Is the internet and social media responsible for Trump? This hypothesis builds on the more general concern that internet media fuels extremism, polarisation, and paranoia by suggesting this is an atmosphere in which Trumpism thrives.  The most commonly identified feature of social media which may explain Trump is the creation of ‘echo chambers’. The term suggests that the new media reflects to its various audiences the messages they wish to hear. They rely on confirmation bias, which the tendency to favour information that reinforces our existing beliefs. It also proposes that this is different from the print media which similarly appealed to its readers because this new media was exclusive. It wasn’t just that social media algorithms create ‘filter bubbles’ that give the consumers what they like, it was that this occurred in the context of a loss of faith in, and a withdrawal from the mainstream media. Most commentators typically worry about echo chambers[1] and filter bubbles because they fear they will fuel polarisation, diminish mutual understanding, and ultimately lead to a situation where people are so far apart that they have no common ground – effectively inhabiting different realities[2]. The virality of content on social media through “friend” networks means that this content, whether fake or real, tends to travel quickly and “echo” among like-minded people. Is it this that insulates Trump from the kind of critical analysis that untethered the campaigns of so many politicians in the age of mainstream media? Gary Hart’s bright start to the primaries of 1988 fell apart with one story of marital infidelity.[3] In 2004 Howard Dean’s campaign collapsed after he yelled too enthusiastically[4] and in 2011 Texas governor Rick Perry exited the presidential race after forgetting his lines in a debate.[5]

While it’s true Ronald Reagan was described as the Teflon president since he seemed untouched by the consequences of personal gaffs or scandals in his administration. Clinton weathered credible revelations of having had an affair with Jennifer Flowers to earn the title ‘the comeback kid’, but neither bumbling charm nor changing social attitudes explain Trump’s stratospheric ability to sale above scandal and outrage. Trump it seems is uniquely invulnerable to a bad press. He famously said that he could shoot someone in Times Square and remain popular[6]. Trump attributed this to a simple matter of loyalty on the part of his supporters and indeed his core supporters are remarkably unmoved by his bad press.

 The question remains why? If the answer is the influence of social media echo chambers there is some reason to doubt this as much more than a narrow effect. A  literature review by the Royal Society in 2022 concluded that echo chambers are much less widespread than is commonly assumed, found no support for the filter bubble hypothesis, and found a very mixed picture of polarisation and the role of news and media use in contributing to polarisation[7] instead they suggest that studies both in the UK and several other countries, including the highly polarised US,  found that most people have relatively diverse media diets. However, these studies point to polarising effects for example Professor Andrew  Guess suggested “even if most Americans do not exist in online echo chambers, they are subject to the political influence of those who do.”[8] This is a variation on the elite values model of media influence but instead of liberal elites it points to the disproportionate influence of the cadre of cultural and political influencers whose reach can be huge such as Joe Rogan or extreme such as Alex Jones. They can reach people as they sit in their cars, wait for trains or walk in the street. This is ubiquitous media, unlimited by schedules with no obligation to balance, verify or explain. Author Chis Bail argues that user behaviour online is powering deep social divisions, but his concern is that rather than locking people into comfortable hobbit holes of their own kind, it draws them into new landscapes of extremism and conspiracy. ‘It functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible’[9].

In Echo Chambers, Fake News, and Social Epistemology Jennifer Lackey argues that the echo chamber effect is not based on the exclusivity of the message but its unreliability. In other words it’s the introduction of specious information into the public discourse which while it validates some misinformation it also undermines trust in all media[10]. The most outlandish ‘fake news’ stories made little impact beyond the die hard Trump believers[11] but  contributed to the atmosphere of distrust and the prevailing belief that we are in a post truth age where ‘no one really knows’ and ‘they all lie’. This may help to answer a question that perplexes the traditional news commentators, why aren’t people repelled by Trump’s lies?

Trump routinely asserts easily debunked lies, but being found out in a lie does not hurt Trump. While this is new, lying politicians is not. The expectation that a politician might not tell the truth is as old as politics, what is new is the level of desensitisation[12] Being caught in a lie might be expected to be at least embarrassing and possibly damaging, but Trump has pushed through the sound barrier of lies and each outraged reaction or fact checking is quickly forgotten pushed aside  by the  next lie. Trump knows the press  are compelled  to repeat his most outrageous claims so his lies reach millions of people through constant repetition in the press and social media. They appal, they repel and some lies are believed but overall they receive a resounding shrug and create few if any harmful effects for Trump.

A CNN fact check identified 12 completely fictional stories Trump told in the month preceding the election. These included that Kamala Harris planned to bring back the draft, he said “She’s already talking about bringing back the draft. She wants to bring back the draft, and draft your child, and put them in a war that should never have happened.” Trump claimed that schools are sending children for gender-reassigning surgeries without their parents’ knowledge. He said, “The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” At a September press conference in California, Trump claimed that “if I ran with an honest vote counter in California I would win California, but the votes are not counted honestly.” He had delivered an even more colourful version of the claim in an interview in late August, saying, “If Jesus came down and was the vote counter, I would win California, okay?” Trump’s running mate JD Vance and billionaire supporter, Elon Musk suggested the Democrats were behind the assassination attempts on Trump.  "I want to just address the elephant in the room here, which is of course just a couple of days ago my running mate, my dear friend, and our next president was nearly assassinated, again," Vance said. "Two assassination attempts in as many months." Elon Musk, who has nearly 200 million followers on X,  suggested in a quickly deleted post that it was odd that "no one is even trying to assassinate" Vice President Harris or President Biden.

Some Trump supporters know these are lies but don’t mind,  like Trump supporter  James Cassidy  who was interviewed by Daniel Dale for the University of Notre dame blog, Truth in Politics. He said he didn’t need the director of the FBI to tell him Barack Obama never wiretapped Donald Trump at Trump Tower. Cassidy knew from the start that Trump made the whole thing up. He was happy the president lied. “He’s ruffling every feather in Washington that he can ruffle. These guys are scrambling. So: yeah! I like it. I think it’s a good thing. I want to see them jump around a little bit,”[13]. Among the many reasons that Trump’s supporters excuse his lying is that they, like Trump himself, do not really hold him to the standards that other humans are held to. And that is because many of his supporters, like Trump himself, do not consider him to be a person ‘he is more like a primal force or superhero, more than a person, but less than a person, too.’[14]

Rather than Trump’s unique almost extraterrestrial qualities others have argued that Trump benefits from existing in the post-truth world.

‘In our new normal, experts are dismissed, alternative facts are (sometimes flagrantly) offered, and public figures can offer opinions on pretty much anything. And thanks to social media, pretty much anyone can be a public figure. In much public discourse, identity outranks arguments' [15]

For this line of reasoning, the most compelling reason for Trump’s invulnerability is a general loss of faith in the mainstream media and the validity of knowledge itself. The Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition asked us to ‘ Imagine a world that considers knowledge to be “elitist.’’[16]  and a post I came across from brendanschaub on X  voiced feelings of resentment at being threatened, condescended to, being vilified by the media, and liberal elites for believing what people used to take for granted.

Mainstream media is officially dead.

I don't know anyone under 50 that takes CNN or Fox

serious. The celebrity endorsements didn't work.

Anyone with a few brain cells knows those people

are completely full of sh*t. It’s not the flex you think

it is. The left ran on hate and thought Americans

were dumb enough to vote for someone they never

asked for in the first place. You were told this was a

close race and it wasn’t even remotely close in any

facet. They tried to separate us, they told you

America was racist, they told you if you vote for

Trump you're a N*zi. None of it worked. The gig is

up. The woke crap, the DEI non sense, it's over. Keep

our kids safe, protect the border, and keep us out of war. That's it.

Thank God.

Not only does Brendan resent being misled he sees himself as being in possession of a more comprehensible truth which rests on a simple heartfelt desire to stay safe. So rather than a post-truth world, it’s a clash of truths. The truth that seems right, which I can see with my own eyes and which the people I know believe is against the truth of those who do not know us or care about us. 

The widespread belief that traditional media have not been telling the truth and have been peddling an agenda of the left, which has undermined traditional values and placed America in harm's way, underpins the mission of the conservative media,  to push aside the stodgy mainstream media of print journalism and television and unseat the left elites and their woke agenda.

This was first promoted by Fox News, who presented themselves as champions who sought to balance a media dominated by liberals and establish themselves as the television manifestation of the shock jocks like  Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. Michael Tomasky writes in The New Republic sees a right-wing media coup where   ‘the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country’. He concludes ‘This is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times. That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him’.[17] . Michael Tomasky like much of the left sees a concerted right-wing media take over as a kind of reverse ‘elites theory’ which is indeed how Fox see themselves. In his book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History Kurt Andersen describes the conquest of American political discourse by the radical right in politics and the law, and the neo-liberals in economics. He blames the complacent and complicit establishment, and liberal “useful idiots’’ for letting it happen. This is a top-down explanation whereas the rise of Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and Theo Von whose medium is the podcast,  represent a great change in the media landscape, but in one which grew organically from below. The media has always been a transmitter of establishment ideology whose central concern is to run profit-oriented businesses dependent on advertisers for their revenues. The media has always chased the down veins of discontent and flattered its consumers by the belief that they, the reader or listener, had selected a voice that articulated their own ability to see the truth. The trick of all media businesses is to sell the myth of intellectual agency. In this, Rogan is supreme. He has made himself the avatar of the common man who sees in Rogan personal validation and an authority burnished by  Rogan’s huge wealth, which can be both envied and admired and read as a signifier of value and authenticity. Rogan like Trump exists in a media landscape where anything might be true so nothing also might be true. Trump trades in lies and Rogan in passivity. You just never know there may be aliens visiting our planet, maybe vaccines do cause autism- who knows?

[1] Social media echo chambers gifted Donald Trump the presidency

[2] https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/echo-chambers-filter-bubbles-and-polarisation-literature-review

[3] How Scandal Derailed Gary Hart’s Presidential Bid

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwkNnMrsx7Q

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyMosJdIfdo

[6] Donald Trump Says He Could 'Shoot Somebody' Without Losing Votes

[7] Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation: a literature review

[8] (Almost) Everything in Moderation: New Evidence on Americans' Online Media Diets

[9] Breaking the Social Media Prism by Chris Bail

[10] Echo Chambers, Fake News, and Social Epistemology

[11] Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 U.S. election

[12] https://www.howwegottonow.com/post/desensitization

[13] Donald Trump voters: We like the president’s lies

[14] The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning

Dan P. McAdams

[15] We're in a post-truth world with eroding trust and accountability. It can't end well The Guardian Nick Enfield

[16] Beyond Misinformation: Understanding and Coping with the “Post-Truth” Era

[17] https://newrepublic.com/post/188197/trump-media-information-landscape-fox