{"id":1998,"date":"2026-08-12T07:41:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T07:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1998"},"modified":"2026-08-12T07:41:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T07:41:14","slug":"hindsight-is-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1998","title":{"rendered":"Hindsight Is 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an edition of The<\/i> Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n

Read more The Democrats Can\u2019t Just Laugh Off \u2018Woke 1\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2014in politics, business, and education\u2014faced a dilemma about how to respond.<\/p>\n

A few concluded that they should resist the president\u2019s demands of fealty and collaboration. Another group tried appeasement, seeking accommodation that would allow them to otherwise operate as usual. And some looked at the landscape and concluded that something fundamental had shifted in American politics. They saw the MAGA movement as a lasting change, and decided that their best move was to make their own radical shift to adjust.<\/p>\n

As I wrote last week, predictions of a Trump-driven realignment of the electorate now look extremely shaky. The groups that he was able to attract to the Republican ticket two years ago\u2014young voters, especially men; Hispanic voters; and Black men\u2014have turned solidly against him and against GOP candidates in polls ahead of the midterms. Voters who were unimpressed with Joe Biden or Kamala Harris and who heard Trump\u2019s promise of stopping inflation are now angry about the president\u2019s shrugging at higher prices and inflationary war in Iran. With some distance, the 2024 election looks less like a decisive turning point and more like a fluke. But that realization has come too late for those who reshaped themselves for a reality that has proved ephemeral.<\/p>\n

David Ellison, who, along with his father, Larry, is a friend of Trump\u2019s, decided to use the new Trump administration as an opportunity to build a huge media conglomerate. First, his company Skydance merged with Paramount. Taking control of CBS News, he installed Bari Weiss as editor in chief, seeking a leader who would appeal more to both the White House and to conservative viewers. But Weiss\u2019s makeover has so far looked like a flop: 60 Minutes<\/i>has hemorrhaged staffers, and the Evening News <\/i>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\u2019t appear to actually be appealing to either MAGA viewers or legacy CBS watchers.<\/p>\n

Ellison has already moved on to an attempted merger with Warner Bros., reportedly promising administration officials deep political changes at CNN if the deal was approved by federal regulators. Ellison got approval, but now that deal is in trouble anyway. Facing an antitrust lawsuit led by the attorney general of California, Paramount agreed to pause the merger until a trial next year. Experts are divided on how likely Paramount is to prevail, but if the merger doesn\u2019t close by September 30, the company will owe Warner Bros. shareholders $7 million every day until it does. In a New York Times<\/i> column last week, Ellison complained that people are drawing incorrect inferences about his politics, but his private views are beside the point: What ispublic is Ellison\u2019s willingness to play to the Trump administration\u2019s politics to build an empire.<\/p>\n

CBS News is not the only media interest to discover that courting MAGA news consumers is not a guarantee of success or growth. The Times <\/i>also reported recently on how a range of right-wing influencers has seen audiences shrink drastically. Their travails appear to reflect Trump\u2019s own difficulty in keeping his 2024 coalition together: The most pro-Trump figures have seen some of the biggest drops, amid ideological battles inside the MAGA coalition over Israel and the war in Iran, while more Trump-critical figures on the right have sometimes gained.<\/p>\n

Other corporate leaders also bet on Trump. Elon Musk attempted to become something like an unelected deputy president at the start of Trump\u2019s second term. That experiment ended acrimoniously, and the men\u2019s relationship has been on and off ever since, but Musk\u2019s reputation is now inextricably connected with Trump\u2019s. X has shed users. Tesla sales have struggled, in part because anti-Trump consumers have turned against Musk and also because Musk has been distracted by other ventures, such as SpaceX.<\/p>\n

These decisions to throw in with Trump were notable because many institutions treated his 2016 win as an accident of chance, and were happy to publicly resist him. In doing so, though, they seem to have opened the door to more direct corporate involvement in politics\u2014and with it, greater vulnerability to political pressure. The idea that corporations had gone \u201cwoke\u201d by embracing DEI and other progressive causes in 2020 and 2021 was to some extent a marketing ploy by the companies, but it infuriated Republicans and made them targets for Trump\u2019s second administration. Trying to protect themselves, corporate leaders now may have overcorrected, mistakenly assuming a lasting MAGA regime.<\/p>\n

Read more The Key to Understanding the Traditionalists<\/a><\/p>\n

Within right-wing politics, many individuals and organizations also leapt into Trumpism. 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\u2014and 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. Many mainstream Republicans remade themselves as MAGA Republicans, but the results have not always been good. Just ask Senator John Cornyn, who lost his primary to an even-more-MAGA challenger this May.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Politico<\/i>\u2019s Kathy Gilsinan reported on the broken pipeline for bringing new foot soldiers into conservative government and nonprofit organizations. \u201cEveryone 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,\u201d a senior GOP congressional staffer told her. \u201cWe have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the risk of betting big on a long-term realignment: If you wager wrong, politics overall will snap back quickly, but you will be stuck with the consequences of your decision for much longer.<\/p>\n

Related:<\/b><\/p>\n

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