The Daily Signal - Trump's Influencer Network: Inside the Parallel Media Universe

Episode Date: November 24, 2024

In this special interview edition of "The Daily Signal Podcast," Rob Bluey interviews Jonathan Baron, founder of Baron Public Affairs and host of "The Political Risk Brief" podcast. Baron reveals his firm's groundbreaking research on the conservative influencers who helped fuel Trump's electoral victory using a parallel conservative media ecosystem that bypassed traditional outlets. He details the three key groups of influencers—amplifiers, specialists, and mavericks—who shaped the media narrative. Baron believes four major "betrayals" of the American public set the stage for Trump's rise. Since then, Trump has used his unique abilities to position himself as a "centrist" while still taking strong stances on controversial issues. Listen to learn more about the new media landscape and how it will impact Trump's second term. Keep tabs on Baron's work by subscribing to "The Political Risk Brief" podcast: https://www.baronpa.com/the-political-risk-brief/ Sign up for our email newsletters: https://www.dailysignal.com/email Subscribe to our other shows: The Tony Kinnett Cast: https://www.dailysignal.com/the-tony-kinnett-cast Problematic Women: https://www.dailysignal.com/problematic-women The Signal Sitdown: https://www.dailysignal.com/the-signal-sitdown Thanks for making “The Daily Signal Podcast” your trusted source for the day’s top news. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our special interview edition of The Daily Signal podcast, where each weekend we feature conversations with thought leaders and newsmakers. Today is Sunday, November 24th, and my guest is Jonathan Barron. I first met Jonathan several years ago and quickly discovered the value of his work. He's the founder and principal of Barron Public Affairs, a firm he created in 2006 to, as he put it, liberate innovators from political risk. Jonathan's resume includes senior roles on political campaigns and with the leadership. of the U.S. House and Senate. Today, we are talking about the election, what drove Trump's victory, who's in his sphere of influence, and what to expect when he takes office.

Stay tuned for our interview right after this. Pro-life, pro-women conservative and feminist? That's right. We're problematic women. The radical left does not know what to do with strong independent women who believe in traditional values and love America. So you might say we're problematic to the left narrative. of what a woman should be.

Here on Problematic Women, we sort through the news to find the stories that you care about. Join Problematic Women on the Daily Signals YouTube or Rumble every Wednesday or catch the show wherever you get your podcast on Thursday morning. And be sure to follow Problematic Women on Instagram. Jonathan Barron is the founder of Barron Public Affairs and the host of one of my favorite podcasts, the political risk brief. Jonathan, welcome to The Daily Signal. Rob, thank you for having me. Great to be here. You bet. It's good to see you again. Now, your team produces some of the best research and analysis, data-driven analysis that us lowly journalists, I think, find very helpful to better understand what's going on in the world, particularly here in Washington, D.C. And we're going to talk about the election, post-election, what a second Trump term looks like. And you have published a couple of podcasts recently that I've enjoyed listening to that really dive into some of these issues that I think that, Probably on a surface level, many journalists may not have really comprehended the full coalition that Trump has been able to put together.

And so I'd like to start there. And you specifically have identified the different factions that make up this really unique political movement that Donald Trump has created. Tell us a little bit more about what you found in your research. Sure. Thank you, Robin. Again, great to be here. So I think it's really underappreciated the Trump achievement in putting together this co-executive. what are the elements of that coalition? I think often it's seen as a monolith, but of course

there are some very, very important factions. And I would think within this coalition, there are four or so, I think, key factions, some of which are well known, others a little more subtle. They may be obvious someone as experienced as you. But in no particular order, you have something, you have MAGA, which is the core Trump movement around the president himself. Then you have ultra MAGA, which think of as Trump plus Trumpism, right? So it's Trump as an indispensable critical figure in the conservative movement, but attached to a very specific or ambitious policy agenda. So that would be ultra-maga. Then you've got the new right, which is sort of Trumpism, but within the debate of the conservative movement. And then you have America First, which is, again, Trumpism focused

outside of the conservative movement, right, against the left. And so these four factions, among some others, but these, I think, are the four principal ones, are trying to figure out how are we going to live together in a second Trump administration, how we work together to achieve common goals. Does Trump put his, does he have a favorite among the different factions or are they each trying to, in their own unique ways, you know, get leverage with him to maybe get their people in positions of power or get their policies enacted? I think that that latter point is exactly right. That I think that he understands the value of each of these constituencies. Of course, MAGA itself is sort of the core foundation upon which everything else is built. But he understands it to be, I mean, it seems to me to be successful.

to bring to bear all of the assets and capabilities of the various members of the coalition. And again, figuring out who will do what, we're in that early period now of trying to reconcile those things. Some of these factions include members of his own family, though. So I would think that probably they may hold a slight advantage over others. Well, that's right. But there's, you know, even different family members would appear to fall in different factions. And so that process even exists, it would seem to me from the outside, you know, within the family. But together, so far anyway, it's been quite successful. Yes. Yes. It's truly interesting. Okay, I'm going to come back because I'd like to get into this political risk brief that you did on the influencers.

But I first think it's important to set the stage for how we got here because you're leading up to November 5th. There were many journalists in Washington, D.C., who truly believed that the polling, that it was a roll of the dice. It could be Kamala Harris. It could be Donald Trump. And at the end of the day, obviously Trump ended up sweeping all the swing states, resounding victory in many places across the country. improved his standing with certain demographic groups that have traditionally aligned themselves with Democrats. You talk about four betrayals that have transpired over the last two decades. Walk us back to that first betrayal and the ones that have succeeded.

So if we think about this first quarter of the 21st century in American life, it really has been defined by these, as you mentioned, four betrayals. And those started with the bilateral U.S.-China trade relationship and the enactment of permanent normal trade relations. with China. And the promises of that trade relationship were that it was going to be a hundred to nothing deal for the United States. We were going to benefit from cheap goods. China would become a democracy. Their middle class would develop and there would be only winners and especially only winners in the United States. And that promise turned out to be false. And although there were some benefits of that relationship, ultimately, it did great damage to significant parts of the United

States and what was promised was not delivered. And that really set in motion. a lot of the hollowing out of the manufacturing base, the industrial Midwest, many of the afflictions that have been well covered. But that really, the great betrayals, the four began with the PNTR for China. Which, just to interrupt you briefly, which could be an early policy initiative that Trump takes on. I mean, there could be a move afoot not only in Congress, but in his administration to end that relationship. And certainly he's talked about tariffs quite a bit on the campaign trail. So we'll see what it comes with that. And Trump has a long history of being very consistent on the trade issue. And if you think about the things that really define President Trump and Trumpism,

China in trade is one of those core issues. It goes back decades. So this is not new for him. And you can see at the very beginning this was present. Moreover, if you look at the debate in the Senate on PNTR, you know, more than 20 years ago, there was an interesting foreshadowing of populism because you had Jesse Helms on the right and Paul Wellstone on the left together opposing PNTR. So we had this very intriguing right-left. populist coalition. Now, they were in a very small minority at the time. I think there were only something like 12 or 13 senators who opposed PNTR and the Senate approval of PNTR. But in that very strange bedfellow coalition, there were sort of the glimmers of the populism that would emerge much more forcefully a couple decades later. Yes. Well, and of course, it's one thing to

regret a decision like that. It's another thing to untangle ourselves today. And so we will see. Okay, I interrupted you. Tell us about the second. So we began with PNTR. Then we move, of course, to the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan and sort of the interventionist foreign policy aims and the idea that America would be able to export democracy in this great sort of evangelizing project of the American approach other places and of course ended up in great in great disaster including on of course under the Biden administration with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But again, what the elites promised, right, not only wasn't delivered but ended up being a catastrophe and the opposite of the objectives that were sought.

So I think that was the second fundamental betrayal. And we see the reaction against interventionist policy resulting from that. So I think with the elements of Trumpism and populism, that certainly has played a major role. And by the way, did much like PNTR to discredit elites. The people who claim to know how to manage the world were not very successful. And it's a complicated story. And I'm not going to point fingers at this person or that person. At the end of the day, it was a failure.

Yes. Yes. No, it certainly was. And you saw that, I think, come through pretty clearly in terms of some of the decisions that were made on not only this election, but the pushback that the Republican Party has received for some of its stances on Ukraine, for instance. Right. And this sort of the bipartisan coalition in favor of interventionism, right, that has become a mass of political liability and not easily justified to the American people. And I think President Trump was very effective in presenting, presenting that issue. Yes.

Okay. So number three. So number three, we go to the Great Recession. Okay. What happens in the Great Recession? In the Great Recession, we have gains in the financial services sector being privatized, right, and losses being socialized, right? And this idea that no one was ever held accountable, right, that there was this great financial engineering catastrophe and, again, no accountability. And so if you're living most of your life, most of your adult life, let's say, through the 21st century, you know, this is defined by tremendous economic dislocation.

People lost their homes, their businesses, and et cetera. Where was the accountability? So again, you can see someone whose life has been shaped in the first 10, 15, 20 years of the century, this played a very important feature and the economic populism that followed. And people questioning the American system of free market economics, I think this was a major contributor to the change in the confidence people had in that system. I agree with you. I mean, it was certainly evident among conservatives, but I think you're absolutely correct. And it's interesting some of those Occupy Wall Street protests and things. transpired, certainly the Tea Party movement came about in the aftermath of the 2008 crash.

So, okay, so three, what's the last one? And finally, we have COVID. Okay. We have COVID where you had experts recommending policies, lockdowns, shutting down the economy, all kinds of measures that were taken, that in retrospect, several were totally ineffective. And we now know that the experts were not totally candid in their assessment, some things they proposed.

And again, the impact on the impact. a whole generation of young people who are out of school, businesses that were closed, tremendous costs incurred on recommendations that turned out to be unreliable. So we don't even have to assign intent. Let's leave that aside for a moment. But just the impact of those bad recommendations will reverberate, it seems, for decades. And yet, Donald Trump was the one that initially implemented some of those ideas. So, but the voters didn't punish him for that?

A great point, Rob. and I would say this, you could argue that COVID was the one place where Trump relied on the experts. He may perhaps went against his instincts, said, you know what, I'm going to listen to the adults. And it turned out to be a mistake to do so. And so again, there were policies under the Trump administration. But I think that's maybe the exception that proves the rule. And I think it's going to shape perhaps the way President Trump approaches this second term, that he's probably not going to give as much deference to the so-called adults to the experts.

Well, I think you're already seeing that play out in terms of his cabinet selections and other appointments. It seems fairly clear to me that he is looking for a particular type of person to fill those high positions at the cabinet level. We'll see who ends up filling in the rest of the political positions that he's going to appoint. But there does seem to be this genuine backlash against the experts in Washington, D.C., and there may be elitist attitude about how things should be done. And it seems to me that the Trump project for a second term, as we understand in these early days, is really to challenge the established order. And it's in some way to hold the established order accountable for the four betrayals that have defined the first quarter of the century. Absolutely.

Okay. So we have the four betrayals. How did those betrayals contribute to this coalition that now is in Donald Trump's court and ended up electing him to a second term in the White House? It's all about change. And ultimately, although he had been president before, as everyone knows, he became the agent of change. He became the force that is going to overturn the established order and try something different. And I think ultimately, that is one of his great assets that made him so formidable. And despite all of the attacks and all of the liabilities and all of the challenges, that worked its will in the end.

Interesting. Okay. So it really didn't matter who the Democrats put up because chances are they would have found somebody who came up through the political ranks and would have been viewed as an establishment type of candidate. And Donald Trump, because he's an outsider and we'll have that image, even though he did serve one term, was still able to dismiss of all of those things. Exactly. And let me try to describe it the following way, Rob, which is that if you look at Kamala Harris's strongest state, I believe she won her strongest state by something like 32

percentage points. But she won the District of Columbia by, I think, almost 87 percentage points, which means that Washington, D.C. is well more than twice as to the left as the most left of center state in the union. So just consider what that means for a moment. And because the Democratic Party really is a creature of Washington, it is going to produce leaders who reflect a consensus way to the left of the center point of the American electorate. So we have an American electorate that's roughly two or three percentage points to the right. She is sitting atop a party that, you know, arguably is 87 points, you know, to the left in terms of the elites, the people who run the party, right, the people who make the decisions at the very, very top. And I think that the Democratic Party is really running as a far left monoculture within Washington, D.C., against the center of the American electorate. That is a problem that is not going to be easily resolved.

Can you, can you, can you, I believe you made the point, if I'm remembering correctly, The difference between centrist and moderate, am I recalling that correctly? Just share with us what you mean by that, because you said that Trump was able to do, play the role of a centrist as opposed to a moderate. And we shouldn't confuse those two terms. Exactly. So I would argue that one of Donald Trump's great political innovations is he is a very effective centrist who is immoderate. Now, I don't mean immoderate in a pejorative sense. I just mean, he understands that he can take very strong positions on very controversial issues and still be at the center point of the American electorate.

Think immigration. Think trade. Think crime. These are not moderate positions, but it turns out they're centrist positions. And I think he understood that that combination of strong positions at the center that reflect the desires, the objectives of the American people, that's a place to win elections. And I think he deserves a lot of credit in terms of strategy for that insight. It seemed that that was one of the things that Kamala Harris struggled with, though, because she had taken these far left positions on many issues and perhaps seeing the polling

or where the American people were, she tried to move to the center on immigration, on crime, on the economy. And at the end of the day, I don't think the voters necessarily believed her. True. But if you operate within, for example, the Washington, D.C. framework. I don't mean Washington, D.C. geographically only. I mean it sociologically. She's not far left at all.

She's at the center point of that particular, what we would call monoculture. Monoculture is in Washington, D.C., except for the place that we're sitting and a few others, there really isn't anything else but a left-of-center culture. So it's very hard, I think, in that environment to be at the center point. And Donald Trump, because he's not a partisan creature, he's not an ideological creature in the conventional sense. he was able to really locate himself at the center point, and he wasn't overly constrained, right, by the conventions of Washington or the conventions even of sort of the conservative project over the past 50 years, he was able to innovate outside of that. And that ended up being, I think, a massive competitive advantage. This might be a tough question for you to answer, but if you are in the shoes of whoever the next Democratic standard bearer is or the Democratic National Committee, how do you then get back in touch with?

with the everyday American to figure out that, yes, I understand that I'm grounded in this left-wing monoculture here in Washington, but I need to pull a Bill Clinton, perhaps, and understand the concerns that are on the minds of those people and the rest of the country. So I think the Democratic Party some time ago faced a choice. And that choice were gonna be the party of class

or the party of identity. And it chose the party of identity. And that ended up being, although I think it was a principal choice in a certain way. I think it's authentic. It is not a competitive choice. And so I think they have to sort of relitigate that question and ultimately choose the path of class. And I don't mean in a Marxist sense necessarily. I mean that they are going to be the champion in the way Bernie Sanders is for working families, for working Americans. He lost that argument in the Democratic Party. And they chose the Identitarian Path. And I think, again, that will be revisited. But the Democratic Party is very committed

to its current path. So that is not going to be an easy adjustment to make. And by the way, if we look back, it was different, but if we look back to the 1980 election, it took the Democratic Party three election cycles to make their turn and to get to Bill Clinton. Now, we live in a faster time, faster cycle, so I'm not predicting it will take that long, but it could take a while. In a recent interview between Dr. Larry Arnett Hillsdale and Dr. Kevin Roberts here at the Heritage Foundation, Kevin made the point that it will actually take three consecutive Republican victories in order to fully divorce ourselves from the administrative state and the policies. So maybe if conservatives are fortunate, they will have a repeat of what happened in 1980, transpire

between now and 2037. And world events have a lot to say over that ultimate determination. So we think about the 20th century, much of conservative economic policy was challenged by the Great Depression. and then obviously World War II challenge at that time conservative approaches to foreign policy. And so again, we'll have to see how world events and national events unfold. But I think Dr. Roberts is corrected. These victories are not quickly won.

So let's talk about that because you said on your podcast, the political risk brief, that there was a – the Republican Party needs to understand there's a difference between your standard Republican candidate and Donald Trump. He brings something unique that most other Republicans don't. And that's why he was able to assemble this diverse working class coalition that ultimately supported him and propelled him to the second term. And so why shouldn't the Republican Party be cocky right now? Well, because the victory really can't be said to be its victory. The owner of this victory, the father of this victory, really is Donald Trump.

Because, again, it really was a victory premised on his charisma and his policy positions or his policy inclinations. And what I mean by that is Trump is, Trump is. is really the combination of nationalism, populism, and industrialism. And all three of those things don't sit easily with parts of traditional 1980s-era conservatism, as we know. And so, again, I think it was clearly a Trump victory. The Republican Party benefited from that victory, but I don't think it can say that it owns that victory. And we'll see in the coming year two, three, four, to what extent is the Republican Party permanently adjust itself to align and absorb and buy,

Trumpism. It looks like it will, but that's not a certainty, but it looks like a likelihood. Yeah. And even somebody with as much charisma as J.D. Vance, I think, probably recognizes that there's work to do in order to get to the point where you can be in a similar position to where Trump is today. Okay, so now as he, let's move to your, your groundbreaking research here. This is, this is fascinating. So as Trump puts together his cabinet, we've seen these different factions represented. There, there seems to be some patterns that we notice, all, ready forming with the types of people. They tend to be strong communicators, for instance, who are occupying many of these positions.

Their policy tends to, in some cases, bump up against the traditional free trade orthodoxy of the Republican Party. But you have gone through a tremendous amount of data to identify the different types of influencers who shape Trump's vision and perhaps his future policymaking. Tell us about the research that you did first, and then we'll get into the different types. Sure. So let's step back for a moment. I think there's some history here, which is quite important, Rob.

If we go back, and it started earlier, but let's take the 1990s and especially the early 2000s, for reasons we could talk about journalism. I mean, conventional legacy corporate media really became a project of the Democratic Party and increasingly the progressive left. And we could discuss why that was. It's not so important. But what happened was that there were two impacts. The first is with a bigger and bigger swath of the American people, legacy media lost credibility. And it forced the emergence ultimately of a countervailing parallel information environment on the right. Where we're sitting today is a reflection of that in part.

But it happened in different ways. Now, there were early versions of this and talk radio. So it wasn't from nothing. It wasn't ex-Nilo. But it became much more vast. And there were technological developments, of course, that made it more possible. But as legacy media became more and more unavailable to anything center right or to the right, this information network emerged.

And it really catalyzed, I think, under the first Trump administration and then during the most recent campaign. And so that's the backstory. And so in many ways, the movement of legacy media to the left and the abandonment of, I think, the objectivity principle of journalism. forced or compelled this competitive innovation that is this alternative right of center information network and ultimately discredited legacy media and you could say contributed to Donald Trump's first and second victories.

So that's sort of the back story. Yeah, and I just want to point out that you're absolutely right. This was a long time. This was a development that didn't happen overnight. I remember the first journalism class I took in college in the late 1990s was the professor, I believe it could have been the first thing that she said about how journalism needed to be activist. It was no objectivity was dead. And so you have a entire generation of students who are coming out of

communication schools, journalism schools who were taught this and were steered in that direction. They were steered away from objectivity or any premise of it and certainly steered toward those institutions that would advance a particular agenda that aligned with their political worldview. And I'm old enough to remember a time when there were significant numbers of journalists. So whatever their biases may have been, they really were trying to get it right and to approach something along the lines of objectivity. And although I'm not saying there's no one left, they're increasingly few in number and a dwindling minority and were left with a very different kind of media. So it wasn't always this way. I'm not saying it was perfect decades ago, but I think it was better.

And now we're in a very, very different world as we know. And that sort of set the stage. And so we wanted to understand what was, you know, through the campaign, the information network, the information environment around the Trump campaign. And so we designed a initial universe of 40 key Trump advisors and figures. And then we collected reference citations they made to sort of see whom do they cite as authorities, as experts, as trusted sources. And we collected 16,000 of those reference citations through a great team, led to my colleague, Jeremy Furch got. and we have an algorithm that waits for various factors, including volume, consistency, diversity of mentions, other factors.

And that allows us to produce who are the top influencers in the Trump campaign information network, the Trump information environment. And when we look at those top 25 influencers, they tell an incredible story, which is basically there is no one, almost no one, connected to traditional legacy media. This truly is a parallel independent sovereign structure that can. function without any regard to legacy media. So this has happened. And they fall in largely to three different groups. You've even identified some individuals who are representative of those groups. What are the groups and who are the household names that our audience might be

familiar with? Sure. So it's an eclectic group when you think of the top 25. And the thing to note is it has some very interesting characteristics. One is it tends to be much younger than you might expect lots of people in their 30s and 40s, very few who are in their 60s and 70s. That's the first thing. Also, very heavy weighting to places like Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, much more Midwestern than you might have expected, right? You would think maybe it's going to be coastal elites. Also, very few people with elite university or other academic credentials, right? This is not the Ivy League stamped, you know, smart set. These are people who are much more grassroots, It's much more rooted, I think, in the American experience away from the coast and much less dependent on the credentialism with which we're so familiar.

By the way, that goes back to the four betrayals, right? The people who thought they knew everything, who ended up maybe not knowing quite so much. So that's some interesting sort of demographic characteristics of this group. We sort of see three general groupings within these most prominent influencers within the Trump campaign environment. One is the amplifiers. These people who really have platforms that allow them to disseminate. views and messages. Obviously, these are going to be conservative views and messages. And someone like a Summer Lane, the editor of Wright Revolution News, associate editor at RSB Network,

prolific novelist turned political commentator, not someone that if we went to the networks, we asked, you know, they probably aren't very familiar with her, right? You had a massive following. But a massive influence, a massive imprint and impact within the Trump information environment. So you see this combination of importance, but no connection to legacy media. And by the way, that lack of connection allows this alternate parallel structure to be sovereign, right, to be independent, to not really be answerable to more establishment elite forces. And again, that, again, that gap, right, protects them from being compromised. So I think that's a very, you know, an obvious, but important trait. The second category would be the specialists. Classic here be Bill Malusian,

right, of Fox News, who really brought the board. issue before with his original reporting, very effective. Again, better known. But again, someone who's wanted to cover an issue that, you know, if you ask, legacy media outlets, isn't even a problem. And I should mention on a couple things, including immigration and I think Biden's health condition, you know, the legacy media told the American people nothing to see here, right? There's no problem with the border. President Biden is healthier than ever. His aptitude is stronger than ever. And we know both those things ended up being untrue on the border. I think it's obvious. But then, of course, you know, Vice President Harris wouldn't have been made the candidate otherwise. And so again,

you have a figure like Bill Malusian who took, I think, a counter trend position, ended up being right. And again, very, very influential within this Trump information environment. So these specialists, in his case, as I mentioned, immigration on the border. And then finally, you have the Mavericks, someone like a Clay Travis, right, you know, talk radio host, you know, got his start sort of in popular in popular culture, not someone, again, at all connected with legacy conventional media, but ends up being very, very influential as sort of just countervailing voice on the right. So again, we think about these folks, these amplifiers, these specialists, these mavericks, these are the kinds of people who matter in this Trump information environment.

They certainly do. And there's no doubt in my mind that they had a significant influence on the outcome of the election in terms of the ability to bypass the gaykeepers and the traditional legacy media. My question is, how effective will they be when we get to the policymaking? So everyone talks about the first year of the Trump administration being the most critical because we know that as soon as you hit 2026, everybody on Capitol Hill will be focused on their reelection and things of that nature. Do you think that they will be, he'll have more success this time around. Remember, it was a bit slow out of the gate in 2017 with this network of influencers helping him advance the policy ideas and driving the debates in a way that. would be more suitable than what you'd expect from legacy media, for instance? So I think it will be very important.

One interesting aspect will be the following, Rob, I think, which is that because these influencers tend to operate on smaller platforms as entrepreneurs, these are entrepreneurs, right? These are really small business creators. These are people who have innovated themselves in their own brands, their own entities. They have a different relationship with President Trump than, for example, the New York Times and Bill Clinton. So I think that President Trump will have a lot of say in signaling to this network, but the network can also signal back.

So there'll be this interesting mediation. I think clearly as we sit here today, you know, President Trump stands astride, the right of center complex with an incredible position. But over time, the network will signal back things that make them happy, things that make them unhappy. And again, there'll be a negotiation that will go on. But it'll be very different than, you know, the publisher of the Washington Post, you know, dealing with the Democratic president. It's not going to look that way. It's going to look very different. I think it'll be different, too. I was a reporter at human events at the time when George W. Bush selected Harriet Myers for the Supreme Court. And you'll remember the conservative

pushback and ultimately his decision to withdraw her nomination and picks Samuel Alito instead. It was ultimately confirmed. I wonder if that would be effective with the Trump. Would Trump, Bush caved under the pressure? Would Trump have this group? Maybe the group would be divided, but it'll be interesting to see as these policy debates do play out how things end up happening. I think that there are social issues. There are probably foreign policy issues. We talked about the trade issue earlier.

I mean, any number of these could divide these influencers in certain ways. And if Trump's charisma and sway will have the same effect that it seems to have had prior to the election. The key thing to watch for will be where a strong majority of these top influencers are united on a position or issue opposite President Trump. And I think that's where you'll see them exercise collective influence, which would not be the case on an individual basis necessarily. So I think that will be an important metric, an important indicator. Yes, yes. Okay. I want to close by asking you a couple of questions related to the media. Certainly a tremendous amount of money was spent on advertising. You founded a public affairs firm and you do a lot of work in the space of messaging.

What were some of the things that stood out to you in the campaign that we should be thinking about in terms of innovations or things that maybe were under the radar that popped that we didn't notice here in Washington? So I would make the following argument. Presidential campaigns are different than any other type of American political campaign. They operate at a scale and a level which has its own gravitational forces, right? You know, a Senate race, a race for governor, obviously a House race. You know, they are small enough where advertising plays, I think, a very powerful role. But the presidential level, you're dealing with cultural and symbolic and metaphorical forces that are totally different.

And I think ultimately, Trump won that you could call it the memes war, right? He won that in terms of the symbols, the, you know, all. of the, again, the metaphor of the campaign, he was able at the end to really dominate that. And I think that's so I think advertising played a role and there was targeting and that has a place in a campaign. But at the end of the day, he was consistently able to dominate the thematic level of the campaign. And he understood how to take up the oxygen.

Every day was about what was Trump doing. How was he doing it? Good or bad. He was able to really shape the contours of the race. I give the Trump team tremendous credit for that. I give the president credit. He understands, you know, politics and the element of entertainment within politics. And you could just see, I mean, for example, when he worked at McDonald's, right,

the signals he was sending, he just seemed to win so many of those days on the campaign trail through unconventional means. That is so true. I mean, if you did a daily scorecard, Trump would rack up the wins. And even when the news was not necessarily favorable, he found a way to distract. the news media, the traditional legacy news media in ways that they would quickly move on from the negative news to cover the next thing that Trump was able to do. One of the things that I found really interesting was Trump's approach to doing interviews and which media outlets he chose

to speak with. And obviously he played, spent a lot of time with podcasters, Joe Rogan, Thea Yvon, others. Do you think that that is going to change the way, and even Harris did it to a certain extent. I mean, call her daddy, obviously, made a lot of news when she sat down with that show. Do you think that will change the way that candidates in the future approach the news media, or is that a unique characteristic to the 2024 presidential election? So let me duck the question by saying, I think it's both. Okay. In the following sentence, I think it will change things permanently in that candidates are going

to want and be required to go in much more unstructured, long format settings. At the same time, I think that President Trump has unique abilities, to do that and even to make the missteps work for him ultimately. Now, that's not an infinite power. Everyone has limits and he has limits, but that is not easily replicated. So we'll see how that plays out. But I do think that more and more candidates, especially Republican candidates, will avail themselves of this parallel information network to circumvent legacy media to reach voters directly. And I think that will be an enduring feature of American politics. Yes, no, I think it is. At the same time, I think we need to, I have no problem giving credit to the podcasters and others who played a larger role. We did some exit polling at the Daily Signal with RMG research, Scott Rasmussen's firm. And when you ask people where they receive most of their political or election news, about half of the respondents said television. So I think there's the reality that, yes, we can say that Joe Rogan had an impact. And maybe they saw clips of Joe Rogan on television, but how many people can commit to two to three hours?

to listen to a show. At the same time, it did humanize Trump in a way that I don't think you, that certainly wouldn't have been the case had he done the 60 Minutes interview, which he ultimately declined to do. And I think also the message that perhaps in some way that's hard to measure that penetrated was that Trump was fearless. He was authentic. He had nothing to hide against an opponent who seemed fearful, who seem overly controlled and avoiding, revealing much about herself. And I think somehow in ways that are hard to measure that that penetrated the American consciousness. Absolutely.

Absolutely. I think that that contrast just with Rogan and the fact that they couldn't figure it out in the schedule, you know, show that, you know, Trump was willing to take the time to do that. Jonathan, tell our audience how they can track your work or listen to your show. What are the things that you'd like to leave them with? Sure. You can go to your favorite podcast platform and look up the political risk brief. And you'll see our podcast come up and we'd love you to subscribe and listen.

you can go to baronpa.com and we have a whole array of thought leadership and briefs and reports and the podcasts are also there. So we love people to consume that information. Well, thank you for spending time with us. We'll be sure to leave links in the show notes to make it easy to subscribe. And I hope they do because, as I said, I love when you have a new episode. It's always very informative and I feel better educated after listening to it. Rob, thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Be sure to check out our evening show right here in this podcast feed every Monday through Friday. We help you cut through the clutter and bring you the top

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