Donald Trump’s presidency ended in chaos and disgrace, as a deadly pandemic ravaged the country and a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. In the years since, he has doubled down on the “rigged election” lies that helped incite the insurrection and proposed a nakedly authoritarian vision for the country. He’s also been indicted four times, convicted on 34 felony charges, and ordered to pay $355 million in a civil fraud suit and $88.3 million after being found liable for sexual assault and defamation.

But on Thursday night, Trump once again accepted his party’s nomination for president after a series of runaway victories in the Republican primaries. His meandering address to the Republican National Convention featured more than 20 falsehoods, ramblings about his assorted grievances, repeated lies that Democrats stole the 2020 election — and a vow that “we’re never going to let that happen again.”

Trump owes his party’s total capitulation in no small part to the fervent support he received from the right-wing media apparatus. Outlets like Fox News are a powerful force within the GOP, and they could have tried to move on from the former president after he left office — but instead they bent the knee and helped him glide past his legal calamities, steamroll his opponents, whitewash the January 6 insurrection, and return to power.

Rupert Murdoch, whose right-wing media empire includes Fox, the propaganda network that aided Trump’s political rise and served as an adjunct of his White House, privately signaled in the days following the January 6 insurrection that Trump’s time was over. “Fox News very busy pivoting,” he told a former network executive a few days later. “We want to make Trump a non person.” Murdoch instructed Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott: “Best we don’t mention his name unless essential and certainly don’t support him.”

This did not happen. Trump’s relationship with the network and the broader Murdoch empire went through a series of twists and turns over the next several years, including a reported “soft ban” from the Fox airwaves. But Murdoch never closed the door on a Trump revival — in the increasingly fractured right-wing media ecosystem, that would have left his outlets vulnerable to attack from rivals promoting themselves as more supportive of the former president. Instead, his network, in pursuit of the market share that Trump’s supporters bring, followed its competitors back into Trump’s fold.

Rather than break with Trump, right-wing conspiracy theorists, led by then-Fox star Tucker Carlson, concocted a January 6 counternarrative in which the rioting Trumpists were gentle patriots who had been victimized by the deep state, the Democrats, and the media. This revisionist history ultimately won over the Republican base, demolishing the initial consensus that a violent attempt to overturn an election was unacceptable.

Each Trump indictment also represented a potential offramp for his right-wing media supporters. Instead, they responded by rallying to him, baselessly denouncing the charges as politicized prosecutions akin to those in a “banana republic” whose real targets were their own Trump-supporting audience members.

By reinforcing Trump’s personality cult, his media allies helped make it impossible for his rivals to gain traction. When Trump began campaigning for president in March 2023, his core message was that he is an avatar of retribution against corrupt elites who are targeting him to get at his supporters, including the unfairly maligned J6 “hostages.” That aligned perfectly with what the Republican base had been hearing from the right-wing media for years, cutting off potential avenues that other candidates might have used to win over voters.

Trump ended up crushing his primary opponents, who spent the final days of the primary complaining about how his dominance of the right-wing press had hamstrung their campaigns. And with Trump triumphant, Fox and the rest of the right-wing press returned to their roles as his propaganda force.

The right-wing media concludes the Republican National Convention closer than ever to the party’s center of power. Their fixations are at the core of the vision articulated at the RNC, and would-be GOP leaders must truckle to their whims. Trump’s running mate decision amounted to a proxy fight between candidates backed by Murdoch and Carlson; the latter emerged triumphant when the former president settled on Carlson’s favored choice, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.

Now the right’s propagandists will spend the next few months doing everything they can to ensure victory for the Trump-Vance ticket. And if that ticket falls short, they’ve paved the way for another January 6-style attack on democracy. That effort would be unhindered by Republicans like former Vice President Mike Pence, who Vance replaced because he is more willing to put Trump’s interests over the Constitution. And it would have the full support of the right-wing media apparatus that powered Trump from national disgrace to the cusp of the presidency.