President Donald Trump benefited from the same long term technological and cultural trends that have allowed companies like Uber to disrupt longstanding paradigms that have traditionally governed how business and politics are understood.
Republican lobbyist Bruce Mehlman identified many of the ways in which Trump’s meteoric rise from political novice to president mirrors technological disruption in the 21st century. In a new PowerPoint Presentation developed for his clients, Mehlman points out that like Uber, Trump benefitted from the existence of an entrenched system that had experienced minimal innovation in recent years.
During the campaign, Trump was able to successfully connect directly with voters, bypassing the traditional media gatekeepers that have previously exercised some degree of control over the dissemination of relevant political information.
Mehlman illustrates the extent to which technological disruption aided in Trump’s rise using a graph that details the length of time required for various technologies to reach 100 million users. The graph compares the telephone, which took more than 70 years to reach 100 million users, to the mobile application game “Candy Crush” which reached an equivalent number of users in just over a year.
The impact of this technological shift on the Trump campaign’s success cannot be overstated. Trump was able to deliver his message directly to voters, primarily through Twitter, which he used actively throughout the campaign. While some observers criticized Trump’s sporadic Twitter messaging, his strategy proved successful as he was able to aggressively challenge criticisms emerging in the dominant establishment media narrative. Mehlman addresses this issue in his presentation, pointing out that the sheer volume of negative media attention fatigued Trump supporters, thereby decreasing the potency of negative Trump coverage.
The technological disruption that enabled Trump’s direct messaging emerged out of and spurred distrust of traditional media. This phenomenon is evidenced by numerous polls indicating a sizable proportion of Americans rely on social media outlets as their primary news source. Mehlman addresses the historically low trust in traditional media outlets, which he casts as a “loss of honest brokers,” using a graph that illustrates the degree to which trust in establishment media outlets has decreased over the past decade.
The graph reflects a Gallup poll that revealed a substantial partisan divide in media trust. The percentage of Republicans who have a great deal or fair amount of trust in media declined from 40 percent in 1997 to only 14 percent in 2016. Democrats’ distrust of media declined at a significantly less dramatic rate, falling from 64 percent in 1997 to 51 percent in 2016.
Trump seized on this rampant distrust of traditional media outlets among Republicans to insulate himself from any and all criticism levied by adversarial cable and print media outlets. In much the same way Uber disrupted the transportation space by going right to the consumer, Trump overturned the traditional political dynamics that governed political discourse in the U.S. for decades.
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