Donald Trump: The Media Feeding Frenzy, Reality TV Star
Donald Trump, the made-for-TV, unapologetic, un-PC, moldable, malleable, make-me-into-whatever-you-want candidate. Just when you thought we were done with celebrity presidents, in walks the reality TV celebrity. Twice the arrogance and far less tact. Alec Baldwin must have been too busy to run.
Trump is in business, so this analogy is appropriate. “The Donald” is like that unruly, ill-tempered customer everyone hates because they deserve no attention, should be asked to leave, are usually wrong, but will be heard and advanced in line over all the nice, polite, people who actually are correct about the problem they speak of. Although, the nice people do not have it in them to be that loud mouth, rude, blow hard, so they fail if they act in concert with the unruly one. Thus explains the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Contrary to popular pseudo-intellectual thought, Donald Trump’s general message has taken up the frustration of the silent majority of people who are simply fed up with the status quo and the current status of the country.
Trump is kind of like one of those carnival clown games that when you shoot with water, its balloon head keeps filling up more and more. Trump’s ego inflates like a car tire at an air pump. The media’s bluster and bombast inflates and fuels his. Sadly, Trump is not too dissimilar from a spoiled child vying for attention from his parents, and like bad parenting, the media fuels the frenzy. Let’s be honest — he is their bread and butter, so don’t let them pretend they hate him.
Just like reality TV, the public eats up every moment he is exploding on their screen. Not to mention that this is all by design. Donald Trump wrote it in a book, the Wallstreet Journal reported.
“I play to people’s fantasies. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win.”
Case in point, as Breitbart News reported, news outlets love to just edit videos of Donald Trump saying things about Muslims. Someone, such as the great combover, does not need edited videos to make him look bad. He does that enough himself. His undoctored video suggesting people would vote for him if “murdered somebody” is, sadly, quite possibly true at this point.
Donald Trump thrives, partly because of the current shock media culture that takes aim at anyone who doesn’t toe their political line or someone who is the antithesis to their PC, cotton candy, carebear world view. However, being “not politically correct” doesn’t necessarily make you “presidentially correct.” It does not make “Donnie” right or a good candidate, but it does mean that this PC culture, and its campy, over-the-top, bound in absurdities, touchy, reactionary way of responding to someone like Trump, combined with the media’s obsession with him, is actually perpetuating, strengthening, and carrying Donald Trump into political victory.
The media would actually do itself a favor to not report on Trump, nor respond to his insanity, then and most likely only then, would they slay the egomaniacal blowhard.
It doesn’t help they force feed everyone the Hillary gruel, or the Bush brussels sprouts, then act surprised that Trump is resonating with a little of both sides. Yes, Lefties. There are Democrats for Trump groups and stickers out there. Granted, there were also Democrats for Romney, and McCain was a Democrat in disguise, and we all saw how that worked out. Sadly, the media generated charisma did not exist for either of them.
What the 2016 election is really all about is a rejection of the establishment, but sadly, the replacements establishment-lite. They wear the shrouds of the underdog while underneath they are the wolves, the devil we already know and have dealt with before, but like the new packaging enough to vote for them again.
Donald Trump is, as the bible would put it, a man who says what “their itching ears want to hear.” There’s an itch that needs to be scratched, and Trump is more than willing to scratch your ear while he is pouring itching powder down your back.
It doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump is a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Socialist, or follows the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, he will play whatever role he thinks the crowd wants, at any given moment. Well, all except for an honest candidate. He’s been conveniently conservative, possibly lyingly liberal, but what does Trump truly think? We may never know.
The Donald Trump presidential campaign is proof that well-meaning conservatives and Tea Party folks can also be duped. Not by silver-tongued faux political saviors, but by vitriolic, divisive entertainers whose wares are non-PC straight talk filled with as much substance as a donut hole. When the media feeding frenzy dies down, the entertainment television turns into reality, and Trump is sitting in the Oval Office, many will be kicking themselves for being so foolish.
The Tea Party movement will need to breathe a desperate sigh, and extend an apology to those who followed their false messiah in 2008 and 2012. Perhaps, then Republicans, Tea Party, Democrats, et cetera can become Americans. George Washington was right about political parties.
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
Maybe then America can pick up the pieces of the shattered Constitutional Republic and turn the tides back. Otherwise, dumb and silent we will be lead to the slaughter bewitched by the next faux messiah, the cult of personality, scarecrow, full of empty promises, simply scratching our metaphorical itch and telling us we are special.
[Image under CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Commons | Courtesy of Gage Skidmore | Resized]
