Photo by Grant Peters via Flickr/Creative Commons.
Talk radiofication
by Tom Sullivan
Photo by Grant Peters via Flickr/Creative Commons.
Chris Hayes last night stated aloud something many of us have had kicking around the dusty corners of our skulls.
The reality-show president is a showman, to be sure. He was once associated with professional wrestling. He appeared at WrestleMania. Yet he is combative and pathetically needy. He prompts his Cabinet members to praise him. He boasted for the cameras yesterday that the governor of Puerto Rico told him "the entire federal workforce is doing great work in Puerto Rico, and I appreciated his saying it, and he's saying it to anybody that will listen."
Meanwhile on the ground in Puerto Rico, "People are starting to die already," San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz told reporters.
But the constraints of the presidency provide him less leeway for his freewheeling style. He is easily bored discussing the tedious details of policy. Policy discussions don't place him at the center of the maelstrom where he feels most himself. He's got to stir the pot so his fans won't forget to love him.
Hayes suggested that in his new role, the real estate magnate has turned to the conservative talk radio model for getting daily affirmations from his base.
"What Donald Trump wants to do is run against Colin Kaepernick, Antifa, and undergraduates," Hayes told Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall last night on MSNBC's "All in with Chris Hayes."
"It really is primal with him," Marshall agreed. He is a master of weaponizing negative feelings and using them against his enemies.
"You know, I think with Trump we get too hung up on the military and the flag," Marshall said. "There's enemies and there's allies. There's his people and there's THEM."
Like Limbaugh and Savage and Beck and Hannity before him, the president knows his base needs to be fed red meat each day. He'll get the love he craves if he gives it to them and begin to stray if he doesn't.
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