The Friday Brief, May 15, 2026
Trump, Thiel, And Summer Badness
Inside
Why Culture War Is Enough for MAGA
Thiel’s New Attack on the Press
Trump Is A Thief
My Son Crushed It On “I’ve Had It”
Brian and the Ballroom
The Golden Age of Foreclosures
The Internet of…Poop
He’s Insane, You Know
Preheating Season In Florida
How To Make Voters Hate You
What I’m Reading
Scenes From The Home Front
The Big Picture
Why Culture War Is Enough for MAGA
Here’s the question that should be keeping every Democratic strategist up at night, somewhere between the third organic fair-trade Erehown matcha and the fourth existential crisis: why is it enough? Why don’t the MAGA hardcores understand how well and truly Trump is screwing them?
Gas is $4.55 a gallon. Foreclosure filings are at a six-year high. Trump’s approval is mired in the low 30s. He hasn’t ended a war; he’s threatening two more. The grocery bill that was supposed to crater on Day One has done the opposite. By every transactional measure, the measure we were all trained to believe decides elections, this administration is a failure in a saggy Brioni suit.
The 2026 election will be regarded in this space, this moment, this misery that will not stop and will not improve. A reader asked me a question earlier this week, asking for a deeper “why” on the sticky 30% of so who will not leave Trump. It percolated in my head for a few days.
And the base does not care. Not a little. Not at the margins. They do not care.
The instinct on our side is to treat this as a riddle, or a mass delusion, or a failure of messaging that one more chart will fix. It’s none of those things.
It’s the most rational thing in the world once you understand what MAGA was actually buying. They were never buying cheaper eggs. They were buying a feeling, a warm glow off the engine block of the Hate Machine, the feeling of winning, of dominance, of watching the people they resent get humiliated in real time. And culture war is the only product Trump sells that reliably delivers that feeling on schedule.
That’s why Democrats need to prepare for the pivot, and not allow it.
Think about the structure of it.
Material governance is hard, even for smart people. It requires competence, follow-through, trade-offs, and the patience and compromise missing from the MAGA party.
Trump has none of those things and never will.
But culture war? Culture war is infinitely renewable. It costs nothing. It doesn’t require a supply chain, a Senate vote, Fed cooperation, governance, or anything but a shameless willingness to hate.
There is always another enemy to manufacture, another terror to drag on to the Fox airwaves from the Catalog of Imaginary Demons: a flag, a pronoun, a migrant, a professor, a late-night host, a magazine columnist. The supply is endless because the supply is imaginary. You can’t run out of grievance the way you run out of money for a ballroom.
The Trump economy isn’t simply bad…it’s designed to break, to transform us into an
