Gyroscopic Investing

Here is an opposite take on the prevailing thought expressed here about Trump and the media. How Trump has accomplished so much in spite of the never ending attacks on him by the media and how damaging that has been to him.

This is a from book my Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer.

Vinny

The quotes were all the same, more or less, but every reporter wanted their own quote because they didn’t like citing other publications, so I just rattled off the lines over and over again. I had friends at liberal and conservative outlets, in television and print, and by the end of the day the story that Trump was going to run had gone viral.

I knew that Trump would want to be updated on the smallest of details, as he measured how much free press he was going to be able to command, as well as soaking up the sensation of ego stroking that he craved constantly, and in the coming weeks I wound up in his office offering detailed reports more than a dozen times a day.

“What about self-funding the campaign,” Trump said to me one afternoon.

I knew there was no way he was going to spend his own money on politics. He was far too cheap, to begin with, and he was far less liquid than was understood by outsiders, but he appeared to be seriously contemplating the idea.

“I don’t want to take money from a super PAC,” Trump said. “A billionaire can’t ask people for five bucks. Maybe I’ll self-fund the primary but do it cheap. I don’t need to spend a lot of money because we’ll get all the free press we want.”

Please pause over that final sentence and read it again. And again. And again. Because if you want to understand how Donald J. Trump became president, you have to grasp the essential fact that by far the most important element wasn’t nationalism, or populism, or racism, or religion, or the rise of white supremacy, or strongman authoritarianism. It wasn’t Russia, or lying, or James Comey, though all of those forces were hugely influential. It wasn’t Hillary Clinton, though heaven knows she did all she could to lose the election.

No. The biggest influence by far—by a country mile—was the media. Donald Trump’s presidency is a product of the free press. Not free as in freedom of expression, I mean free as unpaid for. Rallies broadcast live, tweets, press conferences, idiotic interviews, 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage, all without spending a penny. The free press gave America Trump. Right, left, moderate, tabloid, broadsheet, television, radio, Internet, Facebook—that is who elected Trump and might well elect him again.

The underlying reasons were both obvious and hard to discern, and it continues to amaze me that this phenomenon isn’t a central part of the conversation about the current plight of the United States of America.

Start with the proposition that Trump was great for ratings. If you’re a right-wing AM radio commentator, or a lefty Brooklyn political podcaster, you were making bank talking about Trump. It’s like a car crash, with people unable to avert their gaze. The Boss knew this and he knew how to exploit the greed and venality of journalists because he was (and is) an expert on the subjects. But there was something deeper and more primal in the way the media obsessed over Trump, as I did. Trump was a great story. He was chaos all the time. By five a.m. every day, he’d created the news cycle with his stubby fingers sending out bile-flecked tweets attacking anyone or everyone. In this way, as in so many others, he was the absolute opposite of Obama. Instead of No Drama, it was Drama All the Time.

The thing that astounded me, and still does to this day, was that the media didn’t see that they were being played for suckers. They didn’t realize the damage they were inflicting on the country by following Trump around like supplicants. What Trump did was transparent, once you identified it, and this remained a central fact of the campaign. If interest in Trump was waning, even just a little bit, he’d yank the chain of the media with an insult or racist slur or reactionary outrage—and there would be CNN and the Times and Fox News dutifully eating out of his hands. Like so much about Trump, if it weren’t tragic, you’d laugh—or cry.

There's no denying Trump is a media genius. He knows how to get publicity. This Macro-Voices podcast just came out yesterday with an interview with ex-White House advisor Pippa Malmgren. I listened to it earlier. She basically thinks Trump is going to go the route of creating his own media conglomerate. She actually makes the argument that he would have more power and influence controlling the narrative through his own media network than he did in the White House. She actually thinks all the lawsuits and such right now are a good strategy for him to launch his new platform from. Basically, she things it's the ultimate contingency as he wins in many ways by losing. It's worth a listen, it's very fitting to this topic https://www.macrovoices.com/923-macrovo ... ws-network

More how the media has helped Trump...

Vinny

The story was ridiculous, of course. But I knew the Boss would love it. The tale was right up his alley, the kind of scurrilous and unanswerable lie that would cast doubt on Cruz by association with his father, a Cuban who had been involved in fighting Fidel Castro’s revolution in the early ’60s. Just putting the words assassination and Cruz and Oswald and President Kennedy in the same sentence would cast doubt on the Texan’s family history. To say it would be a low blow would be an insult to low blows; can you think of another American politician, ever, who would stoop this low?

During the campaign, the Enquirer had tied hit pieces on Trump’s opponents to the polls, slamming every candidate that appeared to be rising and threatening the Boss. There was the “bungling surgeon” Ben Carson leaving a sponge inside the brain of a patient he’d operated on, or Marco Rubio’s “Cocaine Connection,” or Carly Fiorina’s “druggie daughter,” each article published to counter their momentum and suppress their poll numbers, with the so-called media outlet operating as an unpaid propaganda wing for Trump.

And here’s the thing: it worked. It really, really worked. The journalists at the Enquirer delighted in taking the worst rumors or bullshit conspiracy theories circulating online and turning them into ridiculous headlines sitting at the cash register of almost every grocery store in the country and seen by 100 million Americans—a formidable form of attack advertising for us. For free, of course, because that was what the free press was to Trump. The mainstream media would then write disapproving articles about the made-up story, but they’d always repeated the slander, providing yet more free press as the news cycle started to best resemble the eddy of a flushed toilet.

More counter to the belief that the media was nothing but damage to Trump....

Vinny


If Trump claimed you cheated or lied or stole, you could be sure that he’d done those things himself; it was almost as if he had a compulsion to confess to his terrible actions by way of accusation. My biggest and growing fear was what would happen if all this conniving ever emerged. For months, it had amazed me that the national press investigated every accusation made against Hillary Clinton, as if she were the most devious and corrupt politician in history, while Trump’s long history of bankruptcies and infidelities and dubious business practices received relatively little scrutiny. I knew it was because no one really believed he would win, so the presumptive president deserved more attention, but giving Trump that kind of leeway seemed like lazy journalism.