With his return to the White House, Donald Trump now has the singularly powerful bully pulpit and megaphone of the presidency, and with that, great control and influence over a vast multimedia propaganda communications machine which includes not only television, radio and print but also social media, podcasts, YouTube and other online spaces and digital culture.
Donald Trump, like other historically powerful authoritarians and autocrats, is a master of spectacle and distraction. This spectacle is disseminated through and amplified by a type of political and social experience machine that compels Trump’s MAGA people and other followers and supporters by entertaining, “educating,” and emotionally training and conditioning them into TrumpWorld, the MAGAverse and the larger right-wing echo chamber and alternate reality. The Democrats and other mainstream establishment political voices (including small “c” conservatives and traditional Republicans) who believe in America’s democratic institutions, the Constitution, the rule of law and “normality” have not built an equivalent experience machine. This is one of the main reasons why Donald Trump and his authoritarian populist MAGA movement and the larger global antidemocracy movement have been so effective in their revolutionary project to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy and civil society.
