I just found this viral moment amusing and thought I'd share in case you missed it.
Trump hired JD Vance to help him more deeply connect to the regular folks of middle America. Unfortunately, what he actually is is to me the most annoying sort of person on Earth: a Silicon Valley "populist". Other examples of this phenomena in our politics include Blake Masters, Josh Hawley, and Vivek Ramaswamy. These are men (they're all male) who take Trump as a serious political theorist and attempt to codify his many principles into a political program that makes sense and their political careers are all bankrolled by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the former CEO of Paypal, who seems to be on a mission to make this a thing. They're geniuses and they represent the people. Like this:
Why does Vance's visit to a doughnut shop remind me of Mitt Romney's PR visit to a hardware store? Nobody is excited to see him. Lady asks not to be filmed and gets filmed anyway because when you're a star, they let you do it. His idea of small talk sounds like he's from corporate, about to tell everyone he's going to liquify the branch. And he fails to order doughnuts somehow! Look at the contrast with a parallel restaurant visit from Tim Walz. It's night and day. Can you believe it, folks, this man (Vance) has been visible on the national stage for only a month and already manages to poll worse than Trump (as in his personal favorability numbers are further upside-down than Trump's). I can believe it.
Silicon Valley tech bruhs should stop pretending to be normal people. They really should. Seriously, who cites neo-monarchist intellectual Curtis Yarvin as a top influence on their socio-political outlook? In touch with the working class, are we? Huge at NatCon, not so much with regular people. Be like Mark Zuckerberg hiding away in his massive Hawaii compound. At least it'd be more intellectually honest.