How to get run over by the Trump juggernaut.

Posted by Pointman on March 18, 2016 · 27 Comments 

The first thing you have to do as a politician is totally lose touch with those people who’ve been voting for your party on auto-pilot for years. They’ve always done it, so obviously they’ll continue to do it. They’re someone you can afford to do a few “I hear you, I hear you” type of inane and totally content-free speeches and whom you can safely ignore thereafter while you pander to the increasingly bizarre demands of the first time, minority or perennially floating voter.

You have to be so politically inept, that you totally misread the angry mood of the people you confidently expect to vote for you, because you’ve never waited in line at a grocery store checkout and actually talked to them as just another Joe Public, never mind listening carefully over your shoulder to what the couple behind are talking about.

You don’t need to, because you’ve already got all the polls and excruciatingly analysed results of focus groups who’ve been running supposedly representative examples of your electorate through the fully recorded and videoed sessions and you’ve read the summaries of the digests of the précis of the bottom line anyway. You know it all, your finger’s on the pulse, roll on.

You don’t appear to know that how people respond to face to face pollsters or being slightly flattered to be a guinea pig in a focus group contains a large amount of virtue signalling. It’s only when they get into the privacy of a polling booth that you get to know what they’re really thinking, and you can unexpectedly get both barrels of it.

The political pundits are inward looking and spend so much time cadging tasty morsels from the elite’s high table that they actually neglect to monitor the people who on the day will have all the power – the voter. Expect nothing more from them but the second hand opinions of their masters, since they’ve cozied up so much they’ve effectively gone native. They too rely blindly on increasingly misleading polls to tell them what the public are going to do.

The mainstream media (MSM), as usual, are living in medialand, comfortably detached from ordinary people and everyday reality. They’re also crippled by a rigid view of what’s acceptable. They either agree with the views you’re expressing and you are therefore a mainline person, or they don’t and you are therefore some deliverance type hillbilly minority whose views are quickly discounted as a statistical outlier.

They long ago strayed away from reporting news, went through a momentary dalliance with presenting it, to nowadays managing it. It’s effectively censorship of viewpoints they don’t approve of.

All the self-appointed leaders of the various minorities and pressure groups are going to get their quadrennial fifteen minutes of fame and wring a few promises out of the various politicians courting them for their support. They mostly appear to be chronically invested in the concerns of various benighted minorities but their whole career has been built on righting some wrong which realistically it wouldn’t be in their long-term employment interest to right once and for all.

Their “people” just want the simple things in life like a job, but at times their leaders appear to simply want the notoriety and power that flows from being so virtuous. High profile and fame actually is more important to some of them than actually doing anything significant. They sold out to the establishment status quo a long time ago.

If you’re part of the Republican party machine, you have to be lazy and fundamentally arrogant, because as a nominally right-wing party which has only won two of the last six presidential elections, and that against some pretty indifferent opposition, you yet again field a different selection of the same type of anodyne ivy league losers who are all impeccably well-groomed and look and talk as if they fell out of a shopping channel advert for some dodgy car finance scheme.

If you’re in the Democrat party machine, you have to be smug enough to offer an equally establishment but shop soiled candidate who was arguably the weakest if not the worst Secretary of State in the entire history of the US but who’s also a woman, which means she’ll be above criticism, so that’ll be okay. The thinking is she’ll bag the women’s vote, but I rather suspect in her particular case that won’t happen.

You, like those women, have to ask yourself if she couldn’t keep control of her hubby’s wandering pecker, what chance would she stand running a corner store, never mind the United States of America? Perhaps if big bully boy Putin comes after her as hard as he did for Obama who crumpled like a paper cup, she’ll take it but determinedly won’t suck, to adapt one of her husband’s famous escape phrases.

Since by now the whole of the establishment are sitting in their usual seats aboard the usual presidential election train and it’s chugging along nicely, you casually dismiss the arrival of the beast on the scene. Let the games begin.

There is an initial blip of derision in the media followed by a news blackout.

Concerns within the Republican gentry that he might run as an independent and do for the Republican party what Ralph Nader did for the Democratic party on arguably two occasions – split their vote and therefore deny them the presidency – are assuaged since he’s running as a Republican. With the passing months, that relief will gradually mutate into stark blind panic.

He says a few outspoken things which early on earn him an avalanche of morally outraged editorials in the MSM, because it’ll make good copy. It does get him attention though. Strangely enough, these sermons from the mount by the media are received in silence by the ordinary voter, rather than some sort of expected outbreak of anti-Trump rioting in the streets, complete with burning cars, Molotov cocktails being hurled and fully armoured up riot police baton charging the crowds while trucks mounted with water cannons blast them off their feet like tenpins.

Trump quite simply doesn’t give a rat’s ass what the media think of him, and they don’t like that.

In the end, the MSM need him more than he needs them but all the reporting remains unremittingly negative. With every well spun attack on him from all organs of the media, his supporters rally around to become more loyal. The truth is he doesn’t need the MSM, preferring instead to use new media like twitter, Facebook and the Internet.

Since they’re determined to give him nothing but negative coverage, he doesn’t have to pander to them like the other contenders, so he’s free to go for their throat and does so, much to the delight of his supporters. Little tin media idols start getting knocked off their pretty little perches by him. It’s just not fair they whinge, we’re the ones supposed to be doing the attacking.

He starts to make progress in the primaries and even when he starts to pull well ahead, all the media focus is negative while it’s not focused on his Republican contenders, who’re actually dropping miles behind him. Most pathetically, some of the contenders even reverse positions on issues and start creeping in Trump’s policy direction, hoping the voters won’t notice.

One by one, just before they admit defeat and drop out of the race, they’re touted as the one to beat Trump, never mind win the presidency. Each of their loser bow out messages is the same – we’ve got to stop Trump. Strange days, whatever happened to party unity and basic political acumen?

Trump’s really on a roll by now, gaining popular momentum and looks to be in danger of upturning the comfy political arrangement gluteus maximus over mammary gland, so the establishment knives really start to come out. Two time losers like Romney are rolled out onto the stage like a poor man’s Brutus to plant the knife between Trump’s shoulder blades. For some reason, a dagger wielded by a man who was twice rejected in a presidency bid has no effect and indeed seems to gel yet more support around the upstart Trump who has by now crossed the party’s Rubicon and is deep into its heartland.

The brilliant ploy hasn’t worked, and indeed only serves to alienate the party apparatchiks even further from their own foot soldiers. For a lot of people, that was the last straw in dealing with the old guard. How they ever thought it could do anything other than boomerang back on them is indicative of how out of touch they are with their own grass root supporters. In a more subtle response the Republican elders lean on his no hoper competitors to remain in the race when everyone including them knows all is lost, just to starve him of the crucial number of primary votes before the convention.

The media, while they’re not attacking him, change tack and mount a determined campaign stereotyping the sort of right-wing, nasty, low-down, mad, red-neck, white, commo-nazi, race-traitor, Catholic, racist, Jew and whatever is an out of vogue type of person who could possibly support Trump. Whatever this was intended to achieve, Christ only knows but in a free democracy people resent someone else in effect trying to intimidate them out of voting for the candidate of their choice, and revenge is always taken in the secrecy of the ballot box. Revenge is duly taken.

The negative, continuous and almost hysterical barrage of angst ridden propaganda from all quarters and solely directed at poor little Donald generates more sympathy than hatred. People as a rule don’t like baying lynch mobs.

What the media pointedly ignore is the number of disenchanted minorities, and even habitual Democrat voters, who’re sick to their back teeth of gesture politics and are finding more than a degree of resonance in some of the things he’s saying.

Nobody wants to talk about that demographic shift, never mind factor it in to any projections, but it is happening whether it’s acknowledged or not. As usual in the shadowy areas like that, the opinion polls are blowing sunshine up the expert’s butts, because what people say they’ll do and what they’ll actually do in November are I feel going to be two very different things. Time will tell.

Spontaneously organised demonstrations of outraged “students” appear outside Trump conventions, hurling projectiles at scurrying attendees and running through car parks smashing the windscreens of any cars displaying a Trump bumper sticker. The heavily edited but still violent scenes are seized on by the Trump campaign and used immediately because it’s a gift.

The martyrdom card is played very effectively and will be played again every time such violent incidents happen. We won’t be intimidated, we won’t be silenced by thugs, you will not prevent us having our say becomes a new motif of the Trump campaign. In what is still a basically conservative country, storm trooper violence like that simply serves to have the opposite of the intended effect.

Because of the various losers being pressed into staying in the primary race long after they should have retired from the field, the odds are Trump will most probably arrive at the Republican convention short of the numbers for an outright ticket but still well ahead of his rivals.

The old grandees of the party are rumoured to be cooking up a hatchet job on Trump to thereby hand the ticket to one of their approved candidates. If they succeed, it’d be the end of the Republican party and usher in yet another scandal plagued Clinton presidency, and God help America.

Not even they are that stupid, but you never know. A desperate dinosaur establishment facing extinction tends to make poor decisions. Should they do so, he’ll simply run as an independent if only as a fuck you gesture. He’s got the time, money, the inclination and wouldn’t like being shafted by the party establishment.

If they’ve any political survival instincts left, they’ll accept the ancien régime is now gone and hand him the nomination. The Roman mob are already crowning him by popular acclaim and you ignore that at your peril. The oldest rule in politics applies – nobody, no matter how respected and esteemed they are, is bigger than the party.

Should he get the ticket and run, the final desperation straits, up shit creek without a paddle theory of the political establishment is that an electorate who’ve always fundamentally distrusted and never actually warmed to Hillary Clinton will somehow suddenly hold their nose and vote for her, just to do the righteous thing and block a Trump presidency. Yeah, well, like that’s really gonna happen …

And if that’s how smart all the political sharpies continue to play it right up to the vote in November, that’s how Donald Trump will become the next president of the USA.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

We’ve reached a political fracture point, but of a different kind.

Political fracture points and power vacuums.

The loss of faith in the political class.

People are pissed off.

UK Election 2015 – The car crash of the chatterati against reality.

Click for a list of other articles.

 

Filed under Article · Tagged with Donald Trump, Politics