The World-Class Demagogue Returns
CNN's "Town Hall" showed that Donald Trump remains a formidable force in our politics
I’ve been running “Above the Fray” posts on Fridays lately, but not this week. That’s because next week is going to be a little unusual around here. I’ll have just two (longer) posts—an “Above the Fray” post on Tuesday and a “Looking Left” post for Friday that I’ve been putting together for several weeks. Hence my decision to do a third “Eyes on the Right” post for this week. Thanks for reading. Have a good weekend.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I haven’t watched a media appearance by former president Donald Trump in real time for several years. That included when he was president. Sometimes I’d need to when I had to file a column very quickly at the end of speech. But whenever I could, I would avoid watching the actual event in favor of two alternatives: I would “watch” (reaction to) the speech on Twitter and then read the text as soon as a written transcript became available.
I did the first in order to gauge how Trump was being received (and the conventional wisdom about him formed) by the hundreds of journalists I follow online. I did the second to fill in gaps I couldn’t glean from various tweeted highlights while avoiding being distracted by Trump’s demonic charisma and the atmospherics of domination that permeate any political event in which he’s a participant.
That’s how I handled Wednesday night’s Town Hall on CNN. My conclusion? Unless he’s felled by an act of God, Trump is going to be the Republican nominee; mainstream media coverage of the campaign will be no better, and may even be worse, than it was for the entirety of the Trump presidency; and Trump will go into the 2024 general election with a better chance of winning than he did in either 2016 or 2020.
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