The heart of the problem is the conservative media..
And think about that "He wants to transform the GOP"
As if it's not already right-wing enough..
Quote:The problem, as establishment-oriented and even some staunchly conservative Republicans see it, goes beyond Trump. Right-wing media outlets have grown increasingly willing to whip the GOP base into a frenzy with fact-free nonsense — and even mainstream Republican politicians have often been unable or unwilling to resist their demands.The Republican civil war starts the day after the election - Vox
Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 campaign, dubs this “the conservative entertainment complex.” It “has become the tail that wags the dog that Washington leaders, policymakers, and conservative leaders are terrified of,” he says. The complex’s leading members include many Fox News commentators (especially Sean Hannity), talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, and leading online outlets like the Drudge Report and Breitbart. And it soon may include Donald Trump himself, if reports that he’s looking to participate in a post-election media venture of some kind pan out.
For years, commentators and media outlets like these have loomed large over the Republican Party’s messaging and policy priorities. “I’ve seen with my own eyes conservative leaders alter their message and public priorities in response to Fox’s demands,” David French writes at National Review. Talk radio hosts and outlets like Breitbart would frequently give Republican leaders heartburn by denouncing them as not conservative enough, or as unwilling to truly fight against Obama. But when Trump rose, most of these personalities either enabled him or actively promoted him, despite his lack of conventional conservative credentials. Some, like Hannity, have become particularly fawning backers. As in the Republican Party writ large, some of these commentators will likely turn against Trump if he does lose big to Clinton.
There’s a fundamental discrepancy in incentives between Republican leaders, who want to win the presidency and need to win over swing voters to do so, and the right-wing media, which wants to stoke outrage and appeal primarily to the faithful. “We’ve got this online media where the profits are driven by controversy and clicks,” says Sarah Rumpf, a former Breitbart contributing writer who’s joined Evan McMullin’s presidential campaign this year out of disgust for Trump. “It’s just an activism problem in general, where it’s easier to fundraise and easier to get members when you can declare an emergency, when you can declare a crisis, when you can identity an enemy.”
So there’s a growing sense among anti-Trump Republicans that, in some way, the power of these media outlets must be challenged — that their incentives have developed in a way that’s fundamentally incompatible with the Republican Party’s electoral success in presidential years. “I think there will be some effort with certain elements of the conservative media, with the talk radio folks, that there will be some effort to at least try to come to terms with that, and to try to some extent reduce that influence,” says GOP consultant Patrick Ruffini.
Still, the problem here is that these commentators and media outlets get their influence because they can get ratings and clicks — and behind those ratings and clicks are actual people attracted to that content. Breitbart has set traffic records this year as it’s championed Trump when other conservative websites wouldn’t. Hannity recently bragged that his show “pays the bills” for Fox.
In many cases, these hosts are deliberately delivering what their viewers want, as Robert Draper recently concluded in a New York Times magazine feature. And when some big-name conservative commentators have ended up criticizing Trump, they’ve been subjected to intense backlash from his fans, as Fox’s Megyn Kelly and Redstate’s Erick Erickson were.
“There’s clearly a market for Trumpism,” says Schmidt. “So anywhere there’s opportunity to communicate to a sizable market, there’s gonna be people doing it.” Indeed, even if the biggest names abandon Trump, he could still have conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in his corner, plus the newly-minted pundits have sprung up supporting Trump this year and the legions of websites that post false pro-Trump content optimized to go viral on Facebook.
Breitbart in particular seems set on establishing itself as the home for Trumpism after the election, whether Bannon and Trump end up going into business together or not. “I think what you’re gonna see,” Schmidt predicted to me, “is Steve Bannon monetizing 30 percent of the electorate into a UKIP-style movement and a billion-dollar media business.”
Bannon himself was nearly as blunt to Bloomberg Businessweek’s Josh Green and Sasha Issenberg, saying the Trump campaign had built “the underlying apparatus for a political movement that’s going to propel us to victory on Nov. 8 and dominate Republican politics after that.”
We’ll see about the “victory” part in a week, but Bannon is suggesting that his post-election ambitions will be very big indeed — and that he doesn’t want to stop with merely getting more clicks and making more money. He wants to transform the GOP.
And think about that "He wants to transform the GOP"
As if it's not already right-wing enough..