The Dylan Mulvaney Paradigm

The photo at the top is of Kaitlan Collins, the 31 year old CNN former chief White House Correspondent whose disastrous performance at Wednesday's Trump town hall caused rending of garments and gnashing of teeth in elite circles. The photo below her is Dylan Mulvaney, the trans female whose disastrous performance as a Bud Light surrogate six weeks ago has continued to cause rending of garments and gnashing of teeth in elite circles. I'm surprised at how few commentators have pointed out how much they look like each other.

Maybe if that light bulb had gone on over the head of someone like Mr Licht at CNN, the outcome of the town hall would have been different. As it is, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the sort of gadfly the Democrats need right now, characteried Donald Trump as a result of Wednesday night's performance as "the most devastating debater, probably, since Abraham Lincoln".

I didn't watch the CNN town hall Wednesday night; it was only when I saw excerpts on YouTube yesterday morning that I sat up and said uh-oh. My big takeaway was that the consensus strategy against Trump, which has been the same since 2016, isn't working. The Access Hollywood tape about grabbing body parts didn't work then, and the E Jean Carroll verdict didn't work Wednesday. Two successive impeachments on trivial charges didn't work after he was elected, and whatever indictments on trivial charges political hack DAs are able to bring against him won't work now. They'll only feed the beast.

On the heels of the Carroll verdict, the New Hampshire audience greeted Trump's entry with a standing ovation. He turned references to classified documents or January 6 into laugh lines, and the town hall loved it. Clearly both CNN and Ms Collins completely misread the national mood, but the rest of corporate media was taken by surprise as well. Don Surber reviews the universal editorial shock, with the most apoplectic at Vanity Fair:

Vanity Fair’s review began, “CNN’s decision to host a prime-time town hall with Donald Trump already looked like a terrible idea going into Wednesday night, and now it looks like, well, whatever is German for ‘letting an insurrection-inciting sociopath take a [redacted] in your collective mouth on live TV—and get applause for it.’”

This simply echoes the consternation in corporate circles over the completely unexpected public reaction to the Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney not-a-formal-campaign:

Bud Light’s controversial marketing deal with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney has ignited speculation that top executives at corporate parent Anheuser-Busch may have been blindsided by the tie-up when it was revealed.

. . . “Some low-level marketing staffer who helps manage the hundreds of influencer engagements they do must have thought it was no big deal,” according to an unnamed source cited by the Daily Wire.

“Obviously it was, and it’s a shame because they have a well-earned reputation for just being America’s beer — not a political company.”

The deal was, of course, the brainchild of a well-regarded marketing VP with degrees from Harvard and the Wharton School who'd already telegraphed her intentions to remake the Bud Light brand on social media. She clearly felt she had at least the tacit endorsement of the higher-ups, and her boss took the fall with her when the Mulvaney deal went south. This was no corporate whoopsie, this was a high-level, high-stakes and disastrous misreading of the US Public.

By the same token, CNN's peers are blaming CNN for a similar misreading of how Trump would handle the town hall. Various commentators have pointed out the contradictions in their format: it was the first event in the 2024 Republican primary season, but it featured only Trump, and the idea was that Trump was there to debate Ms Collins, who was thought to represent all bien pensant opinion, not other Republicans. But it was with an audience that had been selected deliberately to represent Republican or undecided voters. My surmise is that CNN expected the foreordained outcome to be a win for the Nurse Ratched team, who'd then go on to scold the Republican audience as a bunch of Neanderthals.

Instead, Trump played to the audience CNN gave him, which he clearly understood much better than CNN did, and he debated a woman whose public persona actually wasn't too far afield from Dylan Mulvaney -- look at the insipid smirk on her face in the photo above. The nicest characterization of their encounter was that he wiped the floor with her, but Vanity Fair's suggestion that he took a [redacted] in her mouth is closer.

Dylan Mulvaney is becoming a paradigm for the current public mood, and the corporate elites are continuing to misread it.