BRET STEPHENS WRITES ON Bush 41, Trump, and American Decline. There’s a lot of talk about how decent and wonderful Bush was, and how crass and crude Trump is. But Bush was elected thanks to Lee Atwater, whose campaigning technique (and electoral target market) wasn’t that different from Trump’s. And Bush lost after the very same establishment that’s now waxing nostalgic about his presidency viciously went after him, mocking him, scorning him, calling him a wimp, making up the claim that he didn’t know what a grocery scanner was, calling him a warmonger and a tool of the theocratic Christian right, etc.
Now they miss him? Too bad. You chose the form of your destructor, guys.
With Trump, meanwhile, the press treated him as a novelty candidate until he had the nomination wrapped up, and then started calling him, basically, Hitler. This didn’t get much traction because they do that with every Republican nominee. As David Mastio wrote here, “No one is listening anymore. When mild-mannered technocrat Mitt Romney was running for president, Clinton’s obscure Obama-administration colleague Joe Biden told a black audience that Republicans ‘are going to put ya’ll back in chains.’ If you listen to Democrats, every Republican who has run for anything in my lifetime has Klan robes in their closet and secret Confederate memorabilia collection.”
Perhaps we should require reading “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” in journalism schools.
Destructor, chosen.