If Trump is so unpopular, how did he win the Republican nomination? Why is he holding his own in the contest with Clinton? The answer might be found in a media analogy. The television shows that top the Nielsen ratings these days reach far fewer people than did similar programs back in the 1970s, before the market fragmented into dozens of special interest channels. He’s a candidate who has been wildly embraced by a plurality, not a majority. He’s a niche candidate—a very big niche, mind you—but still a niche. To complete the analogy, the AMC show The Walking Dead is currently a ratings leader. But its raw numbers are so low it would barely break into the top 30 programs that aired in 1989, before the fragmentation of TV. The Trump show, like The Walking Dead, is only relatively popular and the very attributes that make it popular have stalled its greater popularity.
Trump, entering the race as a sort of pariah, used his communication channel to nurture that status. He ran his campaign like a soap opera, deliberately creating new controversies with his uncouth comments. Just as media interest in one Trumpism crested, he’d supply a new Trumpism to replace it, riding it through the press storm until it was depleted and was in need of replacement itself. The effect of almost all of these Trumpisms was negative, of course, designed to outrage the easily outraged and please his supporters who delight in his cruelty and defamation. Other public figures may set a fire-break of apology or contrition to stop an onrushing blaze of bad publicity, but Trump regularly repeats and expands the original hot comments—sometimes dumping new gasoline on the existing flames. The best recent example of that behavior is his “it’s a fixed election” tantrum, which followed his defiant response to the scathing publicity he received in the wake of the Billy Bush tape revelation. All along, Trump’s defiance of decorum, good manners and campaign tradition was counted by his supporters as an asset: If the press and the elites and the fact-checkers wanted to label him a Four Pinocchio liar, his fans would gladly take that as an backhanded endorsement of their man, additional evidence that the press was against him.
Trump is a media pioneer, deserving of mention in the same breath with Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, William S. Paley, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. But the media machine he has built only looks enduring. Except for a blitzkrieg grab for power, Trump doesn’t stand for anything, and that may prove his downfall. The cult of personality he has built appears to have reached its ceiling.
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