I spent yesterday at the University of Georgia doing an event on campus, talking politics with college kids. I love little college towns, and it was a genuinely illuminating day. Here’s the good news up front: most of the kids I talked to are voting for Democrats. They’re voting for Jon Ossoff. They’re voting for Keisha Lance Bottoms.
But the ones I can’t stop thinking about are the handful of conservatives who decided to get in my face.
MAGA Isn’t Dead. But It Is Dying.
Today’s rant is sponsored by Ground News.
I’ve been paying more attention to how differently the same story gets covered depending on where you read it—especially lately, when everything feels optimized for speed and outrage instead of context.
Take this one—hundreds of outlets picked up reports of Elon Musk and other billionaire donors giving unprecedented sums to the Republican party in the race up to the midterms.
The New Republic states that Of the 170 billionaire families whose contributions ATF tallied through August 28, 113 gave predominantly to Republicans and only 45 gave predominantly to Democrats.
100% FED UP! says Senate Democrats are spending borrowed cash to widen their battlefield. Musk is financing an outside Republican turnout machine with checks large enough to alter the shape of that battlefield.
Same story—completely different narratives.
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There was a group frat guys standing in the back of the outdoor space, snickering the whole time. At one point I baited them into coming up to the mic. And they did. And they did exactly what you’d predict. They immediately asked me how many genders I think there are. They asked me how I felt about gender affirming care as aform of child genital mutilation. It was juvenile, and it was exactly what you’d expect from the best and brightest of a broken, fractured movement that can only focus on a handful of incredibly stupid things. It was very, very 2024.
Not one of these MAGA kids had a question about the economy. Not one had a question about the illegal war Donald Trump would love to ship them off to fight. Nothing about the corruption. They wanted to talk about dumb, stupid culture war bullshit.
And that, friends, sums up the Republican Party’s entire closing argument.
Most Republicans already believe the House is gone. The Senate is the last big thing in play, so look at how they’re fighting for it. In Michigan, they’re making fun of Abdul El-Sayed’s name, lying about ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and calling him a ‘radical communist jihadist’, the same garbage they threw at Barack Obama and anybody else whose name sounds funny to Midwestern white people. It isn’t working.
In South Carolina, Annie Andrews made a race competitive that was never supposed to be, so they’re dumping millions into bailing out Darline Graham, who I’m not sure could find her own state on a map, let alone Taiwan or Ukraine. Donald Trump’s big solution is to call her “Trannie Annie” and lie that she wants to pull your kids out of school for transgender surgery.
And in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy went after Amy Acton by putting her estranged mother in an ad, a woman who lost custody of Amy at 12 for staying with her own daughter’s rapist.
That’s the playbook everywhere you look. Name-calling. Race-baiting. Demonizing kids. Even if you don’t agree with what’s happening to trans kids, even if you don’t love that trans people exist, we should be hugging our kids and making them feel safe and loved no matter their circumstances. Instead, they’re using them as props.
They’ll talk about anything other than the economy, the war, and the massive corruption inside this administration, so they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something gets their base off the couch. Sometimes that works, especially when they’re out of power and their voters need something to be angry about, someone other than their own representatives to blame for their problems. But you can’t gaslight people like this when the economy is this bad.
I’ve started paying more attention to how the same story can feel completely different depending on who’s reporting it. Ground News makes that easy to see by showing coverage from across the political spectrum and pointing out what certain outlets leave out.
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You know exactly what I mean. You feel it every time you fill up your tank. You feel it in the grocery checkout line. You feel it if you’ve ever sat with your partner and done the math on buying a house and realized it isn’t happening. That daily indignity wears on you. And then you turn on the TV and the President of the United States is babbling about a golden age, bragging about how much money he’s making, and pivoting to some culture war fight you never think about.
It doesn’t work anymore. Marjorie Taylor Greene called it late-stage MAGA, and she’s right. It’s pathetic. Truly pathetic.
Nate Silver wrote in the last couple of days that this election is the end of MAGA. I don’t think that’s quite right. Trump still has two more years in office. What we’re watching is the beginning of the end, not the end itself. And here’s what I’m certain of: it’s going to get weirder, sadder, more pathetic, and more dangerous from here, because a cornered, wounded animal is always more dangerous than a healthy one. We should go in with our eyes open.
But this is what the beginning of the end looks like, no matter what happens on Tuesday. I think we take back the Senate. Even if we fall short, this is still a massive rejection of everything they’re selling. And if the bottom really falls out? If we get to 53 seats and start winning places like Kansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina? Who knows how far this goes.
Trump will loom over the Republican Party for years. The rest of the country is going to move on much faster than they think. Those guys snickering in the back of that crowd in Athens? That’s what’s left of their movement. Loud, smug, and talking about everything except the lives people are actually living. We’re the ones who get to decide what comes next.
So this week, run through a brick wall. I’m in New York right now, away from my family, doing as much media as I can to push us across the finish line, and I’ll keep writing and shooting videos the whole way. Do everything you can to elect as many Democrats as you can.
I love you. Stay safe out there. Because we know they’re going to try to fuck with this election at the end, and our job is to make the wave too big for it to work.
With urgency,
—Mike
Hallelujah!
Nice, Mike!! I grew in GA, and my sister is a UGA grad (suma cum laude-- that annoying overachiever!). Athens is a great town, and is home to the cutest mascot in college football, with Dubs coming in a close second :-). Glad you enjoyed it, and found hope in most of the student body there.