As Justin Ling said on his CBC podcast series about American right-wing talk radio, “And these radio hosts start to look at Trump like one of their own. When he gets attacked, they are the ones cheering him on from the side lines.”

The radio hosts rallie to Trump’s side no matter how outrageous he was. When he said he could grab women by the pussy they supported Trump. When he said John McCain was not a war hero because he was captured and he liked soldiers who were not captured, the radio hosts stood by him.

As Brian Rosenwald said,

“What happens most of the time, is these media and the left and these lords of political correctness they say this, and person tucks his tail between his legs and disappears. They go away. They abide by the judgment. [with enthusiasm] This guy is not doing that. And he very much realizes his audience is fed up. They are fed up with Republicans who don’t seem to get results. They are fed up with these Republicans they see as playing the Washington game. And they want someone who is just going to be an unvarnished champion who is going to fight for them in their battles and when he sees it makes the left angry is going to say, “Good! You deserve to be angry.”

The Trump supporters wanted a wrecking ball, not a ballroom dancer. And that is what they got.

It did not matter much to them what he wrecked either. The entire establishment deserved to be wrecked. His supporters loved it when he wrecked things and the left and the establishment and their media peons got mad.  The madder the left got the more the Trumpsters liked it.

 Of course, the Republican establishment was horrified by Trump’s rise. They didn’t want a wrecking ball. They had too much to lose. The Trumpsters had nothing to lose. By Trumpsters here I do not mean all of Trump’s supporters. He had plenty of support in the establishment too. They just thought they could control Trump. They thought Trump  would be their wrecking ball and he would not wreck them! By in large, of course, they were right. After he was elected, he no longer wanted to drain the swamp. He wanted to wallow in the swamp! The line about draining the swamp was all for show. That’s what Trump did best: be the showman. Not the real man.

While the Republican establishment thought Trump would fail and their supporters would desert him, the right-wing radio hosts recognized him as one of their own. They saw in Trump a fellow traveler. They wanted the rage machine. They did not want any namby-pamby lily-livered leaders. They wanted anger. And nothing less would do.

Matt Lysiak  the author of  The Drudge Revolution: The Untold Story of How Talk Radio, Fox News, and a Gift Shop Clerk with an Internet Connection Took Down the Mainstream Media Hardcover  explained that all of this was instrumental to the rise of Trump. As he said,

“Donald Trump would not have finished in the top three in the GOP primary if it weren’t for Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge. I will explain why. The populist wave in media has been growing from Rush Limbaugh and then blown up by Matt Drudge. And without that opening somebody like Donald Trump could not even run. When they said, ‘we’re supporting him, everybody under their conservative ecosystem followed suit.”

They all bought into a wrecking ball for president, and that is exactly what they got.

The Republican establishment was cowed.  Jeb Bush had worked for years building up support and financial help, but he was out of the running for the GOP nomination in no time during the 2016 Republican presidential primary race. So too were all the other “normal” Republican candidates.  All were traded for a wrecking ball. According to Matt Lysiak the two people who deserved most of the credit for this were both from talk radio—Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge.

American talk radio had produced a king. A King who raged.