Ron DeSantis admits what we all know: conservative media is not news. It's a messaging apparatus for the reactionary movement in American politics. What goes largely unsaid in Chait's account of this is that we have a Frankenstein's monster situation here. For years, Fox and its imitators riled up the rubes with fear-mongering and populist pablum. Now, they can't really influence their viewers as they could in the past.
It's like a drug. The first few months, you get a little high, you enjoy it. But then you build up a tolerance so you need more and more. Innuendo and dog whistles no longer cut it; so you get Trump who's an airhorn. Efforts to put the monster back in its cage are fruitless.
All of this means that the most important question in American politics: "What to do about Trump?" is somewhat off target. It's the Trumpenproletariat that are the problem. My hope is that once Trump (hopefully) shuffles off to prison or flees the country to avoid prison that large numbers of his cultists will drop out of the political process entirely. That was my point about the routinization of charisma.
Still, the disheartening aspect of these last eight years in Trumpistan is the realization that tens of millions of Americans look at that bloated con artist - a man whose very skin color is a lie - and see salvation.
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