His Antisemitic Fans Hand Abdul El-Sayed a Gift He Can’t Accept

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

It might be the political ad of the 2026 cycle, but in all the worst ways:

 

New @RebellionPac ad dropping in Michigan. We have to suffer here at home, so Israel can get all its wars. That’s why they buy politicians like Mike Rogers. He promised to serve Israel “unconditionally,” but never made that promise to you. pic.twitter.com/mtgVOyNczg

 

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) October 24, 2026

 

The pro-Abdul El-Sayed ad, produced and released by the populist Rebellion PAC, became an instant viral sensation, generating millions of views in just a few hours. The 70-second web spot is not, however, earning much praise. Instead, the very Democrats it was supposed to boost have condemned it.

 

Anti-Defamation League chief Jonathan Greenblatt called it a “desperate” example of “scapegoating the Jewish state.”

 

“This type of fearmongering about Israel is wrong,” Michigan Congresswoman Haley Stevens wrote. “It is not a winning strategy for any state.”

 

It is possible, wrote Joe Biden’s former ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, to “oppose aid to Israel” without “promoting the fiction that such said, or Israel itself, is responsible for what Americans pay for their groceries.” That’s an overly flattering assessment of what motivates this , but Shapiro isn’t wrong in theory.

 

It’s not just that this pro-El-Sayed spot is cartoonishly vile in its contempt for Israel and its supporters; it’s also impossibly dumb. CNBC’s Sara Eisen explains:

 

Some serious economic misinformation to go with the antisemitism in this ad that blames Israel for the rising price of American eggs, bananas, healthcare

 

– it falsely links American families’ grocery bills and healthcare costs to U.S. aid to Israel.
– Aid to Israel is… https://t.co/I1ImuxI8os

 

— Sara Eisen (@SaraEisen) October 26, 2026

 

El-Sayed’s friends have handed him a priceless gift here. No other reason the Senate race in Michigan is as close as it is than El-Sayed’s inability to distinguish America’s allies from its enemies and his habit of surrounding himself with people who are similarly confused. He should find it easy to distance himself from this advertisement, its creators, and the bigoted, inane logic it seeks to popularize.

 

But he can’t. If he denounced this spot, El-Sayed might as well condemn himself as well. He, too, argues that the relatively modest aid Israel receives from America, which primarily takes the form of American-made products, contributes meaningfully to Americans’ cost burdens. He says he would rather keep that cash in America — at least, he does when he doesn’t more honestly confess his view that U.S. tax dollars should be transferred to groups like UNRWA despite (we might charitably assume) the organization’s admission that its employees participated in the October 7 massacre. He seemingly cannot talk about the cost of consumer goods without, in the same breath, implying or even claiming outright that those costs are inflated as a result of “the billions in tax dollars that we spend sending our money over there.”

 

El-Sayed is a sharp enough campaigner to know his position would improve if he distanced himself from toxic sentiments like those in this ad and, by extension, those in his orbit who promote them. Either he’s too proud or too honest to take the offer.

 

Michiganders can at least be grateful they have no excuses next week. If they pull the lever for El-Sayed, they cannot say they didn’t know exactly what they were voting for.

Yes, We Have No Bananas

By David Frum

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

Maybe you’ve seen the ad: A man and a woman are loading a shopping cart. The woman tells the man he must return a carton of eggs. “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.”

 

The woman explains that grocery prices are rising because the United States gives so much aid to Israel. “It’s costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza,” the woman explains. “Don’t they get universal health care too?” the man asks. “We’re paying for that, too, probably,” the woman responds, at which point the man puts back the bananas.

 

The ad was produced by an independent political-action committee to support the Senate campaign of the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. During the Democratic primary, El-Sayed regularly denounced American supporters of Israel as a shadowy, sinister special interest. Since winning the nomination, he has distanced himself from his earlier language. Now a super PAC is reviving it for him only a week before the general election.

 

The legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson explained the ad half a century before it was produced. In his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, he described “one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics,” which may have played a role in one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas:

 

The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

 

“Christ, we can’t get away calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

 

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

 

In the case of the ad supporting El-Sayed, the sonofabitch targeted by the false accusation is not El-Sayed’s theoretical opponent, the Republican Mike Rogers—not really. The ad concludes, “Mike Rogers is for”—ironic chuckle—“they/them.” We all know who they are, and they are the real target of the ad.

 

The accusation that Israel is to blame for America’s economic problems is not some unique quirk of El-Sayed supporters. During his campaign to become New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani told Politico in 2025 that the dilapidated state of the city’s housing was the fault of the same villain: “The government refuses to fund public housing, all while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians over more than a year now.”

 

That same year, Marjorie Taylor Greene drew a similar link. American aid, she charged, typically accounts for up to a fifth of Israel’s defense budget, “even though Israel, nuclear-armed Israel, has universal healthcare for their citizens and subsidized college for their citizens. Here in America, we’re $37 trillion in debt.”

 

On Meet the Press in August, El-Sayed insinuated that U.S. aid for weapons in Israel was somehow an impediment to health care at home. “This campaign was a referendum on whether or not we want health care here or bombs somewhere else.”

 

Do supporters of Israel have to deny the false accusation? Okay, here goes. U.S. military aid to Israel is set at $3.8 billion a year from 2019 to 2028—about one-20th of 1 percent of the total federal budget. In 2024, Congress approved a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and other allies—of which, nearly two-thirds went to Ukraine, about $15 billion went to Israel, and about $9 billion was directed to humanitarian relief, including assistance for Gazan civilians displaced by the war that Hamas started. (The rest went to Taiwan and other allies in the Indo-Pacific region.)

 

Almost all U.S. assistance to Israel takes the form of credits that Israel can use only to buy American-made equipment. This assistance provides at least two direct and immediate benefits to Americans. First, it buys the United States access to Israeli military technology. By partly underwriting the development of Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, the U.S. has gained the use of battle-tested systems that also protect American lives. Second, this assistance lowers the per-unit cost of U.S. systems. The United States buys up to 48 F-35 fighters a year. Israel has bought 75 and is considering an estimated 25 more. Foreign orders allow U.S. arms manufacturers to improve their economies of scale. At a time when other NATO allies are canceling their orders of American equipment because they no longer fully trust the U.S. as an ally or supplier, Israeli orders enhance the efficiency of American defense production.

 

Meanwhile, all U.S. aid to Israel amounts to a fraction of what Israel’s critics wish to spend domestically. Despite the implications of that El-Sayed ad: Americans spend $1.1 trillion a year on groceries. Canceling aid to Israel would deliver the equivalent of about 30 hours of that spending. Per Mamdani’s complaint that Israel is to blame for bad housing in New York City: The city’s housing authority estimates its backlog of deferred maintenance at almost $80 billion, or about 20 years’ worth of U.S. assistance to Israel at present levels. Expanding Medicare to cover all American citizens would cost perhaps more than $32 trillion in additional federal spending over the first decade. Covering even one month of this plan would take 70 years’ worth of aid to Israel.

 

By blaming the Jewish state for the price of bananas in Michigan, the super-PAC ad calls to mind political tricks older and more disturbing than the one attributed to Johnson. In 1899, Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna and one of the most notorious anti-Semites of the 19th century, gave a speech blaming the Habsburg empire’s economic troubles on its Jews. “Here in our Austrian fatherland the situation is such that the Jews have seized a degree of influence which exceeds their number and importance,” he argued. “And in this respect the Jews operate a terrorism of a kind that could hardly be worse. For us, in Austria, it is a matter of liberating Christian people from the hegemony of Jewry.”

As with the rising cost of living in the U.S., the problem Lueger was concerned with was real. His voter base of artisans and craftspeople was coming under immense pressure from factory competition. There was not much Lueger could do about his voters’ distress. But he could point them toward a politically useful target. Now, with a modest update of Lueger’s language, an outside PAC’s closing argument in one of the most watched Senate races of 2026 blames a familiar “they/them.”

Europe’s Mad Voyage Meets the Whirlwind

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

In 2015, facing a migrant crisis that was exacerbated by the collapse of the state in Libya, the ongoing Syrian civil war, and the continuing gains of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Europe’s de facto leader, Angela Merkel, declared, “Wir schaffen das,” or “We can do this.”

 

By the end of that year, the terrorist who had masterminded the horrible massacre at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris and the suicide bombing at the Stade de France in a Parisian suburb was discovered to have used the migrant flows to disguise himself and move freely over Europe. Merkel was at the same time taking a hard line with U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who was practically begging her to allow some room for national sovereignty within the European Union, which would let the U.K. better control migrant flows. Merkel, seeing herself as the guarantor of the direction of European politics, took a hard line, too: No. The results of this intransigent maximalism — more Europe, more globalism — was Brexit in the U.K. and the rise of populism across the European continent. Even Donald Trump pointed to Europe to motivate his supporters at home in his win over Hillary Clinton.

 

There is a certain kind of folly in human affairs. People, institutions, nations, and empires look for their security in having more. More territory, more resources, more allies, not understanding that these also come with more responsibility, more costs, more risks, and even more unpredictability. By putting faith in ambition over timidity, they lose sight of the virtue of prudence, and the virtue of contentment with present satisfactions. The Athenians chose their expedition to Sicily at the height of their power, then watched their finest men die and their empire unravel. This human fault is given one of its most powerful expositions in Dante’s Inferno. The daring Ulysses takes his ageing crew on another “mad flight” to see the mountain of Purgatory:

 

Joyful were we, and soon it turned to weeping;

For out of the new land a whirlwind rose,

And smote upon the fore part of the ship.

Three times it made it whirl with all the waters,

At the fourth time it made the stern uplift,

And the prow downward go, as pleased Another,

Until the sea above us closed again.

 

Ulysses sent his men to doom with beautiful sentiments ringing in their ears. He told them they are “not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” They were so stirred that Dante’s Canto 26 says that Ulysses “could scarcely have held them back.”

 

Europe’s leaders have been giving versions of this speech themselves. They can open their own borders without consequences, and they can protect Ukraine’s without serious costs. In both cases, they told themselves they were privileging moral commitments over self-interest. Emmanuel Macron said the very thing that keeps a nation alive is not the self-interest of nationalism, but moral values. Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin has scolded Brexit and critics of Ireland’s refugee and migration politics for holding on to narrow nationalism and a “backward-looking idea of sovereignty” that would lead to division and isolation.

 

But the leaders making such promises did not seriously reckon with their costs. On immigration, it turns out that the national sovereignty is not so easily discarded without throwing out democracy with it. The rise of populist parties and sentiment has led to a quiet change from Merkel’s “We Can Do This” to “We Can Deport.” The EU’s new immigration pact is built to make deportations faster and to process people at the frontier. Denmark’s Social Democrats ran hard against immigration. When running for office, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz promised to “permanently control Germany’s national borders.” After his narrow win, he used a form of literalism to backtrack and insist that he’d never promised to stop entry. “None of us are talking about border closures. . . . None of us want to close the borders,” he said.

 

On Ukraine, the gap is even wider. President Trump waived nearly all the Russia sanctions in a law he signed just a month ago. There have been conflicting reports over the decision to throttle the satellite service guiding Ukraine’s drones, though Elon Musk now says he was closing a “loophole” to enforce terms of service. Europe has promised to take up the burden of supporting Ukraine’s defense. But not if it costs them.

 

Unable to agree on seizing Russia’s frozen assets, the EU borrowed 90 billion euros last December and “lent” it to Kyiv on the understanding that Ukraine will repay it when Russia pays reparations. Could a less secure form of collateral even be imagined? Europe is going to finance a reversal of Russia’s aggressive seizure of Ukrainian land, and the backing for this finance is Russia’s willingness to hand things over to Ukraine. The borrowed money increasingly flows to America anyway, which is producing the weapons. This deepens the sense among Europe’s nationalists that the energy inflation crushing their household budgets is a result of Washington’s foreign policy and that America’s defense industry is gaining capacity in the name of European security, even as the American president talks about shifting burdens to them. Ukraine is already running out of the money Europe lent it, of course, and needs 70 billion more euros. Chancellor Merz promised that it’s coming, but it’s not in the German budget, and Germany itself — fearing populists at home and free riders across the EU — is lobbying against expansion of the EU budget.

 

Now comes the political whirlwind in Europe. We see it in a France consumed by riots. And in the rise of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the polls, which show not just that the party is likely to lead the first round of next year’s voting but that it will be competitive against any of its likely opponents. We see it in the rise of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD). These parties not only reject mass immigration but also question Europe’s subordinate place in its geopolitical embrace with America, and Europe’s role in supporting Ukraine.

 

The order that was so confident in itself decades ago that it could promise a world where nationalism faded away, where “sovereignty” was a demonic word from centuries of war, where people, goods, and capital would move freely, and where Ukraine would be a member of NATO or an economic partner of the European Union, or both, is now one that is decomposing from within.

 

The modern European order was built by France and Germany, working out political and economic arrangements that would end their national contestation over industry and resources, and that became, in its way, a universalist project — of power and wealth without real work, of security without military investment, of openness without the need for cohesion, of expansion without end. Moral values without moral commitments. The ambitious voyage has run into this trap in a mad flight of idealism. Now the stern rises beneath their feet.

Now They Tell Us

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

With one week left before voters deliver what political observers believe could be a historic rebuke of the GOP, the Washington Post advises readers to temper their expectations of the Democratic Party. “If voters expect a new Democratic Congress to bring down prices,” Post reporter David Lynch warns, “they will probably be disappointed.”

 

Although prominent Democrats have solicited voters’ support by promising to focus on “affordability,” Democratic majorities in one or both chambers of Congress will find their hands tied. “There is nothing the next Congress can do about the level of prices,” said Barack Obama’s former chief economic adviser Jason Furman.

 

Furman suggests that the Democratic Party’s conundrum stems from a lack of authority. But Lynch says that it’s a matter of will, too — or, perhaps, a prudent lack thereof.

 

“Even if they win control of the House and Senate on Nov. 3, there’s little chance Democrats could terminate the war and end Trump’s tariffs over his opposition,” the author contends, “or would want to derail the AI boom.”

 

The subtext of Lynch’s piece is clear: It’s not only wise to expect that Democrats will suddenly abandon the enthusiasm they’ve evinced this year for pausing data-center construction or throttling the AI industry with a regulatory garrote. The AI boom is, after all, the foremost driver of domestic economic growth. If that’s correct, Lynch might have spared some of the opprobrium he heaped on Donald Trump for failing to meet his own affordability promises for Democrats who are right now — at practically this very moment — misleading voters about their stance on this issue.

 

The same could be said of the rising energy and transportation costs, which are attributable to the fallout surrounding the unresolved Iran War. Lynch doesn’t address why Democrats will probably decline to roll back Trump’s war-making powers — cutting off funding for the blockade or sorties over Iran, for example — so this one also belongs in the “won’t” column. And for good reason.

 

Elementary logic would lead observers who are not besotted with partisan fervor to question precisely how it is that withdrawing the blockade on Iranian ports would lead to lower energy prices. More likely, withdrawing U.S. assets from the region would give Iran a free hand to control access to the strait and toll its traffic, imposing a significant premium on global energy and signaling to America’s enemies worldwide that the time to test their luck is now.

 

Only the president’s tariff powers and the upward pressure his manic-depressive relationship with trade barriers is putting on prices seem to be truly outside congressional Democrats’ reach. Since the Supreme Court weighed in on the matter, Lynch observes, “the powers that Trump uses to impose tariffs do not require congressional approval.”

 

While the Post set out to prime the public for disappointment, its report focuses more on explaining why prices are high and why voters don’t appreciate that. There’s even a handful of supporting quotes. For example: “There’s no question in my mind that what’s driving folks nuts is not inflation, it’s the level of prices,” said Joe Biden’s economic adviser Jared Bernstein. That’s the kind of insight you can only get from a Biden alumnus.

 

But he has a point. “People eventually acclimate to the price level,” Bernstein concluded. So, what is the remedy for an overheated economy in which wages are rising but not fast enough to keep up with the demand for — and, therefore, the cost of — goods? Lynch has a one-word answer: “Time.”

 

Funny. That’s what Trump’s been saying.

The Big Scholarly Lie

By Abigail Anthony

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

 

The Byline Times reports that the academic publisher Taylor and Francis concluded a second probe into Jason Arday that did not substantiate the plagiarism accusations made against him, marking the fourth institutional inquiry to reach the same exculpating conclusion. Thus far, the inquiries have cleared Arday by assessing that he copied text accidentally without malicious intent; the duplicative passages were in portions like the introduction or literature review rather than the central body of the work; he was “autistic,” and therefore something like replication was part of his learning process; and/or he lacked proper supervision from his respective institution. Taylor and Francis reaffirmed its previous findings that Arday’s publication simply required corrections to insert missing citations and quotation marks where relevant, rather than a full retraction.

 

It is true that there is a spectrum of plagiarism offenses. There’s a big difference between insufficiently paraphrasing another scholar and lifting, verbatim, an entire chapter from another writer. I also think that plagiarism can be a forgivable offense in certain cases: An academic working on a dissertation-length work will have hundreds, if not thousands, of source materials, so it is an understandable human error if one particular citation doesn’t make it into the final version. Maybe a citation is in the bibliography, but just mistakenly didn’t end up in the footnote on the particular page where the specific claim is made. The appropriate remedy, in cases like these, is to issue a correction without banishing the person from academia for eternity. Indeed, a full retraction is not always necessary.

 

But Arday was a serial plagiarist who routinely lifted material, including research data, from others without proper attribution. In fact, the title of his doctoral dissertation borrows from that of another student. Arday was so incompetent that he managed to introduce a punctuation error in the title, possibly as a result of copying and pasting. His doctoral submission was titled, “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ [sic] to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” And, even if Arday hadn’t lifted a single word from someone else, his scholarship would still be ideological rubbish to advance pro-DEI outcomes. Consider, for instance, how he interviewed just three people to advance the conclusion that universities need affirmative action in hiring. (For National Review’s lengthier treatment of Arday’s research misconduct and fictitious biography, see here.)

 

It is ridiculous that previous inquiry teams contrived elaborate explanations to excuse Arday’s academic offenses, because he frequently committed textbook plagiarism. Honestly, it is somewhat ridiculous to even convene a review panel of any kind because Arday’s misconduct is so flagrant; to probe whether Arday committed plagiarism is as silly as initiating a systematic review to examine whether water is wet. Despite the fact that we can all see the damning evidence for ourselves, academia is going with The Big Scholarly Lie.

 

But why would academics circle around Arday to maintain such an obvious and incriminating lie? They do not actually care about Arday. Rather, they want to avoid confessing to their own wrongdoings. The people who granted degrees to him, hired him, promoted him, and published him are also guilty of academic misconduct, or at least professional negligence. Cambridge had previously announced that it would review its appointment of Arday, but since he was found dead after he resigned from his position, the university pivoted. Cambridge will instead examine whether it offered him sufficient support when the media were exposing his sham publications and fabricated personal achievements. In other words, Cambridge is seizing on the tragedy as an opportunity to avoid discovery of a real institutional failure; we can reasonably anticipate that the school will conclude it didn’t do enough to support Arday during the weeks of media heat, and the findings will then be contorted into a justification for more DEI-style initiatives and bureaucracy.

 

Thankfully, the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) has launched its own independent review into the professorship of Jason Arday, which will hopefully reveal how Cambridge University justified the appointment of someone who was very clearly unfit for the position. Inside Higher Ed reports that CAF seeks to examine the “material change in the language and emphasis of Cambridge’s own review following Arday’s death, which risks prejudging the legitimacy of the scrutiny he faced and displacing questions Cambridge had itself initially identified for investigation.” (Some outlets are already trying to suggest the outcome of this inquiry will be illegitimate because the Committee for Academic Freedom receives at least some funding from Ben Delo, a billionaire who has donated to the right-wing party Reform UK.)

 

And so academics, universities, and publishers will continue asserting the obvious falsehood that Arday did not plagiarize because to admit anything to the contrary would, in their view, somehow be more embarrassing than maintaining The Big Scholarly Lie. Now, the relevant line of questioning concerns who enabled and legitimized Arday. The answer, I fear, will be everyone around him in academia.

Getting to the Bottom of Trump’s Recent Antics

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

 

The season of Republican discontent draws near. The size of the approaching Democratic swell is difficult to fully project, but it looks likely to swamp large parts of the Midwest. To weave metaphors: Republicans are double-checking the filters on their gas masks as they prepare to sink into the political morass and fight two years of bitter political trench warfare behind their leader Donald Trump. I’m told the Battle of Passchendaele was legendarily muddy; prepare for its legislative equivalent.

 

Which is not to say that Donald Trump seems particularly focused on pushing the GOP over the top, even as he’s out campaigning, invoking his own name and fortunes. Trump has no need for a Republican Congress save as a shield from investigation and impeachment; his second term has been quasi-imperial in its ideology and public presentation. With that imperial mindset comes imperial decadence — at least Trump’s farcical, pantomime-horse imitation of it. So two nights ago, instead of fiddling while Ohio burned, Trump took the time to dash off a 1,300-word Truth Social rant about the real issue troubling undecided voters: the lack of respect the president gets from Bill Maher.

 

The other day he interrupted a Michigan rally for Mike Rogers to denounce Norway as a “s***house country” whose immigrants were no longer welcome in America — not for some entirely understandable reason like the creation of lutefisk, but rather “because I didn’t get the Nobel Prize.” (Those who insist that he’s only kidding are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of “kidding on the square.”)

 

But most of all, our commander in chief has made it a point to spend these last few weeks before the election staking out a daringly forward ideological position as a proud assman. I’m sorry to have to be so vulgar, dear readers, but these are pretty much Trump’s own words, so I can hardly be faulted for covering the doings of the Leader of the Free World.

 

And anyway, at some point even Bill Buckley’s august institution must take note of Donald Trump’s increasingly Pacino-like obsession with the human posterior. Helen Lewis, who beat us to the punch over at The Atlantic, clearly had a ball discussing the odd but undeniable truth: Trump has begun riffing more and more on the physical attractiveness and virility of the men surrounding him, in ways that end up sounding rather remarkably “camp.” (By his own account, he assessed Ohio Senator Jon Husted thus: “I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline.”) He is an equal opportunity offender: In Michigan on Sunday, he saluted supporter Nicki Minaj: “By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj. That’s hard to miss. Stand up. That’s hard to miss.”

 

What in God’s name is going on here? The election is a week away, voters are concerned about the economy, angry about the price of gas, and worried about world war, and somewhere along the way Trump’s closing argument turned into “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” Why such weird vulgarity? Why such blatantly sexualized disrespect for the dignity of the co-author of the hit single “Anaconda”?

 

For one obvious reason: It gets headlines, and in Trump’s reptile brain, self-generated headlines are always good. Furthermore, Trump is correct that the crowds eat up his antics, and so he responds exactly as a showman would to an appreciative audience. The new material is killing, so why stow it?

 

But on another level, Trump is yet again giving away too much about himself. This pattern of comments is by no means unique to Trump; rather, to anyone with enough life experience, it is immediately recognizable as a thinly sublimated old man’s lament. Trump has long flattered himself — in both his self-fashioned public iconography and endless self-praise — as the quintessence of male power and virility in all fields: business, entertainment, and now politics. And now it’s coming to an end.

 

His obsession with youthful virility — especially its physical aspects — isn’t veiled homoeroticism so much as it is a redirected expression of his own regret at his advancing age. Recall that Trump’s true lodestar has always been his reflection: He sees the chiseled jaws and bottle blondes of his administration as an echo of his own faded youth, and wishes to be surrounded and comforted by exemplars of comeliness and vigor in his final years, just as Moammar Qaddafi once insisted on a bodyguard of statuesque supermodels to remind the people of his manliness. I have long contended that Trump is the most psychologically transparent president we have ever known, and as he advances into dotage his insecurities have begun to show in ever greater sharpness. It would almost be poignant, were it not for the fact that I expect the worst after he is publicly rejected at the ballot box.

 

Sibling Rivalry of the Week

 

One imagines the Sununu clan of New Hampshire to be a fairly thick-skinned bunch, given that the family profession is Republican electoral politics. Patriarch John H. was governor during the Reagan era and later George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, mother Nancy was once chair of the state GOP, and the two sons are veteran politicians in the state. Younger son Chris stepped down after four successful terms as governor, handing the job over to Kelly Ayotte, the only person in these paragraphs not related to everyone else here by either marriage or blood.

 

And then there’s older son John E., once a senator during the younger Bush’s administration, now seeking a return to the office from which he was bounced in 2008 by Jeanne Shaheen. It’s a forbiddingly tough race, for reasons I’ve already addressed at the Carnival — right candidate, wrong time — and it only gets harder when your younger brother is there to dunk on you. Chris — who supports his older brother, obviously, but is not actively campaigning with him — was asked by CNN the other day whether he thought John’s yard signs and advertisements were deceptively emphasizing their shared last name, to capitalize on Chris’s popularity as governor.

 

And Chris rattled off a response to remember, one that could only come from brothers long accustomed to hazing one another: “Look, if people thought they were voting for me, my brother would be up by 30 points. Come on.”

 

Forget about politics for a moment: That, right there, is a classic younger brother move, and I speak as an authority on this subject, having spent my entire life as one.

‘Cheesecake’ Populism

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

I seldom feel nostalgic for the old right-wing blogosphere, but watching an outrage jamboree form in real time on social media over something Barack Obama said will do the trick.

 

Obama was in Michigan this weekend campaigning for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. He came armed with a series of one-liners about Donald Trump’s preoccupation with “home renovations” and eventually steered around to the Oval Office’s new decor. “There’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold?” he wondered. “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

 

Pretty good. I’d describe the aesthetic as “Liberace but gayer,” but I understand why that might not fly at a Democratic political rally.

 

As the clip of Obama’s joke circulated, the MAGA commentariat began to hum with populist indignation. “Classic Obama snobbery,” Republican strategist Matt Whitlock sniffed. “Cheesecake Factory is a great option for people who can’t afford a private chef at their Martha’s Vineyard estate.” Author Evan Barker agreed: “The coastal elites hate Americana. We know what they really think, and we know why they are so quickly defending Obama’s snobbery. They might think they are ‘too good’ for the Cheesecake Factory, or find the decor to be tacky, but most regular Americans don’t.”

 

On and on it went. “Makes speeches for [$500,000] a pop,” CNN Trump apologist Scott Jennings said of Obama. “Hasn’t eaten dinner that costs less than $250 in years. Has never been in a Cheesecake Factory. Undefeated at condescending to regular folks.” Angriest of all was Steve Krakauer, Megyn Kelly’s producer, who normally has a very high tolerance for offensive remarks but appeared to reach his limit with this “elitist garbage written by a speechwriter who clearly hasn’t spent much time in a Cheesecake Factory, which has none of the gaudy Trump aesthetic, and just feels good to say because it represents flyover MAGA ‘night out.’”

 

It felt like 2015 again. Nostalgia is usually stupid (especially as a political ethos), as it’s almost always a case of projecting wistfulness for the simplicity of one’s youth onto the zeitgeist of the era in which that youth was spent. But life really was better when right-wing media got to spend its days grousing about some Obama soundbite instead of mindlessly propagandizing for a fascist racketeering operation that makes no bones about its hostility to dark-skinned undesirables.

 

And I suspect a fair share of people who still work in right-wing media would admit it privately. The eruption of outrage in this weekend’s throwback kerfuffle appeared cathartic, and no wonder: Populist Republicans have spent the better part of two years trying to choke down a s--t sandwich so enormous that it would put even the Cheesecake Factory’s portion sizes to shame. Getting to dine out for an afternoon on old-school “Obama’s a snob” argle-bargle must have tasted like candy and ice cream by comparison.

 

It also revealed how shallow and confused right-wing populism has become. Or always has been.

 

Temples to excess.

 

Let’s stipulate up front that the Cheesecake Factory is fantastic.

 

I say that not to disassociate myself from Obama’s alleged elitism but because it’s true. What Las Vegas is to nightlife and Disney World is to theme parks, the Cheesecake Factory is to chain restaurants. The menu is 75 pages long, it offers dishes from every type of world cuisine, and the servings are large enough to bloat a water buffalo. Polish off your dinner with a slice of one of the 50 or so different cheesecakes they offer, and you might easily end up consuming a day’s worth of calories in one meal.

 

It’s a temple to excess. If you don’t like it, you don’t like America. Barack Obama must not like America.

 

But Obama didn’t say anything about not liking the restaurant, did he?

 

His joke was about the chain’s decor, which is tacky and incoherent—and deliberately so. It enhances the “pleasure palace” fantasy, the same way the lights in Vegas and the Cinderella Castle at Disney World do. In all three cases, patrons are seeking some sort of hedonistic indulgence; the more unreal the atmosphere is, the less inhibited they’re apt to feel in their pursuit of enjoyment. Somehow, eating a football-sized cheeseburger seems less strange when you’re digging in next to a plaster Egyptian obelisk.

 

You go to the Cheesecake Factory for the same reason you go to the amusement park or to the casino: to escape. It’s a magical world where the usual rules of day-to-day life don’t apply.

 

As it turns out, whether Obama meant it this way or not, that’s a fantastic metaphor for the Trump White House. The usual rules of day-to-day life don’t apply there either, as behavior that might get you indicted and/or imprisoned anywhere else in America enjoys total legal impunity. And the gilded fixtures and moldings are plainly designed to enhance a fantasy of royalty, just as Trump’s new ballroom is. The president wishes he were a king, conducts himself like one as often as he can get away with, and has plastered the walls around him with evidence of his ambitions.

 

When you walk into an Oval Office that looks like a Cheesecake Factory designed by Saddam Hussein, you know you’re a courtier at an autocrat’s palace—and that, if you succeed in earning his favor, you might be granted the corrupt pardon or tariff waiver or no-bid government contract your heart desires. The White House too has become a magical land, a temple to excess.

 

So why do so many MAGA types have a bug up their behinds about what Obama said?

 

RETVRN?

 

Partly it’s reflex, as I suggested earlier. When you spend eight years wringing content out of every debatably controversial thing that a particular person says, and then that person goes and says something debatably controversial, the Pavlovian bell will ring and the proverbial dogs will salivate. Old habits die hard, and right-wingers have been in the habit of attacking Obama for elitism since (at least) the days of Arugula-gate in 2007.

 

Partly it’s electoral strategy. You may have noticed that the GOP’s midterm closing argument is light on policy and extremely heavy on demagoguery (and admiring people’s asses) even by Trumpist standards. That’s in keeping with the president’s belief that the key to winning this year, or at least holding down losses, is to forget about persuading undecideds and instead get disaffected Republicans excited to vote. “Pretend I’m on the ballot” is part of that. So is calling Abdul El-Sayed a terrorist. So is the “us against the media” dynamic created by Vivek Ramaswamy’s loathsome attack on Amy Acton in Ohio.

 

If greater right-wing rage means greater right-wing turnout, then Barack Obama supposedly insulting blue-collar aesthetic sensibilities is a hanging curveball for Republican partisans. It’s a callback to the “bitter-clinger” controversy of 2008, in which the would-be first black president looked down his Columbia-and-Harvard-educated nose at the cultural preferences of rural whites. And now here he is, allegedly still doing it nearly 20 years later. Get angry!

 

Mostly, though, I think this weekend’s uproar is a case of Trumpism revealing its vapidity. How facile must one’s commitment to populism be to rise in indignant defense of the Cheesecake Factory’s decor?

 

Normally if you ask a postliberal about modern aesthetics, they’ll give you a sermon about classical beauty. From architecture and fashion to industrial policy and immigration, we need to go back is the absolute essence of the movement. And so, one might think, MAGA types would share Obama’s critique of chain restaurant decor. What is the “RETVRN” argument, exactly, for the Cheesecake Factory’s—or, for that matter, the White House’s—garish kitsch?

 

Better yet, what’s the populist argument for the Cheesecake Factory, period? “The rise of chain restaurants created over-the-top, replicable dining experiences, which eventually put the final squeeze on mom-and-pop restaurants,” menswear writer Derek Guy said of the reaction to Obama’s comment. “I would argue those family-owned neighborhood businesses made the dining experience feel more special and pulled communities together. The shift to chain restaurants homogenized American life and concentrated corporate power.”

 

We need to go back to classic American diners, not corporate slop decked out with fake palm trees that serves food on hubcap-sized plates is a more legible populist take about the Cheesecake Factory than whining about Obama’s insult to “MAGA flyover ‘night out,’” as Krakauer put it. Which, incidentally, isn’t accurate: More than half of the chain’s locations are in California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, only one of which arguably qualifies as “flyover.”

 

Even if you get past all of that, you’re left with headscratchers. Why do Krakauer et al. assume that Cheesecake Factory customers don’t share Obama’s opinion about its decor? Being middle class doesn’t doom one to having poor aesthetic taste; I assume most of the chain’s patrons feel about it as I do, that its tackiness is part of its charm. But if you disagree and wish your own home could be adorned with replica Easter Island heads or whatever they’re putting in there nowadays, you’re still left with the question of why the Oval Office should be as tastelessly campy as a Cheesecake Factory.

 

That was Obama’s actual point, remember—not that there’s no place for bad taste in our culture, inside or outside a chain restaurant, just that the White House ain’t it. Can’t American populism muster a little dignity and aesthetic restraint when styling the room where our head of state conducts official business?

 

Populism without prosperity.

 

I don’t think so. Populism doesn’t do restraint, and it sure as hell doesn’t do dignity.

 

I agree that the Oval Office looks hideous after Trump’s “Louis XIV with brain damage” makeover, but I’d never tell you that it isn’t true to the spirit of the man and his movement. If you’re going to barrel through civic norms en route to amassing power, you might as well barrel through aesthetic norms as well. In that sense alone, the president has done a good job of decorating his workspace. The gaudiness efficiently communicates the message “I’m going to do things my way, whether you like it or not, and no sense of propriety will stop me.”

 

That’s how his administration operates, and that’s what the gilded nightmare around him conveys.

 

It also leaves the president’s apologists stuck arguing that bad taste is a hallmark of populist authenticity, which is why they landed where they landed with the Cheesecake Factory, I think. If your politics holds that The Common Man’s tastes are per se superior to those of the elites, then you kind of have to believe that the famously cheesy decor of a popular chain restaurant is worth defending simply because the hoi polloi love to eat there.

 

Follow that logic to its conclusion and eventually you’ll find yourself on Twitter arguing that the reason Barack Obama doesn’t find gold toilets classy is because he’s never been in touch with “the people.”

 

Still, I think the former president’s joke would have passed largely unremarked upon on the right if Republicans had stronger populist material to run on over the final week of the campaign. “Obama the snob thinks you’re a slob for eating at this restaurant you like” is what you say to the working class only when you’re completely out of economic ammunition.

 

Until recently, Trumpists had a solid political argument that right-wing populism meant prosperity. The pre-pandemic economy was robust during the president’s first term and looked even better in hindsight when Joe Biden’s term brought inflation not seen in decades. Republicans had a colorable case in 2024 that a Trump restoration would mean cheaper goods, higher growth, and much improved consumer confidence.

 

After tariffs, a war of choice that scrambled oil prices, and a Big Beautiful Bill that cut Medicaid, there’s nothing left of that prosperity pitch. Less than nothing, in fact: At a rally on Saturday, Trump said “I don’t give a damn” about temporarily high gas prices because American oil producers are making bank selling their product during the Iran crisis. At other events, he’s warned voters explicitly that he’ll penalize them if they don’t elect Republicans. Either they won’t get those $5,000 checks he promised (which they won’t be getting anyway) or he won’t assist in solving some local problem that’s bedeviled them.

 

The president’s great populist revolution is now being sustained by an orgy of swampy spending from filthy rich Republican megadonors, most notably Elon Musk—who, over the past two election cycles, has spent more money on U.S. elections than George Soros has over his entire life.

 

Think of “Cheesecake populism” of the sort we saw this weekend, then, as an analog to “luxury nationalism.” Luxury nationalism is nationalism stripped of the usual demand for sacrifice; Cheesecake populism is populism stripped of the usual promise of working-class prosperity. It offers culture war unto death against left-wing elites without material improvement in the average joe’s standard of living, which is why Obama’s joke was catnip to Trumpists. This liberal looks down on you has always been the engine of MAGA grievance politics more so than we want to help you get ahead has.

 

And don’t think that J.D. Vance, prospective Republican nominee, doesn’t know it and isn’t worried about it.

 

Ironically, the implication that the Cheesecake Factory is some oasis of affordable dining in an era of belt-tightening goes to show how removed some of Obama’s critics are from economic populism. It’s true that the chain is more reasonably priced than anything that resembles fine dining, but if you feel squeezed financially, a night out there is a splurge. Burgers are $20 and a proper entree runs even more, and of course you’re all but obliged to order dessert if you go.

 

If there’s a “Cheesecake Factory vote” this fall, it’s not going to come from voters who resent seeing liberals mock the ambiance at their favorite restaurant. It’s going to come from twentysomethings who resent the fact that they need to save up to have dinner at a place with Eye-of-Sauron light fixtures.

 

But that’ll probably suit the people who disliked Obama’s joke just fine. They’re plainly starving to go back on offense after two exhausting years of playing defense for Trump’s indefensible government. A Democratic Congress will hit the spot.