Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Peter Hamby. Holiday greetings from my family’s house in Richmond, Virginia, a city where sleeve tattoos and salted ham biscuits coexist in blissful harmony. Tonight, as Democrats struggle to understand an evolving media environment mastered by Donald Trump, my conversation with progressive content creator Brian Tyler Cohen, who has more than 7 million followers across his platforms and some advice for Dems on how to start prioritizing the small screen over the big one.

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Two weeks from the end of a House term with no shortage of drama, the House Ethics Committee dropped a farewell bombshell, releasing its report that found ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz had committed statutory rape under Florida law, paid for sex, used illegal drugs, expedited a passport on behalf of a sexual partner he falsely claimed was a constituent, and broke other basic rules that govern the U.S. House. (The committee did not find that Gaetz violated federal sex-trafficking laws, for what it’s worth.) The broad strokes of the story, of course, have been largely public since 2021 reports of a Justice Department investigation that ultimately wrapped up with no charges filed. Indeed, the specific allegation that Gaetz had “slept with a 17-year-old” was already familiar by the time that ex-speaker Kevin McCarthy publicly resurfaced it this spring. One surprise, however, was that Ethics decided to release the report at all—a highly unusual, though not unprecedented, move concerning an ex-member. (The committee lost jurisdiction over Gaetz when he resigned from Congress in November.) But even by the standards of recent headline-grabbing House member personal-life antics (Lauren Boebert, George Santos, etcetera), the report enters uncharted territory. To wit: It says Gaetz used drugs and had sex with a minor in front of multiple witnesses while leaving a paper trail of texts soliciting drugs. It also includes his denial of the most explosive claim: “He has publicly stated that Victim A ‘doesn’t exist’ and that he has not ‘had sex with a 17-year-old since I was 17.’” Also of interest is the degree to which the report takes aim at Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, which closed its own investigation into Gaetz in February 2023. Ethics had deferred to Justice initially, then picked up the ball. But Justice refused to share evidence to the point that the committee “submitted FOIA requests to several relevant D.O.J. offices, which to date have not been adequately processed.” Indeed, the Ethics report blames Justice, alongside Gaetz, for the repeated delays that explain its late publication. Gaetz, for his part, has spent the day on social media reiterating his contention that he never paid for sex but gave funds to women he was dating, and retweeting supporters. Sample defense from a well-wisher: “If gifts are now prostitution, then everyone in Congress is now a hoe.”

Peter Hamby: The post-election conventional wisdom is that Democrats and progressives lost, in part, because they were too slow to understand digital media, distributed content, and the podcast universe. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has embraced alternative media for years. Do you agree with that thesis generally? Brian Tyler Cohen: Yes. Democrats are operating under this notion that unless a message is delivered on legacy media, then it’s not legitimate, it’s not valid. Independent media for them still feels extraneous. In their minds, any real news has to be broken under the glossy veneer of legacy media. Any juicy interviews have to be conducted under the glossy veneer of legacy media. But the reality is that not only is legacy media’s influence waning, not only is their audience smaller, but if the goal is persuasion—which it is, ostensibly, for politicians seeking to win elections—then you need to talk to an audience that’s actually persuadable. Democrats have high-information voters already. By virtue of heaping more attention onto the same people whose votes we already have, you’re just bringing sand to the beach. You have to go where the persuadable people actually are.

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You’ve interviewed a bunch of Dems over the last few years. President Biden, A.O.C., Beto, Fetterman. Who on that long list of Democrats gets what you are talking about?  Pete Buttigieg deserves a lot of credit. At the Democratic Convention, Pete had a two-hour block with 10-minute increments for all of these creators. He’s walking the walk. He’s doing exactly what I think people should be doing. He didn’t discriminate based on how big somebody’s platform is. I have like 7 million followers across my platforms. The very next person in line after me was somebody who had 10,000 followers on Instagram. Pete is doing the work and validating all these creators. I know for a fact that he’s helped launch creators’ careers, because when they nab an interview with somebody like Pete Buttigieg, that instantly validates them. A few others would be Jamie Raskin, who has been really, really generous with his time. Eric Swalwell is really generous with his time. In the Senate, Chris Murphy and Brian Schatz.

Harris’s deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, who also ran digital for the Biden and Harris campaigns, made an important confession to Semafor last week. He said that digital media tactics—doing more podcasts and YouTube shows—only go so far for Democrats today because their party and their leaders have lost their cultural cachet. Trump has always been viewed as a celebrity, so it’s been easier for him to show up in new media spaces.  Absolutely. Jon Lovett has a great take on this. He said that Trump and his supporters have back-of-the-classroom energy, and the Democrats today have front-of-the-classroom energy. Especially for younger audiences, this topic is really the whole ballgame, because politics is downstream of culture. The lesson Democrats have to learn coming out of this election is that we have to be a little less insistent on the purity tests we impose. Right now, in order to be a member in good standing in the Democratic Party, you have to abide by a really narrow set of guidelines and language. We have to be willing to be a little less safe, a little more controversial, and not be so fast to punish somebody if they don’t pass all of our litmus tests. Democrats have to realize that with our politicians, we’re not looking for a partner, we’re not looking for a spiritual leader. We are looking for somebody to win elections, to get us in power, so we can then enact or to implement as much of our agenda as we can. Oftentimes, I think Democrats would rather be out of power with 100 percent agreement, rather than in power with only 75 percent agreement—even though, in the latter situation, we can actually enact change. Until we change that mentality, I think we’re going to be in the wilderness and pushing people away in the process. How much is this a staff problem? It seems like communications staffers in Washington don’t have a lot of imagination. I think that oftentimes they look at creators the wrong way. So instead of just sending press releases out to NBC or Politico, now they send press releases out to me. But we don’t operate that way. I’m not going to read your press release on air at the 6 p.m. broadcast. It doesn’t work like that. If you want to talk about something, offer up the principal, and I’ll have him or her on, and we can have an interesting conversation for 20 minutes and go in depth about something. You have to think about what independent media actually is. And I think that Democratic staffers often are so stuck in their ways of how the media used to be, that they’re not able to think about how indie media operates and also think about the opportunities that it presents. The Harris campaign made a big deal out of their TikTok effort. Kamala HQ kind of became the way we in the press understood their digital efforts, and the vibe shift on TikTok after Biden left the race was real. But I also think a lot of reporters confused Kamala’s buzz on social media with real-life excitement among young voters, which obviously didn’t turn out to be the case. Was TikTok too much of a focus this cycle? Let me put it this way: What they did on TikTok, that should be the bar. The reality is that we just got completely pummeled in terms of the sheer amount of content everywhere, and sometimes it’s just a numbers game. We are at a fundamental systemic disadvantage on the left in terms of the content and the number of creators on all of these platforms. TikTok felt like the only one where the left has a slight edge over the right, but I’m sure that’s about to disappear. It’s just a matter of getting out in front of people and trying to slow some of the advantages that Republicans have on all these platforms. We need to be ubiquitous on the left, and it shouldn’t just be on Kamala HQ to do that. We’ve squandered years and years and years of being able to build up a progressive or left-of-center media ecosystem. We should have spent the last few years making it so that we have a ton of creators on the left that are doing this work. We haven’t. I think that largely falls on the shoulders of Democrats who refuse to see the writing on the wall and refuse to nurture and embrace independent media. But hopefully the silver lining out of this will be that Democrats finally recognize the media environment that we actually live in, and operate accordingly.

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