Though a great many on the right don’t consider Donald Trump one of their own, he’s the Republican presidential frontrunner in large part because he’s exploited an ideological and media environment designed to increase the power of movement conservatives, contended Vox’s David Roberts in a Tuesday piece.
According to Roberts, Trump appeals to “a faction of the electorate that has been primed to respond to someone like him…Republican billionaires and political operators have spent decades building a self-contained epistemic bubble in which they could pump up the right-wing base with fear and paranoia. Now the Frankenstein's monster has lumbered off the table and crashed into the cocktail party. It no longer heeds the GOP establishment, and it utterly disdains the media. All Trump does is give it voice. He is what happens when conservatives stop being polite and start getting real.”
From Roberts’s article (bolding added):
[I]n the days when there were fewer media outlets and their power was more consolidated, politicians' ability to lie was at least somewhat shaped and tempered by the media…
What's happened from (roughly) Gingrich forward is that the right has used coordinated institutional power and the explosion of new communications technology to sap the media's power to do damage.
This has been done in two ways. First is the unceasing attack on "liberal media bias," which has left journalists terrified of passing judgment on any matter of controversy. And second is the development of a parallel intellectual infrastructure, a network of partisan think tanks, advocacy organizations, and media outlets that provide a kind of full-spectrum alternative to the mainstream…
The establishment media has largely proven feckless in the face of this assault…They have less and less power to penalize a politician for lying…
…[Trump is] just an opportunist who was in the right place at the right time, taking advantage of a faction of the electorate that has been primed to respond to someone like him.
Republican billionaires and political operators have spent decades building a self-contained epistemic bubble in which they could pump up the right-wing base with fear and paranoia. Now the Frankenstein's monster has lumbered off the table and crashed into the cocktail party. It no longer heeds the GOP establishment, and it utterly disdains the media. All Trump does is give it voice. He is what happens when conservatives stop being polite and start getting real…
There is a faction of the US electorate that is positively wroth: angry that they are losing their country, angry at immigrants and minorities who want "free stuff," angry at terrorists for making them feel afraid, angry at liberals for rejecting good Christian values, angry at the economy for screwing them and denying them the better life they were promised...They are angry at all institutions, including the Republican Party and the media, that have failed to halt America's decline.
They are mostly white, mostly older, and entirely pissed off. And Trump speaks for them…
…The old-guard political media has always seen itself as a disinterested referee. But what they confront now is aggressive, unapologetic nonsense, piped up from a nationalist, ethnocentric, revanchist conservative base through the mouth of one Donald J. Trump…
…Media outlets are being forced to take sides, and facing the grim possibility that even if they do, they have no power to affect the outcome. Their twin idols — objectivity and influence — are being exposed as illusions.
