Ezra Klein

But because he actually sincerely believes in a series of very, very dumb and cruel ideas—

He has ended up creating a lot of crises for himself, and that is before any have been created for him.

He's not facing, as he was at the end of his first term, a global pandemic.

He's not facing, as he might by the end of this term, a recession.

And so, if things begin to go wrong...

the kind of things that any president has trouble dealing with, he's not working with a lot of goodwill or, frankly, even a lot of policy space.

He's used a lot of money on these different moves to respond.

I think it's been interesting to watch a lot of people on the right.

Chris Ruffo, for instance, the right-wing provocateur who was very much part of spreading the pet eating slanders.

He was out on X the other day, as he has been occasionally recently, just being like, I don't know what's happening to our empirical standards here on the right.

All of our people are getting radicalized and they're swimming conspiracies and slop.

And a successful movement cannot have this much online brain rot.

And there's a lot of, I'd say, pointing and laughing because Rufo has been part of pushing the movement towards online brain rot recently.

And I think he feels he stays- Yeah, or Ben Shapiro complaining about Candace Owens, who used to be on his show.

Who used to be under his Daily Wire umbrella, yes.

But there is a broad thing happening here, which is that the president is deep in right-wing brain rot.

And the people around him who wanted to weaponize the right, they wanted to use it to amp up their base and get certain things and win certain fights, but they can't stop it.

They've set up a set of systems and a momentum and a culture on the right that they do not actually control.

And then Elon Musk took over X and took away the moderators and let all the Nazis back in.

And it turns out if you let all the Nazis and the racists back in, that has a real audience on the right too.