Joe Biden Was The Last President of the 20th Century—And the TV Era
Digital and social are replacing TV as America's dominant medium—Democrats must evolve to win
As we continue to reflect on the election result and how to move forward in this new and troubling political era, we welcome guest author Tristan Snell for his take on the changes Democrats must make to win the 21st Century Digital Media age. This piece also appears at TristanSnell.com. - The Big Picture Team
For all the analyses and think pieces on why Donald Trump won and how the Democrats are doomed, the vast majority of such commentaries completely overlooked the most fundamental change affecting politics in America — and indeed, around the world.
The deeper paradigm shift is not about politics per se. It is about media.
It propelled Donald Trump and JD Vance to national office — and it is the primary reason why they won.
By contrast, Joe Biden was the last president of the 20th Century and its TV Era, and if Democrats want to elect the next president, they will need to adapt to the new Digital Era. Immediately.
Joe Biden using a teleprompter in 2024. It went from a standard indispensable tool of the TV Era politician to a point of criticism and weakness.
The internet killed TV
The TV Era is now ending. It began in 1951: the first-ever national live TV event was, fittingly, a presidential address, from Harry Truman. Only nine years later, TV had arguably swung a national election, with the first-ever live televised presidential debate in 1960 between JFK and Nixon.
Since then, American politics has been dominated by the institutions of TV, the set pieces we know so well: presidential debates, White House press conferences, the occasional primetime presidential address, the national party conventions, the Sunday morning talk shows, the exclusive interviews, the late-night talk shows, hosting Saturday Night Live, cable news talking head shows, and the ritual of election nights with their live reporting of results.
TV forced politics to adapt, to reshape itself. Before TV, a national party convention was a series of closed-door meetings to horse trade and cut deals, followed by marching and singing in the convention hall — it was a messy, turbulent process in which the candidate was chosen right there in a four-day period. We now think of that as an anachronism: the dreaded “contested convention.”
Why? Because in 1968, there were literal fistfights on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — and it was all broadcast on live TV. It made the Democrats look fractured and out of control, helping lead to Nixon’s eventual victory that year. Since then, every national convention has looked the same: choreographed down to the millisecond, nothing left to chance, the outcome already decided months before, all to make a shiny perfect surface for the TV cameras.
TV demanded this perfection: it is a hallmark of the medium. Film has many of the same attributes, as did theater before that to a great degree. All aim to present an artificial world, to hide the stitching and the seams, to engage in a form of magic, a sleight of hand. This is the entire goal of special effects — and of makeup and costumes. It is all artifice, and the artifice must be hidden (one must believe that the planet is a planet and not a styrofoam sphere). This imperative extends to the actors and anchors as well. Never let them see behind the curtain. Never break character. Don’t break the fourth wall. Don’t show how the sausage is made.
Digital and social media, however, are fundamentally different — in a way that most of the establishment still has not truly absorbed (1). YouTube and TikTok are not just TV on a smaller screen. Social is a different medium entirely, a successor to TV, a newly evolved species, overthrowing many of the conventions of TV and film. It values authenticity over artifice. The audience is supposed to see everything. Nothing is hidden. We watch creators get up in the morning, watch them in their cars, watch them go grocery shopping, watch them put on their makeup. They speak directly to the camera, as though they are addressing us directly. There is no fourth wall at all.
This also extends to genres that are not quite all the way on the social end of the spectrum — like podcasts. A talk show on cable news is a highly structured affair, with a strict schedule, commercial breaks, and a teleprompter for the host. The host’s words are scripted and edited in advance. The show runs exactly an hour and starts and ends at the same time every time. Compare this with a podcast, where there is often little to no scripting at all, far less editing, a lot of rambling and tangents, and a show time that can vary widely and run far beyond an hour — and yet the listeners and viewers love the format, because it feels like the hosts and guests are hanging out with you having a conversation.
The social/TV differences are even visible in genres that are still technically on the TV side of the spectrum — like reality shows.
Reality shows exhibit many of the same characteristics as digital and social media — they are less scripted, less rehearsed, with a higher value placed on authenticity and raw emotion, with less of a fourth wall. Yes, they have a professional camera crew following them, and the shows are heavily edited — but just as on a YouTube vlog, you see (most of) the cast members when they first wake up, and you see them put their makeup on.
It is thus not surprising that so many reality show stars have done exceptionally well by crossing over to become social media stars (“influencers,” as the establishment business and media worlds call them, condescendingly (2)); they have built massive followings on social platforms like Instagram (where they make branded content just like other creators), and it now seems to be required that they all have podcasts.
Yes, the shows are on TV, but a reality show star has far more in common with a social media star than with a “Hollywood” celebrity from traditional TV or film.
Whether by coincidence or not, reality shows first exploded into mass popularity in 2000 and 2001 — just as broadband internet became widespread, and just before the first social media platforms emerged (MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006). People wanted to watch unfiltered “real” people on screen, and social media technology allowed them to do just that, without the intermediary of a large production studio. Then once the iPhone was first released in 2007, the revolution was on.
But if it’s a revolution, why has it taken so long? Many technological paradigm shifts are not instantaneous but generational — dripping slowly into a society over a 30-year period. We are now roughly in year 23 of a 30-year revolution in retail, for example, moving from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce. And we are now roughly in year 17 or 18 of a 30-year revolution in media.
In other words, we have moved past the midway point and crossed over the great divide — and the media revolution has now pulled politics with it.
The internet killed TV-centric politics, too (3)
There were early signs of the changes to come, of course. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was the first to make heavy use of Twitter and Facebook (and the first to inspire viral videos by YouTubers), and it was part of his appeal to younger, more tech-savvy voters, especially given that Obama was 48 at the time, and his opponent John McCain was 72. But the biggest flashpoints of that election cycle were still all tied up with the major institutions of the TV Era — Obama’s massive rallies and incandescent speeches, Sarah Palin’s disastrous one-on-one interviews with Katie Couric on CBS, and Tina Fey’s hilariously perfect spoofs of Palin on SNL. As wonderful as Obama’s speeches were, they were still scripted and read off of a teleprompter, just as politicians had been doing since 1952 when the device made its political debut at the Republican National Convention.
Yet by the time Donald Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, the digital and social media revolution was in full swing (4), and Trump was weirdly positioned to take advantage of it.
Trump was never a TV Era politician, despite his old age. He was initially a creature of the tabloid newspapers — and someone who appeared on TV as a personality, a celebrity, being interviewed (and interviewees don’t have teleprompters; if their remarks seem canned, it’s because they’re often scripted in advance by PR handlers). Then, of course, he was a reality show star, with its more digital style and tone — and becoming a fairly early adopter of social media. Starting in 2011, Trump began to post more and more like a digital creator, with blunt, provocative takes rather than scripted promotions for his TV appearances.
Trump never had to exist in the scripted paradigm of TV-centric politics, and he immediately shattered many of its rules once he began his run in 2015 — ranting, rambling, unscripted, unfiltered, unhinged, starting late and running way over schedule, often with no teleprompter or freelancing away from its prepared remarks, insulting whole segments of the population and tossing crude and violent remarks at rivals and reporters and audience members.
In the heart of the TV Era, Trump would have been utterly disqualified by the luminaries of the TV-centric media world, who would have deemed him not to be a serious candidate, lacking the temperament to be president. Even in the Late TV Era, this type of top-down rejection from the media was still a very real phenomenon as recently as Howard Dean in 2004 and then Palin in 2008. Yet in the Digital Era that had already dawned and was in full morning by 2015-16, Trump was able to circumvent the TV-centric media entirely — speaking directly to his growing cult of fans by using Twitter and Facebook.
There is often a sense that Trump himself did something to change or realign American politics when he won his first term in 2016 — but the change had already happened, to the media, and only then to politics. Trump was merely the first to benefit from it.
The media revolution has only accelerated in the last eight years, but it is not yet complete — and so Joe Biden, in every way a classic 20th Century, TV Era politician, was able to defeat Trump in 2020, and in an interestingly hybrid fashion. Perhaps the most memorable political moments of that year, prior to the election, were Trump’s catastrophically bad White House press conferences (a staple institution of the TV Era) during the Covid-19 pandemic, and yet it was the viral videos and comedic spoofs of those Trump pressers, especially Sarah Cooper’s on TikTok, that seemed to cement the image of Trump as a bumbling buffoon unable to captain America through the crisis.
By 2024, it was clear that the TV Era rules applied to Biden and Harris (who followed them) — but not to Trump (who flouted them).
The televised presidential debate has been a pillar of the TV Era, and last year featured perhaps the two most crushing defeats of any candidate ever: first, Joe Biden’s performance against Trump in June, and second, Kamala Harris’s drubbing of Trump in September. And yet a strange thing happened: the first debate followed the old TV Era rules, in which the media (and the political establishment in turn) so coalesced around the idea that Biden was too old to run for another term that he felt compelled to withdraw from the race; the second debate followed the new Digital Era rules, in which the voters did not seem to notice that Harris had pummeled Trump.
Under the old rules, a victory like Harris’s over Trump would have led to Harris jumping out to a 10-point lead in the polls (and Trump’s refusal to debate Harris again would have been considered disqualifying by the media). Under the new rules, the polls did not budge, the media mostly refused to deem Trump unfit for office — despite being a 78-year-old convicted felon and indicted leader of the January 6 insurrection, falling asleep at his own criminal trial. And the voters who swung the election likely did not watch the debate at all. Democrats still follow the old rules, and so the old rules were applied to them. Republicans follow the new rules, and so the new rules were applied to them.
Kamala Harris was no exception to this. Harris ran an absolutely magnificent campaign — but mostly rooted in the TV Era and not the Digital Era. She had larger, more exuberant rallies; she and the Democrats threw a far better national convention; she so obliterated Trump in their one debate together that he refused to engage her in another. By any measure of the heart of the TV Era, Harris would have won handily.
Yet we were in the Digital Era (or at best, the Late TV Era), and Harris came up through the ranks as a TV-Era politician. Her social media team did heroic work, and they wisely leaned into the online memes, the coconuts and the bratness of the halcyon days of summer — but Harris herself still used a teleprompter. No freelancing, no tangents. Everything was scripted and choreographed. Executed perfectly, mind you, but scripted and choreographed all the same — in sharp contrast to Trump’s rambling, tangential mess every time he got up to speak at a rally.
To voters in the Digital Era, Trump’s messiness reads as authenticity — and Harris’s crisp professionalism read as fake.
Sadly, this is one of the core lessons and ironies of the Digital Era: fake authenticity will beat out a scripted professional, every time.
What ultimately mattered in 2024? Not that Trump refused to participate in another TV debate with Harris – but that Harris refused to participate in an interview at Joe Rogan’s podcast studio (a defensible decision at the time, but in hindsight, one that may have cost her the election, especially with the men under 50 who have increasingly swung to Trump).
And who ultimately matters in media and politics? Looking at the largest figures in American politics and media shows the revolution quite clearly. In 1994, the most prominent American politicians were Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, and the most prominent American media figure was probably Tom Brokaw. In 2004, it was George W. Bush and Rupert Murdoch — another TV-Era politician, and a mostly traditional media figure. In 2024, the most prominent politician is Donald Trump, and the most prominent media figures are probably Rogan and Elon Musk — a reality show host turned podcaster, and a tech billionaire turned social media influencer and platform owner. And to top it all off, the incoming vice president was, only a little over two years ago, just an author with a large account on Twitter; like Trump, JD Vance tweeted his way to national office.
The revolution was televised, but only after it had already been posted online.
The future of Democratic politics in the Digital Era?
Joe Biden was, more than likely, the last president of the TV Era — and thus the last holdover from the 20th Century political and media world. But what does that mean for the future?
Kamala Harris’s campaign slogan was “We’re Not Going Back,” but she was more right than she realized. We’re not going back: the TV Era is in its final evening phase. And while Republicans have fully embraced this, Democrats seem to resist it (5).
Republicans under Trump have focused much of their campaign energy on digital targeting of previously unlikely voters. Democrats have continued to pour the lion’s share of their campaign money into TV ads — the pièce de résistance of TV-Era politics. Republicans have spent anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion on building a digital media ecosystem in the last decade: this bankrolled Turning Point, CPAC, Prager, the Daily Wire, Newsmax, OAN, Real America’s Voice, RSBN, and more, building up hundreds of digital and social influencers such as Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and Ben Shapiro. If Fox News went off the air tomorrow, Republicans would be totally fine. If MSNBC went off the air tomorrow — or if it gets bought by new owners who turn it into another right-wing network — Democrats would suddenly lose their primary megaphone for reaching the faithful.
If Democrats wish to be more competitive in national politics, this imbalance must be fixed, immediately, with a massive investment in digital and social media — and especially creators. Critically, when it comes to the Digital Era, it’s not just about building networks — today’s audiences want individuals, not institutions; personalities, not properties. In the TV Era, the network made the stars. In the Digital Era, the stars make the network.
But what about the politicians? Well, first, in the Digital Era, the distinction between a creator and a politician is collapsing. Trump and Vance were content creators before entering politics. The most visible down-ticket Republicans are who they are because of social media: Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert never had to suffer through the indignity and invisibility of being backbenchers, because they could tweet their way to national notoriety. Matt Gaetz is now out of office; in the TV Era, his disgrace would have meant a complete exile from public life, but in the Digital Era, he simply slides over to hosting a show on OAN and continuing to post online to his millions of followers. Anna Paulina Luna literally went from being an influencer and activist for Turning Point to landing a Florida congressional seat.
Democrats have their own Digital Era politicians — even if they’ve been inconsistent in embracing them — and they prove that left-leaning politics can absolutely reach an audience in this new world.
For Exhibit A, we need look no further than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Establishment Democrats and TV-Era media commentators mistakenly ascribe AOC’s appeal to her progressive politics — but this misses the mark. More of her appeal is her Digital Era persona and her skill as a social media creator: she is direct, blunt, brash, passionate, not just conversational but confessional (doing posts or livestreams from the hallways of the Capitol or relaxing on her sofa, like she’s just decided to FaceTime you). New York City politics is full of outspoken progressives like AOC; what catapulted her to national fame is her superpower as a creator, as a communicator in the Digital Era. It’s about her persona, not her policy positions.
In a fascinating window into how Digital Era politics really work, AOC herself took to Instagram to ask a question: given that a sizable number of her congressional district constituents cast seemingly incongruous ballots that included votes for her and for Trump, why did they vote that way? A slew of respondents answered that they loved AOC because she’s not a typical or traditional politician, because she tells it like it is, because she supports people like them — and so does Trump, they said.
Voters in the Digital Era want authenticity and realness so badly that they will lunge at it even when it’s entirely fake.
Yet the other critical thing to note here is that Digital-Era appeal is not about political positions or ideology per se (6). There is nothing inherently fascist or authoritarian or right-wing about digital and social media (7). And there is nothing inherently extremist about it, either, lest you see Trump and AOC or Bernie Sanders (8) and think that only far-right or far-left politics play well on social platforms. The Democrats’ other Digital Era rising stars — such as Jasmine Crockett or Katie Porter (9) — are more moderate than AOC. The important thing is personality, not policy.
The core of Digital Era political appeal is tone — or to use the parlance of the social platforms, it’s all about the vibes. Unscripted. Unfiltered. Real. When people say they don’t want a typical politician, they really mean they don’t want a TV-Era politician. They want a Digital Era politician. They don’t want a TV anchor. They want a social media creator.
And it is possible for a TV-Era politician to adapt to the new rules and become a plausible Digital Era figure, but that has happened far more on the right than the left so far.
One good example is Ted Cruz: very much the standard-issue ambitious conservative of the TV Era, up until his 2016 loss to Trump in the Republican primaries, in which he stood at his lectern silent as Trump bullied him, failing to return fire when Trump insulted his wife and when the pro-Trump National Enquirer smeared his late father by falsely claiming he had something to do with the assassination of JFK. After 2016, Cruz learned his lesson, becoming much more outspoken and bombastic on Twitter, and launching a podcast — all allowing him to win re-election in 2018 and 2024 despite well-funded challenges from Democratic candidates with a more Digital Era bent, Beto O’Rourke and Colin Allred. Cruz may not have the crude charisma to be Trump’s successor, but he can certainly have a long career in Digital Era politics.
Or look at the strange evolution or devolution of Tucker Carlson. He was a TV-Era pundit; it usually seemed like Carlson had been promoted to TV directly from a college debate team, hyper-prepared, speaking in three-part arguments, wearing a bow tie. At Fox News, he became a host, and in that flagship of the hybrid Late TV Era world, he combined blunt, bombastic, provocative-for-its-own-sake ranting with a teleprompter. The provocation was still scripted. His prominent role in the Dominion defamation allegations against Fox News (in which he appeared to know quite clearly that Trump lost the election but went spouting the Big Lie and platforming its craziest adherents like Sidney Powell) managed to earn him an exile from Fox News (still at its roots a TV Era establishment even though it has successfully adapted to and in some cases pioneered the new rules; it has been the reality TV of cable news). But it did not matter. Now Carlson made the full transition to an unscripted, unfiltered influencer, with his own show and podcast. And we should not be surprised at all if Carlson emerges as a leading contender for the Republican nomination in 2028 (indeed, the GOP is far more likely to pick a content creator than a veteran politician).
The key for any political figure in the final transition to the Digital Era?
Break your teleprompter.
It was the perfect device for the TV Era. A machine invented to fake perfection in front of the cameras, to make everything as smooth and scripted and practiced as possible. It was for 75 years the politician’s best friend, indispensable, especially at the national level. And now it is probably the worst thing a politician can rely on — all of its virtues are now vices (10).
What does this mean for the future of Democratic politics? There must be a reckoning — a realization of what is truly going on in politics and media in 2025 compared with 1950, a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the Digital Era, its traits, its rules, its leading practitioners. They must be celebrated and elevated rather than scoffed at and condescended to — and there must be a revelation that the imperatives of the Digital Era transcend ideology and policy. Digital is not right or left. It is not moderate or extreme. It is a different axis entirely.
Or to put it in more political terms — the Digital Era demands populism, not professionalism. And populism is more about tone than anything else. It is most associated with extremists and insurgents, on the right and the left, because it has historically been the chosen tool of outsiders who were otherwise shut out of the establishment.
But the Digital Era means that everyone is becoming a populist now. It is inherent to the digital medium: its disdain for polish means a disdain for pedestals generally, for elites, for experts, for traditional institutions.
Even more fundamentally, TV speaks to us from on high; it is an inherently elitist medium, expensive, capital-intensive, something only an exclusive few have been able to command. Digital is literally in our pocket: we now carry a production studio with us at all times. It is a populist medium, radically democratic. If you don’t need elites to produce or to consume information or entertainment or political messages, then why do you need them for anything else?
The challenge for Democrats, then, is to channel this Digital Era populism and to follow its new rules, while still being a party that believes in competent government administration and the power of public servants to do enormous good for all of us and to bring about true American greatness.
That may sound difficult or impossible, but it is not. After all, Trump convinced people to vote for him as a fake populist who’s actually in the service of billionaire oligarchs and foreign autocrats. Surely Democrats can find digital personalities who can be real populists in the service of the people.
Indeed, they already exist. We just need to embrace and invest in them, now, before it’s too late.
I use “digital” and “social” interchangeably throughout this piece as an oversimplification, but there are, of course, some meaningful differences. Digital media is anything delivered over the internet. Social media is digital media with a social component. So digital is not necessarily social, but all social is digital. And if we think of a spectrum, social is at the far end of the digital side, whereas digital media that are not social (e.g. podcasts) would be somewhere a bit further away from the side.
Pro tip: Creators hate being called influencers. But the terminology serves as a handy litmus test. If the POV is from a TV Era or establishment source, they typically use the word “influencer,” and they mean it at least somewhat pejoratively (very much so in the case of anyone coming from establishment media). If the word used is “creator,” it usually means the person actually has at least some understanding of the Digital Era.
FYI: “Internet Killed TV” was the original name of the YouTube vlog of Charles Trippy, who is considered the godfather of daily vlogging, recording and posting his life every single day for a record 3,653 days, from 2009 to 2019. Trippy was right. It’s just taking a generation to play out.
Other interesting trendlines that appear clearly in retrospect: not only has reality TV become one of the dominant forms of linear TV, but within the political space, starting in the 2000s and accelerating through the last twenty years, some of the most trenchant political commentary has come not from pundits but from comedians. Stand-up comedy, in particular — and stand-up as an art form rests closer on the spectrum toward the Digital and Social end, directly conversational and confrontational, with no artifice, no fourth wall. Drop the mic, and you make another joke about it. Sweat on stage, and you make another joke about it. Stand-ups like Jon Stewart were the ideal pioneers for tilting political TV toward the Digital Age — and now with Trevor Noah moving from The Daily Show to his own podcast, the evolution is nearing completion.
And while normally I’m all about the Resistance, this is not the kind of resistance we need.
Indeed, TV Era appeal was not about political substance per se, either, but that’s a different story that has already been well told in the last 50-75 years, going all the way back to Daniel Boorstin’s The Image in 1962.
However, digital and social media have an inherent weakness that makes them vulnerable vehicles for authoritarian propaganda and psyops. It’s the permeability. In the TV Era, in order for the Soviets to push propaganda into our media ecosystem, they would have needed to take over our TV and radio stations and newspapers. In the Digital Era, Putin’s Russia merely needed to hire a team of developers and other minions and turn them loose on the West’s social media platforms (and financially support chosen influencers). The decentralized nature of the digital and social platforms that makes them inherently populist also makes them inherently permeable to foreign influence. I’ll likely return to this in a future piece.
Sanders is an interesting figure in all of this. As many have noted, he was almost the Trump of the Democratic Party — populist, passionate, more to the political extreme. But I would argue that what made Sanders into Bernie-as-folk-hero was not his political positions but his bluntness and inability to mince words, which were liabilities in the TV Era (indeed, Sanders has been in politics since the 1970s) but superpowers in the Digital Era. Or again, as with AOC: there are lots and lots of outspoken progressives on the left, but that’s not what makes Bernie Bernie. What made Bernie into a star was his personality, his ability to communicate. Sanders is not a digital blackbelt the way that AOC is or that Trump turned himself into, but his persona is perfect for the Digital Era.
Or to go back to the Early Digital Era — Barack Obama. His vibe inched toward the Digital Era, even if he was still a mostly TV-Era figure, and he governed as a center-left Democrat. Or to go back even further, Howard Dean, whose appeal was all about his proto-Digital-Era tone — his bluntness, his passion, his campaign’s pioneering use of digital media. Dean won the love of progressives because of his outspoken criticism of George Bush and the Iraq War, but he was ideologically a center-left Democrat. He fell short because he was ahead of his time: if the Digital Era had come a bit sooner, Dean could easily have been president.
This was especially true for Joe Biden, who had taken to using it not only for large, set-piece televised speeches but also for smaller events — bringing him more criticism from the media establishment.
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Tristan Snell is a lawyer, commentator, and fighter for democracy. He served as Assistant Attorney General for New York State, where he led the investigation and prosecution of Trump University. Today he’s the founder and managing partner of the law firm MainStreet.Law, the creator of TristanSnell.com on Substack, author of the bestseller Taking Down Trump, and host of the Tristan Snell Show on Apple and Spotify. You can also follow him on Bluesky, Twitter, and Instagram.
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Pete Buttigieg transformed the role of a Cabinet Secretary by making sure a video camera followed him to each of the
I'm glad you highlighted AOC as someone doing it right. I was thinking of her as I read the article, even before you mentioned her. Other politicians, and their staff, need to pay attention and step up!