How the Conservative Media Created the Monstrosity that is Donald Trump

In follow to the last post in which Michael Gerson laments what has become of the GOP as personified by Donald Trump - and I would argue in Ted Cruz as well - a piece in Salon looks at the role that the so-called "conservative media" has played in the descent of the GOP into religious extremism and open racism.  Leading the way is Fox News - Faux News at this blog - and the various hate merchants that have found platforms in the conservative media.  The GOP establishment once loved these outlets.  Now they have turned on mainstream Republicans like a rabid dog.  Here are  highlights:

Pundits have spent a lot of time analyzing the Trump phenomenon. For the most part, Trump is considered an anomaly, a product of a uniquely hostile political climate. He’s also a massive celebrity with a powerful brand and a talent for self-promotion, and that goes a long way in our media culture.

Trump’s success as an anti-establishment candidate has raised a lot of questions about the ability of party elites to dictate the nomination process. Party leaders – particularly in the GOP – have traditionally decided who the nominees would be, but that’s clearly changed.

In the case of Trump, the question is whether he’s just an outlier or an inevitable byproduct of systemic changes in our political system. If it’s the latter, then we can expect to see more Trump-like candidates in the future; that is to say, more celebrities masquerading as serious candidates (à la Sarah Palin and Herman Cain).

Trump’s uniqueness as a candidate means it’s a “mistake to assume his campaign signals systemic changes in the process.” Trump may not be an ideologue (he’s too vacuous for that), but there’s no question he’s benefited from partisan media and an ideologically charged climate.

Trump is an unintended product of Fox News, but a product nonetheless. Trump only exists because his supporters live in a fact-free bubble that has been engineered by conservative media. And while conservative media clearly favors the Republican Party, ultimately it’s driven by the profit motive, not partisan loyalties.

In a column for FiveThirtyEight.com this week, Anna Pluta asks why Trump’s relentless bullshitting hasn’t hurt his campaign. Pluta writes:

“Donald Trump has a consistently loose relationship with the truth…Politifact rolled his numerous misstatements into one big ‘lie of the year.’ But all the fact-checking in the world hasn’t pushed Trump toward a more evidence-based campaign, and his support has held steady or even increased in the some polls. What explains Trump’s ability to seemingly overcome conventional political wisdom?”

Trump’s “supporters have shown signs of being misinformed. Political science research has shown that the behavior of misinformed citizens is different from those who are uninformed, and this difference may explain Trump’s unusual staying power.” Misinformed means voters are fed erroneous information in order to flatter their biases and concretize their beliefs. Consequently, “misinformed citizens tend to be the most confident in their views.”

We know that people who get their information from Fox News are exceptionally misinformed, and that’s because Fox News cares about ratings, not the facts. And Fox has helped create an entire conservative media ecosystem that spins false narratives, fuels resentment, and cultivates an indifference to truth. All of this has shaped the conservative base in the last 15 years or so.

Donald Trump only exists because of this ecosystem, and to the extent that that’s true, Fox News and partisan media are responsible for him. The people at Fox News may not like the Frankenstein they’ve created, but that doesn’t make them any less accountable.

The GOP's Bizarre Disregard for Facts

More and more the one of the hallmarks of today's GOP - in addition to its transformation into a largely sectarian party ruled by Christofascists - is that objective facts simply do not matter.  Instead, it is all about adhering to an ideology driven by hate, fear and often greed.  The examples of this contempt for facts ranges from GOP denial of climate change to the growing acceptance of gays by a majority of Americans to the constant refrain that the Affordable Care Act is a failure.  On this latter issue, Paul Krugman rips the GOP a new one and in the process also sheds light on the cynicism of some on the right who ought to know better, but continue to lie and misrepresent the truth.  Personally, I blame the GOP's retreat from honesty and objective reality of the Christofascist take over - after all, no one lies more than the "godly folk."  Here are highlights from Krugman's column:

Have you been following the news about Obamacare? The Affordable Care Act has receded from the front page, but information about how it’s going keeps coming in — and almost all the news is good. Indeed, health reform has been on a roll ever since March, when it became clear that enrollment would surpass expectations despite the teething problems of the federal website.

What’s interesting about this success story is that it has been accompanied at every step by cries of impending disaster. At this point, by my reckoning, the enemies of health reform are 0 for 6. That is, they made at least six distinct predictions about how Obamacare would fail — every one of which turned out to be wrong.

[T]o be that consistently, grossly wrong takes special effort. So what’s this all about?

Many readers won’t be surprised by the answer: It’s about politics and ideology, not analysis. But while this observation isn’t particularly startling, it’s worth pointing out just how completely ideology has trumped evidence in the health policy debate.

What was especially odd about the incessant predictions of health-reform disaster was that we already knew, or should have known, that a program along the lines of the Affordable Care Act was likely to work. Obamacare was closely modeled on Romneycare, which has been working in Massachusetts since 2006, and it bears a strong family resemblance to successful systems abroad, for example in Switzerland. Why should the system have been unworkable for America?

But a firm conviction that the government can’t do anything useful — a dogmatic belief in public-sector incompetence — is now a central part of American conservatism, and the incompetence dogma has evidently made rational analysis of policy issues impossible.

It wasn’t always thus. If you go back two decades, to the last great fight over health reform, conservatives seem to have been relatively clearheaded about the policy prospects, albeit deeply cynical. For example, William Kristol’s famous 1993 memo urging Republicans to kill the Clinton health plan warned explicitly that Clintoncare, if implemented, might well be perceived as successful, which would, in turn, “strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.” So it was crucial to make sure that reform never happened. 

But that was before conservatives had fully retreated into their own intellectual universe. Fox News didn’t exist yet; policy analysts at right-wing think tanks had often begun their careers in relatively nonpolitical jobs. It was still possible to entertain the notion that reality wasn’t what you wanted it to be.

It’s different now. . . . . And let’s be clear: While it has been funny watching the right-wing cling to its delusions about health reform, it’s also scary. After all, these people retain considerable ability to engage in policy mischief, and one of these days they may regain the White House. And you really, really don’t want people who reject facts they don’t like in that position. I mean, they might do unthinkable things, like starting a war for no good reason. Oh, wait.