Trumping the Media: Donald Continually Confounds the MSM By Roger Kimball
https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2016/11/22/trumping-the-media/
Looking back on it now, who do you think provided the best commentary on the run-up to the election?
And a related question: who has provided the most insightful commentary on the aftermath, i.e. “Why Trump Happened,” “What His Victory Means,” “What the Protesters and Crybullies Want”?
It’s amusing now to replay the scenes of those Important People who assured us that Trump, the clown, could never win. My favorite headline was from The Nation: “Relax, Donald Trump Can’t Win.”
My favorite election clip was provided by Bret Stephens (who was joined in his folly by many others). And if you just want to listen to ten minutes of fatuousness, here’s an audio clip of the Wall Street Journal’s national politics editor Aaron Zitner speaking on Election Day. Zitner was 100% wrong, but what’s amusing is the supreme if casual confidence with which he delivers his dicta: “Of course Hillary will win. Any fool knows that. All the best polls show that she is a shoo-in. All the most perceptive people (like moi, A. Zitner) agree.” Et cetera.
But if the MSM was almost exclusively a source of schadenfreude, who was out there telling the truth?
There were several percipient commentators. But I want to mention one who may be overlooked because the public regards him as an entertainer, not a sage. I mean Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. Adams, at his blog, has been providing some of the most original and most penetrating commentary on the whole Trump phenomenon.
I was, I admit, a little taken aback when I first encountered his description of Trump as a “Master Persuader” (see here, for example, or here), but the more I think about it, the more right I think he is. Trump on the stump was not articulate in any traditional sense. He was repetitious, digressive, given to stumbling about in sentence fragments. But he honed a message that resonated deeply with the voters.
Adams noted the following in a column posted yesterday:
If you believe Trump’s skill for persuasion wasn’t the key variable in his win, you have to imagine some other candidate beating Clinton with the same set of policies as Trump. Personally, I can’t imagine it.
I commend Adams’ blog to you: among other things, he shows that the people who are protesting against Trump are not really protesting against Trump.
They’re protesting against a hallucination they call “Trump” that has almost nothing to do with the man who is now the president-elect.
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