Above all else, the success of Donald J. Trump ’s presidential campaign was made possible by the media environment in which it was spawned, and his canny ability to exploit it. Now that same environment could very well be the thing that destroys it.
A forceful personality with an unparalleled reality-television pedigree, Mr. Trump was perfectly primed to take advantage of the increasingly happy marriage between the news and entertainment sides of the media business — becoming a textbook candidate for the modern infotainment era of which he was already a product.
It is only fitting that it was not an investigative report from the likes of NBC News that is posing the biggest threat yet to his candidacy, but a bit of raw — and, yes, deplorable — video leaked from the editing bays of a celebrity entertainment program, “Access Hollywood.”
And it is rich symbolism that the Bush family member who helped enable the most severe political damage to Mr. Trump is the “Access” host Billy Bush, not his cousin Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, who was as ill-suited for today’s media environment as Mr. Trump was tailor-made for it.
Mr. Bush — the former governor, that is — approached his campaign as if it would be operating in a normal political news environment, where at least some of the focus would be on economic and educational proposals, foreign policy plans and those words that were once so revered in Republican politics, “values” and “character."
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