“Too much Trump!” cry most American candidates, commentators, journalists and pols during our latest endless presidential primary season.
There’s even a new plug-in for Google’s Chrome browser to filter out Trump-related content. The filter has escalating scrub-levels based on the individual user’s dislike of The Donald: “mild”; “aggressive” and — my personal favorite setting of all time — “vindictive.”
So widespread is the beef with Trump coverage that a blame game has broken out among the many self-loathing Trump coverers over who is causing all of the Trump coverage. The latest suspect is cable news channels, which we naturally find out from watching cable news channels.
Joseph McQuaid, publisher of New Hampshire’s Union-Leader newspaper, which covers and feuds with Trump, charged on CNN that Trump “is a TV brand. He is, in part, a creature of the national television networks.”
On Fox News, the network the MSNBC crowd often blames for Trump and toothaches and tsunamis, press critic Brent Bozell complained that the unconventional candidate has “been able to dominate the airwaves” by playing journalists like a fiddle. Perhaps in that modern remake “The Devil Went Down to Iowa.”
Yet it’s not only Fox News that covers Trump 24/7, or all the other, lesser-rated cable channels struggling to keep up. Trump regularly dominates the presidential coverage of any website, magazine or newspaper with national aspirations, whether or not they take their cues from cable networks.
Take the Huffington Post, a liberal, celebrity-heavy online forum that clearly loathes the outspoken billionaire. The site’s heavies weighed options for Trump coverage in this election cycle. They decided to keep the hits rolling but still make sport of Trump’s “sideshow” by covering him only in the entertainment section.
The oddity of cordoning off coverage of the man who led the GOP pack in most national polls continued until early December, when they just couldn’t stand it anymore. HuffPo editors finally threw in the towel after Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Diva-in-chief Arianna Huffington herself descended from Mt. Athos to explain that her site would now take Trump seriously because “we are no longer entertained.” The Trump campaign’s “novelty,” she warned, “has curdled and congealed into something repellent and threatening.”
Leave aside for now the fact that the ban Trump called for is utterly unworkable. Or that he did so reacting to actual imported Muslim terrorism in San Bernardino, Calif. – the worst such attack since Sept. 11, 2001. Or that at the same time that Trump was calling for an unworkable ban on Muslim immigration many of his opponents who professed shock were calling for bombing or invading several majority Muslim countries.
The real glaring divide that all of the above foofaraw highlights is a stark contrast between those of us who are willing to be entertained by our office-seekers and those who aren’t.
Trump’s ideas as delivered to the masses may be bad or bigoted or batty or blather or even occasionally bang on. It may be profitable to have reasonable, inside voice conversations about Trump on the stump.
But if you aren’t entertained by his presentation — if your first instinct is not to chuckle but to smirk a little too hard or even to recoil — then I question your sense of humor. And your sense of proportion while we’re at it.
Trump is a joke that many of his admirers are in on. He is intentionally outrageous and entertaining from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. And no, that is not a metaphor.
Remember, this is the candidate with the most improbable hair since the late, great felon James Traficant, but that was a wig. Trump occasionally invites folks up to tug on his hair to prove its authenticity. He complains on the stump about how hard it is to spray in place what some follicular scientists take to be that rarely spotted beast, the double combover.
To help manage his unruly mop, Trump wears an ugly red hat with his campaign slogan. The hat quickly become a sought-after collector’s item and led one prominent NFL quarterback to call a press conference early.
This is the candidate with a face so expressive that it appears to be made entirely of gifs, a mouth that won’t quit, a brain with no filter, arms that gesticulate borderline spastically even when he’s not mocking people, thumbs that won’t stop tweeting out insults at his many enemies — just one half-step above “yo mama so fat” barbs.
Of course many cable viewers, news junkies, and early primary voters would eat this up. Of course the ratings spike would lead to Trump’s current commanding lead in national polls. And of course many serious people would find this appalling. I’m sorry: “repellent and threatening.”
Current national polls don’t guarantee Trump will capture the GOP nomination. Far from it. But so long as Trump doesn’t collapse like a house of cards at a Vegas casino, people will draw lessons from his campaign to help jumpstart future campaigns.
We can leave the policy pickings to others and ask: If the legacy of Trumpism was a politics that’s a little less PC, a little more direct, less scripted and a whole lot more open to humor and improv and fun, would that really be such a bad thing?
I don’t know if that would make America great again. In Trump’s eyes, probably not. But it would surely be a great improvement.
Jeremy Lott is the Washington Examiner’s night editor.
