Winners & Losers | All-Star Edition
The Loyalty Enforcer & the Loyal Opposition.
Remember mix tapes? I had to explain to my 13-year-old that making a sweet ass mix for your special lady/dude meant finding the songs that literally no one had ever heard before. These were b-sides or demos you found in the dollar bin at Hastings, the record shop that no one shopped at. The more obscure, the better. Like, the band that played it might not have even heard it.
In some ways, I approach Winners & Losers with that strategy. I don’t want to give you the same old loser that everyone’s already been talking about. I want to dig a little deeper and surprise you, even just a little bit.
But not this week. This week I’m bowling right down the middle.
I’m not being lazy. But here’s the thing: I’m drafting this on Friday, Aug. 1. My choice has already been made. And yet there’s breaking news coming across the wire that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shuttering. And Ghislaine Maxwell has been transferred to a minimum security facility in Texas. And Trump’s name has been redacted from the Epstein files. And, and, and.
There will be more breaking news before the day is over. And before the weekend is over. And by the time you read this on Monday morning (thanks for reading, by the way!), we could be living in a different world.
All of that is to say, you can’t kick a football in this country without hitting a loser. So this week I’m picking a Winner and a Loser who are models of Winning & Losing. To go back to my terrible analogy of the mix-tape, this week’s winner is the breakthrough indie hit that everyone who is cool knows, and our loser is Two Princes on repeat (if you like that song and aren’t sick of hearing it 30 years after it first hit the airwaves, please send your complaints to russell.vought@America.gov).
In any case, they’re both hits that everyone’s heard, but one of them sucks. Without further ado, here are this week’s Winner & Loser.
Laura Loomer, Loser
If Donald Trump fires you, it’s because he doesn’t think you’re loyal. If he hires you, it’s because he thinks you are. This is one of the essential crises of our time. That may sound overblown, but think about it.
Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a disappointing jobs report. In other words, he found her to be unloyal because she reported facts that were embarrassing to him. Perhaps he will find someone willing to report lies to make him look good, which could throw our labor market into a kind of chaos. Perhaps he, himself, will start telling us just how great the job market is from now on.
It’s the move of an autocrat. I know these things are true because I said them. When you only hire people who will tell you what you want to hear, when you fear being embarrassed more than you fear destroying lives, you get Chernobyl. And we can see our entire system melting down before our very eyes.
That’s where Laura Loomer comes in. She is an influencer and far-right activist who considers herself Donald’s loyalty enforcer. In other words, she, too, believes that the only people qualified to run our government are people who love Donald Trump beyond their love of truth and justice.