Welcome to the future

So the inevitable happened. Yet again Trump proves, as if it were needed, that he is invincible and people just need to accept it. And by people, I mean everyone (evidently fewer than they might have thought) who still couldn’t believe that he would just turn around and do exactly the same thing again. Last time there was shock and outrage – this time it’s closer to nausea for most people, I suspect. Even someone like me, who called it months ago, never felt Kamala had done enough and felt pretty sure in the final days that he was once again pulling away from a closer race, felt a wave of apathy on Wednesday arvo as it was all confirmed. I woke up that night with vomit in my mouth for some reason. It’s a new world now, and it’s hard to know how to adjust immediately, because others – mostly Gen Z influencers I’ve never heard of, and Joe Rogan – have got a head start (Joe Rogan deserves it, for the record) on decoding what tomorrow looks like.

It turns out that a bunch of people I tend not to read are the ones who were right all along. This isn’t a surprise, either – it was clear that The Guardian, my natural news source, was juicing the data so hard for Harris that it truly felt like pure propaganda for the past few months. No wonder no one trusts them, because it truly read as though they saw their job as ensuring Kamala got elected. People say that podcasters have no decency, but those in glass houses should beware casting aspersions about traditional media ethics.

The Trump renaissance is both brutal and mundane. It’s hard to perceive as anything other than bad news for people in Gaza, given Trump’s likely incitement of the worst instincts in Netanyahu, but it’s not as though he needs any encouragement, and nor is it as if the Democrats have managed to restrain him in any remotely meaningful way so far anyway. On climate, as renowned climate scientist Bill Hare has said this week, the renewables roll-out may be unstoppable in the States (and stands to substantially benefit Trump benefactor Elon Musk), and on the other side of the ledger Biden also did little to rein in fossil fuel expansion. "Let's be frank,” Bill added, “under the Biden administration, we've seen much more oil and gas development in recent times than have happened before.”

It probably also means the end of the Democrats as a realistic political force, sleepy Joe finally putting to bed the liberal left, but you’ll have to go elsewhere to get proper takes on what that looked like. What I really want to talk about is the impact of a second Trump presidency on me. And that means media.

For years, my personal political theory of change has basically revolved around piling pressure on politicians by getting stories in the press, on the basis that the best way to talk to the government is via the front page of the paper. That still holds here and now, but it will surely be eclipsed before long as it has just been on a massive scale in the States. It has been widely remarked on that part of Trump’s victory speech was handballed to UFC boss Dana White to duly shout out a bunch of podcasters I’ve barely heard of plus Joe Rogan (again, a genuine great). It has also begun to be unpacked precisely why the new media economy was so central to Trump’s victory, even though the general sense seems to be that it was more a symptom than a cause of the populist tidal surge. Content creators are king, and “legacy” media is dead. That’s good for an online newsletter like the one you’re reading now, which need leave no illusion that the “voice from nowhere” objectivity prized by media idiots exists any more than it ever has. But it’s bad for my day job doing media for campaigns by getting stories in the old school press the old fashioned way (flirting with/bullying journalists). And that makes me sad, and concerned, and racing to catch up. I encourage you to do the same.

This is the future. You might not like it. Get used to it.