Donald Trump will be president of the United States again. It wasn’t especially close. Which was a shock, unless you watch or listen to Theo Von. Or the Nelk boys. Or Adin Ross. Or Andrew Schulz. Or Shawn Ryan. Or sure, yes, Joe Rogan, but you’ve definitely heard of him.
You’re going to hear a lot of people attribute Trump’s victory to all sorts of reasons: inflation fatigue, immigration scaremongering, Biden’s doomed determination to have one last detour. But it owes at least part of its victory to the manosphere, that amorphous assortment of influencers who are mostly young, exclusively male, and increasingly boosters of whatever monoculture remains in an online society that has long been fragmented to the point of hell.
It is on these podcasts and broadcasts that Trump spent a disproportionate amount of time in the final weeks of his campaign, and rightly so. That list above, plus Tucker Carlson, includes the four largest podcasters on Spotify. Trump sat down with all of them, often for hours, reaching millions of conservative or apolitical people, cementing his status as one of them, a sigma, a guy with influence and the pinnacle of a model of masculinity that prioritizes fame as a virtue. itself. For many young voters who didn’t pay attention in 2016 and 2020, a generation that overwhelmingly gets its news from social media rather than mainstream media, this was also their first real exposure to Trump.
Trump used these podcast appearances to humanize and mythologize himself. He used them to whitewash his extremist positions through the omnipresent Can’t you take a joke? filter that propels the Tony Hinchliffes of the world to stardom. The most important thing of all is that he used them to get the vote.
Much of this happened in corners of the Internet that many people have never heard of, much less visited. When you think of Trump in his element, you might first think of the rallies, the often confusing speeches that last for hours in front of camouflaged disciples. They served their purpose for both parties: Trump got the in-person adoration he craves, and “resistance” Democrats laughed at the half-empty arenas and strange septuagenarian dance moves.
But in 2024, yelling at a few thousand true believers has nothing to do with being anointed by Elon Musk at X and a group of right-wing influencers with collective followers in the hundreds of millions.
