Why do Americans believe in the idea of Trump as the World’s Greatest Businessman, the playboy with the Midas touch? Because that’s the story that a New York-based media — not talk radio but Time and Vanity Fair, not alt-right bloggers but prime-time TV — spent years and decades selling them.
.. Writing for The Intercept earlier this year, Jim Lewis pointed out that “… it wasn’t some Klan newsletter that first brought Trump to our attention: It was Time and Esquire and Spy. The Westboro Baptist Church didn’t give him his own TV show: NBC did. And his boasts and lies weren’t posted on Breitbart, they were published by Random House. He was created by people who learned from Andy Warhol, not Jerry Falwell, who knew him from galas at the Met, not fund-raisers at Karl Rove’s house, and his original audience was presented to him by Condé Nast, not Guns & Ammo.”
.. But Trump was a pal, a get, and ratings gold. Trump was just playing a part. Trump was part of their scene.
.. So he kept getting (and still gets) the celebrity treatment — friendly interviews with favorable ground rules and softball questions — rather than the mix of ostracism and horror that a cultural outsider would have reaped.
.. They all have a style that reflects New York’s distinctive culture (worldly, striving, ever-so-slightly-impolite), and its distinctive right-of-center constituencies (Manhattan hedge funders, Staten Island cops). Which means that their conservatism differs, in large ways and small, from the conservatism of Utah or Texas or Wisconsin.
.. If Michele Bachmann were running on Trump’s exact platform, Hannity wouldn’t be running nightly infomercials for her candidacy. If Rick Santorum were promising to make America great again, The Post and The New York Observer wouldn’t be endorsing him. If Mike Huckabee were leading in the delegate count, The Journal’s editorial writers would have long ago gotten over their doubts about Ted Cruz.
But for Trump, these gatekeepers are willing to overlook, to forgive, or at least to tolerate. Because he’s a New Yorker, just like them.
.. I’ve written before that the Trump campaign is a kind of comic-opera version of a demagogue’s rise, a first-as-farce warning about how our political system could succumb to authoritarianism.