The MAGA playbook only works for Trump

🕰️ Heads up: town hall and time off

👀 Watching: Backrooms

🇨🇴 Prepping: for Colombia

📰 Reading: about all of Kash Patel’s lawsuits

🕺 ICYMI: Friday’s video

It’s a big weekend for sports fans, which, as I joked earlier this week through the ‘Emo Fact Checker,’ may not be of huge interest to Local News International followers. But as I demonstrated in that same video, so much of sports these days is directly intertwined with politics. For example …

While Trump politicizes everything he touches, I think sports are uniquely political in our country. This isn’t to say that sports are apolitical elsewhere, but that our two-party system is directly affected by the ‘us vs them’ mentality that we gleefully promote on the field. It becomes difficult to shake that once you get to the ballot box.

Speaking of, what kind of coverage are you looking for in the midterms? Are there races in your neighborhood or state that deserve more attention? Let me know at [email protected].

And now … let’s unpack everything else on my mind this week.

Our FOURTH quarterly town hall is just around the corner. That’s right, we’ve been a company for almost an entire year. These are quickly becoming my favorite Zoom calls. In fact, they may be the only Zoom call I thoroughly enjoy (sorry everyone else that I talk to on Zoom). These town halls are available to all LNI members. For a full hour, you have access to me, Lauren, Micah, maybe even my dog Lola. My family likes to jump in and roast me too.

We’ll see you Wednesday night, June 17th at 8 p.m ET. Register here if you’re a member. If you’re not a member, join before Wednesday night.

One last reason to be a member: we’ve got stickers! Every three months, paying members get a new one. Here’s a preview of them in a super-secret unlisted video, as a treat:

Last bit of LNI housekeeping: we’re all off this Friday for Juneteenth. I’m taking Monday off as well. I’ll be enjoying the prolonged Father’s Day weekend at the pool with Mari and Lucia, walking Lola and finally finishing up an adult lego set or two.

It’s always very difficult for me to walk away from the social media video algorithms for a few days, without giving them a daily blood sacrifice, so please don’t let that stop you from engaging in our previous videos. If anyone gets unruly waiting from Thursday to Tuesday for a video, I’ll leave it to you all to calm them down in the comment sections. I look forward to checking in on the following Tuesday to see if we’ve reached 400,000 YouTube subscribers. Otherwise, I’ll be very much offline.

I can only recommend the first 20 minutes of the new hit film Backrooms. That’s not because I didn’t like the rest, but rather … I didn’t see the rest. Right as Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character was checking the circuit breaker in the movie, the lights in our theater went out in real life. We thought it was part of the movie for a moment. Then as the emergency lights came on, it became clear that it was not the movie, but our geography. A severe thunderstorm with heavy winds and possible tornadoes had rolled into Kansas City, pulling trees out of the ground all over my neighborhood (we were spared).

AMC corralled everyone into the lobby, which was a really fun social experiment. Our theater was on the edge of our seats, while others were suddenly pulled off the roller coaster of Masters of the Universe or abducted from the alien-talking Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day. It was like we had all been yanked out of bed after vivid dreams and placed in a public dimly lit living room to discuss.

Shortly after, they told us we were getting refunds, but the power was still out and we had to go home. My friend Tim and I avoided all backroom exits and headed out straight through the main entrance. I’m excited to see the movie eventually. It’s the brainchild of a popular YouTuber Kane Parsons, AKA Kane Pixels, who has been making found-footage horror videos like this for years. It’s already received a ton of critical acclaim. Anyway, the first 20 minutes? Amazing. Highly recommend.

Side-note: somehow bringing it back to sports again, I got a chuckle out of World Cup fans in KC not knowing what a tornado warning is (they were all safe and fine, in the end).

Many of you noticed my Colombia jersey in this week’s video. The Colombian fans in our comment section were a good reminder of the sheer number of our international followers, many of whom are from Latin America.

My wife Mariana is Colombian, and we will not be able to come to the phone Wednesday night, so please leave a message. If Colombia wins both games, they’ll be in Kansas City for the quarter final and we will be doing everything we can to get tickets.

President Trump is extremely good at suing people. It doesn’t always work out, but it’s shocking how often it does go in his favor. Even though the $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization” fund may not go through after all, Trump still largely gets what he wants out of these lawsuits. Remember: he sued the IRS because his tax returns were released - the ones that showed he hardly pays taxes, if at all. Now, no one is talking about this, they’re just discussing whether this lawsuit will give money to Jan 6ers. Both situations require our attention in their blatant corruption, but one completely eclipses the other and allows Trump to go on living his mostly tax-less life.

There are numerous examples throughout the years of Trump suing people into oblivion to muscle through construction projects, overreaching executive orders and everything in between. The highly underrated film The Apprentice (2024) outlines this strategy well, and indicates Trump picked up this playbook from the late, not-so-great Roy Cohn.

While Trump may have picked this up from someone else and run with it successfully, it is not working out for the rest of MAGA world. His own daughter and son-in-law are struggling to move forward with a $1.4 billion hotel resort project on an uninhabited Albanian island (stay tuned for a video on that this week).

The New York Times reported today that Kash Patel is zero for six on lawsuits against the media, including his lawsuit against the Atlantic for the massive report on his chaotic, drunken behavior as FBI director. “It’s time that I began fighting back,” Patel once said, before failing to reach even a settlement in any of his lawsuits against the truth. As I mentioned above, a successful lawsuit in Trump’s world doesn’t necessarily mean winning, just changing the narrative. Even that hasn’t seemed to work for Patel, who is apparently next on the White House chopping block.

What does this mean in a post-Trump era? Can my doppelgänger JD Vance march forward with the MAGA playbook, or will he have to find his own way? Will Marco Rubio remember how much he publicly detested Trump during the 2016 primaries, or stick to the fascist script? No one should be underestimated (or overestimated) in this equation. There are many paths to power. But I’m not sure Trump’s unique path is available to anyone else in his circle.

Our weekly AI Dave series has quickly become one of my favorite bits. There’s no lack of AI news (LNI co-founder Micah already flagged this Red Lobster story over the weekend) and I find it extremely therapeutic to act out the ridiculous people operating, overpaying for, and policing AI. Here’s the latest from Friday: