Dec 20, 2015 2 min read

Why is the media enabling Donald Trump? Nightly, I sit with my wife, alternately eating dinner, chugging Pepto-Bismol and instructing her to hit me in the head with a frying pan if I don’t turn off the evening news.

First, a prediction: this man will never be president of the United States. As much contempt as I have developed for my fellow citizens and their judgment, they will never choose Trump to lead them. So, despite his poll numbers, no one is going to actually vote for him. No one in their right mind will vote for Hillary Clinton either. Don’t ask me who that leaves.

Regarding those poll numbers, the biggest news in polling is Gallup, the world’s most preeminent polling organization, recently announced it would not be conducting polling during the presidential primary runs. Officials with Gallup have come to suspect their methodology and practices. They have good reason to worry. There were several examples in recent years of polls with absolutely no predictive power at all. And this is not just in the United States. Witness the polling before the vote for Scottish independence in 2014, which showed the vote would be much closer than it actually was.

Second, let’s have some perspective on the American attitude regarding immigration and foreigners. The idea of the “melting pot” is a relic of fifth-grade civics classes back in the day when we still did duck-and-cover exercises. America has never been a welcoming country that greeted with open arms new arrivals. Times change. People don’t. The most deeply rooted fear in the human psyche, other than the fear of death, is the fear of the “other.”

Trump should be treated like the guy who stands on a street corner wearing a tinfoil hat, banging a pot, and declaring the end is near. He’s noisy and obnoxious, but it’s best to ignore him. Eventually he’ll go away.

John Manning

Canonsburg