So this is going to sound really silly but hear me out.
The person responsible for Donald Trump is actually someone I used to watch on television, someone who I respected a great deal for his levelheaded analysis and complex understanding on many topics important to Americans; a man who was trying to give the average man and woman a voice in public affairs of importance. His name, which some of you will know, is Phil Donahue.
Prior to Donahue, Americans would sit and watch television as a passive audience. We listened and sometimes formed opinions but we were not given a public voice, a platform for our often ignorant ideas. In many ways, this was good. A layman often knows nothing about the complexity of mathematics, physics, economics, philosophy, etc., and without some significant time and effort is generally incapable of grasping them. Consequently, the people provided a public platform to discuss topics were people who were knowledgeable in their fields and, because the rest of us were not given the opportunity to talk on those topics (because we really knew nothing about them), we listened and learned.
Then Donahue came along and did what seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. Having heard an audience member call out something in contradiction to one of his guests, he went to the person and gave him (or her, I cannot exactly recall) the opportunity to publicly disagree. Now, to his great credit, Donahue did not merely accept what his audience members said, he would artfully point out their ignorance, or give the guest the opportunity to respond and explain why they were incorrect. The Donahue show was a civil setting for discourse, at least in the beginning - and the new technique, which was the beginning of reality television, improved the ratings. Why? Because Joe Blow finally felt like he was being given the opportunity that only those with actual knowledge, the experts, were given before - Joe and Josephine Blow now had a public forum. They were also given the opportunity for fame.
Suddenly, anyone could obtain a little fame, with no qualifications or accountability, for the ignorant things they might say publicly through the medium of television. Soon, others caught on to the new way of being famous, and the silly desire to be noticed caused large numbers of people to begin saying something, anything, no matter how ridiculous, to get their fifteen minutes. Eventually, Donahue’s audience members were standing up and disagreeing solely for the purpose of getting noticed, not because they even cared about the topic. Of course, despite Donahue’s best efforts, there wasn’t time in the soundbite setting Donahue provided to root out the idiots and explain their ignorance. Moreover, part of the “fun” (and increased ratings) of the show became watching Phil run from one person to the next and seeing his expressions of exasperation at things they might say. Consequently, Joe and Josephine began receiving just as much voice (and air time) as the experts and without any time for logical refutation. The average person, having no special understanding or knowledge, was now heard by the millions watching from home, even more than the expert guests who actually knew what they were talking about.
Now, most of the people watching television from home were similarly ignorant to those in Donahue’s audience. Many had similarly ignorant ideas to the studio audience, but now they found many others, namely the studio audience, saying what they already ignorantly believed to be true. Furthermore, the Donahue studio audience, by being given a voice on television, were couched within the public setting previously associated with someone having actual credibility; this emboldened everyone in their ignorance because, as the saying goes, there is security in numbers. If others agreed with them, regardless of how outrageous their thinking and logic might be, maybe they were right and all the experts were wrong.
At this point, capitalism stepped in. Networks realized that ratings were improved when people were allowed a forum to speak as authorities about things they knew nothing about, that more people were likely to watch if the show sounded a lot like themselves rather than an educational reliable source of information. Television became a combination of gossip mill and reality circus sideshow, and the success of the Donahue show became the success of Jerry Springer, and eventually the success of The Apprentice.
Soon, it was impossible to discern the experts from the idiots. The idiots weren’t given enough rope to hang themselves and the experts were not given enough time to do it for them. All the while, television (and other forms of media) were shortening the attention span of its viewers - meaning everyone - so not only were the experts not given enough time to show the folly of the idiots, the viewers no longer had the attention span needed to listen to the experts even if they were given the time. Everyone started to tune out when someone talked for more than thirty seconds, unless the person talking could either make them laugh or make them angry; the anger could be either at the speaker himself, or someone the speaker was blaming for something. This is a key point.
It is an unfortunate fact that most of the population is not taught to think rationally. Schools, which should be teaching and encouraging logic from kindergarten forward, are focused on teaching children and adults what to think, not how to think clearly. Children then are doubly screwed because they are exposed constantly to media that shortens their attention span so greatly they are unable to slow down and read or think on their own at all. The media focus has been on keeping people emotional, not thoughtful. All of this has been progressing for decades, beginning with Donahue, because it is good for capitalism.
For example, people think Hollywood cannot make good movies anymore but it is not true. Hollywood doesn’t want to make good movies because it is not good for the bottom line. If there were enough quality movies out there, people would become good again at discerning what is shit from what is golden. For movie studios it is better to use a formula that focuses, not on providing an artistic quality product, but exciting the audience into stupidity; fast action that makes it impossible to discern plot flaws, outrageous explosions, humor, over the top statements that would make no sense if anyone had or took the time to actually pick them apart, and a reasonable amount of sexuality (though sexuality has decreased in most mainstream movies because with the proliferation of porn, mainstream media cannot keep up, except with female audiences who do not watch porn to the same degree - hence Fifty Shades of Grey).
All of this laid the groundwork for Trump’s approach to success. A good part of the American population is no longer capable of thinking with any rational depth. Statements that are obviously ignorant and false are given credence because the media, in all its forms, has been allowing them to have credence for decades as a way of generating ratings and money. So Trump merely turned the techniques used to generate ratings for television and increased movie goers into a technique for winning in politics.
First, he doesn’t care about truth anymore than Jerry Springer cared about truth. Moreover, Trump knows he cannot make anyone laugh so that approach would never fly. He never laughs or even smiles unless it is fake. He is the least happy human being I have ever seen. Even Hitler genuinely smiled sometimes. Trump never does. When he tries to smile, it comes off as a smirk or worse, a clown face. But he has turned making people angry into a kind of twisted art form. He has made thoughtful intelligent people, some of them good friends of mine, seem smallminded by making them angry at people who are most in need of society’s help. He has made those who have been used and downtrodden by the rich (of which Trump is one, of course) angry at people who are not the cause of their suffering (immigrants, minorities, gays and lesbians, women, etc.), angry at other people who are even more downtrodden by the rich than themselves.
This is possible because anger and heightened emotions inhibit the ability to think clearly. Ask yourself how well you can think when you are spitting mad and you can easily discern how anger makes one easier to manipulate. Moreover, make everyone angry, one side at the other, and there is no path between them to bridge the gap and allow both to see the real villains hiding in middle pulling the anger strings.
Trump has used the tools haphazardly created from decades of capitalistic avarice, to create a unique kind of cult. If your family member is absorbed into a religious cult, you would find that the cult tries to physically keep you away from the person so you are unable to get them out of the environment that is blinding them. Trump has used anger to create the walls that normally cults have to create with physical separation. His base is separated from everyone else through anger - their anger at everyone else, and everyone else’s anger at them. If you are on the left and angry as hell at Trump’s base you should know that you are helping Trump, not hurting him. He knows he needs you to be angry as hell because your anger is what his base needs to lean against to keep from toppling over on their own by hearing the irrationality reverberating from the anger they feel.
Obviously, Donahue never meant for any of this to happen. He was trying to do something completely different, but he opened the door, allowing others to rush in and exploit it for the sake of money having no idea where it would eventually lead our country. I am sure no one, forty years ago, could have seen how this was going to unravel with time but hindsight is 20–20, and Donahue was the catalyst that began it all.
