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How corporate media spawned Trump 2016�

(2024 update: this review was mostly written in 2019 during Trump's 2017-2021 presidency, and I've left it mostly as is to test how much it holds up to more recent history...)

The Missing:
1) Global Trumpism:
--Taibbi's book is missing the context of Global Trumpism, so I must turn to geopolitical economy (historical + global + materialist):
i) Capitalism (society's production dictated by private profit-seeking/endless accumulation instead of social needs) unleashed the magic of banking. Credit-money is conjured out of thin air, in essence taking the anticipation of future productivity gains and bringing it to the present to invest in creating that future growth. Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
ii) This optimism for growth of course unleashes vast short-term productivity. It also leads to increasing short-termism and addiction to speculative magic.
iii) In the global stage, such boom/bust growth/competition led to increasing social crises, culminating in WWI/The Great Depression/WWII: Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
iv) WWII brought the welfare state compromise (watered-down socialist policies, finally giving birth to the redistribution needed for mass consumerism/"middle class", i.e. "Golden Age of Capitalism", centuries after the birth of capitalism), but the US-led global capitalism took mere decades to succumb to contradictions of imperialist rivalries (US military spending: Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance) and saturated markets (squeezing profits, the driver for investments; The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy).
v) Why spend time waiting for long-term investments to pay off in Fordist Industrial capitalism's profit-squeezing cost-raising ventures when you can invest in Wall Street's short-term "financial innovation" of hiding risk via gambling/Ponzi schemes/rent-seeking/monopolization/corporate raiding? The Bubble and Beyond
vi) Since capitalism hides in abstraction (public illiteracy/media propaganda), the growing economic crisis (dismantling of the welfare state compromise, lack of investments in social needs, financialization's soaring costs from rent-seeking/speculating on assets esp. housing: Why Can't You Afford a Home?) opens the door for fascist scapegoating on visible and (conveniently) vulnerable groups.
...There's a leftist saying that the "Jewish bankers/elites" conspiracy (myth) is just the capitalist conspiracy (real) manipulated for idiots (for the history of how European kings fostered antisemitism, see Debt: The First 5,000 Years). Indeed, chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels would start his speeches with critiques of capitalism, only to suddenly pivot to scapegoating (see later on how to diagnose this type of misdirection).
-fascism as colonial violence returning home: Discourse on Colonialism
-Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
-Varoufakis' lecture ""
-Vijay Prashad's lecture "
-Mark Blyth's lecture ""

2) Left Populism vs. Right Scapegoating:
--How did a billionaire businessman connect with a disgruntled public?
--Taibbi picks out a cultural aspect: Trump shares with the public the same habits of media consumption. American news consumers pick from a plethora of products tailored to their fancies. Taibbi details the rampant distrust of liberal establishment media and the resulting conspiracy theory alternative media in The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire. He compares this with Trump’s many attack stunts, most importantly his attack on mainstream media ("Fake News!") to bolster his street cred. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
--I would focus more on: when the liberal Center is in crisis, the reactionary Right relies on coopting the Left's populism (The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump). The liberal Center then censors/purges the Left, leaving a vacuum for the Right's fascist takeover (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism). "Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds"...
--This is why it's crucial to learn to distinguish Leftists critiques vs. Rightist misdirection. Media literacy is a foundational example:
a) Leftist critique of propaganda:
--Chomsky makes the crucial distinction that not all mainstream media is simply "fake". You must first consider the target audience. When the audience is capitalists/military (ex. the lengthy articles in the business press like Wall Street Journal or reports from World Bank/IMF/Pentagon etc.), there are some useful information since capitalists/military need to know real-world conditions to run their businesses/imperialism. The distortions (esp. in framing) are more prevalent when the target audience is the public, esp. op-eds and headlines.
-Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
-Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
...This is why internal oil company/military research indicating their preparations for the climate crisis is so revealing:
-Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
-All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change
b) Reactionary misdirection:
--Trump's "fake news" starts with a half-truth and distorts it with convenient cherry-picking. The above nuance is lost.
...This also relates with pseudoscience; it's crucial for us to learn various tools to counter our biases (including cherry-picking):
-Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks
-I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
-Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients

The Good
1) Accessible style:
--When I first started reading nonfiction for self-learning, it was Taibbi who introduced me to the Ponzi schemes of Wall Street (in his Rolling Stone Hunter S. Thompson writing style) in Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America:
-ex. portraying Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money�
-ex. Alan Greenspan (Federal Reserve chairman 1987-2006): "Chapter 2: The Biggest Asshole in the Universe"
...I know there's been some recent controversy around Taibbi publishing the "Twitter files" that Musk gave him and several other journalists, but I'm not looking for heroes.

2) Media Spectacle:
--Taibbi's analysis of Trump is lacking in the global materialist background I provided above (perhaps because his previous books Griftopia and The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap already cover).
--In this book, Taibbi focuses more on culture, which I prioritize less as spill-over effects (with possible distractions): the devolution of American news/mass media and political campaigns into a 24-hour reality TV show spectacle... Trump may be a political outsider but he was primed for this circus (given his career in reality TV/entertainment), and corporate media was giddy with the viewership profits.
--I would add: they gave Trump much more air-time compared with the other outsider which they censored, i.e. Bernie Sanders, the leftist populist who focused on material conditions (It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalismbusinessman con artist, picked up on this and coopted numerous Bernie talking points, mimicking Leftist populism while the Wall Street Democrats continually pushed further Right.