Four years later and journalists are still looking for reasons to explain President Trump, as though he were found fully formed under a moist rock and not the product of a national election.
New York Times columnist Ben Smith on Sunday microwaved the most repeated reasoning among the national media — that CNN chief executive Jeff Zucker is perhaps the most important factor in Trump’s successful run for the White House.
“The story of Mr. Trump and Mr. Zucker is a kind of Frankenstein tale for the late television age, about a brilliant TV executive who lost control of his creation,” wrote Smith. He also referred to the president as Zucker’s “runaway monster.”
Yes, we know. Zucker is supposed to have “created” Trump by casting him as the star of NBC’s The Apprentice and then, as head of CNN, devoting countless hours of airtime to Trump’s campaign.
It’s a ridiculous concept. Attention from the media doesn’t turn people into presidents. If it did, we’d be looking at a Democratic Beto-Buttigieg ticket. And those two received the most saccharin coverage. In contrast, Trump during the 2016 campaign got to spend the last two weeks listening to audio wherein he’s heard saying “Grab ‘em by the p—-” on repeat 24-7.
True, CNN, and every other cable news channel, covered Trump to an outsize degree. But they didn’t give him that attention. He earned it. In this business, it’s called “earned media” for a reason. A person has to do something worth being seen on a national scale.
What did Trump do worth being seen? It’s not that he was funny or particularly outrageous, though he was and it helped. It’s that he had a message that voters wanted to hear. At his rallies, they weren’t screaming “The Apprentice!” They were chanting “Build the wall!”
Crediting Zucker with helping elect Trump is the same as when liberals blame Hillary Clinton’s loss on “sexism” or her being especially “disliked,” as though being disliked is an unfortunate stroke of luck and not a matter of having done things people find distasteful.
The more accurate way of characterizing the 2016 contest, though you’ll never hear it from anyone in the national media, is that Trump was a better candidate than Clinton.
Trump was elected because of Trump and because he is what voters wanted. The same will be true if he is reelected. This shouldn’t be so hard for the media to grasp, but then they’d have to admit the obvious.
