When Trump blasts Fox News for failing to "work for us," what's key is the *open and unabashed* assertion that he is entitled to a 24/7 propaganda outlet working on his behalf.
The open flaunting of Trump's corruption is a key feature of it.
We should view Trump's demand that Fox News function as his personal propaganda network, along with his nonstop lying and attacks on legitimate news organizations, as its own form of insidious corruption:
"All politicians shade the truth. But most hew to an underlying belief that gaslighting voters too shamelessly treats them with deep contempt; that at some point, factual reality has to matter; and that this is necessary for democracy to function."
Remember the media frenzy about "Rich Men North of Richmond," the song MAGA claimed as their anthem? The media spent weeks obsessing over it as a cry of anguish from the blue collar heartland aimed at elites.
In the song, singer Oliver Anthony says he's struggling with long hours/low overtime pay, and says elites are rigging the system against him. Yet the Biden rule is all about combatting exactly this kind of elite rigging of the economy against workers. 3/
Awful: Senate investigations into Trump's solicitation of $1 billion from Big Oil and Jared Kushner's financial dealings with Saudis will now hit a wall with GOP control, Dems tell me. We're headed for unchecked elite corruption under Trump.
For many reasons, conditions are ripe for right wing elites to loot the place from top to bottom. Remember when Trump vowed to give Big Oil execs what they want in exchange for $1 billion in campaign funds? Now we'll likely never get to the bottom of it.
“The next four years are going to be a smash and grab under Trump,” Sen Ron Wyden tells me, because “special interests who put Trump back in office expect a return on their investment."
His probe into Kushner's dealings will get much harder w/GOP control
Disturbing: A big reason Trump won was undecideds couldn't be persuaded that millions of jobs lost in 2020 and death of Roe were Trump's fault, internal Harris campaign polling showed. Biden/Ds let Trump rehab himself to disastrous effect.
Internal testing in the battlegrounds over many months showed that Dems were having a very difficult time persuading undecided voters that Trump was a bad president, per sources. They didn't hold him responsible for things they disliked about his presidency.
Some Dems still blame the leading pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, for failing to spend enough of its enormous budget on bloodying up Trump early on. This let Trump rehabilitate himself and get his favorables back up.
How did Harris close the gap w/Trump on the economy?
Here's how: Harris campaign and Dem groups have spent a whopping $225 million on ads about the economy, per data provided to me by AdImpact. GOP caught napping, outspent by $70 million.
A fascinating thing: Harris/Dem ads on economy are aimed at different groups in the potential anti-Trump coalition: Some aimed at working class whites who are soft Rs, some at nonwhite working class who are Trump curious, some at more affluent voters.
I'm not sure what Biden meant w/the "garbage" comment. But even the harshest interpretation of it can only be that he meant Trump supporters *who openly make virulently racist displays* are "garbage."
That's news, I guess. Cover it, sure.
But what made it *front page* news? 2/
Why did this merit above-the-fold coverage days before the election?
*Because Trump/Rs made a big issue out of it.*
The headline itself gives away how this works. The news hook is literally that it provided "grist" to Republicans.
Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden is best seen as an explicit, very public declaration that if he wins, well, he told you exactly what you were going to get, so you’d better bend the knee and get ready to swallow all of it.