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.

Gallup finds Trump has the worst favorability of any president-elect in modern American history. pic.twitter.com/2D0tbiJuvF

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) November 17, 2016

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.