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The Media Created Trump and His Voters

Liberals ensured that he would win.

I called it for Trump months ago — they said I was wrong. Like Hillary’s foreign policy of pouring bombs over burning countries, she attempted to counter Trump’s hate-filled campaign with a kind of liberal offensive. All the accusations of sexual assault, racism, and general idiocy against him and his voters did nothing for Hillary’s campaign other than burn it from the inside out. All the claims that this was about advancing women did nothing to sway millions of female voters against her. Hillary’s camp seemed naive and desperate — they said I was wrong.

Election 2016 was a Reality TV program designed for multiple cable news networks, paid for by campaign financing worth over a billion dollars. Trump’s supporters were created by the same media that appeared to attack Trump. They fully elevated his campaign. The best way to attack a candidate is to give them no screen time, and no voice. Jill Stein got less news coverage for joining the Dakota Access Pipeline protest than Gary Johnson did for calling Trump a pussy, and certainly much less time than Trump got for grabbing pussy. That is the world our corporate media wants us to live in.

The Trump voter was carefully developed over the course of decades. By inflating the wealthy celebrity on The Apprentice, by covering his personal life, never discussing his roots as a racist slumlord, the denial of our rotting social fabric continued, unabated.

The GOP doesn’t know their voters like Trump knows them.

The Trump brand flourished and a craving consumer audience waited for someone like him to become President while being fed characters like Mitt Romney from the detached and utterly naive conservative elite who claimed to know them. The GOP doesn’t know their voters like Trump knows them.

Hillary’s strategy to elevate Trump early in the primaries was hinged on a belief that she could appear as a better leader by comparison. Hillary’s coordination with the DNC to sideline Bernie Sanders, combined with her hateful attacks on his professional character, demonstrated only her trickery, not her leadership. She used the media to accomplish these goals and its audience turned the tables on her. You don’t need Wikileaks to see this charade, but they confirmed everything that many of us were suspicious about.

After the DNC succeeded in digging its grave, the media ran three debates that were not just uninformative, they were misinformative. Both sides managed to spout nonsense most of the time. They insulted our intelligence and most of us just shook our heads when our opponent spoke.

If Americans truly had self-respect, we would not accept debates that primarily pivot around who can be the most corrupt. We would ask for different candidates or invite third parties to balance it out. Instead, we took in all their lies and decided which ones to believe.

Certainly, failed neoliberal policies have something to do with the Trump revolution. From trade deals to health care to bailouts to terrorism, Obama has not delivered a good deal. But more than anything, an out of touch Republican establishment really believed their voters were too stupid to see they were doing a terrible job in Congress. The GOP believed they could run another Bush and win.

Democrat and Republican elites have all lost this round to the people — but I don’t believe that this will turn out well for them. The people will be let down.

Very few people are truly happy with the end game that America appears to be arriving at, after eight years of almost-no-change. Obama’s approval ratings are up, but much like all the polls that The New York Times promised in Hillary’s favor, I’m having a hard time believing it.

According to the media, I have been wrong about almost everything while it was happening. The false election of Gore was obvious to me but the media didn’t report why, they simply hyped the recount process because that’s what kept me glued to the TV and watching commercials as Florida counties slowly flipped for Gore.

A media that cannot think beyond the 24-hour news cycle also cannot see right from wrong.

There was no investigative journalism. That information vacuum gave rise to a false narrative that Nader blew the election and that Bush won a majority of votes fair and square. He didn’t deserve to be President. Neither does Hillary now.

Bush went on to let 9/11 happen, launched two endless wars, set an economic time bomb, and he did it with The Clintons. The mainstream media protected his narrative by reporting on everything after it was too late. A media that cannot think beyond the 24-hour news cycle also cannot see right from wrong.

Mobilizing to counter Trump

The urge to break into media began when I felt my voice wasn’t represented anywhere. It has been incredibly difficult earning the traffic and the resources I need to build THRU.

The success of Trump motivates me to pursue media more than ever. I can sense the dissatisfaction for mainstream news boiling over, so there is a lot of energy to be had from that discontent. There is much creativity in it. We can build new media platforms, amplify voices of integrity, and turn away from the deceit we’ve been willingly echoing on our social media outlets.

We cannot rebuild our broken media system by taking sides with either Fox or CNN, Zero Hedge or InfoWars. Almost everyone with a powerful voice in media screwed up this whole thing. The Times aligned to Hillary and falsely boosted our confidence when they needed to remain impartial and allow the best contender to beat Trump.

This morning, millions of Bernie supporters feel that he had the best shot at defeating Trump. The debates would have been entirely different, forcing Trump to discuss policy, not how crooked his opponent was.

While Hillary believed all Bernie supporters would have voted for her in the end, she was wrong. But it seems obvious at this point that every Democrat would have voted for Bernie; add to the balance progressives, independents, and millennials, and he would have offset the Trump vote ipso facto.

The world is changing now. It is time for platforms that hand over the source material, like Wikileaks, to be the first step in facilitating discussion. We’ve been allowing media outlets to conceal the primary source material and make their story the first step in the narrative. This cannot serve our best interests, especially when profit is the end-all motivation.

Truth is not up for debate, it is not up to a panel of experts to dish out in between commercial breaks. It is not on one editor to decide. Truth is or is not. It does not stoop to our level. This is only possible by clearing away the brush and finding it.

After taking time away from this project, I’m going to push harder than ever to build THRU as a social platform for serious and inquisitive people, regardless of political affiliation, to dig into the facts and come up with legitimate reports that exceed the standards of mainstream media in thoroughness.

Trump is not the problem. His voters aren’t the problem. We’re all under the thumb of deliberate public relations machinations, but most of us, liberal or not, can’t see it. If you can, it is your responsibility to wake others up. Media is how you can do it, and you no longer have to wait for Anderson Cooper to deliver it. The time is now, the medium is ours.


This opinion is based upon the experiences of the writer, including past research and the election news at large, but no source material directly contributed to this piece.

Correction: Previously, Hillary Clinton was reported to have lost the popular vote, so this article was updated to reflect that.

Sean Ongley

By Sean Ongley

Co-Founder of THRU Media. A background in non-profit, music, and radio preceded my ambitions here. Now, I aspire to produce new media and publish independent journalism at this site and beyond.

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