By Joe Emanski
Recently, for reasons that aren’t worth going into, I found myself taking an online survey in which I was asked to rank the field of Republican presidential hopefuls from 1 to 16.
It was difficult to the point of pointlessness to decide who is the 8th or the 9th or the 14th or the 15th best person in the running. What is the difference? The most I can see any voter having is a top four or five. After that, you’re just making stuff up. If Rick Perry is not in your top five, I have trouble believing that you are certain that he belongs 11th and not 14th in your rankings.
All right, so that was a bad survey, and I wasted my time. There was one spot that I found easy to fill: 16th. Without hesitating, I slotted Donald Trump into that position. His embarrassing showbiz campaign launch was only just short of a really bad joke because it was largely unintelligible.
But the sheer number of candidates brings into focus the leadership vacuum at the top the of GOP. Whether you plan to vote for a Republican or a Democrat next fall, you’ve got to admit that one party has its stuff a little more together right now than the other. You may like Barack Obama or hate him, you may like Hillary Clinton or hate her, but it’s hard to deny that in terms of political machinery whirring at peak efficiency, the Democrats are an Apple and the Republicans are a Yugo.
The roles were reversed 11 short years ago, which is to say there’s every reason to believe the Republican Party will find its bearings. But things are so unsettled for the Republicans that as of mid-June, the man who was rising fastest in the polls was none other than the failed casino executive himself, Donald Trump.
Now I promise you that this will be the last time I ever write about Donald Trump. I wish that I could convince my colleagues in the media to make the same pledge, or rather, I wish I could have convinced them to make the pledge sometime in the past 30 years. Because due substantially to our negligence, Trump can’t be extricated from today’s news. Which is music to his combover-obscured ears.
The billionaire has always liked to see himself on television and read about himself in newspapers and magazines. I don’t know the man personally, technically I don’t know his mind. But I’m willing to go out on a limb with that statement. And because of his quirky charisma, but mostly because of his immense paper wealth, people like to read about him. Like Kim Kardashian, he is a celebrity mostly because he is a celebrity, the circular flames of his fame having been fanned by his skilled manipulation of, or the woeful complicity of, the objective media.
The media say, “We have to cover Donald Trump. He’s news.” But he’s largely news because he’s been treated as news over the years by the media. Including by Comcast/NBC, which for years aired his show The Apprentice and which now finds itself in the awkward position of reporting about his campaign.
Trump has no chance of being the Republican candidate for president. No matter how many of the fans of The Apprentice dust off and try to vote for him with their old remotes, he’s still well behind 8 to 10 candidates who have actually run government operations. He received a boost after his campaign announcement, but he won’t be able to sustain himself when politics and not showbiz becomes the currency of the debates.
He got that boost, a boost that Bobby Jindal or Ben Carson wish they could have gotten, for one reason and one reason only: he’s a celebrity. He sells papers, ads, clicks—papers, ads and clicks that the other candidates don’t sell. Because the Republican race is a free for all, Trump’s prospects look better than they are. At some point, the more legitimate candidates will manage to consolidate support from the also-rans, until only one hopeless candidate will remain. Donald Trump, whose statements, already outrageous (website Politifact has rated five Trump statements “mostly false” or worse since his campaign announcement), will only grow in absurdity. Which is the only way he’ll be able to stay relevant.
You should know that in newsrooms across the country, reporters and editors laugh about Donald Trump. They laugh about him—and report on him. They respond to his antics and in so doing, lose their objectivity. It wouldn’t have taken collusion among media to keep him off our radars, only common sense. He doesn’t want to be president. He just wants to be on TV.
The time is long past when a sensible public would have told Trump: you’re fired. But we’ve kept him around and now we’re stuck with him. He’s entertaining and we like to be entertained more than we like to be governed. Luckily we’ll never need to find out whether Trump can do both.
