 Donald Trump hijacked everybody this election cycle. He owned us, punked us, trolled us, tricked us, conned us, played us, whatever you want. But I don't just mean sort of liberals. I mean everybody, and it created this virtuous cycle that actually really worked for him. So for example, with the media, he really understood the media's constraints and priorities. He knew that attention is the market and all attention is good, even bad attention is good. He knew that mainstream media, MSM, is absolutely short on time. They have three minutes for a segment, 15 seconds for a statement, whatever it might be, but they're always out of time because mainstream media has limited time and they're desperate for eyeballs. They will do anything. And if you do things that are spectacular enough, they will keep that camera on you and never turn it off, or at least in this cycle. And I did basically, I did a video here on the right about how Trump hacked the media, which is in the first presentation. You can click on here. So Twitter turned out to be perfect for Trump. Absolutely perfect. And I don't think that Trump reads anybody else's tweets and I'm not sure he uses a computer. I think he just tweets out and with 140 characters, he can own the next news cycle. And if he pushes the edge of crazy, he has free attention all the time. So he managed to weaponize both mainstream media and social media, neither of which could defend itself or us against him. He figured this out and neither Facebook nor Twitter, nor CNN, nor CBS, nor anybody else, were able to figure out how to stop this thing from happening. If you don't mind the analogy, Osama bin Laden not only figured out with his partners in crime, not only figured out how to use our technology against us like a missile, basically turning an airplane into a missile, he also figured out how Bush and company would react turning them into weapons against us, doing a whole bunch of things to our privacy and liberty that didn't have to happen and spending $3 trillion on at least one war that didn't have to happen. So the media got hacked and as Trump did this he was attracting fringe elements and Hillary called them the deplorables and there are a batch of groups here, the Klu Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, some of the crazier conspiracy theorists, all kind of under this umbrella of the alt-right, which is unfortunately sort of a normalization of these really fringe elements of our society who are out there and they showed up. They were like, oh, this is great. Somebody is actually normalizing this language. These feelings we've had, he's speaking for us, they showed up. I don't think they're a very large group but the problem is everybody who started following Trump got painted with this brush right away because he put out the bait, they showed up. Now, anything the alt-right did was fuel on the liberal fire, this baited the liberals who went into a froth. They spun into frenzies and it distracted them from what was going on and from issues and from other sorts of things and this attracted even more fringe groups and this created this whole cycle, unfortunately sort of a virtuous circle of interactions that got even bigger. Then Trump hacked the GOP. Trump has flipped back and forth. He's been a Democrat, he's been a Republican, he's been an independent. He sort of flips around to whatever seems to be practical at the time, he's a pragmatist among many other things and the GOP had for 30 plus years since the Goldwater loss. The GOP had been building up think tanks and an echo chamber and they'd been gerrymandering districts so that the House of Representatives was basically safe so that most districts would be solidly Republican, only problem then is, once you've done that, then your candidates are worried about the primary not the election because the district is safe for your party and that means that extremists come in and do weird things. We saw that happen in the Tea Party and then we saw it play out even worse at this point because Trump won primary after primary. They spent, the GOP spent 30 years demonizing the Clintons and liberalism and socialism and most recently Obama. They figured out how an media echo chamber works, echoing stories between Fox News and alt-right bloggers and Twitter and a bunch of other things and then the GOP also doubled down on anti-intellectualism, basically denying science, weakening facts overall. It became the party of no, it had every instinct, it had no desire to let Democrats win any battles so they basically stonewalled as much as they could and somehow they didn't fuss much when the alt-right showed up. That sort of meant, all of this meant that they couldn't shake Trump and he ate them. I went into more details about some of the background here and they reaped what they sowed in the previous presentation. So it looks like this, I talked about the conservative echo chamber, I talked about the scorched earth strategy that came about from the Republican Revolution around 1994 in the Clinton midterm elections when Gingrich became Speaker of the House and they basically said, there is no more cooperation from here forward, you're staying on message or you get no money for your primaries, things like that. This left us kind of in a post-factual world which is kind of weird and then he basically hijacked the liberals. This ability to just type at 140, if he tweeted at 3 a.m. in the morning, it ate another news cycle, people went crazy. We went ballistic at every provocation, we're so certain of victory that liberals were not thinking or really listening and in particular, and I think this really matters, liberals didn't really address the pain across the rust belt, which exists in lots of other places but it was really pronounced in the rust belt. Hillary didn't go there, et cetera. So there's this real painful irony that the left was delighting during the debates at how Donald would always take Hillary's bait. About the Miss Universe contestant, about this, about that and here are some of the political cartoons that came out right after those events. Look, Trump is too easily baited, he's bait baited. You know what? He was baiting everybody the entire time and I think for him it was a little bit like he brought a gun to a knife fight and he did horrible things. I'm not trying to pretty him up but I'm just saying that he understood the media environment better than anybody else did and he knew that this was going to work. In fact, you could argue that this strategy was Trump's only path to the election. Was he going to study policy papers and learn all the presidents and capitals of all the countries? He hates studying. Was he gonna win a legitimate debate against Ted Cruz who was a debate champion at Harvard? Not really. The only way he was gonna make it through was by blowing up the process and doing all the hijack that I just talked about. This process, in fact, choosing this path, horrible though it is, turned his liabilities into his assets. There is all sorts of nice record of video and articles and research and lawsuits, 4,000 odd lawsuits about sexual abuse, his egocentrism and fragile ego, greed, tiny hands, shady dealings, bigotry business. All of that became his assets because when liberals attacked those things and when the media attacked those things, his backers just said, hmm, right, gotcha. In fact, you could argue, and I'm not, again, I'm sort of projecting here and I don't know where he falls on the, this is all accidental scale, but he kind of made a cartoon of himself. If you think about it, his hair, his two tan face with kind of the orangey glow which led to a supreme, wonderful number of nicknames that apparently now we're going to get to use for a while. And so he made himself a cartoon which had a couple weird effects. One was that he seemed more authentic as a cartoon because here he was this sort of pretend billionaire but kind of like in the book, Air Guitar, there's a pan to Las Vegas. Dave Hickey, formerly of The Rolling Stone, the first chapter of Air Guitar is like, Las Vegas is the only authentic city in America and he kind of goes down that path. So this allowed Trump to look kind of authentic and also projectable. And if you look at Scott McLeod's book Understanding Comics, cartoon characters are really easy to project onto yourself, for you to project what you believe onto them. Also, this cartoonishness meant he was easy to ignore and dismiss and we'll get back to that in the next video. Trump's history is that he makes these huge ballsy bets really with only greed in mind and you can point easily here to his bets on building casinos and how he ended up almost a billion dollars in debt to a bunch of banks. And basically he faced them down and said, you either see me through this somehow and give me a $380,000 a month allowance, which is insane. Or this whole thing goes down and you're probably gonna go down with it. So he was too big to fail for the banks. So he's got a history of doing these sorts of things and somehow strangely surviving. But if you sort of look back on what happened, this was his only path. So I'm still shocked that Trump went ahead with this tactic and alienated one group after another. And I'm unclear that had he not pursued this path, any of these groups would have loved him, but certainly he could have wooed them. He could have been very different and more politic. I'm also totally shocked that Howard Dean only had to scream a little too loud and hoarsely to his troops, to his followers after a primary. And he was out of the race the next week, he was gone. And nothing Trump said or did knocked him out of this race. That just blew my mind. Something was wrong there and I haven't quite figured that one out. And then I'm still shocked at how wide open Trump opened Pandora's box. He really was thinking, he was sitting thinking about what to do next. And I can almost picture him sitting in bed going, okay, who am I going to pick on tomorrow in the speech? I'm going to mention the loss of jobs and how corporations need to bring the jobs back. I'm always going to mention that, but then I'm going to pick something that's going to own the media cycle for the next day or two. And he did that so successfully. So this really raises the question, was this just luck? Is this just, he was the right guy at the right time? And I mean that with as much sarcasm and irony as I can muster, was he just lucky or was he actually skillful? Was this a strategy? Was this a costume, a cartoon? A sort of a framing for doing this. If you look at it, it's I tend toward he's smarter than he looks. Thanks very much. My name is Jerry Mikulski. I am not an historian or a political theorist. I've said these things in the introductory video. So thank you very much for listening to this one and come back for more.