Donald Trump would be nothing without the media. This is a man who was 66% self-funded at the start of the 2016 year, according to Politifact. The reason he has the nomination without raising that much money is because of how he has manipulated the media. At the start of August, he had spent $0 in TV advertising, yet was all over the media. He has made sure to secure conservative media outlets by offering them jobs if they bend to his will.
Trump has turned Breitbart news into his personal fan website. Starting last year, they constantly ran stories like “The Great Truth-Teller of 2015: Donald Trump.” Things got so bad at Breitbart that their former “editor at large,” Ben Shapiro, said that Breitbart threw one of their own reporters under the bus. They called her a liar after she was grabbed inappropriately (on tape) by then Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. It was no surprise then that when Lewandowski’s replacement, Paul Manafort, was demoted amid lowering poll numbers and surfacing Putin connections, that the Donald hired Breitbart’s CEO to be the chairman of his campaign. So to recap, Donald had a campaign manager who had connections to Vladimir Putin surface and he didn’t fire him, just demoted him. Then he hired a guy whose biggest political calling card was a movie he made in 2011 defending Sarah Palin after she ruined John McCain’s 2008 campaign. This all happened for Steve Bannon because he used a media platform he inherited in 2012 to work his hands into Trump’s campaign.
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Trump also hired Roger Ailes after the he was disgracefully let go from Fox News after allegations of sexual harassment. This was only after Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly changed her tone on Trump after blasting Trump in one of the Republican debates. Ailes was hired to help the Donald with debate preparation, and seeing as the first debate is next Monday and that Ailes is one of the best at blasting Hillary, Trump is going to need all the help he can get.
To help pump up his message, Trump has Sean Hannity. Hannity has a primetime TV show on the most watched conservative media outlet and is Trump’s biggest cheerleader. Hannity is so important to Trump’s campaign that he’s even advising on the campaign!
Not only is Trump employing these people, but he is openly stealing everything they’ve been saying for years. He was for the Iraq war until after it happened. He took Fox’s (read Ailes’) immigration agenda to another level with the wall initiative. He found himself having to say something about abortion to stay consistent to his conservative persona and said that women should be punished for having abortions. He has vowed to repeal Obamacare. He also stoked the irrational fear of Muslims that Fox News has been peddling for years.
What Trump does better than anybody though, is taking what was subtly introduced by conservative thinkers throughout the years and coming up with a real solution. Mexicans ruining your country by bringing drugs, crime and raping everybody? Put up a wall and make them pay for it! Muslims ruining your country because there’s a crazy group of them 5,702 miles away displacing the people in their area? Don’t let those people running away from these monsters come here. Think Obama was awful? Vow to repeal all of his policies.
What I fail to understand is how this rhetoric is acceptable. I understand that people are angry about the state of our country, but is it really as bad as Donald says it is? Are Muslims really coming over here in droves looking to kill us? Are Mexicans really drug dealers, rapists and criminals? Are we really OK with allowing a corrupt journalist and sexual deviant to run a Presidential candidate’s campaign? Does nobody care that there would be no Trump without a news media so hungry for ratings that they just constantly talk about every offensive thing he says? Or are we just so angry at Muslims, Mexicans and Obama that we want this to happen.
