It looks like America will not wake up this November 9th to the prospect that Donald J. Trump will be its next President. [Nov 9, 2016: OUCH!!] But Trump is not the kind who will just fade as the political sun sets over them, as with Mitt Romney, Bob Dole and Al Gore. So a lot of pundits have been discussing where Trump goes next. Most seem to agree that if Trump can’t be President of the US, he will then try to become the President of a Trump TV Network. <\/p>\n
Joe Klein just posted a good article<\/a> in Time Magazine which outlines the rationale for a post-election Trump TV network, and what it will look like. It will probably be a combination of politics, reality TV and extreme fighting. Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingram will no doubt be a big part of it. I’ve been listening to Hannity’s radio talk show on my way home from work for the past year or so, and it became clear to me by the third or fourth month that Hannity is more of an an entertainer than a legitimate news reporter or a political analyst, despite his current pretensions with Fox News.<\/p>\n As Klein cogently observes<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s campaign orbit\u2013a ridiculous political operation\u2013looks far more plausible as a communications company: Steve Bannon of Breitbart, Roger Ailes and Roger Stone . . . We\u2019ve been heading this way for a long time: a fusion of politics and entertainment, a political party that\u2019s also a network that\u2019s also a reality-TV show.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Well Joe, remember that things have been headed this way for a while now with both parties. Since the 80’s, the GOP had its talk radio for entertainment value, and the Dems had Saturday Night Live. Then on to Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, et al. <\/p>\n IMHO, a Trump TV Network is a good way to absorb and dissipate all of the human energy that Trump stirred up especially during the GOP primary season. Various pundits have pondered the long-term damage that the Trump movement might do to the GOP, perhaps either triggering a schism or keeping the GOP as a whole from ever moving back toward a centralist pragmatism. The country will remain deeply divided because of Trump, if not more so; or so goes the theory. I think that a TV Network could create a virtual reality space where Trump supporters would live in a golden land where Donald Trump is forever king. Hopefully this diversion will prevent them from causing any further mischief within the political system.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, Klein is pessimistic about where this all is going:<\/p>\n \nModerates in both parties are at a disadvantage in this new political landscape. The extremists have already won the first round of the marketing battle: moderates are routinely called the Establishment and elitists and globalists rather than sane or reasonable people. A willingness to compromise is seen as a moral deficiency. So yes, Donald Trump may well lose this election, but the forces of political sanity\u2013Democrats and Republicans alike\u2013could find themselves on the defensive when it\u2019s over. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n But wait — a sign of hope lurks right there within Klein’s article — <\/p>\n And then you have the impending post-Ailes shake-up at Fox News. The Murdoch brothers, Rupert\u2019s sons, reportedly want to take the network into a newsier realm, featuring less polarizing stars like Megyn Kelly, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Shepard Smith.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now this is good news in my book. Hillary Clinton is the best candidate on the ballot this year, but she’s still not the ideal figure to hold down the big desk in the Oval Office. She’s collected a wide variety of ethically dubious deals and situations over the years, but the trust problem has been taken to new heights with all the various e-mail revelations and State Department \/ Clinton Foundation pay-to-play evidence during the campaign. <\/p>\n And quite unfortunately, a lot of the big media establishments, the ones with the best resources to do research and investigative journalism (CBS, NBC, Washington Post, CNN, NY Times, etc.), have pretty clearly shown their political biases. These biases tend to give Ms. Clinton a lot of room to maneuver. Which is not good, given her long record of “royalist” tendencies (“the law is for my followers”). All modern Presidents have stretched the limits of their power, but Hillary could well take this to new heights with a friendly media establishment giving her the benefit of the doubt. But perhaps Fox News might remain the lone cynic, the last one with the media firepower to keep an eye on things in a credible fashion. <\/p>\n You would hope that the new Trump Network would also be inspired to contribute to this cause. However, you also know that Trump is not going to invest in a news establishment that plays by the rules of fair investigation and good reporting. To the degree that Trump TV reports on corruption in the White House, it will be an entertainment-oriented hack job, nothing that can ultimately be taken seriously. So it’s up to Fox to put some balance back into the relationship between the press and the President. That balance is a precious thing . . . sort of like the eggs in a chicken coup, to use a bucolic analogy. And guess who is left to guard that chicken coup in this analogy . . . yes, bad pun, but still much better than the non-joke of waking to a Trumpian presidency. <\/p>\n PS — really interesting article on Bloomberg<\/a>, which maps out in detail the groundwork so far for a Trump media empire, and how it will probably evolve. In sum, Trump’s whole Presidential campaign has been mostly a direct marketing venture, and will easily morph into a media venture, given enough $$$ to water the plant as it starts to grow.<\/p>\n Oh, one other interesting article I just came across, from the realm of science and cosmology. Has Flatland truly been discovered? An article by astrophysicist Ethan Seigal<\/a> in Forbes talks about how black holes may well create new universes; the cosmologist and popular author Lee Smolin has often discussed<\/a> this possibility and incorporated it into some of his more speculative views of the universe.<\/p>\n The interesting thing about Seigal’s new article is the theory that universes created via the runaway gravity collapse process of black hole formation may have one less spatial dimension than the universe that spawned them, based on what we know about black holes. So, our universe may have been created in a black hole collapse in a universe with four space dimensions. AND, universes created by our universe may only have two!!!!! And guess what that is — FLATLAND, recall the classic book<\/a> by Edwin Abbot about conscious beings existing in a two dimensional world, and how freaky it is for them when they encounter a being from the three-dimensional world.<\/p>\n So, might Flatland actually exist somewhere or somehow? Well, Siegel is talking about very speculative physics. There’s no proof whatsoever that this might occur. And another popular theory equates our three dimensional universe with gravity to a two dimensional surface that experiences quantum dynamics (akin to a hologram; thus the theory is called the holographic principle<\/a>). <\/p>\n Would this principle apply to the newly created two-dimensional universe, potentially re-inflating it into a three dimensional gravity-driven universe like ours? Despite its groundings in accepted physics, all of this cosmic speculation is way out there. Nonetheless, I find it fun to ponder. [But a Trump Presidency . . . not so much.]<\/p>\n NOV 9 FOLLOW-UP: Alas, how wrong we all can be. The Trump Media Network will have to wait, while America itself will soon become “Trumpland”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It looks like America will not wake up this November 9th to the prospect that Donald J. Trump will be its next President. [Nov 9, 2016: OUCH!!] But Trump is not the kind who will just fade as the political sun sets over them, as with Mitt Romney, Bob Dole and Al Gore. So a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6468"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6468"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6504,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6468\/revisions\/6504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}