Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, speaks to moderators from left foreground, Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace during the first Republican presidential debate at the Quicken Loans Arena Thursday, Aug. 6, 2015, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
With Donald Trump, clearly the media giveth. But does it necessarily taketh away?
So far, it’s simply not.
Trump’s ascension is the early 2016 presidential campaign’s most notable reality. An inherently dubious press is largely taken aback even as it offers him the exposure that helps him cater to the free-floating rages of his own “mainstream media”-hating partisans.
He’s over the top, not to be taken seriously, a hypocrite and a misogynist, we say, and will self-immolate and be forgotten.
That jaundiced view is escalating and crossing political divides. His spat with Fox News show host Megyn Kelly surely got more weekend time than, say, President Obama’s challenge in convincing Congress to pass the Iran nuke deal.
Trump is a teenage bully out of “Animal House,” says the right-leaning National Review.
“The fact that Trump behaved like a petulant mean girl at recess should’ve been terrifying,” says the left-leaning Salon.
It goes on and on. And the TV guys are the same, though they’re often self-imprisoned by the ratings imperative. They both hold their noses and welcome him to their air, all the more so during the normal dog days of August.
So he speed-dialed his way into at least four Sunday morning shows, scoring a self-serving grand slam usually only reserved for a Secretary of State or a Homeland Security chief amid a biblical storm.
And yet there’s no real sign yet of a descent in support tied to all the battering. One post-debate survey shows his support was not negatively impacted by his performance and scuffling with Kelly.
That might be seen as ironic, or befuddling, given the case to be made for the press being at the root of his improbable rise.
Yes, yes, there’s all that opining about his “touching a nerve” of some sort (it’s dismay, anger, frustration, doubts about all government, take your pick). But some smart political scientists make a strong case that, no, it’s very much the press and the disproportionate amount of attention given Trump.
That was the view of George Washington University’s John Sides and UCLA’s Lynn Vavrack. On the eve of late week’s debate, they slightly elaborated on their assessment to note that a Trump decline, even ultimate disappearance, might wind up as a function of increased media scrutiny and an impatient media’s latching on to some other candidate.
His early juggernaut continues, so I asked Sides if we exaggerate the influence of the press.
“It’s a good question,” he says. “Perhaps Trump is sui generis and can withstand the scrutiny. That’s why Lynn and I were starting to believe it’s not so much about criticizing Trump as changing the subject to a new candidate.”
“I think the evidence is that the ‘scrutiny’ phase tends to be fairly prolonged and gradual, and that we shouldn’t expect Trump’s numbers to plummet immediately,” says Richard Skinner, a political scientist at George Mason University.
He notes the irony of a guy who’s not especially conservative wooing the Fox News and conservative talk radio audiences. And he also notes what he calls the conservative “outrage industry,” especially talk radio audiences, being dominantly male and perhaps not as taken aback by the Trump-Kelly flap.
Skinner says, “We could also see the broad majority of Republican voters turn on Trump, but he still holds onto, say, 20 percent of poll respondents. In the current field, that would still put at or near the top. ”
John McGovern, a Republican consultant in Chicago, says, “I think for Trump core supporters, they like when he attacks the media, refuses to apologize and criticizes the culture of ‘political correctness.'”
Those same supporters tend to be Fox viewers, too, and presumably like Kelly, so perhaps a few are turned off by his attacks on her. “In the end,” says McGovern, “it probably doesn’t hurt him with the majority who are expressing a preference for him in the polls, but it does probably make it harder for him to win over undecideds or those expressing a preference for other candidates.”
“The media’s ability to influence is undeniable,” says Ron Howard, a Washington-based CEO of Mercury Analytics, an online polling and research firm.
Howard is a longtime friend and conceded that while, yes, the influence is obvious, “there are some issues or topics that are easier to ignite than they are to suppress, or vice-a-versa – the fact that they could make Trump larger than life does not mean that they can as easily bring him down.”
“Let’s also remember that the media ran countless stories about Trump’s meteoric rise, including his refreshing manner of political incorrectness and candor – his straight-talk was positioned as a strength.”
As a result, he suggests, the new “negative tonal” narrative has a bit less credibility and might take longer to have any real impact on perceptions of the improbable frontrunner.
And, of course, it remains August in the year before the election. Many other candidates have been running strong at this point, even morphing into media darlings as a hot, new thing.
One of many examples is former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who was racking up the national profiles at this very moment in 2003 in advance of the 2004 election.
He was on the cover of Time twice, including as late as January 2004, too.
Early in the Democratic primary process, however, he self-destructed and went poof.
It’s simply a cautionary note about early surprises, whether or not the media has anything to do with their rise or fall.
