Is a Guy Like Trump the Exception?

As Donald Trump finally seems to be imploding, Matt Taibbi wrote:
“There are not many places left for this thing to go that don't involve kids or cannibalism.”
Trump’s party still doesn’t seem to know how to handle the situation:
“The strategy seemed to be to pretend none of it had happened, and to hide behind piles of the same worn clichés.”

Assuming Trump is toast, the next question is whether he was a one-off case of such a candidate reaching this far? Tiabbi is not so sure. After all, he says:
“All 16 of the non-Trump entrants were dunces, religious zealots, wimps or tyrants, all equally out of touch with voters.”
John Scalzi is even more alarmed. Here’s why:
“Donald Trump is not a black swan… He is the end result of conscious and deliberate choices by the GOP, going back decades, to demonize its opponents, to polarize and obstruct, to pursue policies that enfeeble the political weal and to yoke the bigot and the ignorant to their wagon.”
In American lingo, GOP is short for Trump’s party.
“He was planned. He was intended. He was expected. He was wanted. But not, I think, in the exact form of Donald Trump… They don’t control Trump, which they are currently learning to their great misery.”
And so says Scalzi:
“The GOP created a monster, but the monster isn’t Trump. The monster is the GOP’s base. Trump is the guy who stole their monster from them, for his own purposes.”

If Scalzi is right in saying that the problem is how the voters have become (not just a candidate), then what’s the solution? After all, a party will do what the (majority) voters want; the party won’t try to “reform” people because that would be suicidal politically.

All of that is why Jeff Jarvis feels the media needs to step up to the task:
“The answer begins with empathy — empathy not with Trump’s racism, misogyny, and hatred, of course, but with the real lives of at least some of the people who are considering voting for him.”
Jarvis is aware of the uphill nature of the task:
“Because media demonstrated that we did not hear, care about, or understand them, they did not trust the rest of what we had to tell them.”
On paper, the solution is to strike a balance between opposing views while reporting. Then again, hasn’t that concept been corrupted for other ends?
“False balance is used to justify friction and fighting on the air.”

So while there’s no clear solution (yet), it’s something perhaps we too need to start thinking about: isn’t out politics just as polarizing and demonizing? Isn’t our media perceived to just as biased and only chasing “fighting on the air”?

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