Trump’s not-so-secret weapon
The right-wing media machine in the US – exemplified by Fox News – has succeeded in delegitimizing the Democratic Party for about half the electorate, and in making Donald Trump seem like a normal candidate and a capable leader. Will this be enough to put Trump in the White House a second time?
In the prologue of his new book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Yuval Noah Harari writes: "We should not assume delusional networks are doomed to failure." The implications for the United States in the run-up to its presidential election should be clear. After all, the authoritarian "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) movement – of which the Republican Party is now just the political wing – is nothing if not delusional, and a second term in office for its leader, Donald Trump, would be catastrophic.
And yet the race is neck and neck: polls place support for Trump at about 50% – an alarming result, given Trump's penchant for extreme, offensive, off-the-wall, and outright dangerous rhetoric. It is a testament to the MAGA delusion's intoxicating power that half of American voters apparently genuinely believe that Trump is better suited to lead the US than his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump's supporters might not all give the same reason for backing him, but they do have one thing in common: the constant and sustained inhalation of highly addictive right-wing propaganda. These voters have been bombarded with Trump's toxic rhetoric for a decade, but that is just the latest phase in a much longer process. Americans heard the late Rush Limbaugh's vitriol for a half-century, and they have been watching Fox News's monotone stable of talking heads spew lies and stoke division for nearly 30 years.
For the Republicans who reaped the rewards – including the kinds of establishment figures whom Trump now derides as "Republicans in name only" (RINOs) – the hypocrisy of the propagandists never mattered much. Limbaugh could have Elton John perform at one of his many weddings, even as he railed against what would come to be called "woke" culture. The important thing was keeping the conservative base in line, fired up, and ready to act on a moment's notice against the monolithic, irredeemably malevolent enemy that was "the left."
On radios and television screens, conservative pundits railed against "big government" and "tax-and-spend liberals." If Republicans were the ones expanding the federal government's powers or blowing up the deficit by slashing government revenues through tax cuts, no matter. Endlessly tarring Democrats as socialists, communists, Marxists, or whatever other scary epithet was in vogue kept the public from noticing the incongruity.
Discrediting authoritative sources of information helped. When the then-political consultant Roger Ailes – a former acolyte of Ronald Reagan – first convinced the media mogul Rupert Murdoch to launch the conservative media network that would become Fox News, he immediately tacked on the slogan "Fair and Balanced." The implication was clear: "mainstream" media was biassed if not merely a house organ of the Democratic Party. (Fox News dropped the slogan in 2017 after Ailes was fired in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal.)
Unfortunately for establishment Republicans, the monster has now slipped its bonds. In Trump, the "conservative" movement found a vehicle and a bullhorn for its basest instincts, and in conservative media, Trump found a permanent pulpit. Soon after he descended that "golden" escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and announced his presidential candidacy, the very figures who had spent decades nurturing and benefiting from right-wing media found themselves being criticised, scorned, and insulted by a swaggering Trump before enraptured crowds.
Trump won the 2016 election by taking over America's information ecosystem. He and the MAGA politicians who rose in his wake to challenge the RINOs got practically unlimited airtime on the right-wing networks. However unhinged his rhetoric or bizarre his antics, he was treated as normal and even celebrated for his "candour."
But conservative media was not alone in keeping the public's attention trained on Trump. Applying that most basic principle of news reporting – if it bleeds, it leads – legacy media reported constantly on the political bloodletting of Trump and his MAGA movement. As then-CBS Chair Les Moonves cynically put it in 2016, Trump's political career "may not be good for America," but giving him airtime is "damn good" for media companies.
The left, for its part, has proved incapable of replicating right-wing media's success. While there have been some attempts – such as Air America, which went bankrupt in 2010 – liberal and Democratic outlets appear to be too uptight and elitist to create effective counterprogramming. They lack the right's craven willingness to use any means necessary to push its agenda. In any case, the US is not exactly a hotbed of progressive thought.
The lack of competition from left-leaning outlets – except, perhaps, MSNBC – means that the right-wing media machine can get away with pushing even ideas and policies that are unpopular with the American public. From an electoral perspective, the propagandists have already succeeded in delegitimizing the Democratic Party for about half of voters; even those who are willing to give Democrats a chance seem to watch for any misstep that might validate decades of Republican fear-mongering.
We will soon find out whether this will be enough to put Trump in the White House a second time. If voters reject him, they will have bought the US time – but not much. Over the next four years, the MAGA media monster will grow louder, uglier, and more unwieldy, flooding America's living rooms with relentless attacks on President Harris.
Harari concludes his reflection on delusional networks by noting that preventing them from winning requires us to "do the hard work ourselves." If Harris triumphs on November 5, it will be up to all of us to ensure that we don't find ourselves back here, yet again, in 2028.
Reed Galen is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, President of JoinTheUnion.us, and host of The Home Front Podcast. He writes on Substack at The Home Front.