America's Last Election 6: How Trump’s banishment led to his comeback

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Hi, hang tight.

Matt Bevan will be along in a sec.

I'm Danielle O'Neill, host of the new season of the Expanse podcast, Uncropped.

A wild story that travels from a mosquito-laden Queensland swamp all the way to the halls of Congress in the USA.

Trying to get to the bottom of a UFO story from the 60s that kicked off an international hoax and left a family looking over their shoulders for decades.

Search for Expanse to wrap your ears around it.

This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Dharug, and Eora people.

While making this series of episodes, I've been spending a lot of time on a website called Brumble.

And I've got to tell you, this website sucks.

A ritual that clears out all that sticky plaque, regenerates your nerves, and eliminates your numbness.

The ancient cultures knew the best way to manifest abundance thousands of years ago, but this information has been kept hidden and kept secret.

The ads are super weird and many appear to be for scams.

This makes any man, no matter the age or condition, as potent as a teenager going through puberty.

And now we know, through a Ukrainian doctor, that there is a way to fight this ocular toxin that's wreaking havoc on our vision right now.

Rumble is basically a Frankenstein's monster version of YouTube made up of crypto scammers, AI garbage and conspiracy theorists.

But if you want to understand what happened in the weeks after the 2020 election, this is unfortunately where you've got to hang out.

That's because it's the only place you can find stuff like this.

We looked at the date January 6 and we thought that's probably going to be one of the most important times to shoot down the attempted fraudulent installation or installment of the Chinese communist puppet, Joe Biden.

Videos of people planning the events of January 6th have been purged from platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

We'll never surrender.

And one way or another, politically, lawfully, and legally, Joe Biden will be removed.

He is a Chi-Com traitor.

On January 7th, far-right MAGA media outlets, along with President Trump himself, were banned from the world's top social media networks.

During his presidency, Trump had used Twitter to change government policy, fire cabinet officials, and connect directly with the American public.

Now, his Twitter account was gone.

This censorship is unlawful, it's unconstitutional, and it's completely un-American.

Many thought that this would keep a lid on misinformation, but actually, it might have made it worse.

Today, in the last episode of this series, how Donald Trump and his allies turned this attempt to silence them into an opportunity, one that would massively assist his political comeback.

I'm Matt Bevan, and for if you're listening, this is the sixth and final episode of America's last election.

One of the most significant discussions over the last decade has been about this.

The old saying, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

The best form of disinfectant is sunlight.

One of my favourite sayings is that sunlight is the best disinfectant.

The best form of disinfectant is to let the sun in.

It's an argument that goes back centuries, but the internet really made it a lot more urgent.

Basically, the argument is that if all information is accessible, the truth will win out over lies.

One day I might do an episode about whether or not that's actually true.

But in the 2010s, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the owners of the world's other top social media platforms really wanted to believe it.

We can either continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us.

Or we can decide that the cost is simply too great.

By 2020, the messiness of the internet had already started to break their faith in the sunshine as disinfectant argument.

And Zuckerberg had already decided that in some cases, the cost was too great.

Specifically, in this case.

I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs gay.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones had been spreading unhinged nonsense online for years.

So I never expected Trump charging into a goblin's nest to not get some goblin vomit and slop and blood on him.

I just don't want to catch him in bed with a goblin.

Unhinged, but harmless, right?

I don't want to see him kissing goblins, having political succubus with goblins.

I don't want to see him ingratiating goblins.

Well, aside from discussing goblin succubus, Jones also spent a large portion of his time spreading a terrible lie.

For years, he told his audience that the horrific mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 was fake.

No children had been killed, and the people claiming to be the families of those children were liars hired to create an excuse to ban assault rifles.

His followers then spent years harassing those families, so...

not so harmless.

In 2018, several of those families began defamation lawsuits against Jones, suing him for hundreds of millions of dollars.

And yet, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook continued to host his news outlet called InfoWars.

And I'm here today because I believe that we must continue to stand for free expression.

Jones was able to build a significant media empire, not through ad revenue, but by selling questionable dietary supplements.

My heart's big.

It's got hot blood.

Going through it fast.

I like to eat.

I like to have children.

Jones' audience was extremely engaged in what he had to say, which social media algorithms loved.

He drew audiences to their platforms, and in return, they amplified his message.

But eventually, Jones went too far.

In 2018, he seemingly threatened to kill Robert Mueller, the guy investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

That's a demon I will will take down or I'll die trying.

It's not a joke.

It's not a game.

It's the real world.

Politically, you're going to get it or I'm going to die trying, bitch.

Finally, in August of that year, the platforms cracked.

Bad news for those who like their news weird and screamed at them.

Alex Jones has been deplatformed.

It took more than lies to get him banned.

It was the harassment of Mueller and the threat of violence that did it.

Podcast platforms Stitcher and Apple went first, then Facebook and YouTube followed.

And then those companies were joined by Spotify, Pinterest, LinkedIn, MailChimp, and UPON.

So, if you want to add Alex Jones to your professional network, you have missed your chance.

But after that, we never heard from him again, right?

Let's just whiz forward in time, just a couple of years, to the Capitol Riot, just to check if he's down there.

Not back, back, back, back.

January 6th.

Okay, stop.

And myself, my wife, the crew was all just down there.

Of course.

Alex Jones.

Alex Jones.

Alex Jones had not disappeared.

In fact, he'd only become stronger.

After being banned from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, he started a new site called banned.video, upgraded his InfoWars app, hired more staff and started posting on Rumble.

Court documents showed that getting banned from those platforms increased his company's revenue.

Loyal fans followed him onto the website and app and supported him financially by buying his

products.

Please don't forget a lot of products that were sold out are back in stock like Pollen Block, like X2, like Super Mel Vitality.

All that sweet, sweet pollen block money meant that he could pay high-priced lawyers to defend him from the defamation suits.

It meant that he could expand his empire on the platforms that he owned where no one could boot him off.

Very quickly, Alex Jones went from being the guy threatening violence to the victim of censorship and litigation.

And it turns out that was more profitable.

and made him more popular than being just loud and saying insane things.

Folks tell me, big national Fox host, big podcasters, big you name it, they go, man, it's crazy.

Everybody loves you now.

I mean, just people come over to see me.

I go to events.

They want to talk about you all day.

Denying Donald Trump's 2020 election loss, that was a no-brainer conspiracy for Alex Jones to peddle.

You could sell a lot of male vitality pills yelling about a stolen election.

And what can you do with all that money?

Well, you can set up a big rally in Washington, D.C.

on January 6th, 2021.

I have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in making sure this happened, and I want you to know that's where your money's been going.

Jones played a key role in funding and organizing the rally, which led to the Capitol riot.

January 6th, 1 p.m., Capitol Building, Northeast Side.

I'll be leading that march.

He marched with the protesters and tried to control their rage.

We're not giving into the globalists.

We're never surrendering.

America is fighting for its life right now.

and I salute you all, the candidacy in defense of our great nation.

Everybody, get off that building now!

I'm with Alex Jones, man.

I'm telling you right now, he just tried to de-escalate this stuff.

If we can talk to someone and get him up there, we can get them to get it.

Now, you're probably asking two questions.

Number one being, didn't Alex Jones's uppance recently come quite spectacularly?

And also, what is the point of this story about Alex Jones?

Well, I'll get to the comeuppance soon, but the reason this story matters is this.

The censorship of Alex Jones backfired.

And it backfired in a way that should seem really familiar.

Jones did some obviously morally wrong things, harassing the families of shooting victims.

He became embroiled in court cases.

Social media companies didn't want to censor him, but as his broadcasts became more extreme, they were forced to by public pressure.

He was banished from the mainstream, and in that banishment, he found new levels of fame and fortune by transforming himself from a perpetrator to a victim.

Now, I get the attacks, I get the lawsuits, I get the demonization, I get all the psychic, you know, backlash, which is fine.

I'm willing to take it.

But InfoWars is not Alex Jones.

It's all of us together, and it's incredible.

Now,

if anyone on earth has perfected the art of turning themselves into a victim, it's got to be...

I am a victim of one of the great political smear campaigns in the history of our country.

By January 6th, Donald Trump wasn't just including himself in that.

It had transformed into...

We're all victims.

Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they're all victims, every one of you.

This is a spectacularly powerful strategy for Trump, and there's data to back that up.

The same week as the January 6th riot, the scientific journal Political Behavior published research that found appealing to people's sense of victimhood was key to Trump's success.

It said there were two parts of it.

Trump makes people feel like victims and then makes them feel like he is the only one who can understand and help them.

Now, keep all that in mind as we go beyond January 6th.

President Trump is practically

and morally responsible

for provoking the events of the day.

No question about it.

In the days after the attack on the Capitol, the Republican Party leadership were clear in their condemnation of Donald Trump.

The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions

of their president.

And polls showed that the public agreed.

In the 2020 election, he had gained 46.8% of the popular vote.

But after January 6th, his approval rating slipped down into the mid to low 30s.

And it looked like it was going to stay that way.

The media blamed him for the riot and the world's tech giants silenced one of their most prolific and controversial users.

Trump, the first extremely online US president, was cut off from his megaphone.

Twitter and Facebook deleted President Donald Trump's extensive social media profiles after a violent mob stormed the US Capitol.

Almost immediately, the tide began to turn.

Tonight, social media giants feeling the heat after banning Donald Trump.

There'd been calls from these big tech companies to block Trump from their platforms for years by then.

Banning him altogether seemed like a way to stop his tweets from inciting violence and spreading spreading misinformation.

But as soon as he was banned from posting, there was a backlash.

Right around the world, politicians spoke out against it.

Those decisions were taken by commercial companies, but personally I felt uncomfortable with what they did.

President Trump and his administration accused the tech giants of censorship.

Shutting down free and open debate violates our core values.

and most enduring traditions.

Even Trump's fiercest critics, like Senator Bernie Sanders, weren't happy about it.

Here he is talking about it on the Ezra Klein show.

If you're asking me do I feel particularly comfortable that the president, the then president of the United States, could not express his views on Twitter, I don't feel comfortable about that.

Trump, who had been accused of inciting an insurrection against the United States government, was on his way to being considered a victim of censorship rather than a perpetrator of any crime himself.

It also found him unexpected allies, like Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who told the Financial Times, I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump.

I think that was that was a mistake

because it

alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.

In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, promising to undo all the bans and promote free speech.

And yet...

Mr.

Trump insists he's not going back, instead focusing on his own rival social media app.

He said his new app is being created to, quote, fight back against the big tech companies of Silicon Valley, which he says silences opposing voices in America.

Trump's platform joined Alex Jones's banned.video platform as well as YouTube knockoff rumble in a strange right-wing internet netherworld.

These websites aren't a secret.

Anyone can go there, but they're kind of out of the way.

Google searches ignore them.

They're not pleasant to be on.

There's nothing there but hardcore MAGA stuff.

Unless you're a journal like me or you know a Trump supporter who sends you a link, you'd probably never go there.

And believe me, you're better for it.

And yet, they were great places for Trump supporters to hang out, share ideas and conspiracy theories, and plan for Trump's return.

So far from being the end of him, January 6th and the events that led up to it had left Donald Trump with three pretty powerful things.

By the end of 2022, he had a tight-knit community of supporters, an unexpected alliance with the world's richest man, and the all-important narrative about him being a victim rather than a perpetrator.

And what happened in the years since really helped cement all of those things because the criminal charges began to arrive.

Donald Trump's indictment by a Manhattan grand jury has divided the nation.

I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris.

He'll do whatever he can to try to use this situation to his advantage.

I did everything right and they indicted me.

Senior Republicans have condemned the move against Donald Trump.

Former Vice President Mike Pence called it an outrage.

Yes, even Mike Pence, the guy the mob at the Capitol was threatening to murder.

The Biden administration found itself in a lose-lose situation.

Prosecute Donald Trump and you turn him into a victim.

But you also can't just let him get away with alleged fraud, election subversion and obstruction of justice.

Yet the indictment against Trump seemed to confirm what he and his supporters were saying on their parallel social media networks.

The establishment was out to get him.

The Trump mugshots like the new Che Guavara t-shirt.

The mugshot for the ages.

Mugshot merchandise is already for sale for nearly 40 Australian dollars.

I think this is a powerful image.

Trump's people are certainly viewing it as a powerful image, and his opponents are also viewing it as a powerful image.

At the time, that mugshot was really something.

But when it comes to powerful images, it's hard to go past what is probably the photograph of the decade from AP's Evan Vucci.

An image for the ages.

Remarkable because seconds before Donald Trump came very close to death.

Trump surrounded by the Secret Service, blood streaming from his ear, his fist in the air, an American flag billowing behind him, mouthing the words, fight, fight, fight.

Last week I took a bullet for democracy.

Four days before the election, I went to a Trump rally in Michigan.

In an election when the economy was the top issue, the rally was heavily focused on Trump being a victim.

Democrats have tried to kick Trump off the ballot, seize his assets, and lock him up.

Any normal person that has been through what President Trump has been through,

a biased media, attacks on his family, and two assassination attempts, They would have given up.

But he didn't.

The man that stood up and raised his fist in the the middle of the air for all americans and said fight fight fight say i will not be afraid i will not be afraid why because we're gonna fight fight fight donald trump didn't win the 2024 election because people felt sorry for him he won the election for a thousand other reasons but it did set up his comeback When people saw him as the instigator of an attack on American democracy, only 35% of Americans approved of him.

He needed to get that back up to around 50.

Converting himself into a victim of the system that voters feel oppressed by too

gave them a reason to set January 6th aside.

They felt like victims as well.

Now,

unlike Donald Trump in the case of Alex Jones, it really does seem to be all over for him.

He lost his defamation case and was ordered by the court to pay the families of those shooting victims $1.4 billion.

His empire has basically been broken up for parts, including the InfoWars site, which last week was sold to the satirical news outlet, The Onion.

And they said, well, they're shutting us down even without a court order.

This morning, the Connecticut Democrats with The Onion newspaper

bought us.

The sale is being challenged in court, but if it goes ahead, The Onion plans to relaunch InfoWars as a satirical version of itself.

Something like this has happened to basically everyone involved in the January 6th attack.

Disgrace, bankruptcy, and in some cases, jail.

And those things may have been on the way for Donald Trump as well, but unlike his unlucky allies,

Trump had the brilliant idea of getting re-elected as President of the United States, a job that comes with immunity from criminal prosecution.

This is the last episode of the series, and while I hope that I told you at least a few things about America's last election that you didn't already know, you probably were broadly across it.

And so is everyone in America.

But they have fairly and squarely re-elected Donald Trump.

What does that tell you?

About the desperation that millions of Americans feel, about the anger they feel towards the people that have governed them in the past,

about how they too feel like victims and want redemption or revenge.

People from every background, from every part of America, rejected the status quo in favour of a man who just four years ago seemed on the verge of knocking out the foundations under the world's most powerful government.

These people were not deceived.

This is what they wanted.

If you're listening, is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Jess O'Callaghan with Cara Jence-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Anna John.

This is the end of our America's Last Election series, but not the end of If You're Listening for 2024.

We still have...

What is it, Jess?

Four.

Four more episodes to go this year.

Oh, and we've been recommissioned for next year, so that's good.

Probably will be a bit happening to talk about.

Next week, we are taking a break from America to talk about cables.

Our entire world relies on a network of cables lying on the floor of the ocean, covering the globe like a ball of wool.

But what happens if some of those cables are cut?

This week, two cables in the Baltic Sea were cut, and the Europeans say they think it's sabotage.

So, what does that mean for the rest of the ball of wool and for all of us and our ball of wool-enabled doom scrolling?

That's next on if you're listening.

I'll see you then.

Hello, it's Sam Hawley here from ABC News Daily.

Almost every day since his election, Donald Trump has been unveiling new members of his team.

He's chosen a vaccine sceptic as his health secretary, a TV host to take charge of defence, and an accused drug and sex offender as Attorney General.

Find our episode on what it all says about how Trump plans to govern on the ABC Listen app.