(Washington Insider Magazine) -When the Trump administration was in its dying months and weeks, a bit less than a year ago actually, I posited the question that many had asked before me, and that the 45th President had hinted at himself previously: Would Donald Trump attempt to take his media power back by creating, across that spectrum, his own media, of which he and his ideology would be the brand name and epicenter of. I stated that I believed he would look to take talent from elsewhere to fill his own network, and that these personalities would thrive in this environment, in which they are essentially creating the news of each day, in this alternative reality that the 45th President is attempting to craft in this world.
I called it “Trump TV,” and I wrote that it could be useful in consolidating and furthering the 45th President’s grip upon a rather large sect of the American population. Perhaps this was always more or less the underlying plan that had been whispered about in certain, differing circles for some time, but that began to change during his administration, likely as few people noticed the opportunity, and additional layers of this idea clearly defined themselves these events were happening. After the attempted insurrection at the Capital on the sixth of January, 2021, when Facebook and Twitter either banned or indefinitely suspended Donald Trump from using their products, the 45th President was effectively cut off from his greatest source of publicity, coverage and fans.
This has been a wonderfully positive innovation for so many who use either Facebook or Twitter, and one that has dampened the power of a man who wishes to wield power explicitly for his own ends at all times. Donald Trump has felt this as well, and it makes him angry; his press releases, while comical to read in his voice in your head, do not have the same effect on anyone, whether his supporter or adversary, like his vile tweets and commentary had. Since the 45th President skulked away from office, not taking accountability for anything, not conceding, and not renouncing those followers of his that stormed and broke into the capital building on the hunt for certain politicians for whom they have great, vitriolic anger and hatred for, he has been without his voice in so many ways.
Those ten, nearly 11 months that Donald Trump has not had his great, limitless bully pulpit, have frustrated him, and have surely made him even more vengeful and spiteful in spirit than before. And so, thanks to what conservatives call the existential threat of “cancel culture,” or what was once called “political correctness,” which might both be euphemisms for practical, social accountability, what once would likely have been Trump TV has become the “Trump Media and Technology Group,” of which will comprise different sectors of the technological and social media world.
TMTG Chart
The social media part of this whole rigamarole, known as “Truth Social,” of which is supposed to be like Facebook and Twitter, as per the attached explanatory graphic, has already had a false start of sorts, where the former President had his account hacked, while a pig defecating was posted on his account, before the entire app was taken offline to try to save any further embarrassment or security breach. It will, if it should be built and secured properly, would surely become a place where extremists might recruit hopeful and gullible Republicans, Trump and Qanon supporters, as well as enthusiasts into further, more extreme ideas and measures.
Meanwhile, the second immediate part of this entire TMTG equation is the TMTG+, which is supposed to one day seriously compete or take streaming market share from such giants as Netflix and Disney. It is, in these very preliminary periods, being marketed and talked up as a “nonwoke” alternative for Americans; what this will consist of, remains literally anyone’s guess, but if one were to judge based on the language used to describe and frame TMTG+, one might guess that it might contain non-satirical, stereotypical depictions of people from across the world, as well as America, in stereotypical roles and storylines.
It will attract a certain audience undoubtedly, and it will have a certain cast of familiar faces I can imagine too. Perhaps movies that have been recently considered outrageous or poorly aged might be bought in their original forms and played in these ways; likely, however, it will be a place for right-wing and far-right “intellectuals” to create series, biographies, docudramas and the like that will contain very specific national and worldviews that, to most people, would be considered xenophobic, verbosely nationalistic, culturally insensitive and misogynistic in overall timbre.
Then, and only then, do we get to TMTG News, of which is being compared to CNN and iHeartMedia in scale and versatility; Trump TV, so to speak. This will be where, alongside Truth Social, the great despotic echo chamber will look to convince the public who pays attention or cares what is going on in the world as per this Trumpian reality. They will have names that become trusted for facts, yet will only give fantastical, biased, and often hateful drivel in the name of news, objective reporting, and facts.
How this Trump TV and Truth Social play into and with one another, and how TMTG+ might be either brilliant or too much, will be amongst the more interesting topics that this essay discusses at length, yet there is another, potential and eventual arm to this operation, and it is data collection and analysis.
Should all of this go according to whatever plan they have fabricated here, this analytical, cloud, financial transactional, and website hosting work could, in tandem with the other three arms of this operation, allow Donald Trump and his family massive access to capital, ideas, feelings, hearts, minds, as well as trends, behavioral, transactional and psychological information too. This final option is put off to the side in this essay; it is the topic for a different, singular essay that will be following, and yet needed to be addressed at least superficially in the discussion of this TMTG undertaking.
As this final, more abstract and intangible layer exists, and will function more intimately inside the company at first, before developing further as a real, massive and profitable standalone portion of this endeavor, it will not factor a great deal more in this particular analysis moving forward. On the other hand, Truth Social, TMTG+, and TMTG News are massively important, potential tools of real harm and discord going into the future; the subsequent expansion of the entire Trump TV concept into entirely different and significant spheres of influence vis-a-vis casual, leisurely media, as well the social media sphere, on top of the previously discussed news network exclusively, means that the former President can buttress his message and his money three or even four-fold, all from built-in swaths and throngs of beholden and committed followers; what brazen new horrors might this wrought?
“Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith….” – Yevgeny Zamyatin
While a Trump TV of sorts was always going to be guilty of pumping the President’s views into the world, TMTG News, in coordination with Truth Social and TMTG+ is the next level of information inculcation, indoctrination, and propaganda. It was always understood, at least by me, that a Trump news channel, station or network would draw the reactionary “talent” away from places like Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars, Turning Point USA, Sinclair News and elsewhere, hyper-focusing it all in one place, so that after watching Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, one might get Ben Shapiro interviewing Steve Pinker or Jordan Peterson, before Charlie Kirk, Tim Poole, Andy Ngo and Jessie Waters finished up the pre-midnight time slots, just in time for the Alex Jones show at midnight or one in the morning.
This easy access by conservatives and reactionaries to words and beliefs that back up their own world views, all in the form of unbiased, fully patriotic news, would really be a massive problem. In any sane age, such a malevolent innovation would absolutely warrant a redressing by the Supreme Court of the United States in some form or fashion.
Yet we do not live in a sane age, if ever one existed previously, and so this will likely be seen as business as usual, even as it sets the stage and helps to lay the groundwork for future mistrust, disconnection and insurrectionary type events in the years to come. TMTG News will be a real problem for the United States, as well as anyone or any nation that this news channel, its anchors, personalities, and “analysts” believe defies the will of the 45th President, his loyal bands and swaths, and those beliefs that any right-headed American should have, in their estimation of course; where TMTG News ends, however, Truth Social and TMTG+ continue on.
TMTG News will be where the President and his cronies present their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions as actual fact, and as something that educated people in the know and in support of the effort to rid America of its deep state will have to keep abreast with each and every day. Yet the best place to discuss the information found and obtained on TMTG News has to invariably be Truth Social; that, after all, is where the President will be too.
Even after the little pig-scrotum fiasco previously mentioned, the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, will be using his Truth Social app and account to reach the masses as Facebook and Twitter previously allowed for him to. He will be in the midst of his own people, those who drive from across the country to listen to him speak, and fawn over his toddler-esque language and timbre, and while he likely won’t have very many enemies on the app to antagonize and to be antagonized by, he likely not care too much at all. It is not as though he has ever needed them to set him off, he simply hears of something, rants about it with minimal background information on the matter, ignores the comments he hates, and rejoices in the comments that he likes; in this new setting, Trump won’t even have to suffer any visible criticism, on his app or news station at all.
That will be important, as Donald Trump did not tolerate Fox News anchors, pundits, etc, disagreeing with him at all, about anything, and previously took to his Twitter during occasions where they forgot that 45 was watching. On perfect days for the former-President, Fox News would repeat, highlight, support, and praise those things that Donald Trump had said, either at a conference or on Twitter, before 45 would then use that support to argue that “everyone” is “saying this” or believing in this too, even though its simply the biased, reactionary media repeating the very same language, timbre, and topics as the administration was just using the previous day.
Now, in this new world that it appears we are about to suffer through, this exercise, whether Trump runs and becomes President again or not, will be played out across TMTG News and Truth Social instead of Fox News and Twitter. Legions of his followers will flock there too, in their safe space from the scary reality of the world in which they are often woefully ignorant and ill-informed regarding, to talk and discuss those tidbits of information they just recently learned while watching the TV, the clips they saw from the programming on Truth Social, how cool the newsletter from Donald Trump Jr was, and what they would say to someone who was mildly different than them in whatever conceivable way can be imagined at the time, and while they’re on their phones doing this, they might also decide that, after a hard day of listening to grifters wax grotesquely about “great replacements,” “unconstitutional vaccine mandates,” “the big lie,” and the like, a bit of relaxation or fun might be in order; that’s when they will open up the TMTG+ on their television, phone or tablet, of course
“Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording….Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.” – Aldous Huxley
I do not watch much tv myself; apart from some sports on occasion, biographies or a documentary. I find it to be boring personally, and a waste of time that I might be spending doing something more productive or enjoyable; I hold no grudge against anyone who chooses to partake, of course, and there are, of course, still programs that I do find interesting, funny, or well made when I do happen to catch them on.
There are lots of options for watching tv nowadays, whether you subscribe to a cable or satellite package, or perhaps you stream programs from Netflix, Disney+, Paramount, Peacock, Hulu, or any of the other services, usually offered by a specific network or channel themselves. TMTG+ is the Trumpian version of the aforementioned of course, and on it, one might imagine that they will be able to watch all sorts of programming that, while sold as as pleasurable and fun as any of the other, aforementioned channels, but without the woke communists of Hollywood, or the political correctness of the world today, will feature series and movies with sharp political, cultural and oftentimes xenophobic over and undertones.
Like Truth Social and TMTG News, TMTG+ relies on the rabid desire for Trump supporters to see and hear their leader bragging and billowing as often as he can, about the same things that they don’t understand or sound coherent about as well. While many people will log off of their Twitter after a long day of arguing with people of varying ideological backgrounds or beliefs, and turn off the cable news in lieu of something relaxing, creative, perhaps fantastical or hysterical, Donald Trump and his movement are banking on the belief that his supporters will transition from a hard day of using Truth Social, catching the evening TMTG News with their favorite personality or icon during supper or whatever, only to then watch one of Dinesh D’Souza’s dreadful films, Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice reruns, Gina Carano as some off-brand reactionary superhero, maybe named ICE or something abhorrent, or a film version of the infamous Jean Respail novel, Camp of Saints, directed by COO Steve Bannon, instead of David Attenborough, a foreign film or series, Marvel superheroes, the Muppet Show reruns or even Southpark.
Perhaps I am simply underestimating the appeal that many of these names and their associated acts have for individuals who agree with their takes and positions; perhaps I am letting my own bias blur my own foresight and comprehension of how people think and behave. These could all be true, and yet, unless these individuals are that much more devoted to their political and cultural beliefs than anyone else, it is a heavy wager that the former-President of the United States is putting on his supporters’ total allegiance to him.
Even the most devoted of liberal and leftist Americans will still relax once in a while; Donald Trump is asking his supporters to basically be enveloped by him and his cult, which is currently attempting to extend its reach further into homes through the greater TMTG, by imbibing influence and information from it, even as they’re attempting to wind down, for the entire day. This is all happening at the same time that the Republican Party has continued to, since the events of the November election, those subsequent months, and 1/6, look to diminish their own chances of losing elections in 2022, 2024, and far beyond.
It is a dangerous and tricky situation we all find ourselves currently in, to be sure. And so, while I have my own doubts regarding a “non-woke” streaming service compounded upon all the other moving parts of this TMTG, if it does work and proves to be successful, with the varied and various types of programming that it will offer, it will be acting as a unique third support system to this far-right, reactionary echo chamber, to accompany Truth Social and TMTG News.
“If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth” – Yevgeny Zamyatin
While the news reports on issues or events, and can, in today’s world, be found either on social media or through news networks, even fake news has its limits. It can exaggerate things that are happening, like when Tucker Carlson talks about good, classic white folks being replaced by crazed, liberal foreign refugees from across the world, he relies on reality for the original foundation with which he builds his house of lies, racism, and xenophobia upon. Social media is good for this as well, as, thanks to the concept that most children first learn about through the game “telephone,” one bit of news, from wherever, can be twisted, grown, molded, and formed into something much different, much more severe, and much more publicly incendiary than the original might have even been.
Yet true fiction, and not those deceptions that turn things that are happening into monstrous fabrications, is truly limitless. While the news, when in the wrong, untrustworthy hands, can take an idea and can manipulate it, mold and twist it, until it is remade in a way that can instigate and excite anger, frustration, and negativity towards a person, group of people or agenda, true fiction can use different tools and tricks, under the guise of reality, to inculcate feelings, notions, preconceptions, biases, and misunderstandings into people who might not even understand where they are being led towards.
This “art” is in the same vein as those movies of decades gone by, like the infamous 1915 silent film, “The Birth of a Nation,” or any of the Nazi propaganda films that the Minister of Propaganda, the so-called Herr Goebbels, had made or oversaw the creation of for the benefit of those enthusiastic Nazis, as well as all of those who were still yet to be sold on the fuhrer and his party. It serves to not only further build, psychologically speaking, on the work that the party had already done on willing members of the party, by reinforcing ideas, notions, and concepts further, but also continually subjugates the rest of the silent population to these ideas and principals too.
As the German Nazis, as the great Aldous Huxley said, did not have the television to use quite yet, as it was not yet in existence, this was mostly done with loudspeaker and radio; these films would’ve been incredibly potent, along with the aforementioned measures, at growing the belief that the party members have in ideas and leaders themselves. Donald Trump and his team understand this, and with the advent of streaming networks, his own version of these old films will certainly see the light of day, and many millions of Americans will, eventually, watch them with glee and delight, ready to spew outrageous myths that they learned from TMTG+ after a long day of learning false or misleading information from Truth Social and TMTG News.
This programming will have thinly veiled references to “aliens,” “socialists,” “terrorists,” “thugs,” “very special people,” and “traitors,” as well as entire plotlines featuring other Americans as the enemy of the greater, classical America that these directors and actors will be looking to portray. The use of this type of language is subliminal, and acts in such a way as to mold preconceptions and create a sort of Pavlovian-type effect on those who watch and pay attention to it for any extended period of time.
When this language is used in these films or programs, it can yield horrifying consequences that play out amongst people in real-time, all across the country and greater world as well. Whether the screen shows Americans imperializing space, defeating evil and malevolent aliens, or some dramatized version of a Border Agent or ICE Agent job, it acts to indicate to the viewer, just exactly what we call an individual who might look or act in the way that the antagonist in the show does, and no matter if we understand this or not, those intimations act to prejudice us against people who might superficially appear as those fictional characters did.
This can be understood by simply watching films from the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, where villains were often first Germans, before slowly turning into either Russians or Chinese; the 1980s saw the change slowly occur from Soviets to Arabs, before the 11th of September, 2001, cemented the bad or often ignorant middle eastern villain trope in the minds of, not only adults, but so many thousands, even millions, of young children who grew up drowned in the forever wars of terror and nation-building that have led to much of the rampant reactionary, xenophobic and exceptionalistic jingoism that has become exemplified particularly as many of those children came of political age in the fall of 2016. The damage this does to our understanding of people and other cultures is devastating, to put it bluntly.
While these types of weapons of information and perception are almost always aimed at those who already fanatically support these types of movements, they do catch in their nets, trawling as a fishing vessel might, a few folks, relatively speaking, that they didnt have before, but this type of movement is far more interested in reproducing internally than externally. While they would like for folks like you and I to convert to the great party of the almighty Donald, they are not even delusional enough to believe that it can happen, even if they do think that JFK Jr is just waiting for the dust to settle for he and Donald Trump to announce that they won last years election all along; no, they are banking that their supporters have children, and often times many of them, and that those children, like the generations of children before them who were born into an America with tv, will be watching that tube, as it was once known as, with their parents.
And they would be correct. This strategy is particularly dangerous, mostly because it will be such an effective one. Like those previous Americans, who came to understand their nations own place in the world through the tv, the future is always at the mercy of their parents’ discretion; while Fox News has been relevant for just over 25 years at the time this essay was written, it is simply one network, albeit with a few different channels, as well as their own streaming service now too.
“The Catholic Chruch keeps going because it has been repeating the same thing for 2000 years; the National Socialist Party must do likewise.” – Joseph Goebbels
There are people, to be sure, who keep Fox News on all day long, catching all of the different personalities, from Laura Ingraham, to the rest of the crew, and then turn it off as they’re getting ready to close their eyes; yet this doesn’t have the type of programming that would keep or capture the attention of children, who have, for years, been ignoring news programs because they’re both information-driven, as well as usually boring and meaningless. But while TMTG News will likely be as boring to a child as any news show is, TMTG+ would, if it were done properly and for the purposes that it could be used for, contain programs that might find interest from children, while intoning a timbre that their parents would recognize from anchors and pundits on TMTG News, or from familiar personalities on Truth Social.
Worse still, as TMTG News and TMTG+ will always be on in the unfortunate house that pays for the subscription package, it would seem likely that, with the dominance and prevalence of social media today, that when the children grow old enough, whatever that age is in the world today, they will likely be forbidden to use any of the lib-tech and social media, censoring their children after screaming about the alleged censorship of their society, and therefore, be pushed towards using the patriotic Truth Social instead; in this way, many children will be inundated with pro-Trump information so incessantly and constantly, that they will, at the tender ages of 11, 12 and 13, seamlessly mimic and parrot the ideas, beliefs, and behaviours that they have seen and heard every day across every piece of technology that they come into contact with.
They will have grown up to see enemies in everyone that does not look, act, or think as they do. They will be without compassion, consideration, empathy or toleration, and might be as likely to mock and parody a disabled little child’s struggles as they are to ask the Hispanic girl whether her parents are illegal immigrants; when asked to play by a fellow child, the one-child might even be inclined to decline the invitation from the other, citing the suspicion that little Jimmy’s folks are actually Antifa agents in disguise, who might teach their son critical race theory as the children do homework together. While many of these ideas may seem laughable, and might even make you laugh as you read them, the slope is more slippery than might be first understood, and the consequences of consistent and emphatic misinformation will not only morph the minds of adults, but their children, if exposed to it across an entire childhood, as well.
This is a possible American future, make no mistake about it. When I wrote the original Trump TV piece, I had sat back and imagined what a mad Donald Trump, frustrated and betrayed by the media that loved the ratings he gave them, might do were he to get his own media, like the legendary Italian reactionary Sylvio Berlusconi has long possessed; TMTG, on the other hand, is a much greater, more ambitious vehicle for the movement that Donald Trump helped to breathe life into, alongside the infamous Steve Bannon, of whom I have written quite a lot regarding as well.
This combination, if done properly, will create a dangerous echo-chamber, feedback loop so complete and total, ranging from social media, to news television, to series, docuseries, movies and specials on a streaming service that will look to replace Netflix and Disney+ for those true swamp-drainers and patriots alike, that it will almost be, if not for the real-world consequences that much of this fake news and fantasy might create, a self-contained microverse of sorts. For those who wish and demand to believe these ideas that the former President rambles on regarding, the entire TMTG world will allow for those people to leave their preferred state of being even less than they may already; opposing opinions end up only heard when the host or analyst brings them up in some snide, incomplete and purposely misleading manner, on their way to giving their opinion as per why something, in particular, is either correct or incorrect. Ultimately, while it may be so that this TMTG of Donald Trump, his family and supporters, will act as a way of capturing the volition of more of the people of the United States, it, in my mind, is as likely to further isolate families from their communities, folks from their old friends, as well as, in the final analysis, new generations of children who have grown to realize that their parents are brainwashed, tried to brainwash them, and succeeded with many of their schoolmates.
The Trump Media and Technology Group is here, and it is likely here to stay. It will gain some support and, over time, develop and improve enough to accommodate all of the people who will be willing to pay some premium fee for TMTG+, the add-on’s that will surely be available on Truth Social eventually, as well as a subscription to TMTG News.
While this is unfortunate, it is not the end of the world, no matter how poisonous it has the potential to be to our fellow humans, whether that be brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, or anyone else; when they work hard, we must work harder, and when they look to spread the poison of selfishness and fascism through what they have disguised as the fair and unbiased media, we too, must set our sights on a distant price ourselves. We must do our best, as a society that is, to educate and impress upon each and every person, whether they are a child or an adult, that there is no power in fear, loathing, xenophobia or cultural isolation, but only weakness, folly, and ruin from hatred, suspicion, and cultural or national pomposity.
