Gen Xers for Trump. Plus. . .

It’s Monday, November 18. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Peter Savodnik on Justine Bateman and why Gen X is moving right, Ben Kawaller meets Trump-AOC voters in the Bronx, and much more. 

But first: Eli Lake talks to the conservative lawyers who find Matt Gaetz “deplorable.” 

About Donald Trump’s construction of a cabinet for his second administration, one thing is clear: The president-elect is not choosing the path of least resistance. Trump now faces fights over four of his picks: Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Matt Gaetz. 

It is Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, who will likely have the roughest time getting confirmed. And with good reason: He was recently under a House ethics investigation over allegations he had sex with a minor, and reportedly showed nude photos of his sexual conquests to his colleagues in Congress. In other words, not an obvious choice to run the Justice Department. 

The choice of Gaetz for such an important job has outraged just about everyone. Liberal opponents of the president are beside themselves, of course. Several Republican senators have voiced their doubts. Also up in arms, as Eli Lake discovered in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, is the conservative legal establishment. At the annual meeting of The Federalist Society—the group that has trained and promoted so many conservative lawyers and judges, and with whom Trump worked so productively in his first term—Eli reports that the mood was “nauseous.” The FedSoc lawyers told Eli the pick was “deplorable,” “distasteful,” and “appalling.” No wonder that, as of last night, Polymarket puts his chances of getting confirmed at just 23 percent. 

Read Eli Lake’s full report on the Gaetz nomination and the reaction from the conservative lawyers of FedSoc: “Is Matt Gaetz’s Nomination Dead on Arrival?” 

The Case of Justine Bateman—And Why Gen X Broke for Trump

Which is the Trumpiest generation in America? No, it’s not the Boomers. It’s Generation X. They backed the Republican by a ten-point margin, according to one exit poll. That’s no surprise to Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik, a Gen Xer himself. This was the election where the American people decided they were fed up with being told what to do, and that, argues Peter, might be the defining feature of Gen X. 

“There was, about us, an all-pervasive don’t-give-a-shit quality, and it was reflected in our Ray-Bans, our irony, our apathy,” writes Peter. “Mostly, we wanted to be left alone—by our parents, by the sex ed counselors preaching abstinence, by Nancy Reagan telling us to ‘Just say no.’ We were, for the most part, ideologically committed to nothing.”

To make sense of these generational dynamics, Peter talks to fellow Gen Xer Justine Bateman. The former Family Ties star walked into a political firestorm when she came out swinging against wokeness just after the election. She talks to Peter about “decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years,” why she won’t say who she voted for, and why her generation has veered right. Read the full interview: “The Case of Justine Bateman—And Why Gen X Broke for Trump.” 

Ben Kawaller Meets the Bronx’s Trump-AOC Ticket Splitters 

You might think New York City is as blue as it gets. But this election, many parts of the city got redder, including the Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point represented by left-wing congressional Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

In 2020, Trump’s share of the vote here was around 15 percent; this year it grew to 25 percent. That led AOC to do some serious soul-searching, asking if any of her Instagram followers had voted for both her and the GOP candidate, and why.

The Free Press’s Ben Kawaller was curious to talk to these Trump/AOC backers, too. So he spent a recent afternoon in Hunts Point, where he met some split-ticket voters as well as others who explained why Kamala Harris didn’t perform as well with black and Latino residents as the old, white male Democrat who ran in 2020.

As Ben puts it, “What might look like a contradiction starts to make a good deal of psychological sense when you listen to people. Not everyone divides their political worldview into Team Red and Team Blue and picks a side.”

It’s a Ben Meets America postelection debrief. 

• Donald Trump’s team is planning a campaign of “maximum pressure” to coerce Tehran to drop its nuclear program and to force an end to the funding of its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere. The goal is to “bankrupt Iran as soon as possible,” one national security expert familiar with the Trump transition told the Financial Times. Read Niall Ferguson’s recent Free Press essay on the failure of the current administration’s Iran strategy: “Israel’s Iran Strike—and America’s Strategic Weakness.” 

• The Biden administration has authorized the use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine against Russia. U.S. officials said that they are likely to be used against Russian and North Korean forces in defense of Ukrainian gains in the Russian region of Kursk. The New York Times describes the decision as a “major change” in U.S. policy, but also says U.S. officials “do not believe that the decision will change the course of the war.” 

• President Joe Biden spent Sunday in the Amazon rainforest ahead of a G20 meeting in Rio de Janeiro this week. He gave a speech about climate change before wandering off into the jungle, and signed a proclamation designating November 17 as International Conservation Day. (The whole thing had a distinctly Survivor feel to it.) 

• Trump’s defense secretary nominee Peter Hegseth paid a woman who had accused him of sexual assault but denies he sexually assaulted her, according to a Washington Post investigation. The accuser filed a complaint in 2017 and was paid as part of a nondisclosure agreement because Hegseth feared the accusation would result in his immediate termination at Fox News. Trump says he is standing by his pick. 

• A few days after calling Donald Trump’s favorite fast food “poison,” RFK Jr. was photographed aboard the president-elect’s plane with a McDonald’s burger in his hand. Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services had the face of a man who’d really rather be eating something else—but he appears to have taken his MAGA hazing like a man. 

• In a hearing in Washington, D.C., today, a judge will decide whether investigative journalist Catherine Herridge will continue to be fined $800 per day for refusing to comply with a judicial order to reveal her sources. It’s an important case for press freedom, but in a bitter irony, important parts of the case may be held behind closed doors. Read Catherine Herridge in the Free Press: “Protecting Sources Is A Hill Worth Dying On.” 

• Iowa pollster Ann Selzer has announced that she is retiring from election polling to focus on “other ventures and opportunities.” Selzer—who had a reputation for being one of the best pollsters in the business—made headlines in the final days of the presidential race with a survey of the Hawkeye State that showed Kamala Harris winning. Was it an outlier, or a sign that the other polls were wrong and the Democrats were heading for a blowout win? Well, we all know the answer to that one. “Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist. So, I’m humbled,” wrote Selzer in her parting op-ed.

• Netflix livestreamed the fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul to 60 million households globally on Friday night, the streaming service has claimed. The undercard fight between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano was watched by 50 million households, making it the most watched professional women’s sporting event in U.S. history. The massive demand led to technical problems—and at one point, Netflix inadvertently showed Tyson’s bare butt. The streaming giant has big plans for future live sports coverage, so it urgently needs to figure out server capacity—and locker room etiquette. 

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman. 

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