In a blind rush to appease a phantom Trump demographic, media executives and billionaire owners are granting influential platforms to bigots
Last week, WABC AM 77 in New York announced that disgraced shock-jock relic and gushing Nazi fan Anthony Cumia had returned to the radio in our nation’s most cosmopolitan city. Two months into this second Trump administration, it was just the latest example of media corporations across the board scrambling to placate the president and assure his unappeasable, permanently aggrieved supporters that they are seen, loved, and appreciated. The Cumia news came alongside a Netflix announcement that it had signed a three-special deal with comic Tony Hinchcliffe, most famous for his gig at the Trump Madison Square Garden rally where he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” The week before that, Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live; in 2019, he’d been hired and fired by SNL’s producer Lorne Michaels before he’d even appeared in a sketch, as old podcasts surfaced where Gillis threw terms like “fucking chinks” and “white faggots” around. There’s nothing new in this embrace of right-wing troll comedy; it’s a throwback to the shock radio world where Trump began his media career 30 years ago. In those heady days of “just kidding” racism, Don Imus’s radio show was even simulcast on liberal MSNBC. Back then, Imus could call reporter Howard Kurtz a “boner-nosed…beanie-wearing Jew boy,” and sum up PBS’s White House correspondent Gwen Ifill’s gig thusly: “They let the cleaning lady cover the White House,” and still book Bill Clinton or John McCain. Howard Stern, meanwhile, platformed Klan members and played a racist holiday song called “N——- Claus.” Then as now, Trump used that kind of humor to advance his interests. As his Atlantic City casino empire collapsed, Trump went on Imus’s show to blame his failure on Native American–owned casinos, saying, “They don’t look like Indians to me.” Three decades later, he stopped his State of the Union address to call Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” The resurgence of troll comedy reflects the postelection trend of chasing MAGA followers as the pop-cult demographic du jour. Despite Trump’s nonexistent mandate and razor-thin popular-vote victory, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times radically altered their editorial pages to avoid our vindictive president’s wrath and court his supporters—resulting in large-scale defections of subscribers. As the administration scours the halls of our federal government to remove any visible sign of diversity, MSNBC cleansed its prime-time lineup of non-white hosts—drawing outraged pushback from star anchor Rachel Maddow. The saddest grab for this imaginary MAGA cultural revolution has to be Amazon Prime promoting reruns of The Apprentice. Bezos and company have bet that the American people, after seeing the president all day on the news and reading his daily Truth Social micro-manifestos, will want to relax at day’s end binge-watching his old “reality-TV” show late into the night. So far, the marketing strategy of pandering to Trump and his liberal-media-hating base has not helped said liberal media much. It’s cost them subscribers and traffic, and left the erstwhile resistance-branded team at MSNBC starved for ratings. All of these media decision-makers have misread Trump’s 312–226 Electoral College win as a national vibe shift rather than the meager popular win that it was. The audience hasn’t changed—there’s no red wave remaking the basic contours of media programming. Nevertheless, MAGA appeasement lumbers on. California Governor Gavin Newsom fell for it, launching a new podcast this month with hardcore MAGA guests like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. It blew up on him—not in terms of ratings, mind you, more in the fashion of a Musk-designed SpaceX launch.
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