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Deference to Donald

With about two months until Election Day, the guardrails established around Donald Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election have noticeably eroded.

Author

Oliver Darcy
September 02, 2024

Donald Trump. (Photo by Justin Lane - Pool/Getty Images)

The final, post-Labor Day stretch of the 2024 campaign has arrived — and the icy media environment that Donald Trump faced in the aftermath of the 2020 election has thawed considerably, helping to bolster the autocratic-aspiring ex-president's bid to reclaim power.

When Trump left office in disgrace after inciting a violent insurrection on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, the news media and Big Tech erected substantial guardrails around him, recognizing that allowing the GOP leader's lies to course through the public discourse unfettered carried dangerous consequences.

Meta and Twitter suspended Trump's accounts. The news media stopped carrying his lie-filled remarks live. Even Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire media mogul who controls Fox News and the New York Post, vowed to make Trump a "non-person" and quietly supported the candidacy of other Republicans.

But, with 63 days until Election Day, those guardrails have noticeably eroded.

Trump has not only been welcomed back onto Big Tech platforms, but Mark Zuckerberg recently lauded him as "badass" and Elon Musk pledged to support him while having also transformed X into a right-wing fever dream. News networks such as CNN have resumed carrying Trump's conspiracy-laden remarks live to their audiences. And Fox News has reverted to peddling pro-Trump propaganda to the masses.

Once chased into exile, Trump has reemerged with a vengeance and found a media environment lacking the resolve or desire to stand up to his menacing behavior. Despite the autocratic — and, frankly, anti-American — rhetoric championed by him and his supporters, the measures put into place to safeguard the public have been appreciably loosened.

To be fair, that is not to say that Trump has not been subject to scrutiny or hard-hitting reporting. Of course he has. And some of it has been quite good. But the water in which Trump swims is unmistakably warmer than the polar seas he traversed four years ago.

That less confrontational stance has emboldened Trump's chances at reclaiming the White House. While Kamala Harris holds the advantage as the final post-Labor Day sprint toward Election Day commences, the race remans a toss-up and Trump is well within striking distance.

News and technology executives would be wise to think hard about the impact their decisions or laissez faire attitudes have on the race. A Trump victory in November would surely prompt a great deal of autopsy reports, just as the 2016 election did. But why wait until then to assess the decisions made?

The Information Wars

Elon Musk’s repost of an apparent misogynistic 4Chan comment. (Screen grab)

Musk’s ‘Mask Off’ Moment: By now, it is not a surprise when Elon Musk posts vapid right-wing talking points to his X platform. In fact, it’s so routine, the vast majority of it is ignored by the news media. But, over the weekend, Musk waded into extreme territory, elevating an apparent 4Chan post that argued women are inferior to “alpha men.” The post, which Musk retweeted to his nearly 200 million followers, contended that "women and low T men" have a "safety filter" that disables their ability to critically think. "This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus," the post said, adding that "this is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making." Musk commented, “Interesting observation.”

The NYT’s Ryan Mac, who has co-authored a book on Musk and X due out later this month, called it a “mask off moment.” Mac told me Monday that he sifted through a lot of Musk’s posts while researching for his book. “But,” he said, “even this post, in which he boosts an argument that women do not have the capacity for critical thought and should not be in decision-making positions, stood out.” And yet, when I used Snapstream to search cable news transcripts, the appalling display of misogyny from one of the world’s most powerful and wealthy men prompted no coverage that I could find.

► Separately, it is worth wondering what Linda Yaccarino must have thought as she saw her boss elevate such filth from the dark corners of the internet to the masses. Is she OK with it? It’s behavior that would land almost anyone else in corporate America in hot water. Regardless, one thing is for certain: Behavior like this from Musk won’t make Yaccarino’s already tough job of selling advertisers on X any easier.

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