Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, argues that President Donald Trump's most consequential flaw is that he behaves like an entertainer rather than a president — a pattern he calls the "Trump trap," one that has ensnared much of conservative media and now, he says, clouds the President's own judgment.

"What I mean is that if you start to see your job as telling fans what they want to hear, you risk becoming an entertainer rather than a thinker, and eventually you become a caricature," Goldberg said in The Fulcrum.

According to Goldberg, the same trap has derailed the careers of once-respectable conservative pundits. "In journalism — or what passes for it — you can see the same arc most acutely in talk radio and TV hosts, who define their roles as telling the audience what it wants to hear rather than what it needs to hear," he said. "In the early Trump era, many prominent pundits were fairly conventional conservatives. When the audience veered towards populism and MAGA, the hosts followed [them]," in pursuit of an audience.

But that dynamic, damaging as it is, remains confined to entertainers. The problem deepens, Goldberg argued, when an entertainer carries that approach into politics.

"Politicians often are captured by their true-believing base," he wrote. "It's most commonly seen among 'conviction' politicians, who make a name for themselves on a single issue or idea. Congressman and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan's deep populist support was enough to earn him the Democratic nomination three times (1896, 1900 and 1908), but his support wasn't wide enough to ever win."

Goldberg noted the same pattern in segregationist candidates such as George Wallace, socialist standard-bearer Norman Thomas, and Patrick Buchanan. Sarah Palin, Bernie Sanders, Kari Lake and Ron Paul, he said, represent more recent cautionary tales.

Ego sweetens the trap, he warned — and some egos are far larger than others: "Politicians see huge crowds or read favorable media coverage and assume their people are the people."

Lake, he argued, illustrated the mistake in her 2022 bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona. She concluded she did not need John McCain Republicans, nor the Democrats and independents who had backed McCain, because she mistook "intensity of support for quantity of support."

The MAGA base, in Goldberg's telling, is loud but not plentiful. "Jesse Watters, a reliable water-carrier for President Trump, is Fox News' most popular prime-time host, averaging about 2.7 million viewers per night," he noted — meaning that on any given night, roughly 346 million Americans are not watching. "But if you're Trump, you might think Watters is representative of the American people."

Watters' audience matters, Goldberg acknowledged, because GOP primary voters and small donors are more likely to watch the show — but primary voters are a small fraction of the greater electorate.

Even so, politicians like Trump are orienting themselves toward "small, intense slices of the electorate," Goldberg said, a polarizing dynamic that social media further intensifies. "Politicians and activists mistake the 'vibes' of X and TikTok for the real world. They become intensely 'online' and responsive to the feedback they're fed by social media algorithms," he wrote. The through-line of his argument is that ratings, primaries, and algorithmic feeds all reward the same behavior — serving a devoted audience over a broad coalition — which is how, in his view, a trap that reshaped conservative media came to shape how the White House reads the country.