Bulwark Takes - Is James Fishback the Weirdest GOP Candidate Yet?

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Sam Stein and Will Sommer take on the bizarre rise of James Fishback—the 30-year-old ex–hedge fund analyst who inflated his résumé, ran sock-puppet schemes, and is now throwing bombs in Florida���s GOP primary against Trump’s pick, Byron Donalds. Be sure to read Will's newsletter on Fishback: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/james-fishback-ambitious-duplicitous-semi-fictitious-florida-governor-candidate

Hey, everybody, it's me Sam Stein, managing out with the Bullwark. And I'm here with Will Summer, and we're going to be talking about the newest entrant into the Florida Republican primary for governor, a character, a man named James Fishback, who is roiling the right, in part because I don't want to say he's like a Charlton. He's got some credentials, but like his text messages, which you uncovered from a separate lawsuit, make him seem a little bit quirky, to put it mildly. Why don't you explain to us why this guy? this guy is and why he's running for office. Yeah, so James Fishback is a 30-year-old. A financier seems a little elevated investor. That doesn't seem right.

Financier's not right. He was like a mid-level guy at a, I don't know, what was it, a firm, financial firm? What was it? At a hedge fund, yeah. He was an analyst, which I think is a pretty low level. He's an analyst. That's a good way to put it. But he's kind of fashioned himself, so he's 30.

He's kind of this, you know, I say in the piece, he's kind of like a pip squeaky energy. He's kind of like a little trapbacker guy. And basically, he's used his experience in the financial industry to be, to fashion him. He's a very big, he was a big supporter of Doge. He's on Fox business all the time. He's a real like, he's like Donald Trump's got to clean out the Federal Reserve. And so this is kind of how he built his platform. And now he's running against Byron Donald's, who is Trump's pick to be the next governor of Florida. And Trump people are flipping out about it because James Fishback, he has no, no political experience. He has, I think, very little credibility with voters. but he's willing to go absolutely nuclear constantly on Byron Donald. And I think that is going to present at least an irritant to them. I think it's worth like sort of explaining like because I don't think, normal people would say, okay, this guy's 30 years old and he was an analyst out of hedge fund. Like how did he even get into the stratosphere where he would even consider the possibility of running for governor?

Like what the fuck? It's like an incredible amount of ego to do something like that. And what is his constituency? And I still don't quite know. But how did he get to this point? I mean, he was involved, I guess, in Doge and he's hyperactive online. But so are a lot of people. Like, what is the basis for this run?

Well, he's got a healthy ego, I would say, and in a very strong view of himself. I mean, he's a guy who basically, you know, I saw someone he released his announcement video. I saw someone on X describe it as maga slop. I mean, he's jumping on to like every kind of, like in kind of a Trumpian way. He's jumping on a lot of these policy issues that I think are. gaining currency on the right. Like, he's extremely against H-1B visas to have foreigners work in America. He wants to abolish property taxes, which is obviously a Ron DeSantis thing, who he's kind of trying to align himself with. He's against AI data centers. So he's getting on these kind of

popular issues, I think particularly in Florida. He's really against outsiders moving to Florida. He kind of made kind of a smash when he was just like... Isn't that like Florida's half of Florida's economy is snowbirds? It is. But he's saying, you know, if so Ron, ruins new york i don't want to hear about it stay out of florida um semaphore profiled him and he interviewed a woman or was meeting with a woman who had an idea uh that there should be a lottery to allow access to florida for for people from outside this day like you shouldn't just be able to move there and so that's he's kind of he's just jumping on a lot of these sort of hot button issues and that's how he how he's built a lot of his profile again i doesn't make for a profile i will just say

he's also like blatantly racist towards Donald's right like he Donald's who is black he's called him DEI Donald's and he has said repeatedly that Donald's is a quote slave to his donors and like that's not even subtle that's that's bad stuff but like the the coup de grace is this lawsuit that he's involved in so I'll just said I want to go through some of the allegations but from your piece I just want to be clear. He served at a firm called Greenlight Capital. He was a research analyst, but he started going around calling

himself head of macro. I guess he was called that once, right? Or something like that? Yeah, so this emerged in this lawsuit that became like a big kind of meme in the financial community. The idea, basically he was working as a low-level research analyst at this hedge fund run by this billionaire who's like a David

Einhard who's well-known in Wall street. And he was, this junior employee. And, you know, in David Einhorn's telling, James slept at his job and was just like, he was obsessed with creating an anti-woke alternative to high school debate. And so, like, he was always going on Fox News to talk about it. He was running this kind of separate nonprofit about debate. And they would just be saying, like, you don't seem to be actually working here per se? Like, you know, and he would say, like, I'm going to get it together. And they'd say, okay, all right, you have five months to work on this one project. And then the presentation would come, and then it would look like he wrote it, like, right before the

door is open, and he had to do the powerhouse. And so, so ultimately, basically, they scheduled the meeting with him to fire him. And then he said, actually, I'm quitting. So I'm quitting to start my own edge fund. And that's why they sued him, right? Because he can't, he was like breaking a non-compete and he was going out there misrepresenting the role he had played at the firm and all that stuff. Yeah, he was saying this, this very elevated head of macro, which is essentially like, head of like monitoring interest rates and kind of doing trades around that. And they said, no, you're kind of this, the dude who didn't do very well at this junior role here. And he said, well, I have this one email where they described me as a head of macro to get me on

the list for a conference. And then they said, well, yeah, that's because you wanted to go and you were kind of like this nobody. So we decided to inflate your title this one time to get you in the door. And so he keeps, there's like a lot of schemes that go along with this. He basically, he wants. Well, I want to get into those in a second because it's so funny. But I just, I love the idea of just calling yourself head of macro? It's so funny. Is that even a, is that even a job title? Who knows? But now it's like something, not at the firm, no, but maybe in real life, I can, I can adopt that. All right. So in the course of this lawsuit and then the countersuits, all these texts become public. And they show that this man, James Fishback, is like, the ultimate

schemer. Like, along the lines are like, not quite Jack Berkman-ish, and people would know if they know. But, like, he's kind of close, right? Like, he's doing stuff that is very shady. A lot of, like, plans to sort of, you know, present himself in the public as someone he's not. What were some of your favorite discoveries from these texts? Yeah. And, you know, I would just say James went to Georgetown, as did I. James dropped out a couple years after I graduated. Well, I guess he's also unique to me because, like, I feel like I know a lot of people like this. These kind of, like, real kind of like fake it so you make a kind of Georgetown character. That said, basically, basically what he needed was

he knew Greenlight was probably going to sue him over calling himself head of macro as he was raising money for his own hedge fund. So then he says, well, I need them to tell, I need an investor to do a reference check on me and have them deny the head of macro thing so that I can sue for defamation.

So he sends all these texts. He has this college student, this conservative college student helping him, who's kind of like his crony. And he's saying, you know, you need to get, you know, email this Wall Street Journal reporter and get them to write about how they're doing me wrong and the guy would say okay i did it and he would be like oh my god this james fishback oh my god i love you no ditty i guess it's like no homo now um or he would say like we will destroy this man i mean all these things that like you do not want to come out

in a lawsuit um he got one investor to finally agree to do this reference check and then this is crazy this is james and his dad and he's the dad would be like that investor is to goat and then james would say like base number one home boys stuff like that and then he was also trying to sort of inflate his social to his dad to his dad well and then his dad would say oh he's the goat I mean hold on all on

it's too good I don't want I want to read the Barry Rice thing so I just don't want you to step on it because it's too funny I want to read it straight this is just an example of some of the hilarious bullshit this guy was pulling off this is just straight from Will's piece and one of the more

embarrassing exchanges entered into the record. Fishback urged the college student to send an anonymous email to Barry Weiss's free press, praising an article that Fishback had written for the site. The article was fairly unoriginal and reductive. In it, Fishback made the case to scrap debate moderators and have presidential campaigns go at it like Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in their 1858 Senate race. Wow.

Deep thoughts. Perhaps for that reason, Fishback ended up writing the anonymous laudatory email praising his column himself and urge the free press to have Fischbeck write a follow-up article. And so you can see kind of throughout he does these like little maneuvers to sort of inflate his platform, make himself look more popular than he is. And I think that's relevant as he enters this gubernatorial race where he's constantly, I would say, quote-tweeting accounts that appear to have been relatively recently created saying, we love James Fishback. This guy's amazing.

And so, you know, he tells the college student to buy likes. on Twitter. It's also, it's just so funny having this, like, seemingly very hapless college student roped into his schemes. Oh, that was the saddest part where he, like, made him, like, he's like, spend money on this. He's like, what? What do you want him to spend money on?

You know, he's engaged in these, like, Twitter battles with David Einhorn, and he's, like, you know, use one of the sock puppet accounts to tweet this. And then five minutes later, he'd be like, this needs to happen now. And the college student would be to say, I'm sorry, I'm in class. Or, you know, he's like, you got to respond to this guy. He'd say, sir, this man has an anime profile. I just don't know if it's worth it. I don't think that's a serious person.

Do we know how he found this college student and who the college student is? Yeah, it's a guy named Alex Mungia, who I believe is still with the new hedge fund. He was a blogger for Lone Conservative, which was like sort of a conservative college blog back in the day. So I suspect they kind of met in Florida young Republican circles. And he's still with fishback. he wasn't he doesn't realize that he's been abused well i well you know and to your point i mean there's a point where he's trying to get his dad i mean again i mean these are like lawsuit-worthy scheme and so he's saying okay well you know we're posing as this investor to the hedge fund

um but obviously you're a kid so you can't do the phone call or to this journalist um and so now get your dad to do it and you say like my dad i don't think he wanted just to be clear he wanted his college student stooge to call his dad to get his dad involved in this ridiculous escapade of this kid's probably like my dad doesn't know this shit my dad doesn't know what i'm up to hey dad i do you tell this wall street journal reporter you're a hedge fund investor can you imagine you having a rope in your father into that my dad would be like what the fuck are you talking about please stop dealing with this james fishback character um all right what's the chances he ends up as governor i think pretty low i mean polymarket i think

had it at like 10%. I mean, I think the issue is going to be that like he's just going to really I mean, and I should say he's trying to align himself with DeSantis. DeSanta's world wants nothing to do with him as far as I can tell they have the, you know, I think the lieutenant governor they want to run. And so there's the sense that I think though that like because of his rhetoric and he could

just make the race really ugly. I mean this whole, he sent me this email. I think one of his first times he called Byron Donald's a slave to his donors was in an email to me. And I was sort of like, God, do you want to try that one again? You know, do you want to run that back? I guess not. It's like, no, I like this one. This is precisely the point.

So, and, you know, the other thing I would briefly add here is he created an ETF, which, you know, folks are like kind of mutual funds that was specifically the anti-H-1B ETF. And then it got delisted by the company that made, that packaged it. And he said, this is anti-conservative bias, all this stuff. And the company said, oh, no, we just saw all the text messages that. you did that you know emerged in this lawsuit we don't want to be in business with you so now it it's like he's going to owe david einhorn something like two million dollars yeah i saw that uh is he

like independently wealthy or something where is he going to get the money no i i i maybe well you know he might live in the governor's mansion so you could save money on rent that way or there you go sell off disneyland i don't it's just i mean there is some as comedic as this is like there is like a larger point to it which is that in in the modern republican political movement It's not maybe, you know, enough of a constituency, but there is a constituency for this type of crazy, provocative, you know, jump on every trend behavior. And if it gets a 10% chance to win the governorship, I mean, that's not nothing, folks. Like, that's wild stuff. I guess that's the larger takeaway is sort of the modern Republican Party is just so open to hucksters.

And, like, I don't think this guy's going to win, but that he could get to the point where Byron Donald is having to address him during speeches saying, you know, Fishback, you know, he's... Yeah, Randy Fine had to address him, right? I mean, so Congressman Randy Fine, who himself is a real character, like, had to go after the guy. And the White House has gone after the guy, right? Yeah, I mean, yeah, we had a deputy chief of staff saying, you know, this guy's lying and, you know, he doesn't have Trump's endorsement. Like, would there be a parallel on the left?

Like, who would be the corollary here? I can't even think of someone like this. But it's like, it just doesn't even make sense. Like, it's, it doesn't compete to me. But that being said, if you're a college student who's been, you know, you know hired by james fishback to do some crazy shit and you want to you know send it to us and let us know what it's like we're open hearing from you right absolutely you know he is a lot of people are bringing him up at biron donald's events on colleges i wonder is this truly is this truly

an organic surge or is there something else oh he's going to be he's going to throw so much shit against the wall this is going to be the most mud slingy campaign possible it's going to be crazy um yeah but in all seriousness if you've dealt with james fishback and you have some text and you want to share them with Will, drop a note to Will. We would love to see what you got. I'm here. I'm here. I want it all. I love this just gave me an appetite for James Fishback Tax.

Okay, great. Thank you. Hey, for those who are watching, subscribe to the feed. We get great conversations like this. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.