The Witness Chronicles, 5/1/25

This revolution will be televised

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Trump’s Unintentional Media Revolution

His pressure on traditional journalism had an unexpected result

Despite all his MAGA patriotism baloney, Trump does not really know the American people. He has never lived among us, paid bills, done actual work, bought groceries or gas, or had to improvise when things unexpectedly went wrong.

That reality is evident in what is happening as he tries to destroy press freedoms and control the message from end to end. His oligarchs have fired journalists from outlets like the Washington Post and other journalists have been forced to quit to maintain their ethical standards and independence.

You would think this was an unmitigated disaster for freedom of speech in this country, the bedrock principle of our Constitution. Trump is methodically trying to crush voices in opposition to an emerging autocracy as they fight back with hard facts and investigations. But that is not what is happening.

Americans are very good at making lemonade out of lemons and the media is a great example, one Trump doesn’t really understand. As those journalists were forced out of traditional media, they immediately landed in a new, potentially more powerful place and found a highly targeted and motivated audience for their work.

Take Jen Rubin, the once conservative opinion writer who became a strident anti-Trump voice at the Washington Post. She quit early in this administration after Jeff Bezos, owner of the paper, killed an opinion she wrote and demanded that their opinion page be washed of ‘negativity’.

But she did not go quiet into the night. She immediately joined with others to form a newsletter called The Contrarians dedicated to exposing the Trump presidency for what it is. And they almost immediately gained hundreds of thousands of subscribers and considerable income, income they have plowed into funding lawsuits against Trump’s attacks of the Constitution and the rule of law.

And she is not alone. This newsletter is published on a platform, Substack, that has become a community of many interests, including politics, the arts, creativity, cooking, travel, you name it. It is important to this emerging reality to note that Substack is a platform, not the owner of these businesses.

To clarify, the platform makes it easy to sell subscriptions and takes a small part of the revenue for providing this service. Critically, when you subscribe and enter your email, the list it creates belongs to the writer/publisher, not Substack.

It provides an easy way to publish and reach an audience, but we as writers and creators have to build that audience ourselves. Substack provides tools for that, but ultimately we only succeed on our merits, as has always been the American way.

That American way is exactly what Trump is trying to destroy. True bootstrapped success stories by independent people who work hard without depending on corruption to succeed.

It’s possible that Trump is not completely aware of this media revolution though I am certain his people are acutely aware of it, as it appears every Washington DC pundit has their own newsletter. Those newsletters get the word out at lightning speed and they go directly into the inboxes of readers who have subscribed.

Substack started small, no major venture capital funding, just a bootstrapped idea that now reaches millions. This little newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, only counts my subscribers in the low thousands, but you as my readers provide me with an outlet to express my views on the devastation going on in DC and, as a writer, it means everything to me.

I’m a news junkie, always have been. I look for patterns emerging and I look in a lot of places. The traditional media, PBS, insider things like the Politico Playbook (highly recommended), and individual voices like Rubin, Joyce Vance, and Heather Cox Richardson. The later group are all on Substack and collectively they reach millions every day.

That’s a powerful thing. And it did not exist before Trump, not on this scale. The world of blogs had been around for years but they had a kind of wonkiness that did not lend itself to scaling and actually making money. Those that did have largely moved to Substack to take advantage of the ecosystem, community, and tools that are easily understood and used without a need for techy knowledge.

I think Trump’s war on media, exemplified by fake outlets like Fox that serve as propaganda mouthpieces for his racist, white male perspective, drove a lot of this revolution. But so did an insatiable need for community among the artists, journalists, writers, and anyone wanting to express themselves freely in the face of a crackdown on free speech.

When I was growing up and print newspapers were the principal source of daily news, along with limited TV coverage, they had a letters to the editor page. Citizens could write in and express their opinions. But they only saw the light of day if the editors found them relevant and had room on the page for them.

As print newspapers became relics, we lost even that minimal ability to create a dialog with each other, and I felt that loss personally. But now we have that ability. You can start a newsletter on anything or participate by commenting and sharing on the ones you read, and if you find the content valuable or motivating, upgrading to a paid subscription.

That is entirely a merit-based system. If a creator provides value, readers can choose to support them. Simple, but that is the essence of capitalism, something Trump and his lackeys do not understand. Despite his claims of being a business person, Trump inherited a vast sum, went bankrupt six times, and now makes money through corruption at the highest levels.

In other words, writers and creators here earn their money. Donald Trump has never earned a dime in his life and now he openly flaunts his scamming of the American people, pretending it is the peak of success. But there are a lot of us out here calling him out on his scams.

After all, it’s the American way to have revolutions.

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Martin