President Trump's name is disappearing from conservative podcasts at a startling rate, according to a new Wall Street Journal analysis of nearly 70,000 hours of podcast content.
The Journal built an in-house AI tool to track political conversation trends across podcasts, TikTok, Instagram and cable news ahead of November's midterms. The results were striking: references to Trump on right-leaning shows have cratered by roughly two-thirds compared with their high point ahead of the 2024 race, and that decline has kept accelerating, shedding another 30 percentage points or so since American forces entered the Iran conflict this past February.
A handful of hosts have started openly criticizing the war itself, and at least one prominent name in conservative media, Tucker Carlson, has taken the more dramatic step of publicly splitting from the administration over it.
Trump has spent recent weeks pushing supporters to treat November as though he himself were up for election, urging convention-goers to "pretend I'm on the ballot." But the numbers suggest his own base's media ecosystem isn't cooperating, even as liberal podcasters keep their Trump mentions steady, a pattern the White House attributes to Democrats trying to distract from their own record.
The economic backdrop helps explain the shift. Gas prices sit near $4.50 a gallon nationally, and Republican optimism about the economy has cratered, with roughly seven in ten GOP voters calling it improved back in January compared with fewer than three in ten who say the same now, per New York Times/Siena polling.
In Trump's place, conservative podcasters have found a new favorite target: Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. Among the 147 shows the Journal monitors, no Democrat below the level of a former president gets brought up more often this month, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not Gavin Newsom, not Bernie Sanders — and Talarico comes up roughly three times as frequently as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani does.
Meanwhile, the Journal found conservative podcasters increasingly gravitating toward ostensibly nonpolitical content: the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of killing her three children while allegedly experiencing postpartum psychosis. The case ended in a mistrial this month after jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favor of finding Clancy not criminally responsible, with the sole holdout a man on a jury of nine women and three men. Some conservative commentators framed the case as exposing a double standard around gender and personal responsibility.