No-one is more to blame for the rise of Trump than the media

Donald Trump is totally entertaining, but more importantly, he has a very, very high IQ, and the media has been very bad, not good at all, at resisting how great he is at all the things.

The above sentence demonstrates the syntactical capabilities of a man who has done the unimaginable: manipulate the media to devour themselves. As a free market minded capitalist with a tendency to vote Republican, I have found a shocking amount of unity with my liberal friends in our mutual disdain for Trump and his fallacious, protectionist economics and rhetoric. I was not terribly surprised to hear the conservative media fall for Trump’s false promises of victory and American exceptionalism. No, it was the liberal and mainstream media’s embrace of Trump which left me floored.

“But all the ‘Trump is a racist!’ headlines and unflattering soundbites,” one might protest as evidence that the media were trying to indict Trump. This logic is unsound on two fronts. First, Trump’s screen time allowed him to win the primaries without ever having to construct a real campaign. After all, as Oscar Wilde once said, “The only worse thing than being talked about is being not talked about.” Trump, who has actively branded himself onto towers, steaks, universities and New York Post headlines for over a quarter of a century, knows that people will tune into the news to hear the salacious or race-baiting things he says. It’s free press, but this argument is unoriginal. We’ve heard this in 2016 retrospectives a thousand times.

The second point, though, centers around the media’s failure to understand what fuels the “Trump Train.” Racist rhetoric? You mean, anti-political correctness! Unrealistic foreign policy goals? You mean, a Republican president who will actually do something! Economic protectionism entirely antithetical to the free market ideals which have served as the backbone of the Republican Party for the last 50 years? You mean, my wages are going down, I’m barely making rent and no one in Washington is doing anything to help me!

Every time the media call Trump “racist,” they are helping him win; they are making his supporters feel like they’re sticking it to the limousine liberals who, in their eyes, are weakening America while staring down their noses at Middle America. Trump is a knife-fighter; he doesn’t get insulted through accusations of dishonor. Instead, his kryptonite is “winning.” And the media, all to excited to attack Trump on moral grounds, refused to attack Trump’s lack of actual business acumen and delicate ego (and hands) until he secured the primaries.

Finally, Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, Andrew Sullivan and a few others have come out with substantive attacks on Trump’s consistency, intelligence and independence. Perhaps the liberals in this pack have thought that in doing so, they’re guaranteeing Hillary Clinton an easy victory. But in doing so, the media have opened a deserving Pandora’s box of anti-PC rage, which Trump and the media have both so easily channeled into burgeoning, irrational white rage. Now, we shall all pay.