Huffington Post Moves Coverage of Donald Trump from Politics to Entertainment

We have been talking about the Republican clown car for years, but Huffington Post has actually decided to “fire” Donald Trump and his “campaign,” as they refer to it in A Note About Our Coverage Of Donald Trump’s ‘Campaign’ yesterday, from news to entertainment.

This is their reasoning:

After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for pretender, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of the Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.

This was posted to Huffington Politics. If they are serious, this should be the last mention we should see there of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump posted his response on Facebook, in the third person of course:

Donald J. Trump Response to Huffington Post

Mr. Trump is number one in the unimportant Huffington Post poll, along with all other recently released polls including Reuters, FOX, USA Today/Suffolk University and The Economist.

Mr. Trump is in first place in Nevada, where he is also number one, by a wide margin, with Hispanics. He is number one in North Carolina and expects to win Iowa and New Hampshire.

Mr. Trump singlehandedly raised the issue of illegal immigration and started a national conversation about what has turned out to be one of the most important topics of this election cycle.

Likewise, Mr. Trump is the leader on issues such as the terrible United States trade deals, strengthening our military, taking care of our great Vets and the repeal and replacement of Obamacare.

If you read previously written Tweets, Mr. Trump has never been a fan of Arianna Huffington or the money-losing Huffington Post.

The only clown show in this scenario is the Huffington Post pretending to be a legitimate news source. Mr. Trump is not focused on being covered by a glorified blog. He is focused on Making America Great Again.

The Donald is typically full of himself, giving himself credit where it is not due – he can hardly claim to have begun the immigration debate, the discourse on bad trade deals, or, alternatives to Obamacare – but this is how the man is. He is not the first politician of either party to be full of himself. He’s just the most obnoxious.

And this is how HuffPo responded to Trump’s response:

So Trump is right up there with a sparkling Britney.

While this development is amusing, how is it that Huffington Post can separate Trump’s campaign from those of other Republican candidates who are equally “sideshows”? They won’t take the bait where Trump is concerned, but they take Ted Cruz seriously? Or Jeb Bush? Rick Santorum, for all his craziness, has never been relegated to the Entertainment section.

Even Sarah Palin, perhaps the ultimate in Republican clown shows, was never put in the Entertainment section – not even when she praised Donald Trump in June. That news also appeared in Huffington Politics.

If Trump is Entertainment, then all Republican politics for years has been Entertainment. After all, his extremism is merely the culmination of years of work by various Republican demagogues. Where do we draw the line?

There are various other reasons to object to what Huffington Post has done. For one thing, Trump is polling at the top, not the bottom of the polls. It seems to be a very serious campaign indeed. Whatever Trump really believes, the Republican base believes in him, and it is the Republican base who will be voting in the primaries, not news organizations.

Fox News cites “Rich Noyes, research director at the wingnut Media Research Center,” who “said the decision on a candidate’s legitimacy should be up to voters, not the media.”

And however much a joke we might consider him because of his loud, buffoonish behavior, Trump scares the bejeesus out of the Republican cabal. And we liberals and independents must avoid the temptation, like Republicans, to dump reality when we don’t find it lining up with our preconceptions.

David Corn at Mother Jones has voiced another valid objection. He says that “to exile Trump to the realm of the Kardashians is to let the Republican cabal off the hook too easily”:

Trump poses a crisis for his party. It may be entertaining for the Democrats to watch. But this crisis is not transpiring in TMZ-land. It’s what the Republican cabal has brought upon itself. Here is the ROI on the Republican cabal’s extreme politics.

Then too, if Trump can be sent to the Entertainment section, how about other candidates a media outlet might not like? The corporate media could as easily decide Democratic candidates are not to be taken seriously.

As moves go, HuffPo’s is not the most sensible one.

Humans have shaped their reality for thousands of years in various ways, but anyone serious about understanding it has taken the task of cataloging and defining that reality very seriously. Charles Darwin had to deal with the inconvenient reality of the platypus and we have to deal with Donald Trump. The platypus turned out to be a mammal, once we were able to sequence its genes, and is hardly the terror to evolutionists creationists might claim.

The creationists pretend the platypus’ genome has not been sequenced to make their argument against evolution. Huffington Post also rejects evolution – the evolution of Republican politics. It can, but refuses to, sequence Trump’s ideological genes in order to find his evolutionary niche.

Huffington Post says it will not take @realDonaldTrump seriously, but at this point, is there any reason to take Arianna Huffington seriously? Even Fox News, which I think we all agree is not real news, has not relegated candidates it does not approve of to the Entertainment section.