Our Failed Media Experiment

Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Republicans (and their media enablers) are going to need a new slogan that keeps up with the party’s evolving ethos. They’ll settle on a persona first, probably.

The wired-for-Republicans political press began casting about for Republicans to fluff in a hypothetical post-Piggy future even before the Porcine imPotentate began his catastrophic second term. You think it’s easy to carry water for those fascist fucksticks? It requires planning and effort, bub!

Anyhoo, U.S. Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) was an early favorite in the Beltway media’s race to unearth a Republican who isn’t a super-obvious monster. Here’s how Politico framed it way back in 2023:

Can Katie Britt Be the Face of the GOP’s Post-Trump Future?
The Alabama senator disdains the politics of hate, rarely mentions her party’s frontrunner and favors robust aid to Ukraine. That positions her well to lead a party digging out from Trumpism.

Britt was a contender for Great White Cross-Wearing Hope until her disastrous State of the Union response in March 2024. The speech is forever imprinted on my mind because I wasn’t focused on politics at that moment at all due to pressing personal concerns.

I would have missed the whole thing had I not been inadvertently exposed to Britt’s SOTU response when an orderly who was whisking me from one hospital room to another parked me near a TV tuned to CSPAN. As I watched the Britt calamity unspool, all I could think was, “Shut up, hissy kitty! So I posted that here the minute I got my hands on my phone again.

If you missed that speech, maybe go watch 30 seconds or so on YouTube? I won’t take any longer than that to demonstrate that cringing can be a whole body experience.

The speech was so terrible, so unspeakably bad, so truly awful that I now realize I understated the sheer scale of the catastrophe in my post on the day. By comparison, it raised Bobby Jindal’s self-immolation-inducing oration to Ciceronian heights.

For these reasons, I figured Britt would have to settle for being Alabama’s smartest serving U.S. Senator. That’s an easy bar to clear as long as spud-dumb Tuberville rounds out the state’s U.S. Senate representation.

But perhaps due to the scarcity of not-obvious-monsters among Republicans, it appears maybe the Times is ready to rehab Britt. Here’s a gift link to an article that appears to be engaged in that effort, though I do not really recommend it.

It was click-bait for me because I knew the author would have to address The Speech, and I wondered if Britt would own up to how truly terrible it was. She did, sort of:

For Ms. Britt, the backlash was unexpected and devastating. She called close friends and family members to make sure they were still proud of her. Eventually, she said, the episode became a lesson in how to “block out the noise” and stay focused on what matters: “being the hands and feet of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Okay, and bless her heart.

But the article’s title — the conceit around which it revolves — is that Britt truly cares about Jesus and children and that she works behind the scenes to “soften” her president’s cruelest impulses.

The G.O.P. Senator Who Can’t Stop Thinking About the Boy ICE Detained
Katie Britt is uniquely positioned to reason with the Trump administration — when she chooses to speak up.

The article opens in that vein, with a description of Britt’s alleged anguish over the fate of the 5-year-old boy in the bunny hat who was kidnapped and shipped off to Texas by Trump’s child-snatching squad. But the real question is: when does Britt choose to speak up? It is asked and answered in an article that really could have ended right here:

In Mr. Trump’s second term, Ms. Britt has voted in line with the president 100 percent of the time.

But it doesn’t end there. It goes on to allege that Britt works behind the scenes to ameliorate the Trump admin’s many depredations:

Her disagreements emerge only in private, in conversations with top White House officials and cabinet secretaries, whose numbers are all saved in her phone.

Over the last year, Ms. Britt has occasionally convinced the Trump administration to reverse course, according to several people with knowledge of conversations between Ms. Britt and Trump officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe those interactions.

Color me skeptical — that’s some big “Ivanka and Jared privately opposed” energy right there. Anyway, there’s nothing particularly interesting about Britt, but maybe this tidbit sheds some light on the mysterious behavior of another shape-shifter:

Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said that when he checked himself into the hospital for depression, Ms. Britt was one of a handful of senators to visit him. Among all his colleagues in the Senate, he added, he considers Ms. Britt his best friend.

Britt’s influence, along with the brain injury, could explain Fetterman’s heel turn. Pure speculation, of course, but maybe he needs to spend more time with Gisele Fetterman and less with Katie Britt.

To end on a more hopeful note, as some of us were discussing in the previous thread, it really doesn’t matter how sincere Republicans who are (or want to be seen as) distancing themselves from Trump and his odious statements and behavior are. What matters is that they realize Hair Furor is unpopular and are making moves to unhitch their cabooses from the Orange Loco-motive. This is good!

Open thread!

Amicable AuthoritarianismPost + Comments (190)

NYTimes has truly outdone itself with this latest in its "ask white guys in diner" genre. Thank goodness we get a perspective on what's happening in Minneapolis from people in **Nisswa** who probably mean Brainerd when they say they "prefer not to go the city anymore" www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/u…

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— Graham Lampa (@grahamlampa.com) January 15, 2026 at 7:25 AM

Four bylines! Four! Has the Times also surged into Minnesota (like ICE) felt overcrowded in The Cities and realized they need to fan out a bit?

— Graham Lampa (@grahamlampa.com) January 15, 2026 at 7:42 AM

Nisswa, per Wikipedia. IMO, the reporters, if not their bosses back in the Big Apple, are overtly mocking the whole ‘common clay of the New West — you know, morons‘ trope so beloved of the right wing… Gift link:

The regulars file into Ye Olde Pickle Factory in Nisswa, Minn., before 10 a.m. most days, taking their seats at the bar. Chili pepper lights hang from the ceiling, and neon beer signs glow against wood-paneled walls. A television flickers on. “The Price Is Right” is about to start.

They have been doing this since the mid-1980s, gathering in this small, dim room, waiting for someone on the game show to spin exactly $1 on the big wheel. When that happens, everyone receives a token for a free drink. Lately, they had been in a lull. No one had hit the dollar in weeks — until Wednesday.

Nisswa is a town of about 2,000 people in the Brainerd Lakes Area, a popular summer vacation destination about 150 miles north of Minneapolis. Most of the regulars on hand this morning say they prefer not to go to the city anymore. Not since the summer of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a police officer and the city erupted…

Ms. Good’s death was tragic, they said. Horrific.

But they also said that she had asked for trouble.

“You obey the law officer,” a man in a veteran’s ball cap said, “and question it later.”

This is the divide, in a single sentence. In Minneapolis, protesters saw an innocent woman killed by a federal agent and took to the streets. At “the Pickle,” the regulars saw a woman who should have complied…

The regulars once bristled when Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, referred to rural Minnesota as “the land of rocks and cows.” Now they call themselves “rocks and cows” with a kind of pride.

“It’s a hopeless feeling,” Ms. Jenson said, “that most everything is controlled by the city.”

There is a term for what Ms. Lund and Ms. Jenson are expressing. Christopher Federico, a professor of political science and psychology at the University of Minnesota, calls it “rural consciousness” — a sense that living in a rural area comes with consequences: less political power, fewer resources, less respect.

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Saturday Morning Cartoons Open Thread: The <em>NYTimes’</em> Cletus Safari Goes to MinnesotaPost + Comments (372)