Trump is a media genius at winding-up the liberal left

The President-elect, one should never tire of pointing out, has just had to settle a fraud case over his defunct Trump University for $25m. The man who described Hillary Clinton as “crooked” – and cited the worst ever crimes in presidential history over some piddling emails (the details of which no-one sane can now remember) – has had to pay a fortune to prevent his humiliation in court. The news broke on Friday. It is, or should be, a huge story (so bad) as Trump would say if it involved anyone else.

But something else entirely is getting most of headlines and media attention. The cast of the hit musical Hamilton read a rather dignified statement out at the end of their show last night on Broadway. It was addressed to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was in the audience with members of his family. Some members of the audience booed. What stood out was the respectful way in which the cast had framed their expression of valid concern about the treatment of minorities contemplating the most troubling US government of modern times, elected thanks to the ineptitude of the Clinton machine.

Trump tweeted an unpresidential but acutely observed response:

“The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!”

Perhaps you dislike Trump so much that you can’t see what he’s doing here, but it should be obvious. He’s toying with his critics, playing them at their own game, by acting offended and (rightly) mocking the ultra-liberal concept of “safe spaces.” He’s joking, but in doing so he is also making a serious point that will appeal to exactly the people who won him the election. Those who have had enough of liberals looking down on them and policing their speech and tastes.

That voter in Michigan or Ohio who hears that the cast of a Broadway musical is annoyed with Trump and Pence is unlikely to be bothered. They are more likely to be amused at the lack of self-awareness and whining of the liberal left types they wanted to send a message to on election day.

But Trump’s tweet was also obviously aimed at creating a distraction when people should surely be focused on the real news in the Trump University fraud case. As quite a few people on social media have pointed out, falling for this and getting annoyed about Trump’s tweeting is to play the game by his rules.

Trump is, it should be apparent by now, a new media genius, skilled at driving his opponents mad. This causes otherwise reasonable people to make fools of themselves and, in a rage at his obvious muppetry, to exaggerate and become incoherent. The attacks on some – some – of Trump’s initial appointments have been out of proportion.

In the campaign the Trump-inspired mania led to Robert de Niro spoiling an otherwise brilliant attack on the Donald, by threatening to punch him in the mouth. He had got into the gutter with Trump, and was demeaned. Equally, millions of us let out howls of rage on election night. But the world moves on, and if you’re suspicious or worried about Trump it is better, surely, to keep a clear head, to try to understand the phenomenon and to stay alert.

In that vein, the world over non-Trump mainstream conservatives (and Trump is not a conservative) need to regroup and rethink. Meanwhile, the liberal left needs surely to realise that the obsession with snowflake identity politics is an electoral and cultural dead end.

As Mark Lilla said in the New York Times this weekend:

“The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country.”

Yep.