President Donald Trump, like a lot of Republicans, seems to have believed former reality TV star Spencer Pratt's social media success would carry over at the ballot box, but a tech writer explained why the conservative media bubble provided a distorted view.
The 79-year-old president melted down over the weekend during an interview with "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker, who pressed him for evidence that California elections were rigged against Pratt and other GOP candidates, but tech writer Gil Duran and The New Republic's Greg Sargent agreed that Trump was duped by the social media he consumes.
"A big reason Trump is so angry, we think, is that the MAGA online disinformation universe has been unable to entirely reinvent reality and use propaganda to inflate the GOP candidate’s strength into something it isn’t," Sargent said. "In a sense, then, this saga is really about the failures of MAGA propaganda."
Duran, a California-based tech writer and author, expanded on that idea and demonstrated how conservatives were victims of their own propaganda.
"This is typical Trump," Duran said. "He’s been doing this for years and years. He tries to create his own version of reality and insist that other people agree with it. The main enemy, the main challenge that Republicans have in California is called simple math."
Los Angeles, where Pratt ran for mayor, is 52 percent Democratic voters compared to 19 percent Republicans, and Duran said there was never a realistic path to winning for the former reality TV villain who rang up MAGA endorsements in a right-wing campaign, no matter how much his social media algorithms served his videos to other conservatives.
"They tried to make fetch happen," Duran said. "They try to create what [disinformation researcher Renée] DiResta calls the 'red mirage' — this idea that a Republican’s about to win California. Everybody knows it because it’s happening on X and TikTok. But when the votes get counted, it turns out that virality is not the same thing as votes, and they lose, and so then they immediately pivot to calling it fraud because they are sore losers and big man-babies in reality."
Trump voiced support for Pratt, who was often compared to him during the campaign, but never formally endorsed him, but Sargent and Duran agreed that his view of the race was warped by the stream of AI-generated videos hyping him as some kind of folk hero.
"He internalized this picture of Spencer Pratt as this very powerful figure within the context of Los Angeles politics," Sargent said, "and so you can kind of see his eruption of fury at Kristen Welker as his bubble bursting. He looks at the situation, he says, well, this can’t be happening. He can’t be falling behind in real life because the online universe told me that he was going to win.
Pratt's loss seems to have triggered the president's own pathologies about elections, Duran said.
"This is very personal for Trump because the idea that he won the 2020 election — the lie that he won the 2020 election — is a central part of his mythology now," Duran said. "There was no way he could lose. He was supposed to be the winner. Yet he lost, and that’s this unresolved issue that we’re all going to have to deal with at some point, because Trump seems to believe that he’s owed for that, maybe owed an extra term."