Contributed by Josh Fryfogle
[Note: The author is a third party voter that did not vote for Trump or Clinton. This article is not an endorsement or denigration of the president elect.]
Wouldn't it be interesting if Donald Trump was able to continue spinning the corporate media around in circles, even after he takes his oath of office?
Set aside your feelings about Trump for the course of this article, and let's consider the clear dominance he seems to command over the media. They really pulled out all the stops, and still he had the last word. Donald Trump is the new president. That's real, People. That just happened.
His media skill set is something that most politicians strive and struggle to develop on the job, while Trump has been heavily involved in media for decades prior to running. He was able to see the big picture through the small screen, and never showed a loss of confidence in his candidacy, not once. Trump brought a deep understanding of the human condition, keeping our attention, focusing differing factions into one action to affect change. And it seems that the media didn't even notice!
They said it couldn't happen, but they couldn't convince the voters. The people that voted for Trump completely ignored the big media. They already knew the score. Trump voters had already realized that the media was not trustworthy. Trump spoke to those people, that was his audience.
And now the modern liberal has lost trust in the media, too. They may not come right out and say it yet, but it's true. They are processing it for now, but that's what has happened.
The polls!
The polls let them down. The polls are a premier product of the big media. The polls serve the immediate purpose of informing the public about the election, but also serve a separate purpose of validating and qualifying the Giant Media as authoritative and trustworthy. The polls serve as political prophecy, and when they come true in the election, the prophets are venerated. So, the logical conclusion is that the media is not as trustworthy as previously thought. Trump voters were not surprised by this. The liberal voter was. Their false prophets were exposed.
See what I'm getting at?
The newly disenfranchised liberal voter is going to be looking for a new news!
And the new president is going to have the bully pulpit to push the conversation, with an unprecedented ability to tell the media to get lost, vamoose, gidoutaheer! And what will the media do about it? Report it? Spin it? Perhaps poll the People?
Clearly, this is a whole new ballgame. Trump reset the rules when he won. He undermined the credibility of the entire media establishment.
The hyperbole and signature sarcasm of the left has become passé. It used to be refreshing, pointing out the fiction in the matter-of-fact recitation of right leaning rhetoric. But it was born under Bush.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert went from satire and parody to a palatable aggregation of information under Obama. And then they started losing ground, as the left could no longer inspire hope in light of their failures. When Stewart and Colbert made their exit strategies known, we should have known something new was coming.
The absurd abandon of these infotainment pioneers used to make the ugly truth easier to look at. It was refreshing to hear a talking head say what people think, with a smile and a wink. It worked to the advantage of the liberals, who were new to power at the time.
Now the new republicans are in office, and a new republic is being shaped. Trump has taken the absurdist role, with the same serious subtextual potency, into the halls of power.
Meanwhile, the new media emerges, with Alex Jones and Steve Bannon both being validated for being early adopters, having laid the track for the Trump train via their non-mainstream media portals, Infowars and Breitbart. What used to be fringe news will now explode with information seekers, among them disaffected democrats along with establishment republicans who realize and reflect on their reluctance to winning.
The Republican Party didn't do much better than the Democrats or the media in regards to building bonds with the Donald. They hung him out to dry, they built their argument against him on the pollsters' predictions, and failed along with them. Those who stood by Trump's side within the party were few, and they did so seemingly to keep up appearances and tradition. Once he was the nominee, much to their chagrin, Republicans were obligated to support the candidate to some degree. But it was the People who put Trump in power. Not the republican base, but a surprising cross-section of Americans who have abandoned hope in the Ship of State, and decided to take the train.
So, let's take account here.
Democratic Party? Check. They have never seemed less relevant.
Giant Media? Check. They totally lost control of the dialog, and in the process exposed their real role as propagandists.
Republican Party? Check. These folks have never been more reluctant for their candidate.
The resistance to Trump, even within his own party, seemed insurmountable at times during the campaign. Now the entire establishment has been effectively dismantled, taken offline. He could not have been this well-positioned without the preceding problems that plagued his campaign. The media that was so overtly critical of him is the same media that assured the People that he would never win. Trump promised he would win, and that we would win with him. So much winning, he said.
Assuming all of this is real, and Trump is actually the outsider he claims to be, this is an opportunity to really make change happen. The question is, with all this power, and with his detractors discredited to an all-time low, what will this new president do? What will happen next?
Because the truth is, Trump can do anything he wants. He's proven that.