What accounts for Trump's popularity?

Cut me some slack, ladies! Look I have small hands. You know what that means.

I know this is my personal blog, not my political one, but there's not really much else going on besides the horrendous revelations about Donald Trump, not only what he said to Billy Bush, but the fact that he groped women's privates in exactly the way he described. They aren't really revelations, though. Personally,  I'm surprised they weren't brought out before. Two things that were obvious to me about Trump: he had no respect for women, and he had no restraint. Hey, you might have come out about the conversation before Trump became the GOP nominee.

We find out now that on Howard Stern, Trump kindly gave him permission to call his daughter a piece of ass. How generous! That's the closest thing to having a heart I've ever heard of from Trump. I would have thought someone of Trump's status would never grant anyone the right to spoil his daughter with such a title. I'm sure Howard was gratified. Maybe that's why he didn't say anything. Hey, Howard, couldn't you have given someone a call about this sooner in the process? Did you really want Trump as President?

News is that some of Trump's hot mic captures from The Apprentice are as lewd and aggressive as what he said to Billy Bush, but the producer has locked those away in a safe! Do you see the pattern here that I see? I think it's a fair, perhaps generous conclusion that the entire corporate, chain-owned media was complicit in Trump's scary rise. 

Never have I seen so many females so pissed off on the Internet. I'm convinced now this is not really an election at all. This is actually the best reality TV show ever. And who better to star in that than Donald Trump? The sixty-nine year old child-star of reality TV.

Seriously, though, three things account for Trump's rise. One is the corporate media, which did puff- pieces on Donald Trump for decades, while overlooking his shady business practices; the blight he was on all his contractors and investors; and his incredibly narcissistic/psychopathic personality. A personality so dysfunctional that if he were born into the middle class, he'd likely be in prison.
His treatment of women they presented as something whimsical. (In fact, Samantha Bee on Full Frontal, did a piece that showed this. It wasn't just Trump who verbally abused Alicia Machado. He led the news media in humiliating her.) He helped get them ratings and advertising bucks. Trump's rise is an indictment of corporate-dominated news media, chain ownership,  and a cautionary tale of the dangers in them. We really ought to correct them before this happens again, but with someone more savvy and more functional than Trump.  

The second is reality TV, which came about to break a Writers' Guild of America strike, and therefore gives me a double reason to despise RTV. It then gave Trump his own "reality" show which inadvertently promoted him and his foul self-centeredness as part of business genius. People saw his gnarly personality and associated it with success. Not only greed, but ruthlessness and rudeness was good.

The third has been the decline of education, especially higher education. There are other factors like a decline and aging of the white population, and their insecurity about losing privilege to minorities. That gave Trump a core of fans.

There are other, related things, such as the post-Reagan worship of wealth as proof of morality and intelligence. This caused Trump to get away with things for years, which as I said, would have landed him in prison.

That's likely where he'll end up. Running for President is the worst mistake he's made. After this election, when the stench of loss is on him, his followers we'll abandon him, and the next news we'll hear about him is he's arrested.