The ideological excesses of the American Left are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Political commentator Hasan Piker recently appeared in a Mao jacket—a conspicuous tribute to the Chinese dictator whose regime was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people—before addressing college students. Around the same time, Melat Kiros, a Democratic Socialists of America candidate in Colorado, declared that America would stop “exploiting the world” only after the country elects enough immigrants from the Global South. That is more than a campaign slogan. It reflects an ideology that seeks to replace America’s founding principles with an entirely different worldview. The philosophy has a name: third-worldism. At its core is the belief that Western civilization is uniquely oppressive and that America can only redeem itself by surrendering cultural and political authority to those viewed as its historical victims. Variations of this worldview have gained traction on college campuses, within the DSA and among activist movements across the country. Conservatives are right to challenge those ideas. But confronting a radical Left does not require creating a radical Right. That distinction became especially important this week after social media personality Andrew Tate—who has openly described himself as a pimp and faces allegations of rape and human trafficking—was arrested. Rather than welcoming the legal process, portions of the political Right responded with silence or outright defense of Tate, a reaction that should concern anyone who claims to value conservative principles. The Right will not defeat left-wing transgression by embracing its own version of transgression. It wins only by demonstrating moral seriousness, defending institutions worth preserving, and offering a coherent alternative rooted in responsibility rather than outrage. Americans should never feel obligated to apologize for Western civilization or for the principles that built the United States. A nation that refuses to defend itself is not displaying generosity; it is surrendering its future. At the same time, conservatives should recognize that victory is never guaranteed. The Left’s ideological excesses may appear politically self-destructive, but the Right is fully capable of squandering its own advantages. That happens when conservatives become consumed by conspiracy theories, excuse indefensible behavior simply because it comes from perceived allies, or discard the very ideals they claim to defend. The reaction to the Tate case illustrates that danger. A law-abiding citizen should have no objection to alleged sex traffickers facing arrest and prosecution under the rule of law. Yet a growing faction on the Right appears deeply invested in portraying Andrew and Tristan Tate as political martyrs rather than men facing longstanding allegations that have followed them for years. That instinct reflects a broader problem. Some reactionary conservatives have come to distrust virtually every institution in Western society, mirroring the same anti-institutional impulse that characterizes much of the modern Left. If every court, every law enforcement agency and every legal proceeding is presumed corrupt whenever it involves someone on “our side,” then principled conservatism gives way to tribalism. That attitude was on display in comments from Paul Ingrassia, acting general counsel for the General Services Administration, who emphasized that the presumption of innocence is a cornerstone of the American legal system. On that point, he is correct. Every defendant deserves due process, and guilt is determined in a court of law—not by public opinion. But due process does not require the public to ignore a person’s own statements or conduct. When someone publicly boasts about behavior that closely resembles the conduct underlying criminal allegations, citizens are not obligated to suspend their judgment entirely while a legal case proceeds. The presumption of innocence governs criminal conviction, not private opinion. Ingrassia also argued that politically motivated prosecutions threaten democratic society. That concern is legitimate in the abstract, but it is difficult to apply convincingly to defendants who have faced allegations involving sexual abuse and human trafficking for years, well before their recent prominence in American political discourse. Republicans and conservatives should resist the temptation to rally around every controversial figure simply because the Left dislikes them. Political coalitions built around grievance rather than principle eventually lose sight of what they are supposed to conserve. The greatest threat to conservatism is not simply the rise of the DSA or the spread of third-worldist ideology. It is the willingness of some on the Right to abandon their own standards in the belief that defeating the Left requires embracing anyone who opposes it. A movement that trades its principles for expediency may win attention in the short term, but it will struggle to win lasting political victories. Conservatism cannot preserve American ideals by discarding them in pursuit of the next cultural battle. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Seven members of the Little Sisters of the Poor left their order’s motherhouse in La Tour Saint-Joseph, France, on Aug. 28, 1868, and headed for the coast. Three days later, they boarded the Napoleon III steamship and began a trip across the Atlantic.  Two weeks later, they arrived in New York.  Then, a few days after that, they established their first American nursing home in Brooklyn.  “On September 20 they welcomed their first old pensioner, a woman eighty-two years of age,” says a history of the order published in 1902.  One of the sisters then wrote back to the motherhouse about how well received they were in this American city.  “The public appear delighted to see that the Little Sisters of the Poor are willing to work for the poor; that they ask no endowment; that they desire to trust in Providence and in the generosity of the public,” she said. “Neither the population of New York nor of Brooklyn seem to be roused on seeing the habit of the Little Sisters; I have not even seen the shadow of a hostile demonstration.”  Now, 158 years later, the government of the state of New York is taking a much different approach to the Little Sisters of the Poor and three other orders of Catholic nuns who care for the elderly and the ill. It is seeking to limit their religious liberty.  In February, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the euphemistically titled “Medical Aid in Dying Act,” which legalized assisted suicide in the state and mandated various levels of cooperation from health care providers.  “Our state will always stand firm in safeguarding New Yorkers’ freedoms and right to bodily autonomy, which includes the right for the terminally ill to peacefully and comfortably end their lives with dignity and compassion,” Hochul said in a statement when she signed the law.  “New Yorkers deserve the choice to endure less suffering, not by shortening their lives, but by shortening their deaths—I firmly believe we made the right decision,” she said.  Hochul claimed this law had a viable religious exemption. Among the “guardrails” it included, her statement said, was “[a]llowing religiously-oriented home hospice providers to opt out of offering medical aid in dying” and providing that “no health care professional or religiously affiliated health facility would be forced to offer medical aid in dying.”  Bishop John Barres of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York, adamantly opposed this law. “Governor Hochul’s decision to sign into law the assisted suicide bill is a tragedy and a grave moral failure,” he wrote. “In explaining her decision, the governor invoked personal liberty—the right of the individual to make determinations about the direction of his/her life. Sadly, this law facilitates abuse and manipulation of the elderly, the disabled, and those who suffer from mental or emotional illnesses.”  “Our Catholic institutions cannot and will not participate in physician-assisted suicide,” he wrote. “We will continue to proclaim the love of God for every individual person, created in His image, that endures every circumstance, and we will never abandon the sick and suffering to death. We will care for them until the end of their natural lives.”  Last week, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed a lawsuit against New York on behalf of Bishop Barre and four orders of Catholic nuns, namely the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, and the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict.   This lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, argues that despite the New York law’s narrow religious exemption, it would still require these religious institutions to cooperate in the process of assisted suicide in a way that violates their religious freedom and freedom of speech.  “New York … forces religious providers to participate fully in the informing, counseling, and qualifying stages of assisted suicide,” says Becket’s complaint.  “[I]ndividual physicians are exempt only from the very last step in the process of assisting in a patient’s suicide,” it says. “The MAID Act states only that they are not ‘under any duty, by law or contract, to participate in the provision of medication to a patient under this article.'”  “This narrow exemption means physicians are required to participate in the rest of the elaborate process of informing patients about their ability to commit suicide using lethal drugs or qualifying a patient to obtain those drugs,” says the complaint.  When a doctor declines for religious reasons to actually administer life-ending drugs to a patient, the doctor is still required by this New York law to participate in transferring the patient to a different health care facility.  “If a physician is ‘unable or unwilling to participate in the provision of medication to a patient,’ then the physician ‘shall transfer or arrange for the transfer, upon request, of a copy of the patient’s relevant medical records to the new health care provider,'” says the Becket complaint.  The law imposes the same requirements on religious health care institutions. “New York likewise forces religious healthcare facilities to participate fully in the informing, counseling and qualifying stages of assisted suicide,” says the complaint.  “If a patient in an objecting facility requests lethal drugs to commit suicide, the objecting facility ‘shall’ transfer the patient ‘promptly to another health care facility that is reasonably accessible under the circumstances and willing to permit the prescribing, dispensing, ordering and self-administering’ of lethal suicide drugs,” says the complaint.  The Becket complaint cited the Catholic teaching on euthanasia and assisted suicide as explained in “Dignitas Infinita,” a declaration issued by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.  “[H]elping the suicidal person to take his or her own life,” said this declaration by the Catholic Church, “is an objective offense against the dignity of the person asking for it, even if one would be thereby fulfilling the person’s wish: ‘We must accompany people towards death, but not provoke death or facilitate any form of suicide.’”  Requiring Catholic nuns or health care institutions to in any way facilitate assisted suicide violates their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. New York’s law should be struck down.  COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal. 

Amid celebrations of our nation’s 250th birthday, Gallup serves up a sobering portrait of general dissatisfaction with our nation’s core institutions.  “Confidence in U.S. institutions Remains Near All-Time Low,” reports Gallup.   Of 14 core institutions—banks, big business, labor, the presidency, Congress, schools, health care, etc.—only 27% say they have “a great deal/quite a lot of confidence,” one point above the all-time low for this average.  In 1979, the percentage expressing “a great deal/quite a lot of confidence” in these 14 core institutions stood at 48%.  One explanation is the double-edged sword of the growth of government. More government means more inefficiency. At the same time, the more government control grows, the harder it is to change and reform. More government, more interest groups, more lobbying to keep the status quo.   Let’s consider education.   Per Gallup, only 27% say they have high confidence in our public schools. The highest it’s been since 1993 was 41%.  Any marketplace in which three-quarters of consumers are unhappy with the product they’re getting would see intense activity by suppliers to change what they are delivering. That’s when the marketplace is free.  But when the market is dominated by government and unions, the best interests of the consumer—in the case of education, parents and children—do not rule. Powerful interest groups that profit from the status quo use money and power to block change.  When only 27% are satisfied with our public schools, how can we possibly understand that only 28 states have opted in to the new Education Freedom $1,700 federal tax credit to contribute to scholarship funds to help parents privately educate their children?  The answer is 25 of the 28 states that have opted in are Republican states. Democrats are subservient to the hundreds of millions of political contributions from the teachers’ unions and their agenda to indoctrinate our kids with progressive values.  The results—pathetic test scores—speak for themselves.  But now we can see what happens when governors really care about children and families, put learning as their priority, and let the marketplace work to give parents freedom to choose what they see as best for their kids.   Under the leadership of Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas set up its Education Freedom Accounts program, establishing a platform through which parents have available scholarship funding to use to choose where to send their children to school.   Data is now coming in for the program, now in its second year.   Per a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, students participating in the Education Freedom Account program “outperformed nearly 60% of students nationwide in math and English on standardized assessments.”  Further, per the report, there are almost 50,000 students now using these accounts and 81% of K-12 parents support the program—up 20 points from 2023.  The Education Freedom Accounts provided $6,684-$7,627 to each student for educational expenses.  Blue New York state has not opted in to the Education Freedom Tax Credit.  Investor Jeff Yass noted in the Wall Street Journal that, despite New York City spending $42,000 per student in its public schools, scores in math and reading are dismal.   Yass suggests to New York City socialist mayor Mamdani that the $42,000 be split in half, giving a scholarship voucher worth $21,000 for each child and the other $21,000 into a savings account in the child’s name. After 13 years, when the child graduates high school, there would be $300,000 accumulated—assuming a paltry 2% annual interest rate—for college.   We celebrate America’s 250th birthday with joy, even though a lot is not what it should or could be.   Freedom is precious and magnificent because it leaves the door perpetually open for renewal.   One party, Democrats, thinks that freedom is the problem.  Republicans know that freedom is the answer.  Young new Republican leaders such as Sanders are shining examples of the great potential ahead. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal. 

Speaker Mike Johnson pulled off another unlikely feat getting a divided Republican conference to pass a bill providing Iran war funding and supporting state voter ID requirements. This time, he had a hand from Vice President JD Vance, who worked the phones behind the scenes to get skeptical conservative members on board, sources familiar with the matter tell the Daily Signal.  Overcoming numerous divisions within the conference, House Republicans on Wednesday successfully passed a framework for reconciliation 3.0, which included $95 billion in spending for the Iran war and parts of the SAVE America Act.  The Senate’s process of reconciliation, used for certain budget-related items, bypasses the filibuster, requiring only a simple majority vote for passage instead of the usual 60 votes. Several fiscal hawks in the House raised concerns that the bill did not include pay-fors for the massive spending on the Iran war.  While conservatives were enthusiastic about passing parts of the SAVE America Act, they feared the provisions would offer only optional funding to states that agree to require voter ID and ban mail-in ballots, not changes to blue-state election policies.  However, Vance called several members and reassured them the White House was serious about passing the full SAVE America Act, not a watered-down, optional version, the senior House staffer told the Daily Signal.  Vance also held a private meeting with members on July 15 to answer their questions about the bill.  According to Main Street Caucus Chair Mike Flood, R-Neb., White House Office of Legislative Counsel Director James Braid was responsible for helping the House understand the vision behind the reconciliation push. Braid spoke at the Main Street member meeting last Monday. “The White House did their job, our leadership did their job, and the caucuses did their job,” he said.  Originally, the reconciliation 3.0 bill was supposed to fund the Iran war and cut wasteful spending to pay for it. However, Braid explained that this couldn’t pass the Senate, so the direction of the bill needed to be adjusted.  “We had to write a bill that would be tough to turn down in the Senate, and if we made it complicated,” Flood said, “I have no doubt that it would just lay on the Senate floor and go nowhere.” Flood doesn’t think the bill could have passed without the White House’s involvement. He says the House “couldn’t have had a better week.” “I don’t think this would have gotten off the ground in the House without the White House’s involvement,” he said. “Every time they choose to provide leadership on something this big, it makes the process work a lot better, especially when you’ve got 220 different ideas about how to approach it.” Now, President Donald Trump is urging the Senate to quickly complete the job. “I am asking that the Senate adopt a Budget Resolution, which can pass with a simple Majority, before leaving for the August recess,” Trump said on Truth Social Friday. “We are ready to work side-by-side with the Senate to get this done for the American People!”

The last Democrat candidate to appeal to the white working-class voter was former President Bill Clinton. He needed every one of those voters in his 1992 and 1996 races. Yet he still failed to win 50% of the popular vote because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy.  Since then, the Democrat brand has lost the white working-class vote in nearly every presidential election. Yet this demographic still makes up 40% of the electorate and registers and votes at much higher rates than non-white groups.  Apparently, during the Biden-era influx of 10 million illegal aliens, Democrats really believed their own slogans about an “Emerging Democratic Majority” and how “Demography is destiny.” They therefore confidently abandoned most efforts to recruit white working-class voters.  In 2017, the then-neocon—and now leftist Zohran Mamdani supporter—Bill Kristol (who has advocated abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement altogether) spoke of the need to open the borders to replace the “lazy” American worker: “Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?”  Kristol then characterized this apparently dispensable group as “decadent, lazy, spoiled.”  And yet, until the novelty of Barack Obama’s candidacy and the demographic overconfidence it inspired, Democrats regularly lamented that, aside from the moderate Bill Clinton interlude, their steady leftward turn was becoming both irreversible and electorally costly.  Indeed, Obama aside, conventional Democrat wisdom apparently held that a presidential nominee, regardless of his politics, should have a Southern accent to project authenticity and appeal to working-class whites. Thus, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore all won the popular vote.  By contrast, Northern liberals, who lacked Obama’s singular advantage of being the first black president, only confirmed that Democrats had lost the support of working-class whites. Witness the defeats of Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and even Kamala Harris.  The charismatic Obama, as the first black president, and the wax-museum blue-collar construct of “good old Joe Biden from Scranton” are merely the exceptions that prove the rule.  Toxic Agendas These trends have only accelerated with the top-down takeover of the Democratic Party by hardcore leftists, socialists, and even the occasional communist.  Their agendas are boutique and have little appeal outside blue-city and blue-state echo chambers.  In the proverbial real world, voters have little patience with redefining what a woman is, biological men showering with teen girls, or males masquerading as female athletes stealing girls’ medals. Open borders, mass amnesties, defunding ICE and the police, and romanticizing illegal aliens are likewise 30-70 losing issues.  Working people do not understand the banning of natural gas stoves or the subsidizing of wind and solar power while phasing out fossil fuels. Nor do they like the idea of losers suddenly wishing to change the system through 70% mail-in voting, no-ID voting, packing the court, destroying the Electoral College, and ending the filibuster—much less socialist talk of abolishing the Senate and the presidency.  No-cash bail, revolving-door arrests and releases, early prison releases, abortion on demand until the moment of birth, and climate-change fanaticism are equally mystifying to the working class.  Democrat Oligarchs, Millionaires, and Billionaires  Working-class voters are not stupid, as left-wing elites assume. They know that the Left, for all its bombast about oligarchs, millionaires, and billionaires, is the party of precisely those groups—big-money interests from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the legal profession, the media, and Wall Street.  Lavish giving to the Left has been exemplified by MacKenzie Scott, Jeffrey Epstein, Sam Bankman-Fried, Melinda Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, Reid Hoffman, Neville Roy Singham, and, of course, George Soros in his many manifestations. It is no accident that none of these left-wing billionaires made their fortunes by building tangible products but rather through divorce settlements, financial speculation, or social media.  The rise of the new socialists has only added another layer of hypocrisy to the Left’s preexisting elitism and dependence on big money, creating what Andrew Stiles has characterized as “Trust-Fund Socialism.”  What the new hard-left redistributionists Ro Khanna, Mamdani, Hasan Piker, and Graham Platner share are privileged upbringings, subsidized lifestyles, and prolonged adolescence sustained by parental support—all of which make their supposedly populist appeals to “fairness” ring hollow.  When Mamdani talks of “calloused hands,” we know he knows little about physical labor as the privileged child of “settler colonialists” in Uganda. Indeed, although his Indian immigrant community makes up less than 1% of the population, it accounts for 65% of that African nation’s total tax revenue, and the Mamdani family enjoys a getaway estate on Lake Victoria.  Pajama Boys and DEI The new socialists do not employ any volatile, cranky Southern populist advisors like James Carville or seasoned campaign strategists like Mark Penn or Doug Schoen, who sought to win over the working class.  Instead, the new democratic socialists seem to gravitate to nepo-baby handlers and silver-spoon nerds who oddly seem to speak through their noses as would-be kingmakers—as the recent clips of the trust-funded pajama boys Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff attest.  But the Democrats’ unicorn hunt for the lost—and now almost mythical—white working-class male voter is stymied not only by the off-putting democratic socialist agenda but also by the top-down, talk-down elitism of its emissaries.  DEI plays a considerable role as well.  The Obama administration‘s creation of a new “oppressed” class comprising roughly 30% of the nation, set against a supposedly 70% white “oppressor” class, infuriated the white working class.  Suddenly, the old black-white racial binary of affirmative action disappeared, along with the idea of helping statistically poorer blacks. It was replaced by a new, much broader category of “non-white,” which had nothing to do with class.  Those classified as the victimized DEI 30% were often wealthy, privileged, and drawn from ethnic groups whose per capita incomes exceeded those of whites.  Whiteness on the Brain  Indeed, to normal people, the four-mansion-owning, private-jet-flying Obamas dropping in to lecture Americans about “equity” and “fairness,” or to complain about “raising the bar,” seemed absurd. It reaffirmed Obama’s infamous “clingers” remark. That slur foreshadowed a cascade of Democrat insults aimed at white working-class Trump voters, who were variously branded as irredeemables, deplorables, dregs, chumps, semi-fascists, and garbage.  Whether it was the prep-schooled prima donna Jasmine Crockett spouting off about “white men,” the lavishly living Mamdani talking about going after “whiter neighborhoods,” or the multimillionaires Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin on “The View” lecturing America on systemic racism, DEI became a Democratic IED. It seemed to detonate whenever a privileged “person of color” launched into the accustomed anti-white racial rant without “checking their own privilege” first.  The new batch of socialist candidates only confirms how deeply embedded this racially fueled hostility toward the white working class has become within the Democratic Party.  Darializa Avila Chevalier, the New York congressional nominee, blasted white women as “ugly colonizer women.”  Aber Kawas, a New York State Senate candidate, blamed 9/11 on “capitalism and racism and white supremacy.”  Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, shortly before the George Floyd riots, declared, “White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus [of racism]. But we spread it wherever we go.”  Melat Kiros warned that “we were never really going to be able to tackle white supremacy in the way that we need to without reparations.” So spoke the Colorado Democrat congressional candidate and Ethiopian immigrant to the United States, who ascended into elite circles as a corporate lawyer and now as a perpetual Ph.D. gadfly.  Working-Class Cutouts  So, here are the Democrats’ dilemmas:  1. White working-class voters without college degrees still comprise nearly 40% of all registered voters. In 2024, they backed President Donald Trump by a 66-34 margin. That reality means that any further Democrat hemorrhaging among Hispanic and black middle-class voters will be fatal—as it was in 2024.  2. The mainstream Democrat agenda alienates the white working class because it is tailored to affluent urban voters, with its emphasis on climate change, trans issues, illegal immigration, radically expansive abortion rights, anti-military sentiment, DEI, and defunding law enforcement.  3. The new socialists are most comfortable among wealthy leftist leaders who wish to take over the Democratic Party, talk down to the white working class, and pontificate about how awful the U.S. is.  So, since Democrats need the white working class to regain power, yet both loathe and mock it, what is the radical Left to do?  Presto: invent a white working-class leftist.  So, Democrats produced the unvetted madman Platner, complete with a Nazi tattoo, a violently misogynistic past, antisemitism, and a phony working-class oysterman persona.  Then came Talarico, the “next Beto O’Rourke,” supposedly destined to win a Texas Senate seat. The hard Left’s “good” evangelical Christian was likewise expected to win over the once-despised churchgoing Southern white voter.  Except Talarico is also inauthentic. His past quotes and social media posts portray a curiosity whose earlier record is apparently off-limits and who seems obsessed with justice for gays and trans people—but from whom?  Of course—from the allegedly illiberal, wicked white working class he now courts.  And does anyone remember the roly-poly, hyperactive “working man,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (who just pardoned a serial child rapist)? He was picked as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee not because he empowered Somali welfare fraud, disparaged the white working class, or embellished his resume, but because he could supposedly change the oil in his pickup and had a shotgun.  In 2024, we heard ad nauseam the efforts of his running mate, Kamala Harris—the privileged child of two PhDs, former companion of political fixer Willie Brown, and longtime Brentwood resident—to portray herself as “middle class.”  We were told the unverifiable tale that she had worked at McDonald’s (asking where or when was taboo) and owned a Glock semi-automatic pistol (when and where she bought it remained a mystery). The Berkeleyite was soon reborn as a longtime resident of the nearby but decidedly less upper-middle-class Oakland.  Looking ahead to 2028, will the socialists try to recast the upper-middle-class professional Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a working-class sister to the white working class? Or reboot Harris, this time perhaps with a Smith & Wesson revolver and a previous stint at Wendy’s?  There are even fewer plausible candidates for the Great Leftist Working-Class Hope. Pete Buttigieg—the homosexual former South Bend, Indiana, mayor, ex-Wall Street consultant, and failed presidential candidate—came across in the 2020 primaries and later as transportation secretary in the Biden administration as arrogant, sanctimonious, self-referential, and contrived.  But now he sports a beard and stops in at workingmen’s cafes, achieving precisely the opposite effect of what was intended.  Then there is Gavin Newsom, the nepo-baby populist, with his $9 million estate, boutique businesses, and lifelong subsidies from oil heir Gordon Getty.  Without a hair out of place, wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch vest while shoveling cinders after the latest trademark California wildfire, even he is trying to convince voters in Akron and Grand Rapids that Gavin is one with the working man as he declares capitalism a failure.  It’s the Message, Not the Medium The question is not ultimately one of class, but of authenticity.  Whatever the Left may say about Trump, it consistently attacks his “crass” tastes and appearance—his chrysophilia, love of mixed martial arts and professional wrestling, comb-over, orange complexion, and Queens accent—but not the authenticity of any of those preferences. Trump’s takeout meals from McDonald’s are not staged but a long-standing habit.  Billionaire Trump wears his customary blue suit, red tie, and wingtips in every setting, on every occasion, and in every kind of weather. He does not perch on straw bales wearing a John Deere cap, affect a regional accent à la Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, or don blue jeans and work boots to “bond” with farmers. He is as out of place walking an assembly line as he is genuinely appealing to those who work there.  Why? His agenda is tailored to working-class tastes. He doesn’t care about race. In our 2026 America, that opposition to tribalism takes the form of refusing to gratuitously pander to the DEI industry.  The final paradox?  The Left needs to win a lot more white working-class Trump voters. Yet, in their AstroTurf efforts, they ridicule Trump for his very tastes and appeal, which they try in vain to inauthentically emulate.  (C)2026 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.