A lot of people (not all of them liberals) consider Donald Trump a demagogue, but Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall thinks Trump is as much of a collaborator as he is a leader. In Marshall’s telling, Trump’s invective derives in large part from an audience that’s been primed by Fox News’s nonstop emission of “hate, lies, nonsense and febrile fear.”
Marshall asserted in a Monday post that when Trump became a candidate, his comments about Mexican illegal immigrants were “largely shtick,” and that “terrorism and Muslim-hating wasn't his thing. But like a gifted jazz musician, he can pick up the rhythms of whatever group he's sitting in with, adapt, improvise and take them further. Yes, he's almost a [saxophonist John] Coltrane of hate and incitement. But it's not about Trump. It's about his supporters. A big chunk of the Republican base is awash in racism and xenophobic hysteria. And [Fox News] is the food that they feed on every day.”
Marshall’s item was headlined “Trump Has His Riefenstahl,” a reference to Leni Riefenstahl, director of the 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. (It should be noted that Marshall may not have written the headline.)
From Marshall’s post (bolding added):
It's hard to explain exactly why we submit ourselves to this. But in our New York City office we spend most of the day listening to Fox News. In moments of tension and incitement such as these it is difficult to capture the sheer scale and measure of the storm of hate, lies, nonsense and febrile fear that constantly flows out of it, minute by minute and hour after hour…
Just now we're listening to this show "Outnumbered" where a woman named Andrea Tantaros (who manages to combine in her person in a concentrated form everything that is awful about Fox News) went on a tear about how it was that the San Bernardino shooter's brother was allowed to attend a press conference sponsored by CAIR the day after the attack…as opposed to being in FBI custody. Why wasn't the whole family in FBI custody, she ranted? Well, as far as I know, the person she's referring to isn't Syed Farook's brother but his brother-in-law. His brother is actually a Navy veteran who lives in a different part of Southern California and, from everything we've heard, had absolutely nothing to do with his brother's crimes…
…[W]e don't just arrest whole families of people. The law doesn't work like that. The mere statement of the facts and inaccuracies doesn't capture the mix of florid outrage, angry betrayal and sense of threat.
Yesterday, a…Fox News reporter [said] that…the Paris attackers (plural) entered France…as refugees…But that's not true…[They] were French and Belgian nationals.
These might seem like small or picayune examples. But they are constant. And they build up to a whole tapestry of falsehoods, that combined with incitement and hysteria create a mental world in which Donald Trump's mounting volume of racist incitement is just not at all surprising…
I know I'm preaching to the choir when it comes to noting the factual shortcomings of Fox News. But this is why this isn't really about Trump. Trump's genius — and I don't use that word loosely — is that he is an intuitive. He can feel the public mood in ways that none of these others can. I don't think Trump began his campaign with really any of this. "Mexicans" were his thing. But even that was I think largely shtick. Terrorism and Muslim-hating wasn't his thing. But like a gifted jazz musician, he can pick up the rhythms of whatever group he's sitting in with, adapt, improvise and take them further. Yes, he's almost a Coltrane of hate and incitement. But it's not about Trump. It's about his supporters. A big chunk of the Republican base is awash in racism and xenophobic hysteria. And this is the food that they feed on every day.
