I would agree with you as far as the current media. There's a duty to cover this guy.
However, in 2015 they had the chance to disarm him with ridicule and scorn. instead they covered him as though ideas like build the wall were legitimate policy ideas instead of shit the grifter came up with ad hoc.
For reasons that will always elude me, publications that throw ink at that singularly stupid bore make make money from the endeavour . With the exception of the early birther fallout period, this has consistently been the case for the past 40 years.
None of the press could resist the temptation of talking about Trump, whether positively or negatively. Covering him helped the NYT and Wapo as well as launching the public career of Heather Cox Richardson (among others).
I'm grateful for this, but I wish the MSM had not given this asshole several billion dollars of publicity when they had the chance to laugh him off the stage.
I don't agree with you about how the press covered Trump in 2015. It's not the media's job to disarm a candidate with ridicule and scorn, even though that was the tenor of much of the coverage of Trump before he started doing well in the polls. I still remember Huffington Post in 2015 refusing to cover his campaign in the politics section of their website and instead put news about Trump in the entertainment section You can't not cover a candidate who is leading in GOP polls for president -- just as they can't NOT cover him now. And the coverage of Trump in 2015 and 2016 was unremittingly negative. It's just that Republican voters didn't care.
During the first debate it was clear that the guy was just up there bullshitting, and this was a publicity stunt. He was like Don Rickles, and the audience went nuts. The Republicans haven't had any policy ideas in a long time, and that assortment of clowns was the lowest crop up to that point (though they have recently hit new lows). Nobody called it out. I know that the den of cons and hoodlums talked among themselves and realized that getting a flamboyant primate flinging shit and setting fire to the curtains would distract from their wholesale looting of the public treasury, so they gradually gave him their support. He delivered, too, with the tax cuts and the giant rightward push of the judiciary. His usefulness ended in 2017, and ever since then they seem to look at this monster they created with the kind of fearful awe usually reserved for Shark Week. Since 2015 American politics has been about Trump and still is, and it's still a revenue center to cover him (as we saw last week). Meanwhile ordinary Americans are getting screwed by this "great economy" and shopping at the Dollar Store or Walmart because that's all that is left them. What's next? Hard to say, but it will not be pretty.
I would agree with you as far as the current media. There's a duty to cover this guy.
However, in 2015 they had the chance to disarm him with ridicule and scorn. instead they covered him as though ideas like build the wall were legitimate policy ideas instead of shit the grifter came up with ad hoc.
For reasons that will always elude me, publications that throw ink at that singularly stupid bore make make money from the endeavour . With the exception of the early birther fallout period, this has consistently been the case for the past 40 years.
None of the press could resist the temptation of talking about Trump, whether positively or negatively. Covering him helped the NYT and Wapo as well as launching the public career of Heather Cox Richardson (among others).
I'm grateful for this, but I wish the MSM had not given this asshole several billion dollars of publicity when they had the chance to laugh him off the stage.
Nobody is laughing now.
I don't agree with you about how the press covered Trump in 2015. It's not the media's job to disarm a candidate with ridicule and scorn, even though that was the tenor of much of the coverage of Trump before he started doing well in the polls. I still remember Huffington Post in 2015 refusing to cover his campaign in the politics section of their website and instead put news about Trump in the entertainment section You can't not cover a candidate who is leading in GOP polls for president -- just as they can't NOT cover him now. And the coverage of Trump in 2015 and 2016 was unremittingly negative. It's just that Republican voters didn't care.
During the first debate it was clear that the guy was just up there bullshitting, and this was a publicity stunt. He was like Don Rickles, and the audience went nuts. The Republicans haven't had any policy ideas in a long time, and that assortment of clowns was the lowest crop up to that point (though they have recently hit new lows). Nobody called it out. I know that the den of cons and hoodlums talked among themselves and realized that getting a flamboyant primate flinging shit and setting fire to the curtains would distract from their wholesale looting of the public treasury, so they gradually gave him their support. He delivered, too, with the tax cuts and the giant rightward push of the judiciary. His usefulness ended in 2017, and ever since then they seem to look at this monster they created with the kind of fearful awe usually reserved for Shark Week. Since 2015 American politics has been about Trump and still is, and it's still a revenue center to cover him (as we saw last week). Meanwhile ordinary Americans are getting screwed by this "great economy" and shopping at the Dollar Store or Walmart because that's all that is left them. What's next? Hard to say, but it will not be pretty.