Trump : Why?

During the "debate" with Trump, it was obvious that she had an ear piece telling her what to say...

What makes her inadequate?

Her time as a Prosecutor, her time as State Prosecutor, or maybe her time as a US Senator?

Trump has bankrupted every business he's ever owned, he lies about his loose cannon sexual deviations........basically he lies about everything.

God has a sense of humor, you should be grateful for that....

.you claim you don't live in the US, that makes me chuckle.

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.

Likewise with the post-debate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote about at the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.

Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.

I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.

I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)

Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”

Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasy land. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair’s executive chairman, David Smith, bought the once glorious Baltimore Sun. Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or the News Corp. will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.

I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.

It’s the same reason Viktor Orban told CPAC in 2022: “Have your own media.”

This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.

You can’t even blame the Electoral College this time, that anti-democratic peculiarity that values a Wyoming vote 3.7 times more than a Californian vote, because this time Trump has stormed the popular vote too. This time America made a conscious choice. They chose Trump.
They chose a man with multiple criminal convictions. Judicially determined to be a rapist. With Cosby levels of assault and harassment allegations against him. Who incited an armed rebellion against their country. Stole classified documents and refused to return them. Leaked state secrets to their enemies. Let them die during COVID. Enriched his businesses with their money. Lied to them almost every time he opened his mouth.
This is who they chose.
It was principally white people who chose him, of course. For all the talk of the inroads Trump made with Latino men – and they were significant – 84% of the people that elected Trump were white. Not quite the diverse coalition now being touted by his team. More an identity focussed supporter base who look back to a time of mythical greatness when their supremacy was assured and People of Colour were in their place.
“It was the Economy and Immigration, Stupid!”, intone the commentators, as if Trump had actual policies to boost economic growth or grapple with immigration that the electorate had rationally decided they preferred. Trump barked about tariffs seemingly without knowing how they work in the real world. Apart from reprising his promise to build a wall, his only tangible immigration policy is to round up, incarcerate and then deport thousands of people by unspecified means. Perhaps some voters really believe Trump will deal with these two issues effectively. Most, however, seem swept up in a Zero-Sum politics of resentment and grievance, where any gains by others are at their expense, and it’s time to claim them back. They viscerally understood that Trump was running on identity and revelled as he leaked id over rally stages whilst miming fellatio, swaying to music and wheezing out vitriol.
Trump’s sole coherent economic policy is yet another heist on the American people – a continuation of a decades-long successful campaign to sequester the fruits of their productivity and the benefits of technological progress for the wealthy while living standards stagnate for the rest. He will deliver more massive tax cuts for the billionaires who gathered around him at Mar-a-Lago on Election Night, whose seven, eight and nine figure investments in his campaign will be repaid with interest, who skewed algorithms to create and amplify the dystopian fantasies of Trump’s tirades, who curried favour by reducing legacy media outlets to vanity projects, who professed outrage at Trump’s antics on January 6, 2021 but returned to the MAGA vomit to boost their piles of gold.
It is these billionaires who will now be installed in Cabinet to rewrite the regulations supposed to protect America from their predations, who will drill, baby, drill, dooming the planet to immolation as the rest of its inhabitants watch on in despair.
Maybe those working class suburban and rural Americans who voted for a Daddy to protect them will be shocked by the coming chaos. They shouldn’t be. We’ve seen this movie before. The very economic precarity that destabilises their lives is caused by and benefits the privileged individuals and organisations that orbit around Trump and his MAGA world. Trump’s proposed tariffs will directly cause inflation that in turn will lead to interest rate increases. His massive tax cuts will transfer resources from the state to the wealthy leading to spiralling budget deficits and savage cuts to Government social spending. He has swept the House and the Senate and this time there are no John McCains to save the Affordable Care Act. There are only billionaires complaining about the cost of labour and red tape and demanding both be reduced, men who have built obscene wealth by paying poverty-level wages to the employees who generate their companies’ value. Trump’s working-class supporters may soon ponder the wisdom of their vote.
American women may also ponder Germaine Greer ‘s timeless quote: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them”. With the re-election of Trump, the fathers, brothers and sons of American women embraced a warped violent masculinity that demands control over women’s fertility and access to their bodies, reducing the very-much-Second Sex to incubators whilst fertile and babysitters once menopausal. Their men applauded Trump’s crass insults about his “weak” female opponent who would be a “play toy” for foreign leaders – the very leaders who play Trump like a Stradivarius, flattering him in public, incredulous in private as he cravenly does their bidding, whether gifting them rare COVID testing machines at the height of the pandemic or sacrificing Ukraine. Those American women who understood the danger Trump 2.0 represents to their bodily agency and independence must wonder at their men’s willingness to hoist them on the pyre of a macho idol because he flattered them on podcasts. For the White crumb maidens who embraced his perverse cult believing themselves safe within their white privilege, time will come for you. And your daughters.
No-one can say they weren’t warned. The people who worked most closely with Trump in his first unsuccessful Presidency lined up to say how wildly unsuitable he is to lead America, particularly with the kingly powers gifted to him by a servile Supreme Court. He will now have the power to appoint more judges, clear out the civil service and replace it with lackeys, enhance voter suppression, use his cronies to spin hegemonic narratives through all forms of media. He will hollow out democracy from within to entrench MAGA power for the long term.
As the world braces for the dramatic economic and disastrous environmental shockwaves about to be unleashed, perhaps it now dawns on Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles just how foolhardy was their decision to embrace the Morrison ego-trip of AUKUS, and to integrate our military so blindly with America’s as to transform us into another of their Pacific outposts. Unlike the AUKUS concepts of a plan, the French contract Morrison tore up contained not only concrete timelines for the delivery of the military hardware it purported to purchase, but it also forged an independent geopolitical path for Australia that was not beholden to an archaic Anglosphere nor an anarchic Clown King. With construction on the Virginia class submarines lagging badly, the AUKUS deal may collapse soon anyway if Trump’s hawks decide to keep our promised subs at home. We should let it go.
These next two months will be the calm before the devastating storm and no doubt filled with hand-wringing and finger-pointing as to who is responsible for the Trump redux. Biden. The media. The woke. Elon. There’s blame enough to go around but ultimately it was the American voters – particularly the White and male ones – who doomed us. How bad will things be after January 20? As bad as you can imagine and worse. With the climate crisis already upon us and America’s oligarchal companies’ tentacles extending across the globe, ignoring the tussle and tragedy of its day-to-day politics won’t save non-Americans from the consequences of what America has done. We’ll all be rooned, I fear, before the Trump era is out.

Responses like this are why the Ds will probably fall out of contention as a major party.

If you hadn’t intervened in democracy as your party always does, Bernie Sanders would be at the end of a wildly successful two terms (if the Dems didn’t fight his proposals), Democrats would’ve regained the mantle as the Peoples Party—and Republicans wouldn’t be able to beat his successor.

Kamala Harris spent 1 BILLION DOLLARS paying for celebrity endorsements (Oprah required 1 million for her ‘endorsement’; Beyoncé, 5 MILLION! I thought an endorsement was free? Megan Thee Stallion 5 million.

You’ve been brainwashed so effectively to other-ize, demonize, dehumanize.

So much easier than thinking and coming to terms with reality.

Quote:

You’ve been brainwashed so effectively to other-ize, demonize, dehumanize.

Yeah, like your story about Paul Pelosi. Like the videos you hype from people like Stu Peters. Like your never-ending obsession with Hillary Clinton.

Lash wrote:

LOL, oh no, Hightor! You had to say something I guess, but what a random reach to nowhere! I don’t know who Stew Peters is; what’s the last thing I said about Hillary Clinton?? And the Pelosi story was weird. I finally got straight information about conflicting accounts. I think you’re springing a leak.

Quote:

So much easier than thinking and coming to terms with reality.

I always check your sources (when you provide them) and you are a regular purveyor of misinformation. I consider you neither an objective, nor an original, thinker. Your "criticism", lifted from the pages of Twitter and right-wing outlets, is characterized by its intellectual paucity, its doubtful provenance, framed in your mock outrage and supercilious disdain.

You sound a 1984 script—deciding what is misinformation. You don’t even understand the role you’re playing in the next Nazi regime. Your judgment about me is meaningless, but I hope you wake up about what is happening to this country and stop aiding this slide to horror.

(...) Federal Election Commission filings confirm that the Harris campaign sent Harpo Productions two $500,000 payments on October 15. Other outlets, however, went further, claiming that Winfrey had been paid personally for the appearance.

In a statement, Harpo Productions confirmed that the Harris campaign had paid for the costs of the town hall, without giving a specific figure.

But it said: "Oprah Winfrey was at no point during the campaign paid a personal fee, nor did she receive a fee from Harpo."

Throughout the 2024 election Kamala Harris wildly outraised and outspent her opponent Donald Trump, picking up numerous celebrity endorsements – all in vain. (...) source