If the Circle of Jerks who make up the DC-NYC political reporter class were around for the birth of Jesus, they’d write pieces about how the dregs of society showed up, but no rich people did. The media would be on to a new story by the time the Magi showed up. By the tie Herod started slaughtering every male child under two, the Circle of Jerks would be doing stories on the emotional toll the deaths were causing to the soldiers doing the killings and doing profiles of families who escaped with enough descriptives that Herod could hunt them down and kill those kids too.

Eventually, they’d write analyses of the birth and ponder how it was really in some way about the media, not Jesus. I can hear it now.

Then the Angel of the allegedly imaginary sky god appeared and instructed us to take notes. “Do not fear for I bring tidings of good joy for all the people,” the Angel said. Then a host of angels began to sing. We talked to Joshua of Bethlehem about how the noise kept him up. We also concluded that the angels were relying on the press pool to get out their story. If it were not for us the imaginary sky god would not have been able to convey his story and the post-birth fetus might not have been bothered in the manger. Be sure to read the smart piece in the Jerusalem Times by crack reporter Judas on sanitation conditions in Bethlehem inns and mangers.

Pool Report 2:13-17

That is what the Circle of Jerks does when it covers Donald Trump. Matt Bai is just the latest to analyze the rise of Donald Trump and conclude it has everything to do with …well… Matt Bai and the media.

It’s clear that those of us who cover politics have only a limited understanding of how powerful and pervasive an antipathy now exists toward us in some sizable quarter of the electorate, and how deftly it can be used. The media that created Trump is now at his mercy, and he didn’t have to kill anyone to get here.

The whole piece reads like the blind men studying the elephant and each one concludes the elephant is something different. To be sure, antipathy toward the press has something to do with Trump’s rise, but the antipathy for the press is much more a product of antipathy for an existing social order among the political elite. The Circle of Jerks are just the ones who sit in a circle and write about it.

But Bai leaves out the whores, prostitutes, and pimps called politicians and lobbyists who have really created Trump. That the Circle of Jerks services and gets serviced by these politicians and lobbyists makes them part of the problem, but only part, not the whole thing.

Donald Trumps’ rise is first and foremost about the broken promises of the Republican Party. The party promised to seal the border and did not. The party promised not to support amnesty then tried to get it passed. The party promised to restrain Barack Obama, then handed him a blank check and hid behind judges to fight for them.

Concurrently, the public has seen Barack Obama stretch the constitutional bounds of the Presidency; squander our good will around the world, behave like a what Ralph Peters called him toward Russia, China, ISIS, and so much more; and otherwise degrade the standing of the nation while pitting American against American.

On top of that, and this is where Bai and the Circle of Jerks comes in, everyone who coddles the Circle of Jerks gets fawning treatment and those who do not look or sound like the Circle of Jerks gets excoriated. On top of that, though Barack Obama treats the Circle of Jerks like a turd on his shoe, they still get on their knees in front of him.

When candidates run for office, including Donald Trump who registered “Make America Great Again” shortly after Romney’s 2012 loss, they spend time developing a strategy. That strategy employs tactics to implement the strategy.

The strategy is the overall approach and the tactics are the day to day movements to affect the strategy. Donald Trump’s strategy is to play up voter antipathy towards failures of both sides in propping up a status quo where more and more Americans believe folks in Washington are rewarding themselves and friends while the rest of America gets the shaft.

The day to day tactics Trump is employing require him to pick public fights with those who his campaign sees as Washington elite. That elite include the press who, because they’re a Circle of Jerks, will fall all over themselves for a ratings explosion. Trump is merely taking advantage of that and can get on television shows just by picking up a phone. He does not even need to be on camera.

But it has nothing to do with the media itself. The media is just one sideshow and tactic in the overall Trump strategy. Were the press not giving Trump so much free air time, then he probably would run advertisements. Right now he does not have to. But were he to, it would not change things. It would just deny Matt Bai and so many others in the press a column on how it is all about them.