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Finito World
Whether Donald Trump wins the next US election or not, his recent podcast tour illustrates beyond reasonable doubt that the legacy media is on the way out.
This week Trump sat down for a three hour talk with Joe Rogan, and it ought to be a clear signal to all young people thinking of working in the media not to fill out the arduous applications to CNN, Fox or the BBC, but to consider how they might be a part of a new kind of conversation.
The conversation itself will surprise anyone who thinks they know Trump from his appearances on the mainstream media. It was the question of ‘fake news’ which defined Trump’s first run in 2016. At times, during that presidential cycle, Trump found that he was able to say outrageous things and then gaslight the media and the world that he hadn’t said them.
But we have tended to know Trump predominantly in a network setting: we witness him in clips and the nature of a clip is to cut out other context. His speech in a short format often comes across as rambling and bizarre and there are many indefensible things that he has said and done. But many voters in 2016 were so tired of canned speech and soundbites that they saw his energy as holding a kind of promise, regardless of what he said.
2024 seems to be a continuation of that development, but there is also an undeniably different feel to it all. This is partly due to the assassination attempts. In the first of which, Trump showed undeniable physical courage in getting up so soon after being shot.
Something about that occasion made Rogan want to know more about him. I think it may have been a simple question of admiring his indefatigability and resilience. Rogan, like so many, was appalled by Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in 2020 – but equally appalled at the idea of his murder in broad daylight.
Whatever one thinks of Trump, there is the possibility that we will all be enriched by these developments. The conversation between Rogan and Trump was three hours long and completely different to the typical edited 10 minutes we might get on CNN.
The pair of them discussed everything from wrestling to energy and foreign policy, what it was like to arrive in the White House. to Vice-President Kamala Harris. This followed on from another recent conversation with Theo Von in which he movingly discussed his elder brother Fred’s alcoholism.
The point here is not whether you like or dislike Trump. The point is whether, in advance of being asked to vote for him, you actually want to get to know him. It is to his credit that Trump chose to do these podcasts, and to Harris’ discredit that she has so far been unable to submit herself to this format.
What we learn in such things is telling in a way the stilted mainstream interviews aren’t. For instance, we could notice that though Rogan swears regularly, Trump was always polite, but never followed him into expletives. He isn’t a people-pleaser like that.
There was also a quick aside early on about how he felt seeing the Lincoln bedroom on his first night of his presidency – it was a big deal, Trump said, ‘if you love your country’. It was the sort of glancing aside which has to be authentic because of the format.
Over on CNN, Harris bungled an answer on 60 minutes about Benjamin Netanyahu only for the clip to be substituted by a slightly better answer. What appears to have happened is that the first incomprehensible answer, all too typical of Harris, was accidentally put out to promote the interview, only for it to substituted by the network when the interview aired. Trump is wrong on many things, but he is right to say that this indicates media bias.
Viewers are moving across to the independent platforms. This is welcome if we want to get to know our politicians and it is relevant to Britain too. What occurs in the US usually migrates over to the UK. This follows on from a mind-numbingly dull election in 2024 in the UK, where Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak battled it out over who could give the best 45 second answer over the future of the nation’s entire tax policy.
The result has been a government whose plans were held to no scrutiny whatsoever with the result that months in to the administration, we have tax rises on the horizon which many would rather not have, but which probably would have been more broadly understood if our election had been fought over longer format interviews.
It is a reminder that media careers are changing rapidly, and that Trump knows this. They are headed in the direction of authenticity and individuality against banality and the pre-prepared. If starting out in a media career today, there are vast opportunities for unique voices.
Of course it’s competitive, because everybody can get to market – but it is a fair and sane competitiveness distinct from the competitiveness one sees in corporations: 20,000 AI-sifted applications for even menial roles.
Things are changing: it is as if everybody is being asked to look inwards. This is a huge shift in a world where status itself had become all too dull and staid. Trump is sometimes an unlikely vehicle for these sorts of realisations: he remains boastful, egoistic and at times a bit mad. But he knows things his opponent doesn’t – and much of what he knows has to do with the future and not the past.
