Michael Brendan Dougherty

Love Ross, but I don't think this is quite right, as the problem seems to be more directly attributable to Trump. If we take Charlie Kirk as a proxy for the more polished New Right, he was trying to persuade the president to focus on kitchen-table economics, bringing down the cost of living for young people, and avoiding a war with Iran. According to exit polls, these were the most important reasons for the voter shift, plus corruption in the Mar-a-Lago orbit, which is distinct from the New Right milieu. Even on the smaller cultural issues like porn and drugs and gambling, the New Right and the president were increasingly on opposite sides. On policy, it's certainly fair to criticize protectionist tariffs, the DHS hype-reel videos, and the disastrous management of deportations, but for the latter, especially, the failure seems mostly related to Trump's bad cabinet picks, like Noem and Bovino, when he could have achieved significant out-migration without the heavy-handed militarized tactics in cities like Minneapolis, which led voters to the conclusion that "enforcement has gone too far." (Some of us were warning about this after the anti-ICE riots in the summer of 2025.) The problem for the New Right, and, one could say, its "failure," was that the president doesn't care about the right-wing intelligentsia—he is not ideological in that sense—and pursues his own vision in his own idiosyncratic way. The New Right was an opposition vehicle that Trump used for his campaign, paid back with culture-war wins in the first 100 days, and then mostly abandoned.

You can't outrun this number. This was a normie election decided by normie voters, and being 50 points underwater on the economy is a death sentence.

So I guess the burritos really did cost $20