Mar 04, 2025

Coalition to Strengthen America's Healthcare

Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. Tonight, some early warning signs for Donald Trump as he bleeds support among young voters—including many of the young men who voted for him—over his handling of the economy and inflation. Plus, Abby Livingston has the latest on Republican efforts to avoid town halls and John Thune’s delicate pushback on DOGE. But first, I spoke to Cory Booker about today’s attention-grabbing social media push from Democrats, which showcases how they just might beat MAGA forces at their own clout-chasing game…

Revenge of the Nerds

By now, you’ve likely seen the series of synchronized videos Senate Democrats released on social media, which are going extremely viral thanks to Elon Musk and a bunch of MAGA influencers who thought they’d scored a gotcha moment exposing another episode of Democratic cringe. To be fair, they are sort of corny. This morning, nearly two dozen senators all posted a version of the same selfie-style video, reading the same script pre-butting Trump’s address to Congress tonight: “Shit that ain’t true. Since day one of Trump’s presidency, prices have gone up, not down. … Donald Trump has done nothing to lower costs for you. … He is letting Elon Musk take a chainsaw to vital government services for Americans.” And so on. You can watch one here. The clips were screenshotted and edited together—with a mix of mockery and accusation—by prominent Trump supporters on Twitter. “It’s almost like someone is telling Democrats what to say,” said Republican Senator Mike Lee. One MAGA creator, Nick Sortor, wrote that “an ASTOUNDING **22** Democrat Senators have uploaded videos of themselves reading off an identical cringey script bashing Trump and Musk. This is a REALLY tough watch. Just remember: the Democrats think you’re all stupid.” Musk aggressively reposted all of them to his 219 million followers, claiming that he and his fellow “citizen journalists” on X had exposed a sinister conspiracy. “Now we’re up to 22 Dem senators all doing the same cringe video simultaneously!” Then he posted: “I will buy a Cyber Truck for anyone can [sic] provide proof of who wrote this particular piece of propaganda.” I’ve been covering digital tactics since before any of these people were involved in politics—I lived through the days of the Ron Paul moneybomb and Mark Warner’s bizarre foray onto Second Life—and I must admit I also thought the clips were disastrous, at least at first. But then I thought, what if this push—with senior-center Democrats dropping s-bombs into their iPhones—was actually… savvy?

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I did a gut check with a smart Democratic operative who thinks the party should do more to reach normies and not just nerds. The source texted me back in all caps: “ATTENTION ECONOMY!” And he’s right. The video barrage showed Beltway Democrats finally getting it and stealing from the media playbook that Trump and his allies have mastered. Here were a bunch of crusty senators forgetting their senatorial dignity for a minute and doing something that got people talking—embracing vertical video over television and realizing that generating attention for attention’s sake is how you put points on the board in today’s media world. By sharing and broadcasting the videos, Musk, LibsOfTikTok, “Based” Mike Lee and all the rest were inadvertently doing the Democrats’ bidding: Elevating an anti-Trump message about high prices and a sputtering economy to many millions more than would have seen it otherwise. Already, the videos have gotten close to a combined 3 million views across each senator’s social media accounts—and millions more elsewhere thanks to Musk, Fox News, and other Trump supporters who broadcast them today. All those media impressions hit at the exact moment Trump’s newest tariffs sent the market skidding and gave commodity prices a jolt. In a way, the effort was the reverse image of what Democrats and journalists have done for years in the Trump era by screenshotting and reposting outrageous claims and disinformation peddled by Trump and his allies. Animated by self-righteousness, they were also—oops!—giving a lift to all that fake news and accidentally catapulting those messages far beyond their original spaces and networks. With respect to Elissa Slotkin, who was tapped to deliver the Democrats’ official response to Trump’s speech, many more people will see one of these clips than will tune in to watch what the freshman senator from Michigan will have to say this evening. The video effort was organized by Cory Booker, a prolific purveyor of selfie videos who, by his own admission, can be a little cringe in his own earnest Gen X way. Booker is still years younger than most of the Senate, and with the help of some aides and consultants, he’s running the Senate Democrats’ Strategic Communications Committee, advising his colleagues on how to reach voters on the small screen, where they actually spend their time. “The bottom line is that it drew attention to our message today, which is that Donald Trump is looking out for billionaires, not regular people,” Booker told me over the phone a few hours ago, chuckling about how Musk gave the videos a mega-boost. “It shows that we can do their playbook just as well, which is to use our ecosystem of connected progressive voices to get a single message out. Trump doesn’t often care about the details of how he gets his message out, he just wants to monopolize attention. And today we drew a lot of attention as well.” Booker gave his Senate colleagues credit for experimenting. “Instead of leaving this as a platform for staff, they are creators now,” he said. “They’re holding their own camera, speaking directly to the camera, finding creative hooks, really learning and actually becoming pretty good at it.” Members of the Senate Democratic Caucus, of course, aren’t suddenly going to become memelords and ring light masters overnight. We’re talking about Sheldon Whitehouse and Mazie Hirono, after all. One Democratic operative I talked to joked: “I guess you go to war with the lame nerds you have!” I relayed this sentiment to Booker. He admitted that Democrats on the Hill will never reach Alix Earle or David Dobrik status, but said he’s confident that his colleagues are starting to understand that these days the phone is more powerful than a cable news hit. “Before, we weren’t even on the playing field,” Booker said. “We weren’t even competing in the new media space. We went from a standstill to walking at a brisk pace, but look, you have to walk before you can run, and you gotta run before you can soar.” Musk, it appears, will have to send that Cyber Truck to Booker’s place in Newark.

Now, here’s Abby on the latest Capitol Hill chatter…

Abby Livingston

Town hall aftershocks: After Republicans were lambasted over DOGE cuts at town halls back in their districts, N.R.C.C. chairman Richard Hudson has proposed that members… stop holding town halls. Of course, this kind of pullback is standard whenever members are caught on video getting scolded by their constituents, and most vulnerable Republican members weren’t holding town halls to begin with. (The DOGE protest videos were mostly from safe Republican districts.) Still, it’s notable that Hudson, the lead House campaign strategist, felt it necessary to give such a blunt directive. Meanwhile, Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump, and many, many Republicans have publicly dismissed the protestors as paid agitators following orders from liberal organizations. And it’s true that a few groups, like Indivisible, organized activists to attend the town halls. But crediting the left with funding and orchestrating the DOGE backlash, during a normally dormant part of the cycle, overestimates the capacity of a party still wandering in the post-’24 wilderness.Anyway, there’s historical precedent for Hudson’s concern. There have been two big wave midterms since the internet became fully integrated into politics. In each case, the losing incumbent parties—Democrats in 2010, Republicans in 2018—failed to heed the warning signs from rowdy town halls. But it’s hard to say if those are reliable leading indicators this cycle; after all, predicting anything in politics these days is a fool’s errand.
Singing a new Thune: Senate Majority Leader John Thune took to CNN on Tuesday to offer the highest-level, albeit carefully worded, Republican pushback to DOGE we’ve yet seen. “The objectives are right, but how they go about it matters,” he told Dana Bash. “This is why we’ve worked so hard to get cabinet people in place. Just hand it off to these leaders, these managers, who are going to be making decisions. And they’re going to be, I think, better attuned to the individual voter.” Perhaps he was giving voice to the party’s latent anxieties. But it should be noted that the top two Republican appropriators—Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole and Maine Sen. Susan Collins—have publicly declined to write into the funding bill that Trump and Elon Musk must comply with congressionally approved spending. Dems, meanwhile, have signaled that they’re willing to let Republicans shut down the government if the language isn’t included.

The Boys of Bummer

Exclusive new polling reveals how the Gen Z men who helped put Trump in the White House—Dave Portnoy types who are into sports, stocks, and crypto—are souring on his presidency as expectations for a shiny new economy collide with our current, tariff-laden reality.

Peter Hamby

A half-dozen friends sent me a tweet from Dave Portnoy last week, asking me if it means anything. The Barstool founder and professional attention magnet, who has long identified as just a regular guy who doesn’t care that much about politics, had been notionally supportive of Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign. (He says Trump offered him a job working in the Commerce Department.) But a little more than a month into Trump’s second term, Portnoy has posted some gently critical assessments of his presidency so far. “If I’m gonna be fair, these questions need to be asked today,” Portnoy posted on X. “Why is the release of the Epstein list always a shit show? What’s the point of booting out illegals and criminals while somehow becoming a safe haven for the Tate brothers? Why is Crypto in the toilet if Trump is crypto king? How far does Tesla stock have to crash before Elon goes back to work?”

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The question, implied by my friends who knew I spent a lot of time interviewing young men during the 2024 presidential campaign: Does this mean the bros are abandoning Trump? Portnoy, of course, is at least adjacent to a lot of right-leaning and Trump-curious media figures who are often “just asking questions”—Joe Rogan, Jake Paul, Lex Fridman, Theo Von, etcetera. But he has often been miscast as a Trump disciple by libs who’ve never bothered to listen, watch, or buy anything Barstool-related. And while it’s pretty obvious Portnoy was never going to support the blue team last November—he was a loud and early critic of Joe Biden’s glaringly obvious age problem and said he was planning to vote for Trump—it’s a bit of a category error to lump him in with the rest of the “Trump bro” podcast crowd. Portnoy, as anyone who listens to him knows, would rather guzzle motor oil than hang out with Clay Travis at a MAGA inaugural ball. Yes, Portnoy is contemptuous of political correctness and the identity politics of the left. And yes, he’s a sports freak and unapologetic bro. But he represents something a little bit more specific and relevant to many of the younger men who abandoned the Democratic Party in the pandemic years and voted for Trump last year. Portnoy is a business role model, a self-made multimillionaire (centimillionaire, perhaps) who took Barstool from a local Boston rag to a massive multimedia empire with a blue-collar grind mentality, an enthusiasm for risk-taking, and an unfathomable lack of shame.

“Bet Big, Move Fast, Never Settle”

My friend John Della Volpe, the pollster who runs the youth research firm SocialSphere, would probably place many of Portnoy’s admirers into a category he calls “High Risk Hustlers,” Gen Z men who are more likely than their peers to to bet on sports, invest in stocks, and dabble in crypto. “For this group, the hustle isn’t just about ambition—it’s a survival strategy,” Della Volpe wrote recently in his Gen Z newsletter. “Their financial mindset is shaped by the belief that playing it safe leads to economic stagnation.” For this segment of younger voters—mostly white men—the idea of sitting still and watching your 401k grow steadily over the decades is not a consideration. “Their preference for bold, disruptive leaders mirrors their financial ethos—bet big, move fast, and never settle,” Della Volpe wrote. They are generally pro-Trump, and more likely than their Gen Z peers to have positive opinions of Elon Musk. Della Volpe is the man I called for insight on whether Trump might be seeing slippage among these young men, with home prices stubbornly out of reach, crypto slumping, and the stock market spooked by a new trade war. Since the election, Della Volpe started a monthly poll at SocialSphere tracking the attitudes of voters under the age of 30. It’s a group that Democrats have traditionally depended on in presidential elections, but that Kamala Harris failed to win by a large enough margin to put her in the White House. The main reason? Younger men broke decisively to Trump, by 14 points, after Biden won them by a large margin just four years earlier. It was a massive swing between two election cycles. The reasons are manifold—I wrote about them throughout 2024—but concerns about opportunities for success in the post-Covid economy were chief among them. Six weeks into the new presidency, Della Volpe said that Trump’s support among young voters is already taking an unambiguous hit, as expectations about a shiny new economy collide with our current reality. Trump’s overall favorability with younger voters has dropped seven points since his January poll, the weekend before the inauguration. Trump came into office with a 50 percent favorable rating among Gen Z voters. Now, he’s at 43 percent. Since mid-January, Trump’s favorable rating has dropped most significantly among young rural voters (down 17 points), independents (down 13 points), white women (down 10 points), and women overall (down 10 points). At the same time, Trump’s standing among young white men has remained about the same. “Slippage with white men is not statistically significant right now,” Della Volpe noted.

But when it comes to specific questions about how he’s handling the economy and inflation, the president is on much shakier ground with young men. Della Volpe gave me an exclusive look at his SocialSphere polling between mid-January and mid-February. In January, 62 percent of men under 30 approved of Trump’s handling of the economy. Now, just 48 percent approve—a drop of 14 points in just one month. On handling inflation, Trump has taken a 15-point hit, dropping from 55 percent approval before the inauguration to just 40 percent today. And those downward trends are from Della Volpe’s February poll, which was in the field two weeks ago—before multiple news cycles about nagging inflation, before tariffs sent the markets spiraling, before egg prices hit an all-time record, and before Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies took a massive hit. “Trump’s favorability among young men remains relatively steady, masking their growing skepticism about his economic policies and handling of inflation just a month into his presidency,” Della Volpe told me. “Women have already broken with him. If life doesn’t become more affordable as Trump promised, and quickly, even his strongest backers may conclude he can’t deliver.”

Portnoy’s Complaint

Still, Della Volpe said, many young men are inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. He shared with me two quotes from a recent focus group he conducted with young men who didn’t go to college and voted for Trump. Both had to do with the economy. One participant, a white man, was asked why he’s optimistic about Trump: “I said ‘optimistic’ mainly for the fact that I’m going to be moving up with my job, and I’m hoping that Trump can fix the economy.” Another, a young Hispanic male, said he’s going to give Trump more time to deliver: “With the previous president, I was genuinely scared for my country. I am a Democrat, but I think President Trump’s policies and goals are what America needs in order to be successful—as unfortunate as that sounds. That’s just where I am with it. I feel now there is a little bit more hope now we have President Trump in office.” Those perspectives on Trump—a little financial anxiety, leavened by a wait-and-see attitude—sounded a bit like Dave Portnoy during an appearance on the Fox Business Channel last week. Host Stuart Varney asked Portnoy to score Trump’s presidency so far. His response, I think, conveyed what a lot of young men who voted for Trump have been thinking lately: Chill with the culture war stuff, thank you very much, and stay focused on the bottom line. “Obviously, this Epstein list is a circus. I don’t know what they were doing walking out with those binders. That was stupid,” Portnoy said, referring to the botched stunt in which A.G. Pam Bondi hyped up the release of bombshell new Epstein documents, only to release information that had been publicly available for years. “But overall, [Trump’s] doing what he said he was going to do. I am a very simple man, Stuart. I like it when my stocks are going up and my wallet is getting fatter. Right now, it’s going the reverse way, so you start to raise an eyebrow. But overall? I’m happy.”

Unique and privileged insight into the private conversations taking place inside boardrooms and corner offices up and down Wall Street, relayed by best-selling author, journalist, and former M&A senior banker William D. Cohan.

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