The more impressionable among the world’s privileged golf set visiting Donald Trump’s clubs in Scotland or Florida back when the century was young and innocent might have been star-struck by the framed Time magazine cover, which featured the property magnate turned media star on the cover. “Donald Trump: ‘The Apprentice is a television smash’” declared the headline as the big guy beamed happily from the cover. The issue dates to March 2009.
But if you try to scroll through the Time archives for a memento, you won’t find it, as it never existed. It was a framed fantasy. Trump is a lifelong reader of Time magazine, and that decorative cover was a concession to his desire to feature among the cast of heavyweights to sit beneath the famous masthead.
That was then. On Thursday, Time magazine featured Trump as its Person of the Year for the second time. The president-elect had his day of days in the city, turning up to ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange and sounding almost as chuffed when he spoke about the Time accolade as the night he won the presidency for the second time. He brought RFK jnr along, who looked deeply tan and slightly confused as to why he was there.
I have been on the cover many times — I don’t know who has the record
— Donald Trump
“I think I like it better this time,” Trump said.
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“I have been on the cover many times — I don’t know who has the record.”
But Trump’s delight is the latest illustration of his contradictory relationship with the legacy media. He tirelessly denounces the “fake news media” — the vast cabal of establishment networks and print titles that been around for decades and centuries — at rallies across the United States. He has accelerated the loss of trust among American news consumers in mainstream journalism.
And yet Trump remains an avid news junkie, a throwback watcher and reader and belonging to the generation of Americans who came of age when print was king. And for all his gripes he made himself much more available to the mainstream media during his first term as president than his successor Joe Biden has done over the past four years.
Trump’s historic political achievement, shrugging off his convicted felon status and a Democratic campaign which flipped Biden for Kamala Harris, was remarkable in that it was a new departure from the accepted norms of how to conduct a successful election bid.
“We are way off,” said Democratic CNN commentator Van Jones at a New York Times public event this week.
Recent Nielsen ratings data indicate that MSNBC has plummeted by 53% since the week before the election while CNN has dropped by 47%
“The entire political class is way off. First of all, digital is the new door-knocking. You gotta understand that. We were laughing our butts off at Donald Trump for suspending his door-knocking campaign and letting Charlie Kirk and Elon [Musk] do a bunch of stuff online. We were saying: ‘these guys are idiots ... You know what they were knocking on doors with? Their phone’.”
Jones was among the more prominent of CNN’s regular election contributors and conspicuous in holding his hands up on the night after the election — for anyone tuning in. And not many were. The network’s ratings plummeted that Wednesday, as did the other liberal news networks. Recent Nielsen ratings data indicate that MSNBC has plummeted by 53 per cent since the week before the election while CNN has dropped by 47 per cent. Fox News, bullish about a Trump win throughout the year, has held on to its audience.
Some of those losses are cyclical: loyal news audiences, particularly those with Democratic leanings, undoubtedly sought comfort in anything that wasn’t the daily news cycle in the weeks since Harris’s defeat.
For Maga [Make America Great Again] loyalists, Trump’s victory represented not just a defeat for the Democrats, but for the legacy media as well. The Trump campaign made adept use of the Joe Rogan podcast as well as a slew of other curated sympathetic podcasts. The Harris campaign tried to mirror that and even had their candidate enter the hostile terrain of a Fox News interview. But they could never get the same traction. At the same time, Harris’s elusiveness frustrated the liberal networks who were, broadly speaking, sympathetic to her candidacy.
I’m telling you guys: the mainstream has become fringe, and the fringe has become mainstream
— Democratic CNN commentator Van Jones
And the Republicans had another unique weapon: Elon Musk, who was ubiquitous on X, the social media platform he bought in 2022.
The nimble effectiveness of the Trump campaign has brought about a reckoning of election know-how not just for the Democrats but for much of the mainstream media, too.
“I’m telling you guys: the mainstream has become fringe, and the fringe has become mainstream,” warned Jones in that same talk.
“There are platforms, there are people out there that are getting 14 million streams. And we are on cable news getting one or two million ... Donald Trump understood that and we didn’t and it’s not just Democrats that don’t. The entire political class is way off, way off.”
Within hours, that segment was cut and reposted along with gloating notices that “even” Jones was admitting that the mainstream media’s day is done. It’s not that simple, but Trump’s second coming has swept a torrent of new doubts and insecurities through the boardrooms and newsrooms of television networks, who have always felt central engines for the never-ending roar of US politics.
Only Franklin Roosevelt has been Time’s Person of the Year three times
Time magazine celebrated its century last year. The publication is an aberration in that it still exists primarily as a print offering. Its highest ever sale was just last year, with Taylor Swift on the cover. And it still has the cachet, the old-world power to make Trump beam like he’s voted best in class.
Only Franklin Roosevelt has been Time’s Person of the Year three times. Trump would be up there with him if only that old golf club edition was the real thing.
But then it was there, on those walls, so maybe it was real ... and the fake news is just up to its old tricks. Such is the current deluge of “news media” in the afterglow of Trump’s success, real is whatever you choose to believe.