Base Desires 0
Dick Polman suggests that the news media’s fascination with Donald Trump’s base is old news. A snippet:
You know what? Enough already with these people. They’re not newsworthy anymore.
They’re the impenetrable hard core. They’re not going to change, no matter how much damage Trump does. Last week, after I listed a mere 40 of Trump’s most blatant bald-faced lies, I was emailed by a Trump fan who acknowledged none of them. Doris, who lives in central Pennsylvania, instead told me this (I’ve preserved her spellings): “Your column degraded our president who wants only to make America a great country for all that live here. I hope in the future you right a piece about all his accomplishments as he swims upstream in the ocean of democrates that seeks only to bring him down. He wants to make America GREAT and strong to be the backbone of democracy around the globe to promote peace, as I believe he will accomplish better than any president we ever had.”
Wait a sec … Trump, the devotee of dictators, is “the backbone of democracy around the globe”? Nothing penetrates the fan base.
Here’s a New Year’s resolution for the mainstream press: Dial it down with the Trumpkins. They are just 35 percent of Americans.
I suspect that part of the media’s fascination with Trump’s base is an inability or unwillingness to understand what activates them (I’m betting on “unwillingness” here).
What activates the Trump base is racism. There are, natch, other stones in the arch of Trumpery, but racism is the keystone.
The corporate media, which wants the Trump base to read its columns and watch its television networks, doesn’t say that out loud because it might offend 35% of its viewers, readers, and masters.
