Couthures Journalism Festival: "Donald Trump is at war with the mainstream American media," analysis by Thomas Snégaroff

A few days before the Journalism Festival in Couthures (47) in which he will participate, Thomas Snégaroff, a great connoisseur of the United States, deciphers the media strategy of the boss of the White House

Journalist , history professor, presenter of "Grand Face-à-face" on France Inter and "C politique" on France 5 , Thomas Snégaroff has published a book on "Les Nouveaux Oligarchs" (1). This American enthusiast is one of the guests of the Couthures Journalism Festival, which begins on Friday, July 11.

Donald Trump is often described as a communications genius. Do you share this view?

Yes, he has perfectly understood how the media works: the need to feed continuous news, to constantly surprise on social networks, to create suspense through unpredictability. His media strategy can be summed up in two words: provoke and saturate. Everything is communication for him. We saw a telling example with his recent attitude towards Iranian nuclear power. First, as if to ensure that the world was hanging on his every word: "I'm giving myself two weeks to think about it." Then, three days later, he created a surprise with the strikes. Third step: present this operation as a "historic victory," while its results are very uncertain. What remains of Iranian nuclear power, of enriched uranium? Where does the mullahs' regime stand politically? We don't know. It doesn't matter to Donald Trump; reality is drowned in a sequence of communication.

How does he master the codes of new media?

He could have remained a man of the 1980s, a bit old-fashioned in television, but instead, in the 2010s, he understood the advantage he could take from a new, polarized and atomized media sphere. Far from traditional media, he identified a few powerful influencers, such as Joe Rogan 's podcasts (a great martial artist, editor's note), and used incendiary rhetoric to set social media ablaze.

Isn't it a mistake to analyze Trump's strategy in light of his publicity? Isn't his success based primarily on the real concerns of the American population?

Of course, his success stems from highly political intuitions. For him, communication was a way to maximize the reach of his discourse on the resentment of a section of the population feeling, rightly or wrongly, dispossessed of its "nation," its values, its industrial fabric. He managed to appear as the voice of those from whom, according to his rhetoric, the elites had confiscated the right to speak. He responded to a communication deficit with a new communication strategy.

The first counter-power to his autocratic drift will be the price of butter and eggs.

What is his relationship today, as president, with the major American media?

He's at war with them! He's called for the defunding of public media outlets PBS and NPR, blocked Associated Press journalists from accessing certain areas of the White House... For Trump, there's good media, which celebrates him, and bad media. He wants to subjugate what Curtis Yarvin, a Trumpist ideologue, called "the cathedral": the press and the universities. It's about destroying an elite, replacing it with an elite that serves him.

Can we see a form of fascism in this? What do you think of this reference to fascism?

Some features of Trump's governance evoke fascism, but this reference to the past prevents us from thinking, if only because fascism is a very European phenomenon, and Trumpism a very American phenomenon.

Donald Trump focuses much of his communication on values, the "culture war." How far can this approach hold up in the face of economic realities?

I prefer to call it an "identity" war rather than a "cultural" one, because that's the point. "What does it mean to be American?" This question underlies most of his positions. How long will this discourse eclipse the rest? I am convinced that the first counter-power to his autocratic drift will be the price of butter, eggs, unemployment... Daily social reality.

Trump is criticized for abolishing the notion of truth, but doesn't the problem run deeper? Politicians' relationship with the truth seems increasingly strained. Joe Biden's entourage lied for months about his health. In France, publicity and publicity stunts often seem detached from reality...

After the Biden catastrophe, the Democrats are indeed struggling to appear as the camp of reason and truth. But there is an important difference between manipulation and dissimulation—which is, unfortunately, as old as politics—and knowingly asserting, on an industrial scale, completely false things.

(1) “The New Oligarchs”, by Philippe Corbé and Thomas Snégaroff , published by Les Arènes, 160 p., €15.