Donald Trump's petulant, blame-the-media strategy is getting old, fast.
Trying to bully the media is obviously a technique to reinforce the candidate’s outsider, elephant- in-the-china-shop-of-politics image, as well as distract from the answers he does or doesn’t give to tough questions.
Trump is not the first politician to dodge questions, of course. But he is probably the most colorful one, and arguably no presidential candidate before him has made it quite so dismissively personal, choosing to insult and berate the journalists at whose questions he bristles.
The Donald is clearly tapping into disaffection with a political system that often seems at odds with itself. But if he wants to be more than a bombastic, populist pan-flash, he should stop acting as though unflattering coverage or difficult questions are personal affronts to his ample ego, to be dismissed with insults to journalists in particular and journalism in general.
OK, he doesn’t play the game. We get it. But he tries to play the media, then bites the hand that has been feeding him to the public.
Of course, the news networks are benefitting from the appetite for some flash in an otherwise not very compelling Republican pre-primary run-up and a Democratic contest so far lacking in the “contest” part.
We doubt that presidential candidate Trump will change his tactics given their success to date. But they strike us as less than presidential, and more than a little troubling in the leading candidate for the Republican nomination.
