December 10, 2020--Progressive Enablers

I've been spatting with a few friends who feel I am missing the most important Trump story--how he has been leading a coup that aims to overthrow American democracy.

We aren't disagreeing so much about the specifics (for example, Trump's mauling the justice and electoral systems--we agree about most of that) but we are not in alignment about the potential big event. A coup.

Perhaps Trump has been engaged in this treason, although I do not see him strategic-minded enough to conceptualize something this complicated and ambitious much less competent or smart enough to pull it off. He's a chaos-maker not a coherent revolutionist.

And so I declare myself to my friends as interested mainly--as I have been for more than five years--in what we Progressives have been inadvertently doing to encourage and ultimately enable him. Big picture or rooted in an endless stream of day-to-day outrages.

This of course stirs things up and contributes to matters getting heated between us when we have a full-bore discussion . . . or fight.

When the latter breaks out I feel accused of being the enabler when I "normalize" Trump by taking him seriously.

I say back that I would take anyone seriously who gets 74 million votes. That's not normalizing, I claim, but smart.

They demand examples and deserve them.

So here is what I think is a "good" one--about how Progressive elites, especially during the 2016 campaign, enabled Trump. And continue to do so.

How does supplying $2.0 billion of free-media time sound?  This astonishing bounty was made available to Trump at no cost by the cable news networks.  And this accounting is just though March, 2016. The first half of his run for the nomination. 

(In contrast, Hillary was given just $746,000 worth of free airtime.)

MediaQuant keeps track of these things and also reported that most of the free media was not provided by Fox. Most was made available by CNN and the even-more-liberal MSNBC.

It was all about their ratings. And Trump's as well. They rode the exponential curve together, in tandem. 

They saw their numbers soar every time he appeared on one of their shows. They couldn't wait to have him back.

Arguably, there would be no MSNBC without this Trump surge. There would also be no Trump as we have tragically come to know him.

So these friends and I will continue to work both sides of the street--they will focus on the coup picture; I on things such as Trump and the Russians and his legal exposure in New York.

There is room for all of us. There's a lot to do.