The truest thing Donald Trump has ever said

And, yes, it's about the media.

(Donald Trump, and his brain)

Donald Trump lies. A lot. Like, more than 30,000 times during his four years in office.

So, when he tells the truth — even unwittingly — it’s sometimes hard to see.

But, there’s one thing Trump said — way back in 2017 — that I a) think about all the time and b) am convinced is the truth.

It’s this quote:

“Newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.”

The comment was decidedly off hand, part of an “impromptu 30-minute interview with The New York Times at his golf club in West Palm Beach.”

My guess is that Trump put very little thought into it — and probably didn’t think about it again after he said it.

But, damned if he isn’t right.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the co-dependent relationship between Trump and the media lately, thoughts driven by a(nother) round of cuts across the media world.

The Washington Post is preparing to lay off more than 100 people. Vox and Conde Nast started layoffs last week. Vice laid people off last month. Unfortunately, there are likely more cuts to come.

The moves are explained away, generally speaking, as overly optimistic predictions about web traffic and the broader ad market. As the Washington Post reported on its own planned buyouts/layoffs:

In an email to staff, interim CEO Patty Stonesifer wrote that The Post’s subscription, traffic and advertising projections over the past two years had been “overly optimistic” and that the company is looking for ways “to return our business to a healthier place in the coming year.”

While Trump is rarely mentioned, it’s hard to ignore the role he has played over the last eight or so years in the media industry.

The truth of the matter is that political journalism — cable TV and print/digital — was struggling in 2015 when Trump appeared on the scene.

The excitement and interest of the Obama years had worn off. While Hillary Clinton certainly had her detractors (and supporters) she didn’t move the traffic needle like Obama. (This is less true at Fox News whose audience was very energized by the prospect of a Clinton presidency.)

Enter Trump, who, at the start, was more an oddity than anything else. The giddiness of covering Trump in those early days was palpable; I said some version of “can you believe he just said that?!?!” at least once a day in 2015 and 2016.

What became clear pretty quickly though was a) Trump was more of a serious candidate than the media initially thought and b) people watched everything he did.

There’s a simple reason why cable networks ran all of Trump’s speeches in those early days: Because they rated better than anything that was on otherwise.

Some people watched in admiration. Others in fascination. Still others in abject horror. But, the point was that they watched. And read.

The simple fact is that ANY piece of Donald Trump content in 2016 outperformed ANY piece of Hillary Clinton content (or any other political content). He was totally known, a reality TV celebrity crashing his car through the barricades of the political world. And NO ONE didn’t have an opinion about him. Not one person.

It was like looking at the sun during an eclipse (which Trump did!). Or slowing down to see the aftermath of a traffic accident. People might have been horrified. But they couldn’t look away.

Now consider this: Media companies are businesses. And businesses that — even in good times — get by with very thin margins. (This is less true of cable news, which continues to make good money — although the disaggregation of the cable bundle and the rise of streaming represents an existential threat to their business model.)

Which means that when something — or, in this case, someone — boosts numbers like crazy, media companies pay attention. Donald Trump was that person. He was a life raft thrown to a mainstream media apparatus that was drowning. Everything Trump touched — traffic-wise — turned to gold.

A random weekday news story focused on Trump would send page views through the roof. A televised town hall with Trump would set ratings records. A debate featuring Trump? Forget about it!

That trend continued throughout Trump’s presidency. Some people loved him. And they consumed content about him loyally and regularly. Some people HATED him. And they consumed content about him loyally and regularly. Win-win (at least for the business side of the media industry).

Cable TV — and CNN in particular — was riding high. The New York Times and Washington Post were reporting record subscription numbers.

In late November 2016, CNBC reported that:

From the election on Nov. 8 through Saturday, the Times has seen “a net increase of approximately 132,000 paid subscriptions to our news products,” the media giant said in an exclusive statement to CNBC.

“This represents a dramatic rate of growth, 10 times, the same period one year ago,” according to the statement issued ahead of a CNBC interview Tuesday with New York Times CEO Mark Thompson.

Axios reported in 2020:

Sources tell Axios that the Post is nearing 3 million digital subscribers, a 50% year-over-year growth in subscriptions and more than 3x the number of digital-only subscribers it had in 2016. The New York Times now has more than 6 million digital-only subscribers, nearly 3x its number from 2016.

This chart, also from Axios, tells the “Trump bump” story in visual terms:

Publishers and TV executives did a lot of back-patting around 2020 — crediting their innovative efforts to expand subscribers (and watchers). Few — at least publicly — credited Trump because, well, that would be unseemly.

But, in the harsh light of history, it’s hard not to see the Trump effect at work here. Because as soon as he lost the White House in 2020, all of these brilliant media executives started to, um, run out of great ideas.

As Paul Farhi, the Washington Post’s media critics, wrote in the spring of 2021:

After a record-setting January, traffic to the nation’s most popular mainstream news sites, including The Washington Post, plummeted in February, according to the audience tracking firm ComScore. The top sites were also generally doing worse than in February of last year, when the pandemic became a major international news story.

The Post, for example, saw the number of unique visitors fall 26 percent from January to February, and 7 percent from a year ago. The New York Times lost 17 percent compared with January and 16 percent over last February.

The story is largely the same for cable and broadcast news. Audiences grew during the pandemic last spring and summer, remained high in the fall as Trump tried to fight his electoral defeat with false claims of voter fraud, and swelled in the first few weeks of 2021 when a mob attacked the Capitol and Trump became the first president in history to be impeached and acquitted twice.

Now that Joe Biden is in the White House and Trump has essentially disappeared from the news cycle, many of those viewers are drifting away.

In late 2021, the Columbia Journalism Review reported:

On television, between October 2020 and October 2021, according to Nielsen data, CNN was down 73 percent, to 661,000 viewers. Over the same period, MSNBC was down 56 percent, to 1.2 million viewers, and Fox News was down 53 percent, to 2.3 million viewers.

In December 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Washington Post had lost 500,000 subscribers — a 20% decline — since Trump had left office.

The numbers were — and are — stark. And while attributing all of the ratings and subscription declines to Trump gives him too much credit — the fading of the Covid-19 pandemic clearly played a role as did the broader structural issues with media advertising and the cable bundle — it is also a fallacy to suggest that Trump didn’t have anything to do with the slump in eyeballs.

Now, unless you have spent the last year on another planet (if so, do tell!), you know that Trump is the frontrunner to be the Republican nominee for president. And is, at worst, an even money bet to win the White House (again) in 2024.

So, maybe, this is just a temporary lull for the media. Trump back in office — and doing even some of the things he claims to be planning — could well re-invigorate news consumers to turn back to cable TV and re-subscribe to major print/digital outlets.

For example, more than 3 million people tuned into a CNN townhall this past spring with Trump — FAR more people than typically watch primetime programming on the channel.

That town hall is instructive on another front too, however — the ethical one. CNN (and then network president Chris Licht) faced HUGE blowback for providing Trump, a known liar, with a live platform on which to push his falsehoods.

Those twin realities — boosted ratings but significant criticism for platforming Trump — make clear the extremely difficult choice that media outlets face on the cusp of the 2024 race.

Trump (still) rates. While he may not draw as many people as he did in the earliest days of his political life, there’s no debate that the average piece of Trump content, for instance, drastically outperforms the average piece of Joe Biden content.

At the same time, the threat Trump poses cannot be laughed off or dismissed any longer. We have lived through the 2020 election — and January 6, 2021. Those events make clear that Trump (and his lies) represent a clear and present danger to democracy.

All of which puts the media in a very tough spot. It is a business. But it is also a public trust and service. Life is easy when those two goals (make money and inform the public) align.

But, that is not the situation in which we find ourselves. Quite the opposite. The best thing for business (wall-to-wall Trump) is directly in opposition to the goal of keeping the electorate well informed. And democracy healthy.

What choice will the mainstream media make?