Millions of suckers

The Bulwork’s Tim Miller watches Newsmax so you don’t have to. And it’s much, much worse than you think:

Since the glorious defeat of Donald Trump, I had been ensconced in my cozy coastal elite Twitter bubble, only privy to the bursts of Sidney Powell and Lin Wood crazy when it inserted itself in my feed. So when Ben Smith fed the blue check tigers this juicy morsel about the rise of Chris Ruddy and Newsmax, I was shook.

Newsmax’s prime-time ratings, which averaged 58,000 before Election Day, soared to 1.1 million afterward for its top shows.

Wait, seriously? A million people?

That’s a boost of 20x over the network’s pre-election ratings. To put it another way, Newsmax, which Nielsen only started tracking this past summer, went overnight from having programming that topped out at 1 percent the size of Fox’s biggest show (Tucker Carlson Tonight) to about 20 percent its size.

The demand side of the conservative media curve was speaking. They want Coup Theatre News and they want it now.

I wanted to find out what these folks were being told, so I committed myself to hours upon hours of viewing. You may think you have a sense for what is happening on The Max, but I promise you it is much weirder, more alarming, and more debased than you can imagine. Here’s some of what I saw:

The president’s campaign lawyer saying that a former Trump official should be executed.

A host saying that Biden’s election would bring a war between the races and that Barack Hussein Obama is a “reprobate” who is “pimping” a book.

Hosts and guests suggesting several times an hour that Republican state legislatures should overturn the will of the people to keep Trump in power.

Fantastical stories of millions of votes being dropped off by tow trucks in the dead of night after nationwide blackouts.

The term “ballot harvesting” bandied about indiscriminately.

An endless stream of Lionel Hutz-level legal analysis.

And that was just one day in the life of Uncut Kraken.PodcastJonathan V. Last on the Politics of Paranoia

The cast of characters who appear on Newsmax is so random that you might be tempted to describe it as a Political Star Wars Bar but that would be unfair to the Mos Eisley cantina. I saw Dinesh D’Souza. Dick Morris’s shiny dentures. The Gorka. Random kids from Twitter. Rudy, Rudy, and more Rudy. Blago. John Gizzi. Lots of blonde ladies. Broadway Joe.

A few personal disclosures before we journey into this heart of darkness:

Chris Ruddy, who owns and runs Newsmax, is a South Florida spinner of yarns who bought me a few fancy lunches during the Jeb! campaign, when he thought I might have Sean Spicer’s job at the White House podium one day.

Sean Spicer was my boss at the RNC and has been to my home.

John Bachman had me on his show a time or three back in the day.

I would guess with a high level of confidence that all of these gentlemen know that Donald Trump lost. Spicer said as much on November 5 before Newsmax realized just how much juice they could get out of the scam. Ruddy openly told the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner that he saw a business opportunity in providing wall-to-wall election fraud fanfic.

What these characters are doing is exploiting Trump Nation’s need to believe that their great, nectarine idol is unbreakable and that the only way he could “lose” is if people who they hate—the Deep State, Big Tech, Antifa, the media, black people—are conspiring against him.

So here is the dangerous story they are being told—minute by agonizing minute.

I urge you to click over and read the whole thing. It’s is mind-bogglingly surreal and outrageous, s if QAnon got its own network or the Heaven’s Gate cult had a media company. It’s both hilarious and terrifying at the same time, kind of like a Jordan Peele movie for Trumpers. You simply won’t believe it.

Miller concludes with this, which I enjoyed:

I can’t believe this, but I’m back on the pipe, lured in by Sean Spicer booking Matt Gaetz because honestly, whenever you get two superstars like this on channel 1072, you have have a chance to see some magic.

Gaetz has been brought on to float the next step in the Dumb & Dumber “So You’re Telling Me There’s A Chance” Coup should the state legislature cucks not of the testicular fortitude to steal the election like Dinesh D’Souza commands: the idea that Congress might decide not to certify the Electoral College result when they gavel into session in January.

“Just today, Gaetz says, “I’ve talked to Republicans in the House and Senate and there is an interest in looking into these irregularities to force a debate in Congress about whether to certify these states’ electors.”

Which Republicans did he talk to? That’s close-hold information, obviously. But this last ditch effort to keep the Orange God King in power is a real possibility. Trust Matt on this.

He then floats the idea that some “trucks that have gone missing with ballots and then may have appeared in Pennsylvania.”

This could be the lead that breaks the case wide open!

Spicer then brings up the myth that Pennsylvania stopped counting votes on election night at 9:00 p.m. and unveils this chart—which President Trump would show during his wheels-off Facetime speech the next day:

What could possibly explain that line, Spicer asks?

I don’t know, Sean, maybe Milwaukee releasing its vote count at the end of the night just like they do every freaking election year.

Which you would know.

BECAUSE WE WORKED FOR A WISCONSIN REPUBLICAN TOGETHER YOU HACK.

Sorry. It’s been a long 24 hours. That wasn’t me. That was The Max talking.

Anyway, this prompts Gaetz to fire off three minutes of election fraud gibberish: Ballot laundering scheme! “Urban core!” Ballots “willed into existence.” “Bad ballots” were “commingled with ballots that were lawfully cast.” There is a pool of “polluted ballots.”

Having done his duty, Gaetz departs and Spicer brings on Jordan Sekulow, a member of Trump’s legal team and the son of longtime Republican lawyer Jay Sekulow, who was one of Trump’s impeachment lawyers.

Sekulow fils says he thinks there’s a “very good chance the outcome changes” thanks to their case that would disenfranchise  every single person who voted absentee in the state of Wisconsin because something something signature matching.

“Very good” is doing a lot of work there, obviously, but I couldn’t help but thinking that a person could make a lot of money betting with these people.

That’s a thing, by the way. One of the footnotes to this election is that betting markets continued to take action on the outcome of the election even after the polls closed and there was an entire universe of suckers out there betting that Trump would win even days after the election.

When I saw those betting lines unfolding in real time, I couldn’t understand them. How could someone watching the election returns think that it was smart to bet cash-money on Trump, even as he lost state after state.

And how could tens of thousands of Americans be pilfered to the tune of $170 million dollars to fight an election that was already over?

But my time with The Max has given me a pretty clear explanation.

There’s a sucker born every minute. Maybe even a couple million of them.

That’s Newsmax’s business model. And it’s working out pretty well for them.