The current situation has been described on cable news that we have a media-run state rather than state-run media. This is what I think may be behind the whole chapter of the wall and government shutdown.
The RW media has been using *rump both to drive ratings and push their narrative. Individual-1 may be Putin’s puppet, but he is just as much Ann Coulter’s. The RW media has always realized there will be life after 45. After the 2018 elections, and after the latest round of disclosures/indictments/revelations from the Mueller investigation, they realized they needed an exit strategy, a dump-*rump narrative, through which they could credibly extricate themselves from the past 2+ years of support.
In RW media, there are two primary narratives used to turn an a formerly revered icon:
1. They Have Gone Too Far
2. They Aren’t Conservative Enough
If Fox & Friends simply let the denouement of the the 45 era play itself out much further, they would be forced to go with Narrative 1 by default. This has several risks. *rumps base has become so rabid and cult-like that they might stand by Trump and abandon Fox. *rump is transgressive by nature; there is no red line built into the story created of him. It also would mean RW media might have to explain to their less rabid viewers why they stood by him for so long.
The second narrative, Not Conservative Enough, is the more common avenue for The Right to abandon its heroes. But, given how quickly and unpredictably Individual-1’s presidency is unraveling, the RW media saw they needed to get ahead of events. They needed to create a pretext. They needed to set up an impossible condition.
And so, when a deal was almost on the table to keep the government open, at the last minute Ann Coulter et. al. got in *rump’s ear and told him a Real Conservative would build the wall. Do the owners of Fox, Breitbart, etc. really care about the wall? Did they really expect an actual wall would come out of negotiations to reopen government? No and no! What they wanted –and got— was a narrative under which they begin to paint Twittler as wimpy, weak, ineffective to their viewers. This way, by the time his *residency crashes and burns, they will “have been saying all along” that he was not their guy.
What are your thoughts?