It’s only a matter of time before Clavicular lands a position in the Trump cabinet. The early betting is that the “looksmaxxing” influencer will replace FBI Director Kash Patel, who’s come under increasing criticism in recent weeks, first for his boozing—he’s a “raging alcoholic,” one Democratic congressman claims—and, second, for supposed security lapses at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Should Patel feel threatened, he can always remind the President that the “bonesmashing” Clavicular—a.k.a. Braden Eric Peters, a 20-year-old from New Jersey who now owns a Florida nightclub—has his own substance abuse problems, having used meth to control his weight and, in mid-April, apparently overdosing during a livestream.
It probably won’t help Clav’s chances that he has called Vice President J.D. Vance “subhuman,” “obese,” and with a “recessed side profile.” Clav has also said that in a race between Vance and California governor Gavin Newsom, he’d vote for Newsom, whom he considers more attractive.
But you never know. While our macho man president’s determination to surround himself with winsome young women has been well publicized (google “Mar-a-Lago Face”), his interest in the looks of the men in his inner circle is only now getting the coverage it deserves. The administration’s concern with the appearance and presentation of the males “is a constant,” the New York Times reports, “with policy pronouncements and social media feeds suffused with displays of physical strength, tough-guy talk and masculine mojo.”
At the same time,
those traditional tenets of masculinity have been accompanied by flashes of vulnerability about how the men look and dress: Last fall, for instance, the president groused about a photo from Time magazine for a shot that he suggested made him look bald. “They disappeared my hair,” the president wrote on Truth Social, adding that the photo was “a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out.”
Trump, who does not hide his reliance on cosmetics, has called the UFC fighter Paolo Costa “a beautiful guy” who “could be a model.” “You’re too good looking to be a fighter,” the president told him. Trump has also shown more interest in the White House drapes than previous Oval Office occupants and now claims his “Big, Beautiful Ballroom” is needed for security reasons.
There is some belief that Trump keeps Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his job mainly because of his hair, while Vance and Secretary of State “Little Marco” Rubio and have apparently disappointed the President by their footwear choices. Trump disapproves of sneakers, apparently, and recently gave them both $145 pairs of shoes that he prefers. His opinion of Vance’s eyeliner choices is at this juncture a closely guarded secret.
The rumor that the administration is planning to form a new office in the White House—the National Insecurity Council—is a vicious rumor started by unattractive, low-IQ losers and other forms of human scum that hate America. But if so, Clav, who started using testosterone supplements at 14, would be the ideal chairman.
Democrats feel good about their chances in the 2026 midterms but not so good about 2028. They think they can take the House in November and maybe even flip the Senate. Even so, party insiders are worried about the upcoming presidential race.
Their recent successes at the polls have a number of them thinking they “are misreading what those wins actually signal,” Amie Parnes reports in the Hill. They might be “mistaking backlash against President Trump for support of their policies and rhetoric.”
What does it mean, really, to support a party’s “rhetoric”? What support for policies constitutes is not hard to grasp, but rhetoric is one of those airy abstractions that seems to make the writer sound savvy and sophisticated without actually saying much of anything.
So is “narrative,” and the Hill also tells us that Democrats, while winning elections, might be “losing the narrative.” Narrative, much like rhetoric, is an “earnest word,” probably introduced by anthropologists, the late Alexander Cockburn noted, and now encompasses everything said and done in a political campaign, soon becoming the story itself.
Now we analyze and argue about a campaign’s narrative—and its implications. There are counternarratives to a false narrative, Mark Leibovich writes in the New York Times, that feeds a metanarrative. “It is no longer enough for candidates to simply win or lose or be right or wrong,” Leibovich notes. “They must also control the narrative.”
That’s no doubt true these days, but troublesome nonetheless, in that it signals how much of our politics involves stories about stories and impressions above almost everything else.
Even so, there are useful nuggets in Parnes’s story, one of which confirms what some of us have long suspected. Despite their much-vaunted concern for the poor—that is, the underprivileged—they are actually cheered up when things get worse for the very people whose well-being they supposedly care so much about.
“Democrats quietly acknowledge that Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran has also helped their party,” she writes, “because it has driven up gas and food prices.”
Then there’s this: Billionaire John Morgan, a Florida ambulance chaser—excuse me, personal injury lawyer—who raises money for the Democrats says the party’s best strategy looking to 2028 is to let the Trump administration continue to flounder and reap the electoral benefits.
“When the opposition is catching themselves on fire in the public square, the best advice is not to get close to the fire, lest you catch yourself on fire,” he says, as quoted by the Hill. “Say nothing. Do nothing. Shut the f— up.”
Morgan also recommends “No more chaos. No more cruelty. More civility.” How “Shut the f— up” advances the cause of “more civility” is, of course, hard to figure.
We saw David Sedaris do a talk the other night, and it was amusing, as might be expected. He’s in the Epstein files, it turns out, though only in connection with being spotted in a bookstore in London. Even so, he says with evident satisfaction, people treat him differently now, “when I tell them about it.”
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