The media is structurally pro-Trump

What a petty hit piece reveals about the media's fucked-up incentives.

Lately, when I try to explain to myself or to other people how US politics has reached its current state of decadent degradation, I find myself returning to a handful of aphorisms.¹

Here’s one of my favorites: The media is structurally pro-Trump.

I know there are people who would push back on the structural emphasis. And in the era of Jeff Bezos, the Ellisons, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, I’d never entirely dismiss the argument that oligarchic ownership prefers a rightwing Republican — however insane — to even the most milquetoast Democrat.

But I’ve worked in media for a long time, and I can say with some confidence that most reporters aren’t ideologically liberal. They’re culturally cosmopolitan, which isn’t the same thing. They’re also not MAGA. Mostly, they’re just people with kids trying not to get laid off.

And not getting laid off means operating according to a set of incentives that increasingly determine the direction of political media — especially outlets that depend on advertisers rather than subscribers.

It’s the (stupid) incentives, stupid

What are these incentives? There are many, but for the purposes of my argument here, I’d simplify them as the following:

• Most people — and especially younger people — now get their “news” from social media.

• Therefore: create as much content as possible, as fast as possible, optimized for “engagement” and “traction.”

• That means inclining toward the unholy tetralogy of algorithmic virality: negativity, moral outrage, tribal resentment, and misinformation.

• Ideally, frame stories so they can be easily cut into vertical video for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Under these mandates, the ideal politician to cover is someone who gives you an endless supply of quick-hit content that checks all four boxes.

Someone exactly like Donald Trump.

An anti-Mamdani hit piece as a case in point

I don’t need to belabor the Trump examples.

It’s 2026. We’ve lived through the prospect, the reality, the second prospect, and the second reality of President Donald Trump for more than a decade. You get it.

What I want to draw your attention to instead is what happens to politicians who don’t make it easy for the media to follow these incentives and feed the content machine.

Specifically: a recent piece from the New York Times about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The piece is titled “Mamdani Chooses His Words Carefully After Alleged Terror Attack,” and it’s an unusually transparent example of what happens when a politician declines to help the elite press satisfy the Moloch of algorithmic social media.

The gist of the piece is that there’s something a little off about the way Mamdani handled a recent attempted terrorist attack on a group of protestors near Gracie Mansion, where the mayor lives with his wife:

In the days after a homemade bomb laced with metal was hurled into a highly charged protest near his official residence in Manhattan, Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not turn to his typical means of communication.

There were no short-form videos posted to social media about the attack in front of Gracie Mansion, where Mr. Mamdani lives with his wife, Rama Duwaji. There were no impassioned speeches.

Mr. Mamdani chose an alternative path: two deliberative written statements, and one 14-minute joint appearance with his police commissioner, Jessica S. Tisch, a political moderate, during which they took only four questions.

Before I get into what's really going on here, two stipulations:

• The New York Times has often covered politics under the assumption that if a politician doesn’t want to make news about something, that is in itself newsworthy.

• The basic insight — that Mamdani chose to downplay the incident — is correct. He did.

But here’s the next paragraph in the piece, and I think this is where the Times’s biases — against Mamdani, personally, as well as against Mamdani’s decision to forego this golden opportunity for content — become glaring (emphasis mine):

Mr. Mamdani may have risen to power on the strength of his strong communication skills, but in moments that cut close to some of the city’s deepest fault lines and his own religious identity as the city’s first Muslim mayor, he has come to favor a more cautious and stiffer approach.

I am not a Mamdani stan; but the idea that his “communication skills” only “may have” contributed to his success manages to be condescending on two somewhat contradictory levels. For one, there is no “may” when it comes to Mamdani’s “communication skills,” unless we’re also going to say the sun “may” come up tomorrow. I mean, come on.

And yet even this compliment, backhanded as it is, sells Mamdani — and, more importantly, Mamdani’s supporters — short.

Is he a good communicator? Yes. But he also ran on policies. And among the New York City electorate, those policies are rather popular.² The implication that his supporters are little more than rubes, seduced by a good performer, reads like an opinion masquerading as reporting.

But that’s still just the warm-up.

The real tell here, the place where it becomes clear that the Times is mad at Mamdani for not creating content about the attack — content that the Times can use to make more content, and so on — is when the report says Mamdani has chosen “a more cautious and stiffer approach.”

“More cautious” is fine. But what the hell does “stiffer” mean? That his responses were boring? Formal? Restrained?

Another way to put it: responsible.

Instead of heightening the fear and animus, he communicated to the public what it needed to know without giving the would-be terrorists what they most wanted: outsized publicity.

Democracy vs. content

By any rational assessment, this is what we want our elected officials to do. We do not want them to act like influencers by seizing on the most incendiary items in the news and exploiting them for maximum attention. We do not want them to make engaging content; we want them to govern.

But “we” are not the elite political press. We want a functioning democracy. They want content.

And so, because Mamdani — despite “the strength of his strong communication skills” — refused to give it to them, he must be punished. If he won’t give the press the content that their incentives compel them to demand, then they will manufacture content out of his refusal to do so.

Ultimately, the problem isn’t simply that this incentive-structure rewards Trump. It’s that the media is methodically remaking the entire political landscape in his image. The media may not love Donald Trump. But its own fucked-up incentives are creating a world designed for someone like him.

1. Alongside my recent obsession with reading books about the Roman Republic, this habit is surely a sign of creeping middle-age; but I’ll spare you any further thoughts in that regard. That’s my therapist’s burden, not yours.

2. Are they popular at the highest echelons of the New York Times? God, no. Their de facto anti-endorsement of Mamdani — which was a de facto endorsement of Andrew Cuomo — made that abundantly clear.