The numbers game is everything to Donald J. Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris’s first big rally appears to have gotten under his skin.
When former President Donald J. Trump walked onto the stage at his rally in Atlanta on Saturday, fog machines shot white plumes of smoke into the air, heralding his arrival.
If you looked closely, you could almost imagine steam pouring out of his ears, too. All week long, something had been giving him the vapors.
“Crazy Kamala,” he fumed a minute into his speech. “She was here a week ago — lots of empty seats — but the crowd she got was because she had entertainers.”
Four days earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris had packed about the same number of people (10,000) into the arena, the Georgia State University Convocation Center. It was the first major rally of her newborn campaign, and she had two rappers (Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion) on hand to hype up her crowd.
Mr. Trump, who has been shunned by much of the entertainment industry, spun this as somehow cheating in the all-important competition over crowd size.
This broader issue has been bad for a while. I honestly wonder if our climate change situation would be better today if the media hadn’t given equal time to scientists who didn’t think there was human-influenced climate change, even though they were an infinitesimally small fraction of climate scientists. I can understand why some people thought it was a debate among scientists long after it was broadly accepted.
Likewise, treating every wholly fabricated lie that Trump spouts out like it deserves consideration gives him underserved legitimacy.
Who controls the media? That’s the question to ask. Do they have an incentive to manufacture outrage? Do they have reason to favor one outcome over another? Even if what they’re presenting you is factually accurate, sometimes even deciding to give something coverage at all changes what the story is. Donald Trump coulda been a rich guy with weird thoughts with only the people already following him on twitter seeing his bullshit, or better yet, he coulda been thrown off twitter, but the news MADE him into a public figure by treating him as one. And then twitter didn’t kick him off the platform BECAUSE he was a public figure.