Is the Trump Bump over for right-wing media?

Looking back, the drop, which accompanied President Trump’s falling approval ratings, was an important, and overlooked, indicator of the GOP’s looming midterm rebuke.

There’s been a marked change of fortunes since Trump’s first election in 2016, which ushered in a phenomenon called the Trump Bump — a sharp upturn in news consumption across the board and the sudden growth of an alternative, conservative news universe that I predicted would overshadow traditional media.

The downturn of the economy and the Iran war certainly contributed to the president’s falling support. These issues may have also helped the traditional news media, which, rather than cheerleading for the president, offered serious and accurate news coverage.

According to a September 2026 survey by the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of US adults say they have a lot of or some trust in national news organizations — up 6 percentage points from a year prior, though still lower than a decade ago.

Conservative sites, meanwhile, have been struggling, a trend that first received notice this spring. In April, The Atlantic published a story titled “Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble,” writing that the “flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing; it’s utterly collapsing.”

TheRighting, a newsletter that tracks conservative media, found that the 20 most popular right-wing news websites, including Trump’s own social media platform, Truth Social, saw a decline in traffic year-over-year in May. Howard Polskin, a former communications executive and the newsletter’s publisher, gathered the surprising data, concluding that “the descent is accelerating despite major events like the war with Iran which should have attracted visits.”

The sites watched by TheRighting included Fox News, Truth Social, the Daily Wire, Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, Breitbart News Network, Newsmax, Inc., and Blaze Media.The biggest drops in traffic hit The Federalist (-52 percent), the Daily Wire (-47 percent), Blaze Media (-46 percent), The Washington Free Beacon (-38 percent), and the Daily Caller (-33 percent).

Fox News’s Lachlan Murdoch attributed its drop to a “news fatigue” being felt everywhere.

The Los Angeles Times reported on the severity of the “the steep October ratings drop for the conservative-leaning cable news channel. Fox News, which often draws more viewers in prime time than some broadcast networks, saw its October audience levels drop 28% compared to a year ago, according to Nielsen. Its total day audience among viewers ages 25 to 54 fell to 98,000, the lowest monthly level in 25 years.”

If it really was news fatigue, these numbers should have been mirrored across the media landscape. By contrast, CNN and MS NOW saw gains.

Trump, naturally, had his own explanations for the midterm clobbering, namely that he wasn’t on the ballot so there was less interest. On election night, he expressed irritation with the once-loyal cable network, calling one of its hosts, “dumb as a rock,” and criticizing its polling numbers. He complained that Fox spent, “too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats [sic]!”

The Murdoch-owned network hit another sour note when the preliminary “Fast Nationals” ratings came in, showing the network averaged 3.8 million total viewers between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m., far behind broadcast networks NBC (6.5 million viewers) and ABC (4.9 million viewers), and slightly trailing fellow cable networks CNN (3.9 million viewers) and MS NOW (3.9 million viewers).

Fox, however, did beat the flailing, Bari Weiss-led CBS, which had 2.6 million viewers. (According to Nielson, Fox ended up with stronger ratings, beating CNN and MSNBC)

Whether this trend will hold up through the presidential election in 2028 is uncertain. The news organizations on the right that are likely to suffer the longest declines are ones that towed the MAGA line unstintingly.

As Trump’s behavior has become more erratic and his policies, like tariffs and the war in Iran, have split conservatives, the more independent-minded and intellectually diverse news sites, like The Free Press, probably won’t sustain lasting damage.

The midterm results showed that the MAGA movement is a spent force and that in order to survive, congressional Republicans cannot reflexively bend to Trump. They should be looking for new leaders. Some may even move to the middle.

Conservative Republicans and news sites desperately need to get back their followers. It will be fascinating to watch how they try to do this. Right now, this looks like a daunting challenge.

Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of The New York Times, teaches journalism at Northeastern University and is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.