Following President Donald Trump's reelection in 2024, numerous media observers declared that the political climate had shifted and that MAGA-aligned ideas had become culturally ascendant. Nineteen months later, according to political analysts, that assessment has not held — and influencers and institutions that wagered heavily on a durable Republican realignment are facing significant financial and reputational losses.

David A. Graham, writing in The Atlantic on Monday, described the landscape: "When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he was nursing grudges and claiming a mandate. The institutions he saw as his enemies — in politics, business, and education — faced a dilemma about how to respond."

Graham noted that many of these institutions "saw the MAGA movement as a lasting change, and decided that their best move was to make their own radical shift to adjust." Those that made this bet, he observed, have generally suffered substantial losses. The pattern echoes a familiar dynamic in political media, where outlets and personalities built around a single figure's gravitational pull often struggle to retain audiences once that figure's cultural salience wanes — a challenge that compounded existing headwinds facing digital publishers across the ideological spectrum.

Ellison's Media Empire Ambitions

David Ellison, who along with his father Larry Ellison is a friend of Trump's, sought to leverage the new administration to build a large media conglomerate. His company Skydance merged with Paramount, and upon taking control of CBS News, he installed Bari Weiss as editor in chief, aiming to appeal to both the White House and conservative audiences.

"But Weiss's makeover has so far looked like a flop," Graham wrote. "60 Minutes has hemorrhaged staffers, and the Evening News has hemorrhaged viewers. Her proposition was that a slightly more conservative version of the mainstream media would bring the audience back to a struggling network, but that doesn't appear to actually be appealing to either MAGA viewers or legacy CBS watchers."

Ellison subsequently pursued a merger with Warner Bros., reportedly promising administration officials significant political changes at CNN in exchange for regulatory approval. While approval was granted, the deal now faces legal challenges. Paramount agreed to pause the merger amid an antitrust lawsuit led by the California attorney general, with a trial scheduled for next year. If the merger does not close by September 30, Paramount will owe Warner Bros. shareholders $7 million daily until completion — a ticking financial clock that underscores the risks of tying deal strategy to a specific political moment.

In a New York Times column, Ellison complained that observers were drawing incorrect inferences about his politics. Graham countered: "His private views are beside the point: What is public is Ellison's willingness to play to the Trump administration's politics to build an empire."

Broader MAGA World Struggles

Beyond the Ellisons' challenges at CBS News, Graham documented how MAGA-aligned influencers and organizations are struggling as Trump's popularity declines and his coalition fractures over the wars in Iran and Israel. X CEO Elon Musk has reportedly lost money on both X and Tesla since becoming closely associated with the Trump brand.

"Within right-wing politics, many individuals and organizations also leapt into Trumpism," Graham wrote. "The venerable Heritage Foundation reworked itself and lost or pushed out many long-standing scholars and staffers. Now it finds itself in an identity crisis — and also shut out of the White House because Trump is still sore about the attention and credit that Project 2025 won for driving his agenda." Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's detailed policy blueprint for a second Trump term, became a lightning rod during the 2024 campaign after Trump publicly distanced himself from it.

Graham added that mainstream Republicans who rebranded as MAGA Republicans have not always fared well. Senator John Cornyn lost his primary in May to a more ideologically aligned challenger.

Conservative Staffing Pipeline Problems

Earlier this month, Politico's Kathy Gilsinan reported on what she described as a broken pipeline for recruiting young talent into conservative government and nonprofit roles. A senior GOP congressional staffer told her: "Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence. We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots."

Right-Wing Web Traffic Declines

In June, The New York Sun reported that media outlets "built on harvesting clicks from MAGA supporters are fading as President Trump begins his final act in American politics," with web traffic "falling across the board." These declines come amid a broader contraction in digital media traffic driven by changes to social media referral algorithms and the rise of AI-generated search summaries, though the outlets identified by TheRighting experienced drops steeper than the industry average.

The Sun, citing data from Similarweb, reported that 9 out of 10 of the top right-wing websites saw traffic declines between May 2025 and May 2026. According to TheRighting, which aggregates headlines from conservative outlets, all of the top 20 conservative sites it monitors experienced double-digit traffic declines.

The Daily Wire fell 47 percent, The Blaze dropped 46 percent, and The Federalist declined 52 percent. The Washington Free Beacon's visits decreased 38 percent, and the Daily Caller's fell 33 percent.

Signs that the proclaimed cultural shift toward Trump may have been illusory emerged as early as 2024. The Daily Beast media reporter Justin Baragona, drawing on traffic data from media analyst Howard Polskin's website TheRighting.com, reported that Breitbart, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, National Review, the Daily Caller, and The Federalist all experienced significant drops in unique visitors between the 2020 and 2024 election cycles.