With NBC severing all ties with Donald Trump, his campaign message seems to be that he’s too racist for network television but perfect for the White House. But before he can get that far, he has to win the Republican Party nomination.
That seems rather unlikely, but I don’t think his main problem will be his stance on immigration. Getting fired by a major network is probably an asset for him as he can play the victim and accuse the liberal media executives of cowardice in the face of the political correctness police. It’s like a badge of honor to be silenced by media executives in New York City. I bet that Bobby Jindal would love to get hired by CBS just so he could say something so outrageous that it would get his contract ripped up and he could milk it for all it’s worth.
Normal rules no longer apply to Republican politics, so you can pretty much piss off the establishment in almost any way you want to and not have it hurt your standing with the Republican base. In most cases, making respectable people shudder in horror is the surest way to get a boost in the polls. Donald Trump certainly understands this.
His problems are different. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. And he’s going to have a problem passing the basic electability sniff test. Thrilling the Republican base isn’t enough on its own to win the nomination because there are practical voters who have the ability to think rationally enough to figure out that, yes, Alan Keyes may be making an enormous amount of sense, but he will never be acceptable to most voters whose cerebral cortex is still connected to their central nervous system. So, for Trump, he loses some base voters for not knowing their script and he fails to make up for it with “common sense” conservatives who still have enough empathy to project accurately about what normal people will think is insane.
Trump will lose, but not because the media treat him as a pariah or because he’s too racist.
Yeah, come 2017 Trump can sit around and trade war stories with Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry about the problems inherent with peaking too soon. Maybe they will settle the argument once and for all about which of them was torpedoed the worst by that dreaded massive liberal media conspiracy.
T Rump is the flavor of the month. By Labor Day (and probably a lot sooner), he’ll be polling in the low single digits. Chris Christie is announcing today, so the political reporters will have someone else to cover and T Rump will fade into the background.
Christie is his own special kind of damaged, but he at least knows how to work a friendly room. T Rump just keeps going until there’s about five people left who can still stand him, and four of them hate themselves for it.
What this means is that NBC can go after him with God’s wrath right now. They can go into his finances, his stupidity, his time on that TV show, etc. Stupid is a walking target right now and doesn’t seem to realize it. It’s going to get ugly for him. I wonder how he deals with his new court jester status. He made a dumbass gamble going after that redneck money.
His ego won’t allow him to consider reality. Crazy people are often the ones who are last to realize that they are actually crazy. And in the case of Trump, that realization will never come.
New?
Court jester. Have you seen The Donald pinata? Univision is trashing The Donald in spanish with every foul thing that erupts from his mouth. The damage The Donald is doing to the GOP will not go away when he drops out of the race.
Speaking of NBC, “They can go into his finances, his stupidity, his time on that TV show, etc.” They can, but I don’t think they’re going to. I wish they would. Heck, I wish NPR would, but they’re not going to. They like him. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing as pushing a loose tooth with your tongue — it kind of hurts, but in a pleasant way. I dunno, maybe they’re amused by him. I’ve been trying to think of something he might do to turn the press against him, but if Sarah Palin couldn’t do it (and in the news pages they still treat her seriously) Teh Donald doesn’t have a chance.
I’m not sure who is more cynical… Trump and his views of american politics or the media that gives him a pass for being just another celebrity trolling the country for fun and free publicity.
Everyone in the media thinks Trump is a jerk and his candidacy a waste of time, but he seems to be getting more play than many of the other jerk candidates. Heck, even the liberal media gives him coverage. I realize that there is no such thing as “The Media” but the fact that you all feed on each other’s stupidity is really demoralizing. Sorry… but you all just suck. There is no other word to describe the bottom-feeding BS passing as journalism that comes to my attention on TV and the internet these days.
I think I can explain Trump’s rise in the polls. If I were asked who I support for president, I would lie and tell them Donald Trump out of spite.
I’m sure Mr. BooMan is a decent man, but for gods sake, get yourself out of this awful business.
Same reason they cover car crashes, fires, missing white women — they get eyeballs. It doesn’t constitute and endorsement or taking his candidacy seriously or anything like that. They aren’t in the business of informing the public, they’re in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. As long as they think T. Ronald Dump can help them do that, he’ll be on teevee. But his ludicrousness is most of what makes him interesting.
They aren’t endorsing or promoting car crashes, fires, or missing white women, they’re just presenting them. Giving Dump airtime doesn’t constitute an endorsement, or really an opinion of any kind either.
“It’s like a badge of honor to be silenced by media executives in New York City”
Oh, if only it involved Trump actually being silenced…but we are not so fortunate.
What not to like about a pathological, narcissistic, ignorant, racist billionaire who never knows when to shut up? He’s the perfect face of the modern GOP.
I mean you don’t get much more pathologically narcissist racist billionaire than Prime Minister Bunga Bunga. And even after being convicted is trying a come back.
Of course Belusconi is probably smarter than Trump and owned half of Italian media. That is basically he was Michael Bloomberg with Trumps taste in women and gaudiness generally.
But really you shouldn’t bet against pathological narcissism, it has worked for all too many leaders past and present: Putin, Idi Amin, Mobutu, Marcos, Mugabe, heck Huey Long. And while most of them weren’t born rich like Trump none did or will die anything but filthy rich. (Maybe the Kingfish excepted).
Being a Clown is much like Treason. If successful none dare call it such. Not from inside the Political Circus. Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel called It Can’t Happen Here which of course is the story of how it would.
Winthrop sounds more like Cruz than Trump but hey Truth can be weirder than Fiction.
Yeah, I think our gracious host is wrong in thinking the press is going to treat Teh Donald as a pariah. They aren’t now and I don’t think anything will cause them to in the future. They’re covering the things he said in a neutral way, “Opinions on the shape of the earth may differ, meanwhile …”
His problems are different. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say.
You know, this hits a really key point. If you want to talk Wingnut you have to wallow in the Wingnut gutter. You can’t just pick up a few bits about birth certificates or the 47% or Benghazi and how our military is horribly underfunded or how trillions are being lost on Obummers bruthas in the ‘hood and the regular white people are overtaxed or about how fewer people now have health insurance and its more expensive or how the earth is actually cooling and electric cars are making global warming worse.
No, you have to know it ALL. Even the anti-evolution stuff which even the educated Wingnuts have picked up just because it’s part of the tribal requirement.
You have to have Rush radio turned on during the day and watch Fox at night. You have to make several trips per day to newsmax, worldnutdaily, breitbart, and others.
It’s amazing how many of them actually do believe all this stuff – even people you’d think might be too busy or too involved in the real world, like Anton Scalia or many Fortune 500 CEOs or the top GOP politicians in Congress somehow find the time to be completely fluent in Wingnut.
Trump, OTOH, is a Cafeteria Wingnut. Picking and choosing which of the racist myths to believe.
Now, you can be a Cafeteria Wingnut and still win the GOP nomination, as Romney did, but you have to have the GOP Elders pushing your nomination. Which is why it’s okay for Jeb. Sorry, “JEB!”. But not for Trump or Jindal or Christie.
He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say because he doesn’t even know what he’s going to say. Knowing what your going to say is for little people. He’ll stride up to the podium and just let it rip, and whatever falls out of his mouth is like pearls from a super classy heaven with cloud-side bottle service as Colbert says.
True he says random shit, but then so do most of the rest of the Wingnut candidates. Rick Perry, for example, is like a random sentence generator but because he is a pure Wingnut everything he says is also pure Wingnut. He won’t accidentally say something the tribe doesn’t believe.
I get the feeling his comments on Mexicans were at least in part discovered in the moment, as they came out of his mouth. That’s not an excuse, just an observation about Trump’s combination of total cynicism and total ego. He may be America’s most public walking personality disorder.
Wait, wait…hold up. When did Alan Keyes start making sense?
it’s not immediately clear but i believe boo is speaking in his freeper voice in that line.
With Christie entering the race today, I’m picturing him, Trump & Cruz bringing their lying, bombastic debate talents to a Fox held debate. Yes, today Trump is likely the only one to poll high enough to make the stage, but things change and then we may see Fox in the middle of the food fight they’ve prepped for for so many years. As the NJ paper wrote about Christie yesterday, “He lies” and now he’ll be in a competitive field of liars.
Fox is getting a dose of what they built.
The problem for the RepubliClowns….Cruz, Trump, Bachmann and the like…is really very simple.
Too many clowns, not enough right wing dumbnuts to go around.
Really.
If that segment of the society could simply choose one of their clowns to be the face of RepubliClownism, the dumbnuts would all flock to that choice. There are enough dumbnuts in this country to constitute a real, effective voting block, bet on it. I’ll hazard a guess that well over a third of the possible voters are white, working-class/middle class dumbnuts, and that guess may be on the low side.
Luckily for us (And I do mean that sincerely, because the last real, dyed-in-the-wooll, non-centrist RepubliClown to be elected was Ronald McReagan and you know what happened then, right?), as I was saying, luckily for us the RepubliClowns since Reagan’s reign have pretty much blown each other up real good by splitting the dumbnut brigades into into mutually opposing clumps of stupid hostility.
But if ever another real RepubliClown manages to get nominated for the Preznitcy…watch out!!!
I am dead serious here. Add the dumbnut vote and the remaining hardcore RatPublican vote…they’re not all dumbnuts, y’know…and split the so-called “liberal” votes (Like this site.[
Neo]liberal, really. Centrist in a mask.)…Split them with honestly identified undecided/centrist votes maybe 66%/33% DemRat/RatPub and you have…well, you have Preznit Cruz.
Or even worse, if that’s possible.
UH oh!!!
Let us pray.
Or be preyed upon.
Watch.
Later…
AG
two of the many hats the prez has to wear is “goodwill ambassador” to almost all types of folks, and “peacemaker” to all the rest.
so close your eyes, wind the clock back a few days and imagine president trump’s eulogy in south carolina. now imagine the riots.
now if that thought doesn’t full you with horror, you’re probably a freeper.