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.

Over the weekend I noticed an example of one of the most significant features of the last decade-plus in American politics, though it’s one that still remains too little remarked upon. Lauren Egan writes a newsletter covering the Democratic Party for The Bulwark. Sunday night’s edition was about pundit and political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, “He Was a Legendary Independent Pundit. Then Trump Arrived.” Basically, How did Stuart Rothenberg come down with, as MAGA puts it, Trump Derangement Syndrome? Toward the end of the piece, Egan gets at what I think is the underlying issue here and some of the commonality I’m about to note.

Let’s start this story in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At the time, there were a handful of men — pretty much all men, as I recall — who played a very specific role in the political-journalistic ecosystem. They were rigorously, perhaps obsessively, non-partisan and were go-to people on basic questions of politics. They’d appear on shows, be on call for quotes for journalists at the big papers. Rothenberg and Charlie Cook played that role in the electoral analysis and predictions space. Larry Sabato also occupied that space, though he also played in the political analysis one. In the latter space were Norm Ornstein (AEI) and Thomas Mann (Brookings). I think they were on PBS Newshour for a long time as a pair. Their analysis was on the mechanics of governing, less the explicitly political stuff and generally not electoral stuff.

Every president wants favorable press coverage. Most feel a surprising level of grievance when they don’t get it. Donald Trump is singular in using the powers of his office to force news organizations to bend to his will. But when is it beyond friendly or fawning coverage, or always giving the president the benefit of the doubt? At the gym a couple days ago I watched the soon-to-be-gobbled-up CNN doing a news segment on gas prices with an energy industry analyst. They’re not the only ones talking about gas prices. But the tone of the segment seemed out of sync with a lot of other press coverage. It occurred to me that what Trump wants, distinctly if not uniquely, is a kind of spell preservation as much as good coverage or fawning per se. He governs the country by a kind of manic coaxing which is at war with short-term memory and thrives on the ability to keep as many people fixated on the super dramatic crisis of the moment without remembering that it was preceded by an endless litany of other crises with similar branding.