1. That's bc that "debate" performance from Trump was literally the worst thing ever seen in American politics- & that's after 5 yrs of seeing Donald Trump do his thing.
He was advised against the "strategy" & spent the whole next day convinced he'd killed it 🙄
2. I didn't do what so many others did in their books and suddenly apply magic filters to the two 2016 campaigns. In my chapter, A Tale of Two Campaigns, in the '16 cycle as in now, I recounted how shitty Trump's 2016 campaign was, from beginning to end and on every single metric
3. Especially contrasted w HRC's campaign. It wasn't until Trump's freak accident win that all the Clinton hit books had to be quickly revised to recount what a shitty campaign she ran- they were all set to be print about how much better the Clinton campaign was than the Trump
4. campaign- it wasn't even close. Indeed, as bad as this year's iteration is, the 2016 version was 1000% worse so keep that in mind every time one of these people who just knew the Clinton team was running a shitty campaign comes on the TV... I think I might be one of the few
5. people that criticized their strategy in real-time- and that was in relation to the decision to go all-in on the conversion of Rs and even I was wooed by the rise of Never Trump somewhat. Donald Trump is the shittiest candidate in the history of presidential politics and his
6. instincts are shit- but he had two things work out well for him- timing, running into a complacent left-side of the spectrum- and the RNC's turnout operation bc they're the ones that ran the real campaign for him. He has that now too, and a cult-like following in terms of
7. what right-wing media has done to the GOP electorate so he is still competitive to win if Ds don't match the turnout (they will) and get the votes counted (this is the real fight).
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🧵Fear Factory
Turning Point isn't a Debate Organization, its a Conflict Machine
Charlie Kirk didn’t invent conflict entrepreneurship, but he sure helped to perfect it. He is the prototype of a generation of right wing internet entrepreneurs who figured out that the surest way to build power, attention, and money otherwise off limits to them is not by governing, legislating, or even persuading—it’s by manufacturing outrage and monetizing it.
From the garage to the donor class
Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 at just 18 years old but he wasn’t some grassroots kid hustling alone. He had a mentor, Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery, and very quickly he had a benefactor: Foster Friess, a conservative megadonor who bankrolled much of the group’s early work. That early money mattered. It allowed TPUSA to scale fast—staff, merch, events, and a social media strategy that turned “triggering the libs” into a donor-driven business model.
By 2015, Kirk had what every young conservative hustler of the early digital age wanted: legitimacy with the Republican elite. He was on panels, quoted in political press, and standing on the floor of the Republican National Convention in 2016 being profiled as the future of conservatism.
🧵A Blue Tsunami Is Headed for Virginia and New Jersey:
Out-Party Fundamentals Are About to Open a Can of Whoop Ass on the GOP
Sometimes life comes full circle.
Almost ten years ago, I was putting out a forecast in 2017 projecting a big win for Democrat Ralph Northam over his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie in the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race.
That race was widely treated—by media and the conventional wisdom—as a knife-edge toss-up. Yet my polling with Quentin Kidd at the Wason Center at Christopher Newport University consistently tracked a Democratic lead of at least six points.
How were we so confident? Because fundamentals matter. Because in-party/out-party dynamics—specifically whether your party holds the White House—are a heavy anchor pulling against your performance in off-year races. Virginia, above all, is fertile ground for the midterm effect. Once a new party moves into the White House, Virginia tends to rebuff it, amplifying that national trending through local elections.
When the Nazis sold themselves to Germany in the early 1930s, they didn’t just promise jobs, glory, and a return to greatness—they promised a national makeover. And like all authoritarians, their definition of “cleaning up” had less to do with fixing the economy and more to do with purging poor people.
The Reich was obsessed with visual order. Cities were to be spotless, streets safe, public behavior disciplined, and every human being was expected to conform to the Nazi ideal: healthy, hardworking, racially “pure,” and loyal to the state.
If you didn’t fit, you were labeled Asozial—“asocial.” This was not just a slur; it was a bureaucratic category, written into policy and enforced with police power. And it covered a broad swath of people the regime saw as “blight”: the homeless, the jobless, alcoholics, drug users, petty criminals, beggars, the mentally ill, sex workers, and even some single mothers and LGBTQ people.
While he was in prison, the German version of Club Fed, for trying to execute a coup, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf — part autobiography, part revenge manifesto, part how-to guide for dismantling the post–World War I order.
It wasn’t subtle. He said, outright:
“The reunification of German-Austria with the Motherland… must be carried out.”
And he was clear the borders of Germany should expand:
“It is not the preservation of peace, but the expansion of the people’s living space that is the most pressing task of our time.”
That’s “living space” (Lebensraum) — for Germans only — at the expense of anyone already living there. In fact, you may not know this, but once they killed off all the Jews in Eastern Europe their next step was supposed to be turning the death camps onto the rest of Eastern European-another 40 million people who they saw as racially inferior.
Trump’s tariffs are finally here—and they’re hitting your wallet like a second income tax. He promised China would pay. Instead, American families and small businesses are footing the $29.6 billion bill. Here’s what he’s not telling you.
In July 2025, the U.S. government brought in $29.6 billion in tariff revenue. That’s not a typo. That’s nearly $30 billion in a single month—triple the average from previous years. It’s the kind of hockey-stick spike that should set off alarms. But to hear Donald Trump tell it, this is a triumph. “We’re making money again,” he crows at rallies. “Other countries are finally paying!”
Except they’re not. We are.
That money isn’t coming from China. It’s not coming from Mexico. It’s not being extracted from globalist trade cartels or shady overseas middlemen. It’s being paid by American families. By small businesses. By Etsy sellers, knife makers, Hallmark, Walmart, and yes—by you.
The South Switched Teams but Kept the Same Ideology
There’s a favorite talking point on the American right: “Democrats were the party of slavery. Democrats were the party of Jim Crow.”
If you're sick of that, this 🧵is for you.
There’s a favorite talking point on the American right: “Democrats were the party of slavery. Democrats were the party of Jim Crow.” They throw it out like a grenade in political arguments, as if it were a trump card that delegitimizes any modern conversation about race, justice, or the parties’ respective commitments to equality. And yes, it’s true — the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. It was the party of Jim Crow.
But that was then. And this is now.
The part they always leave out — intentionally — is the political realignment that took place in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Because if you follow the story of what happened after Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, you’ll find a transformation not of values, but of party. The party label changed. The ideology didn’t. And the South — always the stronghold of racial hierarchy — found a new political home in the Republican Party.