power and stayed there so long.

Here is my general discussion of the book and its author, who was a man of the left. To understand the following excerpt, it is helpful to know that for the purposes of the book, Mayer refers to the ten interviewees as his “friends”:

National Socialism was a repulsion of my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government””against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of “the rascals.” Its motif was “throw them all out.” My friends, in the 1920’s, were like spectators at a wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and the sweat, the match is “fixed,” that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal “exposed” another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends”¦

My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians. They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by “politics,” which was only a cloak for corruption”¦Against “the whole pack,” “the whole kaboodle,” “the whole business,” against all the parliamentary parties, my friends evoked Hitlerism, and Hitlerism overthrew them all”¦

This was the Bewegung, the movement, that restored my friends and bewitched them. Those Germans who saw it all at the beginning””there were not very many; there never are, I suppose, anywhere””called Hitler the Rattenfé¤nger, the “ratcatcher.” Every American child has read The Pied-Piper of Hamlin. Every German child has read it, too. In German its title is Der Rattenfé¤nger von Hameln.

When bringing up anything to do with Hitler in the context of today’s world, one must be ultra-careful to make it clear (as I am doing now, once again) that the analogy is not to Hitler himself but (in this case) to a state of mind in the populace that lashes out against a flawed government, and reaches out in its anger and frustration for a remedy that is in fact far more flawed than the original disease, when there were better remedies at hand. Right now, one of the probable upshots of the Trump nomination is that a likely victory over Hillary Clinton was turned into the reverse, a likely victory for Hillary Clinton.

That is another very terrible result. America will have committed what I consider an unforced error. And history—unfortunately—isn’t baseball.

Frost, poetry, and politics: “A Case for Jefferson”

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it may not really be poetry—even though it’s a poem by a master of poetry: Robert Frost. It’s more in the vein of light verse, which Frost sometimes also wrote.

The treatment is light, that is. Not the subject matter:

A CASE FOR JEFFERSON

Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.

By the way, the “Russian Jew” reference in the poem is not, IMHO, anti-Semitic. Frost is suggesting that “Harrison” (not ordinarily a Jewish name) doesn’t even have the excuse for his radicalism of being a Jew in Russia, subject to the pressures and ethos there. Harrison’s “Puritan Yankee through and through.”

More background on the poem and Frost’s politics:

Frost held that not traditional religion and culture, but revolutionary Marxism and reforming liberalism were the true opiates of the people. Marxists and secular liberals rejected or were often agnostic about God, but they deified the party or the state; they rejected the traditional religious concept of heaven, but they believed in an eventual heaven on earth. They rejected religion and much in Western culture as superstition, but were themselves superstitiously addicted by the idea of progress through science and revolutionary ideology. What Frost called “the sweep to collectivism in our time,” which characterized the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, could destroy the principle of limited political power even in America, through the growth of the federal bureaucracy under the New Deal. Frost attributed the political wisdom of dividing and balancing political power against itself to the religious orthodoxy of the Founding Fathers. They knew that only God had or should have absolute power, and their religion taught them that the moral and intellectual weaknesses of man required putting bounds to political power. When modern politicians play God they invariably promise far more than they can achieve as men, and the gap between their promises and their achievements is filled by the abstract slogans and dialectics of ideological propaganda. The language of revolutionists and reformers is characterized by the jargon of rationalized deceit. In a letter to Bernard De Voto in 1936 Frost wrote: “The great politicians are having their fun with us. They’ve picked up just enough of the New Republic and Nation jargon to seem original to the simple.” In 1939, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost said: “More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.”

I knew absolutely nothing of Frost’s politics when I began to admire his poetry, and nothing of them when I started this blog and designed the photograph at the top, which features Frost’s collected works as the book with the dark cover above the Churchill biography.

“A Case for Jefferon” was first published in 1947, but I can’t find anything that says when it might have been written, although obviously it was prior to that. Frost later disavowed it as “dated,” (although he wasn’t able to see the future—the late 60s—in which it became undated again), and thought it was bad as a poem.

Well, as I said, it’s not really a poem. It’s a ditty, a verse—but unfortunately, it’s not dated. I’m not sure it ever will be, because the strains in human thought it was describing seem to have a certain staying power.

[ADDENDUM: Some commenters have wondered why it’s called “A Case for Jefferson.” I’m not sure, but I found this:

To Thomas Jefferson, such would indeed be a case of democracy gone wrong…

[Frost is quoted as having said to Reginald Cook]: “I said to a person high up in the government lately, I said “As long as all my educated friends and Mrs. Roosevelt think that socialism is inevitable and can’t be avoided and has got to come that way, why don’t you and I hurry it up and get it over with? It couldn’t last…I wouldn’t favor that policy.”

Plus é§a change, plus c’est la méªme chose.]

Trump on the ropes

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think that Trump’s chances of winning the presidency—never very good in the first place—are now vanishingly small. Here’s someone who agrees, and has this observation to make:

When a man whose entire candidacy and public standing is predicated on the myth that he is a winner has to face in every single moment a reminder that he is going to face one of the biggest, most humiliating losses in presidential history on the biggest stage imaginable, you better believe he will lash out. We cannot predict exactly the manner it will play out, but we have seen the embers already and they are ugly.

Well, yes. But that leaves out an important point, which is that this behavior is not new for Trump. And he’s not lashing out because he perceives he’s losing. In fact, I’m not even sure whether he does perceive he’s losing, because his narcissism may protect him from considering that possibility, and he will blame others rather than himself if it does happen.

As will many of his most fervent followers.

However, in addition to basing his candidacy on “being a winner,” he has also based it on his propensity to lash out. So of course, now that he is under greater stress in the stretch, that behavior is increasing. It’s what he knows, what he does, and what has given him his well-deserved reputation as a fighter. Many of his supporters very much like that about him: “He doesn’t play by those Marquess of Queensbury rules.”

No, he doesn’t. And one thing that article didn’t mention is the fact that one of the people Trump is lashing out at most vociferously and most often these days seems to be Paul Ryan. For example, this interview of Trump’s combines his dissing Ryan with an emphasis on knowing or not knowing “how to win,” and an assertion that he—Trump—will win (it was immediately preceded by Trump’s statement “Well, I don’t want to be knocking Paul Ryan…”):

When asked by ABC News’ Tom Llamas before a campaign event tonight in Green Bay, Wisconsin, whether he believed Ryan wanted him to win the race to the White House, Trump responded, “Well, maybe not, because maybe he wants to run in four years or maybe he doesn’t know how to win.”

“Maybe just doesn’t know how to win. I mean, who can really know. But I know I’m in his territory and they are all screaming for Trump,” Trump said, referring to the fact that his campaign event was in Ryan’s home state. “The head of the [state] Republican Party just left me. He shook my hand. He says, ‘You are gonna win Wisconsin.’ And I know one thing, we are gonna do very well here.”

Earlier, Trump “had called Ryan a ‘very weak and ineffective leader’ and claimed ‘there’s a whole sinister deal going on’ with Ryan and the Republican establishment.” It’s been a theme of Trump’s right along to criticize Republicans nearly as much as he has Democrats (maybe, at times, even more), and it’s one of his appeals to many of his supporters angry at the GOP and angry at anyone who doesn’t get on board the Trump train.

But here are my questions: if Trump really expects to become president (and let’s say he does), why would he want to lessen the number of Republicans in Congress? Why would he want to offend and alienate them? Does he not think he will need their help once he got in office? Does he think it would be easier to work with Democrats than Republicans? Or does he plan to circumvent Congress?

Or does he think about any of these things at all?

The brilliantly orchestrated news drop

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a piece about how brilliantly orchestrated the “Trump the sexual harasser” news drop was.

A careful drip, drip, and then a flood.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the right could learn how to do this? There’s a little problem, though: the whole thing must be coordinated with a cooperative and willing press. For the right, most of the time (or perhaps all of the time), even bigger news can’t get traction because instead of spreading the news, the press stifles it.

That is quite the uneven playing field. And yet—unless the right can come up with better alternative news sources, and plenty of them, and do it quickly—that is the playing field we’ve got.

And here’s an interesting piece about what we’ve learned from Trump’s campaign, although I can’t say I agree with everything in it. I object in particular to this, at least in part:

One huge advantage held by professional politicians is that they’ve already been vetted, faced opposition research. Trump, despite having been a public figure for more than 30 years, never faced the same scrutiny, as we learned in the dizzying final weeks of the campaign. Why? Because it was never in anyone’s direct interest to take him on. If he had run for any significant lower office, the resources of a political party would have been focused on destroying him by digging up dirt from his past. Any public figure with skeletons in his closet should assume they will be not only found but fetishized.

There’s certainly a general truth to the fact that a professional has usually been fully vetted. But for Trump, it isn’t relevant, because as a public figure for many decades, for Trump all the information was out there. No, we didn’t have that Billy Bush tape, but we already had its equivalent (or even worse), and it was all just out there to be easily obtained by Googling or reading a basic biography. I did it; anyone could have done it, too. I wouldn’t even dignify it with the word “vetting.” It required minimal effort, and there was such an embarrassment of riches that it was impossible to cover it all.

The press could have easily done it. Candidates could have easily done it. The latter were afraid to do it—as I mentioned two days ago—because they thought they could wait for the other candidates to drop out first, and they didn’t want to draw Trump’s considerable fire prematurely.

This is not 20/20 hindsight on my part. I wrote about the phenomenon in January of 2016:

Commenter “Wooly Bully” said that “Trump has a very large closet that holds many skeletons.”

I don’t know about Trump’s closet; the phrase usually refers to something heretofore hidden.

The thing that strikes me about Trump is that a great deal of his bad behavior is out in the open, fully accessible. And his behavior had been very bad. I don’t mean things like infidelities, although that’s certainly part of his past. I mean things that are directly relevant to his ability to govern.

The material is fully accessible, as I said””I’ve encountered quite a bit of it, and probably only the tip of the iceberg, because prior to this campaign I’ve never had the slightest interest in Trump’s biography. But it’s right there in public, in terms of articles and books. However, it’s not common knowledge to most people…

This information is all in the public domain, and so far his opposition isn’t using it. Perhaps his GOP opponents haven’t used it so far because they thought he’d fade on his own. Or each one of them didn’t want to become his special target. Or they thought they could attack him on his politics. That hasn’t seemed to work so far. But it seems to me that, if a guy is making a lot of promises to you, and telling you what a great negotiator and dealmaker he is, and that’s why you should elect him””he’s a doer who does great things””you’d do well to look at some of his deals that went bad, his behavior during them, and the consequences. If he’s a liar, he might just be lying to you.

One thing I think we can safely say is that the Democrats will use this stuff against Trump if he is the nominee…

In that piece I focused on Trump’s behavior in Scotland when building his resort and predicted that the Democrats would use this line of attack in the general, pointing out his anti-common-man and elitist stance there. Although I was wrong about that—it turns out that the Democrats haven’t needed to use it because they found other avenues that give them more bang for their buck—I certainly expected many other lines of attack from them, as well. Many. The two they seem to have fastened on have been the sexual stuff and the idea that Trump is a loose cannon who might start a nuclear war.

[ADDENDUM: In terms of a successful news drop by the right, I recall the Swift Vets in 2004. I don’t have time to go back and look at all the sources right now and link to them, but to the best of my recollection the Vets tried to get their story out to the press in a press conference and with press releases, and it was barely covered initially. That’s why they ended up putting out a book and some ads, in an attempt to get past the press. The press reacted by smearing them (as of course did the Democrats) and trying to debunk them. But it didn’t quite work; the Swift Vets are considered to have been at least somewhat instrumental in Kerry’s defeat. It helped that Kerry was such a terrible candidate, and that he had relied so strongly on his military history in promoting himself.]

“Cornhead” endorses Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

You can read what he has to say at his blog.

Those of you who read the comments here already know much about Cornhead’s thinking on the 2016 race. But he lays it all out in that post, which begins:

I am confident that I am the only person in America who has personally seen Hillary Clinton six times, Donald Trump five times, Bill Clinton twice and Chelsea Clinton once at campaign rallies.

Well, maybe not the only person. Some news people may have had the pleasure as well. But certainly one of very few, and maybe the only one who’s not been paid for it.

Those friends who disappear

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I read this WaPo article by a woman whose best friend stopped communicating with her with no explanation, and how ten years later the author still grieves the loss of their friendship and is mystified by it.

I could relate, because it’s happened to me, only it was someone I’d known and been very good friends with much longer than the woman in the story, who was nineteen at the time it happened. I was about to turn fifty when my friend stopped returning my phone calls, and we had been good friends since the age of eight.

I never really understood what had happened, although I tried to find out. I wrote her a note saying that, although upset, I accepted her decision, but that it would really help me if she could just tell me what had happened, so perhaps I could learn from the experience. She didn’t reply. I called her mother, whom I knew very well from my childhood. Her mother was so upset that she wept, but when she asked her daughter what had happened, my ex-friend refused to discuss it with her, either.

About a decade later, my friend died. And although I had actually encountered her unexpectedly a few years earlier at a class reunion and we had managed a short conversation, when I’d asked her what had happened she gave some cryptic replies. They will have to do, though, and I’m grateful for them, because to have had that conversation was definitely better than nothing. But the meeting occurred by accident.

I still grieve both the end of our friendship and her death.

When I looked at the comments to that WaPo piece, I was surprised at how mean-spirited many of them were, more or less saying “Quit whining; get over it already” and/or “Have you ever wondered what you did wrong to make this happen?”

Well, I think this woman has gotten over it, because she seems to be functioning and going about her business. Does “getting over” something mean one doesn’t bear the scars, or doesn’t think about it very sadly sometimes? Is that our new standard, to wipe all pain from our memory banks in order to prove how stalwart we are? And why would people think the writer hadn’t examined whatever her own role might have been, and searched for an explanation there? Just because she didn’t devote paragraphs to that pursuit in what is meant to be a rather short essay about the effects of a loss of friendship?

As for “quit whining,” I think it’s pretty clear that the writer wanted her article to let other people who’ve had similar experiences know that their strong reactions aren’t that unusual, and to suggest to others who might leave without saying goodbye that perhaps it would be good, when “breaking up” with an old and once-dear friend, to offer a simple word of explanation.

It certainly would have helped me.

I think that people are used to the idea that there’s a lot of grief with a romantic breakup. But friendships—even deep, long-term friendships—are considered more fungible. They’re not, at least not for many people. For many many people, the loss of a friend—especially when the friend doesn’t confront the issue head-on and explain, if only in a relatively perfunctory way (“we’ve grown apart,” “I’m angry at you because…”)—the reaction can be extraordinarily painful, all the more so because there’s little acknowledgement about how painful it can be. Do we have songs about how our best friends drift away? I can’t think of any offhand (maybe you can, though), although there are countless laments about the heartache involved in the loss of a lover, and rightly so.

[NOTE: Some people might say that once a friendship has reached that point, it’s the point of no return and repair isn’t possible, so why not just walk away and make it easy on everyone. But my observation is that although walking away is usually easier on the one who makes the decision to leave, it’s rarely easier on the one who is left, although the leaver may sincerely think it will be. Telling the truth about why you left is almost undoubtedly hard for most people, but it’s much kinder in the end.

I also have had serious fallings-out with good friends that have been repaired—sometimes quickly, sometimes over a number of years. So it can be done, if both people are motivated to do it.]

Amazing air battle

The New Neo Posted on by

I had not remembered this story from 1994, although it’s extraordinarily memorable. I came across it on YouTube the other day and was surprised that it’s not better known.

Watch. It’s unbelievable, and yet it happened:

“Fight For Your Life,” indeed.

Perhaps it’s not more well-known because there were no passengers on the airplane.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s so much news today (much of it depressing, alas) that I’m just going to do something I don’t usually do, a roundup:

Romney on Trump and the future of the GOP.

Clinton operatives crow about how they scared off Chief Justice Roberts.

Big accord signed to limit a greenhouse gas—and it’s not about CO2, it’s about something we’ve heard relatively little about in comparison (hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs) and is regarded as a far more powerful determinant of global warming. It’s also ironic that HFCs were introduced in the 80s as a substitute for ozone-depleting gases.

Meanwhile, Obamacare continues its predictable (and predicted) slide.

Eramo of UVA tells her story

The New Neo Posted on by

In connection with her lawsuit against Rolling Stone for damages done to her as a result of their false UVA fraternity rape story, Nicole Eramo has given an interview:

Eramo told ABC News that she could not discuss her interactions with Jackie beyond what was contained in court documents for her defamation lawsuit against the magazine in order not to violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

The trial for Eramo’s $7.85 million defamation civil suit against Rolling Stone is expected to start Monday. The UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity named in the article, also brought a defamation suit against the magazine, for $25 million; it is scheduled go to trial in the fall of 2017.

In the article, Jackie claimed that Eramo seemed to discourage her from going public with her allegations because she was worried about the university’s reputation and that Eramo said, “Nobody wants to send their daughter to a rape school.”

Eramo told ABC News that she never said that and she would never make a statement like that to an alleged sexual assault survivor. When asked whether Jackie made up that statement, Eramo said, “I can’t say, but I know I didn’t say it.”

I hope she wins every penny, and I hope the same for the fraternity’s lawsuit.

I wrote about the case extensively at the time, and there is no question in my mind that the periodical and its reporter were at fault and should be held accountable. I also have a dream, perhaps an unrealistic one: that the results of the lawsuit would further discourage other periodicals from being similarly reckless about what they publish in their pursuit of their own political goals.

The October surprise is no surprise

The New Neo Posted on by

An October surprise timed to maximally hurt the Republican candidate is no surprise at all. It is so predictable that the term “October surprise” has become commonplace.

In is no news, either, that the MSM tries to elect the Democrat. No news at all.

In the case of Trump, it was easily seen that he was the candidate the MSM and the Democrats wanted Hillary to face, because he was the weakest candidate. So as soon as they saw his candidacy had some legs and promise (which took a couple of months, because at first they found him a laughing stock), they did what they could to get on board temporarily and build him up, with the near-surety that they had more than enough ammunition to tear him down once he was safely nominated. Oh, the beauty of it!

If you think that’s a case of 20/20 hindsight, it’s not. Nor did it take 20/20 vision to predict it in the first place. It was easy. Here’s what I wrote in December of 2015, in a post entitled “Does Trump own the media or does the media own Trump?” [emphasis mine]:

So who’s using whom?

Rush Limbaugh says that Trump has the media frustrated and wrapped around his little finger:

…[T]hey can’t take him out. They can’t stop covering him. They can’t humiliate him. They can’t embarrass him. They can’t diminish his support. They’re powerless, and this has them in a panic. The media that can make-or-break anybody cannot touch Trump, and every time they try, all they do is make him bigger. They can’t explain this. They are frustrated to no end, and so are both political parties who rely on the media to be the great equalizer in all of this…

There’s no question Trump is getting more coverage than anyone else, by a huge margin. YUUUGE! So perhaps Limbaugh is right, and Trump is having a good laugh on a media that can’t do a thing about him except his bidding, and is instrumental in getting him more and more attention even though they don’t want to do it.

But here’s an alternate theory, one I happen to ascribe to.

I think the media knows that Trump is the story of the election. He’s exciting, people are entertained by watching him. So they get something out of covering him—readers and viewers. Remember, though, that the vast majority of the MSM is on the left, so much of what they do is with the goal of directing their readers and viewers to what’s so dreadful about Trump, and of energizing Democratic voters so that, if Trump’s the nominee, voters feel they must vote for the sane person—who would be Hillary—even if they don’t much like her.

I have believed from the very start of Trump’s campaign that the MSM…would very much like Trump to be the Republican nominee. They believe very strongly that, if nominated, he will lose, and that his chances of losing are greater than that of certain other candidates such as Rubio (polls bear that out).

I think they are correct, although of course I don’t know for sure. But more importantly, they think they’re correct. So for them, covering Trump is win/win. They get ratings. And although they’re not trying to destroy him—not for now—they dearly want him to be the nominee, and they’re confident they can destroy him later, or that he will self-destruct with the majority of Americans.

They might be right or they might be wrong. But they think they own him in the sense of using him to fit their purposes, not the other way around.

It’s instructive look at the comments section to that December post, too.

Another way in which the MSM orchestrated all of this was described by me in another old post that I wrote a few weeks after the first one and entitled “The hype about how Trump could win: what are the facts?”:

I doubt the motives of the NY Times or Politico or other left-leaning periodicals when they continue to say he will do well against Clinton, in the absence of evidence that he would do any better against her than other Republican candidates, and the presence of evidence that he would actually do worse against her than they would.

It’s also curious to me that none of these articles seem to actually analyze the polls to come to their conclusions. I have looked at the polls, and continue to do so, and have come to the conclusion that, at least so far, they indicate that Trump would be the weakest candidate of the GOP frontrunners in a head-to-head against Clinton…

I can’t escape the idea that the liberal/left press is pushing a Donald Trump candidacy because they feel he’s actually the weakest candidate.

Much of that post of mine analyzes the polls and compares what they actually indicated (no good news for Trump in the general, if he were to become the nominee) versus what the MSM would have had you think they indicated (“Trump has a really good chance of winning the whole thing!). I wrote other posts about that as well, but my voice (and that of others agreeing with me) was drowned out by the tsunami of propaganda from hopeful Trump supporters and the more Machiavellian MSM who were promoting the idea too.

Not that I expected my voice to not be drowned out. I’m not crazy; I know how large or small my audience is (although I love you guys; I really do). And although there were other, louder voices than mine saying much the same thing I was, they were drowned out too, in the wave of Trump-supporters’ hopes, trust, anger, gullibility, frustration, and probably a host of other things as well.

What prompted this post of mine today? This article by Joe Cunningham at RedState, entitled “The Disgusting Media Sat on Sexual Assault for a Partisan Victory”:

Sixteen women as of now have come forward to say they were sexually assaulted by Donald Trump. Sixteen. It is an avalanche of absolutely bad news for the Trump campaign, and it is far too close to the end of the cycle to recover from it. The Trump campaign is finished. However, each and every one of these cases is years old. The tape that showed Donald Trump talking to Billy Bush, the very tape that started this avalanche, is itself more than a decade old. Some of the stories of Donald Trump are older than that. But, we are only now hearing about it. Wikileaks seems to have provided an answer as to why, as well: The collusion between the Media and the Clinton campaign.

I use the term “collusion” on purpose here. While not exactly the proper use, it’s about the closest I can come to describing what’s going on here. The Media is not supposed to be friendly with political campaigns. Their relationship can be ”“ and should be ”“ cordial, but it should never be in bed with one side and actively trying to destroy the other. And, of course, we all know which side is which in this scenario. The Wikileaks releases verify for us what we really already know. The Clinton campaign has relied heavily on not only favorable, but dictated of certain political events in order to orchestrate their victory.

The Media withheld stories about sexual assault until it was convenient for a presidential candidate.

Let me repeat: no surprise, because that’s what the term “October surprise” signifies, and that expression was not coined yesterday.

And it’s interesting to read this comment at neoneocon from “Cornhead,” written back in December of 2015:

Jeb Bush and his super PACs would do the GOP a real service if they rolled out the dirt on Donald.

Just saying Trump is a bully and that he can’t insult himself to the Presidency doesn’t move the needle.

Jeb is an idiot.

Well, Jeb calculated that targeting the others would weaken them, and that he could pick off Trump later or that Trump would self-destruct. Also, he didn’t want to draw more of Trump’s fire than necessary, because he knew how dirty Trump would fight. The others had much the same strategy until it was too late; Rubio tried a bit of the direct attack and it backfired on him.

No one in the GOP dug up the Trump sexual allegations, though. Perhaps they were afraid it would make them look low. Perhaps they tried and just couldn’t find the information because Democrats were guarding it till the right time. Perhaps…

And yes, as I wrote yesterday, the MSM and Democrats would have tried to work some sort of similar propaganda against any other GOP nominee at a carefully selected and strategic time. But none of them were anywhere near as vulnerable as Trump.

[ADDENDUM: I also recall that during the primaries many Trump supporters argued that Trump had been impervious to MSM smears and would continue to be so. Many of us responded that this argument was a case of confusing the primaries with the general, and that the dynamics in the general are different. That argument was dismissed, but so far that is what has been coming to pass.

But I don’t discount the possibility of a black swan—or two or even three of them—before this election is over. Right now, however, I would describe Trump’s chances of winning as very, very, very, very distant.]

[ADDENDUM II: Oh, and CNN’s president Jeff Zucker gave me a sarcastic chuckle when he said that “it was a ‘mistake’ [for CNN] to air so many Trump rallies ‘and let them run’ in 2015, giving the candidate an unfettered platform.”

Riiiight Jeff, of course it was a mistake. Mistaken like a fox.]