"... I hesitate to ascribe grand and clever schemes to Trump, because the more prosaic reality could be simply that he is making all of this up as he goes along."

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Trump’s real endgame: A white nationalist media empire?
By Greg Sargent, August 22, 2016

Has Donald Trump given up on winning the White House and “pivoted” (this might be his real pivot) to a full-blown effort to build a national following that will outlast the election, perhaps allowing him to establish a media empire with him at the helm — one that caters, at least to some degree, to a white nationalist or “alt-right” audience? Was that his plan all along?

The last few days have brought fresh reporting and evidence that suggest this is where Trump is really headed, a scenario that a number of observers (your humble blogger included) have been speculating about for months. I thought it would be useful to round up this evidence:

* Vanity Fair media writer Sarah Ellison reports in a radio interview that Trump has had private discussions with his inner circle about “how to monetize” the new audience he’s built up. As Ellison puts it, this potential goal should no longer be seen as “speculation.”

* The New York Times reports today that in July, Trump’s campaign “spent more on renting arenas for his speeches” than he did on setting up a national field operation, leaving him with no operation to speak of. That is consistent with the idea that Trump (as I’ve speculated) is very consciously sinking most of his resources into a format (rallies) that allows him to continue staging his unique form of raucous WWE-style political entertainment, and building an audience that thrills to it, rather than winning a general election.

* Sarah Posner of Mother Jones has some excellent reporting this morning on new Trump campaign chief Stephen Bannon, which shows Bannon has skill and experience in building a media outlet (Breitbart) explicitly aimed at the ethno-nationalist audience. As Bannon himself put it last spring: “We’re the platform for the alt-right.” Bannon, naturally, denies that his nationalism is racially driven. But Posner shows that Bannon has regularly “stoked racial themes,” and one former Breitbart insider has explicitly said that Bannon’s Breitbart has become “a gathering place for white nationalists.”

Either Trump actually sees Bannon as just the guy to expand his appeal — i.e., he actually thinks that doubling down on the same approach and themes that won the GOP primaries will somehow expand his appeal — or he has something else in mind.

* Trump’s first TV ad of the general election, with its fearmongering about refugee-terrorists and dark hordes flooding over the southern border, did not appear to be aimed at the constituencies Trump needs to improve among — college educated whites, suburban women, nonwhites. And Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reports that the Trump campaign’s plan was initially to air an ad about the economy — which would make more sense as a way to reach those voter groups — but abruptly shifted at the last minute to the hard-core immigration spot, surprising even some Trump campaign insiders. At critical moments, Trump continues to revert to form — which is to say, he keeps speaking to that hard Trumpist core, as if maintaining their interest is the paramount goal.

* If this is Trump’s endgame, he is already succeeding at building an audience. Dave Weigel reports that white nationalist and alt-right figures are finding a lot to like in Trump’s new immigration ad, and in his overall messaging. In a very telling moment, one white nationalist writer asks us to “imagine a media that was more Breitbart than the New York Times,” adding that “what the media have been telling them” — the “them” being “whites” — “about race relations is simply wrong.”

Trump has trafficked heavily in similar ideas, regularly accusing the media of covering up inconvenient “truths” such as the notion that “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims celebrated 9/11. Trump understands very well that there is a big audience out there for people who want to believe that the American press — hamstrung by “political correctness” (wink, wink) — won’t tell the truth about race and Islam.

Now, admittedly, all of this is still speculative. And I hesitate to ascribe grand and clever schemes to Trump, because the more prosaic reality could be simply that he is making all of this up as he goes along. But this possibility is worth taking seriously, if only because it could have untold longer term consequences.

Trump has already been saying the election will be “rigged,” as part of a broader effort to delegitimize the presidency of Hillary Clinton (should she win) in advance. If the goal here is to persuade a lot of Trump supporters that the outcome of the election is illegitimate, that could create a large audience that wants to hear this message during a Clinton presidency, a message that Trump’s new media venture could peddle to them for fun and profit. For good measure, Trump can also tell his new media audience that the rest of the media is in on the conspiracy to cover up the election’s illegitimacy. It’s hard to predict what sort of longer term civic impact that might have, but it’s hard to imagine it would be a good one.

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UPDATE: Here’s more. Kurt Bardella, a former Breitbart News spokesman and political strategist, tells CNN that Trump’s hiring of Bannon means:

“There is this desire by Trump, and I think Bannon as well, to launch a media venture…even the rhetoric of the Trump campaign, fixating on the media, bringing up the narrative of how this election is rigged — that the media has it in for him, that this is why he’s going to lose — it’s laying the groundwork for something else.”
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