Trumpkins

The liberal media (meaning the vast majority of all main stream media) is obsessed with Donald Trump. For example, CCN spent late night air time on Tuesday carrying the entirety of a rambling, run-of-the-mill Trump speech as it were the State of the Union.

In addition to Trump himself, the MSM is in love with Trumpkins, the merry band of obsessed followers who are true believers in everything Trump. They interview Trumpkins, hoping for a malaprop or some other outrageous statement. They characterize Trumpkins as "right-wing" supporters (partially accurate but not entirely correct).*

Why is this? After all, there's a long way to go until the first primaries, and generally, the MSM works overtime NOT to give GOP candidates any platform at all.

But Trump is different because, well, he's Trump. He's combative, un-PC, often incoherent, sometimes outrageous, sometimes anti-woman, anti-Latin, anti-Washington, anti- ... everything that isn't Donald Trump.

And because he suggests outrageous things, the media tries to conflate his positions (if you can call them positions) and his ideas with the legitimate and sometimes detailed positions and idea of other GOP candidates. He's a weapon they can use to tarnish the GOP brand and at the same time avoid discussing the Democrats and Hillary Clinton.

John Kass summarized this nicely when he writes:

It's much easier to do a Trump-said-something-crazy story than question Hillary Clinton for compromising national security by using a private email server.

And it's less risky to mock Trumpians for their nativist ways rather than question the racism inherent in the angry all-lives-don't-really-matter crowd.

Daring to question Planned Parenthood or Hillary Clinton's lies or racial hashtag dog whistles can lead to frosty looks in the newsroom. And who wants frost at the end of summer?

I'm no fan of Donald Trump, leading in the polls for the GOP presidential nomination. He's a betrayer, though his fans don't know it yet. And he can't be elected president with his high negatives with women voters ...

He's also a pretend conservative Republican (actually more of a Democrat) who promises, in Big Government fashion, to wield the federal hammer and impose his Trumpian will upon the republic.

But his basic populist appeal is this:

He knows American politicians are corrupt because he's bought dozens of his own and says so.

And he vows to kick the High Priests of Political Correctness — meaning journalists — in the private areas until they cry.

So it's no wonder that self-censoring journalists (including the handmaiden scribes of the establishment GOP) have animosity toward this wild and wealthy populist with the bad hair.

This animosity is often expressed by mocking the people who flock to hear him, since ridicule is our one stable currency.

Trump is always good for a crazy sound bite, and he just started another vulgar Twitter war with Megyn Kelly, the warrior priestess of Fox News.

And rather than shy away and hide from social media shaming, his Trumpians throng to his populist rage as they did by filling that football stadium in Alabama.

It's fascinating. With a smile and a wink, the MSM implies that Trumpkins (my word for Kass' Trumpians) simply don't get how ridiculous their support is. The MSM seems to forget 2008 when glassy-eyed Obamakins exhibited exactly the same characteristics but, of course, were not treated in the same way. In one way, at least, candidates Trump (today) and Obama (2008, 2012) had rabid followers who couldn't see past their rhetoric and understand that in the end, both men are empty.


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* Interestingly, the MSM rarely comments and almost never covers the sometimes outrageous positions taken by socialist Democratic candidate (and poll leader in some states), Bernie Sanders, carefully choosing silence over the possibility that the Center might find his ideas on taxes, government control and size, healthcare, and even "income inequality" less than acceptable.