This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comRichard argues that Trump shouldn’t worry about being opposed by the GOP establishment—he faced this challenge before and it was, perhaps, the secret to his success. Trump-ism is a phenomenon in which being reckless and crazy is an essential component of achieving mainstream success. Without Trump’s craziness, he lacks a reason d’être; without Trump, th…
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| I think the Trump movement from its very inception was one that was through the looking glass or it was a kind of upside down campaign. | |
| And let me describe what I mean by that. | |
| So Trump, you know, when he's getting denounced by National Review or when all of these Republican Big wigs are saying, ah, we got to move past this guy, or worse. | |
| He's basically right back where he started. | |
| We forget, because these organs have become so sycophantic, that they were all opposed to Donald Trump. | |
| I mean, Fox News most especially. | |
| Fox News had Megyn Kelly... | |
| Who was then the star of the network. | |
| She was the Tucker Carlson of 2015. | |
| They had her set Donald Trump up to be destroyed. | |
| And he fought back with these crazy comments that I think later said it's like she's bleeding out of her eyes or somewhere else. | |
| Some kind of referenced administration, I guess. | |
| But he counterpunched, he fought back, and he fought that off. | |
| But that was a setup for a network, that is the Murdoch Network, that was opposed to Donald Trump. | |
| The National Review editorial saying no, period, about a Trump campaign reminds me again of a 2015 National Review cover of Against Trump that had all of these... | |
| You know, stalwarts of the conservative movement and even Glenn Beck and other people talking about why they would never vote for this man and why he's a disgrace and a betrayal of conservatism. | |
| J.D. Vance was a very big never-Trumper before he became a Trump ass kisser. | |
| Michelle Malkin. | |
| I could go on and on. | |
| I think there's a bit of a kind of misunderstanding about the Never Trumpers when you focus on, say, like Bill Kristol or the Lincoln Project. | |
| The fact is all of these Never Trumpers, National Review, Ben Shapiro. | |
| I mean, I could go on and on. | |
| They all made their peace with Donald Trump in one way or the other. | |
| And in fact became sycophants and minions and underlings and foot soldiers and propagandists for Donald Trump. | |
| So one of the reasons why I do think that Trump has a very good chance to prevail in this battle is just the fact that we've seen all this before. | |
| He's been through this. | |
| This is back where he started. | |
| And so to go back to what I mean by saying that his Trump was always kind of, excuse me, his campaign was always through the looking glass or it was a kind of upside down campaign. | |
| What I mean by that is that from the very beginning, people who were mainstream Republicans, leadership figures, they either ignored him or denounced him or scoffed at him or said he was a joke. | |
| He wasn't getting endorsements. | |
| But what he was, was the first candidate from the internet, so to speak. | |
| So, Donald Trump, because he was willing to go there, as I discussed earlier, he had this He had effectively 100% name recognition and he had this built-in fan base. | |
| People who knew him from World Wrestling, who knew him from The Apprentice, who maybe knew him from Twitter, etc. | |
| And so his was the first campaign, at least successful campaign, real big campaign, that was internet first and then mainstream second. | |
| And you make the mainstream fit the internet. | |
| Now, he wasn't exactly the first one to do this. | |
| He was the first one to successfully win doing this. | |
| I do think that Ron Paul's 2008 campaign was a lot like this. | |
| So Ron Paul is a well-known libertarian for some time, but he... | |
| He got to people, particularly people who were disaffected with politics and who were very online, so mostly younger people. | |
| He was able to reach them in a remarkable way, and they kind of forced their way into the mainstream. | |
| So the usual way these things go is that the mainstream media will discuss some news story, and then there'll be reaction on Twitter. | |
| Or, you know, there'll be a new episode of some show that everyone's streaming on Netflix or a popular television show, The Bachelor or something. | |
| And then there'll be, you know, a podcast about it or a Facebook group will discuss it. | |
| So that's the direction that it goes. | |
| With Ron Paul, which again was a small campaign and one that never really could... | |
| And definitely with Trump in 2016, it went the other way. | |
| So you had this fanatical support online, on Facebook, on Twitter, on 4chan, etc. | |
| that kind of forced its way into the mainstream. | |
| And so what the mainstream said about Trump, you know, preemptively or the fact that they were ignoring him didn't ultimately matter. | |
| You know, if someone in Iowa denounced, you know, Donald Trump, Donald Trump could either ignore it, and his Facebook readers wouldn't know about it, or he could basically say something like, well, you know, this swamp creature, he's a secret Democrat, folks, we don't like that, and he has denounced me, but, you know, whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger, in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche. | |
| No, he of course wouldn't say something like that, but you get the point. | |
| He kind of did say something like that, though. | |
| But anyway. | |
| So it was this upside-down campaign where the whole dynamic had shifted. | |
| And in some ways, this is expressive of a broader phenomenon, which is the decline of the technological society and the rise, you could say, I'm not exactly on board with this idea, but you could say the rise of the networked society. | |
| In a technological society, there do need to be these organs of control and persuasion, what Jacques Ellul called propaganda. | |
| And so in Ellul's sense, it's not just a poster trying to sell war bonds as propaganda. | |
| No, the nightly news is propaganda, because it tells you what is relevant, all the news that's fit to print. | |
| It tells you what's up, what's down, what's right, what's left. | |
| And these figures, Walter Cronkite being most iconic, were on one level a kind of barometer of public opinion, but were really about creating public opinion and evolving it and kind of molding it and maybe nudging it here and there. | |
| So that was a 20th century society. | |
| Most people had, you know, moved out of the countryside. | |
| They were in cities or suburbs. | |
| There needed to be a new cathedral, as it were, or a new church, a new religion. | |
| And this was largely provided by the mainstream media, which in comparison to what we have today, even in comparison to what we had in, say, the 90s with, you know, 500 channels on cable or whatever it was. | |
| What was really small and focused and strict, you could say. | |
| Three big networks, PBS, three big networks that were all more or less saying the same thing through a mouthpiece that reminded you of your father or your grandfather, the Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather mold. |