An American academic told me that during the 2016 presidential election nobody in academia believed there was the faintest chance Donald Trump would win. Except for the primatologists, that is.

It was that silverback gorilla, alpha male thing – and Trump played the role freakishly well. One election tweet showed him enthroned in his private jet eating a KFC meal, gravy and all. This said ‘I have a Boeing 757 with monogrammed headrests, but I eat the same food as you.’ That’s anthropological gold, right there. No one could imagine Hillary Clinton eating KFC – she’d be hospitalised by a trip to Nando’s.

It’s an old marketing ploy. To differentiate yourself, you ostentatiously do things your competitor is culturally incapable of doing without looking inauthentic or losing status among their peers. If you have a humourless competitor, tell jokes.

Once in power, Trump pioneered something equally cunning, which virtually no other politician had tried before. He insulted journalists. To many conservatively minded people there is a natural hierarchy of things, in which an elected president of the most powerful nation on Earth sits above mere representatives of the fourth estate. For these people, the current impertinent style of media questioning violates the natural pecking order. Trump’s rudeness restored it. Leftists only punch up. Right-wing people sometimes punch down.

To his audience, seeing the impertinent media chimp being slapped back by the alpha was an enjoyable restoration of the natural order of things, a bit like the only scene anyone remembers from A Few Good Men. Trump knew this – he had presented wrestling on television for years. The leitmotif of wrestling, a highly conservative art form, sees the impertinent challenger being slapped down by the acknowledged champion.

Even when Trump spoke egregious nonsense, this disdain for his questioners allowed him to speak his mind, rather than trying to dodge disdainful questions. The reason populist candidates (Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson, Trump etc) do well electorally is they don’t play by media rules. When the rules are stacked against you, that’s the only way to play.

I write this because I am not a journalist. And something that seems obvious to me that will not be obvious to journalists is that the rise of popularism and extremism, combined with a loss of faith in institutions, has much less to do with social media and much more to do with relentless negativity in conventional reporting. When everyone reporting on government is trying to be Woodward and Bernstein, when even sane politicians of both colours are treated with supercilious disdain, something will give. No commercial brand could survive this.

The upshot of this is that politicians no longer try to improve anything. They simply respond to issues, thus compounding the problem further. Even when you hand people money, the lead story is ‘…and critics say it’s too little too late’.

One answer to this – only a partial answer, mind – is to recreate a Central Office of Information. A perfectly important function of government is to help people make better use of its services, and point out where government can be useful. The government spends almost no time or money doing this. Its advertising spend is less than B&Q and Specsavers combined.

People sometimes ask me why I don’t go into politics. I explain John Major put me off. Those with long memories will remember his ‘Cones hotline’. Granted, it wasn’t a cure for cancer, but it was a helpful idea people could use in daily life. It was met with media derision. Why? If I ever did go into politics, I’d go into local government, where you might be allowed to do something positive occasionally.

The post What the media is doing to our politics appeared first on The Spectator.