We’ve all heard the panicans shrieking about how Donald Trump’s voters are allegedly ditching him, but who is actually abandoning the president? Is it you and me? No, it’s not. We’re his normal supporters, the part of his coalition that’s in it for our country. Our agenda is America. We’ll vote for a normal Republican, just not a RINO. We’ll back the president’s plays even when it’s tough (and by “tough” I mean dealing with the ear-splitting volume of his critics crying like little girls). But there are other folks with a different perspective. To us, Trump is a vehicle to Make America Great Again. To them, Trump is a vehicle to drive up their clicks, to rev up their egos, and sometimes to run over the Jews. But now those people are being booted out of the big tent even as they were in the process of making their public, dramatic exits. I’m not one to want to exile anyone, no matter how offensive, but it’s hard to cry about someone getting what they have publicly and incessantly wished for.
If you tell Trump you are ditching him for being too mean to the mullahs and too nice to the Jews, what do you expect? Him to come begging you to stay, promising to never disappoint you again, agreeing to take on and champion your to-do list of personal policy preferences? Well, there’s this thing called a chain of command, and a bunch of podcaster types just learned, the hard way, that they aren’t in it.
When the president unleashed his rhetorical hellfire missile via Truth Social upon Tucker, Megyn, Candace, and Alex, it was long coming. Tucker has gone nuts. Megyn was never right-wing – she was copasetic with many of our social positions and on the perfidy of the Left, but she was never a hardcore rightie. Candace was always a calculating grifter eager to say whatever was going to help her at any given time – currently, she’s cashing in on ridiculous conspiracy theories for gullible doofuses. And Alex Jones? Whatever – he’s the pro wrestling of right-wing talk, a carnival freak show barker promising a glimpse at Nature’s Greatest Monster if you come up with a quarter.
They had been attacking Trump for a while. Apparently, they forgot about everything Trump ever said and got personally offended that he did not abide by his imagined promises to them. Trump has been talking about whacking Iran for decades – there are clips of him advocating this attack on our long-time enemy going back to the 80s. And the Iranian regime is our enemy. There’s this idea among the dumb and the loud that the only reason anyone could possibly hate us is if we had committed some alleged wrong in the deep, dark past. Oh, we were involved in a coup in 1953. We were just asking for the Beirut bombing!
Baloney. They hate us because we won’t submit to their false, pagan, jihadi religion. That’s it – and that’s enough. To think otherwise is childish and stupid and functionally indistinguishable from the ravings of the formally leftist people, as opposed to the functionally leftist people like these podcasters and their friends. It’s an understanding of America as inherently wicked and deserving of all misfortune while denying its right to defend its own interests in any way at any time. For example, Tucker has cavorted with Word War II revisionists insisting that we should not have gone to war against Nazi Germany (because I don’t listen to absolute morons, I am unclear how they deal with the fact that Nazi Germany declared war on us after their Japanese allies bombed us, but I expect they contend we were asking for Pearl Harbor, too). Now, if you can’t take America’s side in World War II, I can’t help you. And I’m not sure who can help Tucker. He’s not a dumb guy, but it’s becoming clear that he is an increasingly insane one. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and attribute his turning on Trump (and America and us) to a mental breakdown. The others, not so much.
Megyn has always been leftist-curious. While she has plenty of solid conservatives on her show – and I hope they keep appearing – she has long championed the creepy and communist Glenn Greenwald. She’s an independent, not a Republican, and she’s open to pinko nonsense. She went with Trump for a number of reasons, including trans insanity and the cancellation culture she had personally experienced. But she was never right-wing in the way we are. When the heat is on, no wonder she wilted.
As for Candace and Alex, there’s little that needs to be said. Neither is a serious person. Neither is anything more than a spectacle. But they got too big for their britches. They imagined that they mattered, and they don’t. At least Tucker and Megyn had some heat once upon a time, though not to the extent they imagined. Trump was always happy to listen to them when they agreed with his inclinations. Their problem was that they expected him to pay attention to them when he was disinclined to, and Trump simply does not do things he is disinclined to do.
These are four individuals who have quit Trump in a huff and found themselves quited right back. But the real question is how many potential coalition voters they will bring along with them as they either sit out the midterms in a petulant huff, or find some goofy alternative candidate to back, or even vote Democrat because that will show Trump! And the answer may not be what they want to hear. Tucker’s favorability rating in one poll has dropped an astonishing 47 points among Republicans. I guess hating Israel isn’t the winning issue the voices in his head told him it was. And Megyn’s podcast was recently No. 129, not bad in the macro but not near what it used to be. Have you tuned into either one lately? I haven’t. I don’t hate them. I just don’t want to hear some goof with a ridiculous theory about how the Jews are to blame for not letting Muslim fanatics murder them hard enough, or some clown sharing the full benefit of his lack of tactical and strategic military experience regarding what those of us who are professionals know to be one of the most incredibly successful military campaigns in human history.
It’s anecdotal, meaning it is evidence only of anecdotes, but the people I talk to who have tuned in recently are doing it from morbid curiosity: “Tucker’s got an exorcist on who says demons run the Deep State.” Sure, it’s plausible, but this is not commentary. It’s novelty. It’s entertainment, and intermittent entertainment at best, because the next Tucker guest is going to be some whacko, pinko professor, and nobody is going to care.
Yeah, they’ll all still make money – there are Candace diehards who want to hear tall tales about Mrs. Macron’s alleged manhood or Alex listeners who mistake his bluster for insights, but it’s the influence that matters. If Tucker tells you not to vote for the GOP in November, are you going to salute? If Megyn insists you boycott Republicans in November, will you? If Candace talks about how MAGA is an Israeli plot and Alex talks about the crisis actors who want you not to vote, will you listen?
I’m betting you won’t. I’m betting you don’t care what any of them say, and that the vast majority of us don’t either. Some will, but how many? Will the exile of the odd podcasters matter? Clearly, Trump is betting “No,” too.
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