Jeffrey Epstein, Trumpcare, And The Influencer Problem

What if the people Democrats want to reach aren't terribly interested in policy per se?

(Photo by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)

We should cop to a tension—a pretty severe one—between a) the Democratic Party’s desire to contest elections on safe ground like health-care policy and b) the new consensus that reaching marginal voters will require engaging with the online influencers and pop-culture figures those voters admire.

Generating mass interest in policy has always been a challenge. Even a few years back, when political content was a backwater for nerds and information about elections and candidates flowed outward from a relatively small number of sources, Democrats struggled to reach voters with policy appeals.

But there was still a broad consensus across politics that issues and solutions helped shape campaign narratives. Democrats would talk about the number of Americans without health insurance, and the number of children living in poverty, and the ways the tax code favored the rich, and it would communicate something meaningful: we’re empathetic, we’re fair. Immigration still drew ugly nativism out of the woodwork, but from a fringe that most Republican leaders found embarrassing. The policy discourse turned on technical questions about border security and legalization. Democrats liked to talk about creating a pathway to citizenship for most immigrants, in no small part because it portrayed them in flattering light: humane, solutions oriented.

That’s all changed now.

Policy is obviously still important—it is the “why” of liberal politics. But do these kinds of appeals—here’s what my policies say about me—make much sense in a world where the decisive voter never has to grapple with politics on those terms? Where he or she gets information from people who don’t generally care or talk about policy?

The tension becomes pretty obvious when you think back on the past months. How many times have you heard Democrats brush off controversies of all kinds as “distractions” from health care? How many of those same Democrats fret openly about their party’s “Joe Rogan problem,” or their inability to connect with young voters who get their information from TikTok celebrities and other influencers? If Democrats continue to insist that everything is a distraction from policy, how will they ever access these audiences?

Politicos love admonishing each other to “meet people where they are,” but what if “where they are” is in the intersection of a Pop-Wellness/Epstein Files Venn diagram? Is it incumbent on Democrats to find those people and recount for them all the projected harms of Trumpcare? Or is it to key into their interests, fads, and reflexive anti-establishmentarianism? To find small areas of overlap, or glom on to their existing obsessions?

WORKING THE JEFF

The answer is probably “both.”

But if it’s both, it’ll by definition entail a major overhaul of messaging practices. Democrats will have to spend less time practicing pivots to health-care talking points and more time gaining fluency in digital pop culture.

It’s a wild thing to ponder, but it took until this week for Democrats to realize that the bugbear of “the Epstein files” wasn’t just dumb right-wing nonsense, but something tons of people (even people who aren’t particularly committed to Donald Trump) actually care about.

Better late than never: Here’s a letter from Jamie Raskin and other House Judiciary Committee Democrats to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding she “publicly release all documents in the Epstein files that mention or reference Donald Trump.”

Here’s the DNC with a daily reminder that Trump and his loyalists have buried the Epstein files.

Here’s Rebecca Cooke, the Democrat running to unseat Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI), tying her opponent to the Epstein-Trump coverup.

But how many high-profile Dems could sit with these dudes and talk about the Epstein scandal in depth?

Do many of them take genuine interest in getting an answer to that question: Are Trump’s minions covering it up, or did they just exploit the sexual abuse of children to help get their guy elected?

Or do they mostly think the whole issue is sordid and beneath them…

To square their objectives, Democrats will have to stop wishing away distractions from their best issues, and start asking whether and how those issues slot into existing online fixations.

WHEN THEY GO JOE…

Consider Rogan’s recent denunciations of Trump’s immigration raids.

It’s a rare “man-o-sphere” invocation of what, at bottom, is a policy question. But read the actual text of his critique and certain longer-running concerns burst forth.

A few weeks ago, Rogan said, “if they’re running and they say, we’re going to go to Home Depot and we’re going to arrest all of the people at Home Depot, we’re going to construction sites and we’re just going to, like, tackle people at construction sites, I don’t think anybody would have signed up for that.”

More recently, he had this exchange with software CEO Amjad Masad.

ROGAN: there's two things that are insane. One is the targeting of migrant workers. Not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers. Just construction workers. Showing up in construction sites, raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?

MASAD: Or Palestinian students on college campuses, or not like, there's a — did you see this video of this Turkish student at Tufts University that wrote an essay and then there's video of like, ICE agents, like —

ROGAN: Is that the woman?

MASAD: Yeah, yeah.

ROGAN: Yeah. What was her essay about? It was just critical of Israel, right?

MASAD: Just critical of Israel, yeah. I mean —

ROGAN: And that's enough to get you kicked out of the country.

Construction workers. Gardners. Speech policing.

The offense here wasn’t to some abstract commitment to due process, or to the idea that diversity is strength, or even to bloodless analysis of immigrant contributions to the economy. It’s to blue collar respectability, free speech—themes that defined Rogan’s programming long before the election, that he returns to in non-partisan contexts quite a lot.

It’s a tell worth dwelling on, because it contains clues as to how Democrats might steer him, others like him, and their audiences, toward other realms of policy.

The internet is overrun with high-profile health, fitness, wellness, and general interest influencers. Rogan is just the most prominent of them. But near as I can tell, basically none has had a word to say about Trumpcare. About all the people who will lose insurance, all the people who will lose SNAP benefits—things that will have a big impact on public and individual health.

If you’re a bit naive, you’ll find that surprising, but if you’re too cynical, you might conclude the whole game is rigged. That these are all charlatans, either secretly aligned with MAGA, or captured by audiences that will abandon them at the first hint of disloyalty to Trump.

There’s a lot of that kind of thing going on, no doubt. The new media teems with RFK Jr. worshippers and others who won’t ever mention Trumpcare out of tribal loyalty. But it’s a big world online. There are plenty of internet celebrities with large audiences, including Rogan, who are happy to tussle with Trump, just not necessarily on think tank-approved terms.

Influencers are not news reporters, but marketers of ideas and products. Their target audiences are able and willing to spend money on their interests—in the broad health-fitness-wellness realm this includes exercise, motivational techniques, supplementation, diet advice, and the daily habits of the people they admire (along, in many cases, with much kookier things). To be crude about it, they, rather than Medicaid beneficiaries and SNAP recipients, make influencing a viable industry. To be cruder about it, how many MMA fans who might buy dubious longevity supplements download podcasts hoping to hear a primer on welfare policy?

Ideally, we’d have better media. More substantive influencers, more substantive reporters. But until that day arrives, Democrats will get farther by sating the press corps’ appetite for salaciousness than by holding more health care press conferences. They’ll get farther thinking of health care not just as a policy issue but also as an online pastime.

Rogan may or may not know or give a shit that Trumpcare will leave so many millions of Americans uninsured. Or without nutrition benefits. But he might be interested in the many ways Trump policies will undermine things he and his listeners do care about. How many Rogan listeners will be ruined by cuts to Medicaid? How many high-school athletes will have to quit their teams if their parents lose food stamps?