If the media reports on Trump (starting in the US and then carried all over the world) are taken at face value, the Trump campaign has imploded and Trump is dead as a Presidential candidate. The November election is already being declared a walk-over for Hillary. The current media onslaught on Trump appears to be a “no holds barred” thing where the most tenuous arguments are used to support sensational conclusions (the latest being that Trump is encouraging violence against Clinton by gun owners).
But there is a fundamental disconnect somewhere. If Trump’s chance is already as dead as the media say it is, then they should be returning to the ridicule they showered on Trump a year ago when his campaign started. But the media “reporting” is, instead, getting increasingly strident, increasingly vituperative, increasingly vicious. It suggests to me that rather than being a reaction to Trump’s declining chance of being President, it is a reaction dominated by the fear that he might win.
The ingredient that the media are most scared of it seems is the US electorate. They are in fact terrified of what is my hypothesis – that the anti-establishment wave that has put Trump where he is, will turn into an anti-establishment tsunami come November. The media are trying, with their increasingly wild attacks, to get to an audience they normally cannot reach.
Right now the media are still living in the hope that they can pre-empt a Trump candidacy. I suspect they might be too late. Some of the more liberal media are enaged in such “over-the-top” attacks on Trump which reminds me of the desperate, crazed, suicidal tactics of berserkers or kamikaze. If Trump can withstand the onslaught and is still around in the middle of September, then, I think, the media’s survival instinct will kick in. If, with 6 weeks to go, Trump is still a potential President, the media will have to look to how they remain alive under a President Trump who might turn out to be quite vindictive.
The mentality driving some of the most extreme attacks on Trump is not so very different to the desperate, crazed, suicide attacks of an embattled terrorist group.
Tags: Donald Trump, Media versus Trump
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