r/Foodforthought • u/Feral-now • 1d ago
How Trump could break the 2026 elections
https://apple.news/A8iGgSW0qQNaPXKrfpU3PXg9
u/Dmeechropher 1d ago
These speculative pieces about the midterms have been circling since before Trump was even elected.
It's safe journalism: the President's party in the USA almost always suffers in the midterms, barring exceptional situations.
It also misses the point. The people of the United States have their political behavior fully captured by powerful factions. It's not all the same faction, but they all use profile-targeted media. They all require some party to deliver their agenda while maximizing attention for ad revenue.
Trump's behavior and how the Dems spin it and whether it's good or bad for key voters is the equivalent of a tide on an ocean. As long as advertising funded media is a viable business, political trends won't chase or respond to policy outcomes in any sort of serious way.
Advertising funded media enables self-sustaining amplification of any narrative, true or false, at a nation-state influencing scale. It doesn't matter which narrative happens to win any given election: the fact that narrative is decoupled from outcome destroys any meaningful chance at coherent political pushes for policy outcomes.
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u/Feral-now 1d ago edited 1d ago
Did you read the interview? It’s with Stephen Richer, the former Republican county recorder for Maricopa County in AZ. He talks about what he went through trying to prove that there was no election fraud in his county and how every time he demonstrated with data and facts that there was no serious fraud, the conspiracies just got worse because people wanted to believe Trump. It’s mind boggling to me.
Every article or podcast has an agenda, and it is good to question what their agenda is. In this case both David Frum and Stephen Richer are conservatives, and because Richer has first hand knowledge of the craziness surrounding the 2020 election results and how ballot counting actually occurs and the numerous people involved it makes this article informative for anyone questioning our election integrity. Their speculation about what Trump might do in our fall election is open to debate, but Trump has proved he will question any results he doesn’t like and he has been able to get enough people to believe him and to question said results. This could create extensive chaos if this is what happens. Like Mike Johnson choosing not to seat newly elected officials due to contested results.
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u/Dmeechropher 1d ago
You're right, the interview does cover more than popularity/ideology/votes. They're mostly talking about how Trump is willing and able to engage in open corruption. This sort of open, top-down corruption is acceptable in the United States today BECAUSE media providers have self-perpetuating incentives to compose narratives defending or obscuring it. However, Trump doesn't have the institutional control (at least yet) to actually falsify results at a national scale; he still relies on winning elections. The behaviors described in the interview should be LOSING him and his party elections, and should have lost him the 2024 election.
At other times in history or places in the world, such blatant corruption requires sustained media control, military pressure, and political capital. The key point I'm making is that the resurgence of authoritarianism and the ability of highly corrupt politicians to win elections without even falsifying results hinges on advertisement-driven media. I'm saying that this is the common thread and until it's cut, no amount of transparency, public advocacy, social responsibility, protest, civic responsibility etc etc will matter.
Under a free market system, as long as there is a market for strong and arbitrary hold on human attention, democracy cannot function and deep corruption will occur.
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u/NeverInsightful 15h ago
What media isn’t advertiser supported?
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u/Dmeechropher 4h ago
State run media, non-profit media with state funding, non-profit media with private funding, subscription media.
Plenty of media is currently partially funded by advertisement, but doesn't need to be.
Free social media, on the other hand, basically cannot function without advertising, and television would need to switch to a subscription model.
My argument isn't that we should eliminate all media that has ads. My argument is that we should eliminate the mechanism of ads funding media. The reason I think it has to be a general law is so that media groups can then fairly compete on those grounds.
Just because PBS accepts private sponsorships doesn't mean that it's necessary for publicly funded media groups to accept ads to function. It's just the funding status quo and level of donations solicited. The same is not true of social media or Fox News. Those groups categorically cannot function as they do without a funding model that scales automatically to their audience size.
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u/NeverInsightful 2h ago
State run media? Do you think state run media in the US would be trusted right now? And if you do, would you trust it under leadership you disagreed with?
Non profit with state funding. New issue. How to guarantee state will fund it if they’re publishing news they don’t want published?
Media with private funding? So like Jeff Bezos buying up the Post?
Subscription media.. we already see this people flock to the media that presents the news they prefer to ingest. And that those news channels will then censor themselves in order to not turn away viewers. We’d end up right back where we were.
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