Profiting from institutional decay

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We are documenting (here) how much of the right in general, and Trump in particular, are delegitimizing a whole raft of US institutions, like election procedures and outcomes, political adversaries, government in general, globalization, economic data, parts of science which right-wingers object against (climate, evolution), universities, etc. 

It could be that they mean all these things. However, it could be that there is a profitable business model in there..

It was Fox News that demonstrated how profitable it could be to create narratives that appealed to the Republican base. With the rise of Fox in 2000s, there emerged an entire cohort of politicians whose presidential campaigns seemed to exist merely to get them an audience for their speeches, TV appearances, and books. In the past, has-been politicians had to become lobbyists or find a sinecure in a think tank.

Fox News created a new career path where politicians could continue running for president and use the attendant publicity and TV appearances to rake in the dough. This explains the ever widening Republican field that included the likes of Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich. Sarah Palin proved that losing an election could lead to lucrative TV contracts. Trump is the logical culmination of this trend.

The problem for the Republican Party is that the very antics that earn good ratings—ranting about Mexican “rapists” or insulting a fallen soldier’s parents—are poison in terms of appealing to moderate voters. That’s why Trump is simultaneously dominating the headlines and plummeting in the polls. If he keeps it up, he’ll likely lose in a landslide in November. That would be a down-ballot disaster for the GOP, but hardly a personal disaster for Trump.

Trump’s Media Empire Takes Shape | New Republic

Donald J. Trump may be the first to run because he sees a presidential campaign as the best way to attract attention to himself. There seems to be no other driving passion in him, certainly not the passion to govern. He isn’t an ideologue like Ted Cruz, an opportunist like Marco Rubio, a movement builder like Bernie Sanders, a political legatee like Jeb Bush or a policy wonk like Hillary Clinton. For all of them — for any serious candidate — attention is a byproduct of a campaign, not its engine. For Mr. Trump, attention is the whole shebang. That may be the lesson of his campaign “shake up” earlier this week. The shift is from politics to grabbing attention, and, quite possibly, from winning the election to winning the defeat, which is how he has spent practically his entire career.

Attention has always been the foundation of Mr. Trump’s modus operandi. Basically, he sells his name: Trump steaks, Trump water, Trump University. You have to hand it to him, though. He discovered that, in a celebrity society like ours, where so many people are competing for attention, running for president puts you a leg up even on the Kardashians.

Mr. Trump is no fool. He couldn’t possibly have thought that insulting the Khans, who had lost a son in combat, or dithering over whether to support the speaker of the House, Paul D. Ryan, or disingenuously hinting that the only way to stop Hillary Clinton was to shoot her, would have boosted his prospects for winning. They only boosted the attention paid to him.

If you think of his campaign as a real-estate negotiation, the man who coined the term “art of the deal” has taken a huge edifice, plastered his name all over it without investing much in it, and is very likely to abandon it as a troubled asset once the election is over and its value is diminished, leaving others holding the bag, just as he reportedly did during his serial bankruptcies. Only, in this case, the edifice is the Republican Party.

It is Mr. Trump’s biggest deal ever. And Mr. Trump leaves not only with 18 months of headlines and cheering crowds, but with an even bigger brand. Sarah Ellison of Vanity Fair and Brian Stelter of CNN have speculated that Mr. Trump may want to use his new notoriety to build a media empire. His alliance with Mr. Bannon may help him do that. So may his reported linkup with Roger Ailes for campaign advice.

To Trump, Even Losing Is Winning - The New York Times

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Difficult to say whether this will pan out, but there is a considerable amount of logic to it..

According to some, the real estate entrepreneur actually has something quite different in mind. They say he wants to start a right-wing media outlet of his own, a cable channel and digital-media platform based on the Trump brand, like a cross between Fox News and the website Breitbart News.

Rumors of such a plan first surfaced in a Vanity Fair piece in June, which reported that Trump had discussed such plans with both his daughter Ivanka and with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, the owner and publisher of New York’s Observer magazine, who has advised Trump on media matters.

According to a source that theVanity Fair spoke to, the view inside the Trump camp was that “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.” Trump has also been celebrated by many for his use of social media platforms like Twitter to raise support and engage with his fan base.

Since that initial report, the Trump campaign has made a number of moves that lend credence to such an idea. For example, former Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes—who was ousted from the network after being hit with multiple sexual-harassment allegations—is now said to be advising Trump on his media strategy.

Here's What Donald Trump Plans to Do If He Loses the Election

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There is real worry at Fox that a Trump election loss will start Trump TV. 

Although there’s been wide speculation that Donald Trump’s 2016 endgame may be to break into cable news with a conservative network that would rival Fox News, anonymous network insiders talked about Trump TV as a near-certainty that was casting a pall over the network’s future. The current top talent and leadership will only last through Election Day, one unnamed host told Sherman. “As of November 9, there will be a bloodbath at Fox,” the host said. “After the election, the prime-time lineup could be eviscerated. O’Reilly’s been talking about retirement. Megyn could go to another network. And Hannity will go to Trump TV.”

5 Points On The Most Stunning Revelations In NYMag's Ailes Bombshell

Perhaps they have another reason to get all behind Trump now, at Fox..

[Admin]

To hell with everything..

But Sean Hannity’s October 10 radio broadcast hinted at a much more glorious path:

You know what bothers me the most about Paul Ryan and these weak Republicans? They are tougher against Donald Trump than these weaklings ever have been against Obama, and if they're offended by Trump's words, why haven't any of them spoken out about Bill and Hillary's actions towards women? They're a bunch of phony — I mean I can't take it anymore. They are so weak that Obama got his entire agenda passed. He got to double the debt mostly with Republican help. He got to keep Obamacare because they didn't want to fight and get blamed for a government shutdown. They got unconstitutional, illegal executive orders on amnesty because they didn't want to fight there either.

This Republican Party of weak, feckless, timid, spineless Republicans is dead. Nobody likes them anymore. Nobody thinks much of them anymore. These are people that are in it just like the Democrats for their own personal political power. They like to be called congressman and senator. Well you're no good as a Congressman or a Senator unless you stand for something. Something.

This basic narrative of Republican Party congressional leaders selling out the GOP grassroots is one that conservative talk radio has pushed for years. That helps explain why Trump’s favorable ratings among Republican primary voters are higher than Ryan’s and far higher than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s.

Conservative media stars serve as the de facto “bosses” in the modern-day Republican Party, enjoying a public profile that’s far higher than that of the party’s elected officials, and they enjoy narratives of betrayal that increase their audience’s sense of isolation and dependence on AM talk radio for trust and community. Going to war with the party leadership doesn’t help win over swing voters, but it does help solidify the alliance between Trump and conservative media — creating a constituency for a strong Trump brand in which he plays a martyr role.

Trump’s likely next act is as a media entrepreneur Back when he was running Breitbart.com instead of the Trump campaign, Steve Bannon directed his staff to treat Ryan as “the enemy” as part of his editorial strategy. Bannon has not, thus far, managed to do much to help Trump win the presidency. But his stewardship of Breitbart has shown real savvy and effectiveness in building up a digital-native conservative media brand.

What Bannon’s site doesn’t have much of, at this point, is the kind of on-camera talent that could turn Breitbart into a video juggernaut. Trump himself, however, is an experienced television host, as is Trump’s close ally Sean Hannity who is thought to be considering a departure from Fox News. Also closely in the Trump orbit are Roger Ailes, the business genius who built Fox into the cable enterprise it is today before being ousted for sexual harassment, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who owns the New York Observer.

While Trump and his team do not appear capable of winning a general election in the United States, they certainly have the right mix of skills and experience to operate a successful media company, folding the existing Breitbart and Hannity franchises together with the Trump brand to form Trump TV or Trump Media. But to pull it off, they can’t exit the 2016 campaign surrounded by the stink of a loser. That makes their impending electoral defeat a pretty serious problem. A campaign to scapegoat Ryan and other Republican Party leaders offers the perfect exit strategy.

The real reason Donald Trump is lashing out at Paul Ryan - Vox