Michael Smerconish has been a familiar voice on the radio since 1990 when he started at Philadelphia’s FM station WWDB. Now the host of The Michael Smerconish Program on SiriusXM and Smerconish on CNN, he sees Donald Trump’s rise as a political figure as similar to that of ideological talk radio hosts in this information era.
“Ideology breathed new life into this whole ecosystem, and Donald Trump was out there biding his time, threatening to run. When he finally made his move, I think Republican voters were ready to vote for someone who reminded them of their favorite talk radio host. That was Trump,” Smerconish told Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin.
On this week’s episode of Mediaite’s Press Club, Smerconish – a former Republican and current Independent – offered an explanation for Trump’s win. “It’s like a parenting lesson, the more that you tell people what they can’t do, what’s intolerable…the more they’re going to rebel.”
He remains critical of the two sides of the spectrum of politically polarized media, especially as it covered the days leading up to the election. “How much easier my job would be if I were one of the ideologues, to simply adhere to whatever the MSNBC mantra of the day might be, or the Fox News mantra of the day,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’ve come to associate moderation with boredom, and that just is not the case.”
He
Smerconish also spoke about his recent monologue on whether Trump changed America or just revealed it, the importance of young men in Trump’s winning of the popular vote, his tentative faith in legacy media in an increasingly divided media landscape, and how the media should cover Trump during the next four years.
Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
So you just came from an interview with Kevin Costner.
That’s pretty wild, right?
Yeah. How did that go?
[Editor’s note: Yellowstone spoiler alert in this paragraph.]
It went well, I thought. And it was really funny because he had invited me to attend a screening last night of chapter two of what he hopes will be a four-part series. And he said, come to a screening. There are only going to be
You’re visiting New York. You live in Philadelphia?
I do, yeah.
Obviously, beyond the fact that it’s convenient to host your shows from there, do you see advantages to not living in New York, where most of the media industry resides?
I do. I like to be removed. I think that it probably influences my
Let’s start with the election of Donald Trump. You have an interesting perspective on this because you served in a Republican administration a couple of decades ago. You cut your teeth on talk radio. You eventually ditched the GOP to become a proud independent and a champion of moderation. What’s your big takeaway from this election and what it says about America?
No, that’s okay, because I had to think a lot about it. So I don’t want it all distilled into this one sound bite or conclusion, but I’ll say it this way. It’s like a parenting lesson, the more that you tell people what they can’t do, what’s intolerable, you must not do this, you should not do this, the more they’re going to rebel. Maybe they would have ultimately come to their own conclusion and rejected Donald Trump. I don’t know.
But I think that the constant browbeating, the combination of the media influence and the four indictments and one conviction, and showing that God-awful joke from Madison Square Garden a week in advance of the election on a loop. And I felt it and I said it. I can’t sit here Aidan,
That’s my biggest takeaway from the election, is that this is a major repudiation of the media as far as I see it because the vast majority of the media has spent nearly a decade now warning about Trump. He goes on to secure the biggest electoral victory of his life. And that was after he went through two impeachments, trying to overturn the 2020 election, January 6th, the criminal indictments, and what was a fairly extreme campaign. Do you see this as a repudiation of the media, the American people basically saying we don’t care about the way you’ve covered him?
In part, yes. But I would be more broad-focused than that. Not just the media, but a rejection of any number of institutions. And by the way, nothing of what I’m saying is meant in defense of Trump’s underlying conduct. I believe that the hush money payment case should never have been brought. The legal gymnastics that had to be undertaken in order for that to get beyond the statute of limitations I thought was very telling. That was the first of the indictments to be brought. I think that it poisoned the water and fueled the perception that this really was political. And I think it
I always thought that the cleanest case, the most egregious case, was the Mar-a-Lago document case, just because they had the combination of the video from the closed-circuit system at Mar-a-Lago and also all the text messages. If you didn’t have a legal justification, the Presidential Records Act or some such thing, and the case got to a jury, I thought it was pretty darn straightforward. But by the time you got to that case, you had to go through the actual trial of the hush money payment case. And I think it really just impacted everybody’s thinking.
And I think it’s no coincidence that his approval numbers surged after he was indicted in that case.
True.
Now, you had a great monologue on your CNN show this week about Trump’s victory. You asked the question, has Donald Trump changed America or revealed it? Which was inspired by the Carlos Lozada piece in The New York Times.
Which I thought was fabulous.
He’s a great writer. Tell us what you mean by that.
In that commentary, and thank you for watching it, it’s funny in the Trump era how we read so much, we watch so much, but there are certain things that hang with you. And one of the things that has always hung with me was Michael Wolff was like the first of the
But one of them that hung with me is he tells a story about Donald Trump in the heyday of Atlantic City if there was one. And Trump’s on a private plane with a group of people, I don’t know if they’re going from New York to Florida or some such thing, but Atlantic City is not in the plan. And Trump proposes a detour that they land in Atlantic City. Somebody else on board says Atlantic City, that’s for white trash. And then a foreign model who’s not identified says, what is white trash? And Trump says they’re people like me, except they’re poor.
And I’ve always had that in my head because long before he ran for office, he’s associated himself with working class people. And then you fast forward to last spring, he was never going to win New Jersey, but he did an event in Wildwood with 100,000 people. And there’s this iconic, I think, image of Trump with a Ferris wheel behind him. And I always just looked at that as the embodiment of Trump and populism that was never fully understood,
So I just think that electorate was so disrespected that there was no way they were going to be told for whom they were going to vote. And they probably came out more so than they might have if they hadn’t had all those forces telling them what to do.
Were you surprised by the results at all?
I was surprised that he broke 50%. I was really surprised by him winning the popular vote because I am one of those people who would often say on radio or television that he has a high floor and a low ceiling. And 2016 vs. 2020, 2016 had a very robust third party. Gary Johnson, Bill Weld as libertarian candidates, movement that never materialized in this cycle. So where the hell was he going to make it up? How is he ever going to get to 48, much less 50? And he did. So I was really taken aback by the breadth of the victory. That he won, is that so jaw-dropping? No, but that he won the popular vote? Huge.
Because,
Right. I think it was a 41% approval rating average.
So he’s never been a particularly popular political figure. In fact, he’s probably, at least in modern American political history, pretty low down on the list in terms of popularity. How do you explain how he managed to get more than 50% of the vote?
So two things. One is some element of begrudging respect, meaning that reluctant Trump voters, the people who say and mean, I really don’t like the guy. Ultimately, he earned some begrudging respect from them because he’s the Energizer bunny. He just kept coming back and coming back and coming back. I think about last spring, early summer when he was on trial here. And the motorcade would go, I walked by Trump Tower last night so I have this in my head, but you’d see him, he’d exit, he’d go down and he’d sit there in court all day long. And then he couldn’t say anything, but he’d walk out and he would quote media sources and so forth.
So I think that was a large part of it. I think that in the end, people had to give him props at some level for coming back from the dead in all of this. That would be
At the risk of being too simplistic about it, there’s also the fact that the Biden administration had a 30% approval rating. 65 to 70% of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track. And just high prices. That’s hard for incumbents to overcome. It might very well have been the case that any Democrat you put up against Trump who was facing those headwinds would have lost.
I agree with that. And I would add immigration to that list. The combination of the economy, the low approval rating for President Biden, factor in now immigration, and it makes logical sense when you look back at it. But then again, you say, but it’s Trump, can he really get beyond, I think he was at 46.1 and then 46.8 in 2016, so I always questioned if he could ever get to 48%. The fact that he got to 50% was really significant.
And one other thing, just on this whole aspect of the disrespect, I live in the Philadelphia suburbs, I’ve spent my whole life in a 50-mile radius in the city of Philadelphia and then those collar suburbs that get so much attention. There was a particular
“You’re an idiot if you’re not.”
Right. And when I saw that yard sign, I talked about it immediately on-air and I said, if people who are inclined to vote for Donald Trump should see that, they’re going to get pissed and then they’re really going to vote for Donald Trump.
You also spoke about how men were the key to Trump’s success. Explain that to us. How do you think he was so successful with young men?
I don’t know if you want to call it dominant media, legacy media, whatever the term that we’re using for old school, conventional media, which includes the big three cable outlets and the networks and so forth, it’s a fragmented world. We all watch different things. I have sons who are in their 20s who tell me about different media platforms that I’ve never heard of. They’re my lifeline to
And I think it’s as a result of him doing the kind of outreach that he did. Scott Galloway, who was one of my favorite television and radio guests, he and I have spoken about the plight of young men, something that I really believe in. I remember in the summer when the DNC was meeting and on television, I was able to put on the screen a page from the platform and it said, here is who we represent. This was like democrats.org, whatever the official website was. And every constituency you could imagine was represented, including women, except men. And Galloway and I talked about it six months ago, like, hey, this is so indicative of how no one wants to go after this electorate.
And then, of course, if you go after that electorate, you’ve got critics who say, you’re pursuing toxic masculinity. And Scott, his response is, no, there’s aspirational masculinity of recognizing that our guys today are lagging behind our young women and someone needs to be their champion. And he pursued that.
There is a lot of reflection now about how the media covers Trump. Which
So I remember well what went on in 2016. That was my first CNN cycle. And I remember that people would be very critical of the network. And they would say, you give him so much time. And my defense at the time was to say, hey, if you’re walking through your living room, this is at a time when I and many others thought, this is never going to last. At some point, this is going to run its course and she’s going to beat him. But I would say to people if you’re walking through your living room and Donald Trump’s on the television, or Hillary Clinton is on the television, for which are you stopping to watch? And they said, Trump. And then I would say, well, don’t blame Jeff Zucker for putting it on a loop.
And then I think there was soul-searching after he was elected and there was this consensus that he’d been given too much free media. Okay, I understand that as well, but then I think the other extreme became one
And I would hear from radio callers who would say, enough already. Let’s get back and talk about the issues. But that was such a battering ram that the media was using to just drive a stake through his political heart. And I think it had the ultimate reverse effect.
As these things seem to do regularly.
So the answer to your question is somewhere in between. And I don’t claim that I’m pitch-perfect, but I think that the approach that I try to take on radio and on television is to be critical of him when he deserves it, which is often, but also to back off and understand some of the issues that give him resonance. Whatever that happy medium is, that’s where I want to be and that’s where I think the media should be.
Does Trump being at the center of U.S. politics, does that make it hard to be moderate?
For me, what it means is that I’m just going
And my answer to him was, well, yeah, don’t forget though, most of the country is like us. Probably fiscally conservative and socially more progressive. The fact that the talking heads and the politicians, which is this whole symbiotic relationship that’s not in the country’s best interest, the fact that they have teams, don’t mistake that for the rest of the country not feeling somewhere in between.
What do you think this means for the future of the media? Because there’s obviously a lot of coverage right now about how this was the podcast election, this was the new media election. And I think we do seem to be entering a phase where the legacy media, let’s call it, is less powerful than ever before, and new media, independent media, is dominant. Do you see that and
Yes, I see it. And yes, it concerns me because the television work that I do is tied to one of those dominant media outlets that I still believe in. I’m old school, when there’s something of a global significance that takes place, I’m immediately on CNN because I continue to believe that the network has this unparalleled footprint that is global. I remember during Covid, we have a second home, and our daughter and son-in-law moved out of New York City and into this second home of ours, and they became like squatters. We had to get rid of them ultimately. But when they finally left, I remember turning on the television and I’m like, what the hell? I can’t get CNN. They had cut the cord. They cut the cord on my cable in my own home, in my own second home.
But I have to say, that was quite a wake-up call because they are young 30-somethings and they don’t watch what I watch. I think that the dust has got to settle. I don’t think it’s going back to where it was, but I’m not sure who’s going to be left standing. In terms of the podcast world, we’re still at a stage where it seems like everybody has a podcast. I’m responsible for
You said in 2018 during Trump’s first term, “I worry that he’s been effective in diminishing the credibility of the media among his constituents.” And that’s something that’s only gotten worse, particularly with now the addition of figures like Elon Musk, who has this enormous platform which he pretty much uses as a battering ram against the media. Is there a way to fight back against that? Is that something that you think is going to get worse during a second Trump term?
The first thing I want to say is that Elon Musk is the media, right? He’s now become the media. And I paid close attention to X in the waning days of the campaign. And it sure seemed to me that he dominated his own platform with his message. Every time I would go online, it was Musk who was at the top of the list. I think that what has to happen is that the media needs to earn back some credibility. And the way to earn back credibility is to be an equal opportunity offender and to be critical of the left and to be critical of the right. To be critical of Donald Trump when he deserves it, but not to make it your mainstay of existence. You’re only going to help him.
The issue and the trap that a lot of the
I think it’s the easy way out. How much easier my job would be, how much less I would have to work if I were one of the ideologues. God, that must be great, to get out of bed and to literally be provided talking points on the left or the right, do no investigation, no exploration of nuance, and simply adhere to whatever the MSNBC mantra of the day might be, or the Fox News mantra of the day.
That’s not where my head is and that’s not what I choose to do with my time. So here’s the shortcoming, because you’ve properly assessed the media world in which we live, which is all polarized, but I think it’s also lazy on the part of a lot of programmers who believe that there’s nobody out there who can bring it and be in the middle. And believe me, there are 100 more just like me, but they’re rising talent and they need to be shown, hey, you don&
You can still be compelling, but moderate.
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know why this narrative has taken hold that it’s all vanilla. What are you talking about?
Mark Thompson is running CNN now, and he is tasked with basically taking the network into the future because obviously the linear model that has been very profitable for CNN for years is in decline. And there is a pretty urgent need to develop a digital future, which he seems to be quite focused on. Are you confident that he will be able to do that at CNN?
So, you are more knowledgeable about these affairs than I am. I truly know, about the inner workings of CNN, what I read in Mediaite. I’m just not connected. I’m not on the 9:00 call. I don’t have the email. I don’t get the memos.
Is that deliberate?
No, I’m not saying that in a disparaging way at all. I’m very proud of my association and affiliation. I just don’t want anybody to think that I’m in the know because I’m not in the know. So my fingers are crossed. He strikes
I know that in my own world, managing both a SiriusXM radio program and a CNN show and having a website and having my passion project, which is my daily newsletter of which I’m so damn proud, you’ve got to be doing all these different things. You’ve got to have a successful digital footprint. And I look at the success of The New York Times in that regard. Why shouldn’t it be CNN? So I think that the elements are there for success.
You also have The Mingle Project, which is an interesting idea for these times. Can you tell us about that?
I’ll explain it this way. I do a lot of public speaking. I speak to private groups. I speak to public groups, usually comprised of radio listeners or television viewers. I enjoy
And I had an epiphany moment. I interview lots of authors on my radio program, and I had an epiphany moment after I’d interviewed Bill Bishop on The Big Sort and Gene Twenge on iGen and Jonathan Haidt on The Anxious Generation, and I started to see all these books as telling and the political science as telling a similar story about how in the Internet age, largely younger Americans have connected, but in a very impersonal way, while we’ve seen a spike in polarization and while we’ve also seen a spike in all of these really horrific mental health metrics.
And I think that the reason is that we’re not having enough communal experience. We’re no longer the joiners that our parents and our grandparents were. And I’m out there really as an advocate
You’ve blamed polarized media as well for how we got where we are. In particular, and I very much agree with this, but the rise of partisan talk radio, which really started with the syndication of Rush Limbaugh in the 90s. Is that a good way to explain not just polarization, but the rise and endurance of Donald Trump?
Yes, because he was the first embodiment of a talk radio figure. And by the way, he did not come out of the gate with the support of the talk radio community, because those traditional conservative talkers, they were all dismissive.
He was an apostate too.
Absolutely. But they all came around when they realized he was the guy. This is part of a much larger, longer, and important conversation. But the short version is that when I came of age three decades ago in Philadelphia on what was then a flamethrower of a radio station, 50,000-watts of power, but typical of big talk market all across the country, every one of the hosts was a local host. They were all characters. The only glue that held
But let’s be fair. AM was dying. Look at them now. They’re looking for a life raft from Congress, of all things. They want to be bailed out by Congress. And because of the gravitation toward FM, where there was no static, here came Rush, and he was the savior. And Rush was a great entertainer. His fodder was politics, but at his core, he was a great, masterful entertainer. And overnight, I saw it flip. And now every station, including mine, wanted to have Rush and a stable of his imitators.
Now in ’96, Fox News comes online. They take a page out of the talk radio handbook. MSNBC struggled. Phil Donahue was their first host of any stature. They couldn’t make it work until they replicated on the left what he was doing on the right. So it breathed new life into this whole ecosystem. And Donald Trump was out there biding his time, threatening to run. And when he finally made his move, I think Republican
Now social media has basically filled a lot of that void, and podcasts as well, if people aren’t listening to talk radio anymore, they’re watching The Daily Wire podcasts or Joe Rogan or they’re on Twitter. How much do you think the information environment fueled by Elon Musk on Twitter contributed to Trump’s win?
Hugely. I think it was a very big factor. Maybe a combination of Musk and from what I’m reading, Barron Trump giving his father advice in terms of where he should go and spend his time because it’s hard to understand the lay of the land when there’s so much competition out there. I just don’t know how much of it is going to last because the market share is just not big enough for all the sources that we have.
There’s been a lot of prognosticating about what a second Trump term would look like. I had Piers Morgan on this show last week, and he said that he thought Trump would govern as a moderate with his legacy in mind. And the week before that, I had Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic on.
Two good guests.
Thank you. She predicted that he would govern like an autocrat. What do you think? If I can get you to
I’m going right down the alley that I was in 2016 and perhaps making the same mistake, but I acknowledge it. So what I said after 2016, which I did not see coming, I said, come on, he’s Studio 54 Trump. “Two Corinthians,” we know he doesn’t believe any of this stuff. But he then became more ideological. And I was surprised by how he governed. I would like to think, as Piers does, I think I’m closer to Piers than I am to Anne Applebaum in thinking that he is now thinking toward how does it all look in the books when it’s over? What belies some of that thinking are the people that he’s already naming to move around him.
But I don’t know that Susie Wiles will allow him to go down the extremist road. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part. I hope that he’s not doctrinaire. He’s not ideological. He’s the least ideological president of my lifetime. I’ve been paying close attention since 1980 with Reagan’s initial election. He’s all transactional. It’s all transactional. So I’m hoping it will be transactional Trump, not tethered to very extreme politics. I’ll be back in