F**king Mondays: Bye Ronny, Republican Amnesia, And Billionaire Media Fails
It's that time of the week again.
Welcome to this week’s installment of “F**king Mondays”! In the roundup today:
Ron DeSantis implodes
Ron DeSantis was the GOP’s big hope to move beyond the chaos and failures of Donald Trump. DeSantis was supposed to be smarter, more ruthless version of Trump, and more importantly, willing to play ball with the establishment. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, DeSantis also had the charisma of a rotting turnip. With smile carefully designed to scare small children, DeSantis’s campaign was built on being more anti-woke than his competitors. Unfortunately for Ron, it wasn’t enough.
After a sad showing in Iowa, the man whose PAC was named “Never Back Down” held a press conference yesterday…and backed down.
“Following our second-place finish in Iowa, we have prayed and deliberated on the way forward,” DeSantis told the press. “If there was anything I could do to produce a favorable outcome — more campaign stops, more interviews — I would do it. But I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don’t have a clear path to victory. Accordingly, I am today suspending my campaign.”
DeSantis’s spectacular implosion and is further proof that Trump’s candidacy is inevitable. Trump’s lead over Nikki Haley in New Hampshire is now in the double digits, making her path to victory afterwards almost impossible.
DeSantis clearly recognizes this, having been quick to kiss the ring and endorse Trump’s ethno-nationalism:
“While I have had disagreements with Donald Trump, such as on the coronavirus pandemic and his elevation of Anthony Fauci, Trump is superior to the current incumbent, Joe Biden,” said DeSantis. “That is clear. I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee and I will honor that pledge.”
“He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear -- a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism -- that Nikki Haley represents.”
While some observers are terrified by the failure of Republicans to mount serious resistance to Trump, Democratic strategists are licking their chops over another chance to face off against the former president. With DeSantis gone and Haley’s campaign one primary away from disaster, Biden’s team will be planning accordingly.
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Republican amnesia
As Donald Trump barrels towards victory in the Republican primaries, Republicans are apparently experiencing mass amnesia over events on Jan. 6th. It is now party line that Trump did nothing wrong and is being persecuted by the Deep State. Reports the Huff Post:
“His legal challenges are making the public so angry because the lawsuits look punitive rather than legitimate,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) said. “It just looks so fake, so contrived that people are disgusted with it.
Lummis apparently forgot she had this to say on Twitter right after the violent assault on the Capitol:
Vivek Ramaswamy has gone further suggesting that Jan. 6th was an inside job, giving us a preview of what to expect from the party going forward: It wasn’t a big deal, the Democrats were probably to blame, and Trump is being mistreated etc, etc.
Given the GOP’s track record of submitting to Trump at almost every turn, none of this is surprising. But it is incredibly depressing.
The election in 2024 is basically going to be a giant messaging war over reality — will the alt-universe of Trump’s deranged projections win over actual reality? Will the courts finally force Trump to pay for his easily provable crimes, or will they too bend to his formidable will? Either way, it will be a turning point for America with huge consequences for the future.
Big money, small media
Speaking from experience, running a profitable news media company is extremely hard work. So hard apparently that even if billionaires can’t seem to make it work. Reports the NYTimes:
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013 for about $250 million. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotechnology and start-up billionaire, purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million. Marc Benioff, the founder of the software giant Salesforce, purchased Time magazine with his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in 2018.
All three newsrooms greeted their new owners with cautious optimism that their business acumen and tech know-how would help figure out the perplexing question of how to make money as a digital publication.
But it increasingly appears that the billionaires are struggling just like nearly everyone else. Time, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all lost millions of dollars last year, people with knowledge of the companies’ finances have said, after considerable investment from their owners and intensive efforts to drum up new revenue streams.
This is concerning primarily because democracies fail if the media can’t (or won’t) hold the powerful to account. The news industry is not a luxury — it is a necessity — and if billionaires aren’t the answer, it isn’t entirely clear what is.
The US government won’t fund public media in the same way countries like UK, France or Canada do, so it is almost entirely reliant on the private sector to fill the gap. If there aren’t any viable business models, then there won’t be much of a media ecosystem to speak of.
Thankfully independent media, specifically subscription based newsletters like The Banter, are proving that it is possible to grow a successful media company. Of course newsletters aren’t going to replace the Washington Post or the New York Times, but there is clearly a huge desire for original reporting, opinion, and analysis. The slow and steady model might not be appealing to ruthless billionaire and VC operators looking for a 10X exit, but they would do well to look at why readers are willing to pay for independent newsletters. Because right now, they appear to be the only model worth replicating.
See you next week!
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Growing up, I remember openly laughing at the absurd pronouncements of Soviet officials and the articles in Pravda. Little did I know that decades later, we’d see the same thing here, only now it’s called the Republican Party and Fox News.
“or will they too bend to his formidable will?”
I don’t think Trump has much will.
Privilege, entitlement, both leading to a not unjustified sense that he can do whatever he wants.
But perseverance? Determination? Keeping going when things are hard? I don’t see him having any of those qualities.
To the extent he’s continuing to persist despite the overwhelming evidence against him is due to his belief in his privilege and that things will eventually go his way (because he’s a white male and they have to) rather than any determined intention to persevere despite the odds.