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New reporting from The New York Times has revealed the MAGA media ecosystem is seeing its audiences collapse as Trump’s unpopular presidency fractures his coalition.
Let me explain.
I’m an independent journalist who has been covering Trump and American politics for over a decade. I documented every day of Trump’s first term and was among the first to cover Project 2025 back in 2023.
The threat of Trump’s authoritarianism has been the focal point of my journalism. So I'm not spreading false hope when I report that Trump is weakening and his MAGA coalition is fracturing. The data backs it up.
Now, we have new evidence that the MAGA media ecosystem is fracturing as well.
A new report from Stuart Thompson at The New York Times is headlined “The MAGA Media Machine Is Fracturing.”
The report provides new quantitative analysis that found some of the biggest MAGA media figures are seeing their audiences plummet.
Cumulative views on algorithmic platforms are down significantly since Trump’s inauguration. Weekly YouTube views are down by 50 million, Twitter views are down by nearly 700 million, and Rumble views are down by nearly 30 million. Only podcast views have remained relatively stable.
In order to assess this, The New York Times analyzed years’ worth of data across podcasting platforms, YouTube, X, and Rumble. They focused on 12 of the biggest right-wing content creators: Tucker Carlson, Benny Johnson, Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Steven Crowder, Matt Walsh, Nick Fuentes, Tim Pool, and Charlie Kirk, whose accounts are still being run by his team after his death.
You can see here that analysis of the weekly YouTube views of the individual creators shows an overall drop in average views, with some down over 20 million views from their highs.
This reduction in viewership comes after major rifts opened up in the MAGA coalition as Trump betrayed his promises on releasing the Epstein files and no new wars. Division over the Iran War, outrage over the Trump Admin’s cover-up of the Epstein files, and very real anger over Trump’s worsening of the affordability crisis have caused many Republican voters to turn on President Trump. Trump has registered a record low approval among Republicans in multiple polls, showing it in the 70s.
I covered this in a previous video:
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It’s harder to sell people culture wars and grievances when your president’s policies are directly hurting their bottom line.
This has opened up an opportunity for right-wing, anti-Trump content.
Content creators who have spoken out against Trump, like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, have managed to garner momentary spikes in viewership as others have collapsed.
It’s good to see more MAGA figures speaking out against Trump, but, as I’ve often said, this is not a moral awakening. They see Trump weakening, and know there’s an anti-Trump “America First” lane opening up, so they’re pivoting to a new market they can monetize as Trump’s fall accelerates.
As soon as Marjorie Taylor Greene began speaking out against Trump, I called this out. This was me in October of last year on MS NOW:
This matters. Leading MAGA figures speaking out against Trump provides a permission structure for others to do the same. It’s why we’ve seen comedian podcasts and the manosphere also turning on Trump.
For a decade, Donald Trump and his right-wing allies have weaponized disinformation to sell the public on their false version of reality. Now, the same information ecosystem that facilitated his rise is documenting his fall.
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