Trumpland pt 4: Life After Trump
Signify tracked thousands of articles produced by Donald Trump’s alt-right media base over the last six months of his Presidency. This network drove over a billion social media interactions during the second half of 2020 and had a huge influence on public opinion and mainstream media. Their brand of propaganda and racial grievance will long outlast the Trump era.
Signify’s proprietary ShareScore technology allows us to analyse thousands of articles and engagements and determine not only how widely read these 15 Trump-base sites are, but also which topics and themes get the readers most excited and agitated. Over the course of our study, the preoccupations of the Trumpland base have proved highly predictive of Republican voters in general: for instance, they were consistently angry about BLM protests and oblivious to poor handling of the pandemic. They didn’t understand or engage with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and they were obsessed with electoral fraud. When we first blogged about the Trumpland obsession with stolen votes in October, it seemed like a niche concern. But we now know that more than half of Republican voters continue to believe the election was compromised. The alt right media base, was the engine for the Big Lie.
In the wake of Biden’s win, the sites have moved on quickly, and with apparent distaste for the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Rather than dwelling on the ‘steal’ narrative this network is now reverting to favourite topics like abortion and political correctness. Pro-life and culture war narratives exactly match their formula for angry and fear-filled engagement. Trump (for now) is absent from their story but the penchant for racial grievance and conspiracy theories is here to stay.
A Splintered Narrative
Trump famously has a hard core of supporters who ascribe to him a kind of mythical status, in which he stands alone in fighting against a venal deep state steered by people with a penchant for biblical evil.
However, his success as a politician rested on managing to construct a much broader coalition of people with differing sets of interests and concerns that was big enough to see him elected President of the United States.
As Reagan managed to combine libertarian conservative economics and authoritarian Christian policies on families and crime, Trump managed to bring into his camp people for whom he could offer key achievements, even if some other aspects of his personality or politics might have turned them off.
With Joe Biden confirmed as the winner of the 2020 election, the fault lines in Trump’s base are beginning to become obvious and those right wing media channels we investigated appear to – for now at least – be lacking anything to make them cohere.
Capitol attack not at the Forefront
A look at the most popular articles so far in January 2020 shows us that pieces about the attack on the Capitol are not taking centre stage.
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A bigger issue by far among the most popular articles is around language and ideas of a culture war – that words like ‘father’ and ‘amen’ are subject to a plot to replace them with more ‘inclusive’ language. This reflects age-old conservative fears that the familiar world in which they grew up is under attack from people who want to radically and forcibly alter society at the most granular level.
The second most popular article is one in which it is alleged that President-elect Biden wants to give taxpayer-funded abortions because “killing babies is a ‘right’”. This appears on pro-life website LifeNews, and clearly appeals to that Christian conservative part of Trump’s base that may not be so fanatical about other aspects of his presidency and persona. The story about Biden (a devout Catholic) is a patently obvious fabrication, but has been shared by almost three quarter of a million readers.
Another major refrain is one around social media and free speech – both in the banning of Donald Trump from several platforms, and the take down of right-wing social network Parler. The most popular articles about either election fraud, the handover of power or the events at the Capitol themselves come further down the list.
This suggests there may not be a stance being put out by these websites that is gaining sustained attention and widespread support among their usual base.
What they DID say about insurrection
While we see that pieces about the storming of the Capitol have not individually gained widespread traction, this does not mean it is being ignored. Obviously, it was those events that spawned the issues around social media, with Parler and Donald Trump’s social media accounts being perceived as a hub for those involved on that day.
Since January 6th, more than half (52%) of reactions were for articles mentioning the Capitol. This means that it is not being ignored – and it would probably be difficult to do so – but that perhaps no individual viewpoint on the events themselves is shared by a very large amount of this audience.
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What we see in the more popular pieces tends to be a mixture of reporting, focusing on after-effects and using the reaction as a vehicle for airing historical opinions and resentments.
Four of the key articles compare the event to Black Lives Matter protests and stir up racial resentment by mentioning suggestions that the Capitol protesters were treated more peacefully because they were predominantly white.
A few more mention the issue only in conjunction with the following fallout on social media.
Others use it as a background to impeachment, and there are also articles using it to spin a pro-gun self-defence narrative, suggesting that people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are exaggerating the level of threat.
What is highly noticeable, is a lack of an overarching narrative.
With the fall of Trump’s power and usefulness, and the decisions of some parties (particularly the Daily Wire) to distance themselves from his claims, we’re not seeing as much unity across these right-wing sites as we saw previously.
This splintering reflects the rise of factions who are not attractive to his main base, but whom Trump himself allowed and encouraged – particularly a fanatical belief in his own importance and purity, as in QAnon – may have made some of the groups in his coalition wary of one another, and so it now stands fragmented, at least for now.
This series Tracking Trumpland followed 15 of the most pro-Trump sites on the internet. To learn more about how we measure the impact of disinformation and help our clients to stay ahead of fake news, please get in touch.