Trump: "THE DEMOCRATS ARE CORRUPT AND EVIL, and I am the exact opposite! Fight hard, Republicans, or you won’t have a Country left!"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) November 12, 2026 at 7:59 AM
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Voters are angry about congressional stock trading and politicians of both parties who listen to billionaire donors rather than ordinary citizens. They're focused on the corrupt activities of President Trump and his allies: the billions made on cryptocurrency, the Jared Kushner diplomacy that's intertwined with dealmaking, and all the rest.
This is not a good time for Republicans to argue that 100% of the political corruption in America is Democratic, and that we shouldn't scrutinize Republicans for corruption at all. Exit polling shows that midterm voters didn't like either party, but they disliked Republicans a lot more. Democrats' favorability/unfavorability among polled voters was 47%/52%; the GOP's numbers were 40%/60%. And voters who said they don't have a favorable opinion of either party -- the so-called double haters, who made up 15% of the electorate -- favored Democrats by a 61%-33% margin.
But that's the approach that makes sense to Trump. His early mentor was Roy Cohn, whose always advised him never to apologize, never to admit error, and always go on offense. And like many other old white boomers, Trump had his brain rewired by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, which turned its audience into a voluntary sort of North Korea where the news says that the Party is always morally flawless and its enemies are pure evil.
Trump's new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, isn't a boomer, but he's on Fox a lot and he's a child of the right-wing media: he got his start in politics calling in to right-wing talk radio programs, and he was mentored by the far-right attack dog David Horowitz. So it's no surprise that he pursues a "Democrats are evil, Republicans are blameless" approach to corruption. The Washington Sun reports:
Stephen Miller was on a quest.Corrupt Somali fraudsters!!!! didn't even work as a GOP selling point this year in Minnesota, where Peggy Flanagan, who is the state's lieutenant governor and thus can be linked to the state's fraud scandal, won her Senate race by 10 points. (Kamala Harris won the state by only 4 points in 2024.)
The president’s fierce loyalist, at the time his deputy chief of staff, pressed administration officials for evidence of fraud related to immigrants, Minnesota and the state’s Somali population nine times in a span of about 10 minutes during a December 2025 call, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Sun.
Miller cut one official off as they were describing a fraud problem in Florida, a hot spot for bad actors who siphon off government benefits, according to the government’s own data. He appeared uninterested in the official’s description of fraud when it didn’t prominently feature immigrants.
At one point, Miller was told about an active criminal investigation into a national fraud case out of the Eastern District of Virginia.
“I hear you, but that’s a long way off from Minneapolis,” Miller responded.
Trump and Miller seem to imagine that they still have a barricade made up of white heartland voters who uncritically believe the "Democrats evil, Republicans blameless" narrative. There clearly are millions of people who continue to believe that, otherwise the blue tsunami would have been even larger. But I think reality is catching up with Republicans -- Trump is doing everything wrong, and even (some) heartland whites get it now. Exit polls said the white vote was split 49%-49% this year. (Pew says that whites voted for Trump over Kamala Harris two years ago by a 55%-43% margin.)
Also, I think Trump and Miller haven't caught on to the fact that the media diet of their target voters is changing. A few years ago, when TV and cable were most Americans' main source of news, Fox dominated the white heartland. It was on in every diner, every bar, every auto repair shop waiting room.
But now people get their news from social media and TikTok, along with streamers and podcasters. The Atlantic's Adam Serwer thinks Elon Musk created a sense of revulsion by turning Twitter into a far-right cesspool:
The Twitter takeover went wrong for conservatives in two ways. The first is that they posted more and more toxic content in an effort to drive engagement. The second is that they had no idea how unpopular that toxic content had become; both influencers and politicians mistook engagement for approval....I don't think this failed to work for Republicans only because it alienated non-Republican X users. I think it failed to work because right-wing content just doesn't dominate the new media environment the way Fox dominates cable news and right-wing Rush Limbaugh clones have long dominated talk radio. Though it seemed for a while that the right dominated new media ...
If you were spending hours on X, you might have believed that most Americans were delighted by cruel memes celebrating deportations, or that affordability issues were a “hoax,” as President Trump kept insisting, or that a “red wave” was inevitable.
... racist mediocrities ... spent the last few days of the campaign posting memes idolizing the fictional character Anakin Skywalker, one of the main antagonists of Star Wars. One MAGA poster said Skywalker, who becomes a mass murderer after rightly being denied a promotion, was emblematic of “the white male experience.” If you say so!
... many of the largest red dots here belong to bro podcasters who have begun to shun Trump and the right, as have Tucker Carlson and some other ex-Trumpers. And there's a non-Republican narrative that bereaking through even in the heartland: that the war and tariffs and inflation are bad; that data centers, AI, and Flock cameras are being shoved down our throats; that Trump is corrupt and out of touch; that ICE agents shouldn't be killing people on the streets of America.
But Trump and Miller still think we're in the heyday of right-wing media, when white heartlanders could be persuaded to care about only what Fox and talk radio told them to care about. You know what else Trump is ranting about today?
The caravans are back.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) November 12, 2026 at 7:14 AM
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Migrant caravans! A Fox News favorite!
Trump really doesn't understand that what used to work for the GOP doesn't work anymore.
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