THE MASTERS OF MANUFACTURED CONSENT CAN'T MANUFACTURE IT FOR POST-TRUMPISM

Here's USA Today's Jill Lawrence with some wishful thinking (paywalled, but available free here):

Is this the beginning of the end for Trumpism or the Republican Party?

... Today, the choice is between preserving Trumpism or preserving the Republican Party.

There is increasing evidence that they cannot co-exist. The [censure] resolution adopted by the RNC in Salt Lake City [targeting Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger] has unleashed a torrent of protest from Republicans and former Republicans including, as of Tuesday, sharp comments from Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.

They want to move on – from lies, from 2020, from Donald Trump....

More than 140 Republican leaders and ex-officials from the bipartisan Renew America Movement denounced the RNC on Monday....

The list of signers is eclectic – Never Trumpers and no-longer Trumpers, conservatives and moderates, strategists and onetime public servants, former senators and House members, and former Govs. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Christie Todd Whitman of New Jersey and William Weld of Massachusetts.

Wow! What an amazing group, especially those last three! Two completely out-of-step GOP moderates and a sexually disgraced former governor! With backing like that, how can this movement fail?

I almost feel sorry for Mitch McConnell and others in the GOP who'd like to be rid of Trump. Most of them have been in the party for years and are accustomed to operating on the assumption that they can sell the public on virtually anything. They sold us on two wars in the Bush years. They've sold us on the idea that tax cuts for the rich, particularly cuts in the estate tax (whoops, I mean the death tax) benefit us. They sold us on the notion that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are history's greatest monsters.

Fox News has been turbocharging these messages for a quarter century, but Republicans can often rely on the mainstream media to retransmit the messages as well. That's what they're counting on now.

But it's not working. It's failing because Fox is afraid or unwilling to catapult this particular line of propaganda, and the GOP base isn't buying it. What can McConnell & Co. do?

I know what they're going to do: They'll keep telling friendly journalists and pundits that the downfall of Trump is coming any day now, and those journalists and pundits are going to continue retransmitting this message, because that's what they do for establishment Republicans. It still won't work, and they'll never quite understand why.