Hundreds of protesters march in downtown Seattle as they protest the election of President-elect Donald Trump. Ted S. Warren AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Karl Rove, who on 23 October told Fox News that Trump’s poll numbers were so bad he was very likely to lose, during the pitch-dark night of 8 November said in passing (again to Fox News, who else?) that Trump had been given a big boost by the news media. About that he was right, of course. Fox played no small part in talking up Donald Trump, ignoramus, bully and business fraud, as a plausible president. As Rove didn’t say, the mainstream media never ceased beating up on Hillary Clinton, creating and inflaming the impression that she was a criminal awaiting indictment. This tissue of smears they were already waving around in the ‘90s. I defy anyone to remember the ostensible crimes committed by the Clintons in a development project called Whitewater, which for years was made to appear the Ozarks equivalent of Watergate and subjected to investigation after headline after investigation, none of which — none of which — ever resulted in any charges that stuck.
Never mind. Hillary = Whitewater. Hillary = Travelgate. (Anyone remember that one?) Hillary murdered Vince Foster. These were the lunatic troughs at which Republicans fed. Pressed onward by Republican politicians thinking that if they held enough investigations they could eventually dredge up a crime; by Fox itself, and by the right’s radio and internet shouters from Rush Limbaugh on down into the gutter of Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity and eventually Breitbart & Co., the mainstream media promoted a Hillary story. Eventually, they were able to saddle her with the scarlet A as well: adultery, expediter of.
As for Trump, he made his way through a bright career as media darling. During his decades playing at glitz and bravado, Trump played the entertainment world like a cheap fiddle. First came his rebranded hotels and gaudy Manhattan tower, then the tabloids’ front pages and gossip columns, then his best-selling ghostwritten books. Once he was a Name, everything he did was newsworthy because, well, he was a Name. His brand so established, he fastened it onto the gargantuan casinos that soon enough he drove into the ground, but never mind. Then there was Howard Stern and a national audience, then reality television and a much bigger national audience. He was a magnate of leisure, a brander of golf courses and hotels that he neither built nor owned; and so eventually he could arrive as a superstar, a one-man spectacle, a sure deliveryman of eyeballs and eardrums, not only holding the corporate fun world enthralled but shoving his way into the precincts of the spellbound, fact-unencumbered news. By promoting the falsehood that Barack Obama was Kenya-born, he could muscle his way to the front of the Republican line.
