The descent of Donald J. Trump, accompanied by his wife Melania, down the escalator into the lobby of the Trump Tower in New York on June 16, 2015, to announce his candidacy for President of United States marks the beginning of what became—by its own outlandish gambit and, arguably, by any objective measure—the most visible icon, the biggest BRAND, and the most intensely debated, era-defining force in all media throughout the world in the five years that followed (Fig. 8.1). The moment when this extraordinary phenomenon began to shrink can be dated with equal precision. On November 5, two days after the 2020 Presidential election, as votes were being counted across the nation and the prospect that he might lose office became real, President Donald J. Trump gave a press conference in the White House briefing room that was timed to capture attention on the evening news broadcasts of the major TV networks (Fig. 8.2). As his misstatements, distortions, and outright lies about the election process mounted, and his accusations of fraud against his opponents grew strident, ABC, CBS, and NBC cut away to anchors who rebutted his claims, directly characterized them as lies, and went on to other news. MSNBC did so within one minute, and even at Fox News, his most committed media backers (to the extent of having become a de facto propaganda department during his Presidency), the White House correspondent noted that there was no evidence to back up the president's claims of electoral fraud.

This moment had been prefigured on other media. The Washington Post had been running a fact-checker column devoted to Trump since the early days of his candidacy. In the month leading up to the election, the volume of false or misleading claims averaged by 50 a day, more than 20,000 in total since he began campaigning. On May 27, two days after George Floyd died, Twitter labelled as “unsubstantiated” a Trump tweet that Mail-In ballots to the upcoming election would be “substantially fraudulent.” The company did the same for a few subsequent tweets that published false information about the pandemic and, by November 4, immediately after election day, joined the growing chorus of media tagging the President's statements about the results as fraudulent themselves.