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Will the media elite help Trump again?

Trump is the omnipresent trickster that won’t go away. He looms over the American experience like a Zeppelin full of hot air

Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump attends a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, U.S., on December 19, 2023.SCOTT MORGAN (REUTERS)

Ishmael Reed

Jan 03, 2024 - 17:51CET

Playwright Wajahat Ali, the fastest and most prepared mind on television panels, was discontinued at CNN because he talked about white racism too much. Because whites buy their products, TV reporters and pundits are instructed to refrain from calling the Trump followers racists or anti-Semites, so they give tepid reasoning for why whites are attracted to a man charged with 91 felonies. Though they might spend 24/7 criticizing the former president, they assist him by making excuses for those who support him, millions of deplorables, and thousands who are deranged like the man who attacked Representative Pelosi’s husband.

On Dec. 26, both media elite members, Chris Matthews, and Tim Miller, appearing on MSNBC, said that Trump followers are rural people who vote for him because the Eastern elites insult and ridicule them. Are they suggesting that if the Eastern elite hadn’t mocked them, the insurgency of Jan. 6 would never have happened? Maybe bought them a beer?

Rather than ridicule rural America, American theater, art, television, and other forms of media have romanticized this section of the country, from Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town to the film Fargo, which draws Midwest states as centers of piety. If this is true, why is a sinner like Trump ahead in Iowa?

Filmmaker Debra Granik shows a more realistic view of rural America in two films, Winter’s Bone (2010) and Down to the Bone (2004), about hard-pressed rural communities which resort to meth sales to survive. Places where drug addiction and overdoses among the white working class is such that, for the first time, white life expectancy has decreased.

Though some media figures admit that there are more crimes committed in “Red” Republican states than “Blue” states, both Fox and MSNBC emphasize crime taking place in cities with large Black populations. Joe Scarborough, whose show Morning Joe has millions of viewers, works himself into conniptions as he blasts crime rates in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. He described San Francisco as a place of “madness and chaos.” I replied to him in an essay in Counterpunch magazine, where I recounted three visits to San Francisco around the same time he belted out this outburst and found no evidence of “chaos and madness.” By exaggerating “chaos and madness” in cities occupied by large Black populations, Scarborough and Fox News provide Trump with talking points. His speeches get a warm reception when he speaks of an American crime so out of control that Black neighborhoods need to be occupied by the army. Under a Trump administration would I have to show an ID in order to leave my neighborhood?

What are the actual crime figures for 2023? According to the FBI, crime decreased in nearly every category.

Facts also counter the argument that Trump’s followers are limited to the rural areas inhabited by those left behind. Actual figures show something different. Support for Trump includes members of all social classes, including Eastern elites who received a beautiful tax break from the Trump presidency. According to The New York Times, Trump is “dominating” Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis “among Republican voters of every age and income level, in cities, rural areas and suburbs.” The former president “is winning 80% of GOP primary voters who do not think he committed serious crimes — and 34 percent of those who think he did,” the report adds.

Trump has to be one of the greatest showmen in history. He believes with circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum that there’s a sucker born every minute. Not only is the media Trump’s sucker, but the sucker earns money by being taken. Trump knows that if he says outrageous things, it would make round-the-clock news. So the media reacts to his every tweet. He called political opponents “vermin,” which became a subject in TV panels for days to come, or his desire that President Biden “rot in hell.” Instead of covering the world like the BBC and Al Jazeera, American media owners involve all-day panels in answering Trump’s tweets, something that’s entertaining and inexpensive.

Maybe President Biden’s poll numbers are low because the media spend so much time on Trump that people think he’s the president. This wouldn’t be the first time Trump received more time from the media than his opponents.

According to data from the Tyndall Report, which tracks nightly news content, between January and November 2015, Trump alone accounted for more than a quarter of all 2016 election coverage in the evening newscasts of NBC, CBS, and ABC, more than the entire Democratic contest combined. The same thing is happening months before the 2024 election. Trump is the omnipresent trickster that won’t go away. He looms over the American experience like a Zeppelin full of hot air.