Posted on August
16, 2016
Trump’s Free Fall
Media made him, and they will destroy
him
by
Daniel
Clark
While Donald Trump is busy formulating the official
excuse for his likely defeat, his loyalists are blaming conservative magazines,
supporters of his primary opponents, and anyone else who hasn’t demonstrated
sufficient fealty to their hero. They
might stop to consider that Trump himself has employed a campaign strategy that
all but assured his destruction once he secured the nomination.
Former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone, who is
reportedly still a very close confidante, explained in a January interview with
Politico that his candidate had
“totally committed himself to an entirely communications-based strategy,
something that veteran political strategists like me were skeptical about. ‘What do you mean, you’re going to run a
campaign and spend almost nothing on paid television or paid radio, or any paid
advertising?’
“He
envisioned a campaign that was all communications, based around the notion that
he would go into these states, do these big speeches, and the speeches would
get wall-to-wall coverage from the networks, which it did [sic]. And then, on top of that, you know, as many
television interviews as he could smash into one day. So, and I’m sure you remember this, there was
a period in which you couldn’t turn on the TV or the cable without getting
Donald Trump … therefore, he believed that you could compete with paid media
through the free media.”
Conservatives have another name for the “free media”
to which Stone refers. We know them as
the liberal media. You know, the same
liberal media that commit themselves to politically defeating and personally
destroying the Republican candidate in every presidential general election
campaign. For Trump to gamble on their
benevolence has been, to put it mildly, a colossal blunder.
Still not seeming to realize this, Trump is now
lashing out at the media with the righteous anger of somebody who feels
betrayed. During the primaries, he once
joked that he could shoot somebody and he wouldn’t suffer for it in the
polls. Now he can’t get away with
spitting on the sidewalk. Once he won
the Republican nomination, the media suddenly became judgmental toward
him. No longer does he get the sort of
coverage that Hillary Clinton is getting, in which the story becomes the
media’s own wonderment at how nothing seems to negatively affect her.
If only Trump were a conservative, or if he had any
idea what it’s like to be one, or even if he had one as a close advisor, he
would have known to expect this since the day he announced his candidacy. Anybody who had observed liberal media bias
during previous presidential election cycles would have warned him that the
reason he was getting valuable free media in the primaries was that he was the
candidate the media most wanted to oppose in the fall, but that he could expect
them to start giving him the Quayle treatment a minute after the balloons fell
from the convention hall ceiling.
For
a Republican presidential candidate to rely on his ability to manipulate the
“free media” is like Daffy Duck handing Elmer Fudd a
shotgun and asking him what season it is.
He’d have to actually be oblivious to the fact that liberals mean him
harm.
Then again, that’s entirely plausible coming from a
candidate who associates so closely with the likes of Stone, a man so far
outside the Republican mainstream that he was chairman of the Specter ’96
campaign. It was Stone, with his first
wife Ann, who founded the pro-abortion group Republicans for Choice. Also an advocate of gay marriage and pot
legalization, Stone would later bolt the GOP to join the Libertarian Party.
Stone says he was skeptical of this “free media”
strategy, but evidently he didn’t know enough to warn Trump about how
dramatically the media would turn on him once he became the nominee. Neither, apparently, did any of the people
who are officially advising Trump today.
So much for his ability to hire good people to cover for the gaps in his
own knowledge.
Ultimately, this absurd strategy, like most of Trump’s
problems, is of his own making. Not only
has he exhibited remarkably poor foresight, but for a man who so relishes being
in charge, he abdicated control of his messaging to the liberal media with an
astonishing lack of skepticism. His
having done so is enough to validate the suspicion among conservatives that
he’s really still a Democrat at heart.
Why else would he have expected to get what he wanted for free?
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press