Lying About Trump Escalates As Ratings Soar. Now He’s Being Compared To Batman. Seriously

Trump TV exists, it just isn’t the brain child of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump as was anticipated back in 2016, when Trump’s presidential campaign was intended as the biggest infomercial in history for the new platform, until the unthinkable happened and he won the election. Newsmax is de facto Trump TV, down to being run by a Trump crony, Christopher Ruddy. It puttered along in the shadows until the Big Lie exploded on the scene. One man’s big lie is another man’s business opportunity and Ruddy wasted no time capitalizing on it. Newsmax became the Kraken standard bearer early on. Interviews with Strikeforce Ruddy were front and center and unreality, in the form of imaginary election fraud, was exploited for profit. The cash register was ringing. New York Times:

All successful TV programmers have some mercenary in them, of course, but even by those standards, Mr. Ruddy is extreme. He has turned Newsmax into a pure vehicle for Trumpism, attacking Fox News from the right for including occasional dissenting voices. And when Trumpism turned this month [article if from November, 2020] from an electoral strategy into a hallucinatory attempt to overturn the election, Mr. Ruddy saw opportunity: Newsmax, available on cable in most American households and streaming online, became the home of alternate reality. […]

Mr. Ruddy is hardly alone in the sudden scramble to convert Mr. Trump’s political profile into cash. […]

When I pressed Mr. Ruddy on why he was stringing along his audience with a story he can’t, really, himself believe — that Mr. Trump won the election — he didn’t really defend it. Instead, he countered that he wasn’t the only one. “For two years, the liberal media pushed this Russian hoax theory, and there didn’t seem to be any substantiation at the end of the day and it was a pretty compelling, gripping story — controversial personalities, things happened, sparks were flying,” he said. […]

Mr. Ruddy’s cynicism brings me back to the most trenchant attack from conservative media on the mainstream media: that journalists think conservatives are stupid. Tucker Carlson regularly tells his audience that the college-educated snobs in New York who preside over the major outlets view conservatives as unsophisticated rubes, misled by misinformation, not as people who actually believe in the ideas pushed by Mr. Trump, like immigration should be sharply curtailed. Those attacks on the media are often false, but the coastal media sometimes does fail to understand people who aren’t like them, left and right, and sometimes they patronize their audiences.

But nobody I’ve ever covered treats an audience with the blithe disdain of Mr. Ruddy. He has them watching a great story — a thriller, a whodunit — about a stolen election. He thinks they’re stupid enough to fall for it, dumb enough to keep watching even after the fantasy inevitably dissolves, buying the supplements and the books and, crucially, tuning in to channel 1115 in large enough numbers that, eventually, the cable companies will pay him.

Perhaps he actually thinks his viewers are that dumb. Or maybe he just needs them to stick around long enough for him to find someone just as cynical, but with more cash on hand, to buy him out.

There you have it from the horse’s mouth. There’s big money in the Big Lie and as long as that’s the case, be prepared to see anything and everything on Newsmax. Ruddy is literally going for broke. Here’s the latest, Trump as superhero.

Newsmax host Benny Johnson lists reasons why Trump is just like Batman, including that “they have a cult-like status, for throwing their privileged lives away and getting their hands dirty.” pic.twitter.com/h3S4OMnFYs

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 11, 2021

This is especially frustrating because Batman is so anti-Trump, in every way.

Batman hates the idea of an ego/pride. He rejects the idea that he is Gotham's savior, and purposefully avoids giving himself undue credit. That's a major part of his character. Trump is… NOT Batman.

— A Big Dumb Idiot Man (@BigDumbIdiotMan) July 11, 2021

It’s a cult and the way it got there, is because the most cynical and mercenary minds, who have no social conscience and don’t give a damn about this country, have chosen to make money off of the show. They’ve got a once in a lifetime freak character in Donald Trump and they’re going to exploit his uniqueness to fleece the rubes. It’s called making hay while the sun shines and as long as this window of opportunity exists to grift, the likes of Newsmax, OAN, and the denizens of right-wing talk radio are going to be right there, picking the pockets of the gullible.

The question then becomes, how do we wake the gullible up? How I wish I knew. But one point needs to be made here: somehow American values slipped far enough to where the almighty dollar has become the only motivation to do anything. No value is seen in life beyond the bottom line. It is that kind of cynicism which is going to destroy this country, I fear. It’s not Pollyannaish to put truth and respect for core American institutions on a higher plane of value than money. It’s simple human decency and integrity and that’s what we appear to have lost in large measure.