Matthew Barlow

Way back in 2009, failed Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin took her feud with the media to a new level.  She began referring to it as the ‘lamestream’ media, bitter as she was about the justifiable questioning of her qualifications for the position, amongst other things.  Her nomenclature, though, became a crystalizing moment for many on the far right, as they now had a catchy and witty term to describe the media.  The far right had long had a problem with the mainstream media, which tended to dismiss them as nut jobs or worse.  Indeed, far right sites like Breitbart, which had already been in existence for two years by the time Palin came up with her term, had been critiquing the allegedly liberal media.  Breitbart, though, was just the most successful of these far right sites, most of which, including Breitbart, descended into conspiracy theories, hate speech, and vague threats against minorities.

And then Donald Trump happened.  Trump, a life-long moderate Democrat from New York City, saw an opportunity.  Clearly he was a student of Joseph Goebbels’ theories of propaganda.  Goebbels, who was the Nazis’ spin doctor, noted, most famously, that a lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth.  But Goebbels also opined that propaganda works best when the manipulated group believes it is acting of its own free will.  This is not to say that Trump is a Nazi, of course (though some of his followers clearly are).  It is to note that Trump is a master manipulator.

All throughout the primaries and into the main presidential election, he carried out a series of feuds with the media.  He refers to the New York Times as ‘failing’ in nearly every tweet about it. He even carried out a feud with Megyn Kelly of FoxNews.  In that, he seemed to break with every expectation of a conservative candidate, as Fox has long been the conspiracy-driven, nearly fake-news media darling of the right (lest you think I’m biased, liberals have MSNBC, and it’s not like the far left doesn’t have its own issues with the media).  It probably helped that Fox was in a crisis of its own at the time, with head honcho Roger Ailes being forced to step down due to a sexual harassment scandal.

Trump, then, coalesced an already-extant movement that developed in the wake of the rise of Barack Obama, the first African American president, and his candidacy for the presidency.  Trump’s candidacy, though, took this until-now fringe movement into the mainstream, most notably through Breitbart and the appointment of its CEO, Steve Bannon, as his campaign CEO before appointing him as the Chief Strategist of the nascent Trump administration.

Trump’s media campaign and discourse has been nothing short of brilliant, even if it is nefarious and repulsive.