So we can lay the blame at the feet of Fox News since that is what his followers were watching. I’m all for blaming Fox News. Fair and Brainwashed is their slogan.
Wrong question. OF COURSE his core will just circle the wagons tighter.
Real question is why he didn’t undergo constant bleeding from the margins of his support, from 45% support to 30% say. WTF are these more “swingy” voters waiting for? It’s very hard for me to grasp that his block of support could be THAT large and unvarying, but I guess it is, then.
It’d be great, because that’s what the media would be telling me. I may be starving, homeless and on fire, but if I am told that I live in the greatest country EVAR, then I’ll be just fine.
See that horse running around the hosptial? Its actually a doctor. All of that running around knocking things over and shitting on the floor? All the doctors do that. And this horse is just on its way to perform surgery. So stop paying attention to it.
Say what you will, but at least he’s in-network.
The premise put forth by this article is incorrect in its estimation of why Trump’s core supporters continued to support him. It wasn’t because of his getting attacked by the media (AKA the media reporting on what Trump actually said and did). It is because Trump hated the people the Republican base hates and said so out loud in public. There is a significant contingent of the media in this country that wants to bury their collective heads in the sand and try to ignore this, and it is to the detriment of the country that they do so.
When it comes to cognitive dissonance, the Republican base is in a league of its own. Barack Obama commuted the sentences of dozens of people convicted of drug possession prior to leaving office; Republican lawmakers went apoplectic and accused him of putting dangerous criminals back on the street. Conversely, perhaps the sole piece of legislation to receive broad bipartisan support during Trump’s entire term pre-COVID, the First Step Act, was hyped by Trump’s handlers as long overdue. The media also gave huge amounts of coverage to Trump’s pardoning of Alice Marie Johnson (which only came about because Kim Kardashian had taken an interest in Johnson’s case and Trump was desperate for a photo op with any well known celebrity).
Now, Biden has announced pardons for persons convicted federally for Marijuana possession, and right-wing media is going full Reefer Madness. Trump is now stating in his rally speeches that he wants police officers to be able to summarily shoot and execute anyone accused of selling drugs. Of course, the Republican base will not offer any pushback on this ridiculous flip-flop.
At the end of the day, the Republican base is effectively a cult. Any piece of information that does not jibe with what the cult leader says is immediately disregarded as untrue. It doesn’t matter what the NYT or WaPo report; Republicans have been conditioned to reject anything they say pretty much out of hand.
Yeah, this is what I was going to say. “Attacks on the leader just make the followers more loyal” is exactly how cults work.
Any approach to Trump and his zealots that tries to treat him as a normal politician with a normal base will fail. it’s a cult, full stop, do not pass Go, do not drink Flavor-Ade on a remote island.
There is a slightly related argument McArdle could have made that wouldn’t have been so emblematic of the right’s moral cowardice. The media should have played up all the ways that Trump IS an insider: that is, he’s an extremely wealthy ivy-league-educated white dude who thinks that rules are for little people. That’s who controls our country, and while he was exceptionally lawless, he was hardly out of the mainstream of our nation’s power-brokers. In a plutocracy like ours, he’s kind of the ultimate insider.
It’s no surprise that Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post doesn’t spend more time railing against billionaires.