Kash Patel Is Talented In One Thing—Trump Sycophancy
Senior Editor Berny Belvedere explains in his debut video (taking the first step to internet stardom) in our early-May video roundup
Dear Readers:
In this week’s video roundup: what the recent Kash Patel saga reveals about the only real currency in Trumpworld; why New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s public grocery store plan may be a trap of his own making; and The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie makes a case for Congress reclaiming its place at the center of American political life.
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The FBI Director Goes on Fox News to Promise Action on Trump’s Stolen Election Narrative
On April 17, The Atlantic published a damning account of FBI Director Kash Patel. Two days later, he was on Fox News promising imminent arrests over the stolen 2020 election. He of course couldn’t name anyone or show anything. Even Maria Bartiromo—an election conspiracist hall of famer herself—had to call out his evasive answers, which tells you how completely detached from reality Patel is. This is the person Trump tasked with running the federal government’s top law enforcement agency.
In this clip, The UnPopulist Senior Editor Berny Belvedere makes the case that Patel’s Fox News appearance was pure job preservation—an audition for a president whose only real currency is sycophancy. The surest way to make himself indispensable was to promise concrete action on Trump’s white whale: his baseless insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him. This is how credit within Trumpworld works: you get it by indulging the president’s fantasies, not serving the public interest.
Mamdani’s Public Grocery Store Plan Could Unravel His Mayorship
On a recent episode of The UnPopulist Live, Belvedere was joined by Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism and author of the Infinite Scroll newsletter, and Tibita Kaneene, political director of the New York City New Liberals and contributor to The UnPopulist. The three discussed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first 100 days in office.
Among the mayor’s most talked-about proposals is a network of publicly owned grocery stores—a signature item on his agenda that he frames as a direct response to food insecurity and the rising cost of living in New York. In the following clip, Johnson explains why the plan is not just economically suspect and unlikely to work, but precisely the kind of policy that could seriously backfire on Mamdani.
We will be publishing the full conversation, which gets into the specifics of Mamdani’s agenda, very soon.
Bouie: Congress Must Reclaim Its Place at the Center of American Political Life
One of the most persistent features of the Trump era, and what will surely be Trump’s most enduring imprint on the office of the presidency, is the executive branch’s aggressive expansion into territory that the Constitution assigns to Congress.
Congress’s response? Self-abdication. Retreat. It has chosen to surrender its constitutional birthright.
In this clip from a recent Zooming In conversation between The UnPopulist Editor-in-Chief Shikha Dalmia and The New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, Bouie argues that what’s needed isn't just resistance to executive overreach but a wholesale shift in how Congress conceives of its own role. Rather than a body that perpetually reacts to what the executive branch does, Congress should become the first mover in American political life, forcing the other branches to work around it. That is what a constitutionally serious legislature would look like.
Listen to the full conversation here:
Where Will the GOP—and Where Should Democrats—Go After Trump: A Conversation with Jamelle Bouie
The last few weeks have been, to put it mildly, politically difficult for the president as his draconian deportation crackdown, the Iran war, soaring oil prices, and inflation crater his approval ratings. At this moment, it seems everyone except his core MAGA base has abandoned him, including staunch supporters in the influencer class.
And for readers interested in this theme, and where The UnPopulist agrees and disagrees with calls for an “Imperial Congress,” our Reconstruction Agenda project, spearheaded by Senior Editor Andy Craig, explores this in depth.
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Kash Patel serves as no better example of the ingraitiating and incredibly evolved vaudeville theatre that has a gridlock on America's democracy. Aside from his disturbing facial set--a monster movie mug whose eyes radiate a dark and glaring threat to all whom he glares upon--is that it reflects his mein as an unrepentant, hostile bully whose response to all and any criticism is drunken biker hostility, hardly the timbre and tone expected of the head of the FBI. Even the eventually compromised Hoover is no comparison. To quote a black in Out of Africa, "God plays with us."