I’ve described to you many times how TPM was saved by an early shift to building a membership system. We began it at the end of 2012 and started building it in earnest in about 2014. That gave us a five or six year head start on almost everyone else. We were thus much better positioned when the collapse of the digital ad economy hit in the couple years just before the pandemic. But today I’d like to share with you another part of that transition because it intersects with a fascinating story of Trump era corruption published today in the New York Times. It’s the story of a couple Syrian-born billionaires, already in business with the Trump family, lining up Trump’s personal support to secure another vast payday. In “a sign of how powerful Mr. Trump has become,” Times reporter Eric Lipton says after laying out the basic facts of the story, “To get almost anything done in the nation’s capital requires not alienating a vexed and vengeful president, and, ideally, pleasing him.”
It’s that personalist rule I want to focus on.
And to do that let’s go back to TPM ad business.
We were very successful for about a decade selling ads in the very specific and peculiar DC public affairs ad space, a very sui generis and odd advertising space which is in effect a subset of corporate America’s lobbying budgets. Every big corporation in America, as well as large organizations, has business before the people who run the country’s government. This can involve long-term policy aims. This can be regulatory issues. This can often be trying to keep the government out of regulating things. Everyone has interests before the federal government. The public affairs ad space is focused on talking to the people who run the federal government about a particular corporation or organization’s interests, needs and what the company does. They’re not selling their product. It’s not consumer advertising. It’s partly reputational advertising. But it’s not even entirely that. It’s corporation X talking to the people who run the federal government. Who is that? It’s everyone in the executive and legislative branches. It’s their staffs. It’s the vast array of interest groups and organizations and policy factories that exist in DC. It’s the lobbyists. It’s not just the folks they talk about in Schoolhouse Rock. It’s the whole para-government. It’s an extremely lucrative ad space. It’s the reason insider sheets and publications like Politico and Punchbowl all seem to defy the gravity that has affected the rest of the journalism ecosystem. The money has also increasingly moved from display advertising to the corporate-sponsored events these publications can host.
The additional factor was that to remain kosher in that world advertisers needed to be very careful about appearing to be on one political side or another. That governed what publications they advertised in. And that was a major problem for us. (It’s also a key anchor of “both-sides” journalism. But that’s a topic for another day.) We faced a major obstacle because we were perceived as being on the side of the Democrats. That’s not really true. Or it’s not nearly as simple as that. But in the world they operated in, it was true enough. It was true in their terms. So what to do about that?
What I came up with turned out to be an effective approach that also had the benefit of being true. The argument went like this. You may not like our readers — who tend to be highly educated, some flavor of liberal or left-wing, politically active and on the affluent side. You may not like us. But you (the advertiser) or you (the public affairs firm) actually need to be talking to these people because sometimes they will be in power. What’s more, those people tend to be involved in or adjacent to the origination of novel public policy questions. So again, you should save a few bucks from your ad buys with WaPo and Politico and Roll Call and do a placement with us too.
Ad sales in that space always involved a lot of hard work for us. But that was our core ad argument. And it helped us sell (relative to our scale) a lot of ads and build out a lot of this organization.
Now, as I mentioned earlier and in many other posts over the years, by the late teens the whole digital advertising world was coming under a lot of strain. We were already moving a lot of our focus and resources toward building our membership base and away from advertising. But advertising was still a big deal.
So now let me take you to the first months of 2017. I was down in D.C. for a few business-side meetings. This was when, you’ll remember, Trump had just been elected and believed he had a mandate to abolish Obamacare. He also controlled both houses of Congress to make that happen. I was meeting with staffers from one of the big health care trade associations. These folks didn’t necessarily support or oppose Obamacare. But its repeal and just what might replace it was a very big deal for them and their members. As I discussed TPM’s unique audience I got a question I’d never heard before. “Do you know if Donald Trump reads your site? Or … what about Jared Kushner?”
Needless to say, in a narrow sense, I didn’t have a terribly good answer to this question. But on a larger canvas this was something totally new, however it might impact us specifically. No one ever asked about what George W. Bush or Barack Obama read. Those weren’t personalist regimes or governments. Like virtually every other post-war American presidency — and many earlier administrations — there was a whole community of policy and political appointees who determined and executed administration policy. And there’s not just the executive branch to consider. What happens on Capitol Hill is just as important. Indeed, if you’re opposing what the administration wants it’s even more important.
This was different. Everything had tightened down to access to one man: Donald Trump. Then secondarily perhaps a handful of his top advisors or family members. Some ad budgets just froze because no one knew how to operate in a situation in which only Trump’s momentary whims really mattered. This conversation again confirmed to me our need to reduce our dependence on the D.C. ad market as much as possible. Toward the end of 2017, I pulled most of the resources we directed toward ad sales and redirected them toward growing our membership business. But it was also a revealing, bracing illustration of how the whole architecture of the D.C. para-government was reorienting itself, rewiring itself around the personalist aspirations and rule of Donald Trump. Out with the broader community of governance and policy-making, in with the whims and momentary impulses of one erratic and distractible guy. That has ramified through the lobbying world, the political communications world, the D.C. advertising world and more.
During Trump’s first term, his personalist rule was as much aspiration as reality. His cabinet was populated mostly with retired generals and corporate CEOs, most of whom didn’t like or respect him. Trump also hadn’t reduced his MAGA slogans to a set of policies, something he never did but a series of “America First” policy shops did largely do. All that changed in term two. Meanwhile, gutting much of the federal bureaucracy tightened the relationship between the president’s will and the actions of the government. As we see from that Times article, in addition to creating a kind of electoral strongman rule it also created an engine perfectly suited to corruption. Obviously there’s a ton of money sloshing around Washington and there always has been. But the old model was persuasion. Or there was at least a significant role for it. But why bother persuading Donald Trump? Or, really, what would that even mean? Why not just cut him a check? Or cut him in on a real estate deal. It’s more direct. It’s more reliable. It may even be cheaper. And we see it happening everywhere across the federal government today.