Donald Trump Won’t Leave Us Alone
How and when does Trump end?
.. Trump doesn’t end. Whether he’s the nominee or not, moves into the White House or consoles himself at Mar-a-Lago, he’ll never shut up and never slink off — not after the convention, not after Election Day, no matter how resounding his defeat, no matter how grotesque his path there.
.. It’s because he’s a showman, not a statesman, a point he copped to on Monday in one of his most revealing remarks yet.
“I can be presidential, but if I was presidential I would only have — about 20 percent of you would be here, because it would be boring as hell,” he told a crowd in Superior, Wis.
.. Those stunts and screeds will continue, because Trump is an attention junkie who has become accustomed to the highest doses imaginable of his beloved drug. He’ll say what he must and do what it takes for his fix.
.. Journalists gave news consumers precisely what they demonstrated that they wanted. This is too often omitted from critiques of Trump’s media dominance, which comes at a time when news organizations can more quickly monitor precisely which stories and interviews are being watched and read.
.. From my seat, most of the Trump coverage was negative: the Mexican “rapists,” the Muslim ban, the blood coming out of Megyn Kelly’s “wherever,” the mocking of John McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, the boasts about his penis, the shrugging about the Ku Klux Klan. These tempests could — and should — have done as much to quash Trump as to elevate him