A Post-Midterms Schaden-Friday Special

0:04Hello, my favorite Slatesters. It is Lizzie. It is time to go off the record. That means we are heading into our very special Slate Plus VIP lounge. You're going behind the velvet rope. Usually, Mary Harris and I are unpacking the stories. We cannot get out of our heads every week. If you're hearing this on the main feed, by the way, you're getting like a little teeny teaser. So go on over to Slate.com slash WhatNextPlus. Sign up, get the real deal. Mary is off this week. God bless her. She had an epic election run, so she gets to sleep. But in her place, we have Slate's very own Molly Olmstead, star of Covering the Right Wing.

0:42Hi, Molly. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm good. Did you like have you slept? Are you fed and watered? Do you feel good? Yeah, I feel I mean, I feel excited to cover an entirely new government. I kind of feel energized by that. Yeah. No, it's it's I think there's like this sweet spot between energized and exhausted. That's where I'm existing right now on like caffeine and leftover Halloween candy. Exactly. Yes. All right. I got to get first. What is your term for this week? Are you going with Blue Bath, Blue Nami, Blue Wave? I know that the Hokusai Museum in Japan is very upset that people have co-opted this very famous painting that I studied in art history class.

1:27What is your phrase? I guess I've been saying tsunami. Tsunami? Yeah, I mean, it feels like it exceeded what everyone kind of secretly in their heart of hearts dreamed about. Very much so on the Democratic side, not so much on the side that you cover. There is a lot of finger pointing in MAGA world going around in the aftermath, blaming the war. The vice president was very candid about that. Tariffs, the president's obsession with retribution. Katie Miller was blaming mothers for prioritizing taking care of their kids instead of going out to vote. There's just a lot happening. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a reckoning, one might say.

2:14A reckoning. Okay. So I want to actually start with Fox News, which I think is slightly different than MAGA, right? There's like a tiny bit of daylight here. Fox is very much the talking arm of the Republican Party. So how are they handling the results as we started to see, you know, midterm votes come in? Yeah, I mean, I do think that there was going to, in general, be a lot more generosity towards the president than you would see in the factions that are sort of angling for control over the party. Fox is, as you said, sort of more like a mouthpiece. And so as a result, they really pulled back on direct criticism of the president.

3:06But the sort of the extreme nature of the results was one where they couldn't actually fully stop themselves from sort of speaking code around the president's failures. Every single executive order the president did, which were good, those weren't codified by Republicans. Every time we asked for the Save Act, we simply got Republicans saying no, and we got the president sending out a few truth socials. But there wasn't a messaging campaign to say, no, we need this legislation. Republicans, you have to do what it takes. So what we did have on Fox was a lot of sort of trying to process how the cost of living in particular and, you know, gas prices and the war might have alienated a lot of these voters.

3:57Molly Olmstead: This idea that I've been thinking about a lot, which is just this shortened attention span that everybody wants everything, you know, instantaneously. And, you know, I gave you my vote for two years and now I want to switch to somebody else. And a lot of these voters don't seem to be expressing what it is they think they're getting by switching over. And we'll see how they did it in a sort of a delicate way. And then they also had on because Fox involves I mean, they they have people on who were literally members of the administration. Right. So that means that there's a lot of sort of talking about like how the voters didn't appreciate fully what President Trump had done for them, et cetera, et cetera.

4:41And they were really the only ones doing that on election night. Everyone else was trying to figure out sort of how things had gone so catastrophically wrong. Fox was kind of the they were the only ones who were trying to defend the president, really. You wrote about the Fox reactions to the results for Slate. And I guess I'm curious in terms of what you saw, were the hosts themselves kind of processing in real time? Do you think they were spinning? Like, how how was it coming out for them? I would say that it seemed like there was a lot of sort of it shifted over the course of the night because early on, right, we saw a lot of different types of reactions to the early signs of the blue wave.

5:34where across conservative media, conservative influencers, everyone was kind of choosing different tactics depending on how bullish they were feeling or what they thought was going to be the right way forward. There was a lot of early spin in that time. But when it became, over the course of the night, when it became abundantly clear that this was just like a full-scale rejection of the MAGA movement, And there was sort of a limit to how much they could actually spend it. So there was sort of a grappling with like, what does this mean for the future? You know, like how did Trump alienate voters this much?

6:18So there was a confrontation or they had to confront reality of it. That's it for now. And if you want to hear the rest of this episode, the way to do it is to subscribe to Slate Plus. Unlock Slate Plus now by going to slate.com forward slash whatnextplus.