[Editor’s Note: This article has been adapted from Sarah Longwell’s new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time, which lays out the definitive playbook for how Democrats can beat the MAGA movement and reverse the country’s slide into authoritarianism. You can order your copy here.]

THERE ARE A MILLION FACTORS contributing to Americans’ decisions to sort themselves, en masse, into two highly polarized factions perpetually at war with one another: geographic sorting, education stratification, big institutional failures that shattered the public’s trust, bewildering technological changes, the loss of those “little platoons” that Edmund Burke wrote about that were once so influential in binding us together.

But I think one of the biggest—and still most underdiscussed—storylines of how we got here is the wholesale transformation of the media ecosystem. By which I mean the way that Americans get their information about the world, and then use that information to make decisions about what kind of society they want to live in, who gets to be part of it, and who gets to wield power. To understand the Trump era, you have to understand this first.

The decade spanning 2015 to 2025 will likely be recorded by historians as the era of the “Great Media Unraveling,” a period when the unified broadcasting models of the twentieth century shattered into distinct, self-sustaining, and mostly not-overlapping digital ecosystems. I think the next ten to twenty years will be about how that fractured media environment reconstitutes itself with a host of new media players.

When I was coming up in the conservative movement, one of the hallmarks of Republican grievance was the belief that the “mainstream media” was controlled by liberals and had a systemic bias against conservatives. The political and cultural right responded to this imbalance by building an industry designed to reduce public trust in mainstream media—hammering the “liberal bias” narrative relentlessly. But they didn’t stop there. They also built an entire competing media ecosystem. And they had a roughly fifteen-year head start on doing it.

By the time Trump arrived in 2015, the infrastructure was already firmly in place. Fox News was just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it were the Daily Wire, the Blaze, One America News Network, Newsmax, and so many others. And below that, a vast network of podcasters, YouTubers, and talk-radio hosts who had been cultivating audiences for years.

When I look at the podcast charts today, the asymmetry is staggering. Among the top political podcasts, right-wing podcasts generally outperform liberal ones (Tim Miller excepted, of course). Ben Shapiro. Dan Bongino. Tucker Carlson. Candace Owens. Steve Bannon. Megyn Kelly. Matt Walsh. Benny Johnson. Alex Jones. And it’s not just that there are more of them. It’s that their audiences consume their content differently.

Plenty of right-wing listeners use these shows as their primary news source. They’re not listening to Ben Shapiro for his “take” on news they already consumed elsewhere. They’re listening to Ben Shapiro to find out what’s happening in the world in the first place. It’s a replacement for mainstream media, not a supplement to it.

And now the landscape is shifting again, in ways that should alarm everyone who cares about a free press and its role in American democracy. The tech oligarchs who built our dominant social media platforms—the distribution mechanisms where people go to discuss politics—are consolidating power in ways that are explicitly hostile to old-media ethics like rigorous fact-checking, fidelity to the truth, and avoidance of partisanship.

Americans can’t rely on mainstream media to hold the lines of democracy anymore. Not because mainstream media is bad, but because it’s actively being captured, or hollowed out, or reconfigured by people who do not share its traditional mission.

As I write, Trump’s allies are busy buying or selling out traditional media companies like CBS, CNN, and the Washington Post, as well as the platforms that distribute content, like TikTok, X, and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram). This, more than any other, is the development that keeps me awake at night.

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IT’S A PHRASE I HEAR CONSTANTLY, across different focus groups, different years, different demographics: “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

Not “I don’t trust CNN” or “I don’t trust Fox News.” Those statements are about specific sources. This is deeper. It’s “I don’t know what to believe” or “I don’t know who to trust.” Quotes from MAGA base voters not trusting the lamestream media have been a dime a dozen since I started doing focus groups. But here’s a sampling from people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Thomas, who flipped from Biden to Trump: “It’s really hard to find truth in anything, because you can read two different news articles from two different places, and it could be about the same issue, but literally, they’re talking about two different things.”

Lisa, a Biden voter who sat out 2024, said she didn’t trust “any” news source. “What I find myself doing is just going to a lot of sources, realizing that one’s far left, one’s far right, the truth is somewhere in the middle.”

Then she added: “I really struggle with where to get information, and that’s why sometimes I just forgo reading anything at all.”

In a July 2024 group, as Joe Biden was under pressure to drop out of the race, Rochelle, who’d voted for Biden as well as for Hillary Clinton, said she was having some “trust issues” with the media. “I’ve always trusted CNN. I’ve always trusted the non-Fox channels,” she said. “But maybe I’ve been a fool to trust them.”

This is the broken-information-infrastructure problem and the collapse of trust underneath many of our other political problems. It’s difficult to persuade when there are few trusted brokers. And when people are exhausted and don’t know how to find good information, it opens the door to the conflict entrepreneurs who now overwhelm the information stream. The technology that was supposed to democratize information has balkanized it.

In an early 2026 group of young Trump voters, our moderator asked participants which specific social media accounts they looked to for news content. This was a necessary follow-up because participants will very often just say “social media.”

“I don’t really follow people,” said Dillon. “I mean, the algorithm knows what I like, so whatever’s on my ‘For You’ page.” Lots of people (especially younger ones) are “news receivers” like Dillon. News receivers—as distinct from “news seekers”—have surrendered their consumption habits to the algorithm. Which means that they’ve surrendered it to the goals of the oligarchs who own the platforms and tell the algorithms what to do. Once you’re in that silo, it’s self-reinforcing. Your reality hardens. And when you encounter someone from a different silo, you can’t agree on what’s happening because you’ve been shown different things.

This creates a perverse incentive structure. The more extreme a content creator is online, the more condemnation they generate. The more condemnation they generate, the more attention they get. The more attention they get, the bigger their platform becomes. Many people have given up on the concept of knowable truth. They’re not weighing evidence. They’re choosing which reality to inhabit based on what feels right, which usually means the reality that validates their existing worldview and that is endorsed by their tribe.

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HERE’S THE THING, THOUGH. Just because we can’t agree on a shared reality doesn’t mean reality stops happening. Reality is persistent. Things still happen in the world, and voters still know about them. Which brings us to another truism: Opinion is like cement. It’s soft at first, but it hardens over time. The single best example I’ve ever seen of this maxim is the Republican reaction to the events of January 6, 2021.

At first, Trump voters—even ones who’d supported him twice—were genuinely shaken. I did a couple of focus groups six days after January 6, 2021, in the aftermath of Trump supporters violently storming the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which Trump told them had been rigged.

One group was with women who voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and another was with women who’d voted for Trump in 2016 and then switched to Biden. In the two-time-Trump-voter group, Jamie from Pennsylvania said she was “appalled” and “shocked” by what she saw. “I realized, but yet I didn’t, if that makes any sense, that there are people out there that could do that.”

Audra from Arizona said, “I think the reason he should be impeached is really just so that he can’t run ever again.” Trump was impeached the next day.

The Trump-to-Biden group was similarly harsh. Like Tina from Pennsylvania: “The windows were being cracked, people were being killed, I don’t understand how this happened like this. And if he’s behind it, they really should impeach him, get rid of it and that’s it.” For a brief moment, reality was undeniable, and people’s opinions of Trump became soft and changeable.

Then the Republican Triangle of Doom kicked in—the toxic and symbiotic relationship between Republican voters, elected officials, and the right-wing infotainment media. The voters who were horrified got bombarded with whitewashing spin almost instantly.

Matt Gaetz spoke on the House floor that night and said it was actually Antifa dressed as Trump supporters who had stormed the Capitol. On social media, some conservative influencers said the riot had been incited by government agents trying to make Trump look bad. And as the days ticked by, Republican voters were deluged with so many competing explanations of the reality they had witnessed that they stopped being able to parse it.

Now, some Trump voters understood what happened and never came back. But the majority of them had spent four years defending Trump—online, at the dinner table, at work. They’d lost friendships over him. So when right-wing media offered them an alternative explanation, they took it. And then their opinions