There's no central orchestration: there are journalists trying to guess what their editors will publish, and editors trying to guess what their investors want, and both cribbing their notes from think tanks, and think tanks trying to guess what their investors will want, and investors trying to guess what's in their best interest. Every single step of that is composed of many separate groups of people, who aren't linked to the other layers in a consistent way. Every person involved thinks their group is the most important and most informed, and every one is high on their own ideology, and nobody knows what's going on. And buried in there, there are many conspiracies with motivations from swaying the election, to getting a particular guy promoted, to implementing evangelical conservative rule, and those conspiracies all believe they're important and capable of doing their thing, even though most of them can't, and they're all too high on their own ideology to know what's going on either.