"Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt."
~ Mark Twain
---------------------------- [excerpt, Frank Rich 2015 article, continued] ----------------- As the Trump fallout has rained down on Clinton, so it has on the news media and political pros who keep writing his premature obituary. He has been dismissed as a lackluster also-ran in both debates -- compared to the "impressive" Fiorina, Rubio, John Kasich, whoever.
No one seems to have considered that more Republican primary voters may have cared about Tom Brady's endorsement of Trump hours before the CNN debate than the substance of the event itself. Throughout, Trump's rise has been accompanied by a veritable "Dewey Defeats Truman" festival.
After the McCain smackdown in July, political analysts at the Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all declared that he had reached a "turning point" presaging his demise. The Times' version of this consensus ran as a column in "The Upshot," the paper's rubric for data-driven reporting.
It argued that because Republican "elites" had been outraged by the incident, it would "probably mark the moment when Trump's candidacy went from boom to bust." This conclusion ultimately proved no more predictive than the ostensibly data-driven Literary Digest poll proclaiming Alf Landon
the certain victor over FDR
in 1936. Given the hostility of the GOP base to elites in general and McCain in particular (unless he's on a ticket with Palin), it was a better-than-even bet that Trump's numbers would go up, as they did.
An "Upshot" entry almost two weeks after the Fox News debate dug in further: "The Most Important Story in the G.O.P. Race Isn't About Donald Trump."
The more important story, it turned out, was the relative "boomlets" for the not-Trump candidates.
But Trump continued to be the most important story, not least because of how he kept drowning out the supposed boomlets of the other candidates.
Trump, we've been told, is sucking the oxygen out of a GOP contest whose other contenders constitute a "deep bench of talent" (the Times) and "an embarrassment of riches" (Peggy Noonan).
But Trump is the oxygen of the GOP race, and that deep bench's embarrassing inability to compete with him is another important story.
Even so, guardians of journalistic propriety (and some readers) have implored the upscale press to resist emulating cable news and stop paying Trump so much attention. Some journalists who condescended to write about him have asked forgiveness for momentarily forsaking sober policy debate and stooping so low.
The Huffington Post announced it was relegating Trump coverage to the Entertainment section.
That summer of denial is now kaput, but many of the press's usual empirical tools are impotent against Trump.
Columnists and editorial writers across the political spectrum can keep preaching to their own choirs about how vile he is, but they are not likely being read, let alone heeded, by Trump fans.
Diligent analyses of his policy inconsistencies are built on a false premise because Trump has almost no policies, just ad hoc opinions that by his own account he forms mainly by reading newspapers or watching Sunday talk shows.
When writers for both the Times and Journal op-ed pages analyzed Trumponomics, they produced the same verdict: Nothing Trump said added up. ---------------------- [end, Frank Rich excerpt, from New York Magazine] ------------------------
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