It is most accurate to look at Trump not as an anomaly but as version 1.0 of who we’ll elect someday. Trump said the right words to Americans who felt disenfranchised, and did well with many others despite being often embarrassing. But he dragged around too much baggage from decades of public life and never learned how to get things done in Washington. His opposition meanwhile was comical, clinging like Jack on that Titanic raft to a fully false Russian narrative for three years.
But with eye toward how this has evolved among rightists in Europe, think about the next guy, who is articulate and smart, who can subtly turn the volume knob up or down as needed when addressing angry unemployed workers or impatient suburbanites whose kids can’t get into a good school due to quotas, both groups worn by taxes imposed to pay for the Democratic vision, both groups suffering from rising crime even as leaders call for defunding the police. Think of a Keanu, not a Pompeo.
Put that slicky boy candidate into a world where the media which backstopped Biden is even more granular, where the big guys like CNN matter even less, and new platforms emerge to make Twitter and Facebook less significant. The media’s credibility is heading toward the bottom anyway. Some 58 percent of us already think “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.” They’ll still make money off the clicks of their converted cleric audience, but they will not influence others as much.
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