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AN 6 25

During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump not only rallied his hardcore base of 2016 and 2020 — he led a MAGA coalition that ranged from Christian nationalists to tech bros to the Manosphere. And he also reached out to independents, some of whom voted for centrist Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 but voted for Trump in 2024 because of their worries about inflation.

That game plan didn't give Trump the "landslide" victory that he claimed it did: Trump defeated Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris by roughly 1.5 percent in the popular vote, which is a narrow victory — not a landslide. But it was enough to get him past the finish line.

Four and one-half months into his second presidency, however, a MAGA feud has erupted between Trump and Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk over the president's "big, beautiful bill." After Musk called the bill a "disgusting abomination," Trump attacked him during a Thursday, June 5 press conference with visiting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The U.S. president told reporters, "I am very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot…. Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if we will anymore."

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In an article published the following day, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that the feud between Trump and Musk underscores the divisions between "techbro fascists" and other parts of the MAGA coalition.

"As (Musk) and Trump snipe at each other publicly," Marcotte writes, "the efforts to pretend this is a friendly disagreement are falling apart. Even if Musk fails in his efforts to kill Trump's bill, this battle is exposing a deeper truth that (White House adviser Stephen) Miller can't hide with his lies about Trump winning in a 'landslide': The MAGA coalition is fragile and some of the differences are starting to tear at the seams less than half a year into the second Trump term. Trump's slim win in 2024 was no doubt due in large part to Musk, and not just the eye-popping quarter-billion-plus Musk spent to push the old man's orange carcass over the finish line."

Marcotte continues, "It's because Musk and other influential figures, especially those associated with Silicon Valley or who pretend to be former liberals, were able to convince a chunk of more secular, largely male voters to throw their lot in with the Christian nationalist base that is the backbone of the MAGA movement. But while these two groups joined together based on a shared animosity towards racial minorities and women, it was always a far more uneasy alliance than Musk or Trump wanted to admit. And now, it's getting shakier as two narcissistic billionaires are at odds."

The Salon journalist emphasizes that the "trouble within fascist paradise" has been "brewing for reasons that run deeper than Musk and Trump's competing egos or Silicon Valley's dependency on government funding."

"The atheistic world of pseudo-intellectualism that Musk and his minions come from," according to Marcotte, "was always going to have friction with the Christian nationalists who actually run the MAGA-ified Republican Party…. This budget fight exposes how delusional that attitude always was. It's not about religion, per se, but the culture clash between the Musk fanboys and the Christian nationalist debate is driving much of this. Musk and his acolytes envision a technofascism that sucks all the money out of social services and puts it into the tech industry, even as it pursues goals typically disliked by the Christian right, such as clean energy production."

Marcotte continues, "Meanwhile, the Christian Right wing of the party, while happy to pass huge cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare, is largely leaving untouched Social Security or Medicare, which their working-class and aging base depends on. The tech bro fascists may hate the liberals they live next door to, but at the end of the day, they're still part of the urban, atheistic, educated class that the MAGA movement demonizes. That difference was not going to be papered over forever."

*Amanda Marcotte's full Salon article is available at this link.

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MAGA propaganda machine helped carry Trump back to the White House — and it’s not done poisoning America

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 11/07/24

Donald Trump was reelected president on Tuesday, four years after fomenting a coup which saw a mob of his supporters storm the U.S. Capitol and then leaving the White House in disgrace. He owes his return 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, be they legacy news outlets or government officials or medical experts.

Once Trump captured the GOP and ascended to the presidency in 2017, that bubble served him and his interests. Within it, for example, his supporters were convinced by a sprawling conspiracy theory portraying the then-president as the victim of a shadowy “deep state” cabal that justified vast retribution.

The January 6 insurrection presented Trump’s propagandists with a crossroads. Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire includes right-wing bastions like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Post, privately sought for him to become a “non person.” But Tucker Carlson and his allies at Fox and elsewhere instead went to work creating a counternarrative in which Trump was blameless. People who knew better either played along or actively participated in the whitewashing of that day.

Trump’s various indictments for a host of crimes provided additional hinge points. Right-wing media figures who could have used evidence of his abject criminality as a rationale for cutting him loose instead rallied to him and sought to delegitimize those seeking to bring him to justice.

The right-wing media bubble’s eagerness to excuse Trump’s actions gave him a dominant position in the Republican primary. As he romped to the nomination, his opponents complained that they were unable to gain traction because the party’s propaganda wing had united behind him.

Trump again became the nominee of one of the two major parties. He selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a Carlson favorite, as his running mate, and demonstrated the importance of the right-wing echo chamber by giving Carlson himself a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.

With the general election set between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, right-wing propagandists went to work holding the GOP base together with a combination of grievance-mongering and silence.

They flooded the zone with a bogus narrative of “migrant crime” while ignoring evidence that violent crime was actually plummeting from its Trump-era high.

They instructed their audiences to treat immigrants as a scapegoat, falsely claiming that federal disaster aid desperately needed to respond to hurricanes had been siphoned off to benefit migrants and ginning up grotesque lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets.

They lashed out at the press, urging the Republican base to treat Trump’s poor showing in his debate against Harris as the result of media bias.

When an unprecedented string of former Republican officials and 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 one, they hid the news from their audiences.

And they kept quiet on a host of unpopular aspects of Trump’s policy agenda, from Social Security to reproductive rights, while beating back burgeoning scandals over his alleged January 6 crimes, communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a political event at Arlington National Cemetery.

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.