Fox News media critic Joe Concha observed that, "So basically WaPo has one-tenth the daily active users it had four years ago. Resistant media appears to have failed. But hey - at least they don’t have Taylor Lorenz and Jen Rubin to offer up any more."

I think Rubin is actually making the right move. As I wrote on Monday in my piece regarding the death of information gatekeepers, organizations like The Washington Post are actually an antique that operate on a system that, to be honest, is becoming outdated very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that it caught the legacy media off guard. 

(READ: The Age of the Information Gatekeeper Is Dead)

Independent journalists handle the news nowadays, and most attention from the legacy media is given toward its commentary, so Rubin is — in my opinion — making a smart move by getting off the sinking museum piece and creating her own boat to stay afloat. 

She may have done it for ideological reasons, as Sister pointed out, but businesswise, this is a very intelligent move. 

But what's not intelligent about it is the ideological reasoning behind it, and it's this problem that will ultimately come back to bite her. Rubin, like other publications identical to hers, cater to a niche audience, the "never-Trumper." 

Now you might be thinking calling people who hate Trump a niche audience is a bit off, as there are clearly millions of people who do, but let's stop and look at the culture for a second. 

Millions of people might hate Trump, but there are far more that don't thanks to a noticeable shift in the culture. Both of these parties are dwarfed by people who honestly don't care one way or another, so long as the person in charge makes the economy decent, keeps the streets safe, and keeps taxes low. 

A lot of these people don't even vote. They sure as hell aren't going to shell out money to an anti-Trump organization. 

So let's focus in on the people who actually hate Trump enough to obsess over him. Not dislike or hate him, but obsess over him to fork over cash to a person or organization that vows to work against him. It's hard to determine that number because a lot of these organizations are private and don't disclose their numbers. 

However, we can get some rough idea. Back in 2021, "The Bulwark," the organization founded by never-Trumper Bill Kristol, said they had 16,000 subscribers to their website when they decided to introduce a subscription model to their site. 

For a website dedicated to opposing Trump and anything MAGA related, this is actually not bad, however, this was during a different era. Biden had only been in office for a few months, and leftists and anti-Trump folks were drunk on January 6. As time passed, this anti-Trump sentiment began to fade and the fearmongering around Trump wore down as the economy got worse and Trump only became more popular as he was attacked. 

Let's also add onto this the fact that other organizations have sprung up around that time that do the same thing, and they all ask for subscriptions as well. This is likely going to tear into the subscription pool as many people aren't going to be willing to shell out money to multiple anti-Trump sites. They'll have one they like and just go with that. 

So now, Rubin is introducing her new organization into an already occupied space. 

I have no doubt the initial excitement will cause sign-ups. I have no doubt there were people out there that subbed to WaPo specifically for her, but this excitement will wear off and subs will disappear. If Trump does well in his second term and truly does help the people, this sub pool might diminish further. 

This isn't Rubin's only problem. 

Rubin's anti-Trump nature is so rabid that she's willing to flat-out say some crazy things that can make even people on the left cringe. In order to keep up the rage bait, she's going to have to flat-out go so extreme that she ends up lying about situations or people. Back when Rubin was on top of the world and WaPo was a top player in the narrative game, she could get away this. 

But as I wrote in my aforementioned article, that age is dead. Now, anything extreme Rubin or her people put out can immediately be debunked, and that debunking will be very, very public. The embarrassment will be constant, and this won't be good for subs. 

So while, Rubin is living in the future in terms of her craft, she's operating on an old set of rules that don't apply anymore. Rubin's only hope is that Trump's second term is a monumental failure, but it's not shaping up to be. Time will tell, of course, but the odds aren't exactly on Rubin's side. 

The anti-Trump audience is actually very small, and Rubin is trying to tap into a sentiment that not a lot of people share. Moreover, once Trump is gone, organizations like Rubin's will have to find ways of tapping into a leftist base that will effectively be "anti-Republican" at all costs. 

However, if things keep going in the direction they are, "anti-anything" at all costs is also going to be a losing strategy. Trump seems to be bringing Democrats and Republicans together in various ways, and the corners we used to retreat to are starting to smooth out a bit.