Glenn Beck's TheBlaze is enforcing 20% layoffs on its staff, a major sign of distress, all the more curious because the election of Donald Trump pretty well showed how significant the potential reader base out there might be. After all, most conservative websites are either doing well or holding their own in the current tough media environment. Breitbart doesn't seem to have any trouble hiring new people, as the re-entry of Steve Bannon and maybe Sebastian Gorka indicates. Breitbart has also been expanding its overseas operations. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been hiring, and the Daily Caller seems to be picking up new talent.

So what did Beck in? I can speak only for myself as a reader, but if you ask me, it was Beck himself. The guy just couldn't keep a steady editorial line. He puffed and pontificated, taking himself from Tea Party stalwart to the guy who was always complaining about conservatives – the very thing that did Jeb Bush in. Not to mention he bawled a lot.

Style points aside, his big problem was that in an era of Trump, he didn't like Trump. And it wasn't because he was a swamper, which has a certain logic; it was because he invented himself some biblical apocalyptic vision and cooked up a rationalization from it that Trump is a bad guy. Or something.

According to The Atlantic:

He didn't just oppose Trump. He compared him to Hitler. He warned that Trump was a possible "extinction-level event" for American democracy and capitalism. In an attempt to defeat Trump, Beck campaigned during the primaries for Ted Cruz. Then, when Cruz endorsed Trump, Beck apologized for having supported him.

Well, 'scuse us voters. This guy wasn't interested in going where his readers were; he wanted to play prophet. Now will he play martyr – rejected by his readers and yet somehow correct all along? Does he really think President Trump is secretly building concentration camps?

Why should anyone bother with this? I think Beck's hatred of Trump did him in. I sure as heck didn't want to read his website after stories like that. If he couldn't see why Americans would support Trump (as Sharyl Attkisson was so brilliantly able to do in her book The Smear), why should anyone read his website? Why wouldn't this be a waste of time, given the competition out there?

Rule number one for running any publication is to never insult one's readers. Somehow, Beck thought it was the opposite.