This column has been updated. See below.

#Trumpness

The Trump candidacy continues to fire up Republican primary voters and dominate political news coverage and the social web – and that’s a very strange sentence to write two months after he declared his candidacy and with one debate already aired for a record-breaking large audience. The Donald is not flaming out.

Three of the aspects of social media that make it so popular are its informality, its ability to succinctly and effectively convey messages and the way it encourages multimedia creativity. This week, Kelly Maher, director at candidate tracking group Revealing Politics, drew a pie chart of the comments on Trump coming through her digital channels and posted it at her Facebook account. The scrawled chart brilliantly summarizes the conundrum and the power of Trump’s candidacy so far.

The vast majority of comments, she says, are not about Trump’s policy proposals, whatever they may be, or his ideology, if one exists. Rather, they’re complaints about the attention Trump is getting, which only add to the attention he is getting. The pie chart captures the fact that the candidacy above all is about getting attention, and the pie chart also demonstrates the campaign’s effectiveness at doing that, adding to the Trump coverage itself, even as it critiques it.

Former Colorado state Sen. Shawn Mitchell, like so many Republicans around the country, is working out his thoughts on the Trump candidacy. Mitchell, of course, is doing the work in public at his popular Facebook page. He laments the “fraudulent hypnotic spell” Trump has cast over “the pitchfork carriers.” Mitchell blames the Trump phenomenon on weak Republican leaders who are pulled this way and that way by wealthy donors and who refuse to fight the big fights in Washington.

There’s something peculiar about the Maher- and Mitchell-style perplexity over the Trump candidacy. The line of thought riding under their complaints about it echoes the line taken by Fox debate moderator Megyn Kelly with Trump last week when she was pressing him on his qualifications to run for office. Her question came out like an accusation.

“You haven’t been a military leader and you haven’t actually governed a state or been a lawmaker,” she said.

But how long has it been that conservative thought leaders have been telling Republican primary voters to hold experience in government with little more than suspicion or disdain? It’s no wonder Trump got the better of the exchange with Kelly.

“I make great deals. I’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars against China,” he said. “All over the world I make money, and I build great things.”

Ted Cruz only wishes he could trot that one out.

#AnimasRiverSpill

What could push Donald Trump aside, if briefly, on the Colorado politics internet? The story of the Animas River catastrophe, that’s what.

The river last Wednesday was contaminated by acidic heavy metal mine waste accidentally released by the Environmental Protection Agency. The disaster unfolded after the EPA attempted incompetently to drain a great pool of the waste that had collected over the course of years behind a dam of fallen mine debris. The mine has been discharging the same waste for years, only slowly. The agency was seeking to find a more permanent solution to the problem than the impromptu and inadequate dam had provided all these years. So staffers poked a hole for a drain pipe and the dam collapsed, releasing a toxic sludge monster sired by Gold King mining company decades ago and left to crouch in a cave above the invaluable Animas River. Three million gallons of poison ran over the rocky riverbed toward Durango. It also set the internet alight.

The irony in the the story of the EPA as bumbling polluter was rich. The sludge slowly transforming the river was horrifying.

Inch by inch, the Animas went orange and cloudy. As the hours passed, it came to look like a river in Oompa-Loompa Land, like a thick tomato soup moving over boulders and under bridges.

In other words, it was a public disaster served up with readymade snark and powerful visuals, which made it a social-media dream story. Twitter and Facebook filled with shocked laments. Photos of people in kayaks floating atop the orange liquid, as if they were vacationing on Mars, went viral. And Colorado politicos and activists on the lookout for fodder to attack the government and the EPA in particular pounced.

Indeed, the timing in Colorado couldn’t have appeared worse for the government. The EPA’s recently released Clean Power Plan will force fossil fuel cutbacks and slash the use of coal in Colorado and around the country. And a federal court ruling is likely to shutter the Colowyo coal mine in northwest Colorado in the fall, costing hundreds of jobs. So, more than ever, powerful people on the local and national level have been looking for ways to undercut the federal government’s credibility on energy and environmental issues, preparing the ground in the public sphere for lawsuits and political campaigns.

Always leading the pack, Amy Oliver of the Independence Institute has loaded her Twitter account with pointed jabs about the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and its toxic spill.

On Thursday, she circulated a theory that the EPA intentionally polluted the Animas to secure a long-sought federal Superfund toxic waste cleanup designation for the area and the billions of dollars that come with it. Oliver Cooke was riding a wave. Thursday was the day after the piece promoting the theory posted at a site called Zero Hedge. By the time she posted a link to the piece, it had been liked on Facebook some 12,000 times and shared by some 1,500 Twitter users. There is clearly leverage to be gained with the Animas spill story.

A mystery, however, is why none of the EPA haters didn’t think to cover their Twitter and Facebook photos in an Animas River toxic-sludge orange filter. Why didn’t they take their cue from the famous happy rainbow icon filter that in June filled some 30 million Facebook pages the day after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage? A murky orange Animas River filter would allow everyday American internet users to easily update their photos in a way that would draw attention to government failure and show solidarity with the extraction industries. It’s the kind of savvy media strategy the mining and drilling industries are paying political activists to launch – the kind of easy “viral” campaign that would continue to distract voters from the fact that irresponsible extraction, not government action, is the source of the never-cleaned-up sludge now polluting the Animas river and hanging fire in mines all across the Rocky Mountain West.

– johntomasic@gmail.com

Correction: This column has been updated. The Independence Institute doesn’t receive significant funding from the Koch Brothers or their political operations, as was implied by an earlier version of this column.