It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's The Donald in the News!

Tomgram: Engelhardt,| TomDispatch

Crimes of the Trump Era (a Preview) 
The 25/8 News Cycle Is Already Rolling, But the Looting of America Hasn’t Really Begun 
By Tom Engelhardt

It started in June 2015 with that Trump Tower escalator ride into the presidential race to the tune of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” (“But there's a warnin' sign on the road ahead, there's a lot of people sayin' we'd be better off dead, don't feel like Satan, but I am to them...") In a sense the rockin’ has never stopped and by now the world, free or not, has been rocked indeed.  No one, from Beijing to Mexico City, Baghdad to Berlin, London to Washington could question that.

Who today remembers that, in those initial moments of his campaign, Donald Trump was already focused on the size of his first (partially hired) crowd?  (“This is beyond anybody’s expectations.  There’s been no crowd like this...”)  And he’s been consistently himself ever since -- less a strong man than a bizarrely high-strung one.  In the process, while becoming president, he emerged as a media phenomenon of a sort we’ve never seen before.

Cont....