I notice that 18% put him in the lead at that time. I imagine there were a lot more Republicans who like him but preferred someone else(I think a lot of people erroneously assumed he'd be overtaken by a less extreme candidate as the field narrowed). As for the conspiracy theories, I could be wrong but I have my doubts…

Bernie supporters who brought up rally size as a reason why he'd be a better nominee than Hillary need to remember that Ron Paul had big rallies too.

We're really just a bunch of swine.

Does anyone know if it was a writer's mistake or character's mistake when Doc Brown said "I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady!" when Ronnie was already married to Nancy by that time?

There are way more people who support Trump than believe in those things.

YouTube was created in February 2005.

Linda Tripp.

His face broke the scale on the Shkrelimeter.

Did he murder every AVClub commenter's dog or something?

Yeah, but there are millions of regular people who support Trump, and those millions of people are why NBC did what they did. If hardly anybody had supported Trump or watched The Apprentice, they would've have let him on.

"He's ruined even more businesses than I have!"

There he is! There he is! It's the Great Pumpkin! He's falling out of the Presidential race!

I don't really buy the idea that there's no such thing as bad publicity, especially since bad publicity has sunk quite a few presidential campaigns. Trump's been an exception until now, but I think that's pretty unusual.

OK, I will admit to being underinformed on the subject. However, I don't think I have to be an expert to say that their exposure didn't make it inevitable that people would love them so much. There are plenty of ubiquitous entertainers who aren't nearly as beloved as they are/were.

OK, but there are so many different news sources now that people can just reject any news sources they don't like, no matter how accurate, and just go with those news sources that reinforce their worldviews, so I wonder how much reporting of what Trump actually is would change people's opinions.

Maybe, but part off why the media introduced so many people to the Beatles was enough people liked them already for the media to give them even more exposure.

Well, of course the media benefits from covering Trump. I'm skeptical about how much Trump benefits from all the exposure. Bad publicity has killed many a candidacy, and what's unusual about Trump is how little damage it's done to his campaign(and now we may be seeing the limits of how much bad publicity his campaign…

It's true they don't really hate the media, just the "mainstream" media. However, the fact that people pick and choose their own media to follow is part of why I think it's misguided to blame the media for pushing Trump on us.

So now you're saying that NBC's mostly given up on being tasteless in recent years. So it seems to me like the reason they didn't get rid of Trump after all the Birther stuff wasn't because they were trying to attract an audience for tasteless crap that ABC and CBS would shy away from, but that they were doing exactly…

It may be wrong, but why blame the corporations more than their consumers?