By Andrew Levine

April 13, 2020 "Information Clearing House" -  Donald Trump is a paradoxical creature. On the one hand, he resembles nothing so much as a dumbass teenage boy, and, on the other, a barfly, long in the tooth and good for nothing but mouthing off.

This from an obese septuagenarian who doesn’t drink and who, unlike Richard Nixon, his only near rival in political depravity, is as unconflicted and intellectually shallow as they come.

Nixon was good at many things. In politics, Trump is good at only two.

One is using corporate media to his own advantage. To be sure, Trump has Fox News and talk radio, propaganda assets Nixon could hardly have dreamed of, in his pocket, but they were in place, dumbing down and otherwise doing harm, long before he came onto the scene. What Trump has managed to do is to get the ostensibly respectable cable networks, CNN and MSNBC, to offer him their platforms for free.

This, as much as Hillary Clinton’s politics and her failures as a candidate, helped him get elected in 2016. It is helping him stay afloat now, even as the utter incompetence of his handling of the on-going covid-19 crisis that he did so much to exacerbate becomes stunningly clear to anyone not hellbent on denying the obvious.

CNN’s and MSNBC’s hatred of the Donald is as palpable as it is justified, and yet he plays them like a fiddle.

The other thing he is good at is turning the GOP into an instrument of his will.