This chapter starts by reviewing the history of American news media since 1789, focusing on how new production technologies and business models led to a comparatively unbiased, objective journalism in the mid-20th Century. The difference today that audiences have become far more polarized. This has enabled market segmentation strategies in which each broadcaster avoid competition by pandering to a different political viewpoint. More recently, the rise of the Web has accelerated the rate at which new political messages can be invented, tested on audiences, and eventually refined to the point where mainstream outlets are prepared to broadcast it. The question remains how effectively large news organizations and Web platforms can suppress information they disagree with. The chapter explores when and to what extent todays markets permit this.

Chapter 2 provides a brief history of the Republican Party – which explains in part how it became the Party of Trump. It describes the Republican demographic, how it differs from the Democratic demographic, and how it was possible for Trump essentially to take over what only recently was an establishment conglomerate. One better known for its institutionalist orientation than its outrageous attacks on political norms – norms that in most cases go back to the beginning of the Republic. The chapter further explores the links between the Republican Party and the house that Roger Ailes built, that is, Fox News. As the book makes clear, the importance of Party media, and for that matter Party Money, to the Trump phenomenon is impossible to overestimate. Above all the chapter begins to explore the party’s remarkable fealty to a man who demanded it with every fiber of his being, but who at an earlier moment in Republican Party history would have been dismissed with the flick of a wrist.

The chapter singles out two senators, two governors, and four Fox News heavyweights as having played especially important parts among the president’s enablers. The two senators – Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and inveterate Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham – were remarkable for the prominence, persistence, and importance of their fealty. The two governors – Florida’s Mike DeSantis and Georgia’s Brian Kemp – were standouts for standing strong in Trump’s corner, no matter the rising numbers of Covid-19 cases in their respective states. And the four Fox News heavyweights – Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity – were striking for their staunch and some would say slavish clinging to the president’s coattails. As with every enabler, most notably those singled out by name in this book, Trump’s presidency, and even his subsequent electoral viability, would not have been possible without them.

This section introduction introduces the theoretical concept of “collusion” in language studies, with reference to James Comey’s testimonial of what it is like to be “caught in Trump’s web.” In spite of themselves, those interacting with Trump often find themselves playing along with their designated role when their turn arrives to make a verbal contribution. Scholars of language have referred to dynamics like these as “collusion,” a kind of joint action that, in language studies, concerns the often-unwitting ways in which people coordinate and synchronize aspects of what they are up to in a speech event, playing into one another’s script while achieving a loose consensus about what is going on. Conversational collusion characterizes Trump’s congenial relationships with Fox News hosts, as well as the apparent lack of resistance when Trump enlists those around a conference table in performances of fealty to him. The chapter concludes by foreshadowing the work of this section’s chapters, concerning ritualistic routines of male in-group talk, and the ways in which collusive laughter and applause seem to ratify Trump’s authority.