How Trump triumphed with Tech—Part 1, 2015

There was a time when if mainstream media went after you, then your career as a politician would be over. In 1988 Gary Hart was the frontrunner to win the Democratic primaries. In 1987, he declared his candidacy on April 13. April-end May-beginning the press started going after him for his “womanizing”. Soon other outlets caught on and it became a raging scandal. On May 8, he withdrew from the race. He quit politics soon after. Such was the power of the media.

Whether its newspapers, magazines or news channels, they are one giant monolith which used to lean firmly Left. If they decided you were not fit to rule, you were not fit to rule. End of story. Heads of state courted the media. Leaders would read the newspaper every morning to see how they were faring.

In this atmosphere, how much of a real chance did Donald Trump have when he announced his intentions to run for the Presidency in 2015? The newspapers, magazines and news channels started attacking Trump with an intensity which could be called 100x, if that against Hart was x. Most expected him to withdraw from the race. Hardly anyone expected him to win. So how did he not only last, but win 3 primaries and 2 Presidential races with the House and Senate at the beginning of both presidencies?

Heard of Matt Drudge?

In 1995-96 we finally had something that could break the power of the media. If you wanted to launch a newspaper or news channel, you needed tonnes of money. But not for launching a news website or a news blog. The Drudge Report started as a political-filmi email newsletter. It soon became a news aggregator website. Imagine a largely one-man-show: Putting up just one main page full of links of articles all over the world getting millions of views. But beyond that was influence.

President Bill Clinton was having an affair with his intern Monica Lewinsky in his second term. Newsweek magazine stumbled on the story and decided not to print it. Had there been no Internet, then maybe the story would have died there. The story was picked up by Drudge Report and the rest is history. That led to one of the biggest sexual scandals of all time and Clinton’s impeachment. In 2000, George W Bush beat Al Gore 271-266 in the Electoral College. The Republicans retained both the Senate and House. Would the story had been different if Drudge Report had not been there?

The very next year I was moved to the website division of a Delhi newspaper. We had just launched online and were struggling with a few thousand page views per story. One day an inside small local page story about the monkeyman menace crossed one lakh page views. The reason? That story had featured on the Drudge Report somewhere near the bottom. Such was its influence. In 2004 Drudge ran a headline against John Kerry over another possible affair with an intern. He had to subsequently withdraw the story, but Kerry lost all the same.

In 2007 Drudge called Hillary “Queen of the Quarter” and said she was getting good funds. That had a multiplier effect and Hillary got even more funds. Then Drudge turned. He published a photo of Obama in a tribal dress saying that it was sent to him by the Clinton campaign. The latter received a lot of flak. Drudge started spiking negative Obama stories. Ultimately Obama won.

It was 2015 that turned things upside down. Drudge went totally pro-Trump. He decided to post pro-Trump stories day in and day out for months on end. While initially this seemed risky, in the end both benefitted. Drudge Report’s page views crossed a billion a month from the hundreds of millions in the pre-Trump era. (Neither CNN or NYT or WaPo could boast of such numbers at that time despite Drudge Report being a one-man show).

For those who wanted to support Trump, this was an alternative reality. While the entire global mainstream media was bashing Trump day in and day out, here was a dynamic page that gave them his side of the story. Trump’s ideas, his campaigns, his strategies. Both Drudge and Trump flourished.

Social Media Era

In the age of social media, not only did mainstream media get dented, but they had to change overnight to cater to clickbait journalism, quickly diluting their quality which had held for hundreds of years.

Those who mastered social media won the elections. In 2008 an Internet-savvy Barack Obama thrashed John McCain, who “was not even on the computer”. I had written an article in 2015 where all the global elections in the preceding years simply went to the candidate with the highest number of Twitter followers.

In 2014, the BJP won on the back of Twitter. In 2019 WhatsApp delivered for them. While they were still ahead of the game in 2024, a blitz of videos by the Congress dented their majority.

When you look back at 2015-16, Trump totally owned the Internet. All the coverage was about him. Both the mainstream and social media was obsessed with him. Someone said that there is no such thing as bad publicity. That’s especially true with Trump. He went viral frequently. The memesters loved him. Pro-Trump Reddit memes were very popular especially those related to Kek and Pepe the frog. They really set Twitter trends on fire.

On mainstream media Hillary had an 85% chance of winning (as one popular pollster put it). In one online poll that got millions of participants, Trump polled more than 90%, such was the disparity. Hillary was like a cat on a hot tin roof on social media. She not only lost but retired. 

Heard of Andrew Breitbart?

Andrew Breitbart famously said that “Politics was downstream from culture”. That’s why the Democrats, which controlled the culture, controlled the narrative and won most of their fights big. In the 2010s, thanks to social media and new age websites, the Republicans started changing the culture of America. One of the first manifestations of this was the election of Trump.

Breitbart was a co-founder of HuffPo and the founder of Breitbart.com. He had been an assistant of Matt Drudge (what are the odds?) While Breitbart.com was founded in 2007 and Breitbart died in 2012, the website totally went crazy in 2015 notching up hundreds of millions of page views per month and tens of thousands of comments for their top articles. (This at a time when most mainstream media outlets disabled the comments of their websites).

Steve Bannon helped launch Breitbart, becoming executive chairman. He later headed Trump’s 2015 campaign and was briefly the chief strategist at the White House too. 

Finally, there was the podcast world which had maximum viewership. They gave Trump ideas a chance and discussed them neutrally.

Drudge Report. Breitbart. Social Media. The Trump supporters had no shortage of forums to follow, discuss their views and propagate their ideologies. The small conservative web ecosystem became much more powerful than the large Liberal mainstream media newspaper-news channel ecosystem. There is no way Trump could have won without it.

As you can see, a lot of stars aligned to make Trump President in 2016.

But there was still a lot more drama to come in the subsequent years!