The Value of Trump(ism)

How are we going to miss him if he will never leave?

I’m talking about Donald Trump. Everyone’s writing about him. I might as well.

Actually, no. I’m writing about the media, and the weird dance that they’ve been doing for years. It started in the 1970s, in New York, where Trump became a local celeb by buying up real estate and being the kind of rich swine that were a big deal when the city was broke.

He kept coming back like herpes, anytime he could: Home Alone 2, Saturday Night Live, The Apprentice. Even a book, The Art of the Deal, that idjuts bought to learn the Big Secrets of making money. (Hint: start with a $60 million nest egg and hire good bankruptcy lawyers). Trump signed away the book’s advance and its royalties to the ghost writer, thinking the book would bomb. Some deal.

But he’s good copy. Trump has made a lot of money for American corporations.

In March 2016, months before the presidential election, The New York Times estimated Trump had already received $2 billion worth of “earned media” from TV, radio, newspaper and Internet outlets.

The Times reporter seemed surprised that Trump “wins primary after primary with one of the smallest campaign budgets. He still doesn’t have a super PAC. He skimped on ground organization and field offices. Most important, he spent less on television advertising — typically the single biggest expenditure for a campaign — than any other major candidate, according to an analysis by SMG Delta, a firm that tracks television advertising.”

Even then, still in primary season, Trump was getting twice as much free advertising as the Democratic front runner, Hillary Clinton. The rivals of his own party were shut out of this windfall. In just one month (February 2016), Trump was given $400 million worth of free media, about what John McCain spent on his entire 2008 presidential campaign.

And that was just the start of a flood of non-stop coverage that’s lasted almost nine years. In a world where celebrity is everything, where morons make a lot of money by breaking as many of the Seven Deadly Sins as they can on Instagram, coverage makes familiarity, and that translates into economic and, for those who want it, political power. Some of the stories about Trump and Clinton were negative, but fame and infamy can sometimes push a candidate. Not being talked about is fatal to politicians.

Paul Senatori, mediaQuant’s chief analytics officer, told the Times how Trump dominated political coverage on every level of media, from newspapers of record, metropolitan dailies, mellow mushy-Left public radio and hysterical talk-radio, television nightly news and all the cable news networks, and, of course, social media. A Harvard study report released in May 2017 found “Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days was negative even by the standards of today’s hyper-critical press.” So Trump benefited twice: once from the publicity that kept him front of mind and inspired people to talk; again when he told his rallies the media is against him.

Another study by the same Harvard team looked at stories on CNN – hardly a Trump-friendly network. The profs and grad students found the phrases “crooked Hillary” and “lock her up” were repeated 3,000 times during the campaign.

Stories about Trump’s tweets are a good example of how Trump and the right use outrageous behavior to fire up the free advertising machine. During the campaigns and his presidency, Trump would often, almost daily, tweet something cruel and outrageous. The media would amplify them with national headlines. A study of people who read the tweets showed 95 percent found them through media coverage, not Twitter. Trump showed notoriety was as good as fame earned through goods. Fame is all that counts, and his claim that his celebrity meant he could get away with grabbing women “by the pussy” or get away with shooting a man in Times Square was solid analysis.

The symbiotic relation of the press and over-the-top politicians benefits both, even those journalists and commentators who claim to loathe Trump. Watching the late-night talk shows, it’s hard to imagine how Stephen Colbert, Seth Myers, John Steward, Jimmy Kimmel and the rest will keep their audiences and fill their monologues when Donald Trump is gone from the political scene.

The numbers tell a story: during the first Trump campaign and his presidency, The New York Times’ digital circulation grew from 2 million to more than 7 million. The Washington Post saw its digital subscriptions go up at least five-fold. Cable news subscriptions, which had been moribund, more than doubled between early 2016 and 2020. Audiences of all the big American news networks – Fox, CNN and MSNBC – took off. Even little NPR made bank on Trump: when Trump’s Secretary of State attacked the public broadcaster live on air, falsely claiming one of its journalists had broken the ground rules of his interview, the national office and member stations were flooded with donations.

Canada has no late-night talk shows. A person could be in the witness protection program and still be a host on a Canadian cable news station without much risk of discovery. No recent Canadian politician has been able to inspire much more than mild curiosity or dread in the great mass of the people, and the kind of Canadians who live on Twitter don’t buy newspaper subscriptions.

But where there’s a mild pulse, there’s hope. By the spring of 2024, Canada’s political journalists were anxious for something big to happen in Ottawa, either Justin Trudeau’s retirement and a Liberal leadership race, or an election where Poilievre and Trudeau would heap scorn and calumny on each other. Jagmeet Singh threw them a small bone when he broke his deal to support the government until 2025. Poilievre did what he could to turn Question Period into a monkey house, but everyone knew the big show was coming.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if we had a couple of dry, dedicated, brilliant contenders who weren’t weird, the kind of people who had different views of the country but didn’t pester and annoy people. But that’s not how things work these days. Like squirrels, our political media chases nuts.

‍