Thursday, November 17, 2016

SOMEONE ON TEAM TRUMP KNOWS HOW TO MANUFACTURE CONSENT

The Trump team is stumbling through the transition -- I wonder, for instance, if what we're seeing is really an effort to pick a Cabinet or just the president-elect wallowing in the opportunity to get as many A-listers as possible to kiss his ring (Romney! Cruz! Petraeus!). But in the midst of all this chaos, someone in Trump World is applying traditional Republican narrative-creation skills to the situation at hand:
President-elect Donald Trump will host a new round of rallies in the coming weeks to celebrate his 2016 election win, according to one of his top aides.

George Gigicos, the head of the Trump advance team, spoke to reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City Thursday, where he said their team is working on "the victory tour now."

He asked Trump's former campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, who was behind him, to ask when the tour would be happening.

She came forward to reporters and said, "'Thank you tour.' It's not a 'victory tour,'" to which Gigicos repeated, "Thank you tour."

"Thank America tour," Conway said.

Gigicos said the tour would be happening in "the next couple of weeks -- after Thanksgiving" and would focus on "the swing states we flipped over."
I know this is happening in large part because Donald Trump has a desperate need for adulation. And yet it's brilliant, in a horrible way.

Trump is going to stand before those crowds of giddy white proletarians and the press is going to conclude that he really was the people's choice, even though he probably lost the popular vote by 2 million and has by far the lowest favorable rating of any recent president-elect.



The press is skeptical of Trump, but the press is not skeptical of white proles. The press agrees that they're the real Americans.

And the Democratic Party, to judge from its post-election hand-wringing, agrees as well, which is why concentrating the tour on swing states is a nastily brilliant idea. It will set off yet another round of counterproductive Democratic self-criticism.

Trump will probably do this throughout his term, and the press will continue to assume that crowd size equals popularity. Let me say it again: Trump lost the popular vote. To judge from the Gallup poll quoted above, at least 5% of the public voted for him but doesn't approve of him. But the press will fall for Trump rallies for the foreseeable future.

5 comments:

Riverboat Grambler said...

"Counterproductive Democratic self-criticism"? Considering this election was the Democrats to lose and now they've been decimated to the point where they essentially don't exist on a national level, I'd say now is a pretty good time for some self-reflection within the party, no?

Victor said...

In the beginning, when he first started his grifting enterprise, the NY media ate out of t-RUMP's tiny hands.

Then, the national media started eating out of his tiny hands when he started going on more and more cable and network news shows - including MTP -"If It's Sunday, It's Time to Meet the Conservatives" - and the other Sunday "news" bloviation festivals.

And now, the political media has followed their brethren and "cistern."

He has been, and will be for the forseeable future, the media's bright shining object - a lure, to get them to keep biting.
It'll be the rest of us who will find ourselves caught and cooked when the media keeps biting at that lure - no "catch and release" for 'we the people.'
We're well and truly fucked!

Feud Turgidson said...

In the past, it was common for nation states who'd lost their royals for whatever reason, to go off and get one from some other nation's royals. The nascent states that eventually made up Russia did that several times. England, too: William & Mary from the Duchy of Orange, the Hanovers from what's not Germany.

But it was the power elites who came up with the idea of 'needing' a royal to front or patsy for those truly in charge, and they knew they'd have a p.r. problem. So, they'd send their newly acquired rent-to-0wn royals on a get acquainted tour, to drum up enthusiasm, get the rah rah up for the fake sentimentality needed to entrust political power to a stranger.

Now, it might be hard to tell whether Dump is doing this tour cuz he's a basket case manchild, or because he's trying to exercise suzerain on these folks because he fears they're really way more Republican than he is and could turn on him, or a bit of both.

But you know which category of New Overlords does NOT have a big history of such tours? The winning sides in palace revolts and coups - and coups of both kinds, bloody and bloodless.

See, that's the beauty to real power to have having royals around: you can have your cake and eat it to, but committing the coup, then sending out a credible figurehead to gather loyalty from the rubes and take any bul- uh, heat as your surrogate.

Now, I'm not saying we just went through a bloodless coup. But I'm not saying we didn't either.

Guess who just got nom'd to head the CIA? One of the Koch Brothers very own properties, Mike Pompeo. Check him out: the Wiki profile is a total tell.

Just sayin'.

It's not in danger of it's over. It's not headed towards it's over. It's over. This is how bloodless coups work. If you doubt that, go check out how Iranians felt ion 1953 the morning after Brit and US intel helped take down the Iranian democratic state.

Have you done that yet? Amazing, ain't it.

This is so over.

Feud Turgidson said...

Read up on Pompeo. His whole history REEKS of CIA. And he's a Koch brothers asset.

This has been a bloodless coup, people: Mister Yam Head is the front.

This is so over.

Jimbo said...

Feud: Problem with bloodless coups, whether they're in "banana republics" or somewhat more sophisticated but, at the time, still a predominantly rural, isolated country like Iran is that their success depends upon total passivity of the population in response. The GOP has waged a very long war against democratic institutions and especially the norms of a commonwealth. However, unlike nearly all bloodless coup victims, the US is a federal state and there are states that have dramatically different policies and values than the Koch-GOP. Second, bloodless coups depend upon a complete monopoly on force. Even if we assume all gun owners and all police are pro-Trump, which cannot really be automatically assumed, it is not true that the military is pro-Trump and, like the Turkish military, they have an institutional loyalty to the Constitution, which the banksters and Koch like billionaires definitely do not. Finally, Trump is a really bad front man for the Deep Capitalist State to rely on. Are we going to have chaos and great political instability going into the future, no doubt, but American Democracy while very seriously strained is not yet dead.