Only #WhiteLivesMatter In Donald Trump’s America
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Sometimes, the dumb shit that gets said on cable news is just dumb shit, but sometimes it’s illustrative of a deeper truth. To the latter category, you can add this Grande Derpaccino from Morning Joe regular Mike Barnicle, who held forth, Monday morning, on the Donald Trump phenomenon that has snuck up on everyone in the world but me.
More specifically, Barnicle marveled at the rich diversity of the Trump coalition, literally calling it a “broad demographic.” Several minutes later, the Morning Joe crew revealed all the colors of the Trump rainbow, and they were “eggshell,” “light cream,” and “vanilla sugar”:
“Well, here’s the question with regard to Trump, I think, just from sensing it from the broadness of his demographic that backs him. And it’s not just one particular slice of the electorate. It’s a broad demographic. The question is what does Donald Trump’s success say about the rest of the field?”
That’s right, it turns out that on the most influential political news show in television, a “broad demographic” consists of stingy pissed-off white people, churchy pissed-off white people, and regular pissed-off white people.
Barnicle’s declaration made me laugh out loud, but then it reminded me that inspite of all the attention that’s been paid to non-white issues for the past year or so, every bit of political news gets filtered through the lens of a mainstream media that is still overwhelmingly white, and in the eight-week-old Age of Trump, that political conversation increasingly takes place only on lily-white soil. The Trump Effect has completely shifted the fulcrum of our media’s political coverage, so that even as Trump dominates, no one dares speak the self-evident name of his appeal.
If you doubt this even a little bit, check out the coverage of Donald Trump and Jeb Bush using the term “anchor babies” last week, and see if …READ MORE
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