First he came for the airtime, then he just came for the air. Donald Trump has taken all the oxygen from his Republican rivals and used it to saturate the media with his every word, exclamation, explanation and exhortation to help him make America great again.
In the last two weeks, Trump has breathed life into a series of farcical news cycles. He has set the agenda by threatening his opponent’s wife in response to an attack from someone not his opponent, promoting an unflattering picture of her, claiming that his opponent started it, defending his campaign manager from a criminal charge of battering a reporter, questioning whether that reporter had bruises predating the encounter with his campaign manager, wondering whether that reporter’s pen was a bomb, and stating it was actually the reporter who criminally accosted him. This would’ve been the wildest stretch of Springer in weeks. Unfortunately, this … is CNN.
This is the 2016 presidential race.
And it’s a reason why his GOP competitors for president, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, can’t get a word in. Forget that debate season is over. Cruz and Kasich haven’t offered much of anything to turn the cameras toward them, short of Cruz defending his spouse and Kasich saying he would fire the Trump aide, Corey Lewandowski.
“This is EVERY DAY for EVERY GOP [candidate] til Nov: “[insert name], do you agree with Donald Trump on [insert stupid comment]?!” THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Michael Graham tweeted.
To the point that Trump has a rival in the primary contest, that assessment can’t be far off. He’s already generated about $2 billion in “free” media this election, six times that of Cruz and more than twice that of even Hillary Clinton. Up to Super Tuesday, the evening network news broadcasts had spent four times as much coverage on Trump as they had Cruz. As the big vote approached, that ratio became even more lopsided, according to numbers observed by the Media Research Center. It couldn’t have decreased much since.
With that level of reportage, how is anything but Trump relevant — not only to the networks, but to his rival candidates? He is solely dictating the substance and tone of the GOP campaign. Instead of being an electoral competition among multiple contenders, the race has become a referendum on the front-runner. This defines the #NeverTrump movement, whose only opposing forces are Trump and the faceless group trying to stop him.
The determining factor of his candidacy is what he can do to disqualify himself from capturing the Republican nomination. Such is the reason why Cruz and Kasich aren’t generating much buzz about their own platforms. Of the first page of Google News results for the Texas senator, only one headline is about a policy: his proposal to have law enforcement patrol Muslim neighborhoods. Kasich had an entire town hall to himself broadcast on cable news Wednesday night. The top-ranked takeaway on Google News? “Donald Trump ‘Not Prepared’ to Be President.”
“I have a record of accomplishment, a record of bringing people together, a vision for the future of this country, and guess what? In the grassroots, people are getting it. Now, they didn’t get it, because, frankly, you put me on the tube a lot, but Trump got $1.8 billion worth of free media. I got, like, none,” Kasich recently vented to Chuck Todd on Meet the Press.
“The media was engaged in a love-fest, giving Donald Trump $2 billion in free media. Let’s be clear: How many hours of free media does CNN and FOX and every other station, you let him call in, and for a year, he got $2 billion in free media,” Cruz complained to Anderson Cooper Tuesday night during an interview ostensibly about his own campaign. (Cooper said he’s offered Cruz time on his show “pretty much every day” only to be declined.)
These statements amount to lamenting reality. Political candidates are fond of saying something along the lines of, “This election isn’t about me.” In the case of Cruz and Kasich, that may be right. In the case of Donald Trump, it isn’t.
