Election Post-Mortem: How Everything Came Up Trump | Matt Taibbi | Big Think
Trump, his innovation was to recognize from the start that the campaign is really a bad reality show, and he made it a good reality show. That's not saying that qualitatively he was a good person, I'm just saying that he knew how to make good television; he knew how to attract eyeballs. It's entertainment.
If you think about the financial incentives that everybody who's on the bus or on the campaign plane, you have the candidates who are funded by a very small group of ultra-powerful commercial donors, and then you have the press, and they're basically funded by advertising dollars. And so, somewhere along the line, there's a synergy between the person who is the most entertaining on the one hand and who is able to satisfy the donor class on the other hand.
If you find that sweet spot in the middle of those two phenomena, that's usually where you're going to get your candidate: someone who is a little bit entertaining and also a little bit morally flexible. As a result of that, at the outset of the campaign, especially, he was able to attract mountains—billions of dollars, probably—of free coverage at a period of the race when other candidates have to buy their own publicity.
And he made it into a kind of a genuine revolt where his voters perceive themselves as the aggrieved victims of a conspiracy of elites that were represented by all the donors, the press, the two parties. And he managed to get past a lot of the kind of bulwarks that we usually had thrown up in the past to keep people like that out.
Like, for instance, normally when a candidate slips up and makes a mistake, a la Howard Dean when he made his scream or Gary Hart when he got busted with the monkey business photo, we typically used to descend upon a candidate. A reporter I know used to call it the seal of death, where we would kind of swirl around a candidate with negative attention, and that would really be it: a few hundred times show a damning clip, and the person would just exit the scene, there would be a humiliating public apology, and a drop in the polls, and then a few weeks later you wouldn't hear from that candidate again.
That didn't happen this time. Trump managed to survive countless scandals like that, and every time everybody expected him to go down in the polls, he went up in the polls. And I think a lot of people in our profession were kind of flummoxed by that. He was sort of defying the usual laws of gravity, and we just didn't know what to do about it.