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Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy [ [link removed] ].
When I launched my Substack, I fully anticipated that hate mail came with the lease. I’d already served a tour of duty years ago writing for Bleacher Report, back when I covered sports and, more specifically, the theatrical universe of professional wrestling.
Sports commentary is a fantastic sport of its own: high-octane argument over absolutely zero real-world consequences. Professional wrestling is even better because the outcomes are explicitly scripted. I once wrote a piece outlining eight structural changes WWE needed to make [ [link removed] ] to survive the decade, and readers fought me in the comment section like I’d proposed defunding their local church. But it was harmless. Nobody’s mortgage was riding on whether Michael Cole stayed on commentary.
Politics under Donald Trump’s second non-consecutive term often has that exact same fictional quality. The plot twists get so absurd you catch yourself waiting for the director’s cut or the end credits. Then he opens his mouth again, and reality hits: there is no writer’s room, this is actually happening, and the outcomes aren’t scripted for anyone’s protection.
I got a fresh reminder of this a few weeks ago when I noted, almost in passing, that Trump isn’t giving anybody a check. One sentence. Not even the main point of the piece. The outrage that single line generated was so disproportionate it bordered on flattering. “Your lying Ealy,” one reader informed me—and no, that possessive pronoun error is not a typo on my end—”when he gives us a check I dont want to see you cash it.” Another correspondent wrote in specifically to complain about my insistence on calling this Trump’s second non-consecutive term, informing me that nobody cares and that Trump certainly doesn’t either. My response: great, keep not caring, and I’ll keep using basic historical precision. The truth has never once required a public permission slip to exist. As for the first reader, all I could do was sit back and marvel at the sheer talent required to be so aggressively confident and functionally illiterate in the exact same sentence.
Here is the basic fiscal reality I keep having to repeat: the government does not give you anything. I’ve made this point before—in a piece on Bernie Sanders’s blind spot on race and class [ [link removed] ], in an essay on how predictably cruel the Big Beautiful Bill turned out to be [ [link removed] ], and most pointedly regarding AOC’s framing of Trump’s ballroom spending [ [link removed] ]. I’ll keep making it because it’s true, and because forgetting it is the exact mechanism by which people get conned into feeling grateful for money that was already theirs. A check from the government, on the off-chance one actually shows up, is just your own money completing a round trip. It is not executive benevolence. It is not Trump’s personal charity. It’s a receipt...
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