When President Donald Trump was reelected in 2024, many in the media claimed that political vibes had shifted and MAGA ideas were now cool. Flash forward 19 months and, according to one political analyst, Trumpism is no longer trendy — and influencers who bet big on a Republican shift are paying the price, in some cases literally.
“When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he was nursing grudges and claiming a mandate,” wrote The Atlantic's David A. Graham on Monday. “The institutions he saw as his enemies—in politics, business, and education—faced a dilemma about how to respond.”
Describing how many of these institutions “saw the MAGA movement as a lasting change, and decided that their best move was to make their own radical shift to adjust,” Graham pointed out that those who made this wager have tended to suffer massive losses as a result.
“David Ellison, who, along with his father, Larry, is a friend of Trump’s, decided to use the new Trump administration as an opportunity to build a huge media conglomerate,” Graham wrote. “First, his company Skydance merged with Paramount. Taking control of CBS News, he installed Bari Weiss as editor in chief, seeking a leader who would appeal more to both the White House and to conservative viewers. But Weiss’s makeover has so far looked like a flop: 60 Minutes has hemorrhaged staffers, and the Evening News has hemorrhaged viewers. Her proposition was that a slightly more conservative version of the mainstream media would bring the audience back to a struggling network, but that doesn’t appear to actually be appealing to either MAGA viewers or legacy CBS watchers.”
He added, “Ellison has already moved on to an attempted merger with Warner Bros., reportedly promising administration officials deep political changes at CNN if the deal was approved by federal regulators. Ellison got approval, but now that deal is in trouble anyway. Facing an antitrust lawsuit led by the attorney general of California, Paramount agreed to pause the merger until a trial next year. Experts are divided on how likely Paramount is to prevail, but if the merger doesn’t close by September 30, the company will owe Warner Bros. shareholders $7 million every day until it does. In a New York Times column last week, Ellison complained that people are drawing incorrect inferences about his politics, but his private views are beside the point: What is public is Ellison’s willingness to play to the Trump administration’s politics to build an empire.”
In addition to the Ellisons losing ratings after taking over CBS News, Graham described how MAGA influencers are similarly struggling as Trump becomes increasingly unpopular and his coalition fragments over the war in Iran and Israel. Even X CEO Elon Musk has lost money with X and Tesla since he became linked with the Trump brand.
“Within right-wing politics, many individuals and organizations also leapt into Trumpism,” Graham wrote. “The venerable Heritage Foundation reworked itself and lost or pushed out many long-standing scholars and staffers. Now it finds itself in an identity crisis—and also shut out of the White House because Trump is still sore about the attention and credit that Project 2025 won for driving his agenda. Many mainstream Republicans remade themselves as MAGA Republicans, but the results have not always been good. Just ask Senator John Cornyn, who lost his primary to an even-more-MAGA challenger this May.”
He added, “Earlier this month, Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan reported on the broken pipeline for bringing new foot soldiers into conservative government and nonprofit organizations. ‘Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,’ a senior GOP congressional staffer told her. ‘We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.’”
In June, The New York Sun similarly reported that media outlets “built on harvesting clicks from MAGA supporters are fading as President Trump begins his final act in American politics,” with their web traffic “is falling across the board."
“The trend is lending credence to the president’s prediction that the press will miss him when he’s gone, with those who advocate for his movement hardest hit,” the Sun added, citing an analysis by Similarweb which discovered that 9 out of 10 of the top right-wing websites saw dips in traffic between May 2025 and May 2026.
“Traffic to all of the top 20 sites monitored by TheRighting, which aggregates headlines from conservative outlets, saw double-digit declines,” the Sun wrote. “The Daily Wire, Blaze, and Federalist suffered falls of 47, 46, and 52 percent respectively. The Washington Free Beacon’s visits dropped 38 percent and the Daily Caller’s 33 percent.”
Similarly in 2024, there were signs that the supposed vibe shift in favor of Trump was chimerical. The Daily Beast media reporter Justin Baragona reported on traffic data compiled by media analyst Howard Polskin's website TheRighting.com which showed that Breitbart, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, National Review, Daily Caller and The Federalist all experienced major drops in their numbers of unique visitors between the 2020 and 2024 election cycles.
