How Musk’s Twitter iteration became 'the main stage' for MAGA Republicans: conservative

After acquiring X, formerly Twitter, CEO Elon Musk restored Donald Trump's @realdonaldtrump account and invited him to return to the platform — which had banned him in January 2021 following the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. Trump, however, has opted to make his own Truth Social his primary social media outlet, although he did post his Fulton County, Georgia mugshot on X on August 24, 2023.

In a New York Times opinion column published on March 3, Never Trump conservative David French argues that Musk has become the second most important person in MAGA World — second only to Trump himself — and lays out some reasons why.

French stresses that because "right-wing media appears to be struggling even more than mainstream media" — according to the website The Righting and Comscore data — X's format has become increasingly important to the MAGA movement.

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"In fact, the loss is so profound that there are individual articles and columns in The New York Times that get more visitors than all of the content that many of these sites post for an entire month," French explains. "As a practical matter, this means that social media — and principally Musk's X — becomes the central way in which many right-wing figures reach the public. There are several consequences of this reality. It's altering the way the right speaks. People will be naturally prone to focus most of their efforts on the medium through which they interact with the most people."

Among MAGA Republicans, according to French, a platform like X "bends a person or a movement around the attitudes of social media and away from the kinds of arguments that require the length of a column or essay."

"Social media creates not a marketplace of ideas so much as a gallery of takes, where you can spend hours doomscrolling through short videos and snappy retorts," French observes. "That's how a movement transfers its allegiance from the ideas of a man like William F. Buckley Jr. to an X influencer like @Catturd2 and his 2.4 million followers. It's one reason a person like Tucker Carlson devolves from an interesting, idiosyncratic writer and thinker to an online shock jock and outrage merchant."

French continues, "This transformation has the effect of further radicalizing the right. There's a 'Can you top this?' dynamic to posting that pushes people to extremes."

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According to the Times columnist, Musk-era X has become "the main stage" for MAGA Republicans.

"It's hard to think of a worse pair of human beings to shape the character of a movement than Donald Trump and Elon Musk," French laments. "Yet here we are, with Trump controlling the right’s access to power, and Musk increasingly controlling the right’s access to the public."

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David French's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).