“The underlying reasons were both obvious & hard to discern and it continues to amaze me that the phenomenon isn’t a central part of the conversation about the current plight of the United States of America. Start w/the proposition that Trump is great for ratings if you are a
right-wing AM radio commentator, or a left Brooklyn political podcaster, you are making bank talking about Trump. It’s like a car crash, with people unable to avert their gaze. The Boss knew this and he knew how to exploit the greed and venality of journalists because he was
And is an expert in the subjects. But there was something deeper and more primal in the was the media obsessed over Trump, as I did. Trump was a great story. He was chaos all the time. By 5a.m. every day he’d created the news stories with his stubby fingered sending out bile
Inflected tweets attacking everyone. In this was he was the opposite of Obama, instead of No Drama, it was Drama All the time. The thing that astounded me and still does to this day was that the media didn’t see they were being played for suckers. The didn’t realize the damage
they were inflicting on the country by following Trump around like supplicants. What Trump was doing was transparent, once you identified it, and this remained a central fact of the campaign. If interest in Trump was waning, even just a little bit, he’d yank
the chain of the media with an insult or a racial slur or reactionary outrage—and there would be CNN, the Times and Fox, dutifully eating out of his hands. Like so much about Trump, if it weren’t so tragic, you’d laugh or cry.
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