From Gatekeepers to „Gate Crashers“- How Donald Trump rode the transformation of US-media
Donald Trump would not be president without social media. He was the first senior US-politician to really understand the changes the media ecosystem had undergone between the 90s and when he first ran in 2016. Whilst the gatekeepers of the old media remained arrogant or asleep in their anchor seats and editorships Trump found a new way of communicating to address the grievances of a disenchanted public which had long despised “the media” as part of an establishment that no longer delivered what it promised. And when the liberal elites thought they were done with “the Donald” in 2020 he came roaring back by bridging the generational gap between the traditional conservative crowd watching Fox News and the young “conflict entrepreneurs” on social media. “Fake News” was his rallying cry. The damage done to media freedom and the public sphere will be his legacy – and a generational challenge for his successors to overcome.
Umberto Eco had seen it coming. He called it “the invasion of the idiots”. The well-known medieval scholar, semiotician and author of “The Name of the Rose” had studied Mussolini’s fascism and the changes in languages over centuries. And now, he said, “social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine without harming the community”. Eco died in February 2016 and within a year Donald Trump had moved into the White House; as the first American president who understood that the democratisation of information without guardrails, that the promotion of emotion over evidence and of virality over accuracy would change the political landscape altogether.
How did that happen? Travelling through the United States during the 90s you could encounter two countervailing developments: the growing hate for “the media” and the increasing self-satisfaction among the gatekeepers of what is now called “the legacy media”. You would listen to the widely syndicated radio talk hosts on your car radio, like Rush Limbaugh, who were funny, entertaining, scathing and racist at the same time. And you could hear from the students at journalism schools that their only career wish was to become a TV anchor person, famous and rich like the well-known presenters of national cable networks in Washington, D.C., without bothering much about learning the skills of journalistic investigation.
In February 1996 the author James Fallows wrote a long essay about “Why Americans hate the media” (The Atlantic) in which he described the self-satisfaction among Washington’s journalists and how “the media’s self-aggrandisement gets in the way of solving the countries problems”. His conclusion: “In the short run these challenges to credibility are a problem for journalists and journalism. In the longer run they are a problem for democracy.”
Over time the conservatives forces within and outside of the Republican Party developed a right-wing network of radio shock jocks, bloggers, think tanks and media owners, funded by billionaires like the Koch family, with the long-term goal to fight a culture war against any form of liberal thinking in the media, at universities and in government agencies. The goal was to reestablish a conservative hegemony which they thought they had lost to the liberal left – and to retrench the state.
During the two Clinton- and the two Obama-presidencies up to 2016 the victorious Democratic Party took little notice of the changing media environment and of the emerging rebellion against the legacy media, the coastal elites, the Washington establishment. The radical Tea Party movement after 2008, they thought, was a problem for the Republican Party, not for the Democrats. Yet technological changes (like the first Iphone in 2007 and the first ranking facebook algorithm in 2010) changed social media behaviour dramatically, creating the conditions for an alternative, conservative media ecosystem that brought Trump to power; to the utter surprise of a left sleepwalking into a new media age.
Even during the following Biden years (2020-2024) the Democratic Party did not come to terms with the consequences the polarised, highly monetised and politicised “attention economy” had on political attitudes and voting behaviour of the angry half of the electorate. They stuck to their view that only facts, institutions and policies mattered although Trump had shown that lies, emotions and tropes could be woven into narratives more convincing than policy proposals and the truth.
Trump was speaking in a seemingly “simple” language with repititions, superlatives and antagonisms which he had honed in the cut-throat world of real estate and as moderator of cheap but popular TV-shows. This new political language was reckless and relatable at the same time. It was the perfect code for alternative media to filter it into the various bubbles of an electorate which was – or saw itself – descending the social scales: parts of the working class, rural voters, southern diehards, evangelicals and young men without college degrees.
Already in 2015, in his essay “How Social Media is Ruining Politics (Politico) the technology writer Nicholas Carr had described Trump as “a natural-born troll, adept at issuing inflammatory bulletins at opportune moments, he’s the first candidate optimized for the Google News algorithm”. And Carr suggested that “a Snapchat candidate, passionate yet hollow, could be a perfect vessel for a cult of personality.” Which perfectly foretold what has happened since then.
Even today the Democrats are still asking themselves why they had no Joe Rogan on their side, the popular podcaster who had switched from favouring the Democrats to routing for Trump and significantly contributed to the election loss of Kamala Harris in November 2024. For the author Andrew Marantz (Anti-Social. Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, 2019) it is because the Democrats are stuck in the “scolding paradox” by pandering to the educated elite, sounding “censorious” whilst “talking down” to the rest of the population.
Having spend time in the online world of rightwing nationalists, nihilists and conspirationalists Marantz describes how the “gate crashers” replaced the gatekeepers, how white nationalism has moved from the fringe to mainstream, how memes have displaced political categories, and how the more extreme “manosphere” has softened so that podcasters like Joe Rogan can now dress up their voiced prejudices as just asking questions.
When you listen to late night shows on Fox TV or podcasting sessions you find yourself in a conversational setting where banter has replaced serious dialogue. Whilst Democrats still debate on panels or in the opinion pages America’s extreme right is gathering in the simulated living rooms of the alt-media. “The formulaic quality of social media”, writes Nicholas Carr, “is well suited to the banter that takes place among friends”. Which again relates to the difference in potential damage pointed out in the quote by Umberto Eco. Many viewers of those spectacles and the President’s followers might know that his media posts on “Trump Social” are not strictly true, but the conversational tone makes them feel that they are kind of true.
Since Trumps reelection in 2024 three developments have further upset the old media order and intensified the conservative’s hold over the online audience and weakened traditional media: AI driven algorithms; the takover of legacy media companies by techbrothers or other Trump cronies; and the increasing attacks by the Trump administration on free speech, practicing the very “cancel culture” they vowed to fight on the left.
First, the rapid advancement of large language models (llms) makes it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between news produced by humans and those generated by artificial intelligence. This has opened the door for AI scammers posing as journalists or even writers of fiction as the most recent scandal at the literary magazine Granta showed. Here, the editors had published a prize-winning story which then seemed to show signs of AI generation, but in the end they could not determine if this accusation was false or true. Further advancement of llms will make establishing the difference between traditional research done by real jounalists and AI generated content being fed into algorithm-driven social media channels almost impossible. It will allow even more “politicsmaxxing”, as Jay Kaspian Kang calls it in the New Yorker, that is, the setting and tailoring specific and “hot” political issues to particulary vulnerable target groups.
Second, the takeover of information outlets and traditional media companies by billionaires and techbrothers supporting the president at the cost of media freedom. Trump’s first presidency saw Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post. His second presidency has been marked by Paramount’s acquisition of the Warner Bros Discovery conglomerate against an economically more sensible bid by Netflix. But for Paramount boss David Ellison politics mattered more then economics because he and his billionaire father Larry Ellison wanted to deliver Warner Brother’s two more “liberal” TV networks CBS and CNN to the rightwing media camp. The Financial Times sees in the acquisitional moves of the Ellisons “the dawn of a new dynasty”. In frightening charts the The Authoritarian Stack project has been documenting “how tech billionaires are building a post-democratic America – and why Europe will be next”.
Third, during the second Trump administration the assault on press freedom has been moving from rhetoric to action by litigating media companies, demonizing journalists, cutting federal support for public broadcasting, and by turning the Federal Communication Commission (FDC), the formerly independent regulator, into a direct arm of the government. Single journalists, well-known late-night hosts and prominent editors have fought these attacks or resigned. But most media companies have cowardly given into to the financial threat of being sued for large sums and often untenable reasons. As the Trump-Administration keeps filling high government positions with presenters from Fox TV or rightwing podcasters the traditional barriers between media and government are being dismantled faster than they had been in Hungary under Viktor Orban. Some call the result “a new kind of state media”.
Donald Trump ran for president when digital technology was rapidly changing the structure of the old media order, when media concentration was advancing ever more rapidly and when the algorithms of social media platforms started to replace the traditional gatekeepers of the legacy media. These developments, his relatable style and his skill to address the perceived victimhood and anger in large parts of the electorate were the perfect match. At the moment when social media “gave legions of idiots the right to speak” Donald Trump was there to channel their grievances into his populist politics. Donald Trump rode this transformation of media like no other. In his second term he lead the “gate crashers” loose to curtail media freedom and other guardrails of the democratic state.
Yet there is no Republican successor in sight who might be able to mimic his style and to merge the growing contradictions of the MAGA movement into one personality. But Democrats, too, will struggle to rebuilt the public sphere after its disruption by Trump and his acolytes. There might be a growing sense, even among Republicans, that the damage done to the national conversation is endangering democracy. There might even be a growing resistance against the broligarchs owning social media platforms and manipulating the streams of communication. And there are the beginnings of a backlash against the use of AI in and outside the media sphere. But to find new rules for establishing a less polarized and better regulated media order will be a task for a whole generation.