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Elise Stefanik: The Cost of Selling One's Soul

Like a number of Republican members of Congress, Elise Stefanik is Ivy League educated and certainly sufficiently intelligent to know better than to jump in bed with the Felon's and the GOP's embrace of ignorance. Yet, due to seemingly blind ambition and a lack of any true moral compass, she went full MAGA and sold her soul to the Felon and his ugly regime.  Her congressional district covers much of the Adirondack Mountains region and surrounding areas in northern New York State. While conservative by New York State standards, the district is a far cry from the hollows of Appalachia (my family continues to own a summer home where I spent summers growing up in her district) where embracing ignorance is a badge of pride among many. Thus, as the Felon's approval rating has plummeted, winning reelection even in that district might have been an effort should Democrats nominate a strong candidate.  Cast aside by the Felon for a cabinet position, Stefanik decided to throw her hat in the ring for the GOP nomination to take on incumbent New York governor Democrat Kathy Hochul, a race that would have been an uphill battle for anyone so tied to MAGA.  Adding insult to injury, the Felon refused to endorse her, proving yet again that loyalty is a one-way street with the Felon.  Faced with the first polls showing Hochul nearly 20 points ahead of Stefanik, Stefanik has withdrawn from the gubernatorial race and has announced she will leave Congress in 2026. Stefanik is a cautionary lesson on the cost of selling one's soul to the Felon.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Stefanik's withdrawal from politics:

Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, was willing to be the team player with the stiff upper lip. But everyone has their limits.

After a series of public humiliations delivered to her by President Trump — his yanking of her nomination to serve as U.N. ambassador; his Oval Office love fest with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, during which the president undercut her; and the coup de grâce of his refusal to endorse her in the Republican primary for governor — Ms. Stefanik on Friday afternoon announced she’d had enough.

She was done with the governor’s race, for which she had raised more than $12 million from donors who may now be frustrated with her decision to pull out. And done with Congress altogether: She said she would not seek re-election next year.

Now, at war with Speaker Mike Johnson, privately livid at Mr. Trump and deeply frustrated with her job in Congress, it is not clear whether Ms. Stefanik even has any interest in finishing her term, although people close to her said she planned to stay until the end of her term.

To detractors, Ms. Stefanik’s shoddy treatment by the president amounted to karmic comeuppance for a Republican lawmaker who came to Congress as a Harvard-educated moderate but tacked unapologetically to the MAGA right when it suited her political purposes. They said she personified the opportunistic shape-shifting that gripped her party.

“My greatest disappointment is Elise Stefanik, who should know better,” Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, said in an interview last year, describing her as a one-time friend. “She went off the deep end.”

Her tumble from grace crystallized the limits of MAGA loyalty and the risks of building a political identity around Mr. Trump, who can turbocharge or torpedo a career — sometimes both. Once one of the president’s most stalwart defenders, Ms. Stefanik, who referred to herself as “ultra MAGA” and styled herself after Mr. Trump, ultimately found herself undermined by him and politically adrift.

Instead of seeking to rise in the House, Ms. Stefanik set her sights on serving in a second Trump administration. When every other member of House Republican leadership ran for speaker in 2023, she sat it out. Instead, she looked in the mirror and saw a cabinet secretary looking back.

“Resilience is one of my strengths,” she said in a brief interview last April, after the president withdrew her nomination to serve as U.N. ambassador. “We have bounced back pretty quick. The reality is almost everyone prominent in American politics has a twist and turn.”

At the time, people close to her said, Ms. Stefanik was able to convince herself she had been the victim of difficult political circumstances. Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson at the time were concerned about losing another seat in the House when the majority was already too slim to govern. Plus, Mr. Trump was privately telling her that he would reward her down the line with something much better. Her political future still looked bright.

In casting about for something else, Ms. Stefanik looked to the governor’s race. Winning a statewide race in New York was always going to be an uphill battle. But Ms. Stefanik viewed Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, as weak, and she thought she could enhance her own profile even if she only came within striking distance.

But without Mr. Trump’s endorsement, people who spoke to her said, the entire premise became ludicrous. And Mr. Trump, who famously hates to back a losing candidate, was holding out.

When the party transformed itself under Mr. Trump, Ms. Stefanik seemed to have no qualms about doing what it took to remain the face of its future. . . . . But things did not turn out exactly as planned.

Part of the strategy of her long-shot bid for governor was to make Mr. Mamdani the far-left face of the Democratic Party. On the campaign trail, she referred to him as a “jihadist,” the kind of incendiary moniker Mr. Trump favors. Given all that she had done to remain loyal to the president, Ms. Stefanik figured he would back her.

Mr. Trump did no such thing. When asked if he agreed with Ms. Stefanik that the mayor-elect was a “jihadist,” he responded: “No, I don’t. She’s out there campaigning, you know. You say things sometimes in a campaign.”

With Mr. Mamdani standing beside him, he added: “You really have to ask her about that. I met with a man who is a very rational person.”

Again, Stefanik should have known better but was blinded by ambition and a willingness to sacrifice decency.  Hopefully, her political career is dead going further into the future. 

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The Felon's Prime Time Rant: Derangement on Display

The Felon likes to accuse his opponents and liberals of suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome" as one of his many ways of denigrating others and spewing lies.  His prime time address this week showed so-called Trump derangement syndrome on display, but the one exhibiting derangement was the Felon himself as he lied and sought to shift blame for the Trump economy on Joe Biden and anyone and everyone rather than himself and his misguided policies. Contrary to the Felon's claims, respect for America is down, inflation is higher, the economy is shedding jobs, and some 22 million Americans are about to see their health insurance double or perhaps increase even more.  Yet in his usual malignant narcissist fashion, he simply could not bear to accept any responsibility for the results of his policies - including tariffs, which he called his favorite thing - and more or less insisted that Americans' own experience in grocery store checkout lines and higher utility bills were untrue. His denial of objective reality likely did little to appease anyone outside of the Kool-Aid drinking elements of MAGA world and should have disturbed Republicans in vulnerable districts.  Add to this his repeated falling asleep at White House meetings and the picture of a deranged individual becomes even more stark.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the disturbing spectacle:

The [Felon] president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.

When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years. (Why did he pick 1977 as a benchmark? Who knows. But he’s wrong.) He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.

But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.

In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy. . . . . But even by Trump’s standards, this was an unnerving display of fear. I can only imagine America’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran smiling with pleasure as they watched a president losing his bearings, berating his own people, and demanding that they absolve him of any blame when things get worse.

His rant contained no news, other than an example of his contempt for the U.S. military, whose loyalty he thinks he can purchase with a onetime $1,776 bonus check. This is projection: Trump has shown his willingness to be bought off with gold bars and trinkets, and he may think that the men and women of the armed forces are people of equally low character.

This was not a holiday address from the president of a great democracy to its citizens. This was a desperate tin-pot leader yelling into a microphone while cornered in his palace redoubt. Trump has been unraveling for weeks, and his speech tonight, like Trump himself, was unworthy of America and its people.

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Trump 2.0: America's Long Suicide Note

I, like I suspect many, have long wondered whether the Felon is a true Russian asset, merely compromised and subject to blackmail by Vladimir Putin, in awe of dictators he wants to emulate and become, or simply incompetent and subject to the influence of conspiracy theorists and right wing nutcases and white "Christian" nationalists.  Whatever the explanation, the reality is that in the national security and foreign policy realms, the Felon in so-called Trump 2.0 appears dedicated to weaken America in numerous ways.  The Felon has alienated allies and demonstrated that America cannot be trusted to honor its commitments, caused chaos in foreign trade and higher prices for American consumers, destroyed much of America's soft power by ending critical foreign aid programs and handing opportunities to China, and created chaos in segments of American industry (particularly agriculture and construction) by virtue of his Gestapo-like mass deportations.   Seemingly, the Felon's concept of "make America great again" boils down to promoting racism and white supremacy while pushing an agenda aimed at enriching the Felon and his billionaire friends.  Now, as a piece in The Atlantic reviews, national security is being further undermined.  Here are article highlights:

Last year, a team of American diplomats from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center traveled to two dozen countries and signed a series of memoranda. Along with their counterparts in places as varied as Italy, Australia, and Ivory Coast, they agreed to jointly expose malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran.

This past September, the Trump administration terminated these agreements. The center’s former head, James Rubin, called this decision “a unilateral act of disarmament,” and no wonder: In effect, the United States was declaring that it would no longer oppose Russian influence campaigns, Chinese manipulation of local politics, or Iranian extremist recruitment drives. Nor would the American government use any resources to help anyone else do so either.

The recent publication of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy showed that this decision was no accident. Unilateral disarmament is now official policy. Because—despite its name—this National Security Strategy is not really a strategy document. It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.

The views expressed in the document do not represent those of the entire U.S. government, the entire Republican Party, or even the entire Trump administration. The most noteworthy elements seem to come from a particular ideological faction, one that now dominates foreign-policy thinking in this administration and may well dominate others in the future.

The one genuinely new, truly radical element in this faction’s thinking is its absolute refusal to acknowledge the existence of enemies or to name any countries that might wish America ill. This is a major departure from the first Trump administration. The 2017 National Security Strategy spoke of creating an alliance against North Korea; noted that Russia is “using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to Europe, undermine transatlantic unity, and weaken European institutions and governments”; and observed that China is “using economic inducements and penalties, influence operations, and implied military threats” to bully others. The 2017 Trump policy team also observed a “geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order.”

The second Trump administration can no longer identify any specific countries that might wish harm to the United States, or any specific actions they might be taking to do harm. A decade’s worth of Russian cyberwarfare, political intervention, and information war inside the United States goes unmentioned. Russian acts of sabotage across Europe, Russian support for brutal regimes across the Sahel region of Africa, and, of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine aren’t important either. None of these Russian acts of aggression gets a mention except for the war in Ukraine, which is described solely as a concern for Europeans.

Even more strangely, China appears not as a geopolitical competitor but largely as a trading rival. It’s as if Chinese hacking and cyberwar did not exist, as if China were not seeking to collect data or infiltrate the software that controls U.S. infrastructure. China’s propaganda campaigns and business deals in Africa and Latin America, which could squeeze out American rivals, don’t seem to matter much either. The new document makes only a vague allusion to a Chinese economic presence in Latin America and to a Chinese threat to Taiwan.

Other rivals and other potential sources of conflict get no mention at all. North Korea has disappeared. Iran is described as “greatly weakened.” Islamist terrorism is no longer worth mentioning.

[I]f America has no rivals and expects no conflicts, then neither the military nor the State Department nor the CIA nor the counterintelligence division of the FBI needs to make any special preparations to defend Americans from them. The document reflects that assumption and instead directs the U.S. national-security apparatus to think about “control over our borders,” “natural disasters,” “unfair trading practices,” “job destruction and deindustrialization,” and other threats to trade. Fentanyl gets a mention. So, rather strangely, do “propaganda, influence operations, and other forms of cultural subversion”—although there is no indication of who might be using propaganda and cultural subversion against us or how it might be countered, especially because the Trump administration has completely dismantled all of the institutions designed to do so.

But what if this document was not written for the people and institutions that think about national security at all? Maybe it was instead written for a highly ideological domestic audience, including the audience in the Oval Office. The authors have included ludicrous but now-familiar language about Trump having ended many wars, a set of claims as absurd and fanciful as his FIFA Peace Prize. The authors also go out of their way to dismiss all past American foreign-policy strategies, presumably including those pursued by the first Trump administration, as if only this administration, under this near-octogenarian president, can see the world clearly.

Finally, although they do not name any states that might threaten America, the authors do focus on one enemy ideology. It is not Chinese communism, Russian autocracy, or Islamic extremism but rather European liberal democracy. This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law.

Not coincidentally, these are the same people whom the MAGA ideologues hate and dislike at home, the same people who are fighting to prevent MAGA from redefining the United States as a white ethnostate, who oppose the corruption of America’s democratic institutions, and who object when Trump’s friends, family, and tech allies redirect U.S. foreign policy to benefit their private interests.

European and American liberal democracy is so dangerous to their project, in fact, that the MAGA ideologues seem to be planning to undermine it. They don’t want to meddle in anyone’s internal politics anywhere else on the planet: . . . . The glaring exception to this rule is in Europe. Here, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” language that implies that the U.S. will intervene to do so.

According to reporting by Defense One, an earlier version of the National Security Strategy said that U.S. foreign policy should even seek to support illiberal forces in at least four countries—Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Austria—to persuade them to leave the European Union. For all four, this would be an economic catastrophe; for the rest of the continent, this would be a security catastrophe, because a damaged EU would struggle to counter Russian hybrid warfare and Chinese economic pressure. If the union breaks up, there would also no longer be a European Commission capable of regulating American tech companies, and perhaps that is the point.

At the same time, the document’s authors seem to derive their hatred of Europe from a series of false perceptions—or, perhaps, from a form of projection. The authors fear, for example, that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European” very soon. Because they are presumably not talking about non-European Turkey and Canada, the clear implication is that countries such as France and Germany have so much immigration from outside Europe that they will be majority nonwhite. And yet, it is the United States, not Europe, that is far more likely to become “majority minority” in the coming years.  

The security strategy also talks, bizarrely, about Europe being on the verge of “civilizational erasure,” . . . . In multiple indices, after all—health, happiness, standard of living—European countries regularly rank higher than the United States. Compared with Americans, Europeans live longer, are less likely to be living on the streets, and are less likely to die in mass shootings.

The only possible conclusion: The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out. Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us.

Some elements of this story are familiar. Americans have overestimated, underestimated, or misunderstood their rivals before. And when they do, they make terrible mistakes. In 2003, many American analysts sincerely thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. During the Cold War, many analysts believed that the Soviet Union was stronger and less fragile than it proved to be. But I am not sure whether there has ever been a moment like this one, when the American government’s most prominent foreign-policy theorists have transferred their domestic obsessions to the outside world, projecting their own fears onto others. As a result, they are likely to misunderstand who could challenge, threaten, or even damage the United States in the near future. Their fantasy world endangers us all.

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Trump Widens the Breach With Common Decency

The Felon has long been an ongoing example of moral bankruptcy who goes through life with no regard for common decency.  Despite this, evangelicals have flocked to his standard, motivated by promises of special rights and the normalization of outright racism and bigotry that are a constant undercurrent of the Felon's regime.  When class and decency are required, one can depend on the Felon to follow a different path and state horrible things about people, revel in cruelty, and always somehow turn  everything into about himself.  In the wake of the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, rather than take the high road or even say nothing, the Felon showed his true ugly self. Rather than mumble benign platitudes, the Felon mocked Reiner and his death, demonstrating yet again that he time and time again always rejects decency and instead embraces ugliness.  Surprisingly, some Republicans and some self-styled evangelical leaders condemned the Felon's crude and insensitive statements. The Felon's response? He doubled down on his ugly remarks and showed us all who he really is. In the process, the Felon again did damage to the social fabric of the nation.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the ugly situation:

When Rob Reiner died violently alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, yesterday, a familiar thing happened in American public life: a window opened.

It opened not because Reiner, a vocal liberal, was universally beloved or politically neutral, but because his work occupied shared cultural space. The National Review writer Jeffrey Blehar quoted Mary Katherine Ham, another conservative writer, in an article lauding the director and actor: Reiner was a “VHS King”—a filmmaker whose movies fused themselves to childhoods, relationships, and formative memories. The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, When Harry Met Sally—even people who disagreed with Reiner’s politics had lived inside worlds he helped create. His death therefore moved beyond private tragedy into collective recognition about a set of shared reference points. That is what opens the window: common memory, common shock, common vulnerability.

When the country confronts something as horrible as the Reiners’ killing, it is destabilizing. When the victim is someone we feel we knew or whose work helped us know ourselves, the moment may be more so. These breaches present leaders with an opportunity to stay quiet. Let the poets and the priests and rabbis take over. Leave room for the fan whose perfect tribute captures the nation. If the leader can’t help but comment, the best they can offer is containment. In crisis psychology, people calm when they sense boundaries around chaos. In today’s world, what that looks like is a leader who acknowledges grief even if it’s not their own, or who affirms that all is not chaos when a major rupture happens.

During a weekend that also included a deadly shooting at Brown University and a massacre at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, the country was already shaken. Containment was needed more than ever.

What was not called for—in the moment, in the psychology handbook, or in the traditions of the American presidency—was Donald Trump’s response.

On Truth Social today, the president mocked Reiner, suggesting that his death was the result of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—a “mind-crippling disease,” he called it, suggesting, obviously without evidence, that Reiner’s criticism of Trump had invited his death. Trump did something worse than mock. He blamed a murdered man for his own murder, while the Reiners’ own son sits in custody on suspicion of killing them. Trump used a family tragedy against a dead man.

This was not merely irresponsible, nor simply another example of norm-breaking rhetoric. It actively widened the breach. He didn’t affirm human boundaries; he punctured them to display dominance. Grief became a plaything. Shock became his permission.

It was not just what Trump said, but what he refused to do. Presidents have unique tools. They can slow the emotional spin of events. They can affirm shared moral grammar: that the dead are off-limits, that suffering warrants restraint, that power bows—briefly—to loss, that no act by a political foe can erase those truths, that leaders uphold standards. Trump used none of those tools.

Trump’s defenders often describe him as a “daddy” figure—strong, unconcerned with elite expectations. Accept that framing, and Trump’s failure in this moment becomes larger, not smaller. . . . A parent signals safety, a backstop. Trump instead signaled that nothing is protected, and no shared floor exists.

In moments when the country looks up for orientation, Trump does not steady the room. He destabilizes it. He does not merely break norms; he erodes the conditions that make shared meaning possible. Where Reiner built a national cultural space—worlds we could all inhabit together—Trump dissolves it. He takes the scaffolding we’ve constructed and sets it on fire.

Rather than setting a tone of decency for the country, the Felon revels in pettiness and mistreatment of perceived opponents, deliberate cruelty towards undocumented immigrants, and the murder of those on alleged "drug boats" - still no evidence has been produced -  and moral degeneracy in general. 

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Could Indiana Prove to Be An Inflection Point?

Since the Felon's political rise, the main attributes of Republicans have been cowardice and willing self-prostitution to the Felon. With few exceptions, threats and fears of a primary challenge have been far more important to Republicans than supporting decency and morality and rejecting previously unknown levels of corruption and grifting on shocking levels.  When the Felon has said "jump" these spineless individuals have basically said "how high?"  Thus, the Texas GOP passed a redistricting plan and some other red states are likely to follow suit. That is unless they take inspiration from the Indiana GOP which defied the Felon and voted "no" to a forced redistricting plan aimed at maintaining GOP control of the House of Representatives in order to protect the Felon.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the Indiana GOP's vote of defiance and whether it may represent an inflection point where Republicans will put the good of their state and/or the country ahead of protecting the Felon from accountability.  Predictably, many of these Republicans who voted "no" have experienced bomb threats and other attacks by elements of the MAGA base - things that only underscore the Mafia-like aspects of the Felon's ugly regime.  Hopefully, other Republicans will be emboldened to regrow a spine. Here are article highlights:

In rejecting yesterday a redistricting plan backed by [the Felon] President Donald Trump, Indiana’s Republican-controlled senate did not merely deny Republicans two new U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections. They also engaged in a mass revolt against the [Felon] president. The stakes of their defiance reach far beyond the midterms. This vote was possibly the most significant blow yet against the authoritarian ambitions that have defined Trump’s second term.

The significance of Indiana’s noncompliance lies not in the specifics of what was refused—attempts to gerrymander electoral maps are hardly unprecedented, even though a mid-decade battle violates norms—but in the act of refusal itself. Trump’s authoritarian project relies on the cultlike hold he has over his party. Republicans have come to understand that the cost of defying Trump is the death of their political career. Trump has proved time and again that he will go to any lengths to destroy his intra-party critics, even if doing so harms the party.

That method was on vivid display in Indiana. Trump expected the state to go along with his plans to redraw its map to help his party in the midterms. When the state’s Republicans held back their support, Trump and his allies went on the attack.

Indiana Republican legislators faced bomb threats and intimidation in their homes (such as “swatting,” phone calls, and the like)—a climate of fear, my colleague Russell Berman reports, unlike anything the state has seen.

Heritage Action delivered a Mafia-like threat, as high-minded scholars apparently do these days: “President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.”

This kind of pressure typically bends targets to Trump’s will. What politician is willing to sacrifice their career or their family’s safety for a single act of defiance?

Yet the spines of Indiana Republicans stiffened where so many others snapped. One reason for this may be that the state contains an unusually strong concentration of Trump-skeptical former governors. Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence remain influential in the state, despite having given up national ambitions by failing to submit fully to Trump. Daniels praised the vote as an act of “principled courageous leadership.”

Indiana’s Republicans also demonstrated strength in numbers. Trump employs the psychology of a schoolyard bully who isolates and targets victims one by one. By engineering a 31–19 vote, Indiana’s Republicans worked together to ensure that no single legislator could be blamed for defying Trump.

Trump’s power has long relied on his political immortality—his seemingly mystical bond with the party faithful and his phoenix-like return to the White House. Indiana’s Republicans seem emboldened by evidence of the [Felon's] president’s political decline. Trump has done almost nothing to maintain the coalition that elected him last year, and almost all of his major moves have cost him support: a wildly aggressive immigration agenda, inflationary tariffs, flamboyant corruption, and a toxic mega-bill that paired benefits for the rich with cuts to the poor.

Political reality is settling in. Last month’s off-year election drove home that the electoral coalition that showed up in November 2024 is gone. Republicans seem resigned to losing the U.S. House next year, which dulls the appeal of violating norms to protect a doomed majority.

Trump’s control over the future of the party is also now in doubt. . . . Two opposing forces have dominated the first year of Trump’s second presidency. The first is a domestic agenda that has generated an intense backlash. The second is a series of steps designed to blunt the impact of that backlash. Most of Trump’s authoritarian moves—prosecuting his enemies, giving his allies legal carte blanche, pressuring media owners to give him friendlier coverage—are meant to create a kind of wall to hold back the waves of public anger brought forth by his policies. His efforts to voter-proof the House map are a key part of that defense.

The wall and the backlash have risen in tandem, the latter faster than the former. And now, for the first time, it seems the wall itself is beginning to crumble.

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Why Women Are Thirsting Over "Heated Rivalry"

Today I am taking a break from politics in this post. I love to read and when not reading about history. working on my ancestry and following politics, I enjoy reading gay romance novels.  I have quite a number of such novels -  I am boxing up some of them to give to the local LGBT center library and find them a nice diversion from work and day to day matters. Plus, they offer a glimpse at committed same sex love rarely depicted in the mainstream media or in movies. In reality, many of our gay friends are in long term relationships (now marriages) that have lasted decades.  Much more than mere sex is involved.   Surprisingly, many these novels are written by women and many, many of these authors have large female followers.  What is equally surprising is how these women write so convincingly about the emotions (and physical aspects) of same sex relationships and that, like in any love story, there is much more than merely a physical connection.  Alex in Red, White and Royal Blue states at one point, "I fell in love with a person and that person is a man."  I read "Red, White and Royal Blue" before Amazon turned it into one of its most popular streaming movies (a sequel is in the works).  I also read "Heated Rivalry" when it first came out and well before HBO turned the book into a series (a second season has been announced).  Like the novels themselves, both the movie and series have very large women followers.  A piece in Harper's Bazaar looks to this phenomenon and what might be attracting female viewers and fans.  Here are article highlights:

“Why the fuck did you think it was okay to sext me before the game?!” It’s not exactly Shakespeare, but it’s a line that carries a lot of weight in the world of Heated Rivalry—or, as it has become known on my social feed, the “gay hockey show.”

Heated Rivalry is based on Rachel Reid’s steamy Game Changers novel series, and was adapted for TV by Jacob Tierney for Canadian streamer Crave. (In the US, it’s streaming on HBO Max.) The show follows the story of two closeted hockey players—shy Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and arrogant Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie)—who find themselves embroiled in a career-spanning secret situationship. They might be rivals on the ice, but in the bedroom? Oh, they’re playing for the same team.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out why gay viewers like me are drawn to this show. There are handsome jocks with eight-pack abs and supernaturally round asses, plus there’s the enduring fantasy of the locker room hookup. And underneath it all, a relationship where at least one party is closeted is actually a very relatable queer experience. Yet what I find even more fascinating is how many women I’ve seen posting about Heated Rivalry—an intensely homoerotic show that is defined by relationships between men. This was surprising to me at first, but when I started thinking more deeply about the state of (heterosexual) relationship affairs, it made much more sense.

[I]in the 2000s, I grew accustomed to seeing a certain type of gay man on screen. From Sex and the City to The Devil Wears Prada, Ugly Betty to Desperate Housewives, we were usually in a sidekick role. The “gay best friend” tended to be well-dressed, armed with witty asides, and, crucially, desexualised. In the 2010s, LGBTQ+ representation increased rapidly. But even then, the prevailing discourse around Oscar-winning films like Call Me By Your Name and Bohemian Rhapsody was that they were coy and sterile when it came to physical intimacy.

Heated Rivalry is significant because of its explicit, in-your-face sexiness. Toronto-based TV critic Kaiya Shunyata writes that, while there have been notable exceptions, like Fellow Travelers and Interview with the Vampire, the majority of queer shows today still represent “quaint” and “safe” versions of our sexuality, with creators “forcing their protagonists into a sexless box that stifles the impact these shows could have on an industry that grows more conservative each year.” Heated Rivalry flies in the face of that. And the fact that it was released the same week as Pillion—the “sub-dom rom-com” film starring a leather-clad Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling—makes me think gay sex is undeniably capturing the zeitgeist.

This shift is obviously thrilling for gay men like me, who have seldom seen our experiences (and fantasies) on screen. But what's interesting is that it's alluring for women, too. In conversations with friends and followers in my DMs, the overwhelming draw of Heated Rivalry is its eroticism. Put simply, every female fan I spoke to thinks the show is really hot. If you’re surprised by this, it might interest you to know that almost half of gay male porn is actually consumed by women. Sexuality is, of course, varied (and I don’t profess to be an expert) but a friend of mine told me that she likes gay porn because it feels escapist—unlike straight porn, which is mostly made by men and is often degrading (or violent) toward women. It might sound diminutive to compare Heated Rivalry to porn, but it’s worth noting that the sex between Shane and Ilya seems to equally satisfy both of them. And this might be particularly appealing to women when depictions of straight sex are so skewed toward one partner’s pleasure.

Still, Heated Rivalry is about more than sex. Outside of the bedroom, Shane and Ilya treat each other almost like brothers, alternating between shit-talking, teasing, and unspoken love. Then, in episode three, we meet another couple: Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) and Kip Grady (Robbie G.K.). Their relationship has a totally different dynamic—economically and culturally. Scott is a closeted hockey player and Kip is an out gay man who works in a smoothie shop.

While Shane and Ilya are able to switch their relationship on and off again with unnerving precision, and text each other as “Jane” and “Lily,” Scott and Kip’s relationship is more frantic and all-consuming.

As a gay man, some of these dynamics feel a little closer to home. But I wonder if, similar to the sex scenes, there is a sense of escapism going on for female viewers. It’s no secret that we’re living in an era of heteropessimism, where many women are feeling frustrated and unfulfilled by the interactions they’re having with men. . . . . . In her now-viral piece for British Vogue, Joseph found that apathy toward men among young women was so intense that “even partnered women will lament men and heterosexuality.” Instead, “it’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single.” This, she concludes, is another “nail in the coffin of a centuries-old heterosexual fairytale that never really benefitted women to begin with.”

These unfulfilling gender roles play out in All Her Fault, a Peacock drama starring Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning. In this show, which just became Peacock’s biggest series launch ever, the mothers are all stressed, over-stretched, and trying to “do it all.” Their millennial husbands pay lip-service to equality while not picking up after themselves and complaining when they have to “babysit” their own kids. And this isn’t to say that heteronormative roles don’t impact queer sex and relationships (they totally do) but maybe Heated Rivalry is so appealing for women because, so far at least, it is happening outside of these frustrating male-female dynamics?

I noticed something similar in the fandom for Red, White & Royal Blue—a 2023 gay romance starring Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine, based on the novel by Casey McQuiston. In the film, which resembles a Hallmark movie, the son of the US president and a fictional British prince become embroiled in a secret relationship. . . . . Despite the difference in tone, there are key similarities with Heated Rivalry. Both are based on erotically charged novels by female authors, which follow a high-profile closeted gay relationship between gorgeous, sculpted men. And the fevered female reaction to them suggests that, for some women, having more distance from gay relationships makes them a more appealing fantasy. In the case of Red, White & Royal Blue, I think it’s also about seeing men treat each other with a level of sensitivity and vulnerability—because in the real world, society at large still doesn’t encourage men to communicate like that.

As Heated Rivalry continues, we’re edging closer toward emotional realities that risk breaking the fantasy. In episode three, Scott and Kip’s relationship bears more resemblance to what it’s actually like dating someone who doesn't want to be seen with you in public. . . . . And for the first time when they’re off the ice, we see them becoming jealous, insecure, and competitive with each other.

At the start, Shane and Ilya’s relationship represents a dream-like mixture of casualness and intensity. They have endless hot sex and deep affection, but without the emotional labour, the sense of obligation, or the domesticity that, for a lot of women in particular, can make being with men feel so unequal. But as Heated Rivalry goes on, it feels like the show is guiding us toward the truth that no type of relationship or arrangement—not even “no strings” sex between handsome, ripped hockey players—can completely shield you from getting hurt. It’s the hottest fantasy, but only because it’s a fallacy.

Personally, I hope these types of shows and movies continue. They show more truth about same sex relationships - including that there's more than just sex involved.  No doubt the Christofascists are not pleased since these books, movies and shows destroy the one dimensional bogey men that these religious fanatics  construct to define all gays.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty