Media’s Future in a Second Trump Era
Calling it right now, 2024 was the year of slop. It's the year slop took over every facet of culture. Google became slop. Slop drowned out journalism. Not just AI slop–there were slop games like Concord. Movie slop like Borderlands. We let a slop CEO get a slop president elected.
The above quote comes from an X Post I stumbled upon a few weeks ago, published by filmmaker Dominick Nero. This post was just one of thousands commenting on the release of Coca Cola’s annual Christmas commercial, which, for the first time ever, was created entirely with AI. Coca Cola is just one of several companies that have begun dipping into the world of AI, not only outwardly via advertising campaigns, but also in less descript ways such as limited-edition drink releases marketed with the label “co-created with AI”. Despite the X post’s unserious nature, ever since reading it, this concept of “slop” media has continued to circle through my mind. It got me thinking, in particular, about how this new era of our government will impact the media we are fed and then consume—beyond the “slop,” how else will the paradigm shift infiltrate our culture? Asking this question then made me reflect upon how media and arts landscapes were shaped by the first Trump presidency. Of course, the election of a new president does not have the power to directly and immediately change the structures of the content we consume. A shift in the political climate, however, is almost always an indicator of an active cultural shift occurring or one that is bound to take place. As we prepare for a second Trump era, I want to take a look at what we might see again culturally, as well as what may differ from the first go-around.
When observing how Hollywood responded to Trump’s first term, it is important to keep in mind that four years is logistically a short period of time in relation to how long the production process can take. Just two days after the 2024 election, Vanity Fair published an article titled “Does Hollywood Have the Energy to Resist Trump All Over Again?”. This article mentions that many of the films that have become defining pieces of the first Trump era–such as 2017’s The Post, the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and 2018’s Black Panther–began production at the tail end of Obama’s second term, repurposing this “Obama-era triumphalism” into Trump-era resistance–a shift in tone that may have gone untouched had Hilary Clinton won in 2016. Nonetheless, coupled with media like Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out (now described as one of the first major cultural artifacts of the Trump era) and Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, these films and TV shows ushered in a right-wing populist represented for both domestic and international creatives despite not directly singling out Trump-ism. Messaging targeted certain things the election symbolized beyond just Trump as a figure. This varies from reckonings of the #MeToo movement in films like Promising Young Woman, Bombshell, and The Assistant; biting commentary on generational wealth and capitalism’s shortcomings in Succession and Knives Out; and the pressing doom of climate denialism in Don’t Look Up.
Following Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020, TIME published a piece in a similar vein titled “Donald Trump’s Presidency Was Supposed to Be Great for Art. It Wasn’t.” The piece sums up everything made worse for both the art industry and the creation of art as a result of Donald Trump’s first term, citing not only Trump’s direct attacks on the creative industries–public lashings toward entertainers, late-night shows, authors, and more–but also his attempts to defund federal arts organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which helps fund PBS and NPR), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services; as well as the indirect effects on art brought on by his rise to power. For instance, the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis had a disastrous economic impact on workers in creative industries, with an estimated 2.7 million jobs and $150 billion lost in these sectors. In addition, the ubiquity of Trump as a figure induces shock value, thus giving media outlets more incentive to cover him in extensive ways. This only furthered artistic media to saturate their attention on Trump with “more ugly portraits, more half-baked impressions, more fake-tan jokes.” Excluding the aforementioned works that commented on broader identity politics and social injustices rather than solely criticisms of Trumpism itself, as well as other prominent Trump-era art (Childish Gambino’s 2018 hit song “This is America,” Lydia Millet’s 2020 novel A Children’s Bible, and Steve James’ 2018 documentary America To Me), TIME describes much of the artistic commentary of the first Trump era as “consensus art” that ignores differences of ideology divided by the labels Republican and Democrat in favor of “speaking broadly to one half of the country or the other.” In other words, while Trump's rise to presidency began as a call to action for artists, these critiques quickly became exhausted by the concentration of attention Trump demanded. Every work became “about” Trump even when it wasn’t, and work that actually made commentary on Trump as a person struggled to send its message in a nuanced way, likely due to Trump’s already “larger-than-life” personality.
So, after summarizing how culture responded to a first Trump term, how will the media world respond now? Well, as I pointed out before, people like the X user I quoted have picked up on a supposed downturn of cultural “quality.” Despite major corporations like Coca-Cola rushing to boast their usage of AI in advertising and in the AI chatbots and other products that tech companies like Google and Meta are promoting, AI in media is still seen to the general public as distant, unnatural, and unethical. It is unlikely that public sentiment around AI in the media will change drastically over the next four years, but it is not unlikely that companies will continue to integrate and market AI into their brand’s image.
As for Hollywood and the film and TV industry worldwide, one key difference between what we will see in this second Trump era is a more evident unknown about what will be widely accepted and well-received. Over the last eight years, the media landscape has become increasingly individually tailored thanks to ever-improving algorithms and the rise in short-form content that is easily digestible and–as research has begun to prove–highly addictive. While the US has been increasingly polarizing since 2016, even prior to Trump’s rise, the divide has only been further spotlighted and accentuated by easily accessible targeted content. Even just skimming the demographics of the 2024 election, the potency of right-wing, ultra-masculine personalities taking over the media landscape via the podcast industry cannot be overlooked when identifying how Trump won the votes of young men. Seeing Spotify’s consistent amplification of hosts such as Joe Rogan, who invited Trump himself on his show just weeks before the election, sends a clear signal that political media (whether or not one interprets Rogan’s show as inherently “political” is, of course, up to interpretation), or media that makes political commentary, has become and will continue to become consumer-selected. Conservatives who voted for Trump will likely not be seated for a film like Ali Abbasi’s recent release, The Apprentice, which portrays Trump’s cutthroat rise to power, or read a commentary on Trump from a major media outlet. Rather, they'll tune into an episode of Charlie Kirk, or perhaps read what news Elon Musk has recently replied to on X.
Needless to say, it is impossible to predict exactly how the media landscape will change in the wake of Trump’s second electoral victory. Culture as we know it is among the many other unknowns ushered in by this new yet old administration, and it is up to us as consumers of media and culture to continue navigating it all through a nuanced lens.
