A mind is a terrible thing to waste on Trump.

I feel cheated by this election.

Every time I log onto Twitter or scroll my online news feed, I’m not only disgusted at the content (or lack thereof) but also disappointed that this is all there is. Instead of an elaborative discourse on policy and problem solving, the 24-hour news cycle has devolved into a steady stream of “breaking news” that reads more like a criminal record than a presidential campaign. With mere weeks to go before election day, one party’s candidate is spending more of his time firing off a litany of mean-spirited tweets than he is laying out a concrete agenda to educate the American people about how he wants to “lead” us. In the absence of such explicit guidance, the mainstream media fills in the blanks with every tawdry morsel of Trump’s dysfunction they can find. As such, we find ourselves deciding one of the most important elections in recent times based on the latest tabloid scandal, not the most pressing policy imperatives.

It's become an all-too-common refrain: the reckless candidate and the feckless mainstream media that aids and abets him. But how did we get here? Trump's stranglehold on the GOP and the political narrative have often been likened to a chicken coming home to roost, but what of the egg from which he hatched?

On the heels of his Nevada caucus victory on Feb. 24, 2016, Donald Trump famously said “I love the poorly educated.” As it turns out, he had very good reason to, because his greatest source of support comes from Americans with limited education. Ironically though, this obvious correlation has become the third rail of political analysis, because the risk of offending this particular subset of the electorate is now deemed way too high. As we watch the punditry clumsily walk on eggshells around Trump’s poorly-educated coalition, it’s easy to wonder if they remember the last 20 years of the Republican assault on reason and public education. In other words, why is the media so afraid to merely discuss the lowered expectations the GOP has explicitly stated it has—of its own voters?