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face=Tahoma><FONT style="FONT-SIZE: 10.5pt">ELECTIONS
2016<BR></FONT></FONT><FONT style="FONT-SIZE: 10.5pt"><A
style="name: node-245330" rel=nofollow></A><BR><FONT face=Tahoma>TRUMP’S MEDIA
DOMINANCE HURTING HIM NOW<BR>[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Greg
Sargent]<BR>[Commentary] One of the most cherished assumptions about this race,
one explicitly voiced by Donald Trump and even entertained by some neutral
observers: Trump can win through sheer media dominance alone. In a recent
episode, Trump gained enormous amounts of media attention by publicly
hallucinating about video of the cash transfer to Iran. But did he really gain
anything from all that attention, other than widespread ridicule, at a time when
his poll numbers are tanking? Press coverage tends to get harsher when a
candidate gets weaker, and that’s what this episode brought. Trump himself has
repeatedly said, in various ways, that his strategy is premised on sucking up
all the media oxygen. After Melania Trump’s convention speech was revealed as
plagiarism, Trump said that all the publicity devoted to the speech was a
positive, because “all press is good press.” Before that, Trump flatly stated
that he had an advantage in the general election because “I have the
loudspeaker.” But it’s becoming increasingly obvious that “the loudspeaker” is
turning voters against Trump, perhaps to a point from which there will be no
coming back. Trump’s ongoing battle with the Khan family drew enormous media
scrutiny, but, given that it brought with it widespread media coverage of
Republicans and military figures criticizing his conduct, all this attention has
been simply awful for him. Indeed, the Clinton team is now explicitly premising
its strategy on the idea that all the coverage has grown so lethal that its best
play is to get out of the way and let it continue. The idea that Trump’s media
ubiquity is largely a positive for him is merely a subset of larger myths about
this race — that everything he does is shrewdly calculated and a reflection of
his ingenious media manipulation, or even worse, that he possesses some species
of Magical Trumpian Political Powers that allow him to defy the conventional
rules of politics. Trump could still win, of course. But as of now, all of this
has been thoroughly discredited.<BR></FONT><A
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