Conservatives Weren't the Ones Who Made Trump a Ubiquitous Celebrity
An important point from Jim Lewis over at the Intercept, about why it is indeed so unexpected that Donald Trump could become the face of the Republican party, and why he represents a takeover of the GOP by "foreign" (as in alien or outsider, not as in international) values, not traditional conservative values: . . . absent from all these ashen-faced accounts is any examination of the people who put Trump in a position to run for president in the first place. The man didn't emerge, all at once and fully formed, from some hidden and benighted hollow in the American psyche. He's been kicking around for 30 years or more, and he was promoted and schooled, made famous and made wealthy, by the same culture and economy that now reviles him, and finds his success so vexing. After all, it wasn't some Klan newsletter that first brought Trump to our attention: It was Time and Esquire and Spy. The Westboro Baptist Church didn't give him his own TV show: NBC did. And his boasts and lies weren't posted on Breitbart, they were published by Random House. He was created by people who learned from Andy Warhol, not Jerry Falwell, who knew him from galas at the Met, not fundraisers at Karl Rove's house, and his original audience was presented to him by Condé Nast, not Guns & Ammo. He owes his celebrity, his money, his arrogance, and his skill at drawing attention to those coastal cultural gatekeepers -- presumably mostly liberal -- who first elevated him out of general obscurity, making him famous and rewarding him (and, not at all incidentally, themselves) for his idiocies. My only quibble with his list would be Spy, which clearly and repeatedly argued that Donald Trump was the living embodiment of everything that was wrong with Manhattan's high society/super-wealthy class in the 1980s. From the perspective of a lot of folks on the right at the time, Spy offered a group of smug New York elites snickering and mocking other smug New York elites (and anyone not sophisticated enough to know who they were talking about). But from the perspective of today, the magazine's ridicule represented the white blood cells of a functioning societal body, pointing out the extraordinary sense of entitlement, hypocrisy, shamelessness, egomania, greed, and Bacchanalian excess going on among the city's elites. At its best, the magazine represented a bit of cultural vigilantism, exposing bad behavior and holding it up for ridicule and scorn that it was unlikely to get from other fawning media outlets. As a contributing editor put it: The founding editors of the magazine, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen, recognized Trump for what he was: the id of New York City, writ large -- a bombastic, self-aggrandizing, un–self-aware bully, with a curious relationship to the truth about his supposed wealth and business acumen. He wasn't so much a Macy's balloon, ripe for the targeting, as he was the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, stomping on everything in his gold-plated path. There was one glaring flaw in the magazine's approach: the sarcastic cynicism of Spy more or less targeted everyone -- including National Review and William F. Buckley at least once -- meaning that there was no good in their perspective, few if any examples of people worth emulating. Rereading Spy today is fascinating, but after enough issues, it begins to feel like comedic nihilism -- everybody's terrible, everybody's shameless and out for themselves, everybody's the worst ever. And if everybody's the worst ever, nobody stands out as particularly bad -- and there's no point in expecting anything better. But Lewis's broader point stands; Spy stood out because of its scathing disdain for Trump in a media world that either celebrated him or, at worst, shook its head in amazement at that rapscallion . . . for about 30 years. This is one of the reasons why it's going to be strange and risky to see major media attempt to demonize Trump in the coming seven months. Most of the media will become some version of Morning Joe -- declaring him unacceptable as a potential commander-in-chief Tuesdays and Thursdays while welcoming his appearances by phone or by remote Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Other figures deemed beyond the pale, and denounced as furiously as Trump -- David Duke, Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan -- don't get invited to share their thoughts like clockwork morning, noon and night. If Trump is this repugnant, nasty racist, so undeserving of public office . . . why is he hosting Saturday Night Live and joking around with Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert? If he's so self-evidently unsuited for the presidency . . . why has the national media spent a full year dissecting his every move? If he's such a vulgar embodiment of reality-television narcissism, why the soft-focus profiles of his lovely family? If his economic plans are so wildly unrealistic and reckless, why has the business media written those glowing profiles about his keen mind and eye for opportunities? Sentences I Never Thought I Would Write: 'Those Ostriches Just Happened to Be There.' The AP reports: In addition to the new space, Bennett said Trump has hired a veteran political operative to serve as the campaign's convention manager. Paul Manafort, a seasoned Washington hand with decades of convention experience, will oversee the campaign's "entire convention presence" including a potential contested convention, said Bennett. The move marks a major escalation in Trump's willingness to play by party rules and build alliances in a political system he has so far shunned. It comes as Trump faces a Republican nomination battle that will almost certainly extend until the final day of primary voting on June 7 -- or even to the party's July national convention in Cleveland -- if he fails to secure the delegate majority needed to become the presumptive nominee. Say, what's Paul Manafort been doing these past few years? From an anonymous office off Kiev's main square, a seasoned American political strategist who was once a senior aide in Senator Bob Dole's Republican presidential campaign has labored for months on a [Ukranian prime minister] Yanukovich makeover. Though the strategist, Paul J. Manafort, has sought to remain behind the scenes, his handiwork has been evident in Mr. Yanukovich's tightly organized campaign events, in his pointed speeches and in how he has presented himself to the world. That piece was from 2007; the relationship stretched on for years. Manafort's friends describe his relationship with Yanukovych as a political love connection, born out of Yanukovych's first downfall when he was driven from power by the 2004 Orange Revolution. Feeling that his domestic political advisers had failed him, Yanukovych turned to a foreign company, Davis Manafort, which was already doing work for the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. The former Ukrainian PM and Manafort, the Georgetown-educated son of a Connecticut politician, hit it off. Manafort's firm had a set of international clients and produced an analysis of the Orange Revolution that Yanukovych found instructive, according to one operative involved in Yanukovych's political rehabilitation. Manafort became, in effect, a general consultant to Yanukovych's Party of Regions, shaping big-picture messaging, coaching Yanukovych to speak in punchy, American-style sound bites and managing teams of consultants and attorneys in both Ukraine and the United States ahead of an anticipated Yanukovych comeback. While it's difficult to track payments in foreign elections, a former associate familiar with Manafort's earnings say they ran into the seven figures over several years. After Yanukovych's 2010 victory, Manafort stayed on as an adviser to the Russia-friendly president and became involved in other business projects in Eastern Europe. In case you've forgotten how things turned out for Yanukovich . . . Ukraine's former President Viktor Yanukovych has said he accepts some responsibility for the killings that led to his overthrow in February 2014. "I don't deny my responsibility," he told BBC Newsnight, when asked about the shooting of demonstrators in Kiev's Maidan Square. He never ordered the security forces to open fire, he said, but admitted he had not done enough to prevent bloodshed . . . In February 2014 Mr Yanukovych was whisked away by Russian special forces to a safe haven in Russia. Within weeks Russian troops in unmarked camouflage took over Ukrainian bases in Crimea. Then in April pro-Russian rebels stormed government buildings in the heavily industrial Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, triggering civil war. His opulent residence outside Kiev, thrown open to public gaze by protesters after he fled, did not belong to him personally, he said. Receipts detailing millions of dollars spent on the complex were, he said, "political technology" and spin. The ostriches in the residence's petting zoo, he maintained, "just happened to be there". "Yes, there was corruption, no one denies that. But a year and a half has passed, those in power have all the means at their disposal. Show us, where are the bank accounts of Yanukovych? They don't exist and never have done." Interpol placed him on a wanted list in January this year, as Ukrainian officials accuse him of embezzling millions of dollars. So the guy who's been advising Vladimir Putin's man in Ukraine is now running Trump's delegate-securing operation? Will polonium be involved? ADDENDA: Master of tolerance Harry Reid strikes again: "A Muslim Democrat running for a U.S. House seat in Nevada says that -- in a private meeting last year -- Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) had encouraged him to end his campaign by saying, 'a Muslim cannot win this race.'"  | 
Comments
Post a Comment