What the media is doing to our politics

An American academic told me that during the 2016 presidential election nobody in academia believed there was the faintest chance Donald Trump would win. Except for the primatologists, that is.

It was that silverback gorilla, alpha male thing – and Trump played the role freakishly well. One election tweet showed him enthroned in his private jet eating a KFC meal, gravy and all. This said ‘I have a Boeing 757 with monogrammed headrests, but I eat the same food as you.’ That’s anthropological gold, right there. No one could imagine Hillary Clinton eating KFC – she’d be hospitalised by a trip to Nando’s.

It’s an old marketing ploy. To differentiate yourself, you ostentatiously do things your competitor is culturally incapable of doing without looking inauthentic or losing status among their peers. If you have a humourless competitor, tell jokes.

Once in power, Trump pioneered something equally cunning, which virtually no other politician had tried before. He insulted journalists. To many conservatively minded people there is a natural hierarchy of things, in which an elected president of the most powerful nation on Earth sits above mere representatives of the fourth estate. For these people, the current impertinent style of media questioning violates the natural pecking order. Trump’s rudeness restored it. Leftists only punch up. Right-wing people sometimes punch down.

To his audience, seeing the impertinent media chimp being slapped back by the alpha was an enjoyable restoration of the natural order of things, a bit like the only scene anyone remembers from A Few Good Men. Trump knew this – he had presented wrestling on television for years. The leitmotif of wrestling, a highly conservative art form, sees the impertinent challenger being slapped down by the acknowledged champion.