Who is the Biggest Loser of Trump 2.0?

Capping off the rankings of the biggest blown opportunities of this administration.

For as hard as it may be to believe, we are quite close to the end of the second Trump administration as we know it. Only five months remain between now and November 2026, when it is very likely that Democrats will break the GOP’s federal trifecta by winning at least one of the two chambers of Congress. Presidential election season will start shortly after that, and it will permanently shift the attention of the political world away from a President in the waning years of his time in power. And as Trump’s time at the center of the universe slowly slips away, so have the opportunities for everyone else in politics to respond to him and the world he has created. If you ever wanted to define your position towards this administration and set yourself up for whatever comes after it, the time to do so was over the past 16 months.

In this newsletter, we’ve written a lot about the politicians and factions that acquitted themselves well over this time period. Earlier this month, we took our first look at those who haven’t. From a sitting Vice President who has completely misunderstood his role to countless mid-tier Democrats who turned down once-in-a-lifetime promotions in favor of long-shot presidential bids, we went over a huge range of political fumbles, each of which would have been large enough to have been etched forever in political lore had they occurred in years past. They were all bad, and they all pale in comparison to the sheer, unadulterated idiocy on the top of this list. To a person and to an organization, every name mentioned here had a once-in-a-lifetime political opportunity in front of them at the start of this administration. The stars were aligned; success was as simple as putting two and two together. But they all failed to do so, they now face oblivion.

The Top Five

#5: The Lamestream Media

During that long, painful period in which Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee and losing to Donald Trump in the polls, the liberal commentary industrial complex had to spend a lot of time coming up with a lot of excuses as to why they were losing. These excuses ranged very far and very wide, but there was always one that rose above the rest of the pack: that the very idea that Trump could ever win was being willed into existence by an elite media class that desperately wanted him to come back to power. As the story went, all of us elite election commentators (yes, they included me in this for some reason) had grown resentful of Biden’s steady competence. He was simply such a good President that it had taken all of the drama out of Washington, and since Washington drama is what sells, he was drastically hurting our bottom line. As such, all of us Biden haters had become so desperate for the former guy to come back to office that we spent all of our days faking polls, conducting faulty analyses and otherwise wishcasting a new Trump presidency. We just desperately wanted to believe that he would come back to the White House so we could once again make that sweet, sweet #Resistance money.

If anybody anywhere was ever uncertain as to whether this story was true or not, their minds should have been settled right after Trump won the election last November. Far from some fifth column that eagerly anticipated another four years of high drama in the White House, the mainstream media reacted to Trump’s second victory with excessive shock and massive overcorrections. It has been a historic showcase in inept bumbling the entire way through, most prominently in the cases of CBS and the Washington Post. Both organizations took excessive and massively self-indulgent moves towards an elite anti-woke center-right philosophy long after it was already clear that the so-called “vibe shift” was a mirage, and both have declined massively in income and influence as a result.

It’s a textbook case of billionaire arrogance that has left the once-societally-dominant upper crust of the industry on life support. Had the likes of Bezos and the Ellisons been genuinely interested in why Trump voters were no longer interested in their coverage, just a quick review of the history of conservative media would have been enough to tell them that the right just wasn’t compelled by objective coverage as a concept. But since people as wealthy as them can never see a foot past their own faces, they convinced themselves that everything from America’s narrow selection of Trump to its decades-long distrust of the mainstream media was because established outlets were not sympathetic enough to the specific brand of right-wing politics that they personally liked: libertarian economics, hawkish foreign policies, and condescending anti-anti-Trumpism. So far, the entire project has only succeeded at destroying their appeal among high-trust liberals while failing to convince a single Dan Bongino fan to turn off Gutfeld! and tune into Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil. If it were not for the continued financial success of the New York Times—something that could very well just be because of wordle—the entire industry would be at the rock bottom of this list despite the fierce competition.

And trust me: when I say fierce competition, I mean fierce competition.

#4: Former Sec. Kristi Noem

Where do you even begin?