Ghosts Of The Before Time: June 2015 and the Art of Seeing Clearly What Is Right in Front of You

If you have eyes to see with and ears to hear, you have no doubt noticed the media making a big deal of the 10 year anniversary of Donald Trump's June 16, 2015 journey down an escalator and into the hearts of the Republican base.   

The Atlantic:

A Decade of Golden-Escalator Politics

It was here that Donald Trump descended into American politics.

The New York Times

‘The Age of Trump’ Enters Its Second Decade

The Washington Post:

10 Years After the Escalator.

The Daily Beast:

Trump Has Us On His Golden Escalator to Hell—But There is a Way Off

Fox News:

Flashback: 10 years since Trump's golden escalator ride

‘The Five’ co-hosts recount President Donald Trump’s first election, his game-changing rise in politics and already ‘fascinating’ second term.

The Washington Examiner:

A decade of MAGA: How Trump’s golden escalator ride changed America

At the time, right down the line, all the Very Serious People and every Republican who would go on to be a Never Trumpers regarded the whole idea of Trump running for president as a goof.  A joke.  A jape.  A stunt.  Burlesque.  The notion of this jumped-up real estate buffoon and reality teevee guy running for, well, anything was seen as a clown on his way to the inevitable banana peel.  

But there was a tiny contingent of us dirty hippies (who had long since been dispatched to media Coventry for the unforgivable sin of being right about the Right when everyone else had been wrong) who looked at Trump and saw the genuine threat he represented. 

It's not that I had any special, inside dope about the way Trump had operated in the New York real estate market, or in the New York media market, or on reality teevee.  I didn't.  What I did have was a lifetime of up-close-and-personal exposure the Republican base, and could see with my own two eyes the terrible trajectory they had already been on for decades: a trajectory which both the legacy media and elite Conservative media categorically refused to believe existed at all.  

And so, on June 18, 2015 -- two days after Trump announced -- I wrote this, which you are encouraged to send along to your favorite Never Trumper who still insists that no one could possibly have seen Trump coming, or what geniuses they are because they and only they caught wind of what a colossal ass-ache Trump might develop into.  You are especially encouraged to send this along to your favorite Never Trump who is constantly moaning that we Liberals are potty-mouthed idiots who have no inkling what's really going on, or what is at stake.

From me, June 18, 2015:

The Premium Leads

In case you missed it, Squint and the Meat Puppet handed the MSNBC camera over to Donald Trump this morning for a relaxing, 30-minute handjob. While Trump rambled lazily from one pinnacle of bullshit and narcissism to the next, Morning Joe crack house regulars Mark Halperin (Glenn Beck's favorite mainstream media enabler) and the pickled remains of Mike Barnacle looked on, smirking and giggling. All that it lacked to complete the creepy, peep-show effect were trench-coats and bad lighting.

But of course, the story of the Trump candidacy has very little to do with Donald Trump. 

As I wrote a few years ago, the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.  

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog.  This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...

...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate.

Fortunately for the Right, now that the "respectable" media has as much to lose by cracking out of turn as Hate Radio and Fox News, we can all look forward to another campaign season of the American mainstream media looking stoically the other way.

End of sobering sojourn into the twilight of the Before Time.

Thank you for your attention on this matter :-)

I Am The Liberal Media.