I don't know whether or not you saw it, but last week MAGA stan Dan Bongino announced that he was launching his own news aggregation competitor to Matt Drudge, because Drudge had become unreliable in his support of Donald Trump.
I love this so much because it's a perfect encapsulation of how dumb Trumpism has become.
Spoiler: "The Bongino Report" is not going to kill the Drudge Report.
Let's stipulate that Drudge may not be your cup of tea. That's okay. You don't have to like the Drudge Report to understand its value proposition.
With apologies to Reddit, Drudge is the front page of the internet.
The power of Drudge is that it gives users a pretty good spread of important headlines, across a lot of different vectors.- Political news
- Economic highlights
- Foreign policy developments
But then it also throws in tabloidy stuff: News of the weird, America's crime blotter, celebrity craziness.
And then Drudge includes his own pet obsessions, like weather and storm watching.
Let's grant that Drudge has a conservative slant. The big thing about Drudge is that people from across the spectrum can get value from it, despite his biases.
And also that it adds value whether you're a news-junky political obsessive, a low-information retiree just popping over from Facebook, or an editor at the New York Times.
Anyone complaining that Drudge isn't supporting Trump enough never understood what Drudge was doing in the first place: He channels the national id, or at least a big part of it, and zeroes in on the zeitgeist as it's forming.
There's something kind of sad about Trumpists like Bongino realizing that their time is almost up and casting about for new enemies to explain why it's all gone so wrong.
The problem isn't Drudge. It's Trump. It was always Trump.
thebulwark
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