Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
Donald Brexit, Donald ISIS...
Give the guy credit. Donald Trump makes perspective -- on him at least -- almost inconceivable, and that's no small accomplishment. Is he heading up or down? Polling well or poorly? Going to win or lose? Who knows? Take Nate Silver whose FiveThirtyEight website recently launched its poll of polls with The Donald having only a 19% chance of taking the presidency. Silver was remarkably on target in election years 2008 and 2012, but he's been off when it comes to Trump (and he's hardly alone), so who really has a clue what that 19% may really mean on November 8th?
For months and months, Trump has performed a masterful version of media jiu-jitsu, leveraging the interest in him from what seems like every journalist, newspaper, website, and cable news network on Earth into more free publicity and coverage than any individual may ever have gotten. It's been impossible to escape the man. There probably wasn't a day in months without a Donald Trump story (or often multiple ones) and he's regularly dominated the news cycle with his latest outrageous statement or provocation, no matter what else is going on. There is no Brexit without Donald Brexit; no ISIS without Donald ISIS, no Hillary without Donald Hillary. He hires, fires, invites, rejects, embraces, insults, tweets, challenges, denies, refuses, ingratiates, blackballs -- and whatever he does, it's news. By definition. And don't forget the endless scribblers and talking heads, faced with his all-invasive version of reality, who cough up reams of "analysis" about him, which only furthers the way he Trumps the world, no matter what they write or say.
You can almost hear the echoing voice from some ninth rate horror film echoing down the corridors: I tell you, you can run, but you can't hide, ha, ha, ha, ha...
In Donald Trump's world, as far as I can tell, there is only one reality that matters and it can be summed up in two words that begin with D and T. Were he to become president, he would give Louis XIV's famed phrase -- whether or not the French king actually said it -- "L'état, c'est moi" ("I am the state"), new meaning.
During these past many months of Trumpery, Nomi Prins has been sorting out the nature of the money game in American politics (onshore and off) for TomDispatch. Now, in "Donald Trump's Anti-Establishment Scam," she turns to the billionaire who has taken possession of us all. Her focus: his frenetic version of "You're fired!" this election season and how that's played out with the Republican establishment, without whom (and without whose money) she doubts he can make it to the Oval Office.