Pre-Trump American conservatism was dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: limited government, cultural traditionalism, antiabortion politics, fiscal rectitude and free market economics. Now, I’m the first to concede the right often fell short of its ideals, but showing rhetorical fealty to the ideals was the binding firmament of conservatism. Those commitments still get some lip-service, but there’s no denying that on all of these fronts, loyalty to Trump is the more pressing litmus test. This has freed up Trump to move leftward on abortion, entitlements and economic policy generally.

Trump didn’t merely shatter the consensus on the right, he shattered the political consensus generally. Or maybe social media and those other trends were the battering rams and Trump merely benefited from the new landscape.

the bedrock assumptions about how politics “works” and the rules for what a politician can or can’t do, no longer seem operative. We’re all familiar with how his behavior has demonstrated that, but it’s also illuminated that the electorate itself is just different today. The FDR coalition is gone, the white working class is now operationally conservative, and the Latino and Black working classes are now seen as gettable by Republicans. The assumption that they are “natural Democrats” was obliterated in this election. Republicans have figured out how to talk to those constituencies.

Trump used these podcast appearances to both humanize and mythologize himself. He used them to launder his extremist positions through the pervasive can’t you take a joke filter that propels the Tony Hinchcliffes of the world to stardom. Most important of all, he used them to get out the vote.

in 2024, shouting to a few thousand true believers has nothing on being anointed by Elon Musk on X and a cadre of right-wing influencers with collective followings in the hundreds of millions.

What Trump and his team understood is that “the discourse,” to whatever extent that means anything anymore, no longer happens in op-ed columns or on The Daily Show or even on Breitbart, and hasn’t for years. Kamala Harris seemingly did not. She did appear on Call Her Daddy, a stratospherically popular podcast with an audience primarily comprising young women, and her campaign enlisted a number of influencers as surrogates. But she skipped Rogan, Lex Friedman, and other mainstream-adjacent marathon podcasts.

the world of conservative influencers dwarfs their liberal counterparts in both follower size and impact. In the same way Democrats never found their own Rush Limbaugh, they don’t have a Steven Crowder or a Ben Shapiro or even, so help us, a Tim Pool. There are Democrats with followings online, but the cumulative gap in people paying attention to what they say is several orders of magnitude wide.