One thing that stands out is how capricious the Twitter right is about Trump, vacillating between supporting him and hating him. They cheer his deportations, then blame him for “affordability.” Some of these grievances are legitimate. Home prices, adjusted for inflation, are way higher than they were 30–50 years ago. Insurance, healthcare, and other expenses have also gone up. Nothing seems to have gotten easier as far as affordability is concerned. If you cannot get a good-paying job that lets you save for a down payment, you’re pretty much screwed. This is a legitimate complaint. But on the other hand, it reeks of political naivety to act surprised by things that are obvious to anyone who follows politics.
I saw this going viral:
Seven words I thought I’d never write: "You should watch this Nick Fuentes monologue." https://t.co/ou4Ev6cIww
— i/o (@avidseries) October 15, 2026
He concludes by saying, “We are so skewed it’s not even funny.” According to what or whom? By many metrics, America is still way ahead of the rest of the world, whether it’s stock market returns, real GDP growth, per capita income, technological innovation (e.g., AI), etc. For someone whose podcast is called “America First,” he sure seems to have a low opinion of it.
Between his economic populism and his opposition to the death penalty, this fits with my post about Nick Fuentes’ politics being much more closely aligned with the continental European left than anything resembling American conservatism or the Republican Party.
This is why liberal media outlets, such as the NYT, continue to promote him: to drive a wedge within “MAGA.” His audience of 20-somethings ranges from disaffected Trump supporters to apolitical “burn it all down” types. The unifying theme is a shared sense of grievance against oligarchic power structures, along with a favorite scapegoat: boomers.
There is no semblance of a political solution. This helps explain his appeal among young people who rarely vote, and why the “MAGA establishment” is right to ignore him (as I correctly predicted here and here), given that much of his audience is ineligible to vote (being too young or foreign) or disinclined to do so (apathy). So a podcast called “America First” is primarily composed of an overseas listenership who want to see America and Trump fail. The irony.
To his audience’s credit, they do have a good intuition or sense of bullshit despite also not being that educated. But there is nothing pro-America about a podcast whose host and content mostly attack Trump and the values America stands for. Sure, maybe they have a point about corruption, affordability, or self-dealing, but then why attach yourself to MAGA or Trump at all? Just come out as socialists or something. It would at least be more consistent and honest that way.
Or on Ukraine:
Ukrainian oligarchs keep getting richer. Look at the cars in Monaco. Who is buying luxury mansions in Miami? It’s maddening that Trump has allowed himself to be humiliated by Zelensky.
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) October 10, 2026
It’s not that surprising if you understand power dynamics. Trump cares first and foremost about expanding American power, whether that means promoting US tech companies in the race for AI dominance or supporting Zelenskyy against Russia. The people who are surprised by what Trump does either do not understand him, do not understand power relations, or simply are not paying attention.
Trump is very predictable in this sense. He is attracted to power, especially when it means expanding American dominance. Russia is obviously hostile to US interests, which makes supporting Ukraine an obvious choice. It also explains why the wishes of his donors or base, whether about affordability or bitcoin policy, are pushed to the periphery or ignored. Those individuals either have little power (regular voters vs. billionaires in tech) or want things that don’t advance American dominance or interests (crypto is irrelevant/weak compared to AI).
This also explains his enthusiasm for tariffs, even though they don’t accomplish much: they are intended to inflict harm on foreign competitors, even if the costs are passed down. The main differences between Trump and the neocons are immigration and tariffs. But otherwise, the principle is the same: expanding America’s global reach and influence. This can be done directly, through attacking Iran or ousting Maduro, or by proxy, through funding Ukraine.
Many people who built careers commenting on politics online do not understand how modern American politics works. As I wrote in “MAGA and its discontents:”
In a previous post, astutely timed before the attacks on Iran, I argued that the GOP is fundamentally the party of foreign intervention and ‘big business’ interests–a point that should be evident to anyone paying attention to politics and not viewing it through a naïve or idealist lens. Its focus is not primarily on household domestic policy issues such as healthcare affordability, home ownership attainability, or student loan debt. However important those issues may be to some on the Right, particularly online, they are generally championed by Democrats rather than Republicans. The neglecting of domestic issues by Republicans is part of the problem inherent in the two-party system.
As I correctly predicted in the aforementioned post and earlier, affordability has not gotten better and has remained a low priority. To recap, the major differences between the parties:
Republicans: self-sufficiency, nationalism, American power abroad (“America as an empire”), might-makes-right, and social hierarchy.
Democrats: compassion, justice, domestic/household issues (e.g., tuition, housing, healthcare), and “America as a reluctant empire.”
Trump’s platform is fully consistent with Republican values. On every issue, from AI to Iran, it lines up. By contrast, Nick’s podcast and much of what goes viral on Twitter about the “hard job market,” “AI/datacenter skepticism, criticism, or calls for a pause,” or “lack of affordability” centers almost entirely on Democratic-aligned issues. Nick attacking Trump for alleged corruption falls under “justice.”
Trump sees strengthening America’s AI competitiveness as paramount, along with policing the Middle East. The federal government is stagnant and complacent while the AI/tech sector races full speed ahead. Trump and AI are the two pillars of America. Things like affordability are pushed to the back burner. This, again, was correctly foreshadowed in the 2021–2022 posts “How the Vacuum of Leadership in Washington led to Rage Online,” “No One Has Any Power,” and “From Big Government to Big Tech.”
Yet here we see Matt Walsh, a popular figure on the online right, attacking datacenters again:
Big Tech companies are sprinting forward, building data centers as fast as they can, sometimes using eminent domain to seize the land by force, making their AI more and more powerful, expanding the technology at lightening speed with no guardrails of any kind at all. Yet none of these tech gurus or any of their apologists have even attempted to explain what exactly all of the millions of people who lose their jobs, and the increasing numbers who lose their homes, all sacrificed on the AI altar, are supposed to do. How does society support millions of unemployed and displaced people? What becomes of a society where algorithms and machines do everything, and a few people become trillionaires while millions more lose everything? There is no answer to any of this. They aren’t even attempting to answer it. Instead we’re simply told that China exists and we have to “beat them” in some unspecified way, in order to achieve some unspecified goal. We’re going to obliterate entire industries, entire categories of jobs all at once, and the only justification anyone can give is “China.” It’s madness.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) May 14, 2026
Or on affordability:
The conservatives on here denying the affordability crisis are engaged in what I can only describe as an act of political suicide. They’re also lying, which is the worst part. Grocery prices are up. Housing. Energy. Insurance. Health care. Basic living expenses. It’s real. It’s happening. Denying it just makes you look out of touch, deceitful, and untrustworthy. It’s also a completely unnecessary and unforced error. No credible person is claiming that Trump caused these price surges. You don’t have to disgrace yourself by denying the reality in front of your face just to prove your loyalty to Trump. The causes for the most part are multi faceted, complicated, and longstanding. That’s true. So let’s discuss them. Debating whether the problem exists at all — or, if it does exist, whether it counts as a problem — is a total waste of time, and makes you look like a shill and a fraud.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 5, 2026
These positions align much more closely with Bernie Sanders’s, minus the wokeness. A clip of Peter Thiel arguing that Trump failed to appoint smart people went viral:
Peter Thiel explains what Trump got wrong in both of his terms
"I think the two administrations made opposite mistakes."
"The first administration brought in all these people who couldn’t agree, and it was just all this internal fighting."
"The second administration, I think overcorrected for the mistake of the first term with all these loyalty tests. You got an administration staffed by not very smart, but very loyal people."
"There’s all sorts of ways it can be criticized. It also, reflected a way that things had reached a certain exhaustion, and certainly on the Republican side."
— dnap (@dnapway) September 25, 2026
Trump didn’t *do* anything wrong. He followed the GOP playbook with some tariffs and more deportations thrown in, and the results were predictable. If you are a Republican and are disappointed by what you got, then you weren’t paying attention—or you were never really one. At least be honest about that, rather than pretending Trump made mistakes. Both terms followed the same playbook, with predictably mixed results outside of stocks and GDP. Tax cuts? Check. Middle East war? Check. Higher oil and gas prices like in 2006–2008? Check.
The fall in Trump’s approval ratings tracks Bush’s decline heading into 2008. Politically, the GOP playbook can work really well, like after 9/11, when Bush tapped into a shared nationalist sentiment. Or it can work really badly, like in 2008, when he became the poster child for economic excess and crony capitalism. That gives Dems an opening to echo the sort of economic-populist message Fuentes is pushing and secure an easy win, like in 2008 or 2012. How much of this is Trump’s fault is hard to determine. Iran did not help, but his approval ratings were falling right out of the gate in 2025, much as Bush’s steadily declined from the start of his second term. People had simply had enough of Trump.
The “smart people” never came. Those who are actually smart quit soon after joining, or are in think tanks and academia. I give the administration a “C+.” It would have been a “B” without Iran. I was never expecting progress on affordability. Trump never positioned himself as an isolationist. There is actually very little libertarian about Trump. If you actually thought this, perhaps you were projecting your desires or beliefs onto him. Maybe that is what Thiel did.
And from @CorpAbsurdity, whose tweet below went viral with 6.2k “likes”:
Boomers will still call you lazy if you can’t find a job.
— Corporate Absurdity (@CorpAbsurdity) September 21, 2026
It’s interesting to see the not insignificant overlap between people who use “boomer” pejoratively to mean an out-of-touch person, presumably an older white Republican man, and those who support Trump, who epitomizes that archetype. Yet the boomer is treated as worse than even the woke. Every societal ill or injustice, from unaffordable housing to indifference or antipathy toward young people, is laid at his feet. So boomers are bad, but Trump, who is himself a boomer and whose dismissal of concerns about gas prices and affordability fits the “boomer ethos,” is somehow an exception.
This is evidence of the cognitive dissonance among people who have to convince themselves that the Trump administration is on their side and receptive to their concerns about jobs, even as the evidence suggests otherwise. They are supporting a party that has never positioned itself as particularly concerned with labor issues or affordability.
If the plight of young, jobless people is important, there are political parties and politicians that prioritize that issue, but Trump and the GOP are not among them. You are not going to find much sympathy from the GOP if you cannot find work. This is just political science 101. When people ask, “What is the value of a humanities education?” maybe the answer is learning the difference between the two major parties. Maybe it would be easier to just admit that, yes, the out-of-touch billionaire and his supporters don’t care about you.
Trump’s older voters in swing states share many of the views that the online right attacks boomers for holding. If boomers met the fate that many openly wish upon them, the result could be Democratic wins for the foreseeable future, given boomers’ high turnout in swing states. So which is it? There does not need to be an answer. Hence the dissonance. Yes, it would be nice to have a GOP that cared more about domestic issues, particularly those affecting younger voters. But again, that is asking it to be something it is not.