Congratulations, of a sort, are in order for Donald Trump, who is the president of political news cycles! That is, he is the president of the April 2011 news cycles, which are among the least important of political news cycles. But they aren't particularly bad when your reality-teevee show is airing, and you covet synergy. Here's the Pew Research Center to make sense of this all:
Donald Trump has drawn a lot of attention in a slow-starting race for the GOP nomination. Roughly a quarter of all Americans (26%) name Trump as the possible Republican presidential candidate they have heard most about lately, far more than volunteer any other candidate. Among Republicans, 39% name Trump as most visible - more than all other possible GOP candidates combined.
To be sure, Trump is standing out in a contest that has yet to draw much public interest or media coverage. In fact, about half of all Americans (53%) could not name anyone when asked which GOP candidate they have been hearing the most about.
Overall, just 20% of the public say they followed possible candidates for the 2012 presidential elections very closely last week and just 4% named it as their most closely followed story.
Yes, Trump is totally killing it at this stage of the game, when no one is particularly engaged in the 2012 race because it hasn't started yet. If you are an engaged citizen, you are probably, per Pew, paying more attention to the ongoing crisis in Japan or the policy debate over the budget: "The deficit debate accounted for 31% of all news coverage, according to a separate analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. By contrast, coverage of the presidential race accounted for just 2% of the newshole."
Of course, if you're built for little else than horse-race political coverage, your "newshole" may look a little different.
What happens now depends upon what version of reality is currently unfolding. If the Trump-for-president campaign is nothing more than some reality-teevee synergy, then congratulations: Trump has secured Gary Busey's endorsement, so we can basically coast from here. (Significantly, an unnamed NBC executive tells Entertainment Weekly that "our inclination is that he's not serious about running for president. We think it's a stunt."
That said, if Trump actually means to run for the White House, what happens now is that the media -- having been offered no affirmative case for a Trump presidency by the Donald upon which to consider -- will ask Trump questions, broadcast his answers, compare them with previous interviews, and by the time everything is done, he will no longer make sense to anyone rational.
Some highlights include Trump's support of the "banking and auto bailouts," his previous description of President Ronald Reagan as a con artist, his affection for Canada's single-payer health care system, and his donations to Obama White House insiders Rahm Emanuel and Bill Daley.
It's really no wonder that sometime-Alaska governor Sarah Palin recently complained that Trump was being "really treated unfairly" by the press, because to Palin, when people point cameras at politicians and report on the things they say, it constitutes "unfair treatment." (As you might recall, if you receive a statement from Sarah Palin and publish the entire thing in full without making any edits to it whatsoever, you have "treated Palin unfairly.)
At any rate, sooner or later, the actual adult candidates will officially join the race and then they will win newscycles and Trump's fortunes will fade. (Spoiler alert: Trump will "blame the media," and will never look more like a bona-fide American candidate for high office as he will in that moment.)
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Bored Media Decides To Sink Donald Trump's Candidacy [Wonkette]
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