The Trump Dilemma (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

I was informed last week — on Facebook, my social media drug of choice — of these facts:

• The media created Donald Trump;
• The media are pawns of Donald Trump;
• The media are busy pursuing an agenda;
• If the media had any integrity, they would refuse to cover Donald Trump so that he would go away.

And even though the first two are mutually exclusive and the fourth would be blatant fulfillment of the third, all four came from the same person. She saw no irony, no contradiction or conflict at all, in scolding “the media” for pursuing an agenda while demanding that media integrity means pursuing her preferred agenda.

Folks, Donald Trump is the front-runner for the nation’s highest office among candidates from one of the two major parties. The media didn’t create his popularity, but neither can it be ignored — unless we trust the media to decide which major-party front-runners deserve to be covered and which do not. (Tip: Even the media don’t think that’s a good idea.)

I confess to baiting my Facebook scold, who clearly believed that “the media” are a monolith. But the media comprise everything from the Stuttgart Daily Leader to The New York Times, from KLRE to Rush Limbaugh, from “The Bozo Show” to “Breaking Bad.” Trump was a media mainstay long before he ran for president, and responsible news organizations have no choice as to whether to cover the Republican front-runner, no matter who that is.

John Burris, the political consultant and former Republican state representative, didn’t blame the media for the Trump phenomenon — at least not that I saw. But he did declare this “cold hard fact” on Facebook: The GOP is “desperately trying to make him go away” while the Democrats are “desperately trying to make him stay.”

I don’t know what desperate acts the Democrats have taken to make Burris say that, but there’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton has taken the opportunity to equate Trump with the entire Republican Party. And she’s only able to do that because, contrary to Burris’ cold hard fact, the GOP has not desperately tried to get rid of him.

Quite the contrary, in fact. Instead of telling Trump that he isn’t welcome because he doesn’t represent the values of the Republican Party, Chairman Reince Priebus agreed to be nice to Trump so that the big guy wouldn’t run as an independent.

Maybe Priebus wasn’t up to the job of negotiating with the author of “The Art of the Deal.” Every time Republicans try to distance themselves from Trump’s attempts to alienate the very voters the party needs to attract more of, Trump threatens to take his supporters and run as an independent. And that threat is more meaningful as time passes; among likely Republican voters, Trump’s popularity has continued to inch upward.

If the GOP had thrown him out months ago, the media wouldn’t be treating him as the Republican front-runner because, well, he wouldn’t be. Instead of neutralizing him, Priebus’ deal has immunized Trump. Instead of protecting the party, Priebus made the party vulnerable to exactly the kind of broad-brush guilt-by-association that Clinton is using.

There’s only one question that Republicans need to be able to answer when it comes to choosing a nominee: Which states (and it must be plural) can this candidate win that Mitt Romney lost?

Trolling through Securities & Exchange Commission filings is not one of my favorite activities, but I devoted a lot of hours to it last week because the No. 1 interest of Arkansas Business readers is what I call OPM — other people’s money. The result is the annual list of the state’s top stockholders. (Wal-Mart’s Greg Foran No. 1 In Exec Pay At $19.5M)

If you decide to spend your lunch hour perusing those 117 listings, ranked by the total value of publicly disclosed stockholdings as of Dec. 4, pay attention to the last column. That’s the annual dividend paid on each share.

The Walton family has 1.62 billion shares of Wal-Mart stock, and each share will generate $1.96 in dividends this year — almost $3.2 billion in cash that isn’t subject to the stock market’s whims. And that’s still $2.5 billion after the maximum tax of 20 percent.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.