Democrats face new reality: Podcasters' political power |
Democrats face new reality: Podcasters’ political power
The “revolving door” between holding a top government job and becoming a highly paid lobbyist is a well-known fact of D.C. life.
The newest fact of D.C. life is a warp-speed “revolving door” spinning between public office and podcasting.
Dan Bongino went from podcaster to deputy director of the FBI and then returned to podcasting in less than 12 months.
This is not an aberration. It is the new reality of our politics.
Author Naomi Klein describes it as a consequence of the political rise of a media celebrity: President Trump.
In a recent New York Times interview, she described these podcasts as part of the “mirror world of the new MAGA right.”
Democrats need to take a good look at that MAGA mirror before the ’26 and ’28 elections.
Hold your nose and consider the strange case of Nick Fuentes, whose rhetoric once firmly aligned with Trump’s MAGA world. Fuentes’s podcasts now cut against Trump orthodoxy with a new populist appeal. As The Atlantic reported, Fuentes now believes:
“Trump is better than the Democrats for Israel. For the oil and gas industry. For Silicon Valley. For Wall Street. Is he really better for us? I don’t think so.”
Also, Fuentes recently declared new appreciation for Democrats: “Biden tried to forgive the student loans—that was good for me,” he said. Then he added: “The free market says that Republicans have enough money to bomb Iran but not enough money to pay for my student loans. And I’m going to vote for that ’cause I’m an idiot.”
Does Fuentes really back Democrats? That could change tomorrow. But the fact is he hints at a new political alignment.
The best example of this dynamic is playing out at the top with podcaster Joe Rogan. By the numbers he is the most powerful podcaster and a key figure in Trump’s 2024 victory. But he began to sour on MAGA, especially after the Epstein files controversy.
Here he is breaking with Trump last week:
“That phrase sucks… ‘Make America Great Again,’ and then it becomes a movement of a bunch of f– dorks… A lot of them are these really weird f- uninteresting, unintelligent people… you got to accept the dorks, too?”
Rogan, who once supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president, embodies the volatility of the mirror world. Platforms don’t produce loyalty; they produce leverage to take the lead in the political parade about to come down the road.
Democrats have yet to learn how to play this game.
That was clear when Kamala Harris declined to appear on Rogan’s show. It’s a decision that may one day be remembered alongside Hillary Clinton’s failure to campaign in Wisconsin in 2016.
The key takeaway today is that the MAGA media ecosystem is open to leadership beyond Trump and his favored groups.
Look no further than the embattlement of Turning Point USA, once the GOP’s premier youth organization, now under sustained attack from a personality it elevated — Candace Owens.
With nearly 6 million YouTube subscribers, Owens is making wild allegations against Turning Point USA and the inner circle of its assassinated leader, Charlie Kirk. She makes claims involving intelligence operations, Jeffrey Epstein and the Swedish Free Masons.
Owens’ specifics almost don’t matter. What matters is the fact that new media rewards escalation, not restraint. It is focused on creating the next hot message that will drive people to subscribe.
Authority no longer flows from institutions and parties reflecting voters’ concerns. Now authority flows as a calculation made by algorithms designed to animate online mobs, to generate constant feeds, clips, and more clicks and subscriptions.
And that has real consequences for Democrats.
With Republicans facing a potentially brutal midterm cycle and accelerating turnover within the Trump administration, expect a surge of newly minted podcasters: former officeholders, ex-Cabinet officials, and political operatives looking for a new job by rebranding themselves as content creators.
As of last week, 68 members of Congress — 11 senators and 57 House members —have announced they will not seek reelection.
Most of them are Republicans who see MAGA media shifting as a sign of Democrats likely to do well in the midterms, so they want out.
Why shouldn’t Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), the departing chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, become another podcaster? For some, it will be a way to demonstrate loyalty to Trump in hopes of future pardons or patronage.
But the deeper truth is this: the line between the mirror world of right-wing talk and politics has collapsed.
Had Democrats paid closer attention to the rise of Rush Limbaugh — from obscure DJ to the most listened-to talk radio host in America in the late 1980s — they might have seen what was coming: Newt Gingrich and the 1994 Republican Revolution.
Had they taken the manosphere more seriously, the rising influence of MAGA-friendly podcasters during Trump’s first term, and Steve Bannon’s “War Room” during COVID, they might have recognized that Trump had an avenue for regaining power in 2024.
Instead, the mirror world was dismissed as fringe. Now it is the main stage.
Douglas MacArthur famously said: Old soldiers never die; they just fade away. The new mantra for post-Trump GOP pols may well be: Old politicians never die; they just become podcasters.
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”
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