When Elon Musk recently declared, “I am become meme,” he was selling himself short. He and his doings have indeed become endlessly shared bits of cultural influence, but, through his ownership of X, he also controls the principal means of sending those signals. On top of that, he is the second-most-powerful official, at least, of the American government. He is the message, the medium and The Man, all in one.
For that reason, something else Mr Musk said then, at the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 20th, was less accurate and also behind the times and thus a little off-brand. Describing his findings at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, he said “a massive amount of your tax dollars is going to legacy media companies,” a reference to government-paid subscriptions to publications (including this one). That explained, he said, “why the legacy media all says the same thing at the same time”. It has become, he said, a mouthpiece “for the state”.
Huh. Surely there has never been, in America, a louder and more enthusiastic cheerleader for the state than the X feed of state cadre (and contractor) Mr Musk—not even in the days of “mainstream” media before the downgrade to “legacy”. Back in the 1970s, when the network newscasts reached perhaps one in three viewers, they did not celebrate and promote any president’s priorities as Mr Musk does Donald Trump’s, to 219m followers on X in dozens of tweets a day. If there is a comparable state mouthpiece, it is that of the president himself, in the form not just of his X feed (102m followers), but of the media company of which he is the largest shareholder, Trump Media & Technology Group. It controls Truth Social, the social-media platform where this president makes some of his most important pronouncements.
Calvin Coolidge started the practice of using radio to speak to Americans in the 1920s, John F. Kennedy pioneered the use of live television for press conferences in the 1960s and Barack Obama began communicating directly with Americans via social media in the aughts. But Mr Trump is narrating his presidency for the public as they never could. He is fusing America’s media and its state like no president before him, and as a result his administration seems to be talking about everything everywhere all at once.
Mr Trump has appointed people to top posts who may lack management or other relevant experience but can fluently communicate via new and old forms of media. On February 23rd he picked at least the 20th serving or former Fox News personality for a senior position when he named Dan Bongino, a conservative podcaster and former Secret Service officer, to be the deputy director of the FBI. Vice-president J.D. Vance, a former blogger, is so at home contending on X that he recently jumped into the fray to challenge a tweet from the defence editor of The Economist about the relative strength of Russian and Ukrainian forces.
Mr Trump himself soaks Americans with what seems a ceaseless stream of announcements, commentary, insults, jokes and complaints. When he is not declaiming on Truth Social he is summoning reporters to televise him signing executive orders or meeting tycoons, potentates or politicians. His delight in fielding questions lends weight to his aides’ claim that he is “the most transparent president in history”. But in truth ubiquity and even accessibility are not the same as transparency: Mr Trump’s posting on Truth Social is an act of “transparency” that lines his pockets in ways that may never be known. And to know what Mr Trump says or even thinks in one moment is of ephemeral value, because it is not to know what he will say or think in the next. Rather than proving a political liability, that changeability keeps Mr Trump’s always-on show perpetually newsworthy, his next emission even more important to policymakers than his previous one, and all of it interesting or entertaining to millions of others.
As Joe Biden’s success in masking the effects of his ageing demonstrated, the White House press corps has often been better at supplying the appearance than the reality of presidential accountability to the truth. Even the appearance is now fading. Like Mr Musk, under whom X has at times suspended journalists’ accounts for mysterious reasons while reportedly boosting his own posts, Mr Trump seems to love free speech as long as it sounds good to him. He is trying to dictate the very words journalists use, blocking access for reporters from the Associated Press, among the fairest of news organisations, because it won’t use only his chosen name, “Gulf of America”, for the Gulf of Mexico.
Meme, myself and I
Since no restoration of a mainstream news media is in the offing, one of the challenges facing Democrats is how to “become meme” themselves. Often crude or cruel, the wit of Messrs Trump and Musk is lost on their opponents but central to their appeal. These days Democrats lack much sense of humour, though Kamala Harris’s fleeting “brat summer”, remembered now with some embarrassment within the party, pointed one way to a warmer and more humane use of social media.
The challenge to civic society is deeper. Visions that the internet would promote understanding and truth by democratising the news media went dark years ago. Users’ experience, confirmed by social-science studies, has shown that, in a bewildering media landscape, social media promotes lies and antipathy more effectively than truth and empathy. The result is “an information environment conducive to authoritarian movements and cults of personality”, writes Nicholas Carr in “Superbloom”, a lucid new book about the effects of communication technology. “A strong populist leader becomes a totem of group identity, a human meme.” New media is more vulnerable to state control and manipulation than legacy media ever was. ■
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