With NBC severing all ties with Donald Trump, his campaign message seems to be that he’s too racist for network television but perfect for the White House. But before he can get that far, he has to win the Republican Party nomination.
That seems rather unlikely, but I don’t think his main problem will be his stance on immigration. Getting fired by a major network is probably an asset for him as he can play the victim and accuse the liberal media executives of cowardice in the face of the political correctness police. It’s like a badge of honor to be silenced by media executives in New York City. I bet that Bobby Jindal would love to get hired by CBS just so he could say something so outrageous that it would get his contract ripped up and he could milk it for all it’s worth.
Normal rules no longer apply to Republican politics, so you can pretty much piss off the establishment in almost any way you want to and not have it hurt your standing with the Republican base. In most cases, making respectable people shudder in horror is the surest way to get a boost in the polls. Donald Trump certainly understands this.
His problems are different. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. And he’s going to have a problem passing the basic electability sniff test. Thrilling the Republican base isn’t enough on its own to win the nomination because there are practical voters who have the ability to think rationally enough to figure out that, yes, Alan Keyes may be making an enormous amount of sense, but he will never be acceptable to most voters whose cerebral cortex is still connected to their central nervous system. So, for Trump, he loses some base voters for not knowing their script and he fails to make up for it with “common sense” conservatives who still have enough empathy to project accurately about what normal people will think is insane.
Trump will lose, but not because the media treat him as a pariah or because he’s too racist.
