Noel King

Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore engineered.

And Laura Bullard checked the facts.

I'm Noelle King.

It's Today Explained.

This is Today Explained.

The reason that the government is shut down is because the Republicans have insisted on taking down the subsidies, also Medicare, Medicaid, all of that.

President Trump said many wild things this year, but one of the wildest was on Pod Force One, where he talked about this multi-day aptitude test he took at the age of like 11 or 12.

Alas.

Right out of college, Trump tried producing Broadway shows, and he has taste.

You can argue about whether it's good taste, but Trump loves music and movies and architecture, LOL.

And he's been using his time in office to shape popular culture.

The culture was already moving right.

It was embracing the trads and the chads.

And so in the waning days of 2025, we're looking at how the counterculture, long the province of lefties and hippies, moved swiftly and sharply right.

And we're going to ask if it'll ever move back.

That's coming up on Today Explained.

So we have Warner Brothers, we have Netflix, we have Paramount.

Walk us through what exactly happened here.

And yet, Paramount being Paramount, the Ellisons being the Ellisons, had to respond.

How did they respond when Netflix won?