What is Donald Trump doing to media reality?
by Jon Rappoport
December 11, 2015
“Even if Trump is a prop-figure set up to sweep the other Republican candidates off the board and pave the way for Hillary to win the election, something else is going on. Something deeper and much weirder.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
Donald Trump, a figure of authority? A folk-hero? A man who can say anything, get away with it, and become more popular? How did this happen? How was Trump sculpted, if you will, to become what he is now?
NBC once loved him. Let’s not forget that. They set up The Apprentice for him. There he sat, a Pope of business, a genius of goof, deciding which contestants moved on and which were expelled into the outer darkness with their luggage. The tasks the contestants strove to complete were ridiculous. They ended up (winners and losers alike) looking like demented and humiliated kiddie-props in a parody of “the business of America is business.”
(“Okay, your assignment is to make signs, stand on a street corner, and sell yak dung.”)
No problem. For several seasons, the television audience adored the show. “You’re fired” became Trump’s signature. And of course, now, during the Presidential campaign, he’s doing the same thing—firing everybody he can think of. To say this is appealing to millions of people is a vast understatement.
Trump is firing politicians, candidates, media, the GOP, immigrants, government bureaucrats, trade representatives and their deals. Wherever he casts his eye, there is somebody to dump.
Trump began as a media creation. They embraced him as a brash, interesting, weird cartoon—and he went with it.
He came across like a happy greedy child playing with toys—hotels, casinos, apartment buildings, golf courses. Then he’d allude to his own brilliance in being able to maneuver the deals that brought the toys into existence.
The media loved this. They loved his crazy hair. They loved his wives, his marriages, his grin, his unselfconscious babble. They kept building him up.
“When I’m President,” he says now, “I’ll make better deals. For America.” Well, he’s already been popularized by media, if only in a Disneyesque animation, as the king of dealmakers. It fits.
In the middle of this campaign storm, Trump and the media are joined at the hip. The media created him, and now they can’t shake him off. He’s a fascist, he’s a racist, the pundits say, but it doesn’t matter. They keep trying to dig his grave and put him in it, but there is no funeral. The more they attack him, the more excitement they generate.
If it turned out The Donald were a closet hermaphrodite, would it really matter? Or would his followers say, “Wow, that’ll show those LGBT fanatics.”
Now, throw into the mix how large numbers of people feel about open borders, terror attacks, gun control, and the export of American jobs overseas—their guy, Trump, is reflecting those feelings with unmistakably decisive remarks, without a teleprompter, without sing-song political-android vagueness…so you have a super-potent catalyst roaming the countryside, blowing people out of their passive minds.
Trump isn’t manipulating the media, he isn’t sitting around thinking of ways to stir up their hatred, he isn’t a Hillary with teams of lizards calculating which issue she should pounce on at any given moment, he isn’t a Jeb huddling in his own pool of tears with a few billion bucks, planning his comeback. Trump jots down a quick note on a napkin, puts it in his pocket, strides through a crowd, gets up on a stage, and lets it rip. Everything he says reminds him of something else and he goes with the latest thought. His speeches look like a roadmap of a bee’s zig-zag through a pasture.
The media are suffering from the Frankenstein Effect. They invented Trump, and now he is taking them to a place they don’t want to go.
He’s already trekked into no-go zones. For example, he’s said that of course vaccines can cause autism. What happens, for example, if tomorrow he suddenly changes his current message on ISIS (bomb them, censor them online) and says of course the US government created ISIS and now the Obama administration is patting itself on the back for stepping up military action against its own partner? What happens if he starts pounding on that tune?
Wild card, joker in the deck, loose cannon, cowboy don’t even begin to describe what Trump is becoming. His supporters are also celebrating a revolt against political correctness, and Trump is their man. Carefully assess what you say before you say it? Are you kidding? In this sense as well, the media have created their own problem, acting as shills and cheerleaders for correct language—and now that op is coming back to haunt them.
Here’s another tidbit. For the past 20 years, the media have been gargling and sputtering and uttering mealy-mouthed he-said he said “reports” about the effects of Globalism on American jobs. Trump has taken that creature out to the barn and shot it. He’s talking about rescinding the trade deals that have been forwarding Globalism. Does he mean it? Does he understand what such an effort would take? His followers think so.
Waiting in the wings: If Trump addresses residents of inner cities, directly and often, and tells them he will bring back jobs for them (whereas no one else will), who knows how much trouble he could stir up in the ranks of the Republican and Democratic parties, and who knows how much support will pour out of those decimated inner-city communities.
This isn’t Rand Paul or Ron Paul or Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders talking about Globalism. This is a billionaire marshal riding into town and promising to flash coin. This is the host of The Apprentice saying, “I can fire, but I also can hire.” This is a wide-screen IMAX cartoon saying, “I’m real. I’ll bring back prosperity.”
How do the Sunday morning news-talk hosts and their guest experts stand up against him? Trump is shrugging and summarily announcing, “They’re jerks.” He’s blowing away the media who made him, and they can’t undo what they’ve birthed.
The conventional wisdom is Trump will fall when the media uncover something truly horrible from his past and blast it out, day after day. You mean saying the Internet needs to be censored and many immigrants must be deported isn’t enough to sink his ship? So far, apparently not.
And scandals and possible scandals have already been aired. There was the accusation that he raped his wife Ivana. She eventually defended him and said no. Four of his companies have declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. According to Salon, he was a figurehead for a company called ACN, which operated as a pyramid scheme. Trump denied having anything to do with ACN. There are ongoing legal actions against Trump University in New York and California, claiming the University committed fraud and deception against students in its real estate curriculum and hustled them for millions of $$.
This last potential scandal carries the most danger, in part because the NY case is headed up by the state Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, who has filed a $40 million lawsuit against Trump. Former students have filed two class-action suits against The Donald.
And yet…all the above-mentioned scandals have already been covered in the press, and Trump’s poll ratings haven’t suffered.
What’s going on?
Originally, the media created Trump as a celebrity and a phenomenon. They made him big. A very big and wild and weird cartoon. Now they’re trying to destroy him. But they can’t make him small and inconsequential because, again, they made him big and wild and weird, and the audience accepted him on that basis, in that image. The audience already took him in, already accepted and digested him. Media creations are hard to reverse when they’re cartoons. People love cartoons. Can anybody make Mickey Mouse vanish? Can anybody make the Simpsons forgettable?
The case of another famous cartoon is instructive: Arnold Schwarzenegger. He rode to victory, in 2003, and won the governorship of California based on his media-image as an all-powerful animation. It wasn’t until he was serving as governor that the picture faded. Only then did people realize he was just another politician. His infidelity, his fathering of a child with the family housekeeper, was the ultimate torpedo—but that scandal erupted long after his super-gloss had already dimmed.
Notice this: as The Arnold was running for the governorship in 2003, it was already on the record (1977) that he had used steroids (they were legal then) and had participated in orgies. Just several days before the election, the LA Times and CNN broke a story about “Gropegate.” Several women came forward with accounts of breast-grabbing, buttock-grabbing. Another woman said Schwarzenegger had tried to remove her swimsuit in an elevator.
On Election Day, Arnold won by over a million votes. He beat out his closest competitor by 17 points.
Disney built an empire based on cartoons. John Wayne built a career being a cartoon. Comic books, graphic novels, and the movies based on them are blockbusters. Twelve days before the opening of the latest Star Wars movie, people are already camping out at theaters.
Meaning? People want to see reality reduced to extremes. One reason: they’re annoyed by subtleties. Another reason: they really believe that, at bottom, when the smoke and mirrors are removed, the world is a drama of light vs. dark, good vs. evil. If you think you can make that idea go away, you’re crazy.
And suppose on some level this drama is, in fact, playing out. Suppose a man riding in on years-worth of media-inflation says, in no uncertain terms, he can win that war. Suppose he actually believes it. Suppose he appeals to millions of people in a way that no other politician on the scene can, because he communicates in a loose direct conversational style, instead of droning on in the usual political cliché carved out by public-relations idiots for candidates who can’t escape sounding and looking like androids. Suppose his version of being a cartoon is “I’m the most honest guy you’ll ever meet.”
Suppose, among the blizzard of his statements and remarks, he is pinpointing several deep ongoing crimes of government, crimes other candidates are terrified of touching.
Suppose for decades now, the whole standard media-PR charade of national elections has conspired to outrage and sicken the American public.
Suppose Trump appears to be the opposite of standard.
Suppose the public is so fed up with this election charade they’d excuse their man, The Donald, if it came out that he’d dropped his mother in a volcano on Xmas Eve.
Suppose the media, who are trying to destroy Trump, have no one to blame but themselves, because they’ve been supporting thousands of political lies and liars for a long, long time using language no one cares about anymore.
Whereas the big, wild, and weird man coming into town is speaking in a different tongue.
Suppose, therefore, this is a clash of dimensions the media simply cannot understand.
In that case, what are we set for?
The people who hate the Trump the most continue to miss the point that he is coming with a different language, and his train and their train are passing, on different rails, in the night.
Once a Donald Duck, you last forever. Don’t underestimate that. Give Donald a fiery sword and a mission and a new and different quack, and you’ve got something that grabs the American subconscious and delivers a shock to the system.
“A cartoon came alive? He’s coming to town? He’s on television? He’s running for President? Get out of my way, I have to see this. I have to be part of it.”
After all, American society has turned into a cartoon. Yes, it can be vicious and painful. It can deliver terminal blows. But it’s an animation. When a piece of it suddenly detaches itself and steps forward into the light and talks, you better believe people are interested. Accept it, don’t accept it, Obama was one of those pieces, Bush was a piece, Clinton was certainly a piece. But none of them was as strange as Donald Trump.
If somehow he wins the nomination, it remains to be seen how he’ll fare against that “woman sketch” named Hillary Clinton, a venal and vengeful and entitled caricature trying to keep her Shriek under control as she barrels down the road, smoke coming out her ears, toward the Oval Office.
It seems like a long time ago that one of the biggest networks in the world put Trump in a throne before a national audience every week—where he said over and over again, “You’re fired, you’re fired, you’re fired.” Is it really that surprising he can do the same thing now and find a huge audience?
The network, NBC, was Dr. Frankenstein. They brought Trump to life, and then he broke away, turned around, and attacked his masters.
It just so happens millions of people also want to attack NBC and the other networks and major news sources in this country for their wall-to-wall lies, their arrogant sense of entitlement, their insider clubby presumptions, their sold-out alliance with government and corporations, and their refusal to listen to the concerns of every-day Americans.
These media giants have been creating reality for the masses.
A revolt is in progress against that reality and its perpetrators.
A large number of Americans have come to the aid of a man/media-creation who, in his own way (love it or hate it), is leading it.
What else would you expect to happen?
You’re fired, you’re fired, you’re fired.
Jon Rappoport
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2015/12/11...a-reality/
