Report: Trump Is Today's 'Shock Jock'

“When Limbaugh came onto the scene in late 1988, he was saying things that resonated with a huge group of people who thought their voices were not heard anymore,” said Gabe Hobbs, a 35-year radio consultant who helped put Trump on the air, in an early-2000s series of radio commentaries for Clear Channel.

“Limbaugh would not only capture that; he’d state opinions for them. Donald Trump appears, to me, to have something very similar going on.”

According to The Washington Post, the popularity of Stern in the 1980s and 1990s spawned schools of imitators: Erich “Mancow” Muller launched from Chicago in 1994; Gregg “Opie” Hughes and Anthony Cumia from Boston one year later. Within a decade, Stern and Opie and Anthony had decamped for satellite radio. In 1996, Talkers magazine estimated Limbaugh’s total audience at 21 million listeners. This year, it was pegged at just 13.5 million — in­cred­ibly influential among conservatives, but no longer shaping the culture.

But between the peak and the valley, the shock jocks changed the way people expected to hear other people talk. Their rise coincided with the growth of “political correctness” on campuses and in pop culture; their decline coincided with that concept’s senescence.

By the late 1990s, it was no longer shocking to hear graphic talk about sex or insults on the radio; conservative talk, at the same time, tore into the details of Bill Clinton’s intimacy. In the Obama years, the speed of cultural change created an opening that only Trump seemed to see.