In this article http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-iowa-ted-cruz-ethanol-2016-1 Ted isn't doing well at all in New Hampshire, but in Iowa he's doing well. And my primary opponent was totally opposed to the ethanol and the ethanol industry. Because he's with the oil industry. You know, he's from Texas. I guess it makes sense," Trump said.
"And he was getting clobbered," he recalled. "And all of a sudden he said, 'Uh, oh, I'm for ethanol.' You can't do that. You can't do that with three weeks to go. You're not allowed to do that."
He is right. Trump has not waivered once in what his platform is.
The fact that she was removed isn't shocking, albeit un american. But the ignorant Trump supporters screaming in her face as she was leaving pretty much sums up the fan base of that guy. They are like Antony's mob.
The fact that she was removed isn't shocking, albeit un american. But the ignorant Trump supporters screaming in her face as she was leaving pretty much sums up the fan base of that guy. They are like Antony's mob.
The fact that she was removed isn't shocking, albeit un american. But the ignorant Trump supporters screaming in her face as she was leaving pretty much sums up the fan base of that guy. They are like Antony's mob.
meh, A typical protester getting typical results.
But that's okay when someone protests Bernie because VanillaISIS double standards. Right, hypocrite?
The fact that she was removed isn't shocking, albeit un american. But the ignorant Trump supporters screaming in her face as she was leaving pretty much sums up the fan base of that guy. They are like Antony's mob.
meh, A typical protester getting typical results.
Sure, unless you have class and self respect. Like the supporters of almost every other candidate.
^^^ I'm not agreeing that her treatment while being escorted away was excusable. She got attention which was her exact motive. She wasn't heckled/bothered etc until she protested - the exact opposite point of a rally.
“You know what a gun free zone is to sickos? That’s bait!” Trump said. He continued:
“I will get rid of gun-free zones on schools, and — you have to — and on military bases. My first day, it gets signed, okay? My first day. There’s no more gun-free zones.”
The fact that she was removed isn't shocking, albeit un american. But the ignorant Trump supporters screaming in her face as she was leaving pretty much sums up the fan base of that guy. They are like Antony's mob.
to be fair, the woman also mentioned there were some around her that were supporting her right to be there.
Do you all remember when Rick Santorum lead the Iowa Primaries back when? How'd he end up doing in the race? It's January - let's see if we're still talking about Trump in July.
The yellow star is what the Jews were forced to wear in nazi germany and german occupied europe.
It is a painful reminder of an ugly past
To some it is a symbol of a people being singled out for what they believe and who they are.
I was wondering why that would be gross to BS. Trump wants to register all the Muslims so it seems to me wearing the star is a perfectly legitimate symbol to use in protest of this buffoons fear mongering.
Do you all remember when Rick Santorum lead the Iowa Primaries back when? How'd he end up doing in the race? It's January - let's see if we're still talking about Trump in July.
we will be........but on Congressional Apprentice.
The yellow star is what the Jews were forced to wear in nazi germany and german occupied europe.
It is a painful reminder of an ugly past
To some it is a symbol of a people being singled out for what they believe and who they are.
I was wondering why that would be gross to BS. Trump wants to register all the Muslims so it seems to me wearing the star is a perfectly legitimate symbol to use in protest of this buffoons fear mongering.
let me get this straight.
republican logic.
muslim registry essential for security and for saving lives.
gun registry too expensive and will not address the problem.
got it.
:rolleyes:
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Now he is back to making sexist, childish remarks about Megyn Kelly (hot by any standard), calling her "average in every way, who would want to woo her"... Where I come from this childish prick would get his dick slapped into the dirt on a regular basis.
That's a fun thought, imagine how much money he could raise for his failing brand by selling tickets to slap his face.
That's a fun thought, imagine how much money he could raise for his failing brand by selling tickets to slap his face
sorry can you explain that clearer bc i dont understand what you are saying and what do you mean by brand
Trump's fame and fortune are built on his childish habit of plastering his name in garish letters on everything he is involved with, and now that habit is becoming a liability as business interests around the world are recoiling from association with his name.
There is a reason most presidential candidates stump through diners and living rooms this time of year. They can’t fill a bigger room.
And then there is Donald J. Trump.
On the second day of January, in the Gulf Coast town of Biloxi, Miss., at least 13,000 stood for hours in a stinging chill to pack an entire sports arena for Trump, and when that venue was full, the overflow spilled into a second megaspace nearby. Trump called it the biggest crowd in Mississippi political history, which is exactly what you’d expect him to say, and also entirely plausible.
A few days earlier, Trump had packed a convention hall in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Two days later, he filled the 8,000-seat Paul Tsongas Center in Lowell, Mass., with people who waited on line in subfreezing cold. The next night, after standing for two hours in single-digit temperatures, locals filled the equivalent of two high school gymnasia on the Vermont–New Hampshire border to catch Trump’s revival show.
Given these crowds, the unprecedented Trump-driven television ratings for GOP debates and his unsinkable run at the top of the national polls–a streak of more than five months and counting–even the most mainstream Republicans are coming to grips with an idea they have resisted since last summer. This could be their nominee. And they are asking themselves, could they stop worrying and, perhaps, learn to love the Donald?
Leading Republicans unhappily find themselves deep in “probing” conversation, asking, “perhaps he wouldn’t be so bad,” says veteran strategist and lobbyist Ed Rogers. True, Trump is a wild card, a flamethrower, a man with no known party loyalties and no coherent political principles, a thrice-married casino mogul and reality-TV star, a narcissist and even a demagogue. On the other hand: Biloxi.
At a time when the crown princes of Republican politics can’t mount so much as a two-car parade, Trump is drawing the biggest crowds by far. He has the largest social-media footprint–again, by far–and lodges the sharpest attacks on Hillary Clinton while attracting the greatest number of potential recruits to Republican ranks. As a result, Washington insiders from both parties are now calling around to GOP heavies, asking, “Do you know anybody on Trump’s campaign? Who is on his foreign-policy team? I need to get to know them fast.” Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who entertained a discussion of Stop Trump strategies at a meeting late last year, now consults regularly with the front runner by phone. Even if the GOP could resist, should it? “He’s got the mo, he’s got the masses,” says Rick Hohlt, a GOP strategist. “He’s attracting a new class of voters.” Efforts to stop him have failed miserably; meanwhile, Trump may be getting smarter as a candidate, adds Hohlt. “He knows when to push and when to back off.”
The man is moving people, and politics does not get more basic than that. Trump is a bonfire in a field of damp kindling—an overcrowded field of governors and former governors and junior Senators still trying to strike a spark. His nearest rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, has traction in Iowa among the evangelical bloc and—in contrast to Trump—is a tried-and-true conservative. But with little more than half the support Trump boasts in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Cruz has a long way to go to show that he can move masses.
Cruz staffers, tellingly, have been studying a 1967 tome titled Suite 3505 as a playbook for their campaign. This F. Clifton White memoir, long out of print, tells the story of the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign. That was the last successful populist rebellion inside the Republican Party, propelling a rock-ribbed conservative past the Establishment insiders–just as Cruz hopes to do. But this triumph of intramural knife fighting proved a disaster at general-election time. Goldwater suffered one of the worst defeats in American political history. It’s no wonder that GOP leaders are every bit as wary of Cruz as they are of Trump.
In short, the GOP has awakened less than a month from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary to find itself in bed between a bombshell and a kamikaze. It’s a sobering dawn for a political party that seemed, not long ago, just a tweak or two away from glory. Republicans dominate America’s state legislatures and governors’ mansions. They control both houses of Congress. So why is their electorate leaning toward the outstretched grip of such a man as Trump?
And could Trump be a sign of something bigger even than himself?
Traditional GOP power brokers have long since lost count of the indignities Trump has inflicted on their rites and rituals. Since entering the race in June with a fantastical promise to wall off America’s southern border and send the bill to Mexico, Trump has shredded the political rule book, scattering the pieces from his private helicopter. Have mouth, will travel. Policies that would be preposterous coming from anyone else–like barring all Muslims from entering the country or hiking U.S. tariffs while somehow erasing trade barriers erected by other nations–sound magical to his supporters when served up by their hero. Outrages that would sink an ordinary candidate, like mocking a person who has a congenital disease or giving a pass to Vladimir Putin for the murder of Russian journalists, lifted Trump atop the polls and then helped keep him there. What Flubber was to physics, Trump is to politics: an antidote to gravity, cooked up by a quirky but prodigious amateur.
Other candidates work to relate their lives to the struggles of ordinary voters. Trump does the opposite, encouraging Americans to savor vicariously his billionaire’s privilege of saying whatever he damn well pleases. “I love Donald Trump because he’s so totally politically incorrect. He’s gone after every group,” says Greg Casady, 61, an Army veteran who joined an immense Trump rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “He’s spending his own bucks–therefore he doesn’t have to play the politically correct game. He says what we wish we could say but we can’t afford to anymore.”
Trump is an anomaly, but not the only one in this 2016 campaign. There is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an avowed socialist who leads the early polls in the New Hampshire Democratic primary–despite the fact that he spent most of his career spurning the Democrats. Though not as shocking or aggressive as Trump, Sanders is no less the darling of a discontented army. He too draws large audiences–but unlike Trump, Sanders faces an even stronger opponent in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Big Money, the supposed superpower of post–Citizens United politics, is a dud so far. Super-PAC bets by various billionaires have done nothing to fire up such candidates as former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Bush has filled screens in key states with millions of dollars in both positive and negative ads. The result: falling poll numbers. Touted as a front runner a year ago, Bush is mired in single digits and rang in the new year by announcing that he was scrapping a round of ads in favor of more ground troops in early-voting states.
Big Media too has been brought low. The collapse of Trump was predicted so often, so erroneously, in so many outlets that the spectacle was almost comic, like a soap opera that keeps killing off the same deathless character. Televised debates became seminars in media ethics, with candidates delivering stern lectures to their questioners, while offscreen, campaigns threatened to boycott networks and blacklist reporters.
What if all of these groundswells are part of the same tsunami? By coming to grips with Trump, Republicans might begin grasping the future of presidential politics, as the digital forces that have upended commerce and communications in recent years begin to shake the bedrock of civic life.
Disintermediation is a long word for a seemingly simple idea: dumping the middleman. It came into use a half-century ago to describe changes in the banking business. A generation later, the term described a key concept of the Internet age. In one field after another, the power of networked computing swept middlemen out of the picture. Ubiquitous retailers like RadioShack and Waldenbooks have either downsized or vanished as their customers go online to buy directly from manufacturers and warehousers. Netflix shutters the Blockbuster chain by mailing movies directly to viewers–then offers streaming, which cuts out the mailbox as well. Craigslist drains the advertising lifeblood from local newspapers, and local libraries reinvent themselves after the web puts the world in your pocket. It’s a familiar story, one of the megatrends of our era.
Donald Trump is history’s most disintermediated presidential front runner. He has sidestepped the traditional middlemen–party, press, pollsters and pooh-bahs–to sell his candidacy directly to voters, building on a relationship he has nurtured with the public from project to project across decades.
As far back as 1986, Trump began seeding this direct relationship with the public. That was the year he goaded New York City Mayor Ed Koch into handing over the disastrous renovation of the Wollman ice-skating rink in Central Park. The decline of New York was an old story by then, and the ice rink was a sorrow symbol. City bureaucrats had turned a routine rehab into a six-year slog with no end in sight. Trump took the reins, and the project took less than six months. He cut the ribbon on a beautifully finished rink, completed ahead of schedule and below budget, with live TV there to cover it.
He followed up with more self-styled rescue missions: the East Coast shuttle operations of dying Eastern Airlines, for example, and the ruined paradise of Atlantic City. Launched with fanfare (if often abandoned in silence), these efforts burnished Trump’s image as a can-do, cut-the-crap businessman–even as he risked his fortune. This is part of the power of owning your image, free of the mediators. You can tell your own story, even if it is not entirely true. Trump’s a fine businessman, with a keen eye for bargains and a knack for leverage. Where he is peerless is as a promoter; he is the Michelangelo of ballyhoo.
A masterstroke in 2004 vaulted him free of remaining middlemen; that’s when Trump debuted his television show, The Apprentice. Tens of millions of Americans followed the cameras past the gatekeepers and into a direct relationship with the purse-lipped entrepreneur. That this intimacy is an illusion doesn’t really matter; it has an undeniable power to create loyal followings for even the unlikeliest characters. From the Kardashians of Rodeo Drive to the Robertsons of Duck Dynasty, from the Cake Boss to Honey Boo Boo, the crafted characters of reality TV experience a different kind of stardom from the TV and movie idols of the past. Fans are encouraged to feel that they know these people, not as fictional characters but as flesh and blood.
Something similar goes on in every celebrity Twitter feed or Instagram account. Properly tended, the social network of skilled disintermediators can grow to encompass tens of millions of people, all sharing a joke or commiserating over a disappointment or comparing breakfasts with their famous “friend.” The pop star Taylor Swift’s nearly 70 million Twitter followers recently overheard her share a Christmas memory with her brother Austin and chuckled at a picture of her cute elf costume.
Peggy Lemke, 64, from Dows, Iowa, is one of many voters who see what is going on. “Trump is a reality-show phenomenon,” she says. “His supporters treat this like American Idol. We treat everything like American Idol. I’m having a really hard time taking this seriously.”
Disintermediation is not entirely new. In 1941, the radio personality W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel dealt Lyndon B. Johnson the only defeat of his consummate insider’s career. Johnson had the credibility with middlemen, but O’Daniel had a direct connection to his listeners. Nearly 60 years later, the professional wrestler Jesse Ventura used his direct connection with an audience to win a three-way race for governor of Minnesota. But technology now gives the power of direct relationships to everyone, not just media stars; indeed, the line between being a media star and simply having a big Twitter following is blurring into nothingness. It’s telling that Trump’s rallies often feature appearances by a pair of women who go by the names Diamond and Silk, whose spirited endorsement of Trump on YouTube has been watched by nearly 100,000 people–as many as tune in to some cable news shows.
Comments
The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
Ted isn't doing well at all in New Hampshire, but in Iowa he's doing well. And my primary opponent was totally opposed to the ethanol and the ethanol industry. Because he's with the oil industry. You know, he's from Texas. I guess it makes sense," Trump said.
"And he was getting clobbered," he recalled. "And all of a sudden he said, 'Uh, oh, I'm for ethanol.' You can't do that. You can't do that with three weeks to go. You're not allowed to do that."
He is right.
Trump has not waivered once in what his platform is.
Silently protesting Muslim woman ejected from Trump rally
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/08/politics/donald-trump-muslim-woman-protesting-ejected/index.html
A typical protester getting typical results.
I'm not agreeing that her treatment while being escorted away was excusable.
She got attention which was her exact motive.
She wasn't heckled/bothered etc until she protested - the exact opposite point of a rally.
www.headstonesband.com
It is a painful reminder of an ugly past
To some it is a symbol of a people being singled out for what they believe and who they are.
www.headstonesband.com
republican logic.
muslim registry essential for security and for saving lives.
gun registry too expensive and will not address the problem.
got it.
:rolleyes:
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
That's a fun thought, imagine how much money he could raise for his failing brand by selling tickets to slap his face.
sorry can you explain that clearer bc i dont understand what you are saying and what do you mean by brand
now you have dawned on me..
thank you for explaining this..
to me...
Time
There is a reason most presidential candidates stump through diners and living rooms this time of year. They can’t fill a bigger room.
And then there is Donald J. Trump.
On the second day of January, in the Gulf Coast town of Biloxi, Miss., at least 13,000 stood for hours in a stinging chill to pack an entire sports arena for Trump, and when that venue was full, the overflow spilled into a second megaspace nearby. Trump called it the biggest crowd in Mississippi political history, which is exactly what you’d expect him to say, and also entirely plausible.
A few days earlier, Trump had packed a convention hall in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Two days later, he filled the 8,000-seat Paul Tsongas Center in Lowell, Mass., with people who waited on line in subfreezing cold. The next night, after standing for two hours in single-digit temperatures, locals filled the equivalent of two high school gymnasia on the Vermont–New Hampshire border to catch Trump’s revival show.
Given these crowds, the unprecedented Trump-driven television ratings for GOP debates and his unsinkable run at the top of the national polls–a streak of more than five months and counting–even the most mainstream Republicans are coming to grips with an idea they have resisted since last summer. This could be their nominee. And they are asking themselves, could they stop worrying and, perhaps, learn to love the Donald?
Leading Republicans unhappily find themselves deep in “probing” conversation, asking, “perhaps he wouldn’t be so bad,” says veteran strategist and lobbyist Ed Rogers. True, Trump is a wild card, a flamethrower, a man with no known party loyalties and no coherent political principles, a thrice-married casino mogul and reality-TV star, a narcissist and even a demagogue. On the other hand: Biloxi.
At a time when the crown princes of Republican politics can’t mount so much as a two-car parade, Trump is drawing the biggest crowds by far. He has the largest social-media footprint–again, by far–and lodges the sharpest attacks on Hillary Clinton while attracting the greatest number of potential recruits to Republican ranks. As a result, Washington insiders from both parties are now calling around to GOP heavies, asking, “Do you know anybody on Trump’s campaign? Who is on his foreign-policy team? I need to get to know them fast.” Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who entertained a discussion of Stop Trump strategies at a meeting late last year, now consults regularly with the front runner by phone. Even if the GOP could resist, should it? “He’s got the mo, he’s got the masses,” says Rick Hohlt, a GOP strategist. “He’s attracting a new class of voters.” Efforts to stop him have failed miserably; meanwhile, Trump may be getting smarter as a candidate, adds Hohlt. “He knows when to push and when to back off.”
Cruz staffers, tellingly, have been studying a 1967 tome titled Suite 3505 as a playbook for their campaign. This F. Clifton White memoir, long out of print, tells the story of the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign. That was the last successful populist rebellion inside the Republican Party, propelling a rock-ribbed conservative past the Establishment insiders–just as Cruz hopes to do. But this triumph of intramural knife fighting proved a disaster at general-election time. Goldwater suffered one of the worst defeats in American political history. It’s no wonder that GOP leaders are every bit as wary of Cruz as they are of Trump.
In short, the GOP has awakened less than a month from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary to find itself in bed between a bombshell and a kamikaze. It’s a sobering dawn for a political party that seemed, not long ago, just a tweak or two away from glory. Republicans dominate America’s state legislatures and governors’ mansions. They control both houses of Congress. So why is their electorate leaning toward the outstretched grip of such a man as Trump?
And could Trump be a sign of something bigger even than himself?
Traditional GOP power brokers have long since lost count of the indignities Trump has inflicted on their rites and rituals. Since entering the race in June with a fantastical promise to wall off America’s southern border and send the bill to Mexico, Trump has shredded the political rule book, scattering the pieces from his private helicopter. Have mouth, will travel. Policies that would be preposterous coming from anyone else–like barring all Muslims from entering the country or hiking U.S. tariffs while somehow erasing trade barriers erected by other nations–sound magical to his supporters when served up by their hero. Outrages that would sink an ordinary candidate, like mocking a person who has a congenital disease or giving a pass to Vladimir Putin for the murder of Russian journalists, lifted Trump atop the polls and then helped keep him there. What Flubber was to physics, Trump is to politics: an antidote to gravity, cooked up by a quirky but prodigious amateur.
Other candidates work to relate their lives to the struggles of ordinary voters. Trump does the opposite, encouraging Americans to savor vicariously his billionaire’s privilege of saying whatever he damn well pleases. “I love Donald Trump because he’s so totally politically incorrect. He’s gone after every group,” says Greg Casady, 61, an Army veteran who joined an immense Trump rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “He’s spending his own bucks–therefore he doesn’t have to play the politically correct game. He says what we wish we could say but we can’t afford to anymore.”
Trump is an anomaly, but not the only one in this 2016 campaign. There is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an avowed socialist who leads the early polls in the New Hampshire Democratic primary–despite the fact that he spent most of his career spurning the Democrats. Though not as shocking or aggressive as Trump, Sanders is no less the darling of a discontented army. He too draws large audiences–but unlike Trump, Sanders faces an even stronger opponent in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Big Money, the supposed superpower of post–Citizens United politics, is a dud so far. Super-PAC bets by various billionaires have done nothing to fire up such candidates as former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Bush has filled screens in key states with millions of dollars in both positive and negative ads. The result: falling poll numbers. Touted as a front runner a year ago, Bush is mired in single digits and rang in the new year by announcing that he was scrapping a round of ads in favor of more ground troops in early-voting states.
Big Media too has been brought low. The collapse of Trump was predicted so often, so erroneously, in so many outlets that the spectacle was almost comic, like a soap opera that keeps killing off the same deathless character. Televised debates became seminars in media ethics, with candidates delivering stern lectures to their questioners, while offscreen, campaigns threatened to boycott networks and blacklist reporters.
What if all of these groundswells are part of the same tsunami? By coming to grips with Trump, Republicans might begin grasping the future of presidential politics, as the digital forces that have upended commerce and communications in recent years begin to shake the bedrock of civic life.
Disintermediation is a long word for a seemingly simple idea: dumping the middleman. It came into use a half-century ago to describe changes in the banking business. A generation later, the term described a key concept of the Internet age. In one field after another, the power of networked computing swept middlemen out of the picture. Ubiquitous retailers like RadioShack and Waldenbooks have either downsized or vanished as their customers go online to buy directly from manufacturers and warehousers. Netflix shutters the Blockbuster chain by mailing movies directly to viewers–then offers streaming, which cuts out the mailbox as well. Craigslist drains the advertising lifeblood from local newspapers, and local libraries reinvent themselves after the web puts the world in your pocket. It’s a familiar story, one of the megatrends of our era.
Donald Trump is history’s most disintermediated presidential front runner. He has sidestepped the traditional middlemen–party, press, pollsters and pooh-bahs–to sell his candidacy directly to voters, building on a relationship he has nurtured with the public from project to project across decades.
He followed up with more self-styled rescue missions: the East Coast shuttle operations of dying Eastern Airlines, for example, and the ruined paradise of Atlantic City. Launched with fanfare (if often abandoned in silence), these efforts burnished Trump’s image as a can-do, cut-the-crap businessman–even as he risked his fortune. This is part of the power of owning your image, free of the mediators. You can tell your own story, even if it is not entirely true. Trump’s a fine businessman, with a keen eye for bargains and a knack for leverage. Where he is peerless is as a promoter; he is the Michelangelo of ballyhoo.
A masterstroke in 2004 vaulted him free of remaining middlemen; that’s when Trump debuted his television show, The Apprentice. Tens of millions of Americans followed the cameras past the gatekeepers and into a direct relationship with the purse-lipped entrepreneur. That this intimacy is an illusion doesn’t really matter; it has an undeniable power to create loyal followings for even the unlikeliest characters. From the Kardashians of Rodeo Drive to the Robertsons of Duck Dynasty, from the Cake Boss to Honey Boo Boo, the crafted characters of reality TV experience a different kind of stardom from the TV and movie idols of the past. Fans are encouraged to feel that they know these people, not as fictional characters but as flesh and blood.
Something similar goes on in every celebrity Twitter feed or Instagram account. Properly tended, the social network of skilled disintermediators can grow to encompass tens of millions of people, all sharing a joke or commiserating over a disappointment or comparing breakfasts with their famous “friend.” The pop star Taylor Swift’s nearly 70 million Twitter followers recently overheard her share a Christmas memory with her brother Austin and chuckled at a picture of her cute elf costume.
Peggy Lemke, 64, from Dows, Iowa, is one of many voters who see what is going on. “Trump is a reality-show phenomenon,” she says. “His supporters treat this like American Idol. We treat everything like American Idol. I’m having a really hard time taking this seriously.”
Disintermediation is not entirely new. In 1941, the radio personality W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel dealt Lyndon B. Johnson the only defeat of his consummate insider’s career. Johnson had the credibility with middlemen, but O’Daniel had a direct connection to his listeners. Nearly 60 years later, the professional wrestler Jesse Ventura used his direct connection with an audience to win a three-way race for governor of Minnesota. But technology now gives the power of direct relationships to everyone, not just media stars; indeed, the line between being a media star and simply having a big Twitter following is blurring into nothingness. It’s telling that Trump’s rallies often feature appearances by a pair of women who go by the names Diamond and Silk, whose spirited endorsement of Trump on YouTube has been watched by nearly 100,000 people–as many as tune in to some cable news shows.