Mainstream Media's Love/Hate Relationship With Donald Trump

It’s funny how those who don’t believe a word the mainstream media says are so influenced by it. They believe the media is biased against Donald Trump while seeming to forget it was this same media that for decades helped make Trump the celebrity he is.

Let’s start back in the early 80’s and the amazing success of Donald Trump’s book, The Art Of The Deal. It was one of the bestselling books of the decade. Books don’t become bestsellers without the help of the media, especially ones that are ghost-written. Random House invested heavily in it, using its connections to get Donald Trump on all the TV talk shows. Donald Trump became a celebrity and the media sold his story.

Because that’s the narrative the media sells us: a celebration of the wealthy and the American Dream that we could all succeed if we were just smart enough (like, presumably, Donald Trump) and hard-working enough (again, presumably like Donald Trump). You have to have the guts to think big, too. Thinking big is in the end what separates the winners from the losers.

The implied but unspoken shadow of the narrative of the winner who thinks big, of course, is that the rest of us are losers who think small. Those of us who sacrificed wealth for other pursuits, well, we were not the story the media was interested in advancing. The cop who protects his community, the fireman or the nurse who saves lives, the average person working hard doing jobs that needed doing, the mother staying home to raise her children—that wasn’t what the 80’s were about. The 80’s were all about Alex P. Keaton, the Yuppies that were transforming our world, and the do-it-all moms. You were nothing unless you were busily climbing that ladder of success, sacrificing all lesser aspirations upon the altar of wealth.

And so it has remained to this day. Professionals are no longer judged by their talents or their accomplishments but by their wealth. People are no longer appreciated for what they contribute to society but by what they can extract from it. Donald Trump has created casinos and luxury hotels, hardly the things that made or will make America great. They in fact contribute nothing to the common man, but as noted before, the common man no longer counts. At least not with the mainstream media.

The common man is the person who gets voted off of Survivor. The media now celebrates the snake who looks out for himself over the person capable of building a fire, finding food, or helping people live in harmony. The media is busy selling a narrative of a dog eat dog world where we all have to be ruthless and relentless to not only triumph but merely survive. And Donald Trump has long been their poster boy, even if they had to fudge the narrative a little and make him appear more than he truly is.

Which is why they gave him his own “reality” TV show, The Apprentice. There he could be himself and advance the idea that everyone needs to be in competition with one another, the stakes being all or nothing. It is a story repeated throughout the new breed of competitive shows. No longer do we watch singers perform on television merely for the performance, we now need to watch them compete against each other on American Idol. Gone are the days of Julia Childs and her cooking show. The knives are out as chefs compete in a game exhibiting sadistic behavior in Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen. The boss gets to berate the people who work for him, it’s part of the fun of the show and one of the perks of being a winner and not a loser. The boss is always a winner, the rest fight among themselves to see who will be the one non-loser.

People no longer have appreciation for the art of dance. Those who work all their lives to reach physical perfection are not spotlighted. Instead we watch celebrities compete against each other in Dancing With The Stars. People are not given stories of romance and love, instead they are force-fed The Bachelor, wherein marriage is not a sacred contract but just another competition reflecting the values mainstream media exists to propagate: capitalism and survival of the fittest.

That’s what makes sports so elevated in our country, the fact that it is all about the competition, all about the fact that there are winners and losers. We are being taught that nothing matters if no one wins and no one loses.

I turn on the History Channel and I see Pawn Stars, where owners of a pawn shop compete with people coming in to sell historical items of some worth. It’s not really a competition, since the owners of the store always end up on top. It is, however, the lesson the media wishes to perpetuate: that it is our duty to get the best of our fellow man.

You see, it’s the MSM that made you like Donald Trump in the first place. You have come to accept cruelty, underhandedness and lack of cooperation as being a sign of the successful human being. This is what the media’s been selling and this is why you like Donald Trump so much. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that those who watch mainstream TV most like Donald Trump best.

The mainstream media has been shaping the way you see the world all along and you don’t even realize it. Most of the values you possess are because of the mainstream media. Ordinary people don’t support a person like Donald Trump otherwise.

But the mainstream media who loved Donald Trump the capitalist has turned against Donald Trump the politician and you have sided on the media’s creation rather than the creator. You see and sense the nastiness and propaganda involved in the media. It is unmistakable to anyone actually willing to think about it rather than simply be controlled by it.

It is useful to note that in refuting the mainstream media you are still clinging to its value system it has instilled in you. With that in mind, let us look into the reasons behind the media turning on Trump the way it has.

One reason is that he was the only presidential candidate other than Rand Paul to say the U.S. should not be involved in nation-building. He opposed our involvement in Syria and suggested there was no reason to view Russia as an enemy. That was a big no-no.

The MSM has always supported the Military Industrial Complex and such a message was counter to the narrative that is their mission to spread. Hell, when they aren’t running their advertisements (Northrop Grumman) interviewing their experts, allowing PSYOPS to work for them, then they are owned by a military contractor (NBC).

But while the MSM’s allegiance to the MIC is an incredibly important reason for them to oppose President Trump, it is a problem that can be worked out. Those who supported a non-interventionist position in Trump’s circle have been weeded out and replaced with generals and neo-cons. Trump has been hamstrung by a Russian hacking story that’s been playing non-stop for over a year and the only time he can get the media on his side is to bomb another country, at which point the media drools in ecstasy at his presidential moment.

So if it is not Trump’s isolationist stance that turned the media against him, then what was it? Perhaps it is because he has ripped the mask from the entire narrative they’ve been selling for decades now. The story has always been that while the road to success was rough, it was a game with fair rules that ultimately rewarded the most worthy recipients. The story was that above us ruled men and women who knew better than us and were morally respectable people despite whatever flaws might arise from time to time.

Trump stripped away the illusion that not only are the rich of the world laughably unsuitable to govern us, they are not even better human beings than us. Trump served the media’s purpose as a businessman/celebrity, but the sight of politician Trump was just too jarring, the contradictions between reality and the fantasy they had to spin too great to be reconciled. So they had to turn against Trump in order to preserve the image of our nation and economic system they’ve worked so hard to maintain.

Trump’s election also removed the last delusions the MSM clung to that politicians were anything more than the servants of the incredibly rich and powerful. Trump was now the face of America’s politics, and, while true, it was an idea too horrible for the media to allow. All the makeup, special effects, and CGI in the possession of the media could no longer hide the truth of what our nation had become.

You see, as much as the media loves to sell dog-eat-dog capitalism, it also realizes it must maintain a feeling of shared purpose, at least when it comes to promoting war. It’s had this difficult and contradicting story it had to sell, that we were each of us in it for ourselves and at the same time all needed to band together under the flag and violence that united us all as Americans. The stories were two completely different ones which were never to intersect. And then all of the sudden Trump jumps out of his adventure story of raw capitalism and jumps into the fairy tale story of pure politics. The gears did not mesh, it was as if anti-matter was introduced to matter. It blew both narratives to hell.

If only Trump had been black, or a woman, or a little bit more reserved in his speech. The media could have worked with that. But the truth goes against everything the mainstream media exists to promote. They have to close the curtain so the people can once again believe in the mighty Wizard of Oz, have to put the mask back on The Phantom Of The Opera so we can forget the ugly truth.

But it doesn’t work that way. What has been seen cannot be unseen. As much as the media wants to blame Russia for what has happened, it is the media itself that is being revealed. Eventually, even the Trump supporters will realize the media narrative they’ve been living with their entire lives has been a lie. Trump’s failure, inevitable and ugly, will show Americans the lies of the mainstream media. The orange genie is out of the bottle now, and there is no getting him back. Even football, the great distractor of the masses, is no longer effective for shutting out the truth. Surely that was the media’s Maginot Line.