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What happens to Sarah Cooper, Crooked Media, and the Lincoln Project in a Trumpless world?
Discover and explain how our digital world is evolving – and changing us
« I’m very excited about it being gone, » says the comedian, who went from (mostly) ubiquitous strangers this spring with a brilliant series of Trump lip-syncing videos. « I want my career to do something else and I don’t want to talk about him anymore «
Cooper does not have a love-hate relationship with Trump She hates What place in the same boat as other media personalities and companies that have transformed Trump to their advantage by focusing their era anger over opportunities
And now that it looks like Trump might leave, they need to know what to do next Even though some of them aren’t ready to say it out loud yet
To be clear: a post-Trump world does not mean that the political and cultural divisions that brought us Trump – and which Trump has exploited – are closing in But if your raison d’être is to defeat Donald Trump, and that it happens, so… what?
The Lincoln Project, a group of Republican « Never Trump » which met there less than a year to deploy ads against Trump during the 2020 elections, now wants to become a media company, according to Axios the Lincoln project said that this is not entirely true, but it could be, according to a company statement:
« We have not launched the idea of becoming producers and media company … people have contacted us about it, and we said to everyone: ‘This is a conversation after the election We firmly stranded on the mission to defeat Trump »
So if they did, they would be following in the footsteps of Crooked Media, the company run by Obama veterans in the White House that formed after Trump was elected in 2016. Over the past four years, the company has relied heavily on its flagship Pod Save America podcast, but branched out into other businesses like a newsletter, HBO show, and other politically-tinged podcasts; industry executives expect company to add other kinds of non-political agendas in post-Trump world
An indicator of Crooked Media’s ambition: He hired Jason Concepcion, a top podcaster from The Ringer, where he specialized in pop culture projects like Binge Mode, a series dedicated to franchises like Harry Potter and Game of Thrones; and NBA Desktop, an inventive version of SportsCenter for Google Doc Insta Generation Stories (Note: the core Crooked Media team also started their podcasting career at The Ringer)
The co-founder of Crooked Media, Jon Favreau, would not comment on the role of Concepcion or post-Trump strategy of his company, but sent a statement referring to the broader ambitions of the company » Crooked has always been in this field for a long time to inform, entertain, and inspire action we will soon have much more to say about later, once we all have the opportunity to breathe after the election «
Some anti-Trump media will have no choice but to move on if Trump loses the election Slate launched his popular Trumpcast podcast in the spring of 2016 when he started to sound like Trump could be a serious candidate for presidential – but not a real president It continues, but if Trump loses, the show will at least change its name while keeping host Virginia Heffernan, says Slate PR representative
« This is a problem we wanted to have, » says Jacob Weisberg, who started Trumpcast at Slate and now runs the Pushkin Industries podcast studio Pushkin, Weisberg notes, has no explicitly anti-Trump agenda in its programming « But I expect a lot of political programming, which is really built on the Trump phenomenon, will decline »
Of course, there are many media that existed before Trump and did not say they are directly opposed to his administration, but yet benefited from its mandate: The « Trump bump » as the New York Times , Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC have all seen are well documented
The same goes for individual talents like Maggie Haberman, Times star reporter Trump Michael Barbaro was a well-known but not very famous Times reporter before February 2017, when he started the newspaper’s The Daily podcast a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration Now He’s a Star and Star Creator Jake Tapper has gone from CNN anchor to charismatic truth-teller and bluffer: Maybe someone else could have brought in Trump’s chief of staff to announce that the White House had given up on containing the pandemic, but Tapper did so on a big platform
One obvious thing that would go away in a Biden administration is the ‘can-you-believe-he-did-that’ story, which Trump has been reliably serving since 2015 when he announced his candidacy What is different in that people are not outraged – there will be many, but it is unlikely that there is only one goal for this outrage – or someone who looks like being the focus
« There is going to be a certain type of easy story that has the potential to fade to all media when there is a change of administration – » Administration official says an outrageous thing, « » says Noah Shachtman , editor of the Daily Beast « If Biden doesn’t win, his people have shown they are careful enough »
A big unknown is the kind of interest Trump would generate outside the White House Traditionally, presidents have kept a low profile after leaving office, but no one expects that to happen with Trump La question is to what extent it will attract attention if he tweeted as a private citizen instead of a type having access to nuclear codes and power of grace
It is likely that Trump and his last pendants try to create a kind of media company after his departure – an idea they float now, as they had done in 2016. Again, he did can – don’t need to build much of an operation: Fox News has already shown that it thrives when a Democrat is in the White House, as it did throughout the Obama administration And he already has an audience that shudders at Trump’s provocations
Cooper, meanwhile, has been planning a post-Trump world for months She says she made her first sync with Trump, « How to Medical, » as an impulse project to keep him busy for a few hours during the pandemic lockdown
But over the next few months, as her clips went viral, she says they started to feel like an obligation and in the summer when her newly acquired talent managers hosted an online Q&A for her. she realized that many of his fans hated Trump more than they loved
So she tried to go beyond Trump Last month, it launched « Everything is fine, » a comedy skits single Netflix She also produced a sitcom for CBS She mostly stopped making Trump videos, even if it will come out yet from time to time: last week, when Trump publicly dreamed up in a truck and drive from, she could not help it
But she also knows she’ll never walk away from Trump entirely. Her Netflix special features a different version of her timing with Trump, where she and Helen Mirren recreate the infamous ‘grab them by the pussy’ Access Hollywood audio And she knows she will always be known as someone who has had his big break with Donald Trump
« I just have to keep doing other things for the next few years to get this all buried, » she said « I’m still very proud of these videos – I don’t think I’ll ever be proud of them. ‘they They are on the right side of history «
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