“Anything you regret about your presidency?”
So asked Ben Meiselas of the MeidasTouch podcast of Joe Biden in December in a rare one-on-one sit-down, conducted during Biden’s lame-duck period, as he and the nation awaited President Trump’s return to the White House. By then, Biden resembled a shambling zombie from the film 28 Years Later, and he squinted and slurred his way through an incoherent answer that boiled down to: Nope, no regrets.
His rant sounded quite Trumpian in its detachment from reality, including a claim that his term would end with an Israel-Gaza peace deal. Yet the hangdog-faced podcaster didn’t challenge it or follow up. He simply nodded and moved on to the next scripted question he had written down in a notebook. Meiselas looked like a man who had won the lottery to interview a sitting president and didn’t want to blow it. You could almost see affirmation in Meiselas’s eyes: You’re doing great, Mr. President. Keep going.
Welcome to MeidasTouch, the popular “news-influencer” show where every hour feels like amateur hour. It’s essentially a booster club for Democrats disguised as just-the-facts-ma’am independent journalism. Since Hollywood and establishment media failed miserably to help elect Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024, the Democrats have been desperately searching for their own Joe Rogan — a charismatic and outsider everyman who resonates with young men and can gently steer them toward Team Blue. What they’ve got instead with MeidasTouch is nearly the polar opposite: it’s anti-Trump infotainment starring three earnest Millennial brothers — Ben, Brett, and Jordan Meiselas — with little charisma and no chill, peddling content that appeals to news-addicted liberals.
The MeidasTouch bros claim that their brand is “pro-democracy,” but somehow that only aligns perfectly with one side. It’s no coincidence that years before they interviewed Biden on their podcast as journalists, the Meiselases were raising money for him. Launched in the spring of 2020, MeidasTouch almost immediately became a DIY SuperPAC helmed by the three Long Island brothers: Colin Kaepernick’s lawyer (Ben), a video editor for the Ellen show (Brett), and a marketing executive (Jordan).
Their early batch of anti-Trump digital ads spoke the language of outrage fluently, and the brothers positioned themselves not just as commentators, but combatants in an existential bloodsport. The prize: America’s soul. Within months, they’d raised $5 million for the 2020 election cycle. A Rolling Stone investigation concluded that MeidasTouch’s anti-Trump ad campaign “was a huge waste of donor money, and its tweets weren’t persuading swing voters.” MeidasTouch responded by threatening to sue Rolling Stone and demanded that the magazine apologize and pay its legal costs. (The MeidasTouch brothers didn’t respond to UnHerd’s request for comment.)
Their digital network grew steadily over the four years that followed — but exploded once Trump took office for a second term. In the first quarter of 2025, MeidasTouch was the fastest-growing YouTube channel in terms of net new subscribers. It made splashy headlines in February, notching 57.5 million downloads and surpassing Rogan’s 51.5 million for the No. 1 podcast. The bros got there by posting multiple times daily, all rapid response 10-minute segments featuring the search-engine-friendly word “Trump” in the title.
Their success is proof that a media empire can be built almost solely on white-hot Trump hate. To listen to it is to enter a world where the president is a mindless buffoon, an Inspector Clouseau type who destroys democracy like it’s a vase accidentally knocked off a pedestal, but also even more than that: a moral aberration, a threat to civilization itself that must be denounced at every turn lest it be “normalized.”
Every YouTube thumbnail is a scream declaring Donald’s impending downfall — “Trump gets publicly HUMILIATED in the WORST TV appearance of all time” or “Trump LOSES IT as MAGA Burns IT ALL DOWN” — repackaging every political development into content gold. The hyperbolic headlines rarely match reality, but the dopamine loop is deliberate and constant. Play the video. Share the tweet. Feel the rage. Repeat. They’re like the #Resistance’s unholy marriage of the dystopian online-game-show host MrBeast and MSNBC — equal parts law school, cable news, and YouTube reaction video.
“There’s no room for dissent, no appetite for introspection.”
MeidasTouch is part of a sprawling digital-media #Resistance ecosystem, in which every news cycle presents a fresh reason to panic and post. The historian Heather Cox Richardson writes Substack essays that feel like bedtime stories for liberals about how history’s lessons all point to Trump trying to wrench America back to the pre-Civil War era. The Bulwark dresses up neocon-friendly centrism in moral urgency against MAGA. Well-dressed progressive commentator Brian Tyler Cohen condenses news stories into slick TikToks.
These are the town criers for the terminally online, warning us that Trump is coming (again), and only your retweet and subscription can stop him. There’s no room for dissent, no appetite for introspection, no curiosity about voters who drifted from the Democratic Party and why they might have done so. The hate machine needs both conflict and clarity. In a recent video, Brett Meideles said that Trump makes problems worse 99.9% of the time, but then quickly corrected himself. Oh, actually, it was 100% of the time.
Their growing audience has often been dubbed “BlueAnon,” because they’re also prone to conspiratorial thinking — similar to the Right-wing variety, QAnon — when it suits them. An Economist/YouGov poll found that 41% of Democrats still believe Trump didn’t legitimately win in 2024. About a third think the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pa., might have been staged. They’re also the fastest-growing demographic of gun owners, doomsday preppers more likely to holster their weapons in farmer’s-market tote bags than camo. This isn’t just fringe paranoia; it’s become the dour mood of a base that now sees even The New York Times or NPR as suspiciously neutral. In their eyes, objectivity itself has become complicity. They want media that picks a side, and MeidasTouch is happy to oblige.
The irony, of course, is that the same people who decry disinformation and cultishness on the Right have created a mirrored pathology: an all-consuming fixation on Trump, his every utterance, tweet, and indictment. If Trump is indeed the Boomer ego in human form — a gaudy, narcissistic amalgam of generational hubris — to his critics he remains the gravitational force around which their media diets, anxieties, and identities orbit.
For many Millennial children of aging liberals, it’s become a running joke; there hasn’t been a family dinner or phone call in years without Trump somehow being invoked. “We’re providing a comforting place where we’re channeling people’s feelings during a real difficult time,” Meiselas told the Times. Still, MeidasTouch is hardly providing comfort — it’s churning out addictive ragebait and telling viewers to “Join the Meidas Mighty,” the podcast’s version of Swifties for Trump haters.
Flattening all Left-of-center commentary into anti-MAGA rants is a copout. Instead of grappling with the real and urgent reasons why Democrats are so unpopular in 2025 — housing costs, health-care failures, stagnant wages — their content is the podcast equivalent of jamming fingers in their ears and yelling “Trump!” at the top of their lungs. It’s red meat for the haters, but it doesn’t build coalitions or expand the base. If anything, it drowns out the figures and institutions that are trying to do the slow, difficult work of organizing around positive policy change. Their brand of algorithmic outrage might rally clicks, but it does not build up alternatives to Trump World.
Once this kind of hyperventilating partisan media was the sole dominion of the Right with the likes of Fox News and Breitbart. Now, sadly, it looks like the future for centrist liberals. America has plenty of legitimate beef with the old, fussy mainstream media. But we’ll miss it when it’s scrapped for parts and replaced by the new algorithmically optimized online media machines.
Where art thou, Brian Williams?
