Anti-Trump Propaganda

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

If you've been watching MSNBC, CNN and other cable networks covering Donald Trump’s rallies you will have seen how they are manufacturing anti-Trump propaganda in a manner worthy of Vladimir Putin. It’s so blatant it’s shocking. 

Their whole emphasis has been on the potential for violence, to create the impression that Trump is like the pre-war British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, using goons to attack protesters. It’s a three-step process: first, you warn viewers that there might be violence at his rallies; then there is violence; and finally, you blame Trump for the violence.

I guess the earlier smears trying to tie him to the Ku Klux Klan or painting him as a Hitler haven’t worked well enough so now we have this.

As surely as the Council of Guardians vets candidates in Iranian elections, the liberal media and political elites have declared Trump ideologically out of bounds and unacceptable. They have all been “piling on,” to use a football expression.

The protests are planned and organized by those who fear a Trump nomination. And of course those coming to support Trump get enraged; they are probably people who have been angry for years at what has happened to their jobs, their kids, their schools, their cities, their lives. 

They and their concerns are ignored as America becomes ever more a plutocracy, with its politicians bought and paid for. (Read, for example, a New Yorker article in the March 14 issue about “The Billionaires’ Loophole,” detailing how the super-rich – billionaires -- manage to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.)

I think the so-called establishment fears Trump because he might take on their entitlements and their destruction of the American economy over the past three decades. It’s why they preferred Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and, especially, Marco Rubio, who are beholden to them.

Last summer Trump tweeted, “I wish good luck to all the Republican candidates who traveled to California to beg for money, etc. from the Koch brothers. Puppets?”

Indeed, a mouthpiece for the anti-Trump Republicans, Ross Douthat, in a March 13 New York Times op-ed, “The Party Still Decides,” has suggested that Republicans should not nominate Trump at the Cleveland convention, even if he has won the most delegates in the primaries and caucuses.

The Republican National Committee’s rule makers will meet a week before the convention, and, if the delegates approve rule changes, they may try to make winning harder for Trump. Presumably this would make either Cruz or, more likely, Kasich, the nominee.

This would be a political “coup d’ état,” and would destroy the party’s chances this November and for many years to come. 

Despite all of this, Trump won four of the five primary elections on March 15. Rubio is out, Cruz and Kasich are hanging on, but neither will amass more delegates than Trump.

In the Democratic Party race, Bernie Sanders brings up many of the same issues that Trump does, though they are seen as ideologically at opposite ends of the spectrum. 

But Hillary Clinton will make sure Sanders doesn’t get the Democratic Party nomination, leaving the field for mobilizing the disaffected to Trump, should he prevail as the Republican nominee.

Trump is battling the “official” ideology that unites all the other Republicans, as well as the Democrats. They are united in declaring that he isn’t “presidential” – whatever that means. 

Perhaps in the past they’d have said he wasn’t a “gentleman,” the same term used against the “backwoodsman” Andrew Jackson, in the 1824 and 1828 elections. 

One thing is certain: just as the elites in 1932 labeled the patrician Franklin Delano Roosevelt “a traitor to his class,” today’s Republican establishment no doubt feels the same about Trump.

If neither Trump nor Sanders makes it onto the November ballot, the anger within the electorate will keep simmering long past this election.