REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

 TRUMP WON’T ADMIT THAT HIS APROACH, WAS LIMBAUGH’S APPROACH

 

                             …Rush Limbaugh and his loyal student, Donald Trump

 

Rush agreed with Trump’s statement that immigrants from Mexico were mostly rapists and other criminals.

 

Well, the man with the “Golden Microphone” has finally succumbed to stage four lung cancer.  Rush Limbaugh died on February 17, 2021.  He was only 70 years old.

It is the legend that, “Limbaugh was Trump, before Trump became Trump.”  Limbaugh, in fact, helped create Trump’s pathway to the presidency, whether the former president would ever recognized it or not.

“I didn’t know Rush at all,” Trump said in a brief interview on Fox News shortly after news of Limbaugh’s death was broken. “I had essentially never met Rush, and, then, when we came down the escalator, he liked my rather controversial speech. I made a speech that was a little bit on the controversial side, and he loved it.”

That speech, of course, was the one in which Trump suggested that immigrants from Mexico were mostly rapists and other criminals.

“And he was, without ever having met him or talked to him or had lunch with him or asked him,” Trump continued, “He was with me right from the beginning, and he liked what I said and he agreed with what I said, and he was just a great gentleman, a great man.”

Yep, just exactly what you would expect the former president to say about the man that President Donald Trump awarded the Medal of Freedom to during the 2020 State of the Union address.  It was an unprecedented move during a SOTU address. The First Lady, Melania Trump placed the medal on the visibly surprised Limbaugh.  This was only one day after the conservative talk show host had revealed that he had advanced lung cancer.

Limbaugh’s show went national in 1988, back when Trump was just a real estate developer. Limbaugh’s approach to politics by now was a now-familiar one, littered with sweeping negative comments at his political opponents.  He was without any traditional sense of propriety.  At the time, though, he was quite novel, attracting attention in much the same way that the kid in middle school first learns that having a trove of dirty jokes can build him an audience.  It was totally unapologetic and unsparing,  and it was always directed squarely at the left side of politics.

When Limbaugh had a television show in the early 1990s, his executive producer was a fellow named Roger Ailes.  The same Ailes that went on to be the founder of Fox News, the network that would eventually define conservative media nationally.  Limbaugh and other radio hosts, though, continued to press forward with a more volatile and combative type of political media, shaping the real Republican politics.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. After Republicans won the House for the first time in decades in the 1994 midterm elections, Limbaugh’s influence was fully acknowledged.

“Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone,” former congressman Vin Weber (R-Minn.) said in December of that year, as was reported by the New York Times. “The people who elected the new Congress were the people who told a pollster that they listened to 10 or more hours of conservative talk radio each week, a group that voted Republican in the midterms by a 3-to-1 margin.”

Limbaugh gave a speech to those same freshman Republicans in which he encouraged them to “leave some liberals alive” to “show our children what they were.”

What Limbaugh understood was that the accepted boundaries of appropriate conversation were often simply norms that could be ignored.  Ignore them and you could reach a lot more people.  His unapologetic toxicity was often amusing to his supporters and generally reviled by his opponents.  This was a polarization that helped fuel attention and popularity.  It’s easy to see why it would appeal to someone like Donald Trump, whose views of the Democratic establishment were highly negative and whose base was aligned with Limbaugh’s.

Limbaugh was “a lonely small-town guy who was just as smart and funny as the people who sneered at lonely small-town guys,” as The Washington Post’s Henry Allen put it in 1992.  

In a sense, this was also what Trump keyed in on. He was the voice of those same Americans largely because of the years of consuming conservative media that had adopted Limbaugh’s approach.  It had also honed Trump’s ability to speak that same language.  In the same way that Limbaugh gained notoriety by breaking the norms of political talk radio, Trump gained attention by breaking the norms of a politician seeking elected office.

Of course Limbaugh liked Trump’s first speech about immigrants from Mexico.  A few months prior to Trump, Limbaugh had suggested that immigrant children from Central America were spreading disease in the United States.  Exaggeration was his primary example, something he long defended by portraying himself as the necessary counterpoint to mainstream media that he saw as overly liberal.  Early on in his career, he responded to calls for giving the left equal time on the air with a simple rebuttal: “I am equal time!”

Trump embraced the rhetoric and stylings of conservative media that Limbaugh had helped to shape.  In doing so, Trump stood out from the more staid Republican field just as Limbaugh stood out from his competitors 25 years prior.  There had been seven presidential elections between Limbaugh being syndicated and Trump winning the nomination; only Trump embraced the “culture-war-uber-allies” approach that Limbaugh had modeled.

On Fox News, Trump praised Limbaugh for having been there “right from the beginning.”  Trump meant the beginning of his presidential run. But that’s selling Limbaugh’s influence very short. It wasn’t Limbaugh’s embrace in 2015 that made Trump president; it was his tactical rejection of the left that informed how Trump would run in the first place.

In 2016, Trump turned northeastern Ohio red for the first time in decades. His approach was Limbaugh’s approach, and at least in that region, it totally worked.

Copyright G. Ater 2021