Glenn Greenwald: Bernie Sanders Would Have Been a Stronger Candidate Against Donald Trump | Democracy Now!
It's
really hard to find analysts saying anything worthwhile to help us
unravel the reasons for Trump's victory. But in this Democracy Now
interview, Glenn Greenwald focuses on a much-overlooked factor: the
corporate media's double-handed role in propelling Trump to the White
House.
At first, during his insurgency in the Republican
primaries, Trump was built up as the rock-star businessman who was going
to rebuild America. At the same time, the media almost entirely ignored
Bernie Sanders' own insurgency against the Democratic party's efforts at a stitch-up on behalf of Clinton.
Then after the primaries, almost overnight, the media switched tack,
deriding Trump and extolling Clinton as the model
president-in-the-making. Quite reasonably, large swaths of ordinary
Americans didn't buy it, and their distrust of the media was further
reinforced.
Greenwald:
So the idea that Donald Trump, the
billionaire, celebrity, TV star, should constantly be heard from,
whereas Bernie Sanders, the old Jewish socialist from Vermont, who
nobody took seriously, doesn’t need to be heard from, with all of his
boring speeches about college debt and healthcare and the like, in that
choice is a very strong and pedantic ideological choice that the
American media embraced and played a huge role in enabling Trump to
march to the primary.
Now, the only other point I want to add to
this immediate issue is that I do think that media behavior changed
fundamentally with regard to Donald Trump once he became the nominee.
So, you have the primary period, where they treated him like a normal
candidate. They revered him. They gave him endless free TV time. But
once he became the nominee and they took seriously the prospect that he
might be president and they started to realize and internalize the
responsibility they bore for enabling him to get that far, I think they
went all the way to the other extreme, where they completely united in
this kind of mission of destroying Donald Trump, of preventing his
victory and ensuring that Hillary Clinton was elected. And in a big way,
that also played a role, unwittingly, I think, in helping Trump,
because, of all the institutions in the United States, the institutions
of authority that are hated, the American media leads the way. And so,
when people saw the media basically trying to coerce them or dictate to
them that they should turn their backs on Donald Trump, that they should
vote for Hillary Clinton, I think a backlash ensued, where people
believed that the media was being unfair, and were not going to you take
marching orders from these media institutions, that they also have come
to regard as fundamentally corrupt. And, unwittingly, I think that
played an important role, as well, in ensuring that he could win.
