Fight Back! Why Republicans must defeat their defeatists if they want any hope of success in the midterms
"Not afraid."
The midterm elections are about 3 months away. Retaining the House is a longshot but not totally out of reach. Protecting Republicans’ Senate majority is going to be important for the next two years and the Presidential election that will come after that. There are lots of people whose lives will be affected in real ways by whoever their governor ends up being.
It’s really important that we win the midterms, or that we at least do well. There seems to be a lot of discussion about what has gone wrong in the first Trump administration, the “MAGA Civil War,” what are we going to do next. I wanted to write this piece on what we need to start doing right now to achieve our most important near-term goal, the only thing people should be discussing and working towards in the next 3 months: Success in the midterms.
During the midterms, the GOP is going to have to run on its domestic agenda successes: Record high deportations, record high reductions in crime, the mass termination of anti-white and “woke” policies in government. I believe the greatest threat to our midterm chances come from increasingly loud group of conservative influencers, podcasters, and commentators who tell potential voters that these domestic achievements are not happening, that their leaders have betrayed them, that they have already lost, and that they must either accept that they are powerless or work to destroy their own side to in order to provide an opening to correct these fatal mistakes.
In short, I think the greatest threat to the GOP is defeatism and defeatists.
In my Election Night 2024 victory essay, released the minute that the election was called for Trump, I bemoaned the fact that the rightwing coalition that had just reelected Trump was overwhelmed by confusion, insanity, and lies. Kyle Rittenhouse, who was almost locked up for life over bogus murder charges by liberal government officials, stated that he could not vote for Trump in good conscience, effectively telling people they should let liberals retain control of the federal government. “There is something wrong with people,” I declared, and if the problem wasn’t corrected it could turn into a major issue.
There is still something wrong with people. The problem hasn’t been corrected. It’s turned into a major issue. If anything, I underestimated how bad it would get. It is obvious to me that conservatives (at least online) do not have strongly held beliefs or a good grasp of their situation, that some of the biggest figures in conservative media are pursuing a fundamentally defective strategy to achieve their goals without regard for our overall position, and that their counterparts in politics and governance have allowed this problem to reach catastrophic proportions by responding with passivity and accommodation.
Rightwing media personalities have internalized that they can benefit themselves short-term by damaging our position in long-term ways. It doesn’t really matter why these people do these things, what matters is stopping them, and you’re only going to do that by making it clear that they will never achieve their goals in this way.
Blessed aren’t the peacemakers in conservative politics today. I want you, the person reading (or hopefully listening to using Substack’s text-to-speech feature) this, to understand exactly what this behavior is, why it is objectionable, why it is not enough to mollify the people who engage in it with policy concessions, access, or money, and why, in fact, if you attempt to do this you are going to lose the election. I want you to understand that Republicans are not going to win if the public sees them bribing these people, Republicans are going to win when the public sees them beating these people.
Last month, I attacked the rightwing commentariat’s response to a controversial quote from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in his recent interview with Jake Tapper about the Trump administration’s recent victory on “Temporary Protected Status,” a legal designation that allowed foreign nationals to have what was, up to this point, indefinite work authorization and protection from deportation. The Trump administration had recently won a court case confirming that it had the ability to end TPS:
TAPPER: So more than 350,000 people from Haiti and Syria who have lived and worked legally under TPS. Will you be deporting all of them, will they be all deported back to their home countries, Haiti and Syria, and when will these deportations start? Will it be immediately?
MULLIN: Well Jake, first of all, Temporary Protected Status was never intended to be permanent. And there’s a lot of people that came over here 15, 20 years ago underneath TPS that’s already changed their status. The whole time these individuals have been here underneath the temporary protected status, they could have applied for a visa, they could have applied for lawful permanent residence. These individuals have a couple of choices here. They can try to apply for a permanent residence here, they can apply for a temporary visa if they choose to or they can choose to go back. And if they want to go back, we’ll help them with that. We’ll actually give you a plane ticket, plus roughly $2,100 to help you re-establish when you get there, but temporary protective status, according to the courts and in its name itself, is not permanent status.
I thought the answer was pretty straight-forward: The legal authorization for these people has ended. They can apply for a different program or leave of their own accord, but they cannot stay as-is.
Unspoken but hanging over Mullin’s remarks were the Trump administration’s recent successes in curtailing legal immigration. An article from NPR on the end of TPS laid it out:
“There is no TPS to green card pathway,” Schulte [Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an “immigrant advocacy organization”] said, adding that claiming asylum is something that can mostly only be done within a year of arriving in the country. Other potential pathways could be marrying a U.S. citizen.
But this Trump administration has also curtailed or slowed many pathways to legal status, or used them as a venue for immigration officers to conduct arrests and deportations.
DHS had also, for more than six months, paused processing all immigration applications of countries on a travel ban list. Haiti, Syria, Venezuela and Afghanistan and other countries with terminated TPS designations were on that list. Recent court rulings have ordered DHS to resume reviewing these paused applications, but progress has been slow.
“To the extent that there may be some other pathways, this very same administration has also banned them,” Schulte said. “These are the very same people who are being subject to courthouse arrests.”
“Where there is [an option], people are finding that that’s often a way that they’re being funneled into being arrested, which is absolutely a travesty,” he added.
In essence, Mullin was saying that TPS holders could either self-deport or apply to other programs for which they had functionally zero chance of approval. In fact, applying to these programs would almost certainly only result in former TPS holders’ arrest and deportation.
Great stuff here: It was obvious that liberals had morphed TPS into backdoor permanent legal status. The Trump administration managed to end the program after considerable effort, enabling these people to be deported, while publicly adopting a soft line and staying within the bounds of the law. Staying within the bounds of the law is important when everything you do is guaranteed to generate lawsuits and you have no way to circumvent the court system, as is the case today.
The reaction from the online sphere was predictable: People began insisting that Mullin had claimed that TPS holders were actually here to stay, and that huge victory on the part of the Trump admin was actually a defeat.
Other influencers began to claim things that were objectively not true, including that the DHS had not even bothered to revoke TPS, even though the Trump administration had just fought and won the lengthy legal battle that had been triggered by the revocation order (last I checked, TPS for Haitians is set to expire this week).
After all this controversy, objectively false claims that got millions of views, Secretary Mullin publicly clarified what had always been the Trump administration’s policy:
The reaction from rightwing influencers to this non-change was triumphant: “Always chimp.”
I go into detail about this incident in particular because I was confronted about my criticism of the influencer sphere’s response to it by someone who I know to be operating in good faith. I want to provide a good faith explanation of what happened from my perspective, and why it’s a problem.
We started with a statement on a major news platform, CNN. However, you feel about Secretary Mullin, going on CNN and explaining the administration’s policies (which are in reality great for us), especially controversial policies like ending TPS, is well within his responsibilities as head of DHS.
The statement Mullin gave was innocuous. The previous DHS Secretary, Kristi Noem, who many of Mullins’ critics compared favorably to him, gave a similar answer when the Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans. As laid out in the NPR excerpt above, it’s obvious to liberals what the statement means: Former TPS holders are subject to deportation, but can apply for various legal immigration programs where, thanks to the Trump administration, they have virtually no chance of approval.
Of course, Mullin might have adopted a more confrontational posture in order to pander to the rightwing base, but I don’t think that would have been a good idea when speaking before a large audience that is likely predisposed against him. Deportations have shown themselves to be far more popular in theory than in practice (I’ll expand on this later). If moderate rhetoric better facilitates radical results (kicking out hundreds of thousands of people who have been abusing “temporary” status for years), that’s fine by me.
Rightwing influencers responded to Mullin’s innocuous statement by twisting what he said and misrepresenting what the Trump administration’s actual policy was. This created a fundamentally misleading impression for conservative audiences and a PR problem for the Trump administration: Trump had just won a big victory for the base, which supports deportations, a popular policy that we’re going to have to run on in the upcoming midterms, but influential people “on side” were claiming it was actually a betrayal.
When Mullin was forced to correct these lies in the face of public outrage, the same people who created the problem to begin with by not telling the truth then gave themselves credit for “solving” it.
This same cycle has played itself out constantly in rightwing circles since Trump took office: Influencers will seize on a relatively innocuous or even bad sounding quote from a Trump or an administration official, misrepresent or misinterpret it and the government’s actual policy and, and create an impression that is the opposite of reality.
There are many valid criticisms to make of the Trump administration, voters are going to make them. These invalid criticisms are unnecessary and damaging, especially when they relate to topics voters care about and Republicans are going to have to lean on in the upcoming election.
Rightwing influencers have been in effect running demoralization operations on our own side over things that are not real. Does this behavior make it more or less likely for us to lose elections? I think more likely, far more likely. That’s a problem because at the end of the day, our ability to solve problems comes from winning elections.
I think the tweet below is a perfect example of the kind defeatist rhetoric that regularly emerges from “populist” rightwing influencers today:
I do not meet anyone in real life who is pro-Israel or supports the Iran War. I am not worried about these views achieving widespread popularity in the near- or long-term. I do meet people all the time who repeat the same lies that these online figures push: That Trump’s domestic achievements are not real and that there is no difference between the major political parties. I am worried about these views becoming popular because it’s obvious the conclusions that one would reach from them: That you shouldn’t vote for Republicans in the upcoming elections.
These people are liars who are making it more likely that we will lose. Online figures who are theoretically “better on the issues” than the establishment have done serious and totally unnecessary damage to our position by lying in this way constantly. I only see this kind of attack emerging from people who I mostly agree with otherwise. It’s not the establishment that’s claiming that Trump’s deportations that aren’t happening. That doesn’t mean you have to support the establishment now; it just means this is another problem that has to be solved. It seems some have internalized that they cannot push back on bad faith and untrue criticism if it’s made with “based” intent.
Republicans have many disadvantages going into the upcoming elections. There are many actual issues and real mistakes voters can point to. We still have to win anyway. You are never going to overcome these disadvantages if voters think that the figures on our own side, particularly those with millions of followers, claiming that Republicans haven’t done “jack shit outside of a tax cut extension” are anything other than liars. That’s what this style of communication is: Lying. This kind of lying makes it more likely for us to lose.
There was a quote from Tucker Carlson’s interview with Alex Jones on June 23, 2026 that really stood out to me. Carlson said:
CARLSON: I want to push an issue out there that I think is of central importance, it’s never mentioned, and that’s the racism against whites the institutional racism against whites in the United States. Where if you’re a white man it’s harder to get a job, a federal contract, or college admission, and that’s factually true it’s proven, not just statistically proven by disparate impact but proven by document requests delivered in lawsuits and we know for a fact this is happening, and DOJ has basically done nothing to fix it. And so that’s like a core question: Can the US government, can our biggest institutions, commit open racism against the people whose ancestors built this country? And the answer is “Yes they can.”
This is a lie. It’s not even plausibly true. The Department of Justice has done an enormous amount to tackle anti-white discrimination since Trump has taken office. It has taken far more action on this anti-white discrimination than any administration since the issue first became a problem in America. Here are just a few recent stories on the Trump administration DOJ tackling anti-white discrimination in the months before Tucker’s interview with Jones:
The Department of Justice joined a lawsuit against racial discrimination in Los Angeles Public Schools (February 2, 2026)
The Department of Justice sued Harvard for admissions data to expose illegal DEI and affirmative action practices (February 12, 2026)
The Department of Justice targeted Yale to establish that it engaged in unlawful affirmative action policies (June 5, 2026)
This is on top of numerous other substantial steps the Trump administration has taken in the pursuit of ending anti-white discrimination: Issuing an executive order that ended the enforcement of policies that rely on “disparate impact theory” (March 26, 2026). Forcing federal contractors and subcontractors to end their DEI policies (March 26, 2026). Openly soliciting white men to file discrimination claims with the EEOC (December 19, 2025).
What Carlson is saying is the opposite of the truth. It’s possible that he is totally oblivious to these developments, which are not hard to find news about and aren’t in distant past, but I don’t think that’s the case.
Thomas Paine, whose writing played a major role in inspiring the American Revolution, eventually turned on his old associates and became widely reviled for his destructive behavior. Paine’s obituary read: “He had lived long, did some good and much harm.” There are many formerly towering figures on the American Right who are likely to be remembered in this way.
Carlson was beloved and well-trusted by conservatives who care about ending anti-white discrimination because he was one of the first major figures to confront the problem on the national stage. I think Carlson did more even than Trump to force this issue, along with countless others that had been wrongly relegated to fringe internet ghettos, into the public consciousness and later public policy.
Today Carlson is abusing that trust to undermine the Trump administration, diminishing our real-world ability to fight anti-white discrimination. There are many rightwing influencers who became trusted for bravely taking positions contra to the mainstream who now abuse that trust in order to sabotage us.
This behavior is contagious. Take former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino. Even though I don’t like Bovino very much anymore, I think there’s a lot of cope about Bovino’s role in Operation Metro Surge from his other critics today. Yes, the situation in Minneapolis was somewhat of a PR mess (in large part due to the hysterical and moronic calls from the influencer sphere for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and then declaring defeat when he declined to do so), but I still think Bovino’s physical courage and presence on the ground had a very positive effect. He might have eventually made a great congressman or activist for aggressive deportations.
Unfortunately, by the end of his tenure in Minneapolis, Bovino began tagging various rightwing influencers at the end of his posts. I strongly suspect, having no information one way or the other, that they had made contact with him and he had begun leaking internal information and discussions to them in an effort to steer policy. I remember the exact moment I saw it. I thought, “Oh shit, this guy is going to end up a fucking retard.”
Bovino was retired from the Border Patrol and then immediately joined the ranks of the admin’s bad faith critics. In June DHS recorded its highest number of arrests in the agency’s history. July’s arrest totals are expected to exceed that number. Deportations today are far higher than they were during Bovino’s tenure and they are only accelerating. Despite this, Bovino now eagerly echoes the lie that the Trump admin’s mass deportation efforts have been abandoned and that as a result there is no reason to vote for Republicans.
I don’t think it was inevitable that Bovino would end up as a bad joke. He probably genuinely cares about the issue and could have contributed towards something good. Instead, when he encountered professional difficulties after decades of distinguished service, he probably got a message from a member of our influencer class telling him, “This is how the game is played,” and promptly became a net negative, working in effect to make achieving mass deportations more difficult.
There is a well-funded ecosystem that churns out these lies constantly. Defeating the lies this ecosystem is pushing must be a major priority for Republicans, and unfortunately this requires defeating the liars who tell them.
Bovino has been making the rounds pushing the not even plausibly true claim that there are 107 million illegal immigrants in the country. I think this kind of hyperbole plays an important role in the environment that the influencers have created: If we were in an extraordinary situation, the collapse of our institutions, precipice of a civil or world war, the total betrayal of our leaders, then the normal expectations of truthfulness, discretion, and loyalty might not apply. In this state of exception, anything might become permissible, even losing, even actively working to make us lose.
This problem of perspective affects people I like, people I hate, people who I trusted, people I’ve known for years. It is rare now that someone can muster the obvious objections to saying and doing things that, if they were to become truly popular outside of online circles, would only lead to our defeat.
Whatever their motivations, voters must be made to understand that people who engage in this behavior should not be trusted in the future. The minimum expectation that you should have for people on your own side is that they tell the truth, especially when not telling the truth is going to make you lose. The task for people who still have their heads about them is to reimpose this minimum expectation in order to separate the loyal opposition (who are making criticism because they want to help you succeed) from the disloyal opposition (who are making criticisms to undermine you and engineer a defeat).
With this in mind, below are a few principles for dealing with these characters in the next few months.
1. Accept that the break has already occurred
Having watched several iterations of the far-right internet discourse that these mainstream influencers are aping collapse into insanity, I am telling you that whatever bad thing you are afraid of certain people doing to you if you push back, you should assume they are already going to do.
People can and will invent reasons to turn on you in the future, they don’t have to be real. In fact, they’re usually not. You are in the damage mitigation phase of the breakdown of this relationship. If someone doesn’t think a relationship is going to break down once a person begins lying about you in a way that only helps the enemy win, it might be because they’re also reserving the right to do that in the future. Be wary.
Your texts are getting leaked. That blackmail file is getting dumped. They are going to start attacking you and pushing whatever insane theory they have already developed to explain why you are not on board with what they’re doing. Obviously, I hope this doesn’t happen, I hope love for all mankind will win the day and we can put ourselves aside to work together towards a better future, but you need to make peace with whatever lever you’re worried about them pulling if you object to their behavior getting pulled. You’re not talking to your old friend anymore, pretending that you are only puts you and others at further risk.
You have to demonstrate that these tactics don’t work. You have to make it clear that they will never achieve their goals by acting in this way, no matter how much they might threaten you. Pull the Band-Aid now. Trying to make something work once that ship has sailed only bolsters bad faith actors’ positions. The longer this lasts, the worse it’s going to be when the bill for accommodating these people finally comes due.
2. Don’t debate, discredit
When someone says something that is clearly untrue, like in the Tweet above where Tomi Lahren said the Trump administration hasn’t done “jack shit outside of a tax cut extension,” it is important to understand that you should not engage with them as though you are having a normal argument over this point.
I have dealt with these behaviors for a long time. You can tell someone that what they are saying is objectively not true, that no reasonably intelligent person could believe it, and they do not understand the criticism.
They’re just saying what they feel. Are you claiming that their feelings are invalid? They might have a good reason for saying whatever untrue thing they’re claiming. Are you saying their reasons aren’t good? They might even have valid concerns about some other un- or tangentially related problem that are motivating them to say the untrue thing. Are you saying those concerns aren’t valid?
Tomi Lahren cannot earnestly believe that the Trump administration hasn’t done jack shit, figurative or literally (i.e. what she’s saying goes beyond normal hyperbole), beyond extending tax cuts. She’s a conservative influencer. I’m sure that if you scrolled back through her timeline, you would find her praising numerous things that Trump and Republicans have done since the 2024 election. Obviously, she would not think those amount to jack shit.
These people have internalized that they can deviate from normal expectations that you would have in a discussion about politics and still get a normal response. Eventually, they will concede something (probably what was obvious all along, that what they were saying wasn’t true) with the expectation that you will concede something as well. What they’re actually trying to do is bargain with you: How much can I lie before you give me what I want?
It is this constant bargaining that has transformed the influencer sphere from an important tool to mobilize conservatives and raise awareness of new developments into an unhelpful middleman class that aspires to hold the Trump administration hostage with lies while doing major damage to its electoral chances.
These lies have a negative effect that builds over time, even if you reach a point of accommodation. If someone is making a grand false claim (i.e. that the Trump administration isn’t doing anything) and you make a little concession in response, then that grand false claim isn’t going to be discredited in the eyes of the public when the exchange is over. If the public eventually internalizes the grand false claim, or if there’s even an open debate over it, you’re going to lose. No one should be thinking that the Trump administration hasn’t done anything substantive beyond a tax cut.
The only way to fix this is to end the negotiation with these characters. Do not discuss the larger point that they are trying to make. Do not respond with “You’re wrong, but I understand why you feel that way.” Do not construct a more valid argument for them and then start arguing over that. Point out that what they are saying is not true and then ask why they’re saying it.
When an influencer is telling these lies, don’t think of yourself as engaging directly with them. Think of yourself as engaging with their audiences, the potential voters who at the end of the day you actually need to persuade to do something inconvenient and time-consuming for you. Influencers come and go. Audiences come and go. You’re in a contest for credibility with a person attacking you, and if you play their game, you’re just ratifying their initial false claims.
This kind of big lying is pretty much never an isolated phenomenon. There are a lot of figures on Twitter who you’ll see a new outrage from every day, every hour, and pretty much every single thing that they are supposedly angry about is not real, heavily embellished, or just irrelevant. Old lies emotionally validate new lies until a person ends up in fantasyland. You are never going to have the time or energy to correct all the false claims that such people make, you have to just interrupt this process at the source. Audiences need to be taught that when they hear something from these people, it isn’t necessarily true. In fact, it’s probably not.
Not very fun to think about, but, beyond simply calling out the lies, you need to change the incentive structure for this behavior. Twitter gives these guys money for engagement now. They are incentivized to say outlandish things that will generate attention and controversy, without regard for whether or not they’re true. These people know they get money and believe they will get political concessions from acting in this way. You need to make it more expensive to lie, which means depriving influencers of the sponsorships, roles, and access after they do so. What’s more, when people really go off the reservation you need to start treating those who still defend them as enabling the behavior.
As far as how to carry this out this pushback in practice, I think you need to show a bit of discernment even if the behavior itself must generate blanket hostility. For someone like Tomi Lahren, I actually think she’s good, even better than most, on the issues. I’m not trying to pick on her in particular. She’s just repeating things that pretty much everyone online says now. It’s harmful style of communication that has become commonplace. Whatever the problems of this, I think they’re probably correctable and wouldn’t exist at all in an environment where lying was abnormal and people understood their responsibilities better.
We’re never going to create that environment where some of the worst offenders are almost instantly rehabilitated. Megyn Kelly was thick as thieves with the ringleaders of the recent demoralization campaign during its high-water mark and is still claiming that Candace Owens is engaged in a good-faith search for the truth about Charlie Kirk’s murder. She is still misrepresenting the objections to Owens’s conduct as an attempt to prevent reasonable scrutiny of Israel’s potential role in the killings.
Kelly played a critical role in mainstreaming Owens’s attacks on Erika Kirk and TPUSA when they first began, laundering this unacceptable behavior into something it was not, likely in the hopes of benefitting from Owens’s ballooning viewership by elevating herself into an imagined peacemaker role. I worry that nearly everyone is going to pretend like this kind of opportunistic betrayal at a critical moment was normal. I hope someone in a position of power eventually works up the courage to make it clear to everyone that it’s not.
These behaviors need to be stamped out, and these networks need to be scattered to the winds. There should not be safe harbors for people who do bad things to hurt us.
3. Remember that shit attracts flies
I’ve criticized Tucker Carlson’s recent behavior a lot in this essay. However, I think it bears mentioning that even if this behavior isn’t excusable, it’s in part understandable, perhaps even preventable.
A few months ago, pro-Israel commentators who were tied closely to Trump like Laura Loomer and Mark Levin (fortunately Levin seems to have burned his influence by launching hysterical attacks on Trump’s Iran War peace efforts) began targeting Carlson’s son. They were trying to get him fired from his job, not for anything that he did or didn’t do (by all accounts he seems to have been a hard-working and well-liked government employee), but for merely who his father was.
These attacks were disgusting and wrong. Real lowlife shit. It is disgraceful, literally bringing disgrace, that these figures were treated with anything other than contempt after they made them. They should not have been seen as having influence with, much less endorsements from, President Trump after this. It’s completely on Trump that these people were still around once they did this terrible thing.
You could tell Tucker was getting kind of out-there before these attacks on his son began. It’s pure speculation to say that these were what broke the camel’s back, but they might have been. Even if they weren’t, one shouldn’t be attacking people’s uninvolved kids at all, ever. Of course there’s going to be a big and irreconcilable split between two major figures if one’s associates are attacking the other’s children and aren’t being punished for it.
That doesn’t mean you should feel compelled to defend Carlson the elder’s recent behavior. Lying and openly working to sabotage us in the way he has over the last few months is indefensible, it puts us all at risk. At the end of the day, we are going to have to win in order to save our country and people. However, the accumulation of characters like Loomer and Levin in Trump’s orbit makes winning more difficult, even if they claim they’re fighting another internal enemy. You can prevent a lot of problems by maintaining basic standards of behavior. It’s also just the right thing to do.
One of the Trump administration’s biggest challenges is building legitimacy in the eyes of the public. If people are doing bad things around him and not getting punished, you should not be surprised when everyone starts acting weird.
I am loyal to Trump. I would die for President Trump. I attach religious significance to my leader, the eccentric billionaire real estate and media mogul President Donald John Trump. With all that said, the often-brazen corruption that is occurring inside and around the Trump administration makes people respect it less. This is not how people who are in charge should act and everyone knows it.
Of course, this isn’t something every or even most admin officials are involved in. The second Trump administration has made huge progress on a bunch of important issues, progress that only Trump and his team could have made. It’s undeniably the best government we had in decades, with the potential for even greater gains in the future. If we want this moment to stick around, we have to bring the state of exception that exists in peoples’ minds to a close.
I think invalid criticism naturally tends to increase alongside valid criticism: The truth is often pretty complicated, it’s almost always easier to get your point across with a lie. The Trump administration could likely go a long way towards reducing the invalid criticism it receives if it closes off legitimate lines of attack against it. People need to act in sustainable ways again, which means policing our own side a lot more. Everyone needs to go back to normal.
I dislike the Iran War and hope it wraps up soon, but Trump can’t unbomb Iran however much I want him to. 18 Americans dead in 4 months of heavy combat operations is a tragedy, but it’s not World War 3. I think the claims that the Iran War was going turn into World War 3, that we were going to have a draft and nuclear Armageddon, were always just panic mongering. It’s not good, but I don’t think it’s honest to describe it as like Iraq or Afghanistan either. It’s something different. There are different people at the wheel.
Even if the world isn’t ending, the Iran War is still a huge problem for Republicans electorally, which is a problem for us because our political power flows largely through Republicans winning elections.
Trump deserves his licks for his real mistakes. I think the Iran War was one of them. He doesn’t deserve criticism for most the things I see him regularly criticized over online, which are not even plausibly true. Americans care about domestic issues far more than foreign policy. If influencers are saying his domestic agenda isn’t happening, they’re saying something that is not true and that if the public comes to believe, then we will lose. There is negative value to this kind of commentary, and it’s sometimes the only way that potential voters are exposed to political content.
I often see the line that Trump has deprioritized the domestic agenda in favor of foreign policy pushed all the time. This is a harmful lie. The government in America doesn’t stop working just because there are military operations going on overseas. The Trump administration’s DHS has achieved it highest daily arrest rate of all time months into the Iran War. That doesn’t mean you should support the Iran War, only that the people who say this are misrepresenting the situation to their audiences.
Influencers need to stop trying to influence policy, foreign or domestic, by lying to their audiences in these ways. If you do this, you are not motivating the Trump administration to pursue a better agenda; you are discouraging our people from doing what has a better chance of solving their problems than anything else: Voting. You’re marking yourself as a saboteur, intentional or unintentional, who shouldn’t be trusted. Many people who might have helped enormously to make the internal case against any number of bad things instead saw themselves out of positions of trust with their behavior. Are the neocons making them lie? Are the neocons making them embrace crazy people?
Age without wisdom is still the story of the modern world. The “based” figures who complain about the Boomers are just as willing to throw future generations under the bus in pursuit of self-indulgence. If most people could manage these dynamics on their own in a healthy way, if the financial and professional incentives naturally aligned with what was good and productive, we would not be in our present situation. It’s very important that those in position of power and influence reimpose the basic expectations of truthfulness, discretion, and loyalty that make any successful movement or organization work. That means behaving a lot more aggressively than they have been up to this point.
I saw a recent clip of a Dave Chappele and Shane Gillis comedy set. Chappele said he was going to impersonate Vice President JD Vance on Joe Rogan and then just said “Hey, I’m a big faggot.” The crowd and Gillis roared.
Vance has gone out of his way to be thoughtful and openminded when dealing with the Trump administration’s critics, especially in the podcast circuit that these comedians are a part of. He has established healthy distance from the unpopular Iran War. He does great in interviews. He’s impressive and quick on his feet. He’s a good public ambassador for Trump and the Trump administration’s policies. I think Vance gets this kind of hostility precisely because he’s so thoughtful and openminded when dealing with the Trump administration’s critics. These guys mistake it for weakness and end up resenting him.
Vance is seen as a figure who conservatives who are disappointed with or hostile to Trump can rally around. Some might claim that this expands his (and Republicans’) electoral potential, but I think it shrinks it. In fact, I think he’s going to lose if this is still how people see him by 2028.
Vance is going to have to run for President in 2028 on the Trump administration’s successes. Vance is Trump’s successor (It’s no one else, Vance is going to win the primary in a blowout, anyone saying otherwise is trying to engineer something bad). He is the person who will inherit the MAGA movement and have to lead it into the future. “Yeah, that sucked but give me a spin at the wheel” is not going to convince anyone. If the figures on the Right who make these untrue claims are still seen as “on the team,” much less tolerated by Vance himself, by the time of the election, then Vance is not going to have anything to run on and no one is going to support him.
A friend pointed out that these media figures seem to think of Vance as a peer, not the Vice President. No one thinks of Trump as a peer. Part of this is a natural consequence of Vance being so young (a strength and potential weakness). Another part is the soft line (often merely silence) that Vance has adopted towards the rightwing online circles he is uniquely tied to as they slowly shift into often totally irrational hostility to Trump, Vance’s boss, and the Trump administration, which Vance is a key part of.
I think these people mistakenly view Vance as the “substitute teacher” who is in some ways part of the admin but simultaneously separate and impermanent. You can get away with things you normally wouldn’t be able to around him. People usually only like that guy up to the point that he has to tell someone “No,” which is a situation that will inevitably arise because this reputation will cause people to eventually try things around him that they normally wouldn’t.
One challenge for Vance, which is really a challenge for all of us because Vance is going to be the 2028 Republican nominee and we need him to win, is establishing the reputation not as Trump’s chief apologist, but as Trump’s chief enforcer. He needs to not be the guy who will listen and learn when someone says something that’s not true about Trump, who holds space for dishonest, thoughtless, or bad faith critics to get it all out of their system, but rather the guy who will force them to correct themselves or regret it. He’s going to have to treat these people the same way when he’s at the top.
It bothers me at a deep level what has happened to rightwing online spaces. Places that I really enjoyed and got a lot out of have been destroyed by these behaviors. Many people who I knew and liked are unrecognizable now. Do you think I want to be shitting out 40,000-word essays about how much Twitter sucks every 6 months? The problems I’ve identified and complained about for years keep getting worse. Clueless people keep making them worse. Real world politics have never been more informed by online discourse than they are today. I’m worried that the obvious mistakes and destructive pathologies that I watched consume the timeline will break containment even further and waste our narrow chance to avert disaster.
The first article I wrote on this Substack (3 long years ago) was a crude paraphrase of Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin’s Wikipedia page. Here’s a Stolypin quote, addressing the rebellious Second Duma, that I still find really striking:
These attacks are calculated to induce in the government, in the authorities, a paralysis of will and of thought. They all come down to two words addressed to the authorities: ‘Hands up.’ To these two words, gentlemen, the government, with complete calm and a consciousness of its own rightness, can answer with only two words: ‘Not afraid.’
Stolypin had the Second Duma dissolved when he realized that he couldn’t work with it, that he’d end up being the Duma’s hostage rather than partner if he allowed them to continue as they were. Not afraid. This is the posture Republicans must adopt if they are to master their critics and win the confidence of voters before the midterms.
Some people cannot handle winning. They are constitutionally built to be losers and to complain. They must not determine our approach to politics and strategy. Think about your own life. Don’t you know people who just bemoan their fate and doom about everything? And when they get an occasional win, their neuroticism makes them spoil it. Imagine listening to these types for do-or-die durations like we are in right now as a country. By the way, I love these long pieces you write almost like cultural position papers (despite the “listen” feature on Substack offering Biden voiceover mode).