Did Fox News Create the 'Trump Monster'?

At the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky “confirms” what many have been suggesting: That the Republican Party, abetted by Fox News, “created the Trump monster.”

First, Tomasky dives into all kinds of polls showing the “Tasmanian Devil candidate” still going strong, still on the rise — you can read the numbers here— and expresses his opinion that, if he and the polls are right, “this process is officially beyond anyone’s ability to predict…” etc., etc. (You can read that here, too.)

But what especially piqued my interest is his second point:

The second thing we’re to make of this is that Fox and the Republican Party have created this new reality. When you spend years nodding and winking and yuk-yuking about the President’s birth certificate, how can you be surprised when the guy who has repeatedly demanded to see it turns out to be really popular with your base? You promote a politics that attacks women not merely for having abortions but for wanting to use contraception, and then you’re shocked when your hard-shell voting base turns out not to be overly offended by remarks like Trump’s?
.
Indeed Roger Ailes recognized all this when he decided to make nice with Trump Monday. In the first instance Ailes did it because Trump has leverage, and the Donald’s threat not to go on his air meant a heavy hit in the ratings department. Ailes was also certainly feeling the blowback from his core audience–the kinds of tweets I alluded to above. And beyond all that, somewhere deeper down, Ailes knows that Fox made Trump, politically, and that the two are made for each other.
.
The Republican Party and Fox permitted and encouraged Trumpian vitriol for years. All that talk over the years about birth certificates and Kenya and terrorist fist-jabs (remember that one?!) and the moocher class and the scary brown people and all the rest of it…all of it created a need for a Trump, and for other Trump-like candidates, to flourish. Now it threatens to overtake them. If they’re wondering who created Trumpism, I have someplace they can look. The mirror.

Some Fox food for thought.