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The Atlantic Donald Trump S Sway Within His Own Party Facebook

Leo Migdal
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the atlantic donald trump s sway within his own party facebook

Infighting. Bad polls. Party divisions. Midterm fears. It’s all back. President Donald Trump’s administration has been embroiled in scandal and sloppiness.

His own party has defied his political pressure. His senior staff has been beset by infighting. He has sparred with reporters and offered over-the-top praise to an authoritarian with a dire human-rights record. A signature hard-line immigration policy has polled poorly. And Republicans have begun to brace themselves for a disastrous midterm election. Ten months into the president’s second term, Trump 2.0 is for the first time starting to resemble the chaotic original.

And that new sense of political weakness in the president has not just emboldened Democrats who have been despondent for much of the past year. It’s also begun to give Republicans a permission structure for pushing back against Trump and jockeying for power with an eye to the elections ahead. This was not the plan. Trump and his inner circle used their four years out of office to create a policy blueprint—drawn substantially from Project 2025—and form a disciplined team of true believers who used their experience with the... The beginning of Trump’s second term was marked by an unprecedented display of executive authority, as the president dominated a subservient Congress and defied the courts, brought to heel some of the nation’s most... Trump has been a steamroller.

But that has begun to change. Voters punished Trump’s party in this month’s elections, seeming to condemn his presidential overreach and the abandonment of his central campaign promise to rehabilitate the nation’s economy. A rare Republican rebellion on Capitol Hill rattled the West Wing and embarrassed the president. And although the White House likes to project a political image of never surrendering, a pair of retreats in the past few days has punctured Trump’s aura of invincibility. In the media world, as in so many other realms, there is a sharp discontinuity in the timeline: before the 2016 election, and after. Things we thought we understood—narratives, data, software, news events—have had to be reinterpreted in light of Donald Trump’s surprising win as well as the continuing questions about the role that misinformation and disinformation played...

Tech journalists covering Facebook had a duty to cover what was happening before, during, and after the election. Reporters tried to see past their often liberal political orientations and the unprecedented actions of Donald Trump to see how 2016 was playing out on the internet. Every component of the chaotic digital campaign has been reported on, here at The Atlantic, and elsewhere: Facebook’s enormous distribution power for political information, rapacious partisanship reinforced by distinct media information spheres, the increasing... But no one delivered the synthesis that could have tied together all these disparate threads. It’s not that this hypothetical perfect story would have changed the outcome of the election. The real problem—for all political stripes—is understanding the set of conditions that led to Trump’s victory.

The informational underpinnings of democracy have eroded, and no one has explained precisely how. We’ve known since at least 2012 that Facebook was a powerful, non-neutral force in electoral politics. In that year, a combined University of California, San Diego and Facebook research team led by James Fowler published a study in Nature, which argued that Facebook’s “I Voted” button had driven a small... Updated at 10:33 a.m. ET on May 10, 2021. The internet has been a bit quiet lately.

Or, more specifically, it’s been quiet since the days after the Capitol riot, when Twitter, Facebook, and a string of other social-media companies banned Donald Trump from their platforms for his role in egging... And now the Facebook oversight board has ensured that social media will remain peaceful for at least a little while longer: The panel, asked by Facebook to review the platform’s decision to indefinitely suspend... Trump’s banishment created a silence where there had once been a foghorn. Even before the president left office, the sudden peace was notable: As the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump a second time, during the last days of his presidency, The Washington Post compared... And the silence has continued. “Trump,” David A.

Graham wrote in The Atlantic, “has remained unexpectedly peripheral since leaving office.” On Twitter, the New York Times opinion writer Farhad Manjoo commented on Trump’s absence from his formerly favorite website: “He used to... When Trump was first booted from social media, experts and journalists alike characterized his exit from the online conversation as “deplatforming.” Until recently, the term was a descriptor for the practice, primarily employed by... In recent years, though, it’s entered into the popular discourse as a catchall for the practice of refusing to grant space to a person for sharing a view considered unacceptable or dangerous, most prominently... Using the word in that sense, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have been deplatforming problem users—such as Islamic State supporters and far-right agitators—for years. The question is, to what effect? Does deplatforming reduce hateful activity, or does it merely push it to somewhere else on the internet?

More ominously, can deplatforming backfire, radicalizing people who lose their account and the online communities around them? A growing body of scholarly literature has developed to answer these questions, and a review of this literature offers one way to understand Trump’s silence over the past four months. The issue is particularly timely, given the Facebook oversight board’s ruling and the six-month clock now ticking down toward Trump’s possible reinstatement on the platform. Whatever the ins and outs of Facebook’s policies may be, handing Trump back his megaphone—even if he remains banned from other platforms—is handing him a weapon. What I learned while I worked on a book about the state of the GOP In March of 2020, I sat in a federal courtroom in Utah and watched a man stand before the judge and murmur through sobs, “This wasn’t me.

This wasn’t me.” The defendant, a 55-year-old health-insurance salesman named Scott Brian Haven, wasn’t protesting his innocence. He openly acknowledged that over the two-year period before his arrest in the summer of 2019, he had placed 3,950 calls to the Washington offices of various Democratic members of Congress, spewing profanities and... But as the prosecutor listed a sampling of Haven’s vile threats in the courtroom, the defendant—a devout Mormon who served meals to homeless people in downtown Salt Lake City—seemed unable to recognize those sentiments... One of the objects of his harassment had been Jerrold Nadler, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. “I’m at his office,” Haven had said in one call to Nadler’s office.

“I’m right behind him now. I’m going to shoot him in the head. I’m going to do it now. Are you ready?” After his arrest, while languishing in a federal jail cell, Haven learned that the Democratic representative was a father and grandfather, just like he was. When he shared this revelation with the judge during his sentencing, he marveled, “There’s so much more to know about people than we hear about in the news.”

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