Eight Men Control What 40% of Americans Believe

I saw a headline yesterday declaring that Trump’s approval rating had hit rock bottom. The number was 39%.

I’ve seen this headline before. I saw it six months ago. I saw it a year ago. I will see it again in three months, when his approval dips two points and the same outlets run the same story and we share it with the same relief. Finally. People are waking up.

They’re not.

The headline is factually wrong. Trump’s actual floor is 34%, and he hit it exactly once, in January 2021, after his supporters stormed the Capitol and he was impeached for the second time.¹ That was rock bottom. He bounced back within months. His first term low outside that moment was 35%.² His second term low is 36%, recorded this past November after a record-setting government shutdown.³ Right now he sits between 36% and 43% depending on which pollster you ask.⁴ That’s not collapse. That’s normal Trump. That’s where he’s been, more or less, for nine years.

So when we ask “how is it possible that 39% still approve,” we’re asking the wrong question. Clickbait headlines have framed a stable baseline as a shocking aberration, shaping our understanding of a number that barely moves. The real question is why it doesn’t move. Why does a third of the country look at everything that’s happened and see a president worth supporting?

Here’s how.

For the 39%, the border is an existential crisis. An invasion. They have heard this framing for years from every source they trust. Millions of people crossing illegally, bringing drugs, bringing crime, overwhelming hospitals and schools, changing the country they grew up in. This is the backdrop against which they evaluate everything else.

Immigration enforcement, in this view, makes the country safer. Plenty of Americans share that belief. When pollsters ask whether Trump’s immigration policies will increase or decrease crime, Americans say “decrease” by a two-to-one margin.⁵ Eighty percent of Americans support deporting immigrants who have committed crimes, including 72% of Democrats.⁶ Border security is Trump’s best issue by a wide margin. In December, AP-NORC found 50% approval on border security while his overall approval sat at 36%.⁷ The Marquette poll found 56% approval on border security against 34% on inflation.⁸ This is mainstream opinion. On this specific issue, Trump’s approach commands majority support.

So when federal agents conduct raids and someone gets hurt, horror is not the first instinct. The first instinct is to ask what happened, because they trust the agents. These are the people standing between their country and the invasion, under constant attack, vilified by politicians who they believe want open borders. When officials say a suspect threatened officers or resisted arrest, they believe it, because they have heard for years that these operations are dangerous and that agents face constant threats. The videos that seem so damning to us? They either haven’t seen them, or they’ve seen them with different commentary, or they’ve been told they lack context.

Economic disappointment has not shaken their support. Prices are still high. Trump promised to fix that and he hasn’t. When pollsters ask about inflation, his numbers crater. His approval on cost of living runs 20 to 30 points underwater.⁹ Fourteen percent of his own voters say they regret their vote, and when asked why, they cite the economy and broken promises.¹⁰

But they’re not leaving. The interpretive frame holds. High prices don’t lead them to blame Trump. They blame the immigrants they’ve been told are draining resources, overwhelming services, taking jobs. The frame that made immigration salient doesn’t disappear when economic data turns bad. It absorbs the bad data and converts it. Everything runs through the invasion filter first.

This is what the 39% looks like from inside. A coherent worldview where border security is paramount, enforcement is heroic, media criticism is enemy propaganda, and every problem traces back to the invasion that only Trump will fight. The facts arrange themselves into a story that makes sense.

The question then becomes how a third of the country ended up with that frame.

Fox News gets the attention, but Fox reaches about 2.7 million viewers in primetime.¹¹ Sinclair Broadcast Group is the bigger piece of this puzzle, owning or operating 178 local television stations that reach 40% of American households.¹² These stations broadcast under ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox affiliate logos. They look like your local news. They employ anchors who cover high school football and county fairs, who develop trust with their communities over years. Sinclair requires those stations to air “must-run” segments produced at corporate headquarters.¹³ When the anchor you trust tells you the border is in crisis, that carries weight Tucker Carlson never could.

Social media compounds the effect. Research from Queensland University of Technology found that X’s algorithm changed in mid-July 2024, shortly after Elon Musk endorsed Trump, to systematically boost Republican-leaning accounts.¹⁴ Engagement rose for right-wing content, stayed level for left-wing content, and fell for fact-checking outlets.¹⁴ Musk has over 225 million followers on the platform he owns.¹⁵ The pipeline runs directly from his editorial choices through algorithmic amplification into the daily information diet of tens of millions of Americans. Users who think they’re seeing a neutral feed are seeing a curated one.

Facebook operates at larger scale. Mark Zuckerberg eliminated third-party fact-checking in January 2025 and appointed Trump allies to senior positions at Meta.¹⁶ Nearly 280 million Americans use the platform monthly.¹⁷ The algorithmic amplification of right-wing content reaches an audience Musk cannot match.

CNN provides less of an alternative than most people assume. John Malone, the cable billionaire, controls Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns the network.¹⁸ In 2024, he donated over $2 million to Republican candidates and committees, zero to Democrats.¹⁹ Most Americans have never heard his name. They think CNN is the alternative to Fox. It’s the same ownership class with different packaging.

CBS is following the same trajectory. David Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle and ranks among the ten wealthiest people alive, now controls Paramount and with it the CBS broadcast network.²⁰ To secure regulatory approval for his takeover, Paramount paid $16 million to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the network.²¹ Ellison installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News.²² CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert’s Late Show three days after Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe.”²³ 60 Minutes killed a story on Trump’s deportation operations.²⁴ Ellison is now the leading bidder for Warner Bros. Discovery, which would give him CNN in addition to CBS.²⁵ The consolidation is not historical backdrop. It is happening now.

What filled the space where local journalism used to be? Since 2005, more than 3,300 newspapers have closed.²⁶ Fifty-five million Americans now live in news deserts with no local coverage at all.²⁶ Into that vacuum rushed 1,200 websites designed to look like local news while producing partisan content at industrial scale.²⁷ That number now matches the total count of real daily newspapers still operating in America.

Ownership is one mechanism. Coercion is another. Trump uses lawsuits and regulatory threats to punish coverage he dislikes. ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel after FCC chairman Brendan Carr threatened license revocations.²⁸ The New York Times faces a $15 billion defamation suit.²⁹ These are not cases Trump expects to win. They are costs imposed for dissent. Outlets with independent ownership face a choice between expensive litigation and quiet compliance. Most choose compliance.

Fox sets the narrative frame. Sinclair pushes it into living rooms disguised as local news. Facebook and X amplify it through algorithms while pink slime sites fill the void left by dying newspapers. Talk radio reinforces the message during commutes. Lawsuits and FCC threats discipline outlets that step out of line. At each step, the infrastructure decides which facts to emphasize, which voices to platform, which interpretive lens to apply. For twenty years, that lens has emphasized one message above all others: the border is an invasion, and the people fighting it are heroes under siege.

This is how the 39% became the 39%. The explanation is not exclusively stupidity or malice but rather propaganda and cultural architecture. An information infrastructure built and owned by oligarchs, one that routes facts through a specific interpretive frame before they reach the most susceptible third of the country. Murdoch created Fox. The Smith family built Sinclair into a local news empire. Musk purchased Twitter and rewired its algorithm. Zuckerberg eliminated fact-checking on the largest social platform in the country. Malone took control of CNN. Ellison is consolidating CBS while bidding for CNN itself. Bezos killed the Washington Post’s presidential endorsement; Soon-Shiong did the same at the LA Times.³⁰ Trump uses lawsuits and FCC threats to discipline outlets these men don’t own. These are not accidents or market outcomes. They are investments in narrative control by people who understood, long before most of us did, that whoever controls the story controls the country.

But here’s something we need to acknowledge.

We have an echo chamber too. Ours tells us Trump is at rock bottom when he’s not, that people are waking up when the numbers show they aren’t. The headlines feel good, and we share them because sharing feels like action, like progress, like the fever is finally breaking. Every time we repost “lowest approval ever” without checking whether it’s true, we’re doing a version of what they do when they share “migrant crime wave” stories without checking the statistics. We’re believing what feels good.

The difference is that we read articles like this and we look for external indicators to factually triangulate our location in proximity to truth and honest moral assessments.

Crime data doesn’t support an invasion narrative, and economic data doesn’t support Trump’s claims of success. Exposed to the same information, we would reach similar conclusions. But we’re not exposed to the same information, and neither are they, and that asymmetry is intentional. We keep waiting for their echo chamber to shatter while ours keeps producing alternating barrages of paralyzing fear and false comfort.

I’m not drawing an equivalence. The oligarch media infrastructure is larger, better funded, more coordinated, and more willing to fabricate. The policy outcomes it enables are worse. Kids in cages are not the same as misleading poll coverage. But if we want to understand why 40% of the country supports Trump and why that number doesn’t move, we have to start by noticing that our own information environment tells us things that aren’t accurate either. As long as we believe he’s at rock bottom, we’ll keep being surprised when he isn’t, waiting for a collapse that isn’t coming, sharing headlines instead of organizing.

His floor is 34%. He’s above it. He’s been above it for almost his entire political career. The architecture that holds his support in place has not crumbled. It broadcasts every day, amplifies through algorithms, reaches 40% of American households through stations that look like local news. And on the one issue where that architecture has focused its energy for two decades, Trump commands majority support from the American public.

We ask how this is possible and expect the number to collapse under the weight of events that feel like obvious disqualifiers. It won’t.

Because 39% of us are not watching the same show. They’re uninterested in shattering their delusion, that’s the difference between us and them. We want to know if we have racist or sexist or just generally incorrect beliefs and for most of those people they’d rather be told they’re correct.

And until we stop believing the headlines that tell us they’re about to wake up, we won’t see clearly enough to do anything about it.

Don’t pacify yourself. We need you.

Free resources at BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER: the Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare, the Educate Activate Recruit Repeat organizing manual, the full-length Conservatism: America’s Empathy Disorder, and model legislation you can send directly to your state representatives.

Available for purchase at TheExistentialistRepublic.com: the Intro to Soft Secession booklet, activist journals, and an “Abolish Billionaires” bumper sticker that looks great on any Tesla.

Throw in what you can. It funds the operation.

Right now I’m on the ground in Minneapolis, meeting with local politicians and activists, following ICE around and recording their brutalization and terrorism, paying out of pocket to print thousands of posters actively going up across the city and suburbs telling people to call Keith Ellison and demand an arrest warrant for murderer Jonathan Ross. Feel free to join in. I’ll put the poster designs in the chat (credit to Joyce Strong)

(651) 296-3353 (Twin Cities Calling Area)
(800) 657-3787 (Outside the Twin Cities)

References

1. Gallup. (2021, January 18). Last Trump job approval 34%; average is record-low 41%. Gallup News. https://news.gallup.com/poll/328637/last-trump-job-approval-average-record-low.aspx

2. Estepa, J. (2018, January 17). See how Trump’s approval rating stacks up against other presidents after one year. Time. https://time.com/5103776/donald-trump-approval-rating-graph/

3. Gallup. (2025, November 26). Trump’s approval rating drops to 36%, new second-term low. Gallup News. https://news.gallup.com/poll/699221/trump-approval-rating-drops-new-second-term-low.aspx

4. The Hill. (2025, December 30). Donald Trump’s approval ratings: A year-end analysis. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5657686-trump-approval-ratings-economy/

5. Pew Research Center. (2025, June 17). Americans have mixed to negative views of Trump administration immigration actions. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/17/americans-have-mixed-to-negative-views-of-trump-administration-immigration-actions/

6. Harvard Center for American Political Studies/Harris Poll. (2025, March). National tracking poll. https://harvardharrispoll.com/

7. AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. (2025, December). Trump’s approval rating slips on the economy and immigration. https://apnorc.org/projects/trumps-approval-rating-slips-on-the-economy-and-immigration/

8. Marquette Law School. (2025, May 21). New Marquette Law School Poll national survey finds overall approval of Trump immigration policies, disapproval of handling of job on tariffs and the economy. https://law.marquette.edu/poll/2025/05/21/

9. Navigator Research. (2025, December). 2025 wrapped: Trump’s year in review. https://navigatorresearch.org/2025-wrapped-trumps-year-in-review/

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11. Engel, M. (2025, December 15). Exclusive: Fox News scores record ratings in 2025 with primetime viewership 80% higher than MS NOW and CNN. Mediaite. https://www.mediaite.com/media/exclusive-fox-news-scores-record-ratings-in-2025-with-primetime-viewership-80-higher-than-ms-now-and-cnn/

12. Sinclair Broadcast Group. (2025). In Britannica Money. https://www.britannica.com/money/Sinclair-Broadcast-Group

13. Smith, A. (2018, April 2). Sinclair Broadcast Group forces nearly 200 station anchors to read same script. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2018/04/02/598916366/sinclair-broadcast-group-forces-nearly-200-station-anchors-to-read-same-script

14. Graham, T., & Andrejevic, M. (2024). A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election. [Working Paper]. Queensland University of Technology. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/253211/

15. Richter, F. (2025, October 28). X followers: All about Elon? Statista. https://www.statista.com/chart/35367/accounts-with-the-most-followers-on-x/

16. Nix, N., Oremus, W., & Gregg, A. (2025, January 7). Meta ends fact-checking, drawing praise from Trump. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/07/meta-factchecking-zuckerberg/

17. NapoleonCat. (2025, February). Facebook users in United States of America. https://napoleoncat.com/stats/facebook-users-in-united_states_of_america/2025/02/

18. Warner Bros. Discovery. (2025, December 2). Who owns CNN. Companies History. https://www.companieshistory.com/who-owns-cnn/

19. Engel, R. (2024, September 6). Media mogul John Malone donated more than $2 million to Republican candidates in 2024, none to Dems. AllYourScreens. https://www.allyourscreens.com/latest-news/u-s/3259-media-mogul-john-malone-donated-heavily-to-republican-candidates-in-2024

20. Larry Ellison will control Paramount after deal, filing says. (2024, September 5). Bloomberg/Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/larry-ellison-control-paramount-deal-170250842.html

21. Koblin, J. (2025, August 7). Inside the first day of Paramount’s new regime under David Ellison. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/07/media/paramount-skydance-cbs-news-david-ellison-merger

22. Larry Ellison props up Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. (2025, December 22). NBC News. https://www.ms.now/news/larry-ellison-props-up-paramounts-hostile-bid-for-warner-bros

23. Stelter, B. (2025, July 17). CBS is ending ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ next year. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/17/media/cbs-cancels-stephen-colbert

24. Adalian, J. (2025, December 22). Paramount beefs up its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery with new Larry Ellison guarantee. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/media/paramount-warner-bros-larry-ellison-rcna250453

25. Adalian, J. (2025, December 22). Paramount beefs up its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery with new Larry Ellison guarantee. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/media/paramount-warner-bros-larry-ellison-rcna250453

26. Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. (2024). The state of local news 2024. Local News Initiative. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/

27. Tow Center for Digital Journalism. (2025). Pink slime news networks report. Columbia Journalism School.

28. Stelter, B. (2025, September 18). How Brendan Carr, the attack-dog FCC chair, helped take down Jimmy Kimmel with words, not actions. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/18/media/brendan-carr-jimmy-kimmel-fcc-first-amendment

29. Trump refiles $15B defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. (2025, October 17). NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-refiles-15b-defamation-lawsuit-new-york-rcna238170

30. Nix, N. (2024, October 28). Over 200,000 subscribers flee ‘Washington Post’ after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/28/nx-s1-5168416/washington-post-bezos-endorsement-president-cancellations-resignations; Garza, M. (2024, October 23). Los Angeles Times editor resigns after newspaper owner blocked plans to endorse Harris. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/23/media/los-angeles-times-endorsement-harris-resign/index.html