We are twenty-eight days from the election and have entered outrage season. The Democratic strategy between now and Election Day is simple. They will take everything President Trump says, strip it of context, and use it to enrage as many voters as they can. The press very much wants Republicans to lose, and it is happy to help.
Consider 𝕏what the President said in Nebraska Monday night. He was talking about the war with Iran and the price of gas. He said higher prices were “a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.” Then he said Iran could take out a city, and he put it as “let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego.”
Within hours, the Democratic National Committee, 𝕏Gavin Newsom’s office, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and 𝕏other Democrats were telling the country that the President of the United States wanted Iran to nuke two American cities. Bass went on television and said the President should not “invite a foreign power to attack a city.” For good measure, she compared that to sending the National Guard into Los Angeles to deal with illegal aliens. 𝕏ABC News and the 𝕏Los Angeles Times ran with the Democrats’ version.
The President was inartful. He said “let them” when he meant “they could,” and some in the crowd seemed to take him literally. He was speaking off the cuff, and he does say hyperbolic things. People who do not want to give him the benefit of the doubt were never going to give it to him.
Democrats, however, have spent this entire campaign insisting that we put people in proper context. We are supposed to read James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed in context. The context for President Trump is that he has made this same argument over and over since the war began. In March, gas prices were climbing because Iran had blockaded the Strait of Hormuz. He wrote then that short-term oil prices were “a very small price to pay” for American and world safety. His point Monday night was the same point. High gas prices are what we pay to keep a regime that wants a nuclear weapon from ever being able to take out an American city. Los Angeles has a major port, and San Diego has a major military installation. Those are exactly the sorts of places such a regime would target.
You can disagree with the President’s argument. Plenty of people are paying more at the pump and do not like it. Disagreeing with the argument, though, is not the same as 𝕏pretending he made a different one.
The President could help himself here with some message discipline.
To their credit, some on the left actually defended the President, surprisingly. The Guardian is hardly friendly to the President, and it 𝕏corrected its headline. Daniel Dale, CNN’s fact checker, has built a career on ruthlessly and regularly skewering Donald Trump. He 𝕏said that Democrats were misrepresenting what the President said. Michael Scherer at The Atlantic 𝕏put the President’s comments in their proper context, even as progressive Democrat Chris Murphy joined the pile-on.
All we are going to get for the next twenty-eight days is constant outrage. Kudos to those in the press who are not sympathetic to or defenders of the President for actually being willing to put his remarks in their proper context. Pay attention to those who refuse to do that.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the Midwestern Führerbunker, the convergence of money and infiltration pulling the Right toward people who admire dictators and traffic in racial grievance, antisemitism, and assorted other awfulness. It is worth noting that, though a lot of sound and fury directed at me for that piece, no one really refuted a thing I said, but they sure did squeal very loudly about a single sentence noting the funding directed at the Vance organized American Moment. There was a complete meltdown over that single sentence, which read, “Haywood’s foundation is a recurring funder of American Moment, the staffing pipeline founded in 2021 with Vance’s support, which exists to place young conservatives in administration jobs.”
I got accused of doxxing people, targeting people not even named in the piece, and assorted other sins, all for accurately connecting the dots between the “Midwestern Führerbunker” and entities on the Right, including those entities being used to place young staff into offices in the White House and Capitol Hill. It’s probably not a coincidence that we have gotten a growing number of young Republicans in group chats with Nazi references, among other things.
The warning I made was that the Right keeps elevating, excusing, and defending nefarious people, and that the elevation would eventually come back to bite the Right. The Andrew and Tristan Tate saga is a symptom of the same disease, and portions of the Right have deployed the instruments of government on their behalf.
In February 2025, the Financial Times reported, citing multiple sources, that Trump administration officials pressed Romania to lift travel restrictions on the Tate brothers. Reportedly, Richard Grenell raised the matter with Romania’s foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference. Romania’s government denied being pressured and Grenell said he had no substantive conversation with the minister while volunteering that he supports the Tate brothers. Within days, Romanian prosecutors lifted the travel ban, and the brothers flew by private jet to Fort Lauderdale on February 27, 2025. The timing speaks for itself.
In November 2025, ProPublica reported that Paul Ingrassia, who had helped represent the Tate brothers before joining the administration, used his position as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security to tell senior DHS officials to return electronic devices that had been seized from the brothers when they arrived in the country. Ingrassia is one of the rare Republicans who could not make it through a Senate confirmation after his text messages came out in which he described himself as having a “Nazi streak.” The Claremont Institute’s American Mind publication, which the “Midwestern Führerbunker” is connected to, has published Ingrassia. From Politico:
Using an Italian slur for Black people, Ingrassia wrote in December 2023, per the text: “No moulignon holidays … From kwanza [sic] to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth,” then added: “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”
The next month, Ingrassia wrote of former Indian-American Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, according to the message: “Never trust a chinaman or Indian” and then added: “NEVER.” Ramaswamy did not respond to a request for comment.
According to ProPublica, Ingrassia made clear his request for the electronic devices was coming from the White House, and DHS officials worried that complying could interfere with a federal investigation. Ingrassia, through his lawyer, denies it. A former lawyer for accused traffickers allegedly continued helping his old clients while working for Donald Trump. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Gary Peters opened an inquiry and asked the DHS inspector general to investigate.
Notably, the Tate brothers’ own lawyer told ProPublica the devices were never returned and that he does not know what became of them. They simply disappeared. Weird. It’s just like no one pressured Romania to let the brothers go, Romania just did it.
None of this would have been possible without years of cultivation. Andrew Tate’s relationship with Donald Trump Jr. traces back to 2017, when Don Jr. liked a supportive tweet and soon had Andrew Tate over to Trump Tower. The brothers spent years building goodwill on the Right, which too often covets celebrity, even D-listers.
When the charges in Romania were already public, Tucker Carlson traveled there to interview Tate in July 2023, and Candace Owens did the same. Owens has gone further, publicly declaring that she does not believe Tate is a rapist. When Benny Johnson hosted Tate alongside Alina Habba in January 2025 and asked him nothing difficult, Owens framed the critics as enemies of free speech rather than people repulsed by the allegations. These are not obscure figures. They are among the most watched voices on the Right, and they chose to platform people like this and normalize them to their audiences — often portraying them as victims.
Last month, Romanian prosecutors indicted Andrew Tate for trafficking minors, for sex with a minor, and for money laundering, with his brother charged as complicit. Prosecutors say one victim was 15 years old. British prosecutors are seeking extradition on counts that include rape, sex trafficking, and offenses relating to indecent images of a child. This week, a newly filed extradition document laid out what British authorities say those counts involve: a video of Tate in bed with a girl believed to be 17, messages prosecutors say show he knew she was underage, and extreme pornography that includes bestiality. His lawyer, Joseph McBride, calls the material “prosecution slop” and says the device in question no longer exists. This is the record that Carlson, Owens, and Johnson decided was worth a sympathetic platform, and that Grenell and Ingrassia decided was worth involving themselves while working for the President of the United States.
Do not ignore the hypocrisy.
For two years, the Right has demanded accountability on Jeffrey Epstein, and rightly so. The accusation at the heart of the Epstein scandal is that powerful people protected a sexual predator, covered for him, and used their influence deny justice to actual victims. Strip the names off that description and you have a precise account of what elements of the Right have done for the Tate brothers. They protected them. They covered for them. They used government power on their behalf. The movement that says it wants every Epstein file released is building its own version of the thing it claims to abhor, in real time, in the open.
The cost will not be paid by Carlson, Owens, Johnson, Grenell, Ingrassia, or the other operatives who leaned on a foreign government or promoted the Tate brothers. It will be paid by the ordinary members of the Right who are told their movement stands for family, and who will one day have to answer for the men others on the Right chose to elevate. A movement reveals its character in whom it defends when defending them is costly. On this one, too many on the Right have revealed exactly who they are.
