Let Them Eat Doritos

Politics has always rewarded the best performers—power-hungry undiagnosed psychopaths who wriggle into their normie costumes and jump enough societal hoops to earn our votes.

Politicians—during election season, of course—will chow down on fried chicken and collard greens, sit on the curb and drink liquor concealed by a brown paper bag, and frantically search a gas station for just the right flavor of Doritos. Why? Not just to convince us mere mortals that they are just like us, but that they see us, they understand us, and they love us.

Who could forget the “Joe Biden’s empathy was his superpower in 2020” Los Angeles Times column, as one particularly obsequious example?

To emerge victorious, these candidates—who are almost exclusively millionaires and billionaires—must become the ultimate champion of the working class. Democrats, once the party of unions and blue-collar grit, are now the mouthpiece of coastal elites, while Republicans have traded in Wall Street and country clubs for MAGA hats and pickup trucks.

They may pretend to be as different as chalk and cheese, but in reality, they are actually two slightly different brands of imported camembert.

Those in power will brand their economic policies as a way to drag what they view as the lower classes out of poverty. Meanwhile, those who seek power condemn these policies as a conspiracy to enrich the upper class, while marketing their own proposals that will actually usher in a new Golden Age of wealth and prosperity.

As we grow dizzy in this hamster wheel, we risk missing a key and depressing point: maybe neither side gives a damn about poor or working-class Americans?

For our modern collection of politicians, the American working class has become little more than a photo op, a rhetorical device, a pawn in a broader economic game. Every campaign stop at a diner, every photo in a hard hat, every speech about “Main Street over Wall Street”—it’s not about policy. It’s marketing. It's optics. It’s pure performance.

Two different administrations, two different parties, two different political movements, and yet we’ve endured constant levels of voluntary economic chaos, masked with lies that would make George Orwell blush.

When inflation began to skyrocket, we were told it was “transitory.” When retirement accounts shriveled and prices soared, we were told “this proves it’s working.” When inflation squeezed wallets, greedy corporations were to blame. When prices soared, a manufacturing renaissance was just around the corner.

Take the Trump administration’s decision to impose unconstitutional lunacy as the latest example, with reciprocal tariff policies based on the economically illiterate idea that trade deficits are “crippling” and a form of pseudo-mathematics that completely rewrites what “reciprocal” means. While jobs have been cut and corporations descend into uncertainty, the inevitable and predictable result has been stocks collapsing like Joe Biden on a windy day.

But, according to Trump’s own treasury secretary Scott Bessent (who is worth at least $500 million), who cares? In a conversation with Tucker Carlson—a man who is brought to tears by Russian supermarkets and the concept of international exchange rates—Bessent declared that “the top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities,” but the bottom 50 percent “has debt, they have credit card bills, they rent their homes, they have auto loans, and we've got to give them some relief.”

Relief from…what? Groceries?