General Discussion

There was always a sense on the left that mainstream media carried water for the Republican Party, whether that was completely true or not. DU and many other websites -- think of the blog revolution of the early 2000s in particular -- were set up as explicit alternatives to mainstream media. When DU was created in 2001, we considered it an opportunity to use modern technology to try to push back against the massive advantage that the right wing had created in areas like talk radio.

But I think after a couple of decades, we've kind of entered a "be careful what you wish for" scenario. Twenty years ago we felt that there was a need for more widely-available alternative media sources. But we didn't anticipate social media, and the creation of a culture in which anyone could quickly and easily become their own news source, or could exist in a world where they could not just choose what "facts" they wanted to believe in, but to have those "facts" force-fed to them, minute-by-minute, on personal hand-held devices, all controlled by privately-created algorithms.

That said I totally agree that Trump is unique. His true talent has been in exposing and encouraging the absolute worst tendencies in people, whether that be his individual supporters -- to whom he has given a license to be proudly racist, misogynistic, and un-American -- or the Republican Party at large, who thought they could achieve their goals by controlling Trump, only to find out that they were controlled by him (or rather, by the forces whispering in Trump's ear).

But I think it took today's culture to get him there. Bear in mind that he did run for president before, on the Reform Party ticket in 2000. He won the California primary and then quit the race, because he realized his run was going nowhere. Nobody took him seriously then, at all. So I think Trump and today's media/Internet environment are like symbiotic parasites feeding off one another. It was inevitable that somebody would take advantage of the massive cultural shift that the Internet and social media brought about, and the person most suited to do that happened to be Donald Trump (likely because of his extreme narcissistic tendencies, which mesh well with today's social media culture).