Breaking News from Pod Save America - Trump and MAGA are LOSING the Culture Wars

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

Alex Wagner and Brian Beutler break down how Trump and MAGA are panicking as their culture wars backfire. CHECK OUT OUR SPONSOR: ZBIOTICS - http://zbiotics.com/CROOKEDNEWS CODE: CROOKEDNEWS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, oh my gosh. I mean, what a monumental day. The day, the day, not the days, the day that we get to have Brian Boiler on this rapid response for a runaway country, Brian. Thank you for doing this. Yeah. Long time fan, long time, what is it, long time reader, listener, a consumer of content. Not the first time that I've talked to you, but first time in a long time. It's been a while, yeah.

So in your newsletter off message, which is required reading, it's so good. You reported on the Trump administration's recent press release, which I remember when it hit my inbox. I was like, what in the fuck is this? It is a press release that it reads, that is titled, Don't be a panicking, which is a panicking Republican. We're winning and we're not slowing down. That is on official White House letterhead.

It is on whitehouse.gov if you want to see for your own eyes this price. release. So when I read that press release, I was like, what is it really truly a panicking? And is this a panicking? And by this, I mean, is Megan Kelly a panicking? Because there is a video that really is worth watching more than once where Megan Kelly joins Pierce Morgan on his television program and loses her mind over Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. Brian, let us watch that video together. I'm sorry, Pierce, but to get up there and perform the whole, the whole show in Spanish is a middle finger to the rest of America. Who gives a damn that we have 40 million, Spanish speakers in the United States?

We have 310 million who don't speak a lick of Spanish. This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country, not for the Latinos, not for one small group, but for the country. We don't need a black national anthem. We don't need a Spanish-speaking non-English performing performer. and we don't need an ICE or America hater featured as our primetime entertainment. Okay. What is the national language, officially, the national language of the United States of America? I mean, English.

And there's been a push for many, many years to make it an official documented thing. You don't have one. If you would have let me finish my comment, I would have pointed that out, but people have been pushing to make it official. Okay. So you're trying to make official. This attitude that you have right here is why you in Great Britain have lost your culture. You ceded your culture to a bunch of radical Muslims who came in and took over and now it's gone.

We're not allowing that here, whether it's Hispanic, whether it's Muslim. It's not happening in the United States of America. That's why President Trump was elected. And whether it's Bad Bunny, who is American but refuses to speak English in his performances or anybody else, we have to keep the Super Bowl, which is a quintessential American event. Football, that kind of football is ours. They call it American football. She goes on to say something about like meatloaf and fried chicken should be at the Super Bowl.

I don't know. Like people should be eating those things or they should be performing on stage, whatever. There's so many things to talk about here, Brian, the thinly veiled racism around what Latinos said in the way that only Meg and Kelly can say it. But really, what I hear is alarm and I hear panic. What do you think of this? And does this qualify as a Republican panicking? I want to tip my hat to Donald Trump who he like he comes up with the. these like terms.

Sometimes they're insults. Sometimes they're like portmanteaus like panicking. And sometimes they land. But even when they don't, even when they're so hamfisted and they stumble off the tongue like panicking, instead of just being like, no, that was a miss. We're going to put that one aside. He sticks with it. Yeah.

He's committed to the bit. He came up with panicking. I probably like before the election, you know, to refer to Republicans who were worried that he was going to lose. and they were the panicans, right? In Democratic circles, they're known as bedwetters. Yeah, exactly. No, it's like, that's on all fours, right?

That's a perfect comparison, right? And so I don't know, I mean, I think Megan Kelly sounds, or maybe he's attempting to sound, genuinely terrified, like in a panic about the loss of whatever, like white culture in America. Yes, right. It belongs to us, and us is not anybody that is brown or speaks. Spanish. But I think when Donald Trump uses the term panic in and whoever wrote this weird press

release for the White House, they're referring to members of the party who are becoming concerned that this method, the thing that you're watching Megan Kelly do on that broadcast, isn't working as a kind of politics anymore, right? That it's backfiring. The public isn't rallying to their side. Donald Trump is becoming less popular. The more he acts like she's acting there, the more turned off most Americans become by him. And that induces a spiral of panic or of, you know, alarm. Susan Collins would call it concern, right? And it's those, like I assume that what's happening is between Donald Trump's poll numbers, what we saw in the aftermath of what he posted on true social last week, depicting the Obama's as apes, the ongoing public blowback.

to the siege and occupation of Minneapolis is causing Republicans in tough races to fear for their seats. And they are reaching out to the White House saying, let's try to not be so crazy. And he's saying, don't be a panicking. We're going to keep our, like, our foot on the gas pedal. And it's all just going to work out and just chill out. We got this. I think the panicans are the ones who are like right to be concerned at the moment. With at the hazard of putting too many layers on what is ultimately a paper thin designation,

Brian, I wonder if Megan Kelly's forced panic over demographic change is not in fact underlying that is true panicking, is a true panicking, right? someone who sees that the sort of Trump proposition is failing, right, and who has defaulted to race baiting as a way of, I don't know, getting the base out of the doldrums or whatever, right? Like, maybe that's too many layers, but I do think it's, I mean, it's what Trump defaults to. It's like, he's not focused on the economy. He says he is in these stupid press releases, but really what he's focused on is culture war shit because there's nothing better to distract from a flailing economy and a person who has no

business being in the White House than a good old fashion like race war or or like a low grade version of that. I don't know. Maybe maybe I'm wrong. But in the process, I feel like what Megan Kelly is doing by going like Latinos, which is like, oh my God, it makes Trump eating that like, remember when he was eating like a five layer taco bowl saying like happy Cinco de, do you remember this? That was in the 2016 campaign. His like shock. Like, was that the judge curiel? He said that judge curia. Yeah. And because right that it makes that shit look subtle. Like Kelly is so bad and so overskies on like with a group of people that Trump is like absolutely in trouble with. And then going off on her. I mean, this reminds me. I said this to before we started of her like Santa Claus is white and everybody knows that. This insanely like white, it's white nationalism meets cultural appropriation. Like it's just so it's so. It's so. downingly offensive, that it just, if you're a Republican panicking, like, it's going to make you panic more. I think, I appreciate this synthesis here as maybe something more like we should appropriate the term from Donald Trump and apply it to the two, you know, people who believe in the white genocide conspiracy theory or they have, you know, demographic panic or they're just racist, right?

Like, I think that, you know, Republicans in California who are about to be wiped out are panicking in the sense that Donald Trump uses a term panic in. But somebody like Stephen Miller, like, I don't know what Megan Kelly believes in her heart or if she's even has a heart. But I think Stephen Miller genuinely believes that America should be whitened, right? Like, by force. Yeah, definitely. Right? And I don't think he is panicking. the way an endangered Republican politician is.

He is aggressively trying to do as much as you can between now and when Republicans lose power to fulfill as much of his ideological mission as he can. But if Republicans end up losing a bunch of seats because of how they went about expelling 300,000 brown-skinned people, he will view that as success. And he won't feel like he panicked. Right.

That's just collateral damage from a necessary objective. Yeah. I think what Megan Kelly may be panicking about is less the underlying issue. Like, I don't, you know, like these people are, like, the people who do Republican media are just so fake. But, you know, she had another clip where she was trying to whip up a hate mob against the Olympic athletes who had. Oh, well, we're going to talk about that. Okay, okay. I don't want to get too far ahead of you.

But I think that to the extent that you see panickingism in. Republican media, it's people like her who are recognizing that the tactics that have worked well for them for the last year are starting to fail. And like a year ago, they would have, you know, maybe successfully, like, pressured the U.S. Olympic teams to send these players home, these athletes home. And now everyone's just like, like, like fuck off. Like we don't care about it. Yeah. You and your shame. Well, okay, okay, before we get to the Olympics, I mean, there is someone who definitely does a 180 on specifically the bad bunny stuff. And you highlight this. I mean, this is, this may not be the panicking in the like lower,

lowercase P sense of the word. This is like full on someone panicking who is a right wing superstar. And that person is Jake Paul, right? The MAGA pro boxer YouTuber, who, who literally stepped in it, which is being euphemistic, I suppose, after a series of posts criticizing Bad Bunny and calling him a fake American citizen telling fans to boycott the overtime, the halftime show. That did not win him any favors online or fans online, not only because Bad Bunny was born in Puerto Rico and is a United States citizen, but also because, wait for it, Jake Paul lives in Puerto Rico. So, AOC, both, you know we are in trouble when both AOC and your brother, Logan, Paul, come after you for these comments, which they did.

So then Paul clarified by framing the word fake as a critique of bad bunny's values and the past comments he's made about ICE and immigration policy in America. And then ultimately claimed his account had been hacked and that he, quote, loved bad bunny. I do think that this is like an example of, you write about this. So I'm going to let you talk about it. You articulate it so much better than I ever could. But this is such a great example of these kind of. of like tip of the spear cultural conservatives,

thinking that the rest of the country is with them and only to turn back around behind them and see that no one's fucking there. Nobody is coming to the shit on Bad Bunny halftime show, aka Kid Rock's like embarrassment. Everybody's watching Bad Bunny and loving it, and he's the odd man out. When you can't make it to your kids game,

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because they spend way too much time on Twitter or X, where the playing field is tilted to make them feel like they have the public on their side. And what you saw, I think, happened with Jake Paul, is he really believed that there would be a ground swell of, rejection of Bad Bunny on the basis of the fact that he's he performs in Spanish his skin is brown and he criticizes ice and that's it like those are bad Bunny's sins and Jake Paul because of his milieu believes that that's enough to rally it half half the country forgetting the fact that bad bunny is a multi-platinum artist who is celebrated around the world nobody else seems to give a shit that's in

Spanish she has fucking bangers and put on an amazing show you fucking idiots and so he And so he just, I don't think he could have contemplated that he would have received a backlash, but his whole identity is being able to pop off like that and be agilated by his fans to go viral. And everyone like starts to echo him and imitate him and tell him how great he is. And instead he got an earful because it's bullshit, right? And in, like his panic is watching himself lose relevance and lose relevance. credibility with the subset of his audience. Popularity.

And basically like Bad Bunny being a much bigger cultural icon than Jake Paul is, was the force that made Jake Paul realize, oh, I stepped in it. And like being aligned with Donald Trump is good as far as it goes, but I can't do that insofar as it makes me start attacking people like Bad Bunny who can squash me. And so that's how you get from he's a fake American to. No, I only mean he's fake because he's critical of this administration to, like, I don't even know what was going on with my Twitter last night. I love bad. I love bad buddy.

I was hacked. And, yeah, I mean, like, if we're, if we're like breaking things down into new dictionary definitions, I think that, like, you can have your panic in that's the elected officeholder Republican who's worried about losing their seat. And then you can have the panicking who's just like the white national. who's worried about the browning of America, and then you can have a panic in as like a Republican influencer who's worried about being on the losing end of the popularity contest in the culture.

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influencer you think you are, if you go up against Bad Bunny, you will lose. Just, that's a truism. I think there's something a year ago when Trump won, it was in this like historic moment or cultural moment where it felt like the sources of democratic or progressive or liberal cultural cachet were dying, you know, like movie stars are not what they used to be because the movie industry is in free fall. And like music, musicians like are not what they used to be because of Spotify and because of streaming and because of so many things, right? Whereas Donald Trump was gaining ground in this new realm of the culture, with influencers with people like Jake Paul who were able to build up sizable audiences but there were

tons of them right there's only a handful of like really big deal movie stars but there's a million you know online influencers and that it it felt in that moment like the old world was dying and this new world was coming online and that it might be kind of permanent and I think that over the course of a year as Trump has cashed a lot of the goodwill he earned in that election mostly by winning, I guess, that that was not a permanent state of affairs. And it still is true that, like, there are big deal cultural icons

who do not have huge presences, like, parisocially, on social media, who can, who, like, just have much, much, much, much more clout than these strivers like Megan Kelly or Jake Paul and probably always will. Yeah, I would just, I would put maybe a finer point on that, which I think is there, like in 2025, people thought you can't have as much influence

if you are from arts and culture because everyone understands that Hollywood and the music industry and arts and culture writ large have been co-opted by the left. So it doesn't really fucking matter if Orlando Bloom is against ice. We already fucking knew he would be against ice and he's not culturally relevant. But what Bad Bunny did, sorry, not to get too deep into bad bunny, but like he put on a show that was explicitly about nothing is the only way to fight. The best, I can't even remember. He, he put forward explicitly the proposition that the best antidote to hate is love. And he put forth a show that was joyous and not at all what the right wing expected it to be.

And it did prove to be the antidote for all of their hand-wringing and alarm bells and Megan Kelly's like, you know, nativist screeds. Like he was just so far above that shit. And also, again, I will say he has bangers. And so it was both an inversion of what they expected from him. And also he exists in this much more powerful space beyond politics. And so that made him, I just think, super compelling in a way that they had not calculated at all. And I, you know, and Riz, he's handsome. He's young.

Just asked my mom. She was like, this rabbit is hot. I was like, it's bad. He's a good looking man. And like kid rock was never. No, man. Old. Even when he was young, though, that was an ugly dude, even in the 90s.

I was there. I'm not going to judge. I was there. But I'm going to say, I take back money over Kid Rock any day. Just to close this out, Brian, because you did mention the Olympics. And I think it's important as we talk about panikins. The way that what is happening among the Olympic athletes is an expression of a panic, like a kind of society where panicans are increasingly in greater number, right?

That there is now a space opened up to, criticize this administration in the most gentle terms possible, I would say. But nonetheless, explicitly say, I don't agree with what's happening in the United States and that Olympic athletes are going overseas to the Milan Winter Olympics and saying, what's happening there I'm not down for? Case in point, Olympic freestyle skier Hunter Hess stepped to the podium to talk about what it means to represent the United States right now. Let's just take a listen to refresh everybody's memory. It brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now, I think. It's a little hard. There's obviously a lot going on that I'm not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren't. Just because I'm wearing the flag doesn't mean I represent everything that's going on. Okay. So like I said, this is not like flag burning Marxism that's on display here, right? But Donald Trump follows up, you know, generously by calling Hess a real loser. Donald Trump would know because he himself is an Olympic athlete.

Oh, no, wait a second. He is not an Olympic athlete. He does not know what, I mean, he knows what it is to be a loser, but he has no idea what. I digress. Hess has framed the press conference as a defense. He's defending his words at the press conference by saying it's about honesty rather than disloyalty to the country. And he is not alone in all in this sort of, I would say, gentle criticism of the appalling things that are happening in America in our name. Freestyle skier Chris Lilis said he was heartbroken about ice and was a little bit more explicit. You argue that this kind of criticism could not have happened in 2025. And I know you've kind of like touched on that a little bit in this conversation. But say more about that because I think the panicking thing connects to this insofar as if people didn't realize how fucked Trump is, there would be no space for nonpartisan Olympic athletes to even begin to touch on this stuff.

So I kind of think it's actually, it's almost like a labor capital divide where even in 2024 when Trump won in the early part of last year, there were a lot of misgivings among professional athletes, actors and musicians, people who work in the tech industry about Donald Trump. But the executives in all of those realms had basically made, at least made their peace with Trump, have not like thrown in with them. And when he won, they imbibed this sense that the culture had spoken and it had spoken out on MAGA's behalf. And so they could ignore their employees. They could ignore their athletes. They could ignore their musicians and just do what it took to stay on the right side of Trump. I think that the real break, the moment when that dynamic became unsettled was the Jimmy Kimmel attempted firing and then the backlash and then the reinstatement. of him where both the labor, the people like Jimmy Kimmel,

realize that they still had power and that that people agreed with them and so they could speak out and that their bosses realized that if they scapegoated the talent, that it was going to cost the company and possibly themselves their jobs, right? And so fast forward to now, like, I think that I think that A year and Trump's sliding popularity and the, you know, the sort of determination Jimmy Kimmel showed not to back down created the space for these athletes to say what they want to say without fear of reprisal. And, you know, I don't suppose it's fun to have the president and people like Megan Kelly trying to put a target on your back and that they're probably getting hate mail and all that.

but that they're not worried about their coaches or their sponsors, you know, running away from them. Like if anything, this will make getting sponsorships easier for them now, right? Whereas, like, I think if the Olympics were held a year ago, they would have felt really chilled, like unable to say anything negative about Trump's presidency, even if they were really concerned about some of the troubling things that happened in those early days, they probably would have not said anything and if they had said something then this kind of effort to portray them as disloyal Americans who should not be on the Olympic team would have had people above them in a

panic and trying to figure out how to silence them or even like pull them off the team. I mean, it's a hypothetical because the Olympics are when they are. But if you remember what things were like just a year ago, you remember how inhibited people in their positions felt about criticizing Trump publicly at all. Like you had to be in a job like yours or mine where it's kind of what we do to criticize conservative thing. Yeah. Anyone, anyone like slightly closer to the mainstream or the center than us with public-facing

jobs were like I think about really, really worried about what would happen, not to their physical safety as much as to their livelihoods if they spoke up. And I think that that's basically gone now. And it's been replaced with something much healthier, which is the executives themselves worrying that they made a bad bet. And you can see this in a few places. The one that I like the most, and I wrote about it in the piece I wrote about all this was that Tim Cook has not been as aggressive about bribing Trump as some of the other tech CEOs. But he did, you know, give that. You know, he's laid a couple bribes on the table.

Yep, yep, and flattery and all that and trying to get special dispensation for Apple so they're not harmed by the tariffs. And like the people who work at Apple have noticed and have not been happy about it, but have not really done much until around the killing of Alex Pretti, the White House hosted a screening of Jeff Bezos's Melania documentary. And Tim Cook appeared, like on the same day or the day after Alex Pready was killed. And something happened inside Apple because he felt compelled to publicly release the statement that he sent to the staff at Apple. Not saying, I'm sorry, but essentially saying, yeah, I get it. That was dumb of me. I might have fucked up. Yeah.

And I hear you. And like, please don't have a staff rebellion on me. I'm trying to navigate a thorny situation. And he would not have felt that way a year ago. It's not his own recognizance. It's also just the extremity of this administration and the fact that Trump's completely fucking up on the job has historically lieu approval ratings. And as we say, every accusation is an admission.

And the White House putting out a press release saying, don't be a panicking, suggest that the panicans are inside 1600 Pennsylvania. Done it? Yeah, yeah. We should say, don't be a panicking. Join us here on the side of right and good. Super chill. No panic here.

Just listening to Tito Me Pregunta? Is that what it is? I can't. Titi mi Pregunta? I can't remember. I get it wrong every single time. But I don't speak Spanish and I still love the music. Someone tell all opera fans that everyone singing in Italian is anti-American.

Yeah. Like, was it Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra who sang Volada? Valare? They hated this country. They hated this country. They hated this country. Well, now we know. Do you think Megan Kelly decided that it was cool of her to say Latinos like that?

Yes. Because back when I think it was Hurricane Maria in Trump's first term, he went down to throw paper towels. Yeah. And he was talking about Puerto Rico. Do you remember this? No, it's a, it's a, it's a trope. It's a trope. When quite clearly the snowflakes that are melting at a rapid rate are on the right.

Well, I'm going to go listen to some bad bunny. I don't know about you, Brian, but I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. And off message is so good. This one in particular, I really, really, really loved. We built a whole rapid response around it. Thank you for joining me. Everybody, please subscribe to Brian's newsletter. And please subscribe to Runaway Country's YouTube channel because that's how we know that we have listeners.

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