This weekend, all of President-elect Trump flew his best boys to attend a UFC event at Madison Square Garden. On the way up, they ate and posed with McDonald’s, which HHS nominee RFK Jr. called “poison” just a few days earlier.
Smash cut to:
The entire crew included RFK Jr., his sons Don Jr. and Eric, potential DOGE co-chairs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and DNI nominee Tulsi Gabbard. In the context of the Democrats’ anxiety over finding the “liberal Joe Rogan,” everything about the event seemed to loudly affirm Republican’s alignment with this particular brand of masculine culture.
Over on the left, political commentators are still debating the role of “The Groups”- influential non-profits, academics, etc. – in the future of the Democratic Party, fueled at least in part by this op-ed by former Harry Reid and John Fetterman staffer Adam Jentleson.
“In politics, winning elections is the moral imperative. You go into this business to change people’s lives for the better. That means changing policy, and to change policy you have to win. Those who would rather lose elections so that they can feel better about themselves leave the real suffering to the people they claim to fight for. No one wins when we lose. It is time to start winning again.” –The New York Times
A winning strategy has to be more heterodox than the interest groups will allow. Many candidates who overperformed in swing districts were, simultaneously, economically populist, culturally conservative, anti-regulation and anti-corruption, reflecting the complexity of voters that the groups try to sand down. Working-class people feel cheated by major corporations, yet Amazon has been extremely popular — far more so than the federal government. Americans blame billionaires for economic unfairness and want to tax them at higher rates, but also look up to them and think they’re good for the economy. By wishing away these complexities, a coalition-first mind-set produces many candidates who are the inverse of what voters want — people with the cultural sensibilities of Yale Law School graduates who cosplay as populists by over-relying on niche issues like Federal Trade Commission antitrust actions.
Get ready for this debate to dominate discourse on the left for roughly the next two to four years.
Meanwhile, President Biden is riding out the last few months of his presidency by being the Joe Biden we’ve all become all too familiar with this past year.
The latest ad from Coca-Cola serves as a Rorschach test for your perspective on AI as a tool to either enhance or destroy the creative industries.
I was going to make a joke about Steve Jobs but then I realize that this is actually how I dress now so I’ll just leave it here.
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