Story at a Glance
• Our political system is shaped by left versus right than by vested interests that capture whichever party holds power, which is why policies with overwhelming public support so rarely become law.
• Republicans lost both chambers of Congress, as the strategy their leadership bet on largely failed. Notably, voters ranked government corruption as the most important factor in their vote.
• Days later, Calley Means, who led MAHA implementation at the White House until October, went on Joe Rogan and laid out how a handful of former lobbyists who controlled the policy process blocked popular MAHA reforms while advancing the priorities of the industries paying their firms. Hours after it aired, Trump announced the chief of staff he named was out.
• Much of what he described is in the public record: the executive order shielding glyphosate, the administration’s brief that helped Bayer win immunity at the Supreme Court, the push for fruit-flavored vapes that preceded Marty Makary’s exit, the reversal on “gas station heroin,” and the record revenues of the lobbying firms tied to the chief of staff.
• Holding MAHA back “until after the midterms” was the same advice that cost Trump the 2020 election, when his advisers agreed the COVID policies were wrong but refused to “rock the boat” before the vote.
• The internet has broken the top-down messaging that once let a small group decide what the public cared about. This election (along with the data center revolt) showed voters are increasingly identifying the problems they feel matter independent of media messaging
• In this article, I will review what Calley revealed, why it reflects a structural problem in both parties rather than a single administration, and what I feel is the best path forward available to us now.
Three different views are often cited to describe our political system:
• Various factions have sinister agendas, and because those agendas are so harmful, it is vital to support the side opposing them even if you don’t agree with all of its positions.
• The same donor interests own both sides and constantly divert our attention to divisive topics so that neither side ever comes together on the major issues almost everyone outside the donor class supports.
• The nature of power and government causes vested interests and factions to emerge that do more and more to advance their interests at the public’s expense (particularly as government grows larger and larger).
For most of my life (especially since starting this newsletter and having numerous insiders share their experiences with me), rather than seeing these as mutually exclusive, I’ve believed all three are at work. For example:
• At every scale of government I’ve seen the inner workings of (e.g., an HOA, a small activist movement, a small business, a university, a small town, a city, a state, the national government, and many levels of the healthcare system), no effective mechanism existed to prevent waste, fraud, abuse, or corruption, and the people managing the money did not own it (so they had nothing to lose if it was misspent). As a result, people pocketed benefits they should not have, overpriced, poor-quality, or unnecessary work was done, and the solution was always to raise more revenue (e.g., higher taxes or HOA dues) rather than fix the actual problem. Likewise, competence at a role is very different from competence at advancing within a system, so you frequently find incompetent or emotionally underdeveloped people wielding far more power than is appropriate for them.
Note: a major reason this thrives is information asymmetry, as it takes a lot of time and work to expose even one small example of corruption or mismanagement (and doing so invites an immense amount of pushback), so most people never learn what is occurring or what it directly costs them. One thing I am very hopeful for is that AI will make it possible to breach this barrier, since provided the data is made accessible to it, AI can rapidly and impartially show everyone what is happening.
• I also concluded early on that game theory dictated all these parties preying on the public would adopt niches that hurt the public but did not threaten each other. So when an absurd policy is pushed (e.g., treating every infectious disease as a deficiency of vaccines), I frequently see many different interests each getting their slice of the pie at our expense, whereas whenever a pro-human policy is put forward, it’s like shaking a beehive, as so many different parties emerge to stop their grift from being threatened. This, for example, is why an unhealthy food system (and the massive healthcare costs it creates) is not only tolerated but subsidized, as while that spending is bankrupting the country and hence seems like something the government would never accept, so many industries profit from it that they are all incentivized to keep the food status quo in place.
Watching this play out again and again is extremely depressing and frustrating (to the point many inevitably become black-pilled and want to give up on everything). However, I also always try to clearly distinguish between “impossible” and “difficult but possible,” and much of what I’ve done here was built on watching decades of attempts to make things better fail and using those failures as guidance for finding what can nonetheless have a real chance of working. Put differently, the way I avoid falling into negativity and hopelessness (despite an overwhelming flood of frustrating and tragic events) is to stay focused on results and be grateful for each thing that happens (particularly the ones I had long felt were “impossible”).
With that context, Calley Means recently gave a very poignant interview on Joe Rogan about MAHA’s first two years in the White House, where he laid out the critical policies with immense public support (and backing within the administration and much of the government) that, again and again, lobbyists working through Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (and a few others whose firms profited immensely) torched, including things Trump directly supported. His account matches the details insiders shared with me over the last two years. Furthermore, as Calley noted, this problem is not unique to the Trump administration, as while Republicans were heading toward losing the midterms (after following the terrible strategy the lobbyists had convinced them was vital to “win the midterms”), those same lobbyists were already shifting to the Congressional Democrats.
None of this is new. For example, over a decade ago, a short online campaign (and a great Youtube clip) concisely showed that the chance of a bill passing has essentially no relationship to its public support, but is instead largely determined by what economic elites and the interests able to hire lobbyists want, since bribery is effectively legal in America:
https://open.substack.com/pub/amidwesterndoctor/p/why-washington-ignores-what-90-of
