The Last Television President
Donald Trump should be understood not as the first president of a new media environment, but rather as the final president of a dying one
I.
Generally speaking, I try to avoid commenting on names-and-faces politics, mostly because whenever I think of something to say, I find that about a dozen people have already said it, and typically much better than I could have. I’m not a guy you want to turn to for analysis on the day-to-day events that journalists report on. The reason, to put it succinctly, is that while I do a pretty good job of staying abreast of the big political issues (often without trying, thanks to social media), I’m really just not all that engaged. I do not get emotional about politics, and thus I have little reason to research it or opine upon it in great detail. I don’t get an adrenaline rush from being The NewsMaster, as many others do. So if I’m commenting on a major politician who gets endless wall-to-wall news coverage all day long, it is because I feel the need to say something that I haven’t seen anyone else say, and now just so happens to be one of those times. So I’ll go ahead and make this gentle and unobtrusive argument, in large part because it concerns the subject of media ecology, one of my main interests.
After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, it was declared in numerous places with near-unanimous agreement that his victory signaled the ultimate triumph of the alternative internet-based media over the “legacy” media of television, newspapers, and radio. After all, he had made appearances on various podcasts, such as those of comedian Theo Von, retired pro wrestler The Undertaker, and the grand daddy of them all, Joe Rogan, whose podcast shot up to unforeseen heights starting around 2015 and has only grown bigger with each passing year. Kamala Harris, by contrast, made her most famous alt-media appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast using a contrived studio set that her campaign team supposedly spent over a hundred-thousand dollars on. For all that money, it got less than a million listeners/viewers upon release. She also supposedly did an interview with a Muslim social media influencer in which she tried to convince him repeatedly that bacon is so good that it constitutes “a spice,” though this was sadly never aired due to its unrelenting awkwardness. So, not a great effort in the digital realm for Harris.
Moreover, Trump opted not to do a second televised debate with Harris after a poor showing at the first, and although it may have looked bad to some, this decision did not result in the election loss that many predicted it would, even though Harris seized upon it as proof of his weakness as a candidate. Trump, it turned out, understood the media landscape better than Harris did. He went strong on the internet, stopped worrying so much about television, and his success justified his decisions. It is thus easy to understand why we might assume that he proved the irrelevance of the “legacy media,” particularly television, once and for all.
II.
But this isn’t quite right, and it suggests a lack of awareness concerning what the legacy media’s role in the greater discourse has been. The alternative media (including social media) sets the agenda for what the mainstream media will report on essentially by releasing a plethora of different ideas and conversations into the æther from which the mainstream media can pick and choose at will. But what truly constitutes “news” is nonetheless up to the mainstream media to decide. Starting around the late 2010s, people would recognize that their little conversation on Twitter might later become a matter of national discourse at some point, prompting them to conclude, “Hey, that’s amazing! This proves that we’re the ones who set the agenda, and the mainstream is irrelevant!” And directionally, they’ve been on the right track, but their specific claim isn’t yet true.
For one thing, they aren’t appreciating that the mainstream media could just as easily ignore them if it wanted to, and it often does. Many newsworthy things go unmentioned while meaningless nonsense gets coverage, as countless media critics have pointed out. For another thing, much of the content the cable news networks took from the internet was often still being put forth by their own employees. For instance, Chris Hayes decided openly on Twitter that the issue of Donald Trump separating children from their families at the US-Mexico border needs to become a major news item, and then soon thereafter, it did for just about every major news outlet.
But most importantly of all, the mainstream media still plays a legitimizing role in most people’s minds, and at that time, TV news was its most distinguished method of output. It still is to an extent, though its influence seems to be fading more and more by the day. But in the late 2010s, even strong critics of 24-hour cable news would cherry-pick conclusions from a 24-hour news channel to validate their own perceptions on why the 24-hour news is bad. Putting aside the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson — an obvious example of this tendency — if MSNBC said something that someone didn’t like, he would say, “Hey, everyone! MSNBC said this! They suck!” but then if MSNBC changed their minds, then the same person would go, “This proves that I’m right! Even MSNBC is agreeing with me!” as if MSNBC had become the highest epistemic authority just because it had said something that it wasn’t expected to say. Therefore, the conclusions of the mainstream media weren’t a necessary source of validation, but they still remained the ultimate source of it.
The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak from 2019 forms a perfect example of what I’m describing. In the early days, the media’s general line was more or less, “The real concern here is American racism against the Chinese. There’s no reason to panic about the actual coronavirus.” Alexandra Ocasio Cortez filmed herself going to Chinese restaurants and eating their food in show of solidarity, elsewhere telling everyone that not eating Chinese is a form of racism. Most of the right-wing corner of Twitter reacted to the mainstream media’s response with hostility — not just because of the left’s absurd concerns regarding racism, but also specifically because of their calmness and lack of hysteria. One piece by a popular anonymous Twitter user published in The American Mind attacked the media, specifically this article and this one, for being insufficiently panic-stricken about the coronavirus, while congratulating the expertise of medical authorities like Scott Gottlieb, who now makes regular TV news appearances arguing for new vaccine booster rollouts. I don’t really need to say this, but the two articles under attack turned out to be essentially correct. And once the right-wingers on Twitter got the mainstream narrative to shift, well… they were happy at first. The fact that TV changed its tune proved that they had won, and so they patted themselves on the back. The TV had seen the light! They finally had gotten what they wanted.
Oh, they got it, alright.
Good and hard.
Now, there are nuances to this complex situation that should perhaps be straightened out another time.1 But the point here is that television was the ultimate reality legitimizer, even among its greatest critics. I can hate it or love it, but the TV is what lets me recognize, even if only second-hand, what essentially matters “out there.” And it is impossible to understand Donald Trump as a politician without first appreciating this fact.
III.
Throughout Trump’s entire political career, television played the key part in legitimizing him in the eyes of the public. Plenty of people have already acknowledged the role that TV played in launching Donald Trump all the way to the White House in 2016. Hillary Clinton, in fact, criticized it harshly throughout her book What Happened (2017), which I, for some reason, actually read (perhaps as a form of ascetic self-abuse, I really don’t know). Even before he announced his candidacy, Donald Trump was already a recognized corporate mascot figure. He was like Chef Boyardee, or Colonel Sanders, or the Jolly Green Giant — more archetype than man. And Americans had gotten to know him further as a charismatic showman through so many seasons of his reality television show The Apprentice and even a highly successful stint in the always-fascinating world of professional wrestling. It is thus unsurprising that once he declared himself a candidate, the media gave him a disproportionate amount of political coverage compared to the others. Much of it was negative or dismissive, sure, but he singlehandedly grew their ratings to unprecedented heights, and so there he was all the same. The stations would play his campaign rally speeches at length without commercial interruption. And they put him right in the center podium of nearly every televised debate he had, where he would take up the highest amount of speaking time out of all the candidates. According to one report, he took up over a quarter of all cable TV news coverage during that election, which is a big deal considering how many other RNC and DNC candidates there were.
All of this, of course, everyone already knows. Less, however, was made of the fact that Trump still got a disproportionate amount of TV coverage during the 2020 election, perhaps even moreso than he did in 2016, since he was the standing president, and the entire four years of his first presidency had been almost entirely about him and very little else. For instance, for three solid years, the American public was treated to an incredible (and outlandish) “developing story” taking place in which various nightly cable TV news hosts would play the role of a forensic detective, looking for clues that Trump was secretly colluding with Russian president Vladimir Putin due to the existence of some naughty blackmail video tapes involving prostitutes and pee-pee. And even after the existence of such a tape was proven to be fictitious, when the campaign race for the 2020 election finally took place, CBS still covered Trump four times as much as Biden, with Fox News covering him three times as much.
If personal anecdote tells me anything, then I’d guess that one of the major reasons so many people voted for Biden, in fact, was because they felt he was boring, silent, uncontroversial, and they were entirely burnt out on Trump. They had “Trump fatigue” due to four years of nonstop #Resistance to anything he attempted to accomplish, and so Biden seemed like the more soothing and therapeutic option. Perhaps if the media had shifted gears to covering Biden more closely during his actual presidency, then Trump would have gone away forever. In fact, when the results came out in November of 2020, I was pretty sure Trump’s political career was over. Others felt the same way.
And, truth be told, it would have been over had the media shifted gears and focused on phasing Trump out of the news cycle. This did not happen, though, as he continued to dominate 24-hour cable news coverage at various points throughout Biden’s presidency. For instance, the January 6th riot at the Capitol building was given round-the-clock coverage, as the news media portrayed it as a national trauma of some kind. Never mind that over 500 violent protests had occurred during the previous summer all across the country. The simple fact that this one took place at the Capitol building somehow made it comparable to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. And largely as a result of that particular happening, the TV news mentioned Trump nearly just as much as it mentioned Biden during the latter’s first several weeks in office in 2021. Trump was still essentially the star of the show, and this would remain the case for the duration of Biden’s presidency.
Trump’s star treatment continued to swell in waves. The January 6th congressional hearings took place in 2022, and they proved to be a major ratings bonanza. According to the LA Times, they were presented more as a dramatic miniseries than actual news coverage, with eight “episodes” spanning the months of June to July. The raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate proved to be another big media event just one month later in August, as the TV was abuzz with excitement. Sadly, the journalists could not get footage of the actual raid, but that didn’t stop the event from being another massive spectacle. Then things got even wilder the following year. For the entirety of 2023, the cable news mentioned Trump more often than it mentioned Biden due to his various convoluted and largely inexplicable felony cases. First, in April, the Manhattan DA revealed a case against Trump that was filed because he failed to record his porn star hush money correctly in his accounting books (or something…? I guess…?). Then, in June, Trump was indicted in a federal classified documents case. Then, once more in August, he was indicted for something related to the January 6th riot (I guess he encouraged it…? But not really…? Or maybe he didn’t discourage it fast enough…?)
Over and over and over again, Trump became the man of the hour. The electronic golden boy, traveling at the speed of light through fiber-optic and coaxial cables all across America’s heartland. The televised Alpha God whose divine presence could instantly rejuvenate the flagging ratings of every 24-hour-news broadcast that needs a boost, bringing countless eyeballs to the TV screen, itself the living retina of man’s collective eye. Biden, on the other hand, wallowed in obscurity, receiving such sparse and limited coverage that the entire liberal journalistic establishment was able to convince itself that he was not, in fact, senile — a misconception that his debate performance in the abnormally early month of June 2024 thoroughly corrected.
With the exception of that 2024 debate, all of these events received far less discussion within the alternative media. In fact, for all of its various faults and foibles, I can confidently say that I was using alternative media to learn about things like the CHIPS act. For most people without a cable television, these lawfare events regarding Trump seemed as though they were taking place on another planet. To the extent that they got any serious acknowledgement, it was mostly through the lens of criticism. The actual legal charges being filed against Trump were functionally indistinguishable from the successive media spectacles that they routinely engendered. A lot of people around this time were rediscovering the ideas of Jean Baudrillard. I have no doubt that the justice system wanted some revenge on Donald Trump for being an ideological enemy and threatening them in some way, but all of these events were more or less designed for television coverage — as though television had mysteriously summoned them all into being.
IV.
Now, if you can’t really follow where I’m going with all of this, let me put it to you this way. In classes on how to be a hypnotist, students are taught not to make negative commands to their hypnotized subjects (e.g. “Don’t go over there,” “Don’t eat that sandwich”). The reason being, the unconscious mind cannot process negative tag-words. It processes the subject, the object, and the predicate — not the manner in which they’re inflected, conjugated, or qualified, all of which require a higher order of interpretive complexity. So when the hypnotized woman hears “eat” and “sandwich,” then she wants to eat the sandwich. The word “don’t” simply doesn’t compute.
Throughout Biden’s presidency, the collective message of the cable news media was: TRUMP. It was like if a would-be hypnotist were to issue commands such as, “Whatever you do, don’t think Trump is good! Don’t think positive thoughts about Trump! Don’t view Trump as legitimate! Don’t view him as The Man! Don’t view him as a God-like entity! Don’t view him as the most important person ever! Don’t smile when you think of Trump! Vote for Trump! Whoops, sorry — I mean, don’t vote for Trump!” and so on, and so on. He may have been obnoxiously overexposed during his first presidency, even to the point of inducing some kind of nausea, but when Biden was president, withdrawal symptoms had apparently set in among the public. He got the perfect amount of total coverage that he should have gotten from 2017 through 2020. The fact that the news about him was almost entirely negative hardly mattered at all.
Biden, if I can make this point once again, really was treated as a cipher; a non-entity. And in fact, whenever he did show up in the news, his appearance, along with the manner in which he was presented, was often quite bizarre. Downright Lynchian at times. And of course, he would often be talking about Donald Trump, because what else could he possibly want to discuss? How could the world not revolve around Donald Trump?
It is largely due to this unwarranted and rather ridiculous television-driven coverage of Trump, all during what should have been Biden’s years of close scrutiny, that when Biden was finally forced to withdraw from the election race, Kamala Harris made the decision to run as though Trump was still president. So, she boldly announced that she wanted to “turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump.” Now, she wasn’t literally saying that Trump is still president — and she did clarify in her interview with Bret Baier that she understands he is not — but the implication was nonetheless crystal clear. Her vice president pick Tim Walz, for his part, dispensed with all subtlety and drove the point home: “we can’t afford four more years of this.” People dismissed that quotation as a mere gaffe, but given the interior logic of cable television, it made perfect sense. Whether intentionally or not, the media had set up an elaborate kayfabe in which Donald Trump had been president for the entire time, and the Democrat politicians were dutifully playing along with the fantasy… as were their followers. On the day of the 2024 election, a friend showed me something she found on an Instagram “story”:
You get that? We need to “begin to heal.” You don’t say this unless your unconscious mind has accepted, against all logic, that Trump is still president.
V.
In various election post-mortems, a surprising amount of Democrats acknowledged that the zeal with which the justice system tried to punish Donald Trump, if anything, helped him in the long run, such as Fareed Zakaria on CNN. Without question, Zakaria’s argument is correct and even surprisingly well-put. Republican voters refused to entertain the notion of allowing Ron DeSantis or any other Republican to replace Trump as their nomination pick, and this was because they saw Trump as an unjustifiably beleaguered figure to whom they owe some loyalty. After all, the justice system was doing essentially everything he had been accusing them of doing all along.
But in my view, even if these cases had gone forward (including the January 6th hearings) yet had not been presented the way they had been, Republican loyalty to Trump would have waned simply because the element of spectacle would not have been so salient. The television, as I stated earlier, is what had legitimized the public’s sense of reality up to that point. If the TV had spent more time scrutinizing Biden’s international policies towards China, or whatever, then people would not have maintained such strong feelings of loyalty toward Trump, since their understanding of reality would have much less prominently involved him. So while Trump saw the opportunity to pivot towards alternative-media appearances such as popular podcasts, which did probably contribute to his surprisingly high youth vote, it was his television coverage that had been loudly and flamboyantly establishing him as a serious figure worth having an opinion about, giving him the freedom to explore different avenues for self-promotion.
Someone will pose the question as to whether I’m accusing TV journalists of being aware of what they were doing. And unmistakably, they did not. I think that journalists are, on the whole, more driven by ideology than money, though if they can find an instance in which the two interests can coincide, they’ll seize upon it. This is because if both they and their bosses are operating on the same wavelength, then things will go more smoothly, even though both parties will be assessing the situation differently. I therefore have no doubt that every TV anchor who was trying to “take down” Donald Trump genuinely wanted to end his political career permanently. But they also failed to recognize that the nuances of whatever message they were trying to popularize would ultimately fail when set in relief against the iconography of Trump the myth — a myth that their medium had been building up for decades.
And yet for all of its importance, and for all of the work it did in steadily expanding Trump’s mythology over time, television is still a dying medium, viewed mostly by the elderly. The median age of all Fox News viewers is 69 years old, and the median age of MSNBC’s viewers is 70. And because of such a lopsided viewership, the TV business is quite strange. Old reruns often get higher Nielsen ratings than newer shows, and newer shows consequently benefit from increasingly low expectations from executives. In professional wrestling, the only televised industry I follow somewhat closely, the All Elite Wrestling owner Tony Khan hemorrhaged viewers continually over the course of a year and yet still landed a surprisingly lucrative media rights deal. More and more people are cutting their cable cords, and increasingly, young people are looking back on the era of cable television with confusion: why, exactly, did people pay for TV? What were they thinking?
But despite the fact that TV (as we know it, anyhow) is a medium on the brink of death, people still require some sort of common information source to give them a vocabulary with which they can communicate. In a piece on mass culture fragmentation, I described the mass media as a Schelling point undergoing an indefinite process of deterioration. I do not believe any part of the alternative media has yet become a viable substitute, and therefore the mainstream newspapers might outlast the TV in terms of relevance, given their relatively smooth transfer to the internet. But television as we currently understand it, despite the towering heights it once reached, is growing irrelevant, fast. For this reason, I believe that Trump’s presidency was its last great hoo-rah — its crowning political achievement, fascinating in its implications and yet never to be replicated again. The TV journalists may have mostly hated Trump as individuals, sure. But television as an egregore absolutely loved Donald Trump, still loves Donald Trump, and will continue to love him until the not-so-distant future day comes in which it finally dies, and its cold bluish light finally flickers into oblivion.
One such nuance is that when we discuss mainstream discourse, “mainstream” can refer to both the mass media as well as the obscure academic researchers and scientists whom the mass media collectively cherry-picks as its “official experts.” This is a phenomenon worth an altogether separate discussion, since I believe that the information scramble going on today is not about ignoring experts full stop, but instead about different factions competing to see who gets to become the official team of “expert-pickers.”