All spiced up
Has Trump started to bore even The Base?
In the least surprising news of the year, a low-energy Donald Trump announced that he is running for president again last night. The speech itself was also predictable, hitting the traditional authoritarian and nativist favorites. We heard about the “invasion” at the border and “radical Democrats” in the White House, all spiced up with the usual combination of self-complimenting anecdotes and self-serving lies that we have come to expect from the former president.
In other words we’ve seen this movie before. Seeing as how it’s not exactly Casablanca or Doctor Strangelove, we’re not particularly excited about seeing it again.
What was much more interesting was the almost complete absence of prominent Republicans in Mar-a-Lago and even the lukewarm interest of the US media. At various channels, journalists were “analyzing” Trump’s run while the former president was giving his speech on mute in the background. Even Fox News’s Sean Hannity cut into the speech after a little over half an hour.
New speech just like the old speech. There’s not much point in actually listening to it. (To sane people of course listening to Trump at all is torture.)
I dunno. Some reboots are better than others. I think Trump would make a fine Major Strasser! And, as far as the Republican Party (if not the whole world), he very well could end up being Major Kong.
I guess this will be an interesting test case of the question “does Fox News and the rest of the Murdoch media empire dictate what conservatives will think, or does it just feed them what they already want”? I lean towards the latter — Fox News was Trump-skeptical in 2015 but fell in line when it became clear what their viewers wanted, and they’re still worried about losing market share to OAN, etc.