In his piece published on Sunday, Biden said the U.S. should be “proud that our democracy withstood this assault” and suggested the nation commit to remembering the Capitol Riot each year on its anniversary. His op-ed notably did not mention President-elect Donald Trump by name.

It also came on the eve of Vice President Kamala Harris certifying the 2024 election results on Monday, with Biden noting she would “preside over the certification of her opponent’s victory in the November election.”

“Four years later, leaving office, I am determined to do everything I can to respect the peaceful transfer of power and restore the traditions we have long respected in America,” Biden wrote.

He added that the election would be certified “peacefully” in Congress and that he would be present for the inauguration of the “incoming president” on Jan. 20.

President Biden has similarly scolded Trump and his supporters for the Capitol Riot several times in the past. In 2022, on the first anniversary of the riot, he said Trump “held a dagger at the throat of democracy.” President Biden echoed that sentiment on Sunday, telling reporters at the White House that Trump was a “genuine threat to democracy.”

The president, in his WaPo op-ed, said the nation “cannot accept” a repeat of what happened four years ago.

“Thousands of rioters crossed the National Mall and climbed the Capitol walls, smashing windows and kicking down doors,” Biden wrote. “Just blocks away, a bomb was found near the location of the incoming vice president, threatening her life. Law enforcement officials were beaten, dragged, knocked unconscious and stomped upon. Some police officers ultimately died as a result.”

Officer Brian Sicknick, who was on duty at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, died about eight hours after the riot from what the medical examiner said were natural causes due to two strokes. Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed while trying to break into the Capitol.

Four years later, Biden said “we cannot forget” the events of Jan. 6. “This is what we owe those who founded this nation, those who have fought for it and died for it.”

The post President Biden Rips ‘Unrelenting Effort’ to Erase Jan. 6 Capitol Riot History in WaPo Op-Ed appeared first on TheWrap.

Either way, the numbers are stark. MSNBC’s total primetime audience has fallen a shocking 55% from November 4 through December 15, according to the latest Nielsen figures released on Tuesday.

CNN has faced a similar drop, a 46.7% decrease, while Fox News has seen its primetime audience grow 10.7%, according to Nielsen.

The reasons for the drop are being widely debated on social media, inside the cable news networks and in the media ecosystem in general. Some viewers clearly feel generally disappointed in the outcome of the election. Others are still angry at the network itself, whether for suggesting erroneously in the days before the election that Kamala Harris was nearing the winner’s circle, or because Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski visited Trump in Mar a Lago to mend fences after. Still others might simply be taking a respite from the news and will return after Trump takes office — as insiders at MSNBC contend.

Claire Potter, professor of history at The New School for Social Research, told TheWrap that to some MSNBC viewers, the election outcome feels like a bait and switch.

“It’s a sort of odd conjunction of what cable news channels have offered, which is, ‘You can trust us — come be part of our community. You’re safe here. We will not only keep you informed, but we will keep you organized and energized to defeat your opponents,’” she said. “That’s what’s coming in, and … the audience is buying it, hook, line and sinker. And then when it doesn’t work out, they get angry.”

Paired with the precipitous drop-off in linear viewership — with streaming growing to a record share of 41.6% for November’s TV viewing, per Nielsen’s Gauge report — Potter said she’s unsure whether audiences will “return in the kind of numbers that the [linear] corporations want,” pointing to MSNBC being one of several cable assets that NBCUniversal will spin-off into a standalone, publicly traded company.

Oliver Darcy, founder of the media newsletter Status, wondered if some viewers have permanently turned to other news sources, from podcasts to YouTube channels to newsletters.

“Something broader’s going on,” he told TheWrap. “Some people are depressed. Others feel betrayed. Some are tuning out for the holidays. It can be a cocktail of things happening here.”

Darcy himself is an example of a former CNN journalist taking audiences with him to his new venture. “[Cable news is] definitely facing increased competition that they haven’t seen before. It’s going to hurt them at the end of the day,” he said. “If I’m getting your attention, I’m taking it from someone else.”

With broken trust and an avalanche of alternative news sources available, MSNBC’s recent decline could spell more trouble ahead for the cable news establishment.

But maybe it’s temporary…

The thinking inside MSNBC is that viewership will pick up in the new year after Trump’s inauguration, according to an insider who spoke to TheWrap. The ratings drop falls in line with historical patterns after a Republican presidential victory — including Trump’s first win in 2016 — according to this individual. But whether that bears out remains to be seen.

MSNBC brought in an average primetime viewership of 1.34 million in 2024 leading up to the election, but the total primetime audience has fallen 55% to 601,000 viewers, according to Nielsen figures through Dec. 15.

Christina Bellantoni, director of USC Annenberg’s Media Center, believes the MSNBC audience is just taking a break and will return. “People want good, solid reporting. They want reporting that aligns with their own ideology and they just want to tune out at the moment,” she told TheWrap.

But Darcy said that could quickly change if Trump starts making provocative moves. “Let’s say Trump starts going in and deporting people,” he said. “I have a hard time believing people won’t turn on cable news for that moment. If Kash Patel is FBI director, there is going to be a lot of newsy stuff that will get people to pay attention.” 

The shift away from traditional media

MSNBC might be in for some reinvention, whether that leads to layoffs or bolstering its streaming arm, as legacy media finds itself in a “precarious position,” Bellantoni said. The shift away from traditional media outlets has given an opening to newcomer centrist cable network NewsNation, which, in its third year, just outpaced MSNBC’s weekend programming for seven hours in the key 25-54 demographic.

But the main competition is coming from YouTube and podcasts, as Bellantoni called the 2024 presidential race the “podcast election.” YouTube, which is quickly becoming the go-to platform for podcasts, drove 67 million hours of election coverage viewership and it’s not slowing down. While the move to finding news via podcasts or social media has been largely attributed to younger generations, Bellantoni said “a lot of people of all ages only get their news from vertical video they are swiping past.”

While MSNBC was the most-watched cable news network on YouTube in 2024 with 3.1 billion views, there’s serious competition coming from less traditional shows on the platform. Bellantoni noted that an interview on “Meet the Press” doesn’t benefit a politician as much as sitting down with a podcaster the politician likes.

This point is further underscored by Trump’s three-hour Joe Rogan interview — which became the biggest episode in the show’s history — and the finger-pointing that ensued after Harris declined to adjust her schedule to participate in one of her own. Many saw that as a fumble given Rogan’s working class listeners are exactly the kind of voters that went for Trump in big numbers. She appeared on Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” instead.

“Those little clips can be shared the same way a television interview can be shared, but the actual entry point for that is much more intimate in somebody’s ears, and it allows for somebody to really talk at length, as opposed to being questioned by somebody that either has training as a journalist or has a journalistic mission in mind: 1) to make news and 2) to verify new information,” Bellantoni said.

“People are exhausted”

While the MSNBC ratings drop is comparable to what happened the first time Trump was elected in 2016, Potter noted the aftermath of the 2024 election “lacks the energy of 2016 where anger quickly turned into action.” 

“I think people are exhausted, and I think they’re looking for people to blame,” she said. 

That blame is piling up on MSNBC, which viewers and pundits say failed to adequately spotlight the anger and frustration in middle-class and Latino voters over issues like inflation and immigration. For liberals, Trump’s re-election doesn’t compute with the trust they put in commentators like Rachel Maddow, whom Potter says is imbued with a “kind of supernatural power to make things OK, when no newscaster can make something OK [or] can make the government OK or make politics OK.”

I think people are exhausted, and I think they’re looking for people to blame. – Claire Potter, professor of history at The New School for Social Research

“People often believe that their media consumption is a way of participating in politics, and to a certain extent, symbolically, it is, but practically speaking, it isn’t,” Potter said. “The desire to pull back to say, ‘All right, I’m done with these people — they didn’t get me the outcome I wanted’ is a way of finding someone to blame, when, in fact, there were so many factors that went into Donald Trump’s re-election.”

Bellantoni echoed Potter’s sentiments, saying some left-leaning viewers are “hands in the air, fed up with everything” — a frustration that was only further fueled by Scarborough and Brzezinski’s meeting with Trump. “There’s a little bit of that, ‘You spend two years effectively being the opposition to this guy, and now you’re gonna kiss butt.”

But she noted that Harris supporters may be taking this time to “totally disconnect” in an effort to avoid getting the “outrage meter going with every breaking news alert,” opting to wait until the inauguration to tune back into politics.

We’ve been here before

There doesn’t seem to be any panic over the ratings decline at MSNBC. A ratings dip was always expected at the network after Trump’s re-election, the individual close to the network maintained, and is on par with the drop in primetime ratings seen after Trump’s 2016 win, as well as President Joe Biden’s debate with Trump during the summer of 2024.

While 2016’s total day audience only dropped 25% in the week following the election, primetime viewership was down 41% month-over-month after Trump’s 2016 win, and the network saw a similar drop-off after George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, when MSNBC saw a 49% decline. 

The ratings dips go both ways, as Fox News saw similar declines in viewership following Democratic presidential wins, including dropping 49% after Biden’s election in 2020. Fox News also saw declines after Barack Obama’s two presidential wins, dropping 37% in 2008 — which also saw a 40% decline for MSNBC — and 50% in 2012.

In 2016, MSNBC averaged 1.09 million primetime viewers through the Sunday before the election, and dropped below 1 million average viewers — hitting as low as 600,000 viewers during the last week of December — for each week through the rest of 2016 before rebounding to its pre-election levels by January, which averaged 1.16 million viewers. Viewership grew in February with an average 1.49 million viewers and, in March 2017, MSNBC averaged 1.71 million viewers — up 17% from the combined 1.46 million total viewers in September and October 2016.

Despite pay TV households dropping 28% from 2016, MSNBC’s primetime audience through the Sunday before the election in 2024 was up 21% from 2016, so interest was certainly high ahead of the Harris-Trump showdown.

When Trump returns to the Oval Office in January he’ll certainly kick off another flurry of news items — he’s promised to pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists in his first minutes in office. The question before the network and media pundits is, will people flock back to MSNBC to digest the news, or have they migrated to new media for good?

Sharon Waxman contributed reporting to this story.

The post MSNBC Viewers Still Haven’t Returned Post-Election – Will They Ever Come Back? appeared first on TheWrap.

Ellen DeGeneres and wife Portia de Rossi didn’t wait for Trump to be sworn in again before moving from California to the Cotswolds in the U.K. —  and they’re not alone.

Emmy-winning trans actress Laverne Cox confided to Variety that after the election, she and her friends are researching cities in Europe and the Caribbean for a place where they’ll feel safer.

 “I don’t want to be in too much fear, but I’m scared,” she said. “As a public figure, with all my privilege, I’m scared, and I’m particularly scared because I’m a public figure. I feel like I could be targeted. I think that they spent close to $100 million on anti-trans ads. It’s deeply concerning.”

Kirsten Schaffer, executive director of Women in Film, told TheWrap that, as a lesbian in a long-term relationship with her partner and a mother of two, getting married is on her mind.

“It’s keeping me up at night [worrying] for myself and the wider community, especially the transgender community,” she said. “There were more guardrails last time: [Trump] didn’t have the House, Senate and judiciary. And he has Project 2025. I was concerned before, but now I’m really concerned.”

The fears that Trump may enact some of the policies laid out in Project 2025, such as stripping the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from “every piece of legislation that exists,” are widespread, said a dozen LGBTQ individuals TheWrap spoke to. Others are fearful that the Supreme Court may try to roll back the right to gay marriage. Many spoke of the fear of being targeted, particularly because they work in the high-profile entertainment business. 

“This erasure isn’t symbolic — it’s part of a systematic effort to strip LGBTQI+ people of all legal protection from persecution, discrimination, and violence,” wrote Ma’ayan Anafi of the National Women’s Law Center in an explainer about the conservative manifesto.

It might not be too much to describe the current emotion in the trans community as panic. A poll in February — nine months before the election — showed that nearly half of all transgender people were considering leaving the country.

“I think there will be a much bigger exodus from America this time around, especially if Trump 2.0 is the disaster that it seems like it’s going to be,” predicted screenwriter Brent Hartinger, who left the country in 2017 after Trump was elected the first time.

Searches for leaving the country surged after the election

In the first 24 hours after Trump’s win, searches about how to move to Canada, Mexico, Ireland, New Zealand, or Portugal dominated Google’s Top 25 Searches. 

Several of the people TheWrap spoke to have at least considered leaving the U.S., but not everyone has the financial wherewithal to pick up and start over in another country. 

Rod Carrillo-Lundgren, a former television executive turned travel consultant, noticed a spike in traffic for his LGBTQ+ immigration resources following Trump’s election win. While each of his clients have different motivators for leaving the country, he has noticed a couple of central themes for the community. 

“What I think is a unifying theme is that they’re not just thinking about it for themselves, they’re thinking about their loved ones and community,” Carillo-Lundgren told TheWrap. “A lot of people are either LGBTQ+ themselves or it’s their child or partner, and they have friends who are scared as well. They’re wanting to find a home where they can see a safe, inclusive future with possibilities.”

One gay couple who did emigrate, Hartinger and his husband Michael Jensen, who left the U.S. in 2017, have become “digital nomads,” spending 1 or 2 months in each country to work around visa limitations. Hartinger told TheWrap that in the week after the election, his blog about being a traveling ex-pat gained 1,000 new subscribers, and currently stands at 10,000.

How worried should people be?

Most of the gay men that TheWrap spoke with seemed to be adopting a “wait and see” approach, with the hope that a second Trump term wouldn’t be that bad. For one thing, there are a number of prominent gay members of the GOP, such as conservative Trump backer Peter Thiel and the president-elect’s Treasury Secretary pick, Scott Bessent, pointed out Gay Film Festival founder Marc Huestis.

“I don’t really think [Trump]’s that homophobic,” said Huestis, who was a friend of slain gay rights politician Harvey Milk and was known as the “Impresario of Castro Street” for his classic Hollywood programming at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre.

Writer and comedian Bruce Vilanch acknowledged “a certain level of hysteria” in L.A.’s LGBTQ community in a phone call with TheWrap. “I don’t think it’s as dire as they’re saying it is, but I understand,” he said.

A Hollywood publicist who spoke on condition of anonymity said he wasn’t sure whether the panic was justified or not. “I genuinely don’t have a sense of how real some of these risks are, and what might be hyperbole,” this person said, adding that they feel relatively safe in California. “That could be naïve,” he admitted.

“We naively feel that we can’t move backwards,” in regards to gay rights. “But we’ve seen how successfully they’ve rolled back women’s rights in ways that five years ago we could not have imagined.”

The trans community has more reason to worry

The same February poll by the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) that showed that nearly half of all transgender people were considering leaving the country, found that about 4,500 people, or 5% of the 92,000 people surveyed, said they had already moved because of anti-LGBTQ legislation.

“I don’t really feel that concerned about my rights,” said Huestis, who is gay. “I do really feel for trans people, because it’s going to be awful for them. I saw those anti-trans commercials, they were really effective, but disgusting. That tagline of ‘Trump is for you, Harris is for they/them,’ was probably the most effective line of the campaign.”

Deborah Zahal, who immigrated to the U.S. from Scotland 25 years ago, began to search for a safe haven for her transgender kid once whispers of Trump’s return to office started swirling in 2022. Seeking to protect her out and proud trans son Del, she investigated Portugal and Mexico as potential landing spots.

Del’s primary motivator for the move is the fear of becoming a target, and they are already careful. “I dress up like a clown to go to the mall,” Del, who identifies as gender-fluid, joked to TheWrap. 

Though the 19-year-old understands that moving out of the U.S. could better protect their freedoms, Del is still wary of leaving queer friends behind.

Following Trump’s reelection in November, several corporations have expressed their financial support for the former president, including tech giants Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg. Del said that this rhetoric and financial commitment has made them anxious to remain in the country. 

“It’s terrifying,” Del said. “People that I thought were smarter than this are bowing down to some guy crowned as president… Honestly, it makes me question if I am the one in the wrong.”

Staying Put, to Fight

Still others who share the widespread anxiety in the LGBTQ community say they intend to stay put and fight. 

Rob Epstein, the two-time Oscar-winning co-director of “The Times of Harvey Milk,” told TheWrap, “We stay, we tell stories, and we resist through our work. At least, that’s where I stand right now.”

Vilanch — legendary as a writer for Oscar hosts from Billy Crystal to Whoopi Goldberg and Jon Stewart — also plans to stay.

“I can’t speak for Hollywood as an industry, but for independent filmmakers like myself, this is how we live and breathe,” said Epstein. “Ellen DeGeneres might have the resources to relocate to another country, but most of us don’t have that kind of privilege — or, maybe not even the inclination.”

But others point out that the shift rightward is happening across the globe. So moving might not be the safe haven they imagine.

“What’s happening in America — the turn to fascism or at least illiberalism, the increased penchant for violence — is clearly happening in more places than just the U.S. There are no easy answers,” said Hartinger. 

Still, leaving the U.S. was “the best decision of both our lives by far,” he said. “So far, we’ve lived at least a month in at least 30 different countries. and it’s been incredible.” He’s written a screenplay based on their nomadic travels.

Cox said she fears the same kind of gay bashing that occurred in Germany in the 1930s as the Nazis took power. “There was a thriving community of queer people in Berlin pre the rise of Nazism. They attacked Jewish folks. They attacked immigrants, they attacked queer and trans people,” she said.

While getting out of the U.S. might sound appealing, it’s more complicated than it sounds. Besides visas and being able to make a living, trans men and women also need continued access to health care and hormones. 

And as other nations, including Germany and Japan, see a public shift to more conservative values as measured in a July survey by Statista, the options narrow. 

“This is not an American problem. This is a world problem,” said actor and comedian Jason Stuart, referring to far-right leaders like Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. Stuart, whose credits include Nate Parker’s “Birth of a Nation” and Sean Baker’s “Tangerine,” has considered moving to Canada, but said, “I’m not leaving. I love this country.” 

Vilanch told TheWrap, “I’m not happy with the turn of events. Obviously, life goes on, but I’m not running off. I’m staying here and willing to do what’s necessary to maintain the other side.” 

“It’s a privilege to live in this country, and we’re going to go through a really rough time in the next four years with Trump,” said Stuart. “But we have to wait it out. I would love that privilege to be able to go to another country, but that isn’t the opportunity for all of us.”

“I hope to one day come back to the U.S. if we do end up moving,” Del said. “I hope that this is just a weird hive mind, something’s in the air, I don’t know, but I hope it gets better eventually, and if it doesn’t, then we’ll find somewhere else.”

Sharon Waxman contributed to this story.

The post Panic in Hollywood’s LGBTQ Community: Some Weigh Emigration Ahead of 2nd Trump Term appeared first on TheWrap.

X, in the two weeks since the election, has seen U.S. downloads increase 27% compared to the prior two week period, according to data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm. And those new downloads have been critical for X.

The platform has seen a wave of disenchanted left-leaning users, celebrities, and media pundits ditch the app following the election, after Musk publicly backed Donald Trump — and spent more than $100 million to help his campaign. Many of those users have jumped over to Threads, the X-like platform owned by Meta, and Bluesky, which has been dubbed “Blue Heaven” with its recent influx of anti-Trump and anti-Musk users.

Despite those lost users, X’s user base has held steady in recent weeks — thanks in large part to new people joining the platform as others have left. X had 25 million daily active users in the States as of Tuesday, according to Sensor Tower’s research, which is the same amount it had a week after the election.

For comparison, Threads, according to Sensor Tower’s data, had 11 million American DAUs on Tuesday, and Bluesky had 622,000. Bluesky’s running user tracker shows the app has more than 21 million users on Thursday, but that is a global figure and does not specify if that reflects daily, weekly, or monthly users. Overall, Bluesky’s daily user base has increased 131% following the election.

A rep for Threads told TheWrap the app has pulled in 15 million new users in November and recently surpassed 275 million monthly users, but declined to share a daily user count for U.S. users.

Many of the high-profile users who have left X, like MSNBC’s Joy Reid, have made it clear they left the app because of the Musk-Trump alliance. Others, like Gabrielle Union and Don Lemon, have pointed to X’s updated terms of service as a key reason they left the app.

X recently changed its rules, requiring users to file lawsuits against the company in Texas — either in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas or in state courts in Tarrant County. The changes went into effect last week.

While those changes may have scared off some users, from a macro standpoint, X hasn’t seen a user exodus following the updated terms of service.

“X worldwide mobile app DAUs have remained largely unchanged from 11/15-11/17 compared to the prior seven days (11/8-11/14), indicating that there has been a minimal effect on app usage related to its terms of service changes,” Kara Lee, a brand and digital advertising analyst at Sensor Tower, told TheWrap.

The post Elon Musk’s X Offsets Lost Users With 27% Spike in Post-Election Downloads appeared first on TheWrap.

“The Democrats are trying to stack the Courts with Radical Left Judges on their way out the door,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Republican Senators need to Show Up and Hold the Line — No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day!”

Trump’s post followed Manhattan prosecutors, led by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, requesting to postpone his sentencing on 34 charges of falsifying business records related to payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels. He was initially set to be sentenced on Nov. 26, but that was put on hold earlier this month after a joint request from prosecutors and Trump’s legal team.

“The people deeply respect the office of the president, are mindful of the demands and obligations of the presidency, and acknowledge that defendant’s inauguration will raise unprecedented legal questions,” prosecutors wrote to Judge Juan M. Merchan on Tuesday. “We also deeply respect the fundamental role of the jury in our constitutional system.”

In a statement shared with The New York Times, Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesperson who will soon serve as the White House communications director, called the decision a “total and definitive victory for President Trump and the American people.”

Cheung added: “The lawless case is now stayed, and President Trump’s legal team is moving to get it dismissed once and for all.”

For Bragg, who spearheaded the prosecution against Trump earlier this year, his decision to request a postponement was due to “limited and unappealing” options, as the Times put it: “He could have either dropped the case, a move that would have alienated his liberal Manhattan base, or proposed some way to pause it, potentially intensifying Mr. Trump’s ire and drawing a legal challenge.”

The post Trump Tells Republican Senators to ‘Hold the Line’ After DA Agrees to Postpone His Sentencing appeared first on TheWrap.

In a matter of weeks, the social platform has enjoyed rapid growth as left-leaning X users — including prominent media pundits and Hollywood celebrities — flee Musk’s app. The reason? Trump, who Musk publicly backed and spent more than $100 million to help get back into the White House, won the election.

Now, to boycott the Musk-Trump alliance, disenchanted X users are turning to Bluesky as their new “Blue Heaven,” as “Sons of Anarchy” actor Chad Lindberg put it.

For those who haven’t explored Blue Heaven yet, here’s a taste of what’s on the app:

“Star Wars” star Mark Hammill joined the app on Sunday. He announced his arrival by sharing a photoshopped newspaper dubbed “The Resistance” (Issue #1) with his picture included. The “paper” includes a write-up that says Hamill is “known for his sharp wit and unwavering support for progressive causes.”

Hamill’s X account, where he was frequently critical of Trump and shared his support for Kamala Harris, hasn’t been active since the day after Election Day. His Bluesky account has nearly 500,000 followers by Tuesday morning.

Other celebs who have made the switch include: Gabrielle Union, who announced her exit from X with a photoshopped letter on Friday, Stephen King, Ben Stiller, who posts a lot about his New York Knicks, and Barbra Streisand.

There’s also a laundry list of media personalities who have taken their talents to Bluesky. The Washington Post’s Jen Rubin, MSNBC’s Katie Phang, former MSNBC host Medhi Hasan, MSNBC’s Joy Reid, and former CNN host Don Lemon. They’ve all had a fair amount to say about Trump, the election, and Musk, since joining Bluesky.

Bluesky is also the new home to a number of politics-focused X users, like former NBA player Rex Chapman and “Brooklyn Dad.” Chances are, if you used X to get political news in the past, these guys made it into your feed one way or another. Now they’re on Bluesky, talking about the need to “fight fascism” and not “normalize” the next Trump administration.

Of course, there are a lot of non-famous users jumping over to Bluesky too. Data provided by Sensor Tower, a market research company, showed Bluesky’s daily active users jumped 62% in the week following the election. That growth continued this week, with Bluesky saying it reached 20 million users on Tuesday.

Here are a few of those “Resistance” members on Bluesky:

And Bluesky users who search for what is going on with Musk or Trump on the app are hit with interesting results — mostly posts bashing the two billionaires. The first two posts when searching “Musk” on Tuesday showcased two posts saying “F— Elon Musk” with a few hundred re-shares each. Another popular post that was recommended when searching for “Musk” said the Tesla boss “appears to be walking proof that penile implants don’t work.”

It’s a similar barrage when users search for “Trump” on Bluesky. Users will see posts from George Conway calling the president-elect “incompetent” and “malevolent,” for example, and the third post recommended when TheWrap searched “Trump” was the following joke from comedian Gabe Sanchez:

“Look, I’m not saying all Trump supporters are Nazis but all Nazis are definitely Trump supporters.”

In short: Bluesky is a safe space for disaffected X users to go and share their anti-Musk and anti-Trump thoughts. It’ll be worth seeing if the app can sustain its post-election momentum and build a formidable alternative to X, which Musk has said is experiencing “all-time high” usage in the past two weeks.

The post Bluesky Is Becoming ‘Blue Heaven’ for ‘The Resistance’ to Trump and Musk appeared first on TheWrap.

The Verge’s boss made his comment to Oliver Darcy’s Status website on Sunday, while also calling Musk a drug-user who twists the “algorithmic knobs of an influential right-wing echo chamber.”

Patel, in his interview with Status, didn’t share much of an explanation on how the Musk-Trump alliance poses a huge threat to freedom of speech in the U.S. The biggest issue, Patel pointed out, was Trump picking Brendan Carr as his FCC chairman, which the president-elect did on Monday. Carr has previously criticized Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which acts as the broad legal shield that blocks platforms like X and Facebook from being sued for what users post.

Here was the key section of Patel’s answer to Status:

“To be as clear as I can be, the second Trump administration with Elon Musk embedded within it represents the most direct and sustained threat to the First Amendment and the freedom of the press any of us will ever experience. If you’re a media executive or editorial leader and you haven’t met with your legal team to understand the current landscape of First Amendment threats, let alone the ones to come, you’re already behind. Get on it.”

Two years ago, when Musk bought the platform then known as Twitter, Patel warned him that “everyone crying about ‘free speech’ conveniently ignores that the biggest threat to free speech in America is the f—— government, which seems completely bored of the First Amendment.” Patel added Trump and President Joe Biden have “identical policy positions” on Section 230, and that they were both interested in curtailing the ability for platforms to censor content as they see fit.

Another interesting slice of Patel’s interview on Musk: he told Status the U.S. “now has an unelected defense contractor sitting in the White House doing ketamine and twiddling the algorithmic knobs of an influential right-wing echo chamber while fulminating against traditional standards-based journalism.”

Patel also called for journalists to get off of X — a move that many have pulled in recent weeks, following the election.

“Why is anyone working for Elon Musk for free? Get off that s—, it’s all fake anyway and he’s getting more out of it than you are,” Patel said. “Building a real audience is the media skill; figure that out and you’ll have a career. We might even get to have an industry.”

Patel hasn’t been active much on X lately; his last post is a repost of a story from The Verge in July. The Verge, on the other hand, is still active on X — the tech-focused outlet has posted five times on Monday.

The post Elon Musk Is an ‘Unelected Defense Contractor … Doing Ketamine’ While Directing Trump, Says The Verge EIC appeared first on TheWrap.

The event marks a return to the venue where Trump staged a massive rally in October, which was marred by a comedian’s bad joke about Puerto Rico. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” an attempted reference to recent news accounts of Pacific ocean flotsam that appears to be growing.

Trump is a longtime friend of UFC President Dana White, and he has appeared before at UFC events, where it’s anticipated he will receive a strong welcome from a crowd that includes much of his base supporters. White spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2016 and this year. White also attended the Trump victory party in Palm Beach.

The appearance will cap a week that saw Trump adding cabinet nominees and working to launch his second administration in January.

Trump has frequently attended UFC and WWE matches.

In 2007, Trump participated in the “Battle of the Billionaires” storyline feud against Vince McMahon. Trump then headlined WrestleMania 23 that year.

The post Donald Trump Expected to Make UFC Appearance at Madison Square Garden appeared first on TheWrap.

The Compton rapper has finally given his reasons for declining to endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential election.

Snoop, who once was vehemently anti-Donald Trump, said he wanted to bring people together.

“I’m not looking for separation, I’m not looking for division — I’m looking for people to come together,” Snoop said in a clip circulating on Saturday. “And I just want to say this: When all of the hoopla was going on with the voting, notice how I was nowhere to be seen?”

“I wanted it to be like that,” he added. “’Cause I don’t believe in separating people. I believe in bringing us together. … If you’re picking and choosing, now I gotta make people mad at me, because I chose this or chose that. I don’t choose neither one.”

Snoop said he was not aligned with any political party, and underlined that point with a reference to his 1996 song with Tupac Shakur, “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted”: He said he represents “the motherf***ing gangster party.”

The footage is from the unveiling earlier this week of Snoop’s new jewelry line, Lovechild, at a Hollywood boutique.

Snoop Dogg indicated a change of heart toward former nemesis Trump earlier this year in an interview with The Sunday Times. “Donald Trump? He ain’t done nothing wrong to me,” Snoop Dogg told the UK media outlet. “He has done only great things for me. He pardoned Michael Harris.”

Harris, a cofounder of gangsta rap label Death Row Records, received clemency in 2021 from Trump after he spent 33 years in prison on drug charges.

Before that, Snoop had a different stance on Trump.

In a 2017 music video for the song “Lavender (Nightfall Remix), Snoop Dogg was depicted pointing a gun at a clown dressed like Trump. After that, in an interview with Billboard, the rapper listed a laundry list of complaints about Trump.

The post Snoop Dogg Explains Why He Didn’t Endorse A Presidential Candidate appeared first on TheWrap.

The progressive think tank and polling firm surveyed 13,404 Americans ahead of last week’s election for its report out Thursday. The results showed that for the month leading up to the 2024 presidential election (Oct. 5-Nov. 3), 48% of the likely voters were in favor of Trump as opposed to 47% for Harris.

However, when those data points were broken down based on the participants’ so-called news attentiveness, the numbers indicated that “support for Harris decreases as news consumption decreases.”

For those who said they read “a great deal” of political news, 52% were leaning Harris and 46% for Trump. On the opposite end of the spectrum, those who self-identified as reading “none at all” were only 32% likely to vote for Harris with Trump at 51%.

Down the middle, “a lot” of news was 50% Harris, 47% Trump; “a moderate amount” was 46% Harris, 49% Trump; and “a little” was 42% Harris, 49% Trump.

A separate survey pool from October also tracked potential voters’ legacy media consumption versus their social media intake. In that study, participants who said their news attentiveness was “a little” or “none at all” tended to get their news from Facebook and YouTube, as opposed to cable news or print publications.

Of course, Trump ultimately won the electoral vote, 312-226, as well as the popular vote on Nov. 5. The Republicans also won control of the House and the Senate.

Many political pundits and others accused expert pollsters of having broken polling strategies after preliminary results indicated Harris was up before the election. Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer, for example, vowed to fix her data collection process after her uncharacteristic miss.

Data for Progress describes itself as “a multidisciplinary group of experts using state-of-the-art techniques in data science to support progressive activists and causes.”

The post Trump Voters Were Less Likely to Pay Attention to Political News Than Harris Supporters, Polling Shows appeared first on TheWrap.