Consent of the Governed
…and the dog that didn’t bark
Bryan Zepp Jamieson
July 18th 2026
Trump’s prime time ‘big speech’ about saving American democracy Thursday drew a total of 580,000 viewers. That’s about one in every 600 Americans. You would have to go back to the days of Truman, when maybe one in 50 households even had a television, to get numbers like that.
Two of the major networks, ABC and NBC, didn’t air the speech at all. CBS, which has a well deserved reputation for being servile to Trump, aired part of the speech, and then cut away, ironically just after Trump demanded that his FCC lift the broadcast licenses for ABC and NBC. Fox and MSNow carried part of the speech and then cut away—MSNow to fact-check the lies, Fox because they realized Trump was doing himself no favors. Newsmax ran with it, of course and as for OANN…oh, who the fuck cares? They probably ran it. They have nowhere to go, and when Trump goes down, they probably will too.
The average ratings for the combined stations that ran the speech probably ran into the tens of millions combined. And if there are any Trump supporters normally watching ABC or NBC in the first place, they would have switched to Fox or Newsmax to watch the speech, right? So it’s safe to say that not only did half the available stations not air the speech, but the remaining stations saw their ratings depressed because they did air it. I know that I normally watch Jen Psaki’s show, and when it went to Trump, I went and watched Netflix instead.
Even more curious was the fact that aside from a few relatively isolated whines, the MAGAsphere was pretty quiet about a situation they normally would be screaming of censorship by the enemies of their beloved leader. (One clear sign of a cult is when the leader is pure, noble, above reproach, and also has enemies everywhere).
Fox News, which promoted the notion of election fraud for years before the defamation suits started landing, had this, and this only, to say about Trump’s speech on election fraud: “We are not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the President’s statements and claims at this time.”
Among elected Republicans expecting catastrophe in the November midterms, the reaction seems to be “Nobody watched it? Hmm. Just as well, really.” It was “The dog that did not bark in the night.”
Trump claims 82% of Americans think the 2020 election was stolen, but polls show the number is 30%, and I’m guessing the actual number is lower because to admit Trump lost fair and square would make a person a pariah in the GOP. Did that 30% (or smaller number of true believers) raise hell about the speech not being aired? They did not.
That nobody watched the speech is telling. That very few complained of censorship is damning. This whole episode shows how weak Trump’s grasp on the reins of power has become.
I’ve been saying for some time that when support for Trump collapsed, it would be rapid and a very dangerous time. Like the Soviet Union in 1989, Trump still looks powerful and dangerous, and his supporters appear unified and resolute. But looks are deceiving. In 1988, I was working in a nightmare job for an outfit that was corrupt, incompetent and overbearing, and I told a coworker that I expected the Soviet Union to collapse within ten years. When he asked me why, I told him it was because the whole damn country was being run like our employers’ shop. I got raised eyebrows from other players in a near-future inline game when I referred to Leningrad as Saint Petersburg, then its pre-revolutionary name.
Trump is about where the USSR was in 1989. Still looks powerful and very dangerous, but completely rotten on the inside, and more importantly, losing the consent of the governed.
Consent of the governed. There’s a reason why that phrase played such a key role in the American revolution, and indeed is a factor in most revolutions that go anywhere (most don’t, of course, or just make things worse). If a ruler or government loses that, they are finished. At the start of the American revolution, less than one in three colonists supported secession, and many of those simply wanted responsible and local government while remaining under the crown. It took a fair number of British military and political blunders to move that needle significantly, but when it did, it was over for the British.
Similarly, in the Soviet Union, a similar collapse signaled the end of Soviet rule. Dismayed by an increasingly lousy economy that make it hard for people to feed, shelter and clothe themselves, and military misadventures such as Afghanistan, support for the regime simply collapsed in a matter of months. And thus the most repressive and seemingly impregnable tyranny in the history of the world just vanished overnight, with hardly a shot being fired. One day, the wall came down, and everything changed, everywhere all at once.
It should be noted that in both examples, it took decades for the two countries to recover even to the point of life that made revolution inevitable in the first place, and America is going to face some rough times when Trump and his fascist backers fall, but it will, in time, at least steer America from the course Trump has it on now. And that may save many lives.
Trump is at the fin de siècle of America’s foray into fascism. What lies ahead will be both dangerous and difficult, and there will be suffering and privation.
But it’s still better than what five more years of Trump offers.
