The smartphone’s sharding of experience through personal networks favoured platforms, recommendations and peer-linked sources, splintered political awareness, experience and activity. This chapter maps the force and consequences of sharded media’s smashing of mainstream news media’s (MSM) hold on reality. We present the conundrum of Trump for the mainstream, sinking fast in a splintering marketplace of that which was once called news, as their most obvious, yet most perilous of saviours. He embodies the very anger-inducing, troll-baiting shards that felled them in the first place. This chapter maps the MSM’s fruitless attempts to regain control over their hold over reality. By throwing moderators, fact-checkers and other verifiers, at a self-righteous pursuit of an MSM-badged truth, they failed to recognise the reality that they were trying to fix, wasn’t theirs. This only served to entrench a liberal self-deception of a society of the comfortably numb. And, by the 2024 election, the Trump campaign weaponised a new reality sharding force—generative AI—collapsing truth and fiction in new black box media ecologies of impossible provenance. Ultimately, the period between Trump’s victories will be seen as a historical void in the liberal mainstream’s failure to grasp the splintering of realities, reflected in their final despair, resignation, and withdrawal, at the 2024 election result.