Jay Kuten: Monster of their own making

Donald Trump -- the joke has become a nightmare for US Republicans

ALL of a sudden there's talk of an actual Trump presidency. From late night joke, he's mutated to world class nightmare. After 37 failed predictions of his demise, then following his successes - Super Tuesday and beyond - he now has to be taken seriously as the probable GOP nominee. And suddenly, too, the question immediately for Republicans is how to stop Trump.

It's become almost traditional, when a politician held in some degree of contempt by the media elites, succeeds, despite their withheld concurrence, to spread that contempt to the voters. George W Bush's successful second campaign was greeted by a British tabloid headline of "Fifty-five million idiots". So it is with Trump. It's assumed that his supporters are the unwashed, uneducated. That assumption dangerously dismisses the real power of the man to persuade and to sell his particular brand of snake-oil, a skill that may buy him the White House.

What is the attractant that so captivates voters? Taking them at their word, the mantra his supporters repeat is "He tells it like it is". How can that be? Trump is nothing but contradictory, a-factual, and full of racist, ethnic and gender pejoratives.

Trump is speaking to the frustration and bitterness and disappointment felt by millions of working class and middle class Americans who hear in his populist anti-establishment diatribes, confirmation of their anger, as evidence mounts of their exclusion from the American Dream.

What they've experienced in 30 years of wage stagnation is their well-paying factory jobs - skilled but unschooled workers made US$25 ($37) an hour - exported overseas, leaving behind the Rust Belt with service sector jobs paying minimum wage of US$7.25 ($10.72) an hour.

This week the Carrier Corporation announced the closing of its air conditioner manufacturing plant in Indianapolis, Indiana, moving it to Mexico where workers earn US$9 ($14) per day. The 1400 unemployed US workers were getting US$21 ($31) an hour.

Trump has amplified the feelings of those workers and the teachers and lawyers and doctors experiencing their own status as threatened, as pensions melt away and only the elite prosper. He's pointed their anger at Mexican immigrants and trade deals while taunting the Establishment of both parties for failing to protect those American workers.

For all the knicker-twisting by the Republican establishment and all the pontificating by the media talking heads, Trump is the Frankenstein monster they've created. He was born out of mean-spirited politics, coded racialism and a long-standing resorting to divisiveness by Republicans.

Since Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" the party has used code words like "law and order" to assuage the fears of Southern whites of black empowerment and economic competition as the civil rights movement took hold. Those Southern whites, once traditionally Democrats, have voted Republican ever since.

Trump simply stripped the veneer of civility and directed his race baiting at Mexicans, Muslims and immigrants, the latter falsely accused of taking the jobs of American citizens.

He is nourished by a media motivated by greed and an insecurity borne of suspicion of their own irrelevancy.

The large US newspapers are losing readership and advertising money. So too, TV network news. Trump, as an attraction, has been a lifesaver. MediaQuant reported last week that Trump's media coverage was worth US$1.9 billion ($2.8 billion) so far in advertising; his next closest Republican competitor, Ted Cruz, generated a little more than US$300 million. Hillary Clinton has received less than US$750 million worth. And Hillary's rival, Bernie Sanders, didn't get a mention.

This unholy symbiotic relationship between a spineless media and an empty suit of a huckster has completely obscured the fact that Trump has neither any cogent policy nor an articulated political philosophy. While his attack-dog pronouncements lend to his supporters the satisfaction of outrage, it's too early to predict where this circus will wind up. Hopefully, not in the White House. One thing is clear. The Republican Party will never be the same. And that may be a good thing, if, when the nightmare is over, there can be a return to a long-absent sanity.