VAL 2016 | Donald Trump är expert på att få exponering i media trots att han kontinuerligt förolämpar deras kampanjbevakning.
Och även om rapporteringen oftast är negativ kan media inte ta ögonen ifrån honom. ”He’s pulling 33 times as much coverage on the major networks as his next-closest GOP competitor, and twice as much as Hillary”, skriver Matt Taibbi i Rolling Stone.
I år är det tydligt att väljarna trötta på vad man ser som en allians mellan media och partiernas etablissemang kring beskrivningen av vad som måste göras i landet och vilka politiker som är lämpliga för jobbet.
Att väljarna på både vänster- och högerkanten har tröttnat på att deras respektive partier alltid tycks välja samma typ av politiker har skapat utrymme för både Bernie Sanders och Donald Trump.
Vare sig Sanders eller Trump är naturliga representanter för sina respektive partier. Båda har kommit in i sina partier relativt sent. Båda ses som outsiders av gräsrötterna. Och i år är detta ett plus.
Taibbi skriver om fenomenet Trump:
Trump is no intellectual. He’s not bringing Middlemarch to the toilet. If he had to jail with Stephen Hawking for a year, he wouldn’t learn a thing about physics. Hawking would come out on Day 365 talking about models and football.
But, in an insane twist of fate, this bloated billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him insight into the presidential electoral process. He likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And he likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business.
That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics?
But they’ve all got it backward. The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line. And every time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny it, Trump picks up another vote.
[…]
Interestingly, a lot of Trump’s political act seems lifted from bully-wrestlers. A clear influence is ”Ravishing” Rick Rude, an Eighties champ whose shtick was to insult the audience. He would tell ticket holders they were ”fat, ugly sweat hogs,” before taking off his robe to show them ”what a real sexy man looks like.”
In Greenville, Donald ”The Front-Runner” Trump started off the debate by jumping on his favorite wrestling foil, Prince Dinkley McBirthright, a.k.a. Jeb Bush. Trump seems to genuinely despise Bush. He never missed a chance to rip him for being a ”low-energy,” ”stiff” and ”dumb as a rock” weenie who lets his Mexican wife push him around. But if you watch Trump long enough, it starts to seem gratuitous.
Trump’s basic argument is the same one every successful authoritarian movement in recent Western history has made: that the regular guy has been screwed by a conspiracy of incestuous elites.
[…]
Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump’s campaign, but these comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content. His pitch is: He’s rich, he won’t owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won’t do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people.
[…]
No one should be surprised that he’s tearing through the Republican primaries, because everything he’s saying about his GOP opponents is true. They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.
Tidskriftsomslag: Rolling Stone, 10 mars (nr. 1256) 2016