Republican consultant Rick Wilson:
This constellation of media players could have at any moment pumped the brakes on Trump and Trumpism during the 2016 election, and could do so now. At any moment, Rupert or the sons could have told Roger Ailes, “OK…that’s enough.” The as-yet unchronicled conspiracy – and I use that word deliberately – between the c-suite at Fox News, Matt Drudge, Trumpbart, Rush Limbaugh is a story waiting to be told. They and others actively elected to elide Trump’s endless catalog of ideological sins, moral shortcomings, mob ties, Russian moneymen, personal weirdnesses, trophy wives, serial bankruptcies, persistent tax shenanigans, low-grade intellect, thinly-veiled racial animus, and conspiracy email-forwarding kooky grandpa affect.
The “populist movement” explanation for 2016 isn’t entirely wrong, but it took the full throttle efforts of the high-volume media enablers to promote Trump as the singular remedy for the moral, economic, and political collapse they decried each day for their credulous viewers and listeners to make that “movement” happen. Even after 25 years in this movement, I can’t help but feel a sense of wonder at how brazen their marketing and monetization of Trump has been, and at its spectacular cost to conservatism.
I’m sorry. I could give a fuck about conservatives. Always ideologues, at the expense of decency. So called conservatives have been anti-American for 50 years. Freedom for me, but not for thee. And we should be reminded that conservatives aren’t populist, they’re tribal, insular. Nothing in their muddled brains is for the ‘people,’ it’s for them alone.
This goes back at least as far as Nixon – always saying that the press is “kicking them around” and screaming about the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Now, with the “reality depends upon what channel you’ve turned to” news model, it’ll take a crisis so major that even the furthest right of the right-wing outlets can’t simply lie about before enough people will realize that they’ve been bamboozled to change our country’s course.
I’m not even sure it’s possible any more.
On this one, I have go with Driftglass and Brother Pierce. All these protestations about limited government, free markets, and constitutional principles notwithstanding, conservatives contracted the prion disease too long ago after eating the monkey brains. Cheeto Mussolini only sells a straighter form of the snake oil to the Pig People.