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An Anthropic employee publicly resigning over fears that AI is spiraling out of control has turbocharged the discussion around regulation. Virtually every politician who matters rushed out a statement, and so did Chris Murphy. Our nation has been plunged into a high-stakes conversation about technology, which seems like a tall order for a country currently stumped by the question of whether Lucia from Grand Theft Auto VI has an ass that’s egregiously Latina, insufficiently Latina, or possibly Latina-but-in-a-settler-colonialist sort of way.

Few people understand AI; it’s not even clear that the people building AI have their heads around it, which is the problem. We’re all forming opinions based on claims made by folks who maybe sorta understand some of what they’re saying, but also maybe not. Whom should you trust? None of the main players inspire confidence.

In a sane world, the president would lead this conversation. But in our world, the president says little, and everyone accepts that because we know that the president has the mind of a child who shoved Pop-Its up his nose until one exploded. Trump is obsessed with his arch, ballroom, and The Case Of The Reflecting Pool Who-Done-It, and that’s for the best — those distractions are the equivalent of giving a toddler Play-Doh so that he shuts the fuck up while the grown-ups talk. The one person capable of spearheading an international effort to develop guidelines is instead hatching a Krusty the Clown-style plan to bribe voters with big cash prizes, which is probably still better than having him attempt Art Of The Deal magic that would surely have us toiling in robot aluminum mines by the end of the week.

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It’s easy to feel unmoored these days. Lies are everywhere, and wisdom is rare. The touchstones that used to perform quality control on our dialogue have been degraded, while opportunistic know-nothings abound. People yearn for a voice with knowledge and insight, but that voice is hard to find.

But what if I told you that a sage capable of matching wits with the great thinkers of any age walks among us? And what if I told you that that philosopher is whoever runs the Twitter account for America’s #1 flash-frozen chipped beef meat product? I speak of the Steak-Umm Twitter feed, which any reasonable observer will agree provides better commentary on life, culture, and the human condition than 99.999% of the chattering class.

For those who don’t know: Steak-umm is the brand name of an edible steak-like entity made by forming beef trimmings into a loaf and then slicing it thinly. They’re good for Philly cheesesteaks and loose meat sandwiches. And the Steak-umm account dutifully spreads the good word about their product to potential buyers from Cherry Hill to Bucks County.

But there’s only so much one can say about ingestible frozen meat sheets. So, the Steak-umm author — the anonymous scribe whose words will surely echo through the ages — eventually began weaving commentary about society, politics, and life into the Steak-umm feed. Like this:

The existence of free will has been debated since Democritus wrote about atomistic determinism in the 5th century B.C. Steak-umm effectively ended the millenia-old conversation with a picture of three pretty-tasty-looking stuffed peppers. There’s no way to describe which pepper you prefer1 without expressing free will — Steam-umm has laid a logical trap worthy of Socrates.

There’s also this enlightened bit of self-awareness:

Much societal dysfunction is caused by epistemic closure that distorts reality. The first step towards enlightenment is to recognize how our perception is altered by filtered information. Steak-umm is steering people towards greater awareness by giving us the tools we need to have a “fish-realizing-he’s-surrounded-by-water” moment.

Steak-umm also has a zen perspective on human wants and needs:

In The Four Noble Truths introduces the concept of “samudaya”, which is the idea that suffering is caused by craving and desire. This Steak-umm tweet gets to that same realization succinctly, thus leaving more time for making meals out of amalgamated beef. Frankly, Steak-umm used 125 characters to capture an idea that Buddha needed an entire book to get across, which does make the Buddha look like something of a verbose wanker.

The Steak-umm Twitter account is quite clearly to our age what Immanuel Kant was to his. And, yes, I’m grading on a curve: Kant was contemporaries with Burke, Rousseau, and Hume, while Steak-umm is contemporary with Catturd and whatever confused logical positivist runs the Fruit Stripe Gum account. It might be true that we’re so surrounded by dolts and hacks that any source of common sense — even if it’s the promotional tool of a company that sells sliced-and-frozen cow parts — seems like profound enlightenment.

Or maybe the Steak-umms account has achieved a higher plane of awareness! Maybe its most profound insights are still to come! I’d argue that any person with a curious mind should be awaiting the next utterance from the Steak-umm account like they’re awaiting Moses’ words upon his descent from Mount Sinai. The keys that unlock deep truths of the universe may arrive in between tweets about the best hoagie rolls for cheesesteaks and new Steak-umm Buffalo-style chicken egg rolls. And if not: Still check out those egg rolls — they look good! Wisdom these days may be as rare as affordable meat products that are ready-to-eat in mere minutes, but it exists for all those who have eyes to see.

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Socialism 2026 — which just wrapped up — was a conference that purported to be “a place for both seasoned radicals and new activists to sharpen analysis, hone strategy, and build community.” In practice, it was a factory producing thunderdunk-worthy social media clips at a rate that would impress Henry Ford. Breakout stars include the GLP-1s are “genociding” fat people guy, the shutting down an airport might lead to socialism lady, and the healing is “health fascism” lady. Even some leftists were uncomfortable with the level of crazy; panelist Hasan Piker showed some awareness that his remarks would end up on Fox News — he may be close to gaining sentience! On one hand, I get the frustration: Piker and other leftists don’t want to answer for every crazy thing said by anyone who calls themselves a socialist. On the other hand: See how it feels to have some lunatic show up and poison your brand by spouting a bunch of crazy bullshit? Really sucks, doesn’t it?

If socialists want to write off Socialism 2026 as a circle jerk by irrelevant losers, then that’s fine with me — we are in concordance on the irrelevant loser point. But let’s not lose sight of one of the conference’s most notable features: It was turbo-woke. I’m surprised that clips from the conference don’t have that wavy, heat-coming-off-a-desert-highway look too them — that’s how thick the wokeness was! Even if we write off the conference as a verbal wank-fest, its existence is a data point in the “who did the wokeness?” debate. Some leftists argue that “establishment” Democrats are the source of identity politics, that they’ve foisted race and identity issues onto leftists who wish to remain laser-focused on economics. But if that were true, then these clips would not exist. Socialism 2026 shows how socialism and wokeness are often mixed together in the Lefty Revolutionary Kool-Aid.

Consider this clip from the conference:

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***Hi! I initially accidentally uploaded a not-finished…

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In lefty circles, “Medicare for All” is often treated as a synonym for “universal health insurance”. But the phrases are different; M4A is one type of universal coverage, and conflating the two is like saying “Ferrari” when you mean “micropenis compensation device”. Contrary to what some people think, there is not one health insurance system used by every advanced country except the US; other countries achieve close-to-universal coverage1 through various combinations of public insurance, private insurance, regulation, and Dutchness.

About eight percent of Americans don’t have health insurance. Obamacare cut the number of uninsured almost in half, but the eight percent figure has held remarkably steady for several years. According to Twitter accounts with a red rose and a Palestinian flag next to their name — my #1 source of news — the existence of that eight percent represents a profound failure of the American system. And there’s some agreement here: I would like 100 percent of Americans to have health insurance. If I were in charge, I’d make big changes, and only most of them would involve getting other people to bankroll my shit. But even while acknowledging that it would be better if more American had health insurance, a closer look at the eight percent of uninsured Americans reveals that not every uninsured person is a destitute peasant being ground to dust by capitalism. In fact, you could argue that we kinda, sorta already have something close to universal coverage.

This chart from KFF tells us who the eight percent of insured Americans are:

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Leftist online hordes — the online equivalent of the gangs from A Clockwork Orange — have a ready-made answer to anyone expressing concern about Abdul El-Sayed campaigning with Hasan Piker: Liz Cheney. Kamala Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney in 2024. It was only two events — leftists make it sound like the pair rode coast-to-coast on a tandem bike — but still: Harris chose to campaign with the Republican congresswoman and daughter of the guy whom liberals used to delight in comparing to Darth Vader. And Harris’ choice does say something, but it says something completely different from what El-Sayed’s choice says.

My argument is not that Cheney is less-bad than Piker. I don’t play the “who was worse” game — I don’t get into abstract debates comparing the two great monsters of the 20th century: Adolf Hitler and Yoko Ono.1 That sort of discussion is inevitably about values, and debating values is pointless. It would be extra pointless to deploy that argument in an attempt to persuade hyper-online leftists, half of whom were toddlers during the Iraq War, and half of whom are Iranian bots whose IRGC commander ordered them to talk about Liz Cheney.

My argument is that campaigning with Cheney makes the opposite point about the candidate’s ideology than the point made by campaigning with Piker. Harris appearing with Cheney represented Cheney adopting Democratic views, not Harris adopting Republican views.

El-Sayed appeared with Piker a few times during the primary, including an Election Eve pool party that appeared to be the least-fun pool party to not include the phrase “we were unable to restore a pulse.” Primaries involve ideologically similar candidates, and candidates need ways to signal to voters what, precisely, they’re all about. El-Sayed campaigning with Piker — allegedly at El-Sayed’s request — signals some significant overlap between their beliefs. That signal is the entire point of the connection.

In contrast, the fact that Harris and Cheney have different beliefs is the whole reason they linked up. An endorsement from your own party means nothing — presidential candidates have a swarm of surrogates making them sound like a combination of Christ and Tom Brady, and that (rightfully) gets tuned out as partisan buzz. An endorsement from someone in the other party is different; it suggests that maybe the TV ads portraying one candidate as ten times worse than the fleas that carried the Black Death contain a grain of truth. In Cheney’s case, if even a Republican considers Trump beyond the pale, maybe some of what is being screeched about on MSNBC is true.

Consider the picture at the top of this article: Detail-oriented readers will detect a subtle, subliminal message that says “COUNTRY OVER PARTY”. I’ll draw on my years spent working in political messaging to suggest that the purpose of that message is to imply that voters should choose country over party. It tells Republicans who have qualms about Trump that it’s okay to vote for Harris. Ideological overlap is not only not implied; the absence of that overlap is being highlighted. The message is “Trump sucks and even Republicans agree”, not “In hindsight, the Iraq War ruled and we should do it again.”

Which means that campaigning with Cheney could make sense if you see politics as a process of achieving things that you believe will improve society. It makes no sense, though, if you see politics as a constant exercise in demonstrating your purity. To leftists, Liz Cheney is Haram, and by associating with her, Harris became unclean. But a better understanding of the dynamic indicates just how different their worldviews are.

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The idea of a 13-member Supreme Court is suddenly mainstream among Democrats. Pete Buttigieg is for it, and now so is Jim Clyburn, so the idea is getting support from sensible people, not just online freaks who also support voting rights for pigeons. I have long supported term limits for justices so that appointments become routine governance instead of a contest to see which side’s justices are most adept at cheating death. But I don’t support expanding the court, and here’s why.

The argument for expansion starts with the observation that the number of justices is not fixed by the Constitution. That’s true but, in my humble opinion, also boneheaded, and the founders buttressed my “sometimes the founders were idiots” theory by initially appointing six justices, which made ties possible. Eventually, our math wizard forebears realized that an odd number would be better, and the number of justices changed several times before settling at nine in 1869. That’s where it’s stayed, and not even FDR could change it, and that guy won a world war from a wheelchair.

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It was a controversial decision in my house: I decided to pay $100,000 a month to get early access to Trump’s Truth Social posts. My wife is not sold on the move…YET. When I raised the idea, she was concerned that this scheme to give early access to market-altering information was clearly a grift. “I see how this benefits Trump,” she said, “But it seems like an obvious con, and taking out a second mortgage to fund this is insane.” I agreed on the latter point, which is why I funded this venture by getting a second reverse mortgage, selling the rights to any future children to a syndicate called “The Golden Fang”, and starting an OnlyFans that provides live video of my wife while she’s sleeping (but let’s keep that between us!).

Less than a month later, look who’s laughing: Me, based on how smart this move will soon prove to be! The big payday hasn’t happened yet, but I can tell it’s right around the corner. I’m currently getting what you might call hors d'oeuvres whetting the appetite for a grand feast — for example, I recently got a push alert for this:

As market signals go, I’d call that one “subtle”. This is a small score, not the Lufthansa heist, though I did capitalize on the tip by buying 10,000 shares of GooseGrub, the leading manufacturer of goose food and home-goose-care products. My wife still fails to understand my angle: “You paid a hundred thousand dollars for that?!?!?”, she hysterically shrieked. But she doesn’t know what she’s talking about: I paid a hundred thousand dollars a month for that, and also for sneak peeks at market-shaping content that’s a million times better than a Bloomberg terminal. Like this video, shared by the president on Saturday:

Allow me to explain the market implications of this post to any novice investors out there: Lake Ontario is now Lake America — we know that because we just saw the president personally travel to the lake and replace the sign. That alters navigation rights — our supply lines will no longer be threatened by the Maple Menace! And that’s a boon to any business whose goods go through the Great Lakes, which is why I bought stock in Land O’ Lakes, the Great Lakes Brewing Company, and Lake & Skye bath products. I also bought another 20,000 shares in GooseGrub, because it’s currently trading at 2¢ a share, so that seemed like a good “buy low” opportunity.

The president’s Truth Social feed is a cornucopia of important business information. There’s this clip of him golfing. This picture that looks like the poster for a Batman movie starring Trump. And this major update on the Iran War:

Yep: Kharg Island has been destroyed. WHY IS THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA NOT REPORTING ON THIS?!?!?! That’s a HUGE development! And with Iranian oil down for the count, I immediately went all-in on Aramco, the Saudi state oil company. Or at least, I meant to go all-in on Aramco: In my haste, I accidentally bought 500,000 shares of Adamco, the nation’s #2 distributor of memorabilia relating to Adam Savage of Mythbusters. And, sadly, that left me too cash-poor to buy Aramco. Unrelated: Look at this steal that I found on Ebay!

My wife — somehow — still doesn’t share my vision. The stress is keeping her up at night, which I know because I’m getting angry comments from people who paid good money to watch her sleep. I remain confident that my investment will pay off — why would Trump offer this deal if not to benefit others? And name one time that anyone has ever regretting trusting Donald Trump. I’m smart, I’m savvy — you’re the one who doesn’t understand that this insider trading grift is for companies that do flash trades, not individuals. And the one key post that will prove me right is surely right around the corner.

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In this episode, I mention Nixon’s approval rating during Watergate. So here’s that:

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The Georgia Senate race is currently a contest to see who can best distance themselves from extremists. Republican candidate Mike Collins is on the back foot after The Washington Post reported that one of his former staffers has a history of racist online edgelordery that includes this photo:

Well that’s certainly bad! Though possibly not quite as bad as it could be, due to this subtle detail:

In Georgia, if you must post a picture of yourself in Klan robes — and I would argue that you don’t! — absolutely, positively do not do so with a Pepsi product in the background. Complete reputation-killer in that state.

Collins’ opponent Jon Ossoff was quick to draw a contrast — here’s Ossoff responding to a question about the report:

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I’ve been watching clips of Dolly Parton and asking myself: Why do I like this? Because I don’t like country music…contemporary country music, anyway. It hits my ear like bad ‘90s rock — most of it sounds like a Matchbox 20/Third Eye Blind supergroup fronted by Larry the Cable Guy. It also turns the pandering up to infinity: Every song is about beer, trucks, whiskey, jeans, and other things on the Taboo card for “southern stuff”. I makes me picture cigar-chomping music execs in Hollywood typing “What stuff do the shit-kicking bumpkins who buy our records like?” into a Professor Frink-style supercomputer.

But I like old country music. Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings — I’m a sucker for anything that’s just a guy, a guitar, and substance abuse problem. I’m also just old enough and just southern enough1 to remember the culture that produced Dolly Parton; I think one reason people loved Dolly so much is that she was an ambassador from a different time and place. I don’t know how to measure the cultural distance between where Dolly ended life and where she began — which was basically the cabin from The Jerk — but it seems like a good place to start might be the show Hee Haw.

Hee Haw was Laugh-In for rednecks — that’s how it was conceived by the Jewish, New York-born, NYU-educated TV executive who created the show. My dad watched Hee Haw, and since we only had one TV — top that hardship story, Dolly! — I watched it, too. The show was corny as hell, literally: The show was set in “Kornfield Kounty”, and in fact, “Gee Maw, this show sure is CORNY” (gestures to cornfield) is exactly the type of humor the show featured. They also had musical acts — always country — and that’s where we get the clip of Dolly singing “I Will Always Love You” that’s being shared right now. I was able to find that whole episode on YouTube, and I feel like the lead-in to Dolly’s set perfectly captures Hee Haw’s bizarre, Catskills-meets-Appalachians vibe.

Maybe I’m projecting, but I detect just the slightest amount of “What the fuck was that?” on Dolly’s face.

I’m not here to gaslight you into thinking that Hee Haw was a good show. I try to appreciate old things — I like to understand where they fit in the culture and how they influenced what came later — but that doesn’t lead to takes like “Hawaii Five-O was tropical Shakespeare”. But watching these clips did remind me of something that I think Hee Haw legitimately did well.

The show was unpretentious. They acknowledged that the jokes were bad — gags often ended with the joke-teller being dunked in water, whacked over the head with a purse, or smacked by a fence (pictured). You can accuse Hee Haw of a lot of things, but you can’t accuse it of taking itself too seriously. When we think of positive traits, we usually think of superlatives — things like exceptional bravery, intelligence, or skill. But one highly positive trait is simply not trying to place yourself above other people. And Hee Haw was never too cool for school.

Dolly Parton was unpretentious. That remained true even as she ascended from backwoods nobody to country star to national treasure. She often told self-deprecating stories — when listing Dolly’s influences, one should not overlook Joan Rivers. In an industry in which egos often collapse under their own weight like a dying star, Dolly stayed humble.

I find a lot of classic country music to be unpretentious. The song was often just a singer and a guitar, decidedly in the folk/blues genre. But I feel like modern country gets far more of its DNA from pop than from folk/blues. The hillbilly schtick also usually seems put-on, whereas the country stars of yesteryear really were redneck nobodies and they really did have substance abuse problems — I’ll believe all these songs about whiskey when somebody gets drunk and burns down a forest like Johnny Cash did. I’m sure there are country stars who don’t deserve my shade; I don’t know the genre well enough to know the exceptions. But so much of what I see seems forced, overproduced, and anything but simple.

I don’t know what caused this change; I’m too busy trying to trace how technological changes altered political currents to know why modern music is how it is. And maybe I’m experiencing negative recency bias — maybe Lainey Wilson would seem authentic to me if I discovered her in the year 2100. But it does seem like pop has swallowed another genre — all music appears to be converging towards one over-produced, mid-tempo singularity. Which does have the effect of making the good-but-simple stuff stand out, which will probably help Dolly’s songs live on even now that she’s gone.

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If this was 1990 — when TV news was four networks and most cities had a center-center-left newspaper and a center-right-center one — I might write a piece called “Media Gatekeepers Have Too Much Power”. There would have been many correct points in that piece. It was weird to have a few powerful people at a handful of gigantic news outlets shaping our national dialogue. Even a small amount of bias from powerful figures like Dan Rather or Arthur Sulzberger had huge impacts. Nobody elected these people, commerce was inevitably part of every decision they made, and it was hard to even know what ideological alternatives existed because the available viewpoints were basically this:

If I had written that article in 1990, where would I have published it? The internet back then was a guy at Stanford exchanging Uhura-based erotic fiction with a guy from MIT. Cable TV was Green Acres reruns and kids getting slimed for minor grammatical infractions. I would have had to type the article in WordStar, print it out on a goddamned dot matrix printer, and then stand in front of Ace Hardware passing out copies. People would have thought “What a nut”, and they’d be right: A guy distributing a self-published article in front of a hardware store is basically handing out a flier that says “BREAKING: I Am Going Through Some Stuff”.

Today is very different from 1990. Independent sources have eclipsed legacy media. The AP recently ran an article about how podcasts, social media accounts, and digital news sites have boosted left-wing “anti-establishment” candidates like Zohran Mamdani, Graham Platner, and Abdul El-Sayed. The article tracks how a media ecosystem that started with The Young Turks and Chapo Trap House became Breaking Points, More Perfect Union, Drop Site News, and Hasan Piker. This is, of course, the mirror image of what happened on the right, where the split with mainstream media started in the ‘90s and now exists in the form of Breitbart, Newsmax, Tucker Carlson, and others. If you want hard data about how our news comes less from capital-“e” Establishment figures and more from capital-“r”-and-”j” Random Jagweeds, here you go. But did you really need the data? We all know that many people — especially young people — get their news from some shit called Hollow Point Truth with Déjändricôn Orgasmica, which airs exclusively on an app that you’ve never heard of.

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I rarely see retro trends coming. I was blindsided by the ‘90s swing revival, and I had no idea that cool kids in the 2010s would sport facial hair that made them look like the shortstop for the 1881 Akron Stillbirths. My nephew wanted a film camera for Christmas, there’s a market for cassette tapes — what’s old sometimes becomes new again, which means there’s a non-zero chance that my retirement could be funded by my collection of California Raisins figurines.

Surely the most surprising retro trend is America’s sudden turn against technology. Recently, the dialogue around data centers has come to include skepticism of electricity, which happens to be a technology older than matches. Even so, journalists and politicians are indulging concerns about the effects of transmission lines — here’s a clip of an aspiring congressman talking to a lady who doesn’t want a power line buried on her property.

I don’t want to dunk too hard on this lady, partly because I’m 60 percent sure she’s my great aunt. But a reasonable response to her “radiation” fears would be to pick up the coffee pot on the table and say “What do you think powers this thing — fucking elves?” But instead of doing that, once-and-possibly-future-congressman Tom Perriello nodded like a bobblehead doll on a cabbie’s dashboard and then produced this video, which — of course — required God-knows-how-many data centers. This video makes me wonder what fearmongering can’t be crammed into the little-guy-being-trampled-by-the-big-guy narrative. Could you make people afraid of bluebirds? Start a movement accusing grapefruits of witchcraft? Convince people that they’re about to be attacked by their socks? I feel like literally anything is possible once “electrical radiation killed my horse” is on the table.

Fear of electricity ignores a few hundred years of human experience, but other people seem determined to ignore a few thousand years. Yesterday, author Paul Vigna argued in The New York Times that America might solve its debt problem by following the lead of Enmetena, a Mesopotamian king from 2400 B.C., who issued an edict that cancelled virtually all debt. Which is a hell of an argument: The Mesopotamians did it, so, logically, it must be good! Vigna is boldly moving the Overton window by floating the idea of rebooting ancient Mesopotamian policies, which, I’ll point out, included human sacrifice, slavery, arranged marriage, witch dunking, child abandonment, and the practice of trying to divine the future by examining the organs of dissected animals. But maybe defaulting on their debt was their one good idea!1 Though, honestly: I think the practice of looking at your debt and thinking “I’m not paying that shit” is more than 4,400 years old.

Modernity is being rejected all around us. “RETVRN” memes romanticize a past that never existed. Much of the population has turned against vaccines. The president pursues a trade policy modeled on the McKinley administration. People are nostalgic about the past, angry about the present, and utterly terrified of the future.

And yet few join the group that acts on the principles of the anti-modernist movement. I speak, of course, of God’s favorite road hazard: The Amish. The Amish don’t use any of the technology associated with data centers or evil electricity. Many don’t believe in lending money with interest. They’re thoroughly untroubled by data theft, energy prices, or those dastardly, scheming “tech bros”. They’re completely unbothered by any of the sources of this anti-tech, populist moment.

And I hope people realize: You can just go be Amish. Any of us could do it today — there is literally nothing stopping anyone from giving up the rat race for a wholesome life of butter churning and becoming physically aroused by especially-curvy butternut squash. Many things about modern life are daunting, AI does pose risks along with the promise, and anyone who wants the noisiest, most water-consuming building in their life to be a barn is free to cease living with “the English” and reboot.

But nobody does that. People jaw about the dangers posed by the modern world but virtually never remove themselves from those dangers. And that suggests that perhaps some selfish insincerity is in the mix. We all make the choice to live in modernity every day, and we should maintain the toolkit that allows us to encourage the positive and minimize the negative, namely: Rationality, empiricism, and processes that balance competing interests. We can’t indulge crackpot ideas or build processes with so many veto points that progress becomes impossible. That’s not compatible with modernity; if we go down that road, we’ll end up Amish whether that’s what we were going for or not. And anyone can choose to be Amish, but they shouldn’t be able to choose it for the rest of us.

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My guess is that President Trump is not sleeping with Natalie Harp, his suddenly-high-profile aide. Trump fans probably won’t like my logic, though: I doubt that Trump has sexual function. He’s 80, and likely past the point at which nature says “Ewww — enough.” That’s a reasonable assumption given that Trump treats his body like a U-Haul van — he fuels it with cheap garbage and there’s zero long-term upkeep — and if he is able to achieve an erection through some combination of caffeine, rhino horn, and prayers to Satan, it’s probably so infrequent that moths fly out at climax.

But the nation is once again pondering the state of Trump’s wang due to speculation about what — precisely — is in the portfolio of his aide, Natalie Harp. The speculation is largely due to a surprise name-check in a speech given by Georgia Senate candidate Jon Ossoff. Here it is:

“Travel with Natalie”…what does that mean? Is that some kind of “hiking the Appalachian Trail”-type metaphor? Many conservatives think that it is, and they’re furious: Scott Jennings called the line “despicable”, and Laura Ingraham called it “a bizarre personal attack”. Republicans seems to sense that this could be damaging for Trump, and I think they’re right, though not because of sex. Like I said: I don’t think that Trump and Harp are having sex. I don’t even know if Jon Ossoff thinks they’re having sex — when asked why he brought up Harp’s name, Ossoff gave an answer that wasn’t about sex. But I think the “travel with Natalie” line works as a political attack even if there’s less sex than a Mormons-only Magic: The Gathering tournament. In fact, I think it works better.

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