The New Normal

Common Misconceptions About American Politics

1. “Trump should’ve been easy to beat.”

Anyone who still claims that is true is unaware of how thoroughly social media has transformed political reality. This is as true in 2025 as it was in 2016, although back then it was still a new idea. Today, there’s really no excuse.

2. “The media is complicit in normalizing Trump.”

This is a common misconception based on extremely vague definitions of “the media” and “normalization”. There was no shortage of media outlets telling the truth about Trump prior to the election, but they were effectively canceled out by activist right-wing outlets such as Fox News that successfully convinced approximately one-third of the voting public that everything the mainstream media was telling them was a lie.

3. “The media is complicit in normalizing Elon Musk.”

If any media outlets were sugarcoating or sanewashing Elon Musk, I genuinely don’t know what difference it would have made. Musk was appointed, not elected. We had no say in the Ascent of Musk. And “screaming bloody murder” has proven to be an astonishingly ineffective defense against a centibillionaire.

4. “The media failed to warn people about Project 2025.”

Again: show me the Venn Diagram of People Who Voted for Trump and People Who Were Genuinely Opposed to Project 2025. They’re two separate circles. And the people who voted for Trump weren’t going to listen to the MSM no matter how loudly they sounded the alarm. Both sides fully understood that Trump was going to follow Project 2025, but the Republicans simply did not have a problem with it.

5. “Fox News will turn against Trump once he becomes a political liability.”

Fox News has been given ample opportunity to oppose Trump. The siege on the Capitol would have been a good time. So would the 34 felony convictions. But even they aren’t powerful enough to fight against the tide of unrelenting pro-Trump sentiment from the Republican base. There’s no evidence to suggest they even particularly want to do this. Expecting Fox News to turn against Trump once he becomes a liability is as unrealistic as believing his current followers will eventually be ashamed of their vote.

6. “In the future, nobody will admit they ever voted for Trump.”

This is based on stories we hear from postwar Germany where few, if any, Germans were willing to admit they supported the Nazis. Again, this assumes the existence of a “shared political reality” that social media has effectively eliminated. It’s an anachronism.

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IN CONCLUSION

“The media should stop normalizing Trump” implies that there is something that the mainstream media could say about him that would convince his cult to stop supporting him. “Sanewashing” was a real thing that sometimes happened, but it was not the main reason people supported Trump.

The problem here is that people only listen to media they trust. “Poisoning the MSM well” is how MAGA got to where they are today. And “Refusing to listen to the MSM” is how his followers got to where they are today.

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