MAGA vs. Media: A Love Story

Or, Why Platform Lying Liars Who Lie For Trump?

Many serious — and some not-so-serious — journalists, editors, and producers often argue that their accommodations to the leaders of the MAGA movement, from Trump on down, are justified in part by the threat of losing access to sources and stories.

Some may believe this line, but it’s just that. A line.

In no universe will Donald Trump, his campaign, his acolytes, his enablers, or his consultants ever cut off a single mainstream media outlet. Ever. The Earth will be a cold cinder circling a dead Sun before they deny access to the mainstream media.

This comes down to the anthropology of Trump, of which I am, sadly, the global subject-matter expert. (When they upload me to the cloud during the singularity, let’s edit out my overabundance of Trump knowledge. As Cipher in The Matrix said, “I don’t wanna remember nothin’.”)

The Dear Leader Wil Never Stop Talking To The Media

He’ll Never Quit The Mainstream Media

Donald Trump loves the mainstream media more than he loves overvaluing his real estate deals, pump-and-dump stock scams, defaming victims of his sexual predations, and threatening the children of judges. He loves the mainstream press because Donald Trump is still a Page 6 guy in New York, with evil homunculus Roy Cohn whispering in his ear that even the bad press is good press. He loves attention, focus, and eyeballs turning in his direction like a dog loves its spew. He can’t resist.

He particularly loves MSNBC and The New York Times and will never shut them out because Trump has an animal instinct regarding where the news is made and what news matters. He revels in throwing them chum, feeding them bloody bits and chunks of his grudges, obsessions, and bizarre ramblings. He’s the Leaker-In-Chief. He’ll never cease beta-testing his bad ideas, new lies, and all the products from his laboratory of outrages and excesses.

Donald Trump understands the media ecosystem more clearly than the people who run it.

His contempt for the MAGA media fluffers and ass-kissers is barely contained. These may be the only people left who’ll socialize with him, but he wouldn’t let them within a mile if they weren’t part of fueling his email donation scams. Listen to him when he’s interviewing with whatever random bama from OAN or Newsmax or any of a billion MAGA podcasts, and he’s barely animated, chewing his rhetorical cud like a particularly slow and aged bull.

When he’s talking to, and more importantly, about the mainstream media, Trump is his most Trumpian. He knows who matters and who doesn’t. He knows that Newsmax, OAN, and the rest of the right-wing media junkyard’s audiences are already entirely his creatures, and he knows he’ll never meet even an iota of professional or journalistic resistance.

Interestingly, he treats Fox in a particular third category. Imagine a dangerous and powerful animal, but it dies without Trump feeding, and he dies without it defending him. He demands more of them, even when they suck up to him. He takes the flashes of defiance on the network as a sign they want Daddy Donnie to spank them, and he does.

Trump is a man with a deep history of delivering mental and sexual abuse to those he wants to control. Defiance, challenge, resistance, and truth arouse in him an ugly response; he wants to break and control those who defy him. From a dressing room in Bergdorf’s to parties with Jeffrey Epstein to almost every Republican official, Trump relishes the attack, the engagement, the battle for dominance, and the pain he causes.

He knows the media has consistently failed to address the threat he poses. He knows he’s gotten away with lie after lie, skated free on every assault on America’s laws, values, and people. And he loves it.

He revels in it—and he revels in fighting the media most of all. He understands—again, better than they do—that without someone reminding Americans of what the law, the norms, the guidelines, the traditions, and the history of this nation look like—and why they matter—he can make his army of drones believe any version of reality he chooses.

But he can’t have that challenge if he’s not in the fight with the media.

MAGA Needs Only One Liar

Unlike the Democratic Party, which has more factions than the Sultan’s Court in the late Ottoman Empire, the Trump-era GOP is entirely hierarchical. Trump is the only messenger. He is the only authority. His word, either whispered to New York Times reporters in late-night calls or with heads of cable networks (no, not just Fox), is all that matters.

You don’t need a Ronna McDaniel to tell more sides of Trump’s lies. You don’t need to pretend Trump is a typical candidate in a traditional party in a regular election. This isn’t a fight about whether we’ll have a 38.5% top tax rate or a 33% top tax rate. This isn’t about whether we’ll spend $1.4 trillion or $1.5 trillion next fiscal year.

It is a fight between democracy and autocracy, and autocracy demands precisely the kind of lying liars Trump's world produces wholesale.

Telling the audience that objectivity and balance require a parade of paid liars to repeat the exact words Trump vomits out on Truth Social by the hour isn’t fairness; it’s an insult.

You’ll Never Get The MAGA Audience

Network executives at ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC stare fixedly at spreadsheets and slide decks, asking repeatedly: “How can we peel off some of that big, red Fox audience?”

The answer is utterly obvious, and I’ll save them all hundreds of millions of dollars with a few words:

You cannot.

The conservatives who were going to leave Fox over Trump’s catalog of horrors are already gone. Depending on their disposition, they’ve migrated away from Fox to CNN or MSNBC — for the Never Trump and non-Trump GOPers - or to OAN, Newsmax, et al. It was always a small-ish number, anyway.

Nothing MSNBC or CNN could do, and I include replacing the nighttime lineup with Don Jr’s steam-of-cokiness rantings, Eric Trump eating wallpaper paste, and Lara Trump doing a musical variety hour will break off the Fox audience. (Although I think “Melania After Dark” might be big for ratings.)

Fox branded itself into the minds of conservative viewers for 25 years as the one place they can go to be loved and respected, not talked down to by those elites with their reading and higher reasoning skills. Fox is delicious, horrible junk food, and the MAGA audience wants all the fat, all the salt, all the sugar, all the calories, and most importantly, all the validation, all the time.

To be sure, MSNBC and CNN work — in different tonalities — to bring information, news, context, and analysis to their viewers. Agree with their positions or not, both networks are qualitatively worlds above the slurry of grunting conspiracy goons, lowest-common-denominator “them brown people are coming to kill you” agitporn for which Fox is infamous.

The entire premise of Fox, in Roger Ailes's brilliant conception, was to make people who were intellectually and socially insecure feel as if they had a network that would tell the elites where they could stick it. It works, it’s addictive, and it’s a business model that the normie networks can’t penetrate.

Fox’s de minimus audience loss to OAN, Newsmax, and online streamers wasn’t because those audiences wanted more objective and professional journalism. These were people seeing more pure, uncut, weapon-grade insanity at the end of the MAGA conspiracy food chain.

Covering Donald Trump is the most consequential challenge that journalism — aside from the broader collapse of the industry's business models — has faced in decades. Truth, news, reporting, and revelation about who and what he is, what he has done, and what he will do is more vital than ever.

I encourage my friends in journalism at every level — particularly in the C-Suites at the cable networks and the editorial jobs at the big media outlets — to treat Trump not just as an assignment but as the threat he truly represents.