Matt Bai: Trump and the media, made for each other
Politics
Matt Bai: Trump and the media, made for each other
Trump is an emotional extremist. He’s a pure performer, trained to manipulate the audience and mindful of no consequence beyond the ratings it produces. And in this way, truth be told, he’s hardly any different from the reporters and media executives whose very lives he can barely roust himself to defend, Matt Bai says. Trump’s most useful opponent, the one who causes his most fervent following to stick, isn’t Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or even Hillary Clinton. It’s us [the media]. This is the essential paradox that the American media has created for itself, and you can feel it becoming less and less tenable right now.
Sometimes it seems that Trump himself is trying frantically to find that edge of acceptable rhetoric and hurl himself over it …
Matt Bai
It’s time for me to admit I was wrong about Trump’s staying power. And it’s time for the rest of my industry to take a long look in the mirror and consider what we’ve wrought. It’s clear that those of us who cover politics have only a limited understanding of how powerful and pervasive an antipathy now exists toward us in some sizable quarter of the electorate, and how deftly it can be used. The media that created Trump is now at his mercy, and he didn’t have to kill anyone to get here. We want to see Trump get “schlonged” for the same reasons we can’t bear to lose him, and he understands that dynamic better than anyone alive.
