Obviously, I don’t know for certain that Donald Trump is really trying to lay the groundwork for a cable-TV network, though a lot of smart and informed people I know think that’s the case. If you’re looking for a theory to explain what Trump and Campaign CEO Steve Bannon — the former head of Breitbart News — are doing, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than this fanciful notion that he’s trying to become president. Since the convention, only once did he make any serious effort to expand his losing coalition to a larger, winning coalition: His tone-deaf, ridiculous, and utterly fake appeals to black voters. “Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before,” Trump said. “Ever. Ever. Ever.”
Put aside how utterly absurd this claim is (rent Roots if you don’t know what I mean) and how understandably offensive it is to a lot of black people, it was never intended to win black votes. The campaign had this idea that white suburban women would be swayed by Trump’s “concern” for blacks. He failed — which should have been obvious from the start.
And that’s it. For the rest of the campaign he’s been whipping up his 38 percent of the electorate into a kind of frenzy. Some people think he’s betting that he can dampen turnout generally, while spiking his base to win the election. Maybe. Or maybe that’s the rationalization they throw out there to distract from the more realistic goal: the launch of Nutter News Network. Read the transcript of Trump’s speech from Thursday railing about the globalist corporate-media conspiracy. It might as well be the mission statement for Bannon’s new enterprise, a network that stands up to the global cabal siphoning off our vital bodily fluids (in between commercials for water deflouridizers and gas masks). Why has Trump done scores of interviews on Fox and virtually nowhere else the last two months? Because he’s not interested in winning over undecideds, independents, or swing voters — you know the sort of thing serious presidential candidates do. No, he’s reselling the same product to people who’ve already bought it so he can take the customers with him after the election. Why is Trump constantly saying that if he loses it will be because the election was rigged?
Why is he wasting precious time attacking fellow Republicans, a move guaranteed to shrink his coalition even further? Because he wants the faithful to be permanently alienated from the rest of the political culture and utterly reliant on him. In fairness, it’s also because he can’t tolerate the idea that people will reasonably conclude that he’s a loser and choker so he has to lay the groundwork for the claim the other side cheated. But that narcissistic insecurity just makes him all the more susceptible to Bannon’s manipulation. He was such a Bannon puppet yesterday you could almost see Bannon’s fingers moving in the back of Trump’s mouth.
Read more at:
‘Operation Destroy the GOP’, by Jonah Goldberg, National Review