Straight to the point

It’s a tender, almost touching moment — not at all something you’d expect to see at the height of a presidential campaign and far out-of-keeping with the general perception of Donald Trump’s character. At the start of an interview, a 23-year-old social media star, Adin Ross, showed Trump his livestream on Kick with comments pouring in through the chat. “Do you know what live streaming is on these platforms?” Ross said.

“More or less, more or less,” said Trump, a little timidly.

It could have been any eager kid explaining a new technology to someone almost four times his age, but what Trump said next encapsulated so much of what he has brought to American politics. “It’s the new wave,” he said, to which Ross enthusiastically agreed.

Trump’s podcast blitz over the last few months — on Kick with Ross, on X with Elon Musk, on YouTube with Lex Fridman and Theo Von, and most recently on Ben Shapiro’s podcast — showcased his ability to adapt to new media forms. This started in the Nineties, when he rose to political prominence as a regular guest on talk radio. He then became a nationwide celebrity through his starring role on reality TV’s The Apprentice. He ran for president in 2016 largely through his Twitter account and, when that was disabled in 2021, switched to his own social media platform, Truth Social. His 2024 campaign strategy hinges on his ability to reach low-information voters who wouldn’t normally pay attention to politics. (Von is a comedian and Ross an online gamer.) From the standpoint of communications, his approach has been astonishingly successful and may well return him to the White House. Really, the entire Trump phenomenon is just media studies — but why, with Kamala Harris only just appearing podcasts now, have his political opponents been so slow to learn its lessons?

Every time I try to understand our era, I find myself — like the kind of person who pulls out their pocket Bible on any occasion to check the relevant verse — reaching for Martin Gurri’s 2014 text, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri, a former CIA analyst turned media theorist, outlined the dominant dynamic of our time: it is “an episode in the primordial contest between Centre and Border” but with a new array of weapons made available to the Border. “Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest,” he wrote.

In the past, the Border had to make do with penny presses, alternative weeklies, late-night radio stations or, simply, the power of “word-of-mouth”. But, with the public-to-public traffic of social media, the Border developed an ability to communicate with itself at a staggering volume and to change the underlying dynamics of political discourse. For Gurri, 2012 was the watershed year, in which the two-way traffic of social media became a social force of its own, eclipsing the standard establishment media organs and creating an entirely different communicative discourse that was ripe for political exploitation. Gurri self-published The Revolt of the Public and the book passed largely unnoticed, but after Trump’s 2016 victory Gurri’s now-dug-up thesis was the only explanation that really fit.

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Trump had said as much in a 2013 meeting with Republican supporters — a meeting reported on years later by Politico — in which he laid out his playbook for his longshot presidential campaign. “I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me,” Trump said. When told by an attendee that the only possible way to run was through lavish spending on paid advertisements, Trump said, “I think you’re wrong” — he would reach a “mass audience” entirely through the new possibilities afforded by earned media.

Initially denied the obvious entry points to airtime in his presidential run — he lacked endorsements and funding, and was far behind rivals like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker in access to conservative media — Trump made adroit use of the new technology. Twitter seemed juvenile for a presidential candidate — nobody else was really using it — but it allowed Trump both to make himself relatable and to take his case directly to voters. He became the protagonist of the election, and, when the establishment did what it could to sideline him, he turned the establishment into the foil of his story, attacking Megyn Kelly for her coverage of him.

Trump’s use of Twitter (and Truth Social) is, of course, well known. What’s vastly underappreciated, though, is the extent to which he’s consistently been ahead of his political rivals when it comes to social media and been able to use that playbook for other forms of new media. As a centrepiece of his 2024 campaign, Trump has, as The New York Times somewhat disparagingly put it, “embarked on a cavalcade of interviews”, appearing on podcasts, live streams, and basically any form of new media he can access.

That really shouldn’t be such a big deal. 360 million people use Twitter. 540 million people listen to podcasts. The only ones who don’t, it seems, are the grandees of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden never made effective use of social media — up until Biden’s announcement of not seeking a second term — and, even Kamala Harris, who is closer in age to digital nativity, has been a less-than-enthusiastic adopter. Meanwhile, Trump’s streamed conversations over the last month brought somewhere on the order of 100 million views.

In that same time period, when Trump was embarked on his “calvacade”, Harris made one — count it — large-audience media appearance, in front of the friendly audience of CNN. She appeared in person at a large number of rallies and was also interviewed by comedian Rickey Smiley, an ABC affiliate, and a Phoenix Univision station — none of those with anything like the reach of the podcasters Trump appeared with. The YouTube stream of the Rickey Smiley interview, for instance, has attracted a pitiful 7,000 views. Her paid ads have been saturating the airwaves, she can rely on near-universal support from establishment print media and favourable coverage from network TV, with the exception of Fox. She has an army of surrogates pushing out the campaign’s messages across a variety of media sources. And her debate performance, unlike Trump’s, only proves her confidence with established media forms.

The problem is that none of this messaging takes advantage of the unique resources of new media. New media — whether podcasts or social media — is all about casual, easygoing, personality-driven conversation. In Gurri’s terms, what is happening is that the entire society is going through an emperor-has-no-clothes realisation. The immediacy of digital resources makes social media users — who are also voters — highly sceptical of anybody who over-ceremoniously cloaks themselves in the mantle of authority. In the Twitter era, everyone — the world’s richest man, world leaders, sports stars, celebrities, whatever — is reduced in the end to a common denominator: they are individuals sitting behind a device and tapping into it, just like anybody else. From the perspective of “authority”, that’s something close to an existential threat — a difficulty in reestablishing the lineaments of majesty. But, from the perspective of a democratic politician who relies on popularity and relatability for legitimacy, it should be a golden opportunity. And, for every day that Harris doesn’t appear on general-interest podcasts, she is, essentially, leaving votes on the table. The Harris campaign seems finally, belatedly, to be recognising what should have been obvious a month ago, with Harris appearing on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast and with the campaign announcing a media blitz which included an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But it may be already be too late. For every day that Harris hasn’t made a new media appearance, she has missed a chance to set the narrative for the campaign.

There is nothing whatsoever that Trump does that digital media users can’t do as well. Anybody under 40 or so can do it in their sleep. But the Democratic Party still hasn’t managed a generational handoff from the Clinton era. They both don’t recognise the power of the new modes of communication and don’t know how to exploit it. Those who do — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have a vast leg-up compared with the rest of the party. And, really, that is the entire explanation of the AOC phenomenon. She tweets like a pro, she’s relatable, and she makes herself the protagonist of her story. It’s not a hard playbook to emulate, but you need to be digital media-conversant to emulate it.

Instead, though, the Dems have moved in the other direction. They have come to rely on their stranglehold over traditional media. They have newspapers, network TV, public radio. They have a war chest that gives them an advantage in all traditional ad markets. And none of that is to be underestimated — that arsenal of communicative technology has enabled them to make inroads particularly with seniors, a traditionally Republican bloc.

What the Democrats, like some red-coated, overly regimented colonial army, fail to recognise, however, is that this is asymmetrical warfare. None of their preferred modes of communication make inroads into the younger or low-information voters who are, at this stage, most likely to swing the election. The Republicans already have talk radio and Fox-world. Through Trump’s media dexterity, they have done very well in social media and, now, on podcasts.

When we assess the results of this election, what we likely will assess isn’t issues or even messaging but modalities of communication. The parties have swerved into very different communications bubbles. This has been the case at least since the era of media revolutionary Rush Limbaugh and talk radio’s shift towards conservatism, while print media and network television tended to skew more liberal. But now, with media ever-more-siloed, those distinctions are only exacerbated across a variety of forms. What the Democrats are still failing to get through their heads is that it’s the newer, more dynamic communications technologies where the more effective persuasion can take place — and which require an aggressive, personable, let-it-all-hang-out approach. Harris should be more than able to hold her own in those formats. But if she doesn’t visit them, she’ll effectively be passing over undecided votes — and those votes will cost her the election.

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