The Winning Message

Friday, September 4, 2026

This morning, for the first time in weeks, none of the stuff I looked through contained a headline about Abdul El-Sayed.  I think that disproves a theory I have been working on.  But it also proves something wonderful about the American people.

Let’s start with the theory I have been working on.  Donald J. Trump was elected the first time around on what would be called in professional wrestling circles “heal heat.”  That is to say he played the bad guy that everybody loved.  This earned him remarkable levels of media coverage.  The news was virtually overrun with “look what Trump did now” stories that gave him more media time than any candidate could ever hope to purchase.  My theory in progress has been that El-Sayed, who was receiving massive, and constant, media coverage was trying to run the same playbook – saying and doing ever more outrageous things to get the coverage.

If that is the case, given his greatly diminished media presence of late, it’s not working.  Now, it could be that Democrats have figured out he is an anchor around their neck and are trying to squelch coverage.  But even that is good news because even that tells us the strategy is not working.  The failure of the strategy in the El-Sayed case tells us something terribly important – it is not just about the amount of coverage, it is about the message being conveyed.

Even when Trump was pulling all that shock-faced coverage, the message that he put through it was MAGA.  It wasn’t “America stinks,” which is the message El-Sayed, and Dems in general actually, convey.  The message was “Let’s build something good together.”

The American people want to be led and they want to be led towards something good. Most importantly, they don’t want it handed to them – they want to participate; they want to earn it.  To borrow from the Gipper – Americans don’t want a hand out, they want a hand-up.

Which brings me to the Lindsey Clancy case.  It is the real life version of the analysis I did a while back of the latest Spider-Man movie.  The case exemplifies the trend in this nation that if you can cast yourself as a victim of some sort, it is license to do evil.  The people that nominated El-Sayed, or elected Mamdani, have bought into the trend.  They think themselves victimized, so they feel justified in trying to change the very fabric of the nation – from a nation of earners to a nation to takers.

What is forgotten in this trend is that doing wrong, yields wrongful fruit.  A peach tree planted from a bad seed may produce peaches quickly and for a season.  But it takes a good seed to create a tree that will bear good fruit for generations.  That which the presumed victim justifies only produces another victim who then feels justified in creating another victim in a never ending cycle of bad things happening to good people.

People have to learn this lesson over and over, and it is a hard lesson to learn.  But it seems apparent as El-Sayed fades into obscurity and Mamdani fails utterly in NYC, that we are learning it again.

Can I get an “AMEN!”