I'm not sure it's Trump that played the media like a fiddle, or at least he had help from a certain Hillary Clinton whose campaign strategy (per the e-mail leaks) was to make him look like a plausible candidate and downplay the actual serious candidates. Basically, her strategy seems to have been to try and make sure what her campaign considered the worst candidate possible ran against her, and she sure as hell has a lot more media connections to pull that off with than Trump ever did.