Post-Trump, his party and his favorite network have to figure out their relationship with reality

Trump was enmeshed in the moment. He began a weekly gig appearing on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” in 2011, about a month after he began to gain notoriety for amplifying false claims that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Every week, he’d riff on current events as he flirted with a 2012 presidential bid. He ramped up his use of Twitter and Facebook to bash Obama, transitioning from overt birtherism to claims that Obama was hiding his college transcripts. After Obama won reelection, Trump’s social media moved more into the realm of Breitbart-level exaggerations.

The shocking 2014 ouster of then-Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor hinted at the power of right-wing media and its narrative on immigration. A year later, Trump removed doubt about its power with his ascendance to a front-runner position in the crowded presidential primary field after embracing similar right-wing tropes. He built a base loyal enough to secure the nomination and leveraged partisan loyalty to narrowly win the presidency.

Trump was saying things that made things trickier for traditional Republicans, but eliminated the need to walk any lines with the right-wing base. During the tea party era, the establishment tried to figure out a middle ground. But under a President Trump, the establishment was pulled deep into the right-wing universe. It worked out better than they’d expected since Trump, recognizing what that base actually cared about, was fine with standard policy proposals like tax cuts. Confirming a bunch of conservative judges and ignoring Trump’s disregard for the historic behavior of the chief executive allowed Republican leaders in Congress to mostly do what they wanted.

Some Republicans tried to both maintain a traditional approach to their jobs and to appeal to Trump’s base. Those voters, after all, were seen as an essential component of winning Republican primaries in particular, and Republicans were wary of alienating them. At the same time, there was a sense that Trumpism was fleeting and potentially toxic.

That was exacerbated by Trump’s focus on maintaining his relationship with his base. It meant his lying constantly, misrepresenting his own positions and failures and generally fostering broad conspiracy theories about his opponents. That instinct — that it was better to have people believe something false than believe something negative about himself — helped create the space for the QAnon conspiracy theory to flourish.

QAnon evolved from a bizarre theory that emerged at the end of the 2016 campaign in which it was alleged that prominent Democrats were involved in sex trafficking at a D.C. pizza shop. When an anonymous individual calling himself Q began claiming that he was working within Trump’s government to uproot similar activity, it caught fire. The idea that the president was actively engaged in a private fight against an obvious evil allowed his supporters to believe that external chaos was a mask for internal competence, however nonsensical. This was simply an outgrowth of Trump’s approach to his supporters: Believing nonsense was more palatable than accepting reality.

“I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” Trump said in August. Later, he would praise QAnon for its ostensible focus on sex trafficking, essentially celebrating its allegations against his opponents.

In the aftermath of his unsuccessful bid for a second consecutive term in office, Trump’s demanded that his base accept a different falsehood. He has claimed repeatedly, without evidence, that the election was tainted by rampant fraud and that he, not President-elect Joe Biden, was its victor. It’s clear that he understands this isn’t likely to lead to another term but it’s also apparent that, at some level, he actually believes it.

When he began making this case after Election Day, he and his allies pressured Republicans who had been iffy on Trumpism to come on board. Trump demanded, in essence, that they accept his nonsense to maintain their support from his base. Some acceded. Others managed to simply sidestep things, to remain in the shadows.

As it turns out, that was trickier for conservative media outlets themselves. Fox News in particular has been unable to figure out a middle ground between its long-term interest in being treated with any credibility and appeasing Trump’s most energetic base. Its announcement on the night of the election that Trump had lost Arizona infuriated Trump and his supporters. Its eventual call that Biden had secured the presidency was met with a similar response, including from some on-air personalities. Tucker Carlson’s later reporting that Trump’s legal team had failed to back up its more bizarre claims about electoral fraud prompted a new outcry.

It’s too early to tell how much of an effect the hostile reaction to Fox from the right will have on the network. But it’s important to emphasize how central that network was to Trump’s term in office. Polling repeatedly indicated that Republicans who watched Fox News were the group most loyal to the president. Research from PRRI released last week shows that Republicans who trust Fox News more than any other news source (about 40 percent of the party) are far more partisan than other Republicans and far more likely to hold extreme views on issues such as racial discrimination.

The challenge for Fox is the emergence of seemingly viable alternatives less concerned about adhering to reality. One America News in particular has become a source of unfiltered nonsense meant to appeal to the far-right wing of the Republican Party — with Trump’s explicit endorsement. Newsmax lies somewhere between the two, apparently benefiting both from anger at Fox News and from its founder’s close relationship with Trump. Newsmax has ostentatiously refused to call the race for Biden, pretending that there is some question about what actually happened.

This split between a reality-adjacent network hoping to maintain its grip on Trump’s base and upstarts who reject the need to dwell in the literal mirrors an apparent divide in the party itself.

Beyond Trump, one of the more prominent voices to emerge from the 2020 election is that of Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). After winning the Republican primary in Georgia’s 14th District, she coasted to election, despite a demonstrated history of both sharing conspiracy theories and explicitly advocating for QAnon. Since winning, she’s spread false claims about coronavirus restrictions in D.C., among other things.

Greene was elected in part because she, like Trump, was willing to embrace clearly false claims, which were bouncing around in the right-wing media news universe and on social media. Like the president, she understands that many Republican voters are more interested in the cultural fight than the political one. Just as One America News understands that there’s a market for completely invented claims which Fox, still tethered to key aspects of reality, won’t embrace.

The problem is that it’s often psychologically easier to believe the nonsense. If you’ve lost an election, it’s nicer to insist that it was stolen from you, no matter how bad the loss. If you’re committed to the idea that Trump is unfailing, it’s easier to accept his unfounded assertions about rampant fraud.

It’s also still useful for cynics to allow falsehoods like that to spread. There’s no question that Republican officials who are well aware that no such fraud occurred will nonetheless leverage those claims to advocate for new restrictions on voting. By doing so, the circle will be complete: claims about fraud were elevated for years to pass just such laws, creating an environment in which Trump could use existing skepticism about fraud to defend his own losses.

One of the questions that accompanied Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party was what would happen when he was out of office. Powerful institutions like the GOP and Fox News tend to be adept enough at co-opting vocal minority groups to survive. The Republican Party did that to an extent during the tea party era and Fox did so much more effectively when Trump won the presidency. It’s more likely that each will incorporate some aspect of the surrealistic right-wing fringe of the party moving forward than it is that the fringe will establish a viable beachhead that threatens either institution.

But it’s not certain, particularly with Trump so far being indifferent to the damage he’s causing both to his party and his favorite network. It’s indulgence from Trump on down, from his insistences that he was cheated to much of his base’s concerns about their cultural status. And it’s a large market into which political and economic actors can tap, as no one knows better than Trump.