What Trump teaches Scotland. No, seriously.

Undermining the media has immunised Trump from due scrutiny and common decency.

Writing from my sedentary position in northern Scotland, I’m not best placed to comment on the atmosphere of a Donald Trump rally. I hear tell that they are hellish and hilarious in equal measure — an audience whipped into a quasi-pentecostal frenzy through ill-constructed soundbite after ill-constructed soundbite.

The great Teflon candidate of the GOP’s 2016 primary season, it seems not even Trump’s abject refusal to disavow the endorsement of a former KKK Grand Wizard is enough to destabilise his messianic mission.

For any other candidate in any other race, calling Mexicans “rapists” would have sounded the death knell for their career. In a different climate, physically mocking a journalist’s disability would have been toxic. Calling for a ban on all Muslim immigration would have been laughed out of the room, and running this long without a single concrete, costed policy would have resulted in total collapse. To run the gamut of controversy and emerge not only unscathed, but strengthened, befuddles our political sensibilities.

It’s not like the Republican electorate is unaware of these episodes. Rarely has a GOP candidate united Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly in condemnation. Turn on any television set or take a sweeping glance at Twitter, and this frighteningly brazen behaviour is there for all the world to see.

The trouble for the GOP establishment is that hard-core republicans have been fed a bumper diet of media mistrust and rejection over the last eight years.

Republicans have long taken delight in dismissing “the liberal media”. It’s convenient, especially when the facts don’t chime with your reality. During President Obama’s administration, alternative media outlets who cater for an ever growing hard-right in the GOP have taken this to the next level.

Undermining the media among this grouping has immunised Trump not just from due scrutiny, but from common decency. The louder the traditional media cries, the more inclined his supporters seem to reject their narrative.

And so a core function of any democracy — its ability to speak truth to power through an independent media — is rendered entirely impotent.

Where have we seen these patterns before? Peter Jones’ final column for The Scotsman makes for similarly sobering reading. Reflecting on a lifetime in journalism, Jones highlights the here-and-now in Scotland as a time dominated by binary partisanship, and a rejection of journalism as a balance of facts.

A growing section of Scottish society howl at any and every story that even remotely challenges their world view, to the point that many have come to reject the UK media scene altogether. It seems a large portion of nationalists prefer to get their information from RT, or blogs like Wings Over Scotland. The National is another manifestation of this hunger for the uber-partisan.

When the facts don’t fit, the facts are ignored. More and more, the traditional media’s ability to make any meaningful contribution to our democracy is waning.

“Good!,” some may cry, as they re-shape the landscape to align with their one-track world view.

Good? Take a look across the pond.