Here’s a quick dose of light, refreshing Friday schadenfreude for you as we head into the Memorial Day weekend: Raw Story has a post today about the effects Donald Trump’s presidency has had on his champions and supporters at Breitbart, and the numbers aren’t looking good. Pulling data from web site ranking company Alexa, it looks like the conservative blog has been losing readers in droves since Trump’s inauguration, despite former editor Steve Bannon’s high-ranking position in the White House hierarchy.
Quoting Vanity Fair‘s Tina Nguyen, the piece notes that Breitbart has dropped from the 29th-highest ranked site on the internet, back in February, to 281st today. The piece puts forward a couple of different rationales for the conservative mouthpiece’s sudden decline—which mimics, but on a far more dramatic scale, similar losses at a number of right-leaning media outfits, including Fox News—but they mostly boil down to “This is the asshole you’re choosing to defend?”
More specifically, Trump and his controversial actions have now become part of the mainstream, putting Breitbart—a site more accustomed to going on the attack, to say the least—in the unfamiliar role of sticking up for the status quo. Quoting an anonymous former staffer of the site, Raw Story writes, “When you tie yourself to a candidate you shouldn’t be surprised. If the candidate has trouble, you’re going to have trouble. And if your goal is to provide cover for that candidate and the news is about that candidate, it’s going to be difficult to cover the news in a way that’s interesting.” As far as silver linings go, obviously, this one surrounds a cloud of toxic gas, spewed out by factories unshackled from basic environmental regulations by a president who thinks climate change is fake news junk science. But, hey, we’ll take what we can get.