Months after Donald Trump cemented his frontrunner status, the American media and the Republican Party are now approaching a state of panic. Press and pundits have scrambled to explain how Trump--despite his blatant lies, casual race-baiting, religious bigotry and shameless xenophobia--has in the face of their predictions of his certain doom nevertheless tightened his grip on the 2016 GOP race for the White House. Meanwhile, GOP leaders fearful of an Election Day disaster with Trump at the top of their ticket are mobilizing the resources and an arsenal of talking points to prevent that from happening.
To which one can only reply: A plague on both your houses. The hate machine that Donald Trump embodies isn't an aberration, but the natural culmination of the intertwined, downward spirals of the conservative movement and its U.S. media enablers. After all, the GOP long ago entered an era of "post-fact" politics in which morality tales and stories of good and evil replaced facts and science as the basis for winning elections and setting public policy. And as it turns out, the Republicans' largely successful descent into degeneracy was only made possible by the concurrent decline of American journalism. Having abandoned the search for objective truth as its mission, most of the U.S. media are now solely in the entertainment business. In this new environment, all issues are framed as having two--and only two--sides, with the loudest voice in the "debate" being declared the winner.
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