Imagine you’re someone who will pay attention to no more than 16KB of political speech per year. Hillary would burn through that in three minutes. That kind of politics is pure white noise to you; it might as well be happening in a secret bunker on the moon.
But Turmp can talk for an hour, on dozens of wide-ranging topics, and you’re still well under your data cap. Sure, you kinda know it’s uninformed, vengeful horseshit, but for the first time in your life you’re in the loop – you can be fully informed on everything the president thinks and says – you’re the core audience of the politics show now! What morally-competent candidate ever offered that?
So, yeah, if there were a single anti-Turmp voice speaking in his language, that might get through, but it doesn’t work like that any more, which is part of why Turmp happened. Walter Cronkite wouldn’t have allowed it.
I’m not saying Turmp’s pod people are retarded. They’re just utterly disengaged. America is, after all, and why shouldn’t it be, a machine for making people fat and comfortable and insulated from the troubles of history. It is a success story that for millions of Americans, war and poverty and hunger and oppression are nothing but TV fairy tales. They don’t really feel like this reality show has anything to do with what makes that comfort possible. If they started to feel it, they’d suddenly discover vast new reserves of attention, and that might happen if he fucks up their finances, but when it comes to bombing “terrorists”, or shitting on brown people and big-city abortion sluts, that’s just another episode of CSI. And people don’t watch CSI for nuance and bridge-building. They want to see someone get clearly labeled as a bad guy, and then swatted like a bug. It’s comforting.
