Drip, Drip, Drip

I've noticed something interesting about the media's ubiquitous phone interviews with Donald Trump. (He appears for alive interview only occasionally.) Rather than pressing Trump to provide details on how he intends to "make America great again", or how he will "create" jobs" or how he will solve the immigration crisis, or how he will "defeat" ISIS or how he will balance the budget or how he will achieve any of the over-the-top claims he makes daily (he is, after all, the greatest -- ever), they allow him to ramble incoherently, hoping he will say something controversial, outrageous, or denigrating to one or more of his GOP opponents.

The trained hamsters allow Trump to do this, I think, because there's a drip, drip, drip effect to the Trump candidacy (if you can call it a candidacy). The more he appears in interviews, the more people begin to associate his incoherent, insulting and often mean-spirited rambling with serious GOP candidates. This tarnishes the entire GOP brand and thereby achieves what the media hamsters always try to do—provide a clear media advantage for a weak and really quite extreme Democratic field. It's working.

Even if the GOP rejected Trump outright, the media would continue to provide him with a forum—because in an odd way, he is doing their bidding. He's reinforcing the canard that the GOP field is a bunch of rich white guys (no matter that the GOP field is far more diverse that the Dem field) who don't give a damn about the average voter.

Fortunately, this is happening well over a year from the election, and hopefully, the field will narrow and the Trump idiocy will diminish or disappear. Then again, maybe not. I have this bad feeling that a small segment of the conservative electorate has lost their minds in exactly the same way that a larger segment of the progressive electorate did in 2008 and 2012. It appears that no rational argument, at least for now, will dissuade them for supporting a completely unqualified, empty suit who plays to emotion, not common sense. Drip, drip, drip.