re: #78 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

I agree. My ‘thought’ for the evening…

It seems to me that Trump’s public power is due to his ability to create ‘entertaining’ content for the media. By entertaining I mean that attracts lots of viewers. (A lot of them out of fear and anger.) And Trump is very good at this.

The media love this for the revenue and power it brings them. They prioritized his content over all others in 2015-2016. Traditional campaigns using traditional methods were tied by norms, such as respect and truth while Trump, who respects nothing, did anything and everything that created more media for himself. This handicapped the ‘normal’ candidates, although I hesitate to use ‘normal’ to describe much about Cruz and Graham.

This is one reason why Clinton got buried in the media. This is what I think critics mean when they say she ran a ‘poor’ campaign.

The problem is of course, that this content-creation goal is in place of rational governance. Because the goals of the two objectives are very different. It seems to me that this is why Trump is portrayed as both brilliant and an idiot. He is just playing a very different game with very different goals.

Without rational governance, millions of citizens lives and well-being are put at risk. A lot of the media have not yet figured out that they are in as much danger as the rest of us.

Meanwhile, the entire circle around Trump are grifters, criminals, and sociopaths. Normal organizations try to filter these folks out in favor of the competent. Trump has sought them out because they are weak and compromised. This results in a weak and compromised government.

Further most of the competent people have filtered themselves out because they favor goals of competent governance.

We need to vote out the current administration before they do further damage and fatally weaken our country and its institutions. And then we need to inventory the damage, fix it and encode the lessons into law and into our institutions.