Could Clinton have won with 'weird'? No, I think the political media was already in the tank by that point.

In the discussion over Weird is the Path over at The Other Place, commenter Dalbert asks a pretty good question:

I always thought Hillary should have leaned into her “basket of deplorable” comment once she had said it. Her equivocation and backing off from that when those in media joined in with the right’s attacking her is perhaps a seminal moment in our  politics of the past 8 years.

So, had she gone with weirdo, and hit it again and again and again, how do you think that may have changed things?

Yeah, that's a tough one. Mocking Trump directly was always effective when she could do it. To a large extent, the "deplorable" pushback was more a media creation than a genuine campaign problem, because the people who were offended by “deplorable” were not gettable, even if they said they were. It was obvious Trump was a racist, a liar, and cruel beyond words and that his support came in very large part from Americans who thought those were good things rather than bad things; anyone riled by Hillary Clinton pointing that out could hardly be called sincere.

But Clinton’s main problem was that the press, meaning NYT, CNN, and the networks, immediately began playing along with Trump by granting him distinguished-person status despite his demonstrable inability to articulate any ideology or policy that wasn’t just the stream-of-consciousness ramblings Trump uses to try to search for applause lines.

In their absolutely poisonous attempts to ingratiate themselves to power rather than question it, the media made the conscious “both sides” decision to treat racists, misogynists, con artists and unabashed hoaxcrafters as legitimate “equals” worthy of standing alongside people who are not those things. That was the toxic choice that spawned everything else, and the political press did it for their own self-gratification. The media legitimized white nationalism and anti-democratic efforts, granting them “mainstream” status on television and bringing what was once back-alley John Bircherism, neo-Nazism “great replacement” nonsense and other conspiracy-minded stews out of the shadows and into studios with red-white-and-blue color schemes and dramatic intro music.

Once the media—I say media and not ‘journalists’ because there are perhaps ten political ‘journalists’ who exist in all of America and all the rest are hairdos who scramble to provide entertainment rather than information—granted glib liars and known cranks this legitimacy, the public followed, money to the far-right started pouring in, and racist anti-democratic billionaires who had previously showed at least a little situational wariness when propping up fringe white nationalist and authoritarian voices lost that wariness and started dumping money into the cause.

That has been the other half of the equation: After billionaires were granted the Supreme Court “right” to dump any amount of money into politics they liked, they naturally started pouring money into whichever sub-movements were most amenable to declaring that billionaires owed society nothing and government attempts to regulate the pollution their companies might unleash or their ability to decide which employees deserve which rights. Corporations have long been fascism's most powerful enablers, because democracy imposes limits and fascism—at least during the early days, when they have not yet been granted enough power to unilaterally shutter whichever companies find themselves in the movement's oft-incoherent disfavor—promises to impose none.

So in the end I believe that we saw in Trump's rise had not much to do with Hillary Clinton but a great deal to do with the media's choice to legitimize known propagandists, conspiracy cranks, and brazenly anti-democratic groups as merely the "other side" to be balanced against policy, facts, and democratic ideals. It granted legitimacy, which led to funding, which led to power, and now we find ourselves in a moment where those voices could well seize and dismantle our very democracy—and still, the national press declares that it must stay indifferent to those implications, and continue to treat even the supporters of an attempted coup as supposedly legitimate political voices.

Always Punch Nazis. That is one of the most consequential lessons of the last century; granting legitimacy to even the smallest movement of violent thugs can only result in a nation overrun by them. Hillary’s loss was in majority part due to long-simmering corruptions in the “press” that became so rampant, in media’s power-seeking obsequiousness, that even brazenly fascist voices and known propagandists were granted Serious Person press coverage rather than being scorned as dishonest and ignorant anti-American creeps. Media companies are being even more brazen in rigging their coverage this time around, with "Biden verbal gaffe" stories dominating frontpages while the equally elderly Trump's bizarre ramblings get cleaned up and not even mentioned.

Those media companies are weird too, after all. It takes an amazing amount of gall to fete crackpots who ramble about the need to ban books and jail librarians as just another tomato in the great American stew. We're not likely to see the end of the American fascist movement until we somehow manage to shame the utterly shameless New York Times, CNN, NBC and every other media outlet into again treating them as the fringe lunatics they so plainly are.