Amid weeks of compounding foreign policy failures and an economy that lost a revised 103,000 jobs across May and June, conservatives are grappling online with a brutal realization that the Republican Party as a whole is desperate to ignore: What do you tell working-class voters who are drowning under the weight of unrelenting inflation and sluggish job growth, when your entire economic platform is built on a foundation of gaslighting? 

The GOP has spent the better part of the last decade telling Americans it is the party of economic populism. Donald Trump was supposed to be the politician who understood the frustration of people who felt left behind by globalization and stagnant wages. But 18 months into the president’s second term, Republicans have arrived at a remarkable place: running the Biden administrations’ failed playbook on inflation. Now conservatives are fighting with one another over whether a $20 burrito is actually too expensive. 

The current food discourse is not about the price of avocado toast or organic eggs, but it is a similarly mundane symbol of a much larger problem confronting Trump and the Republican Party heading into the November midterms. It started, as these things do now, with a tweet. 

Last week, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh complained that grocery prices were “insane” and still rising. Then Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet relayed a comment from one of the organization’s college students: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” Kolvet added his own gloss — that it’s “a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation” — but he noted that “the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.” 

Inflationary pressures on grocery prices and supply chains have caused the cost of a standard beef burrito to climb 50% since 2020. For workers at the 50th percentile — the middle class, in other words — wages have not kept pace with fast-food prices, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics price index for limited-service meals and snacks. Rather than reading the room, conservative politicians and pundits immediately rushed to echo the White House line that affordability concerns are a Democratic hoax, and then pivoted to calling young people lazy and irresponsible. This is a remix of the lecture supposedly spoiled millennials, who refused to sacrifice every small pleasure on the altar of homeownership, heard for years about $7 lattes. 

In response to what he called the “burrito debate,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, told people to “get a job” and “eat Ramen.” Ben Shapiro responded as if the student had demanded that the federal government provide what he curiously described as gourmet burritos. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen reminisced about working two jobs, living with roommates and eating ramen after college. When he reminded college students that burritos are covered by their meal plans, he got fat shamed by Vice President JD Vance. Fox Business blamed the commotion on young people and their supposed addiction to “little treats.”

What these responses revealed is that a large segment of right-wing media would rather lecture struggling families — cook at home, get a roommate, eat ramen, skip Starbucks — and condemn their lifestyles than acknowledge the obvious reality about out of control prices. Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry generated a pile on after he suggested in a viral post that he could feed a family of eight for under $20, only to admit he was entirely skimping on meat and loading up on beans. 

Trump has called affordability concerns a Democratic “con job” and “hoax,” and a meaningful chunk of MAGA media’s older guard will not, under any circumstances, hear a complaint about the cost of living. But by engaging in the burrito debate, many of them unintentionally exposed the fact that despite their comments on the youth, they have not actually spoken to a young person in years. The pushback they experienced from Trump’s younger supporters was swift — and remarkable.

Far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec questioned how Trump could claim this is a “Golden Age” with the disappearance of McDonald’s Dollar Menu. “Let’s be frank about it,” Fox News host Tomi Lahren wrote on X, “some Americans are turning to socialism because Republicans have failed us so dismally that even the most destructive economic model imaginable feels palatable to people who are struggling to make ends meet and buy groceries.” 

Even as Trump’s own base was arguing about burritos, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC and announced he was “sick” of hearing about the so-called K-shaped economy, the idea that gains are flowing overwhelmingly to the wealthy while everyone else stagnates or falls behind, and declared it flatly over. In its place, Bessent said, America now has a “C economy,” in which lower wage earners are, in his telling, finally clawing their way back. 

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The secretary cited a 2% wage gain for the bottom quarter of earners as proof. But the Atlanta Fed’s own wage tracker showed the bottom quarter of earners had the lowest median wage growth of any income group, a pattern that has held every month since October 2024. Bessent, in other words, picked the one statistic that told a happy story and built a press appearance around it, while the broader data he was being asked about pointed the other way. 

But if Chipotle has genuinely become a luxury good in just a couple of years, the administration’s economic policy is a complete and utter failure. A reliable indicator of economic health is real disposable income, which tracks how much extra money people actually have after essentials are paid for. Since February 2025, the month after Trump returned to office, it has remained completely flat. Every other time in modern history that real disposable income has flattened out for that long, the nation has been stuck in a recession. 

Pocketbook issues have always been the single strongest motivator for the electorate. During a 1980 debate against the incumbent Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan famously asked voters if they were better off now than they were four years ago. Trump can obfuscate, lie or blame the media for only so long before even his most ardent supporters look at the empty space in their wallets after a trip to the grocery store and realize the truth. While they aren’t suddenly going to vote for Democrats, many of his MAGA followers will simply sit on their hands and stay home in November after concluding they are definitively worse off.

The split in MAGAland is not really over burritos. It is over whether MAGA can admit that the economic anger which carried Trump back to power was real, whether it persists under his administration and whether working people deserve anything better than a lecture on personal responsibility. The conservative scolds are not offering a solution because they do not believe there is a social problem to solve. In their worldview, a family’s shrinking purchasing power is primarily evidence of bad character. 

The structural depression is looming large, and as the administration prepares to slash welfare programs further, the online rhetoric from the right will inevitably paint anyone hurt by safety net cuts as a lazy loser. Already, an estimated four million people have lost critical food assistance through SNAP benefits. In any normal political climate, mocking average Americans for being anxious about the economy by calling them lazy or entitled would be immediate political suicide. Imagine Republicans trying that stunt in August 2006 when they were already facing a brewing blue wave in November. But in today’s hyperpartisan and media-fragmented ecosystem, millions of voters are expected to fall in line and vote for the ruling party — regardless of how badly they are squeezed at the checkout counter.

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The spectacle of Laura Loomer touching down in a Kyiv bomb shelter to announce her sudden conversion to supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia has been covered by much of the media as a sort of a political awakening. In a series of recent interviews with America’s most prominent news outlets, the MAGA influencer and conspiracy theorist took a victory lap for discovering — nearly four-and-a-half years after Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine — that Vladimir Putin is a liar. But what looks to be a surprising shift away from Russia is not a moral reckoning. It is a petty turf war amongst MAGA media — and Ukraine stands to benefit. 

Our unfortunate reality is that the shallow personal ambitions and petty feuds of MAGA influencers can dictate foreign policy. Loomer holds no elected office and possesses no genuine policy expertise, yet because she knows how to flatter the vulnerabilities of Donald Trump, she wields terrifying influence on the administration and its agenda. After years of parroting Kremlin talking points and even calling on Putin to swallow Ukraine whole, Loomer recently took a tour of Ukraine, arranged and paid for by unnamed handlers, and had an epiphany. She has suddenly rebranded herself as Kyiv’s most unlikely defender, telling the New York Times that Ukrainian officials now “view me as an extension of the Trump administration.” She recorded a glowing, highly produced interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the gardens of the presidential palace, dined with the chief rabbi of Ukraine and declared that she had been “bamboozled” by Russian propaganda. 

“You don’t need to listen to a podcaster and let them influence your opinion about a country. You can look at those facts yourself,” she told the Associated Press, blaming American social media platforms for banning her in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 election loss, which led her to try Telegram, where Russian media is widely shared. “The Russians are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And I was very angry.” 

She elaborated six days later in an interview with NewsNation’s Batya Ungar-Sargon: “I really have come to understand that everything that I was led to believe while living in this echo chamber, a very toxic echo chamber, that is supported by foreign governments.

The whiplash is breathtaking, but it requires profound gullibility to take her transformation at face value. There is no ideological conversion here. Loomer’s evolution comes at precisely the moment when the Republican coalition is undergoing a bitter fight over what “America First” is supposed to mean. The old MAGA formula — distrust Ukraine, NATO and GOP hawks, and view Putin as a potentially useful counterweight to American liberalism — is colliding with a newer reality related to Trump’s ongoing and unpopular war of choice against Iran. Russia is increasingly difficult to portray as a friendly or even neutral power while it cooperates with the Islamic Republic. Ukraine’s resilience and effective drone campaigns, meanwhile, have made it impossible for even the most hardened cynics to paint Moscow as the inevitable victor. 

Loomer’s reversal is also inseparable from her rivalry with fellow podcasters Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly and other right-wing media figures who have become increasingly hostile to Trump over Israel, Iran and the use of American military power. Loomer herself has said the right-wing split over Iran prompted her to reconsider Ukraine, and she claimed to have noticed that people she regarded as opponents of Trump were simultaneously advancing Russia-friendly arguments. Now she worries those pro-Russian voices inside the MAGA coalition have become “the biggest detriment to social cohesion” heading into what, by all credible predictions, will be a brutal midterm cycle for Republicans.

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Owens’ decision to travel to Putin’s marquee conference in St. Petersburg and Carlson’s ongoing pushing of lines amplified directly by Russian state media have provided Loomer with a tactical opening. She realized that her online nemeses had cornered the market on reflexive Kremlin apologetics. By pivoting to a pro-Ukraine posture wrapped in the language of America First security investments, she’s weaponizing patriotism against her rivals while positioning herself as the true guardian of the movement’s ideological purity. This evolving narrative frames support for Ukraine not as an act of charity or foreign aid, but as a hard-headed business transaction, one Trump appears to have welcomed. He publicly endorsed her meeting with Zelenskyy, and Loomer has said she spoke twice with Trump while in Ukraine.

None of this happens in a vacuum. In September 2024, the Justice Department indicted two Russian state media employees for funneling nearly $10 million into Tenet Media, a Tennessee outfit whose talent roster included right-wing podcasters Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin, all of whom produced content the indictment says was crafted to inflame American divisions and tilt coverage toward candidates the Kremlin found useful. Pool was allegedly pulling in a $100,000 an episode while insisting he had no idea where the cash originated, a claim that got considerably shakier once reporters noted he’d made major real estate purchases the same month Tenet launched. After Loomer arrived in Kyiv last month, Pool experienced his own conversion and posted that Ukraine had been “fighting for their very existence against an evil dictator” and hoped Trump would “lend their support.”

Republican voters have also been moving in this direction. In January 2026, Pew Research Center found that 47% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents described Russia as an enemy of the U.S, up from 40% the year before. Republican confidence in Zelenskyy also rose four points to 34%.

While Loomer works to convert MAGA to the Ukrainian cause, the press should stop treating her reversal as a heroic story about one brave influencer seeing the light. They should instead frame it for what it actually is: a split in MAGA media over Ukraine and Russia that is ultimately a domestic turf war disguised as statecraft.

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For 58 seasons, through wars, impeachments and the corporate dismantling of the network news business around it, “60 Minutes” remained America’s highest-rated newsmagazine. Viewership of the CBS News program was up 9% during the 2025-2026 season and generated more than 2.5 billion social-media video views, according to the network. Yet in a bizarre case of fixing something that does not need fixing, the program became the one CBS property executives chose to radically remake. 

David Ellison, the network’s new owner, appears determined to test whether the rare commercial-news institution that persuaded millions of Americans to spend an hour with investigative reporting can survive the removal of the very people who made it matter. In barely a year, under the ownership of Ellison’s Skydance and the editorial stewardship of Bari Weiss, that legacy has been stripped down, gutted and reassembled as an instrument of political appeasement. By sacrificing seasoned investigative reporters and filling the vacuum with anti-woke contrarians, Ellison and Weiss have defanged a national treasure. 

“60 Minutes” was imperfect, sometimes badly so. Every institution with a half-century of history is. But the program retained an essential public purpose. And in its zeal to purge the newsroom of dissent, CBS and Weiss may have inadvertently triggered the creation of their most dangerous future competitor — and accidentally set the stage for its own undoing.

The journalists Weiss pushed out did not simply disappear. Bill Owens, the former “60 Minutes” executive producer who resigned in 2025 over corporate interference before Weiss even arrived, has reportedly been assembling a business plan and pitch deck for a rival investigative newsmagazine, seeking something in the neighborhood of $50 million to fund two years of programming. The names attached to it read like a “60 Minutes” reunion special. Such a group — joined potentially by Anderson Cooper and the former producers who resigned in protest — could sell itself as carrying the true DNA of gold-standard television news. 

There is a reason Ellison spent billions acquiring a legendary news brand. His $8 billion purchase of Paramount and his aggressive right-wing revamp of CBS News is an overt attempt to smooth the waters for an infinitely larger prize — a $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes cable news giant CNN. With Donald Trump long signaling his disdain for traditional media, Ellison’s moves at CBS functioned as a high-stakes litmus test. When the Department of Justice cleared the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger in June, Ellison passed.

But after 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America filed anti-trust lawsuits to block the merger ahead of a trial next March, Ellison took to the opinion pages of The New York Times on Tuesday to defend his growing empire. Pushing back against speculation regarding his political loyalties, Ellison pledged “independence” for his newsrooms and argued that the combined entity would control only a fraction of the streaming market. But his pleas for personal trust ring hollow. You do not demonstrate a commitment to objective journalism by spending $150 million to acquire The Free Press and handing the keys of a legacy news division to Weiss — an opinion columnist with zero television management experience and a well-documented history of tendentious reporting.

Now, at CBS News, her editorial interference has been disguised as routine management. At her infamous first staff meeting, Weiss vowed to “do the f**king news,” but what followed instead suggests a systematic effort to reshape reality.

When veteran correspondent Cecilia Vega reported on the fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, network executives pressed her, she claims, to include footage of protesters assaulting undercover officers, despite Vega finding no credible examples of such altercations. She said they also urged her to feature Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey declaring he wanted law enforcement to target Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, a statement that was never made. When covering the conflict in Iran, Vega said she was instructed to open her segment by declaring the nation “totally outgunned by the United States and Israel” — framing that skewed favorably toward the Trump administration’s telling of events. (CBS News has disputed the broader claim that it sought to inject bias, saying its editorial process reflects ordinary review.) 

Elsewhere, Weiss personally blocked a deeply reported piece by Sharyn Alfonsi on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where the Trump administration has deported hundreds of individuals into conditions marked by horrific human rights abuses. Though the story eventually leaked in Canada and later aired on CBS in its original form, the message Weiss sent to the newsroom was unmistakable. The effect was to launder censorship in the language of journalistic standards.

Producers say Weiss was also involved in choosing which correspondent got to interview Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, sidelining “60 Minutes” stalwart Lesley Stahl, who is famous for decades of forensic interviews with presidents and world leaders, in favor of Major Garrett. Most recently, it was revealed that Alfonsi had been sitting on a major scoop regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s financial ties to Wall Street giants like Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — complete with an on-camera interview filmed in March 2026 with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who was heading his own investigation into Epstein’s finances — before being fired by Weiss in May. CBS claimed the piece simply was not finished by the end of last season, and has not said whether it intends to air it this fall. Wyden is now pushing legislation to hold individual bankers personally accountable for exactly this kind of institutional silence.

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The optics are damning regardless of the internal timeline: The network fired the reporter chasing one of the biggest financial accountability stories of the year in the middle of a purge explicitly aimed at correspondents who resisted political pressure, and the story broke three months later, just not on CBS.

This should be the central concern about the Ellison era at CBS. Not whether Ellison privately considers himself a conservative, a liberal or a man above ideology, nor whether Weiss thinks of herself as a dissident or a reformer. The question is whether their actions are creating the practical conditions under which reporters can hold power to account.

The upheaval has been extraordinary. Tanya Simon, the executive producer who oversaw the program’s recent success, was removed alongside correspondents Alfonsi and Vega, as well as senior editors and producers. Scott Pelley was fired shortly after publicly challenging the appointment of Nick Bilton as executive producer and accusing Weiss of “murdering” the broadcast. Cooper had already departed. The result is a “60 Minutes” with a drastically depleted bench heading into a new season.

In place of these decorated investigative journalists, Bilton and Weiss have assembled what the former reportedly referred to as “the Avengers of news.” But, as longtime media critic Eric Deggans pointed out, a look at the roster reveals a strategy straight out of the old Fox News playbook: Hire a token investigative journalist to construct a thin facade of balance while filling the remaining ranks with anti-woke contrarians. 

Bringing on “The Perfect Storm” author Sebastian Junger provides comfortable camouflage for stocking the rest of the newsroom with figures like Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat and former Free Press staffer Tanya Lukyanova, whose primary qualification appears to be an eagerness to challenge progressive consensus. When an organization hires a conservative columnist known for asking whether liberal feminism ruined the workplace, or a producer whose major contributions include reframing starvation in Gaza through the lens of pre-existing health conditions, it signals a troubling shift in focus. 

Yet in their rush to destroy the old guard, Weiss and Ellison have overlooked the fact that they left behind an elite corps of unemployed, highly motivated investigative journalists with nothing left to lose. Whether this exiled team finds a home as the investigative video arm of an outlet like ProPublica, launches a streaming-native newsmagazine or partners with an independent distributor, the potential is staggering. Pelley and Alfonsi are now set to serve as journalists in residence at Columbia Journalism School during the 2026-27 academic year. While that is not a launch announcement, it is evidence that their careers and credibility did not disappear when CBS took away their airtime. 

Somewhere out there, a rival show called “Stop Watch” is writing itself, and CBS built the pitch deck for it, one firing at a time.

The post The ghost of “60 Minutes” is about to haunt Bari Weiss appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump hates embarrassing failures even when they are, ultimately, his own fault. So when the sealant on his $13.1 million-turned-$16-million Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation started peeling off in sheets days after the pool reopened and the water turned green with algae, he couldn’t simply say that a rushed, no-bid contract handed to his golfing buddy’s company produced shoddy work. Instead he demanded a villain, and the weaponized Justice Department complied.

On July 2, 2026, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro held a triumphant press briefing to announce a felony indictment against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn. Pirro claimed her office possessed solid evidence of guilt proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the 67-year-old had committed a deliberate, forceful and violent act causing over $1,000 in damage to the pool liner when he stopped his bike in June, reached down and touched a loose piece of lining that had already come apart before he ever laid a hand on it. When pressed by journalists like NBC’s Ryan Reilly about photographic evidence showing the liner was already peeling long before Hearn ever stepped near the water, Pirro grew combative, waving off the question with the same on-air contempt she perfected across 14 years as a host at Fox News, and insisted her office would prove the damage in court with expert testimony.

Weeks later, the Justice Department acknowledged something dramatically different.

By late July, as Hearn’s defense counsel moved for release of the grand jury transcripts to expose glaring prosecutorial irregularities, Pirro’s case collapsed. Facing the real possibility of judicial sanctions, an inspector general investigation and disbarment, her office filed a 20-page motion to dismiss the indictment. The filing threw the Interior Department under the bus, claiming Secretary Doug Burgum’s agency had withheld 695 megabytes of crucial documents revealing the damage was caused by contractor error during the rush to finish before the America 250 Independence Day festivities. The department’s own records described repeated installation failures and extensive peeling of the pool liner weeks before the alleged vandalism was ever said to have occurred. Prosecutors asked that the charges be dismissed because the evidence no longer supported Pirro’s claim, evidence that, it bears repeating, had been available to the government the entire time.

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The dismissal did not stop with Hearn. Within days, Pirro’s office also moved to drop misdemeanor charges against three more people accused of the same phantom vandalism. Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers all faced lesser counts of destroying property worth less than a thousand dollars, and their attorneys told reporters the common thread was simple: The federal government had just spent millions repainting and relining the pool, and when the work failed, the Trump administration needed a scapegoat. The entire theory of the case — that ordinary citizens had descended on a national monument with knives to sabotage it out of political spite — evaporated once anyone with subpoena power actually looked at the evidence.

The saga of the Reflecting Pool is emblematic of everything amiss in America right now, a perfect diorama of how right-wing media turns Trump’s fantasies into public reality, and then tries to quietly conceal the wreckage once the facts catch up. Fox News was happy to amplify the vandalism narrative when it was useful. But once the case fell apart, the network gave it barely cursory treatment, a striking silence from an outlet that had spent weeks covering the alleged desecration of a national monument when the story served the White House.

That silence makes sense once you remember Pirro’s origins. She spent years at Fox telling viewers whatever the moment required. By her own network’s private assessment, she was a “reckless maniac” whose 2020 election fraud claims helped make Fox liable for one of the largest defamation settlements in American history: a $787.5 million payout to Dominion Voting Systems. 

Pirro’s appointment as U.S. attorney represented the full realization of the MAGA media pipeline, in which performative loyalty on television is treated as the primary qualification for federal law enforcement authority. What she is now discovering is that a courtroom does not run on the same rules as a cable television set. At Fox, Pirro could tell her audience whatever she wanted without personal consequence. Telling a federal judge the same kind of thing carries the threat of disbarment and perjury charges, and no amount of bravado previously reserved for on-air broadcasts could change that math.

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Predictably, the moment Pirro chose self-preservation over total subversion of the law, Trump turned on her. He spent days publicly berating her, complaining to reporters that she had “folded like an umbrella” and writing on Truth Social that he fully disagreed with his own Justice Department. In a rambling, incoherent stream of consciousness to reporters from the Oval Office on Monday, he continued to insist on the existence of security tapes showing mysterious figures cutting the pool lining with box cutters — tapes no one has ever produced — while simultaneously trying to shift blame for the pool’s historical leaks onto previous administrations. On Monday, Trump met privately with Pirro and Burgum while reports circulated that he was considering replacing her.

After her Senate confirmation in August 2025, Trump promised Pirro would be a powerful crusader, and she has spent the year since prosecuting his perceived enemies with a zeal that has not been matched at trial. Her record in court is poor, with her office winning only half of its first eight criminal trials in 2026 a rate CNN reported was far below the national average. Bloomberg Law’s reporting describes a string of similarly threadbare cases: a man charged with assaulting a federal officer using a Subway sandwich following Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in the District, who was acquitted by a jury but forced to flee his home after receiving threats; a Maryland woman jailed nearly a week for spitting on an officer at the National Zoo before the charge was quietly reduced and then dropped; a man left with permanent injuries after being tased during a high-speed chase, and whose federal charge also collapsed into a misdemeanor plea. The latter was interviewed by a Bloomberg Law reporter about his ordeal and was, according to the outlet, found dead behind a Washington rowhouse a month later. 

As people swept up in this kind of prosecutorial overreach have noted, the goal is not really conviction. It is using state power to inflict maximum disruption on a person’s job, housing and relationships, and to send a chilling message to anyone else who might draw the government’s attention. A conviction, when one happens, is treated as a bonus. The process itself is the punishment.

Pirro will likely survive this particular episode. Trump did not fire her over the weekend, and by Monday he had already moved on to blaming the judge instead. But something has shifted. 

The former Fox star who built a television career on never conceding a point is now the first prominent member of this administration to publicly contradict Trump’s own account of a story he has told, in increasingly baroque detail, for weeks. It turns out that feeding Trump’s delusions is a great deal easier from behind a Fox News desk, where no one can hold you in contempt, than standing in front of a federal judge who can.

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Right-wing media looks to have made a profound miscalculation. They put Hunter Biden through an unrelenting public pressure cooker, convinced that by turning a private citizen’s darkest personal rock bottom into a daily political circus, they could break both the man and his family. Now, seven years into his sobriety, Biden has picked up a podcast mic and won’t stop talking. The man whom the right spent years trying to destroy is now walking into rooms they open up for him — and setting them on fire from the inside.

For the better part of the past decade, conservative media made a concerted effort to turn Biden into the ultimate avatar of political corruption: the degenerate failson as a symbol of Democratic rot. During his father Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the right devoted extensive attention to Hunter’s overseas business dealings, particularly his role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and allegations stemming from a laptop Hunter owned that surfaced in GOP hands shortly before the election. The laptop story became a defining example of modern media dynamics after the major social media companies temporarily limited distribution of an October 2020 New York Post article that included information taken from the laptop, a decision that conservatives still cite as evidence of a massive, multi-institution coverup. Republican lawmakers spent endless congressional hours investigating his digital footprint, but were ultimately unable to establish that the elder Biden had engaged in a criminal bribery scheme tied to his son’s business activities. 

The meandering story is what makes the current public rehabilitation of Hunter Biden one of the stranger spectacles in American politics. Right-wing media turned him into a household name to hurt his father, and now that notoriety is precisely what gives him leverage. 

Having emerged from severe addiction, public humiliation and federal prosecution, Biden is now truth-telling about his past and single-handedly roasting the right wing’s bad-faith outrage ecosystem on its own home turf. This year alone Biden has sat for hours-long interviews with independent outlets that cater to the very audience the GOP spent a decade cultivating against his family. He talked to Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5, whose YouTube following runs past three million and skews toward people who trust almost nothing coming out of U.S. institutions. He talked to Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who spent years amplifying allegations against him. Ryan then hooked him up with MAGA podcaster Candace Owens, who once called him a degenerate who belonged in prison. 

Biden’s media strategy is dangerous and fascinating. He has described his media blitz as partly about addiction recovery and partly about strategy. Independent podcasts and YouTube channels have replaced the legacy media gatekeepers that used to referee these fights, and Biden figured out faster than most Democratic operatives that the audience he needed to reach was sitting in exactly the media ecosystem built to hate him. “No one gives a shit with what anybody says on CNN,” he told one interviewer, arguing that years of investigations and public scrutiny had lowered expectations to the point where audiences were surprised simply to hear him speak coherently at length. His approach appears designed to replace years of secondhand portrayals with direct exposure. 

Biden’s rapid growth on X further underscores this tactical evolution. Joining Elon Musk’s platform just days before his interview with Owens dropped, Biden began tweeting with relentless energy, sometimes authoring over 100 posts a day. Commentators quickly dubbed him a “MAGA whisperer” as he systematically dismantled right-wing talking points and exposed media figures he accused of building careers off bad-faith attacks. When CNN anchor Jake Tapper published a scathing review of Jill Biden’s memoir — which defended the former president’s fitness for office — Hunter immediately went on the offensive, blasting Tapper and corporate media for what he viewed as complicity in weaponizing personal family dynamics for television ratings.

Biden’s new approach mixes vulnerability with nuclear-grade anger. Instead of avoiding controversy, he frequently addresses it head on. On a Barstool Sports podcast this week, he joked about signing a laptop and openly discussed his struggles with crack cocaine addiction. For a movement that has invested years in hyping “Hunter’s laptop” as a civilization-ending scandal, seeing the man himself turn it into a potential merchandising opportunity should be humiliating.

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On that same Barstool appearance, he delivered an expletive-filled rant about Donald Trump’s entire family: “F**k him. F**k his sons. F**k his daughter. I mean it, all of them, the whole family, down to the grandchildren. I hope for the rest of time that I am on this earth, that their names live in ignominy.” Biden backed that rage up with a substantive critique, pointing out that the Trump sons received $3.2 billion in Defense Department contracts in just 18 months and that son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite holding no government position, is reportedly receiving more than $110 million from the Saudis, tied to nuclear enrichment authorization and billions in investment funds. 

But Biden is also reaching out beyond the right-wing media ecosystem. He has appeared on NPR’s “Newsmakers,” podcasts hosted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Don Lemon, and the “I’ve Had It” podcast with hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan. Yet his aggressive, unapologetic posture does not spare Democrats. He has openly torched party leaders who pressured his father to abandon his 2024 reelection bid following the president’s disastrous debate performance, specifically calling out Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a “piece of s**t” for his role in pushing his father aside. “I’m not running for anything, so I can say whatever the f**k I want,” Hunter Biden declared, giving voice to millions of frustrated progressives who are sick and tired of watching Democratic leaders play by polite, outdated rules while right-wing extremists burn down democratic norms. 

It makes you wonder: Had the party embraced Biden’s willingness to fight back early on, perhaps they could have deployed one of the most effective anti-MAGA communicators in the country to stop Trump’s return.

To be certain, Biden’s media strategy has generated intense criticism, especially his decision to sit down with the extreme, far-right activist Nick Fuentes. The interview, filmed in a Philadelphia studio dressed up to resemble a seedy motel in a wink at the laptop scandal, quickly became a viral sensation, generating millions of views. During the interview, which reportedly nearly escalated into a physical confrontation, the two found common ground, trading skepticism about American support for Israel, with Fuentes framing his objections as political rather than religious, a distinction that will comfort no one who has watched what he actually says about Jews. When discussing their public reputations, Biden joked, “I’m a crackhead,” to which Fuentes replied, “I’m a racist,” prompting Biden to shoot back, “Mine is true!”

Biden defended the pairing on social media in terms that sound almost reasonable — until you remember who he is talking about. He argued that people who profit from keeping Americans separated have built a business model on it, and that he would sit down with anyone who sees Trump as an enemy, regardless of what else they believe. He was explicit that Fuentes’ views on race and women are indefensible, and that what Fuentes has said about the Holocaust and Nazism cannot be defended. But he argued that one issue — stopping Trump — mattered more than any daylight between him and a man who leads an online movement built substantially on racial grievance. 

This is a coherent argument. It is also the argument every troll counts on succeeding, because it leads and allows audiences to conclude that platforming extremist speech and views like Fuentes’ is a savvy tactical maneuver rather than what it actually is: a laundering operation. In this particular wash cycle, Fuentes needed laundering a great deal more than Biden needed an outlet. 

The instinct to give Fuentes and people like him a bigger microphone under the banner of anti-Trump unity deserves more skepticism. There is no common ground with someone whose political project is ethno-nationalist authoritarianism, and treating a two-hour conversation as evidence that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” echoes the bad faith politics that lets extremists claim they were misunderstood or “just joking” the whole time. It’s just whitewashing bigotry for clicks. 

But Hunter Biden’s choice to sit with Fuentes exposes something crucial about our current media environment. At a moment when fascism is organizing through podcasts and X feeds, he has stumbled into a role Democrats should have desperately filled: that of a loud, media-savvy fighter who doesn’t care about decorum. By owning his flaws and speaking directly to the public, Biden has stripped the right-wing outrage machine of its primary power source.

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The shift was as swift as it was cold. Standing before reporters in the briefing room on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked a direct question: Would President Donald Trump or his administration intervene to stop the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate to the United Kingdom on 59 charges of rape, sex trafficking, assault and extreme pornography? Her single-word response — “No” — denied the brothers, who have been championed by many MAGA media figures as examples of white male persecution, a lifeline. 

On Thursday, federal marshals in Miami took the Tates into custody. In addition to the charges they face in the U.K., the brothers remain embroiled in grave human-trafficking and minor-exploitation proceedings in Romania and investigations in Florida about new allegations.

In the days since their arrest, their attorney Joseph McBride — who has also represented Jan. 6 defendants — has insisted the arrest is political persecution, and he has been amplifying supportive commentary online from media figures with close ties to the Trump administration. MAGA influencer and white nationalist Nick Fuentes wrote that it would be a “national humiliation” if Trump agreed to extradite the brothers to Britain over what he called “trumped up ‘Me Too’ charges.” Other far-right influencers reportedly joined in, but to no avail.

Trump’s refusal to intervene in the Tates’ extradition fight is a much-delayed correction. For years, the brothers were treated by the MAGA ecosystem not as alleged traffickers facing serious criminal scrutiny, but as useful avatars of male grievance and anti-feminist rebellion. That bargain is now boomeranging in the direction of a different Trump: Barron.

The key to understanding how the Tate brothers rose to such political heights — and why their collapse now threatens to drag the president’s youngest son into a potentially damaging congressional spotlight — can be found in the conservative media ecosystem that laundered Andrew Tate into a right-wing icon. 

When mainstream platforms like YouTube, Meta and TikTok finally moved to deplatform the Tate brothers in 2022, the right-wing media apparatus stepped in to grant Tate a second —  and far more dangerous — life. Tucker Carlson first gave Tate a platform on Fox News back in 2022 and later hosted a long, sympathetic interview. Elon Musk reinstated Tate’s X account, restoring his reach to over 11 million followers while repeatedly tweeting defenses that hand-waved sex trafficking allegations as political distractions. The late Charlie Kirk chimed in on behalf of Tate: “What he says is so powerful. Our society is configured towards collapsing the American man.” MAGA podcaster Candace Owens dedicated hours of airtime to declaring the Tates’ innocence while launching vicious smear campaigns against their victims.

The brothers were indicted in Romania in 2023 on charges of rape and human trafficking, accused of running a criminal operation that lured women — including, prosecutors allege, a 17-year-old — into pornography and prostitution. But in February 2025, weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, Romanian authorities lifted the travel restrictions that had kept the Tates in the country, and the pair immediately boarded a private jet to Florida. At the time, the country’s foreign minister Emil Hurezeanu said that a U.S. official had expressed interest in the case. Trump, for his part, said he knew “nothing about” any pressure his administration might have applied.

The reporting since then has filled in the blanks. ProPublica reported that federal authorities were told to return electronic devices they had seized from the Tates during an investigation and chided by political appointees like Paul Ingrassia — a vocal Tate defender appointed to the General Services Administration. Heidi Blake, the New Yorker reporter who has covered the Tates more exhaustively than perhaps anyone else, has traced a direct line from a Munich Security Conference conversation between U.S. special envoy Richard Grenell and Hurezeanu to Romanian prosecutors reaching out to the Tates’ lawyers within days, asking what the Americans wanted. Experts labeled the political interference highly inappropriate, but it worked. The travel ban on the brothers was lifted. 

Within days of Andrew Tate landing back on U.S. soil, another woman came forward accusing him of assault and strangulation — the same pattern of abuse, Blake has said, described by victim after victim in this case.

This machinery surrounding was never a secret. What has been less investigated, at least until this week, is how deep the personal relationships ran — specifically, the friendship between Andrew Tate and the president’s 20-year-old son.

According to reporting in the New York Times, Tate spoke with Barron Trump over a Zoom call last year with a mutual friend present, and the two discussed their shared belief that the Romanian case against Tate was an effort to silence him. That claim — the idea that a rape and trafficking prosecution amounts to censorship — is the same framing Tate’s MAGA allies have pushed for years. Barron’s older brother, Donald Trump Jr., has called Tate’s 2023 detention “absolute insanity.” Tate publicly boasted about his access to MAGA’s top circles, bragging in 2024 that he was “very close with the Trump family” and that he was looking forward to reminding Donald Trump that he was a “bulletproof bada*s.”

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For Trump’s presidential campaign, the alliance delivered results. By leveraging the manosphere media network that Tate helped anchor, the campaign mobilized a wave of low-propensity young male voters in 2024. 

So why did the Trump White House suddenly cut the Tate brothers loose? The breakdown was not sparked by a sudden moral awakening regarding sex trafficking or rape. It was likely sparked by the cardinal sin of the MAGA media universe: political disloyalty.

In February, as the administration weighed military action in the Middle East, Andrew Tate took to his livestreaming platform to launch a furious, unhinged tirade against Trump’s strike on Iran.

“I do not support war with Iran for Israel,” Tate raged to his audience, accusing the administration of driving the country into disaster while ignoring domestic collapse. “If you’re at home in America right now and you feel like your country is f****d… and moral degeneracy is out of control . . . why would the U.S. going into a war with Iran benefit anybody in America at all? Give me one possible reason. NOBODY WANTS THIS WAR.”

When the British government authorized 38 new criminal charges against the Tates and submitted an updated extradition request to the Justice Department, the White House’s calculation was simple. The political cost of protecting two alleged serial rapists, one of whom was actively attacking the president on foreign policy, far outweighed any remaining value they brought to the youth-culture strategy. The administration threw them to the wolves.

While the administration may hope that cutting the Tates loose will close the book on this embarrassing chapter, the fallout from their tangled relationships with the first family and the wider MAGA sphere may just be beginning.

Rep.Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., has formally urged House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer to open a swift investigation into the Tate brothers’ relationships within Trump’s inner circle. In a searing letter, she highlighted grave diplomatic and ethical concerns regarding whether political networks leveraged their influence to shield accused human traffickers.

It doesn’t help the administration’s case that the Tate brothers were, by multiple accounts, still socializing with Trump-world figures in Washington in the days before their arrest. Ansari said she learned only this week that the brothers had traveled to D.C. for meetings, including one with Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas. 

The Arizona congresswoman wants the committee to subpoena communications between the Tates and administration officials, and she wants Barron Trump to testify under oath about whether he “influenced official actions or administration policy” about the brothers.

There is no evidence that Barron engaged in criminal wrongdoing or played any role in the government’s decisions involving the Tates. But his choice to enthusiastically fraternize with a self-described misogynist facing dozens of horrific felony counts has exposed him to scrutiny. 

Barron Trump was not an unwitting bystander dragged into a media storm. He was an active participant in defending Andrew Tate, using his influence to validate an accused predator because it fit the edgy, anti-establishment aesthetic of the modern manosphere media. Now, as congressional scrutiny looms and the Tate brothers prepare to face trial in a U.S. federal court before being extradited to London, the president’s youngest son is left facing the stark consequences of his MAGA alliances.

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