Humiliating your foe

It isn't enough that Trump wins.  He needs to humiliate the loser.  This time it is the suckers in the media.

Trump was the center of attention all day yesterday with his announcement that he now agreed Obama was born in the USA.   His entire statement was:  "Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy.  I finished it. I finished it. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period."

Real men can kill their rivals

The election can be better understood when one backs off and interprets it the way an anthropologist or zoologist would see it.  Look at big picture body language and dominance displays, not the fine points of policy.   This is a fight over who is king of the hill.  Voters in American have been watching primates struggle for leadership of their group.  The group is in competition with rival bands, whose leaders present themselves as powerful due to their iron grip on their power structure.   Being ruthless isn't a bug.  Its is a feature.

It was no accident or slip of the tongue when Trump said he would use torture, that he would bomb civilians, that we should use "extreme" vetting, that prosecutors should search out radical Islam "viciously, if necessary."   Trump has discovered a significant body of American voters who want strong, authoritarian, dominating, patriotism language in a leader.  Trump fills that void.

Unrivaled control

Donald Trump makes news when he says positive things about Russia's Putin, and about North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un.  It is not enough to have a reputation for killing off political rivals and potentially disloyal deputies.   Real leaders in real control are not puppets of the media.  They control the media.  

Trump just showed that he was in the company of giants.

Trump humiliated the media.  They got played for suckers.  He didn't try to hide it from them.  He rubbed their nose in it.  

Trump's campaign put out a tease, both directly in a press release and by sending out surrogates including Rudy Giuliani to say that Donald Trump now agrees that President Obama was born in the USA.  They got two days of press describing Trump, who himself played coy and said he "wasn't ready" to say it.  He told Fox he wanted to keep the "suspense" going.  Then he announced there would be a major announcement.  The press trooped to his new hotel, waited an hour because he delayed, then played live an impromptu infomercial on the hotel plus testimonials from military people.  Then Trump presented a 30 second announcement that positioned Hillary as the cause of the birther controversy while Trump was the one who ended the nonsense.

What profit could there be to Trump for playing the media as suckers who got tricked into filling their air with a Trump advertisement?   

Well, number one, it filled their air with suspenseful waiting for Trump, the center of attention.  Plus, it motivated their anchors and reporters to voice their irritation complaining about Trump.  He wasted their time.  He led them on.  He suckered them into putting their wait time for Trump on the air for an hour.  He got them to show non-newsworthy things for another hour while they waited for the real news.  They got played.

This does not hurt Trump.  It empowers him.  It validates him.  It shows he bows to no one, not even the supposed gate keeper media.  This helps Trump maintain the meme that he is independent while Hillary gets propped up by the press with preferential treatment.  "Dishonest media" is a big applause line in rallies. 

Trump is positioning himself as the candidate who looks like a leader.  Hillary--especially a sick fainting Hillary--compares badly to Trump.   Trump appeared presidential when he stood beside a Mexican president, standing tall behind a similar lecture     He looked even more presidential when he returned to the US and insulted the man and country he had just visited.  The arrogance.  The bravado.  The shameless willingness to insult a Mexican president. 

Trump puts himself into the company of powerful ruthless leaders when he shows that he doesn't kowtow to foreign leaders or the American media.  The media kowtows to him and does his bidding, even when it doesn't intend to.   Much of the public likes this.

I post a new podcast every week.  Check it out:   Two Left Eyes.  Thad Guyer and I try to describe what we think is happening in this crazy election year.
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