I wrote yesterday of the Trump administration’s extensive and sophisticated (social) media system. All of Trump’s core supporters get most of their news and analysis from this system, beginning with the closely allied Fox News Network and continuing down through a dense web of independent journalists, bloggers, YouTubers and social media posters. This system functions as a MAGA Hyperrealism Machine, and its purpose is to assure rank-and-file voters and donors that Trump is always winning and that history is on their side. The MAGA Hyperrealism Machine has annexed Greenland, restored factory employment en masse to the United States, observed from across the Atlantic the fall of Europe to African invaders and defeated Iran perhaps twenty times over.
A lot of these apparently independent vloggers and viral X posters are paid, and their content is boosted by other people who are also paid. They coordinate on messaging and strategy behind the scenes. This is not nefarious and it is not a conspiracy. It’s a complex, distributed publicity operation – and a very powerful one, because social media allows content creators to form close parasocial relationships with their followers. The Democrats do this too, but the sprawling, informal Trumpist social media ecosystem seems more extensive, probably because it has to be. Most of the establishment media is utterly opposed to Trump; sympathetic voices at the major papers and broadcasters are few indeed. Like other populists, including German parties like AfD and Die Linke, he has turned to social media as an alternative platform.
The MAGA Hyperrealism Machine is extremely powerful. Many believe that this Machine, and this Machine alone, provides the absolute truth on all matters Trump. Even in the less extensive, less sophisticated iteration of Trump’s first term, the Machine extended a bright technicolor screen of bold optimism before the core MAGA audience. This in turn created a curious problem, namely how to account for blunt setbacks that threatened to falsify the illusion. Early on, the Machine developed a clever if unsavoury solution to this problem. Whenever you see this solution being deployed, you know that the MAGA movement and Trump himself are in trouble.
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