Why Does No One Understand the Real
Reason Trump Won?
It wasn’t the
economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive
those things, which points to one overpowering answer.
Selcuk Acar/Getty Images
I’ve
had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why
Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or
that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion
times. And so on.
These
conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously
how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they
bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his
invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his
disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that
Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest,
well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and
wouldn’t do anything weird as president?
The
answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things.
At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”
But
this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the
crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things?
And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of
this tragic mess.
The
answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the
entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of
radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel),
the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like
Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed
their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it
possible for Trump to win.
Let
me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the
news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The
Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when
Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The
agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the
mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they
set disturbingly often.
If
you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to
keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only
people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of
affairs—take some action.
I’ve
been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the
front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a
little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also
Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented,
after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how
quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the
rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W.
Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal
media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere
that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost.
But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the
last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported,
VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google
starting eating up the revenue pie.
And
the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon
a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a
golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the
near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and
the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re
wondering, is bigger.
This
is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power
than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks
with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous
elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country
and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your
daughter.
And
that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in
our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought
experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing
media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid
old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.
That
atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he
needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at
all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have
been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they
failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.
But
the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which
Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the
grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of
the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump
possible.
And
this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed
all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches
lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and
you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into
the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance
originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.
The
fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs,
for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand
sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the
major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice
it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But
it started in the right-wing media.
Likewise
with the post-debate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote about at
the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential
debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started,
Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump
X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.
Maybe
that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I
believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency
aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states)
and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his
campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It
started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this
was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.
I
think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t
understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says
something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But
more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere,
then they become part of the Trump agenda.
I
haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say.
Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The
U.S. economy, wrote The
Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the
right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic
reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest
prediction: After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox
Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator
they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump
economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from
the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the
beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he
opposed and regularly denounced.)
Back
to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone
moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox
News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that
she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a
coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much
does not care about you.”
Same
Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious
witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most
importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”
To
much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of
things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch
in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels,
as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when
you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the
TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one
television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get
in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio
station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by
Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up
their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas
and Ben Shapiro.
Liberals,
rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would
beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience
the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty
quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.
And
then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasy land.
They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now.
They want media domination. Sinclair bought the once glorious Baltimore
Sun. Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or the News Corp.
will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we
think.
I
implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living
memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s
the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once
they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First.
There’s a reason for that.
It’s
the same reason Viktor Orban told CPAC in 2022: “Have
your own media.”
This
is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and
this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed
a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and
mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing
someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than
the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley
beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14
points.
The
reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t
even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far
more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those
fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it
before it’s too late, which it almost is.
