Trump reaps what media and GOP have sown
TAMPA, FLA.— Florida is accustomed to hurricanes. Sandbagging down for them, cleaning up after them.
This week, Hurricane Trump came and went, leaving Republican Party wreckage — the aghast establishment — in its wake.
An unstoppable force, as probably all except Ted Cruz have now acknowledged, as the blovian churns through the primary storm season, like a torrent swollen with all the flotsam and jetsam of white working- class voter bitterness.
What, or who, they’re so angry about is still unclear, except that it feels amorphous and vestigial.
Donald Trump blew away his few remaining rivals for the Republican nomination, winning all but one of the 67 counties (99 delegates in a winner-take-all state) and sticking a (pitch) fork into Marco Rubio, whose presidential ambitions were formally declared dead amid the ashes of his home-state vanquishing. Rubio, a generation removed from Cuba, got 52 per cent of the Hispanic vote, but they made up just 17 per cent of the Republican vote overall.
More scrawl on the wall for Rubio, as he pulled the plug on his campaign: Cruz, the Texan almost equally reviled within GOP inner circles as Trump and for far longer, beat him in 27 counties, strongly suggesting a falling out with the conservative base that launched Rubio (“Little Marco”) into the Senate in 2010.
So, another overestimated obstacle cast aside like so much driftwood along the shoreline. While Donald Trump keeps bobbing along, endlessly buoyant, on-message (divisive, incendiary) and un-shamed, already turning his beady little eyes on Hillary Clinton.
(Bumper sticker on cars here: “Trump That Bitch.”)
Trump is to the GOP as the Taliban were to Pakistan’s intelligence service — a force that, once unleashed, could no longer be controlled and channelled, consuming its progenitors.
Voter turnout on Tuesday was 46 per cent, highest for a Florida presidential primary since 1975, so there can be no accusation that a rump group of reactionaries wrestled the state to the mat.
“It’s almost like there’s nothing Trump can say or do to stop this,” Republican state Rep. Dennis Baxley said afterward. “I expected, like a lot of people, given the lack of substance, to see the Trump phenomenon fade. It’s just continued to gain momentum.’’
Realistically, there won’t be a great fade — the total eclipse of Trump — between now and the GOP convention in July, even as the primaries move toward northeastern states where the Republican base is viewed as more moderate, presumably favourable to John Kasich, and the religious belt states presumably favourable to evangelical, smarmy Cruz.
Suggestions a Republican countereffort will coalesce behind a thirdparty option amount to a vain-hope Hail Mary. A scheme floated by former House speaker John Boehner to advance his successor, Paul Ryan, as the nominee at a brokered convention arrived still-birthed — Ryan took himself out of consideration, saying through an spokeswoman that he would “not accept a nomination,’’ believing “our nominee should be someone who ran this year.’’ Which, pointedly, would open up the grab-bag to any of the wannabes who went down in flames over the past several months — the also-rans given a new lease on life, a clumsy do-over after swing-and-amiss wildness against a misjudged opponent.
All the back-room strategizing, the internal hand-wringing, the wall-towall right-wing radio caterwauling — what to do? what to do? Hill o’ beans in the realistic picture. Too little, too late and deeply risky to the party’s post-Trump future, should the will of the primary voters be utterly ignored.
“You’d have riots,” Trump warned on CNN. “If you disenfranchise these people, I think you would have problems like you’ve never seen before.’’
For once, The Donald has got it completely right. He’s boxed in the party that coveted his money and his cachet, when all that was expected of him was an endorsement, like the one Trump gave Mitt Romney last time around.
The thing is, the Republican greybeards and analysts should have seen this Trump low-pressure system swirling in the distance long ago. But because his declarations were so absurd, his demagogic dimensions so obvious, few took the Trump phenomenon seriously enough or foresaw the momentum he would build. Perhaps Republican strategists figured the vox populi rage would be directed at Democrats in the next presidential election, with an unloved Hillary Clinton the victim.
They didn’t take the pulse of their own constituency.
Trump has won 47 per cent of the delegates awarded so far and needs to win 54 per cent to clinch by the time the primary season ends June 7, to avoid the mayhem of a brokered convention.
The thing is, the more the Republican talking heads and hand-wringers try desperately to make their anti-Trump case, the more they inflame resentment among the party base, which is clearly feeling bullied.
We all — including Canadian commentators who have no horse in this race (apart from a nag-nag-nag) — have played into Trump’s wheelhouse by making a populist incubus out of the guy. Nobody on the political scene in the U.S., nobody in the world, has received as much attention as Trump and it hardly seems to matter that most of it has been negative. The name recognition alone — which he already enjoyed — has hit supernova wattage, despite the fact Trump has spent a comparative pittance on his campaign budget and boasts no super-PAC trumpeting. Media has fed the beast — for free. Fascinated, engrossed, transfixed — and endlessly focused on Trump.
“I’ve spent zero on advertising because you and Fox and all of the others, I won’t mention names, but every other network, I mean they cover me a lot, to put it mildly,” Trump told Fox News last November. “And in covering me it’s almost like if I put ads in on top of the program, it would be too much. It would be too much Trump.”
According to SMG Delta, a firm that tracks television advertising, Trump has spent less on TV than any other major candidate. Yet, as noted by a Media Matters analysis, Trump has been the beneficiary of more free airtime than any other candidate — to the tune, in the last half of 2015, of $29.5 million in gratis “coverage,” the equivalent of 24 hours. With a total audience — for the broadcasts and often rebroadcasts of interviews — of 306,104,725 viewers, according to the monitoring service IQ Media, which uses Nielsen data to determine viewership and price data for advertising to come up with equivalent advertising rates. The New York Times on Thursday also published findings from mediaQuant, a firm that tracks media coverage of each candidate computed into dollar values — a calculation module that includes all traditional media, print and broadcast, as well as online-only sources such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
The Big Bang For No Bucks: Trump earned, according to mediaQuant, $400 million worth of free media in February. Over the course of the primary campaign, the billionaire has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, “about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history,” the Times notes.
Moral (and note to self ): Shut up. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.