In 2024, Trump ran on lowering costs across the board, but he focused on energy prices, promising to “slash energy and electricity prices by half.”

He also ran against “forever wars,” promising to be the “president of peace.” In his 2024 Republican Party platform, Trump said that “war breeds inflation,” and that he’d end both.

Little did we know that Trump actually meant the exact opposite. Prices have only gone up since the start of his war of choice with Iran.

Republicans were eager to share photos and videos of higher gas prices during the Biden administration and comparatively low prices under Trump. This obsession has now become one of the biggest self-inflicted wounds in recent political history.

In focusing national attention on energy prices, that attention has now come back to bite Trump in the ass. Not only are prices up, but Americans everywhere know who to blame.

While Republicans try to blame Iran, Democrats, or even regular people for higher prices, Americans aren’t buying it.

When Trump returned to the presidency in 2025, many of his supporters slapped “I Did That!” stickers on gas pumps across the country. At the time, they were praising his perceived lowering of prices while taking a swipe at former President Biden, who saw MAGA plaster stickers of his face with the same caption during his term.

Since then, photos of those same stickers against $4, $5, and $6 gas have blown up on social media because, well, it’s true. Trump’s war of choice with Iran is the reason why energy prices have spiked, why airlines like Jetblue and Spirit are now being pushed to the brink (or over), and why inflation is rising yet again.

Just this week, Marco Rubio said that the administration’s new goal with the war in Iran is to restore it “back to the way it was” before.

Translation: We gained nothing in attacking Iran, and the economic pain inflicted on Americans has been for absolutely no reason.

If the goal now is to turn back the clock to February 27th, the day before Trump attacked Iran, then why the hell did we attack in the first place? This conflict has become the textbook example of a pointless foreign entanglement, the same kind Trump railed against.

Even MAGA influencers like Alex Jones, who’s become increasingly disillusioned with Trump in his second term, have called out Trump’s hypocrisy on energy prices.

For American consumers, the worst part is that this isn’t the end. Prices are likely to continue to climb as long as we have a president who cares more about a $400 million ballroom than he does about the economic stability of working people.

For years, Republicans said the President is responsible for gas prices. Under Biden, they used this to attack him, and under Trump, to praise him. They turned gas prices into a political weapon, a meme, a punchline.

(Of course, they ignore that the price of gas rose under Biden because of Russian manipulation following their invasion of Ukraine, while gas is skyrocketing today because of yet another avoidable war in the Middle East.)

Today, that punchline has changed hands.

If Trump owned the prices when they were low (which he had nothing to do with, by the way), he definitely owns them at their peak today. With gas prices up $1.63 and climbing since the start of the misadventure in Iran, the buck stops with the president. When you spend years telling Americans exactly how to assign blame, you don’t get to rewrite the rules when the numbers stop going your way.

Higher energy costs don’t exist in isolation, but are already rippling across the economy in higher rent, flights, groceries, and everything else. What starts at the pump doesn’t stay there.

The lesson for Republicans?

Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

This week, the Republican-majority Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to democracy in a move unseen since, well, the last time they took a sledgehammer to democracy.

In its decision, rendered through Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court dismantled key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, clearing the path for Republican legislatures across the south to redraw their congressional maps and erase Black and Latino representation in Congress.

Section 2 of the VRA, which was gutted in the Court’s decision, prevented legislatures from enacting congressional maps that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or nationality.

Just thirty-nine minutes after the decision was handed down, Florida enacted a new map that aims to gain four additional seats for Republicans in the state. In Tennessee, Senator Marsha Blackburn (who’s sadly running for governor) posted a tweet publicly urging the legislature to redraw their maps and eliminate their sole majority-minority district in Memphis. In Louisiana, the governor postponed the state’s primary elections in order to implement a map that discriminates against Black voters. Other red states, like South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama, have also signaled their intent to redraw their maps.

What will result from this is a less representative government. It will be a government where entire communities will be shut out of the democratic process by being packed and cracked into misshapen districts. What this decision has done is state the quiet part out loud: in Donald Trump’s America, ours is not a government of, by, and for all the people. It’s only for some of the people.

This is not a decision made in isolation. It’s yet another example of Republican attempts to suppress the will of the voters and to dismantle the key tenets of our democracy. In other words, it’s a five-alarm fire. Complacency is no longer an option.

This also represents the latest counterargument to those in favor of incrementalism in the face of authoritarianism.

Make no mistake: Incrementalism has failed, and it is a large reason why we have ended up here today. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have spent decades operating independently of the will of the voters, and in despair, many turned to Donald Trump as an answer.

Upon hearing of the decision yesterday, Trump lauded it as a “BIG WIN” for Republicans. In contrast, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Democrats to fight back against further attempts to rig the midterms by redistricting in blue states “until we get to the day where we can pass non-partisan anti-gerrymandering legislation federally.”

The era we find ourselves in is no longer a jockeying between parties for an infinitesimal advantage on policy. It’s a war of extinction in which victory for one side results in the erasure of another. It’s an era where political violence has become increasingly normalized, partisanship is the defining trait of each person’s identity, and the ideals upon which the United States was founded seem further from reach than at any time since the first shots of the American Civil War.

This environment is not reflective of the America many of us know and love. Yet, because of a decade spent undermining and dismantling our democratic and social institutions by Donald Trump and Republicans, it’s the tragic reality we find ourselves in.

At Headquarters, our purpose isn’t simply to report the news. We leave that to legacy media. Our purpose is to contextualize it and explain why it matters. The ruling in Callais by the Supreme Court matters because of the signal it sends. It tells us that the time for incrementalism has not only passed; it is no longer an option. For the sake of the republic we’re inheriting, we must demand bold change, no matter the risk.

On every front, young people everywhere find themselves walking into the middle of an unprecedented cyclone.

On the economy, young people are the most economically disadvantaged, unstable, and vulnerable group in the country. We are bearing the brunt of the cost of Trump’s wars of choice, an inaccessible housing market, and exorbitantly high education costs.

Socially, Gen Z is torn between those who were born just prior to the explosion of technology and social media, and those who’ve only ever known a world where smartphones, cameras, and online content are ubiquitous.

Now, we must contend with unprecedented assaults on our democratic principles, liberties, and fundamental freedoms. With a ruling gerontocracy determined to cling to power at the expense of literally everyone else, we cannot afford to be cautious any longer.

In 2021, Democrats proposed the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would have, among other things, made partisan gerrymandering illegal, expanded ballot access, and reaffirmed the VRA’s outlawing of race-based gerrymandering. After passing the House (where ZERO Republicans voted for it), it failed in a party-line vote in the Senate because of the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold required to pass legislation.

But now, we are where we are. And Democrats will have no choice but to use every tool in their arsenal. The choice we face is a binary one: fight fire with fire or be gerrymandered into oblivion.

Democrats in legislatures across the country must be prepared to counter regressive gerrymanders emerging across the South. In Illinois, Colorado, New York, and other states, we must be prepared to fight fire with fire.

Let’s be clear: The result of a war of such proportions is that everyone loses. Every state that redraws will become less representative. Our democracy will become more dysfunctional and polarized. However, MAGA has left us no choice. As citizens, we have a responsibility to mobilize in defense of the only democracy we’ve ever known.

Here at Headquarters, we’re not ones to prescribe specific policy proposals, but the truth is that there is action needed. Urgently.

All hope is not lost. Despite MAGA’s best efforts, the People do still have the final say. In our current circumstances, where Democrats don’t have access to any of the institutional levers of power by which to rein in Republican overreach, we must organize, mobilize, and vote in unprecedented numbers, because the ballot box is the one true power we have.

This week, the Supreme Court made its latest move in trying to remove that right, too. Now, it’s our turn to send them a message. It’s time for us, like Justice Kagan, to say:

We Dissent.

Lately, things have been bleak. That’s putting it mildly.

Whether it’s rising energy costs, the launching of wars of choice (and yes, we include ICE waging a domestic war in this category), a Congress and Supreme Court hellbent on advancing Trump’s agenda, or blatant corruption seemingly a constant among administration officials, it’s done a lot to make regular Americans feel powerless.

It’s true that right now, it feels like there’s little to be done to stop Trump and his allies from trampling over the rights and liberties of Americans across the country, but this misses the change that is happening.

After years of “strongly worded letters” and public, yet purposeless, condemnations of Trump, Democrats have finally begun to fight fire with fire. In doing so, they’ve learned the oldest lesson in the book: to beat a bully, you first have to stand up to them. In Virginia and California, Democrats did just that, successfully passing new congressional maps to give the party additional seats in Congress in response to Trump’s attempt to rig the midterms with gerrymandered maps in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Missouri, and others.

In special election after special election, Democrats are massively overperforming by ten, fifteen, twenty, or even twenty-five points or more across the nation. Millions of people have turned out and protested at “No Kings” rallies across the nation, and the coalition that Trump once hailed as one that would keep Republicans in power for a generation is collapsing in epic fashion.

In isolation, these election results have little meaning. Simply putting Democrats in power is one thing; what they do with that power is an entirely separate question.

As we’ve seen in previous elections, young people are increasingly transactional voters. We aren’t loyal to any one candidate, party, or ideology. We’re concerned about the kind of future we’ll be living in, whether we can afford that future, and whether that future is one where our friends are safe, where we can love who we love, and where our fundamental rights aren’t reduced to being the subject line of a DNC fundraising email.

In short, we reward parties who benefit us directly, not just rhetorically, and punish those who take us for granted or who seek to undermine our present and future realities. It’s a lesson Democrats learned the hard way in 2024, when young voters swung towards Trump and Republicans amidst economic and social concerns.

Democrats’ victories have since been powered by youth voters, from Abigail Spanberger’s landslide victory in Virginia, or Mikie Sherrill’s victory in New Jersey, to Zohran Mamdani’s come-from-behind victory in New York City. This turnout was a response to all three candidates running on platforms of effective governance reflecting the urgency of action to stand up to Trump’s militarization of America and destruction of the economy.

They were given a chance with a stipulation: Should they fail, we wouldn’t forget.

So they set into motion.

In Virginia, Governor Spanberger has signed legislation raising the state minimum wage to $15 an hour, codifying reproductive rights, expanding housing availability, and signed a constitutional amendment repealing the ban on same-sex marriage.

In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill has expanded first-time homebuyer assistance, capped rent increases in high-pressure regions, expanded tax deductions for student loan repayment, and repealed New Jersey’s ban on nuclear energy, helping directly reduce energy costs.

In New York City, Zohran Mamdani recently launched a program to provide free and reduced-cost groceries at stores administered by the city. He’s rolled out a program for free 3-K, with the program set to include all young children by 2030, and announced New York’s first ever pied-à-terre tax on nonresidents who own homes valued over $5 million.

What each of these leaders have done is show the power of possibility. Each have provided a window into what a better future could look like for young people if we elect leaders who are responsive to our needs. Not mere lip service, but meeting those needs through real action – through legislation and budgets that speak to our lives. Put simply, fighting for us in the same way they fight for their corporate donors in bill language and million-dollar contracts.

However, what these leaders have understood beyond the crazy idea that you should deliver on the promises you make in the course of a campaign is that it isn’t enough merely to do something. You must also show that you’re doing it. Voters can’t reward what they don’t know is happening.

In today’s media ecosystem, governance doesn’t happen behind closed doors or out of the public view, only to be revealed intangibly by reduced taxes or better infrastructure. Elected leaders must now also explain, defend, and translate policy into digestible mediums to the people they affect.

Increasingly, that medium is digital messaging and public events.

To continue with our current cast of characters, in New York City, Zohran Mamdani has continued his avid use of social media to advocate for his policies and create publicity around otherwise boring and monotonous municipal functions. To mark his 100 days in office, he held a presidential-style rally in the city with Bernie Sanders to tout his achievements and rally public support, a move unprecedented in scale for a city mayor. In New Jersey, to announce new infrastructure funds, Mikie Sherrill curated an event in a subway hall, flanked by subway cars and workers in hardhats. In Virginia, to mark the codifying of reproductive rights in Virginia, Abigail Spanberger flanked herself with abortion advocates, community leaders, and power players in Richmond.

One lesson that the Democratic Party must learn from the Trump era is that spectacle is equally as important as progress. Creating a moment, a vibe of success, is critical to public perception. Where the Democratic Party of the past has failed to adequately tout its achievements, and was then punished at the ballot box by voters who believed they hadn’t done enough to address their concerns, the Democratic Party of tomorrow must be willing and eager to aggressively promote its policies, successes, and goals.

In many ways, it’s this dichotomy that explains why young people have become enamored with a cohort of leaders in the Democratic Party. For us, we’ve grown up watching promises go unfulfilled and been conditioned to believe that government isn’t capable of directly, meaningfully, or properly meeting our needs. We now know that to be wrong.

To borrow a phrase, hope is making a comeback.

If we’re able to harness that hope, even in small ways, the window of possibility becomes limitless.

We have a chance, fleeting though it may be, to restore hope to a generation devoid of it, and finally make America that shining city on a hill that we’ve striven to be for so long. So, despite how bleak it may seem, let us have hope that better days are ahead, because together, they are.

What Went Down: After escalating attacks on the Pope, Trump posted (then deleted) an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, triggering vociferous pushback from his own base.

Why This Hit Differently: Trump has often survived controversy by keeping things ambiguous. This wasn’t. The image made the implication unavoidable.

What It Reveals: In 2026, politics is visual. Images stick and reshape how everything else is understood.

The Bottom Line: By turning himself into the image critics had long warned of, Trump exposed a real limit. Not of politics, but of the internet itself.

Since taking office 15 months ago, Donald Trump has rarely faced a single opponent strong enough to resist his intimidation.

Not in Congress, where Republican sycophants have fallen in line and where Democrats lack the power, and in some cases the will, to resist. Not in the courts, where the Supreme Court has served as a rubber stamp on the vast majority of his policies. Not in the media, where corporate monopolization has led to the marginalization of once-venerated journalists seeking to speak truth to power.

Enter Pope Leo XIV.

Following a series of subtle but public rebukes of Trump’s policies, Trump massively escalated the feud by posting a rant railing against the American Pope on his Truth Social account and an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ.

Interestingly, that image, or what Trump has since said was “supposed to be me as a doctor,” is what broke through more than anything. Trump’s blasphemous statements and actions alone are sufficiently disqualifying, but it wasn’t until he portrayed himself as Christ Almighty, descended from on high as the ultimate healer, did enough of his own supporters finally say the quiet part out loud: this shit is weird. (and that’s an understatement).

In an embarrassing sign that even he knows he went too far, Trump has since deleted the image in response to blistering criticism from across the political and religious spectrum, particularly from some of his most ardent supporters.

Trump has long trafficked in what would traditionally be considered blasphemous political behavior. He’s invoked God to justify his wars of choice, surrounded himself with pastors who compare him to Jesus, and actively encouraged rhetoric that frames him as divinely chosen.

Despite these brazen offenses, his support among evangelical Americans continued unruptured.

That all changed with Trump’s self-portrayal.

For many Christians, even those who consider themselves MAGA or supporters of Trump, his attempted embodiment of Christ was a step too far, and pitted Trump against their religion.

Even though Trump may think differently, he cannot win a fight with God.

To understand why, you have to understand what made this clash different, and why Pope Leo XIV, of all people, became the one figure capable of exposing the limit.

The answer, actually, is rather simple: politics is no longer primarily verbal, but visual.

Increasingly, politicians have begun to realize that they can say almost anything. Their supporters will rationalize it, reinterpret it, or simply scroll past it. Our words have become elastic, and have the shelf-life of curdled milk.

Images, however, are permanent.

An image collapses the distance between implication and reality. It forces an audience to confront what something actually looks like, not merely what it can be spun into.

In other words, images are seared into our minds. We don’t have to physically see them to recall what they looked like, how they made us feel, and in Trump’s case, how they violated the beliefs of Christians across the globe.

Trump didn’t merely suggest divine authority, but rendered it.

In doing so, he stripped away the last vestige of ambiguity that had protected him from the truth we all already knew: Trump views himself as God-like, and at least on Earth, sees no equal to himself. Not even the Pope.

To be clear, this isn’t the first time Trump has done something amoral, beyond-the-pale, or otherwise disgusting.

What’s changed is how American politics has become increasingly memetic. Visuals have become far more compelling, and far-reaching, than words.

That’s why videos of the cold-blooded killings of two American citizens by ICE fundamentally changed the conversation on immigration enforcement.

On more than one occasion, he’s surrounded himself with loyalists who have prayed over him. He’s posted photos of himself as the Pope (this is when he was still content to be God’s emissary, though he now seems to be aspiring to be God himself).

Such images have gone viral before. Evangelical leaders have touted them as proof that Trump has been sent by God and is a part of his broader plan for the United States.

Trump as Jesus, however, is much more revealing of the psyche he’s inhabited all along. Rather than being sent by God, Trump attempted to position himself as God. Such a position places him fundamentally at odds with the Pope and with Christian teachings, making a conflict inevitable.

However, where Trump is political, Pope Leo is cultural.

Where Trump has escalated, Pope Leo has reframed. Where Trump insults, the Pope indicts. His criticisms have been moral, not partisan. In his statements, the Pope has warned against leaders consumed by a “delusion of omnipotence,” against the weaponization of religion, and against the idea that strength alone confers righteousness.

Pope Leo’s unique position, as someone of America yet simultaneously a leader of one of the world’s largest religions, adds more weight. His statements, made almost exclusively in his native English, have also helped reach millions more Americans than might have otherwise. Pope Francis, who made similar calls for peace during his pontificate, failed to reach many of these Americans due to that language barrier.

In full, where Trump has sought to attack Pope Leo in the same way he attacks any political opponent, the Pope has criticized Trump’s misappropriation of theology.

Instead of rebutting that argument, Trump visualized it.

In doing so, he didn’t just cross a political line, but a religious one, confirming the very critique that Pope Leo had been making all along.

At its core, the Pope’s warning was about idolatry far more than policy.

That’s why this moment matters. Not because it’s shocking, but because it’s clarifying. For millions of Americans who have spent a decade rationalizing Trump’s statements to mean something other than what he obviously meant, there is finally no recourse.

For years, the lesson of Trump-era politics has been that there are no limits. That everything can be absorbed, spun, or memed into submission.

In Pope Leo’s triumph over Trump, that conclusion was proven incorrect.

Limits do exist, they just look different than how we thought. More than anything, that limit is on what can be seen.

For the first time in a long time, thanks in no small part to Pope Leo XIV, the image made the truth impossible to look away from.

After days of market volatility, of American allies and adversaries alike frantically trying to prepare for the possible deployment of nuclear weapons, and after members of Congress began openly urging the invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office, it all came to … nothing.

Or did it?

Sure, there weren’t any nukes. No annihilation. Just a delay, announced with little explanation, as the administration stepped back from the brink it had itself created.

For Gen Z, we didn’t just hear about the crisis on the television. We couldn’t tune out when we got tired. We watched it unfold, in real time, post by post.

On Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, we saw videos of smoke billowing into the sky as people screamed and their homes burned. Images and videos of people forming human chains around power plants in Iran, leveraging the value of their own lives in hopes of deterring an American-led genocide, went viral. Refugees held their loved ones, killed in airstrikes, in their arms and pleaded for peace.

The carnage was inescapable; the pain universal. It didn’t feel distant, or abstract, but immediate and personal. Many of us feared that the situation could spiral at any second.

Gen Z has grown up in the shadow of American misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve watched their fallout play out in our homes, communities, and across our screens. Because of this exposure, we’ve seen what “forever wars” actually mean. We’ve seen who gets sent, who pays the price, and who is left to pick up the pieces.

It’s us.

In the coming days, some within the administration, and Trump himself, will claim this as a victory and a de-escalation that only a genius such as the president could achieve.

They will be lying.

Of course it’s good that the United States didn’t violate every international law that we ourselves wrote at the close of the Second World War; but that doesn’t mean America, or the world, emerged unscathed.

Ultimately, the damage wasn’t tied to whether the bombs fell or not. America was irreparably harmed the moment Trump’s threat was made credibly enough that the world had to believe it.

We’ve watched markets dip, gas prices spike, and everyday goods become even harder to attain.

Young people are the most economically vulnerable group in the United States. We have the highest unemployment rate, least savings, and most exposure to economic shocks. When markets swing, prices surge, and instability becomes the norm, it hits us first and hardest.

But you see, this is nothing more than par-for-the-course for Trump. We are but expendable collateral in pursuing his “Art of the Deal” – which, to be clear, is nothing more than a vain attempt at legacy-building, whether it be in Venezuela, Greenland, or in Iran today. To make the books of history, Trump is unconcerned with how many people must suffer and die in the process.

In many ways, this armageddonist approach has defined Trump’s political career from the very beginning: escalate, dominate the information environment, sow chaos, and then, just when it seems too late, pull back.

A name for this tactic has emerged from both critics and even some uneasy allies: T.A.C.O. – Trump Always Chickens Out.

That framing is not only fundamentally incorrect, but dangerously shallow.

Firstly, such a perception boxes Trump into a compulsory need to strike so as to prove his words carry real weight. Secondly, and more importantly, it misses the cost of performance.

On the home front, Trump has deployed ICE agents to indiscriminately target people based on the color of their skin, and empowered them to act with abandon, resulting in the deaths of two American citizens. He has deployed the National Guard to cities across the nation, militarizing America in hopes of vilifying dissent.

Internationally, Trump invaded Venezuela and captured its leader, Nicolas Maduro. He came to the brink of trading blows with the European Union over his ill-gotten desire for control of Greenland. He bombed Iran in June 2025, before launching his war of choice in February 2026.

Trump’s strategy of blasphemous statements to extract concessions and avoid conflict had, inadvertently, given him no choice but to attack.

To call yesterday’s back-down a TACO moment invites such a moment to come again, except there eventually won’t be an off-ramp. It also fails to recognize Trump’s inherent and omnipresent danger.

Trump has wielded, and continues to possess, great power to inflict harm on America and the world. TACO is too shallow because it treats each episode as isolated, when in reality, they stack. Today’s bluff increases the odds of a real crisis tomorrow.

We live in an era of unprecedented times. Every day, something that has seemingly never happened before happens. Our leaders should be striving to make life more normal, not less. We long for a time when life can be decidedly precedented.

None of the pain inflicted by Trump’s wars of choice and economic warfare can be unwound just because he changed his mind. The genie is out of the bottle. Next time, (because with Trump we’re all-but-guaranteed a next time,) de-escalation won’t be possible.

The financial costs cannot be avoided. The markets cannot simply reset; those price surges will be passed onto the American consumer in the form of higher gas prices, energy bills, and everyday goods. The instability will only become more clear, even if the war doesn’t.

Geopolitically, the damage is equally as severe. Once again, allies must reassess whether America can be a reliable international partner.

In the Trump era, it’s becoming clear that the answer is no.

Each time Trump leverages America against the world, he erodes credibility that our fellow Americans gave their lives to building over the last 250 years. Our credibility is our most intangible, yet valuable, asset we have. It’s been the least discussed casualty of Trump’s second term to date.

All of this damage over a crisis that, in the end, amounted to nothing.

However, the absence of action does not mean the absence of consequence.

We will all continue to feel the whiplash of Trump’s whims each day he is allowed to swing around American might without obstruction. We will continue to feel it in our social environment, in our political environment, and in our wallets. To date, fifteen American families have felt it in an empty chair at their dinner table. Of the service members killed, three were under thirty. One had just turned twenty.

Trump’s decision to step back from his self-constructed brink is not restraint. It isn’t prudence. It isn’t even, in any meaningful sense, successful brinkmanship.

It is the embodiment of crisis as a means of governance; volatility as performance.

Make no mistake, while the immediate danger has passed, Trump continues to loom over America like a ticking time bomb, just one tick away from exploding.

If he does, it will be left to Gen Z to pick up the pieces.

What this signifies is clear: cable news has decided that the solution to losing an entire generation of viewers is to cosplay as the thing that replaced them.

The problem is that the cable executives fundamentally don’t understand why podcasters beat them.

You can put Jake Tapper behind a microphone in a cluttered office over and over again, but it won’t make him feel like Joe Rogan, or Alex Cooper, or Carlos Eduardo Espina, or literally anyone else Gen Z actually watches. Because what those creators have, and what no amount of production and set design can manufacture — is the feeling that you’re getting an unfiltered, unscripted version of what someone actually believes.

Cable news is, by design, the opposite of that. It is scripted, lawyered, produced, and planned, down to the second. It has advertisers to protect. It has relationships with investors to maintain. (And if you’re CBS, it’s a relationship with the Ellisons and Trump himself.) It cannot “go there,” because “there” is exactly where its endgame interests prevent it from going. The podcast mic behind the desk is not a format change. It’s a costume.

The same principle applies in progressive politics. We see more moderate candidates copying the same style of online videos that worked so well for Zohran Mamdani, thinking it’s the magic formula that will work for them too. But a generation raised with sky-high screen times and parasocial relationships galore have a preternatural ability to detect a politician’s lack of authenticity.

Young people today follow creators who swear, who change their minds on air, who admit when they get something wrong, who don’t cut to commercial the minute things get uncomfortable. Gen Z wants to see human error, because in an era where anyone can make anything look real, they’re a generation with a lot of built-in cynicism. That cynicism applies directly to media institutions and legacy politicians.

Progressives and media figures alike will have to do a lot more to win this generation. That includes genuinely investing time and energy into online-first strategies, not just putting a bow on a legacy format and hoping nobody looks closely enough to tell.

In a now-infamous cover, New York Magazine dubbed this new era the “Cruel Kids’ Table.”

According to this popular narrative, the Democratic Party was doomed for a generation.

But now, just one year later, an entirely different story is unfolding.

As MAGA bleeds support from voters of every demographic, there is one group of voters who stand out as rebelling the most against Trump: Gen Z.

The latest Gallup poll shows 59% of voters between 18 and 29 disapprove of the second Trump administration — and that number is climbing. A Harvard Youth Poll found only 13% of young people believed the U.S. is headed in the right direction, and only 30% believe we will be better off financially than our parents.

As with every broad social trend, there are many reasons for this: Cultural flashpoints, ICE’s abuses of power, the Epstein files, affordability. But if you take it all as a whole, Trump has simply lost his grasp on the online-first information environment where Gen Z receives their information.

If you want a clear example of the recent vibe shift in American culture, look no further than the Super Bowl this past Sunday. MAGA spent weeks framing Latin singer Bad Bunny’s halftime performance as some sort of evil liberal bogeyman who was out to, uh, ban English or something? To them, Bad Bunny’s ascendance to headlining this major cultural event was a direct affront to the cultural gains they had made since last year.

They were so outraged that they went as far as setting up an entirely opposing Halftime Show, hosted by Turning Point USA and headlined by the washed up singer Kid Rock. Despite their confidence that they could match the viewership numbers of the Benito Bowl, they ended up peaking at 6 million viewers compared to Bad Bunny’s 135 million.

Yet another case in recent weeks that has turned young people off from the Trump coalition is the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

Prior to their deaths, the conversation around ICE had been boiling for the better part of the last year — largely in part to countless viral videos surfacing online of masked agents whisking mothers and children off the street. But it all reached a boiling point the day that Renée Good’s killing was recorded and uploaded from what felt like every possible angle.

Even some of the most right-wing pundits could not justify the level of brutality from ICE agents toward Good when faced with the final interaction between her and the agent himself: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” she stated, only to be met with the agent calling her a “fuckin’ bitch” after shooting her three times. Roughly a week later, when Alex Pretti was tackled to the ground and shot, the abuse of power was undeniable for Americans across the political spectrum.

Trump and his minions responded to these events in almost perfect accordance with the infamous George Orwell quote: ”The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

But here’s the thing: The nationwide ICE backlash was driven by social media and viral videos recorded by everyday citizens. And for a generation of digital natives like Gen Z, we saw straight through Trump’s bullshit.

Then there are the Epstein files. This scandal poured gasoline on Gen Z’s already massive bonfire of cynicism about the rich and powerful. But while Donald Trump was able to ride that cynicism to a narrow victory in 2024 through his anti-establishment rhetoric, this scandal has been highly effective at tying him to the very establishment he claimed to be so strongly against.

And perhaps most critically, in an information environment where news stories can last only hours before disappearing forever, the online discourse around the Epstein files has been raging for months on end. The “drip-drip-drip” nature of the file release and the absurd redactions have kept MAGA on everlasting defense and reminded people that Trump is the exact scummy, well-connected billionaire figure he postured himself as being against.

Finally, the number one word on everyone’s lips in 2024 was affordability. Trump sold Gen Z a dream of finally being able to afford a home, a stable job, and a 401k — but as we enter the second year of Trump 2.0, prices don’t seem to be budging.

By stark contrast, images and stories have gone viral of Trump spending an awful lot of time (and money) obliterating the East Wing to build himself a golden ballroom and profiteering off his own crypto-coin. To add insult to injury, Trump has recently started referring to affordability as a “hoax,” and occasionally sends out Scott Bessent or Howard Lutnick to assure voters that the economy will just fix itself eventually.

In short, MAGA is losing the culture war. They’ve made too many missteps that have been woven into the fabric of online culture, percolating through Gen Z’s For You Pages and into their daily conversations. To be clear, this is not to say that they’ve all suddenly shifted to the left… yet. Progressives will have to do a lot more to win our generation back — including investing in online-first strategies to capture this momentum.

But the tides are turning. And this is the time to change minds.

In that time, I have taken stock of the state of our nation. Here is what I have concluded:​

The far-right has a 24/7 outrage machine online. They are casting Donald Trump as an agent of change, yet he has delivered nothing but empty promises for the American people.

Under his leadership, prices, inflation, and unemployment are up. Health care costs for millions of Americans are about to double. But Donald Trump is not the only source of our problems; we must also look at the rise of the MAGA movement.

Democrats must improve our ability to convey our message and reach every American — including Gen Z, who are now a larger generation than the Baby Boomers and are one of our greatest assets as we confront the challenges ahead.

That is why I have decided to revive my team’s social media operation, KamalaHQ.

It will now be known as Headquarters.

I am so proud of the campaign we built in 2024 and of the ways KamalaHQ innovated online and brought new, young voters into the conversation. But let me be clear: Our movement has always been bigger than one candidate. We must be where the people are, and these platforms help ensure our voices stay loud and our fight continues.

The goal of these accounts is to keep delivering the latest information. But it won’t just be bad news. We love good news too, and the accounts will share the stories of leaders across our nation who are showing what it means to stand up and fight for the people and for the future they deserve.

This is a moment to organize, and this is how we’ll do it.

We are clear-eyed, with the grit, determination, and fire this moment demands.

We love our country, and we fight for the future and fight for the people.

Will you join us in the fight?

Give Headquarters a follow here on Substack and everywhere else you are online.