Here’s why Trump ignores traditional media: He has his own media ecosystem now.

And Democrats not only don't have the same network, but they don't seem interested in building one.

By Jeff Nesbit

A recent report from Media Matters, a non-profit advocacy group that studies and reports on the state of media in America today, makes a stark reality crystal clear: The principal reason Donald Trump no longer pays any attention to traditional media outlets is that his presidential administration has the right-wing media ecosystem marketing content and messages daily to a mass audience reaching 100 million Americans every single day.

Media Matters analyzed 320 online shows with a right-leaning or left-leaning ideological bent and discovered what has become obvious now to even casual observers of the state of traditional and digital mass media in America.

“We found that right-leaning online shows dominate the ecosystem, with substantially larger audiences on both politics/news shows and supposedly nonpolitical shows that we determined often platformed ideological content or guests,” the report said.

“Right-leaning online shows had at least 480.6 million total followers and subscribers — nearly five times as many as left-leaning. Across platforms — YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, Kick, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok — right-leaning online shows accounted for roughly 82% of the total following of the online shows we assessed,” the report concluded.

This robust, new GOP media ecosystem is largely responsible for Trump’s 2024 electoral success. Trump’s GOP party apparatus is now interconnected inside it. And marketing isn’t an afterthought in this new Trump GOP media ecosystem—it’s a central aim.

“These numbers are staggering, but they’re not an accident. They’re the result of a deliberate, well-funded strategy to colonize the digital media landscape with conservative voices,” writes Parker Malloy, the author of The Present Age. “While left-leaning creators struggle to cobble together sustainable business models through Patreon donations and merchandise sales, right-wing personalities are frequently backed by billionaire money that allows them to build sophisticated media operations with professional production values and massive marketing budgets.”

Trump supporters have fought with traditional media for years. Supporters occasionally called journalists at his campaign rallies the “Lugenpresse”—a German word roughly translated as “lying press” that Adolph Hitler’s Nazi propaganda chiefs popularized in the 1930s. The Nazis attacked traditional journalists relentlessly while building out their own media channels to guarantee a daily mass audience of the German people.

The reason autocrats and dictators seize media when they take power is this: if you control the message, you control the people. That is the central goal and art of effective propaganda.

In Hitler’s case, it didn’t happen overnight. In fact, if you study the rise and fall of the Nazi party from 1920 to 1945, you see a demarcation line when the party went from experimenting to full control of the media ecosystem in Germany. From 1920, when Hitler began his rise, until 1933, the Nazis bought a few newspapers and tried their hand at their own media ecosystem.

But in 1933, once he’d abolished the rule of law and seized control of the state, Hitler and the Nazis made a simple but wildly effective move—they essentially ordered manufacturers to create very cheap radios that were then made widely available to the German people. They were called “people’s receivers.” When Hitler gave his rabble-rousing speeches daily, every radio in Germany was tuned to them. They created a mass audience almost overnight in 1933 this way. Using that cheap radio to listen to any other channel after the start of World War II in 1939 was considered an act of treason against the state.

Hitler and the Nazis proved that absolute control of media to a mass audience works. When you control your own mass media ecosystem, lies can easily become truth and distortions can become facts. You can see obvious elements of this mass media theory in what’s happening with the Trump GOP media ecosystem the Media Matters report describes in detail.

Now, to be clear, no one is making the analogy that Donald Trump is Adolph Hitler. This isn’t 1933. There has been no Reichstag fire event in America to trigger martial law, thereby allowing a new, American dictator to seize radio, TV and newspapers to tightly control party messages that reach the American people.

Trump’s GOP has not seized power to such an extent that they can shut down the media and demand that a mass audience in America listen solely to their leader’s speeches and nothing else. No one is buying cheap radios in America and putting them in the hands of 100 million Americans so they can listen to their leader’s daily speeches.

But what the recent Media Matters report makes excruciatingly clear is that one of the two national parties in America has acquired and built its own media ecosystem to such an extent that they no longer need to pay even the slightest bit of attention to traditional media. Trump has his own social media, where he puts on a daily show for that mass audience.

At any given time, dozens of nodes within Trump’s media ecosystem can reach a mass audience in the tens of millions with the push of a button. Those voices all repeat the same message (regardless of its veracity) to the exclusion of anything else to their collective mass audience. That’s the genius of propaganda. It can drown out democratic voices with ease.

There is no parallel with the other national party in America. Even if it wanted to, the Democratic Party has no ability whatsoever to command the daily attention of a mass audience of 100 million or so the way Trump’s GOP now can. It cannot quickly replicate the media ecosystem that Trump now has at his command. There are two reasons for this.

First, Democrats largely trust and respect the traditional media. They may not always like it, but they generally believe in the concept of the Fourth Estate. They believe that science, evidence, and facts prevail at some point in any political or policy discussion—and that journalists are America’s best hope of reaching the closest approximation of the truth in those cases.

This media construct for Democrats—that you make your case to journalists so that they can cover daily or breaking news, known as “earned” media—has not changed in a quarter century. It’s why the Democratic Party is struggling to match the intensity and scale of the Trump GOP media ecosystem right now.

Second, the wealthiest Democratic donors who give large sums of money immediately prior to a presidential or midterm election for paid media have never seen the need to build a daily media ecosystem the way Trump’s GOP has. They view the concept of “paid” media largely through the lens of 30-second TV ads in the closing weeks of a political campaign.

This, too, has largely not changed in a quarter century. Democrats are comfortable giving large sums of money for TV-style ads—but only toward the end of political campaigns when that paid media content can be created and marketed through TV and digital channels. They view paid, controlled communications efforts to reach a mass audience each day—the way the Trump GOP media ecosystem now works—as propaganda. And they will not fund or support it.

In fact, though Trump’s GOP media ecosystem pays and markets in order to reach a mass audience daily (by sharing consumer and voter lists, all under paid marketing efforts), Democrats generally believe that funding communications to a mass audience should only be used to raise money—not to make sure that tens of millions of Americans hear, understand, process and act on democratic principles and what your party believes in and stands for.

You can see this daily—right now—in texts, calls or emails asking Democratic voters for small donations. It’s all about fundraising—never about communicating what your party believes in and stands for. Hot button issues like Social Security, Medicare, Elon Musk, destroying the rule of law, or tax cuts for billionaires are used largely as props for the purpose of asking for money.

That’s why independent media sites like The Contrarian—which is adding thousands of new subscribers on a weekly basis—are so important right now. Collectively, they are using widely available video, audio and writing tools to make science, evidence and facts available to a growing audience on a daily basis. It’s not a mass audience (yet), but it’s a good start.

What has become abundantly clear in the past two months is that there is, in fact, a mass audience of the American people who want to hear the alternative to the Trump GOP media ecosystem. They showed up at the “Fighting Oligarchy” and “Hands Off” rallies in the millions.

But, in the end, rallies are not enough—not when you’re up against a Trump GOP media ecosystem with a marketing budget capable of directly reaching 100 million people in America every single day of the week. The Media Matters report lays out this new media reality in clear, stark terms.

For those of us who believe that science, evidence, and facts still matter in an American democracy, we need mass audience daily shows with authentic voices, objective truth as a central goal, and a marketing budget at the scale and speed of the Trump GOP media ecosystem. Whether anything remotely resembling such a mass audience effort arrives in time to hold off the steady march of authoritarianism in America, however, is another question.

Jeff Nesbit was the public affairs chief at five Cabinet departments or agencies under four presidents.

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