I’ve written about the Enquirer from time to time, my Jan. 7th story was about the Clintons and Obamas suing them. Just a few days ago I wrote about how they were missing being able to write about the most salacious political story since Monica.
Now Politico has a major story about the influence that the National Enquirer has on the the gullible Trump smitten electorate.
Politico presents a cogent analysis of why people read and believe the Enquirer. Here’s a sample:
Some consider Enquirer readers representative of the emerging “post-truth” era, reliant on their own beliefs and indifferent to the facts accepted by the mainstream. But a better way to look at Enquirer readers might be as a “pre-truth” group, drawn to arguments based on pure emotional appeal. Ted Cruz makes such a perfect tabloid villain because he looks like one, because he went to Princeton and Harvard, and because he seems unimpressed by anybody not named Ted Cruz. Hillary Clinton, too, is a paid-in-full member of the American elite: Wellesley, Yale, the Senate and global foundation muckety-muck. Going into 2016, the tabloids already had marked her as their campaign heavy.
Trump, on the other hand, could be cast as the perfect proletarian candidate: patriotic, plain-talking (or plain double-talking) and a nativist. Trump, being rich and educated at the Wharton School, isn’t an obvious ideological fit for these Enquirer readers. But when he wolfs down fast food or speaks in broken sentences, praises his tacky palaces as beautiful, or unexpectedly takes a vulgar turn in the middle of a speech, he ends up declaring a kind of class solidarity with a set of people who could never afford his resorts. His penchant for glitter, big hair, big things in general and bad grammar, and his disdain for all thing refined (his favorite musical is Evita), makes him highly representative of Rust Belt culture. I grew up with many of the people who voted for Trump in the primaries and the general election. They can smell condescension at the parts-per-billion level. With Trump, they don’t even sniffle.
I decided to check out the National Enquirer website and found that while it is well designed, it has almost no content. It is clearly designed to prompt people to buy the tabloid at the checkout aisle.
Here’s what I saw, a promotion for their latest cover article:
Talk about an exclusive! Talk about treasonous double-talk — they are revealing a secret summit talk which they have just made not-secret.
“Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will hold a secret summit within 45 days of Trump’s inauguration — and the new issue of The National ENQUIRER, on newsstands now, exposes their secret plan to change the world map!”
On their cover that say together they will
1) Destroy China,
2) Destroy N. Korean regime,
3) Destroy Iran’s regime, and
4) Punish the real hackers.
Amazing, for people with working cerebral function because, obviously,
1) China is more powerful than Russia, and the U.S. can't go against China in any major way because we need them FAR more than we need Russia
2) Only China can destroy N. Korea,
3) Trying to overthrow the Iranian regime will start a war in the mid-East with a country that would re-start its nuclear program, and
4) how can the real hackers be punished since they were working for Putin.... talk about gaslighting!
Here’s a devious promo of my own. Trump thinks that CNN is fake news. He thinks BUZZFEED is a propaganda website while he loves Brietbart and Bannon. He also dismissed BBC News in a snide remark which was deftly parried by the BBC reporter. I wrote about this last night:
No wonder Trump dismisses the BBC. After the so-called press conference they titled their article “Trump press event a theater of the absurd,” and described the employees who were cheering him from the back as the peanut gallery. www.bbc.com/...