The reporter/pundit early promotion of Meatball Ron happened because they desperately wanted notTrump to appeal to Trump voters. Basically they bet on "a guy just like Trump but without all the violence and crimeing" to prove that the fine real Americans they have spent 8 years conducting deep anthropological studies about and telling us to hug at Thanksgiving wouldn't support THAT Donald Trump.
And lol of course they would.
8 years later they still mostly don't describe Trump supporters as they are, much as they pretended the TEA PARTY was actually about taxes and small government. The people whose job it is to explain things to you have spent decades pretending to believe things are other than they are.
