Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and House Minority Leader Jeffries and Senator Booker have begun a sit in protest on the capital steps. We have such a great show for you today to the Contrary Newsletter author Charlie Seike stops by to talk
about Trump's first one hundred days changing America. Then we'll talk to the Up and Up founder Rachel Jafonza about the divide in gen Z voting and the complicated landscape of their support and criticism of Trump. But first the news.
My mister Trump makes big claims about deals. He loves deals, and he claims he's made two hundred deals on tariffs, but his cabinet members can't name a single one.
Yeah, yet another moment of scott Essen embarrassing himself for Trump. Both scott Essen and Agriculture Secretary of Brook Rollins were asked what these trade agreements were, What these trade deals were. You'll remember that Peter Navarro said during this ninety day pause he would make ninety trade deals. Guess how many trade deals he's made? Not ninety? In fact, they announced they were doing one with Japan, and then Japan said no, they weren't. They announced they were doing one with India.
Maybe maybe not, we don't know. But you know, we don't have ninety of them. We don't even have twenty of them, and we certainly don't have two hundred of them. So watching yet another member of Trump's administration try to defend what is clearly a mistruth, an alternative fact.
Yes, yes, fake news. So DOGE is claiming it saved one hundred and sixty billion dollars in the wall receipts. But those cuts of cost taxpayers one hundred and thirty five billion, one analysis says.
So they're tallying the costs for federal employees placed on leave, rehired, mistakenly fired federal employees, and lost productivity. So you'll remember that Doage went in and it fired many people, including like people like the remember when they fired all the air traffic controllers. They sent that email, the form email that was like what do you even do here? And then they had to rehire a lot of people. My favorite, though, is still his say five things you did this week? Email?
Remember that? And then some people were told they couldn't respond because you know, if you're in the State Department slash CIA, you're really not supposed to send an email saying the five things you did.
Me say these five classified fact Well, espionage cross borders things like that.
Even if you're like working on a sort of prosecutorial thing and you you know, you're talking about cases or things that are sensitive or that you know, and you're putting that in a mass email to a guy called big Balls, who's going to maybe read it. They said, well, it's going to get read by AI. I mean, there's a lot to support that this is all completely insane. So Doe turns out the savings is greatly reduced by the fact that it's so expensive.
Yeah, I'm so shocked to hear that this incompetent loser messed something up. Anyway, I got a question from a friend this week. He said, who is the person who's the most crazed and Trump's administration? I said, are we just qualifying Trump? And I how is forced to stay Stephen Miller And this quote right here, it kind of is evidence of my theory.
Stephen Miller unveils bizarre new attack on birthright citizenship. They really hate birth right citizenship. They really want to get rid of it. It's going to the Supreme Court. This is not the brain child of Steven Miller. This is like one of these conservative cooked up in a sea pack like thought community experiment. So here's the quote, though, the biggest financial ripoff of Americans in history, not to mention the fact that it is one magnet for I
legal immigration and invasion. So his idea is that people come to this country have children so that they can get whatever the little bit of money you get for
having children who are citizens. I mean, the whole idea here is like I mean, I just want to pull back for a second and talk about immigration, because part of what we've benefited from so much in the last couple of years, and the underlying efficiency of our market, has been that we have had a lot of immigrants because they have provided labor and a tight labor market. We are getting many fewer immigrants now because people don't
want to come here. There are these horror stories of the French scientists where the ice agents read her phone and they detain her, you know, all sorts of stories like that, you know, And then we also have this weird power struggle with Canada, where there's a lot of people are not coming here, they don't want to move here, they don't even necessarily want to visit he or in fact, are the numbers on our tourism are way way way down.
I was talking to restaurant employees this week at places that like a lot of tourists travel to, and they're like, we are dying.
Yes, So tourism, immigration, all this stuff helps the economy. I think it's pretty interesting Steven Miller is still attacking immigrants. Meanwhile, there was an article in the New York Times this weekend about how the Trump administration is trying to get people have babies, but they don't want to have babies because you know, and this has been something that's been
going on for decades. In a decades, more people realize how expensive it is to have children, and because housing is so unaffordable and lifestyle is so unaffordable, they don't want to have more kids, or any kids. The way to fix this is to build out headstart right, spend more money on public education, public health, more like a
public option for healthcare. So these are all things that run completely contrary to what Republicans want to do, so they're saying, like, how about we pay you five thousand dollars of a baby. So that's where we are right now.
Speaking of where we are right now, if we head down to Florida, which I'm glad we're not in right now, we have some serious political chaos going on as Ron and Casey Disantis seem to have really dropped the ball on their political future.
Yeah, it's really sad.
I would like to point out, I'm crying.
The political future was largely speculative. Casey DeSantis, There's long been talk that she would run for governor. I think a lot of that talk was maybe spun by her.
I think that's what many people say right that.
She was some kind of powerhouse. The Democratic Party in Florida, as we have heard many times on this podcast from Rick Wilson, has really imploded, and so Republicans have had a real opening here and a lot of Republicans have moved to Florida for the lower tax base and because it's got a very maga like a static right now. But this scandal, again, if they were Trumpers, I don't know that this scandal would weigh them down the same way.
But it's a funding scandal involving her signature initiative a state assistant program known as Hope Florida, which you'll be shocked to know that ten million dollars from a state Medicare sentiment settlement was routed to a charity connected with Hope Florida. Now everyone knows, you're only allowed to do Medicare fraud if you're running for Senate in Florida.
I was going to say say, if your name is Rick Scott, if.
You're running for Senate, that's fine, But if you're running for governor, not allowed to do.
Medica fron Technically he was governor after that.
Right, It's true he was governor, but then he was running for Salon and that was open. But the couple have stood by their work fiercely and denied any wrongdoing as long as they denied it obviously and lobbyist because why wouldn't they. So we'll see if they get through this. Look, Ron DeSantis did run against Trump, and you know, maybe this is it. Maybe this is the blow we'll say. Charlie Sykes is the author of the To the Contrary newsletter and the book How the Right Lost His Mind
Welcome Back Too Fast? Politics, Charlie Sykes.
Are we in one hundred days yet? Are we there yet?
We're at a himer Is countings. Yeah, yeah, it's like one hundred years in dog years.
You know.
I was looking at that, you know Aled Lennon quote, you know, sometimes decades happened in weeks, that sort of thing. Apparently it's one of those apocryphal quotes. But we know what he means, right, And we're coming to the end of this period. And I think some people are going to have a hard time hearing that Donald Trump is the most consequential president of the last century. It's not a positive thing to say, but it's true. I mean, this has been You do feel that the tectonic plates
of democracy are shifting. The country's tested and will be changed one way or another by what Trump is doing and how we respond to it.
So my friend, who's an academic, was saying, it's the end of the American century.
Well, it may be, it may be. However, what's being tested is the resilience of the American idea. And I think for a few months people's heads have been down. There's been a sense that Okay, that's it.
It was a good run.
What was your best memory of the rule of law. That may be somewhat premature. One hundred days is a long time. Lots happened, But if you take a longer view, one hundred days is just one hundred days. And so some of these polls that are out, which I'm guessing Molly you've seen, would suggest that everything that Trump is selling is not necessarily being bought by the American people.
Yes, but it's like in July. I'm going to bring you back to July, which is a million years ago. For that it is keeping drag at home. We said, well, Donald Trump is going to do Project twenty twenty five, and everyone said no, no, no, he says he's not. But when we talked about Project twenty twenty five, when people looked at it, it was wildly unpopular, right because nobody wanted that. So now Trump is doing it.
Yeah, he's doing it with a considerable amount of zeal and yes, people are finding out that maybe this is not that popular. Look, what's happened is that we sometimes confuse the Trump base with the electorate as a whole, and there's a maga base that frankly does not care what he does. He could aboord babies in the Oval office and they would not care. There's nothing he will do. But that is not the whole electorate. It's not even
the whole Republican electorate. Who knows, you know how many people voted for Trump simply because they thought that they would be good for their four oh one k or that he would be the most pro business president ever, or because they were just sick of Democrats. And then suddenly they're confronted with the mad King who is intent on retribution, you know, defying courts, raising tariffs, trashing the economy, and yeah, maybe this is not what they signed up for.
But again, we're going to have to see how that plays out. Because I look, as bad as the polls are, Republicans are still lined up behind him, and there's no indication that Republicans in Congress have any inclination to be anything more than pottered plants.
Right, So you've.
Opened the door to something I actually really wanted to talk about, think about, meditate on. So there is a number that Donald Trump gets to where he's as unpopular as he's you know, he's still got the magabase, But there is eventually a number if he gets to it Republicans who are up for reelection in a year and change are like, like, let's talk about Elon Musk. Well, let's go for Elon Musk for a minute. So Elon Musk came in. Everyone was excited. He got a special
make America great hat. It turns out now he has, according to the Wall Street Journal, more than forty children, perhaps or a number closer to forty. He DMS women to send them sperm, and he is now, you know, and he spent thirty million dollars in judicial race in your state, lost, unpopular, wildly and popular now at least saying again, I don't know that you can trust what he's saying here, but saying that he's going to step.
Back, well he can put more time to being father of his country, right I mean, or at least sperm donor to his country. Actually, I was thinking about that today as I was a drive around the east side of Milwaukee behind to Tesla, thinking about the change in fortune of Tesla ownership, but also the pivot point of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. You know, if you really sort of trace it back, his complete face plant here in Wisconsin was really the beginning of his decline and
his politically irrelevance. But again, Elon Musk is not Donald Trump, and so I don't know whether there's a number that Republicans in Congress will ever get to. However, I do think that it's now it's now easier to resist and push back against trump Ism when clearly he has not found some magic formula of power, this magic formula that the public has decided that it's fallen in love with everything, And can I make it? Can I confess something, Molly
that I'm probably going to regret. I am really really bored of talking about when are Republicans going to do X? And I'm really bored talking about Democrats. I'm actually talking, really bored talking about both of them, because I think what's actually more important is what the rest of us do, the rest of civil society, you know, all the other institutions, and say it's the Look, it is not up to Chuck Schumer to save America. You know, it's upbout quite
And I'm serious about this. It's you're talking about the private sector of the universities, the churches, the law firms, the courts, everyone else has to decide what it means to be an America. And it's something that I think because the challenge is so great, it actually transcends electoral politics. And so if anybody expects that congressional Republicans are going to figure out I mean, congressional Democrats are going to figure out some magic form, I may need to be
much more aggressive. Don't get me wrong. I want to think more about what Americans out there in the actual real world who have to live in this society think about all this. What what do average Americans? What do judges? What do police officers think about? The mass deportations, the the you know, scoffing at court orders. Because I think that's the challenges. Well, and if Americans say, you know what, this is not what we want from America, I think
the electoral politics flows from that. And so I don't think the answer is going to come from Washington. I'm not saying that there's not a lot of responsibility. I'm just you know, we keep saying, well, win, are Democrats going to do this?
Win?
Are Democrats going to do that? I'm want to win. Are the American people going to do something?
Yeah? It's really relevant, certainly, but it is easier to push back against things I mean, if you look back at Trump one point, how the thing that prevented a lot of this stuff from happening was corporations people. I mean, you know, there was a certain sort of combination of factors that what we see in this time is a lot of corporations are all over, which is, you know, because they thought it was better for business or whatever. But what they've seen is that none of this is popular.
Like it wasn't popular the first time, it's not popular the second time, which there's a reason that very famous people try to stay out of politics. And it is like what happened to Elon Mosk right right.
Quite frankly, yes, you're right, it's not popular. But I don't care whether it's popular or not. I mean, this country was actually founded on the principle that there are certain fundamentally inalienable rights, and whether it's popular to illegally rendition someone to All Salvadory or not is really kind of a secondary point. But I think that what's happening
is is that that's settling in. I'm hoping that we can sort of get back to first principles here is that people look around and go, Okay, this actually is dangerous this offense are innate sense of fairness and that he's violating all of that. So I think also there was and I'm glad you brought up the project twenty twenty five because no one should really have been that surprised by what Trump was going to do. Trump's campaign
was Trump in full. He made it very very clear who he was, what he was, what he was going to do. And you and I and others spent months hair on fire saying, do you know how bad this is going to be? You know what he's going to do. It's not going to be like Trump point zero. And we were accused of being hysterical, we were accused of having Trump derangement syndrome. And then he comes in and does exactly what he said he was going to do.
They wrote it in a book, and so a part of me is like, how could you possibly be surprised by this? But it's right there, it's in front of you. Now, what is America going to do? How are they going
to respond to all of it? Now, I'm gonna contradict myself having said that it's not important whether it's popular, It certainly should change the sort of the Eori ish, Oh my god, everything has gone to see that huge majorities of the public are seeing this, are watching this and going, no, we weren't reject I mean, I think part of the problem is that we watched this. Wee go how come American people are not seeing what we're saying? And what's wrong with them if they don't see it?
Now at least there's an alignment where you have huge majorities that go, yeah, you know, tariffs actually are big taxes, they are inflationary, They're not good. Maybe ignoring the Supreme Court is a bad thing for the Louisville.
So there was this Siena College poll from April twenty fourth, and percentage of voters who said the following words described Trump's second term in office, well, sixty six percent said chaotic, fifty nine percent said scary it's hard to imagine chaotic.
But forty two percent said exciting.
Yes they did, they did. So.
Do understand that there's a large portion in the American public that's kind of kind of getting too messent over this.
Yeah, but his approval rating is negative twelve. I mean, everything is down right, I mean, even on the economy, which was like the reason that theoretically, at least some of the people voted for him. They're not happy with him.
He's not ten feet tall. He is not unstoppable. I think a lot of his power in that first hundred days was this belief that resistance is futile and that everybody had to capitulate in advance. When you look at a first his margin in the Senate is very very small, his margin in the House is infinitesimal. And he's Donald fucking Trump who won by a sliver and who is now engaging in the classic political hubris of overreading his
victory and his mandate. And so but you think about all of the his initiatives and all of the surrenders, and all of the surrenders, I think we're done. Because people thought he was unstoppable and that there were no guardrails. Well, okay, we're coming up to one hundred day point. He's not unstoppable, resistance is possible, and there are still some guard rails. I mean, we can take this back and forth.
How about that.
You have to agree that behind the scenes there's Roberts trying to get the numbers. There's just no way otherwise.
Well, and Trump is you know, This is one of those those things where I know there's an entire cottage industry of people who assure us that he's playing four dimensional chess, but his lack of respect and his defiance the judiciary is Backfron. You're seeing more and more conservative lawyers, conservative judges pushing back hard his decision to arrest a Milwaukee judge at the Coarehouse and the FBI am Trust me, I don't think you have to be a a woke
progressive judge to be appalled by that. So I'm saying he's alienating the judiciary at a moment when they actually do pose a significant threat to his authoritarian agenda.
Yeah. I also think that the thing that is kind of amazing is that you know, you have all of these people like Ken Griffin, largest Republican donor to this cycle, though not a Trump donor, but to every other Republican running for office in the world. I mean, he is like one of the very few people who's saying that Trump is ruining the American brand.
Well, there's been a lot of delusion about Trump on the part of these guys that they have you told themselves a story that he was going to be their champion that he was going to deregulate and cut their taxes and don't worry, he was bluffing about everything else, and we can control him. And now they're finding out no, he's not, and he's making decisions that have injected a massive amount of uncertainty into their decision making, into the economy,
and investors hate uncertainty, they really do. Now, on the other hand, there's going to be this group of people who are think, hey, you know what, as long as we stay close to the throne, we can benefit from the corruption, we can benefit from the insider trading, we can benefit from the fear and favor. But yeah, I think that you've had a lot of illusion shattered, right.
I mean, if you look at the people around Trump, it's not like I mean, Elon obviously is a specialized case, but there are certainly people on Trump's inner circle who are getting read to on lobbying or whatever. But if you're just you know, a bill men or someone who relies on the markets, the tariffs are.
Rushing, well they are. And it's also again the relationships that have been destroyed, the fact that you don't know what he's going to do from day to day, and it's hard to make investment decisions. So there's a sense of does this guy actually know what he's doing, is he irrational? Is he dangerous? And that's where that number in that New York Times Senapol you said it is so important that you have more than the sixty What was the number four chaos?
Sixty six percent?
Okay, so sixty six I mean, can we just sit on that for a moment. You have two thirds of Americans that are looking at the President of the United States and seeing him as an agent of chaos. Now there are there's going to be a segment of the electorate that likes that, that loves chaos. Not in the business community though, but also the other thing is that like this is the second Trump administration, this is the one that's better organized, Like and sixty.
Center saying chaos, I mean, we don't know what's going to happen, but we are open to so many possible catastrophic events because of the combination of the deregulation and the stripping the federal government that like between the measles pandemic that is sort of or pandemic is the wrong word, I think, but it certainly the measles outbreaks at this moment in different parts of the country among unvaccinated children.
That's going and that, I mean, They're just a number of things that are bubbling under the surface that could derail us even further.
I'm really glad you brought that up, because the return of measles and other diseases that have been eradicated by vaccines would be one of the great tragedies of history and completely preventable and avoidable and completely man made. And this administration could actually usher that. I mean, this is a real danger. And I think a lot of things are still like clouds on the horizons, so we don't
know all the dangers out there. I mean, America first turned out to be America alone, but also the rollback of public health. No, you're you're right, and I think that these are all danger signs for Trump going forward. We haven't seen the full impact on the economy. You've probably seen these stories about the empty cargo ships coming
from China. We haven't even seen all of this. We don't know, I mean, and by the way, measles pandemic, measles epidemic would and I don't want to just see this in political terms, but it would be a catastrophe.
Yeah, the trade war is a really good example of how none of this was three dimensional chests, Like, if you were going to go to war with China, you would make sure that Mexico and Canada had your back, right if you were going to go to trade war with them in Europe. And instead what he did was he made everybody really mad and then made China really mad. So I do think it's worth remembering that none of this Again, as you said earlier, you know, we.
Go through these poll numbers which are really historically unprecedented. I mean, no president has ever been this low this early in his term. The fall has happened very very quickly. And it's not just on never Trump type or democratic or progressive issues. It's on immigration. Immigration was his thing, This was his signature issue. He's underwater on this. He's underwater on the Abrago Garcia case. I think he's minus twenty one on that case. He's tied for its least popular.
Remember all the smart kids who were telling us that you know, well, you guys should stop talking about that, because that's what Trump wants you to talk about. This is a winning issue for Donald Trump. Donald Trump wants to focus on this because the American people like the brutality and the cruelty and the lawlessness of his immigration policies. Well, Molly, it turns out and in fact, if you do talk about it and people do think about it, that they
don't approve of it. So this is again one of those There are all of those voices and including Gavin Newsom out there saying no, no, that's a distraction. We should be talking about table issues. Fun Let's talk about the kitchen table issues. But also it's not necessarily a loser to be talking about the rule of law issues, or the humanitarian issues, or.
The deported children with cancer, the United States Citizens Supported with Cancer. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Charlie Sikes anytime. By the way, cannot wait for your book, Molly cannot wait.
Rachel Trafonza is the founder of the Welcome to Fast Politics.
Rachel, thank you so much for having me. Mollie.
All right, so let's talk about what is happening with gen Z, because you wrote this very interesting piece about how gen Z is split, and I'd love for you to explain to us how gen Z is split, Why gen Z is split, and what's it look like totally.
So I have been holding listening sessions, which really are just informal conversations with young people across the country for the past really like two and a half years, and since after the twenty twenty two midterms, I started seeing a major split in how the youngest members of gen Z who were eligible to vote and the older members of gen Z who were eligible to vote vote not
just politics but life in general. And I started to develop this theory that I called the two gen zs, where there's gen Z one point zero and gen Z two point zero, and gen Z one point zero includes anyone who graduated high school before the start of the COVID nineteen pandemic, and gen Z two point zero accounts for anyone who graduated high school during or after.
The start of the pandemic. And the reason why I think that the pandemic was such a formative split between these two subgenerations of gen Z is that it really changed how members of this generation were growing up. And when you think about the fifteen year span of time that accounts for gen Z when they were born, there really were very different lived adolescent experiences depending on if you had grown up before or after the start of COVID.
Right, COVID is the break. If you grew up before COVID, you have more normal liberal policies right for your age. Explain.
This is still very much unfolding, but the more data points we get, the more clear this picture seems to become where the gen Z one point zero had more idealistic liberal tendencies. For example, I'm in gen Z one
point zero. I was born in nineteen ninety seven, and when I was in college, my four years of college were the four years of President Donald Trump's first term in office, and there was a lot of resistance to that time period, and there was this sort of liberal ideology that by demonstrating by protesting, perhaps you know, people's message would be heard, and politically, this cohort was considered at the time very left leaning and perhaps you know,
there was some language around gen Z could save us all things like that.
What we're seeing.
Now is that gen Z on the whole is shifting right, in large part being driven by these younger gen Zers who grew up amid COVID lockdowns and restrictive policies and really grew to resent authority and the time frame in which they were growing up. When they were, you know, in late high school or maybe starting college, after the
start of the pandemic. During the pandemic, or even after the pandemic, Biden was in office, and they were looking for someone to blame during this time period when it felt like life wasn't normal, life wasn't getting back to normal, And the people who were in charge and who were associated with the more social distancing policies or masking policies things like that were Democrats, and so I think that
contributed to some of this shift as well. But then the the key piece, and this is related but not exactly the same, is that we really saw the evolution of TikTok during and after COVID, and there's been a just change in how younger gen Zers consume media and how all of us consume media. But this is how these younger gen Zers grew up. This is all that they knew. They never had the previous forms of social media. They only know a world where TikTok is the place
for public discourse. And there's been some data coming out that starts to show that TikTok has more republican content on it, or more conservative content on it, and perhaps that's part of this puzzle as well, But I think it's just important to point out that we don't exactly know the causality. What we do know is that this generation is split into two and that the younger gen
zers account for more of that conservative viewpoint. And there was a new pool that came out last week from the Yale Youth Goal that showed this.
Divide pretty starkly.
So it showed that they asked respondents who they would in a generic ballot who they would vote for in twenty twenty six midterms, and for ages eighteen to twenty one the generic ballot Republicans we were plus twelve and for ages twenty two to twenty nine, Democrats were plus six. So you do see that split playing out, even thinking towards twenty twenty six as well.
So let's do two seconds on what this split means. For example, does this mean that TikTok is making young people more conservative?
I don't know if we can say it as clear cut as that, but I think what it means is that older gen Zers and younger gen Zers are just consuming content, news and information totally differently, and that is changing their politics, and I think that it also one of the things that is both related to some of this anti authority sentiment that came out of the pandemic and also might be related to the type of content that's consumed on TikTok.
The type of content that does well on TikTok is very off the cuff, very pithy, not highly filtered or edited content, but it feels more raw and perhaps more organic. And that is sort of similar to the way in which President Trump talks right like, he speaks in sound bites most of the time. He is very punchy.
He is perceived as being unfiltered, and so there's sort of a correlation there in the type of content that does well on TikTok and the way that Trump and members of the MAGA movement communicate.
Yeah, So one of the things I think when I think about this election is Trump right before the election, he did all of these podcasts, He did Joe Rogan, he did theovonn did all of this new media, and he also introduced a lot of ideas that he probably wasn't going to actually put into play, things like you know, he was going to make bitcoin great again, he was going to sell sneakers he was going to. He sort of obfuscated a lot of stuff. Did that work? Is
that what you're saying that it worked? And did it work with younger people and not older people? Did COVID set this up? Like, tell me kind of where we go with this information?
Yeah.
So one of the things that I think Republicans did really well in the lead up to the twenty twenty four election, and Trump in particular did well, was that he politically coded culture, whereas Democrats were culturally coding politics.
So what I mean by that is that.
Yeah, you got to say it two more times too.
So Trump and Republicans in the lead up to the twenty twenty four election politically coded culture, while Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris culturally coded politics.
Okay, politics is downstream of culture, right.
Yes, So what I mean by this political coding of culture is that Trump and his allies would go into cultural places, whether that meant going to UFC fights or showing on these podcasts in this menosphere as it's been dubbed. When he would go to these locations, he wasn't off the bat talking about politics. He was just showing up as himself as Trump, the former president who was running for reelection, and he would have conversations, especially on these podcasts,
that had nothing to do with politics. He would talk about his children, he would talk about his experience as a businessman, he would talk about sports. Sometimes he would just talk about things that were organic to whatever the
podcast conversation would typically be about. And same thing when he would go to a UFC fight, he would go there as Donald Trump, but he wouldn't make a campaign rally out of it necessarily, whereas on the flip side, you look at something like the rally that former Vice President Kamala Harris held in Texas with Beyonce, and Beyonce was there. Beyonce was talking about being a mother, and the theme of the rally was about abortion access, but
Beyonce didn't singing. Beyonce didn't you know? It wasn't it was a political event, and that I think was similar to how Democrats would show up on some of these podcasts as well. For example, when Kamala Harris went on Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy, the conversation was very political, right.
And it should have been just her schmoozing and talking about cooking exactly.
So you know, we're starting to see some examples of Democrats changing their strategy with this. I think a great example is today this episode with peepoota judge on the Flagrant podcast came out and that's a podcast that Trump actually went on before the twenty twenty four election, and
I just started watching the episode. It literally just came out, and at the start of the episode, boota judge is talking about the White Lotus and how he thinks that Lachlan should have died on the White Lotus, and so it's a very relatable conversation that has nothing to do with politics, and then they get into some of the more political conversation about tariffs and taxes and immigration and things like that. So you can see that Democrats are
starting to take note of this. But I think that when you're looking at how young people are consuming content, the strategy that Trump deployed ahead of the election was super successful because it felt relatable to young people. And one of the biggest things I hear from young people is that they want a politician who they feel like is just normal, who looks like, sounds like, talks like them. And while you know there are definitely things that Trump
does not have in common with young people. He was able to show up in the places that they're authentically consuming in the podcast and reach them that way.
I want to go back to the Flagrant podcast from it because Jesse just sent me a producer's note the host of the Flagrant Podcast. I think we're getting at something really important here. Andrew Schultz. He said that youth voted for Trump cause he has three baby mothers. I'm cleaning this up and gets a lot of action, so romantic action. I can't believe I've become this person who is saying romantic action instead of what is actually a
lot of cleaning. But I actually think what you're saying is more correct, which is actually correct, which is Donald Trump sold them a person, and Democrats tried to sell them policy.
Yeah, And to be fair, like, I do think young voters and I actually I know that young voters care about issues that affect their daily lives. For sure, they care way more about issues than they do about partisan politics.
They're prioritizing issues over party. But they wanted a candidate who felt authentic, who felt like they were unscripted and were saying what they meant and I think a lot of this, and I write about this in that Washington Post op ed as well, is that this is for GenZ two point I'm in particular, they grew up at the peak of cancel culture, where they had to be
very careful about what they said. And I've had a lot of young people tell me it felt like they were walking on eggshells, and they didn't want to walk on eggshells anymore. And so what they appreciate about Trump is that he doesn't walk on eggshells. He says what he wants. He is able to get away with whatever and say whatever, and it really flies in the face of that pervasive cancel culture or political correctness that this
generation grew up with and is resentful of. And they felt that Democrats were the party that was policing that language,
and that was largely responsible for that cancel culture. And so you know, when you looked at Trump and this quote from the podcast, I think the through line is just that whether or not they agree with every single one of his policy is views or every single thing that he says, they do like the fact that he does say what he means and is able to get away with sometimes being controversial, oftentimes being controversial.
Some of this is COVID, some of this is canceled culture. Some of this is just a rebellion to cancel culture and COVID.
Yes, And I think that the cancel culture and COVID peace are related because I think that while we started to see cancel culture before COVID, it really took a turn during COVID because we were all living our lives online and so sort of and then there were these restrictions that were in place where that were meant to stop the spread of the virus and keep people safe, and so if you went against that or refuse the vaccine or things like that, there was this moral high
ground kind of associated with that, and so there was a lot of judgment in shade being thrown at people. And I think that when students started to go back to school, they saw this plan out in their classrooms,
on their campuses. I'm the oldest of four, and I've seen this with my younger siblings where they'll tell me about certain situations where people are called out on social media because they either did or did not post about some sort of social issue or in the day, in the earliest days when kids were going back to school, if someone wasn't wearing their masks correctly, or if you know, if they broke some sort of rule at school, there was judgment and there was and everyone kind of got involved.
And so I think the cancel culture that sort of started as this online conversation started to seep into the real world lives of young people and it just is exhausting for them, and it and you know, then I think this is also a part of the right word shift, is that they think about their life before COVID and if they were eighteen in the twenty twenty for election, you know, they were really really young when Trump was in office the first time, and so they don't really
remember that time period. They might not know about the politics of it, but they you know, if they were let's say they're in fourth grade at the time, like life was probably pretty good.
And so they think back to, oh, when Trump.
Was in office and they were in elementary school and like had no worry in the world, and so why not want Trump to be back in office again?
If that's the association, right.
And I think that is insane, but it's certainly something we've seen the tracks and historically this is what happened after the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic too, This idea that the real world is too painful and so we'll go back to a time when things don't seem as scary, totally don't seem as well.
And Trump taps into that too, of course, because his whole message is about making America great again, and so it taps into that nostalgia that is really present within gen Z. And I've written about this where I've said that the nostalgia's for a time period that they never experienced. A lot of the never existed, right exactly, but it is something that they've grown up a mid constant crisis, and so it's kind of like a reprieve from reality.
To envision that type of a world.
I would like a reprieve from reality.
Thank you, Rachel, Thank you so much, Molly. I loved our conversation.
No mofectly Jesse Cannon so bally, We've well known that the elites have these private clubs, but usually the price tag to get into the like you know, a soho houses a measly few thousand dollars in an application, but a half a million dollars to get into a private club with exclusive access to Trump's cabinet.
Now that's something.
Sure, there are private clubs that are that expensive, but you have to be willing to pay it to hang out with Don Junior. I mean, all of this seems ridiculous to me. Launch of the executive branch comes as Trump World looks to remake Washington. Good luck, guys, a new club. So this is Donald Trump's mega donor. I'm sure that a lot of people this club will have tattoos. It's involved with Trump's seventeen eighty nine conservative venture funder.
I guess it's a hedge fund. Seventeen eighty nine capital referral requirements are that you paint yourself orange and married to someone with very white blonde hair, and have had multiple rounds of plastic surgery so that these c suite crowd can mingle with Trump advisors and cabinet members without the prying eyes of the press, and want to be insiders. This is what happens when you don't have any writers
in your inner circle want to be insiders. The price tag won't be a problem for Trump's cabinet, given it is by far the wealthiest in history, and the club already has a waitlist. Oh well, another heartbreak. But if you do get into this club, you can hang out with David Socks, I mean Sacks and Donald Trump Junior. And it's such a good club that they had their party at the Willard Hotel, which is not the club. So we'll see how this goes, and good luck to
all we celebrate. I'm sure this is going to be great.
Oh yeah, I can't wait.
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