Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses radical change in the media landscape.
President Trump's marathon appearances on male-oriented shows made 2024 the first "podcast election." That'll be even more true. Fox News' Greg Gutfeld said on "The Five" while discussing Kirk's death: "The media is dead to us on this story. They built this thing up. We're dealing with it. We are going to act. We don't care what the whataboutism is anymore. That s**t's dead."Alex Bruesewitz, the young Trump adviser who was the architect of the podcast strategy, has become a principal himself — a coveted guest for shows and events.Drew Harwell and Dylan Wells at WP:
The White House struck a victorious tone last month when it launched a TikTok account seven months into President Donald Trump’s second term, posting a cinematic highlight reel showing Trump shaking hands and walking red carpets with the caption, “America we are BACK!”
But behind the scenes, according to interviews with eight people familiar with the matter, the @whitehouse account’s launch kindled months of internal uncertainty over strategy, resources and tone, with Trump administration officials at odds over who should lead the effort and how aggressive the videos should be. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
The debut also faced an immediate setback: a flood of negative responses, many from left-wing influencers, that turned every video’s comment section into an anti-Trump sounding board. The top comment on 97 of the 101 videos posted since the launch has been negative or critical of Trump. On the account’s most watched clips, some of the most prominent responses call Trump “the most corrupt president ever” or share an unflattering AI-generated image combining his face with a fish.
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Trump vowed to ban TikTok during his first presidency, but then last summer his campaign account there became an extraordinary success. Named, like his longtime Twitter handle, @realdonaldtrump, it posted 58 videos in the five months before the election, many of which featured influencer cameos, frenetic cuts and thumping rap-style soundtracks, and received tens of millions of views.
The campaign used the account to undermine Vice President Kamala Harris’s online messaging and her fans on social media, but also to tailor messages to TikTok’s generally younger fan base, including by posting videos in which Trump promised to “save TikTok” from the sell-or-ban law passed last year. “We have TikTok people, you know, we’re leading the internet,” Trump said in August.
