Four years after fomenting an attempted coup and leaving the White House in disgrace, convicted felon Donald Trump was reelected president on Tuesday. He owes his return to the presidency at least in part to a rankly dishonest right-wing information ecosystem that helped carry him through countless scandals that would have ended the careers of most politicians, driving his comeback to the pinnacle of power.
Conservative audiences are dependent on a right-wing media complex that bombards them with falsehoods and grievances while dissuading them from consulting any alternative sources of information. During Trump’s first term, that bubble served him and his interests. Within it, his supporters were convinced by a sprawling conspiracy theory portraying the then-president as the victim of a shadowy “deep state” cabal that justified mass retribution.
During the election, right-wing propagandists worked to hold the GOP base together with a combination of grievance-mongering and silence. They flooded the zone with a bogus narrative of “migrant crime,” instructed their audiences to treat immigrants as scapegoats, and lashed out at the press. When an unprecedented string of former Republican officials (including Trump’s own former administration aides) came forward with dire warnings of what Trump did in his first term and could do in a second, they hid the news from their audience.
As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz writes: “Journalists and political strategists will spend the next weeks and months grappling for explanations as to how Trump returned to the White House. But without the support of the right-wing propaganda machine, he would not have been in position to sweep his party’s nomination in the first place — and in an evenly divided country amid a global anti-incumbent wave, that provided a strong position to win the presidency. Now, the same propagandists who helped him back to power are poised to help him carry out his extreme agenda of destruction and retribution.”
