Notes from the Middleground

Notes from the Middleground

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Notes from the Middleground
Notes from the Middleground
The World-Class Demagogue Returns
Eyes on the Right

The World-Class Demagogue Returns

CNN's "Town Hall" showed that Donald Trump remains a formidable force in our politics

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Damon Linker
May 11, 2023
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Notes from the Middleground
Notes from the Middleground
The World-Class Demagogue Returns
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Former president Donald Trump appearing on CNN’s Town Hall on the evening of Wednesday, May 10, 2023. (Video posted on YouTube.)

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.

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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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