Tag: real thing

How Donald Trump Became Unbeatable

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Not too long ago, Donald Trump looked finished. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and a poor Republican showing in the 2022 midterms, the GOP seemed eager to move on from the former president. The post–Trump era had supposedly begun.

Just one week after the midterms, he entered the 2024 race, announcing his candidacy to a room of bored-looking hangers-on. Even his children weren’t there. Security had to pen people in to keep them from leaving during his meandering speech.

Today, thanks to Trump’s dominant performance in South Carolina, the Republican primary is all but over. Trump’s margin was so comfortable that the Associated Press called the race as soon as polls closed. How did we get here? How did Trump go from historically weak to unassailable?

I talk with Republican-primary voters in focus groups every week, and through these conversations, I’ve learned that the answer has as much to do with Trump’s party and his would-be competitors as it does with Trump himself. Most Republican leaders have profoundly misread their base in this moment.

The other candidates hoped to be able to defeat Trump even as they accommodated his behavior and made excuses for his criminality. They even said they would support his reelection. By doing so, they established a permission structure for Republican voters to return to Trump, all but ensuring his rise.

My focus groups over the past few years can be seen as a travelogue through the GOP’s journey back to Trump. Three key themes emerged that help explain why Trump’s opponents failed to gain traction.

First, you can’t beat something with nothing. The Republican field didn’t offer voters anything new.

Nikki Haley and Mike Pence cast themselves as avatars of the pre-Trump GOP. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy did their best to imitate Trump, presenting themselves as younger and more competent stewards of the same MAGA agenda. None of them offered a viable alternative to Trump; instead, they spent their resources trying not to anger his supporters.

But Republican voters don’t want Reagan Republicanism. Old-school conservatives may pine for a return to balanced budgets, personal responsibility, and American leadership in the world (guilty). But a greater share of Republican voters prefer an isolationist foreign policy and candidates who promise to punish their domestic enemies.

Read: Nikki Haley’s endgame

“The feds, both parties, the elites … want everything to go back to the way it was before Trump got elected,” said Bret, a two-time Trump voter from Georgia. “And that would be the wrong direction, in my opinion.”

And voters aren’t interested in Trump-lite when they can have the real thing. Trump’s supporters see in him a leader who’s willing to fight for them. No other candidate proved they could do that better than Trump.

“We need a man that is strong as hell, a brick house,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from South Carolina, in May 2023. “He is that man.”

Larry, an Iowa Republican, called Trump “a disruptor. In the business world, you bring in a disruptor when everybody’s stuck in groupthink. That’s what I hired him to do: blow stuff up.”

Contrast that with how Republican voters saw his opponents. “If you want to be president, you’ve got to be hated by half the country,” said Dakota, a two-time Trump voter from Iowa, adding, about Nikki Haley: “I don’t think she can do it.”

“Does it kind of feel in a sense that he just kind of gave up?” Ashley, another Iowa Republican, asked about DeSantis before he dropped out of the race.

Pence, Chris Christie, and the other also-rans came in for much worse criticism. “I don’t know if anyone would vote for him, just his family at this point,” Justin, a two-time Trump voter from Texas, said of Pence. “I think he’s alienated everyone.”

The second theme: Trump’s competitors declined to hit him on his 91 felony counts, despite the fact that voters say they have serious concerns about them. Instead, most of them (with the honorable exception of Christie and Asa Hutchinson) actively defended Trump.

DeSantis called the charges the “criminalization of politics.” Haley said the charges were “more about revenge than … about justice.” And Ramaswamy promised to pardon Trump “on day one.”

By the time Haley started attacking Trump in recent weeks, it was already too late. She can call him “diminished,” “unhinged,” “weak in the knees,” and “incredibly reckless,” but voters saw her raise her hand six months ago when asked whether she would support him if he became the nominee.

If Trump’s primary opponents weren’t going to hold his indictments against him, why should GOP voters? “It’s all a witch hunt,” Dennis, a two-time Trump voter from Michigan, said of the charges. The Department of Justice and state prosecutors bringing the cases “are terrified of Trump for whatever reason … because they’re afraid he will run and they’re afraid he will win.”

Read: Republicans are no longer a political party

Lastly, Trump started to be seen as electable. This represented a big shift from a year ago, when voters had concerns about Trump’s ability to beat President Joe Biden in a rematch.

In February 2023, Isaac, a Pennsylvania Republican, said of Trump: “I just feel he is unelectable. I think you could put him up there against fricking Donald Duck and Donald Duck will end up coming out ahead. He just ticks too many people off.”

But as they got a better look at the alternatives—and as they came to believe that Biden was too frail, weak, and senile to be competitive in the general election—GOP voters came around.

“I’m convinced that he is in the final stages of dementia,” Clifton, an Iowa Republican, said of Biden. “I mean, yeah, Trump’s an asshole and he doesn’t have a filter and he says stupid things, but it doesn’t matter.”

These voters have come to believe that the election is a choice between senility and recklessness. And they’ve decided they prefer the latter.

DeSantis’s rise and fall is the clearest demonstration of how we got here. For a time, he looked like the greatest threat to Trump, leveraging culture-war issues to gin up the base while projecting an image of being, as one voter put it to me, “Trump not on steroids.”

He sent refugees to Martha’s Vineyard, went after Disney, banned books—and the base loved him for it. “For the most part, from what I hear, he’s doing a good job in Florida,” said Chris, a Republican voter from Illinois, in March 2023. “He stands for a lot of the same values that I think I do.”

But over time, DeSantis’s star began to fade. The more retail campaigning he did, and the more voters were exposed to him, the less they liked what they saw.

“I think he was a strong candidate before he was actually a candidate,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire in December 2023. He cited “things he’s done in Florida and how big he won his last governor’s election.” But now, he said, “I think he got a little too into the social issues.”

By the time DeSantis dropped out, skepticism had turned to contempt among the Republican voters I spoke with. Sean, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire, put it succinctly last month: “He has a punchable face, and I just don’t like him.”

This time last year, DeSantis had a real shot at consolidating the move-on-from-Trump faction of the GOP while making inroads with the maybe-Trumpers—each of which constitutes about a third of the party. Instead, he tried to wrestle the former president for his always-Trump base, a doomed effort. He couldn’t get traction with the always-Trumpers and he alienated the move-on-from-Trumpers. It was a hopeless strategy for a flawed candidate.

Haley may hold out for a few more weeks, even though she has virtually no chance of beating Trump outright. Her only real incentive for remaining in the race is to be the last person standing in the event that he is imprisoned or suffers a major health event. Barring either of these scenarios, Trump’s path to the nomination is clear.

This outcome wasn’t inevitable; Trump was beatable. His opponents had real opportunities to cleave off his support, but they squandered them.

The reason is simple: Republican elites don’t understand their voters. They spent eight years making excuses for Trump and supporting him at every turn, sending the clear signal that this is his party. They spent nearly a decade saying that he was a persecuted martyr—and the greatest president in history. It’s frightening, but not surprising, that their voters think he’s the only man for the job.

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Sarah Longwell

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February 25, 2024
America Loves Coffee. Why Not Yerba Mate?

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It shouldn’t be hard to persuade people to take a sip of yerba mate. It’s completely natural. It makes you feel simultaneously energized and relaxed. You can drink it all day without feeling like your stomach acid is burning through your esophagus. It’s the preferred caffeine source of Lionel Messi, Zoe Saldaña, and the Pope. I’m drinking yerba mate with my Argentinian mother-in-law as I write this, and I’ll probably be drinking it with her or my husband when you read it. And yet, my track record for tempting friends into tasting it is abysmal.

The average Argentinian or Uruguayan drinks more than 26 gallons of the green infusion each year, but as far as I can tell, the average North American has never even tried South America’s most consumed beverage—at least not in its traditional form. After more than 100 years, plenty of added sugar, and growing consumer desire for “clean caffeine,” something companies are calling yerba mate is finally on shelves near you. But in this land of individualism and germophobia, the real thing will simply never catch on.

The plant has been seen as a moneymaking commodity since Europeans first arrived in the Americas. Long before North Americans rejected yerba mate, European colonizers were falling head over heels for the stuff. Within a few decades of their arrival in what is now Paraguay in the early 16th century, the Spanish were already drinking the local infusion they’d picked up from the indigenous Guaraní. The Guaraní people had used yerba mate—which they called ka’a—as a stimulant and for its medicinal effects since time immemorial. They collected leaves from a particular species of holly, dried them, and then either chewed the ka’a or placed it in an orange-size gourd to be steeped in water and passed among friends.

An early-19th-century lithograph of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the ruler of Paraguay, holding yerba mate (Source: Letters on Paraguay by John Parish Robertson and William Parish Robertson)

The Spanish liked the energy yerba mate gave them and began selling the leaves. But according to Christine Folch, the author of the upcoming book Yerba Mate: A Stimulating Cultural History, Jesuit missionaries in Paraguay were the ones who transformed yerba mate into a true cash crop, by developing techniques for cultivating it on a large scale—methods that relied on the forced labor of indigenous people. Yerba-mate use exploded. By the 1700s, it was consumed all over South America:from what is now Paraguay across Peru, Bolivia, southern Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile.

In the United States, the first major push to popularize and cultivate yerba mate didn’t happen until 1899, when representatives from Brazil and Paraguay boasted about its benefits at the International Commercial Congress in Philadelphia. Soon after, the first U.S.-based firm, the Yerba Maté Tea Company, was founded. The company’s marketing slogan was straightforward and catchy: “Drink Yerba Maté Tea and be happy.” “Here, then, we have an ideal drink,” a 1900 Yerba Maté Tea Company pamphlet proclaimed, “one that promotes digestion, gives immediate strength of the body and brain and acts soothingly upon the nervous system.” Plus, it added, “the ladies will be especially interested to know that it exercises absolutely no bad effects upon the complexion.”

Promotional material published by the Yerba Maté Tea Company in 1900 (Source: Yerba Maté Tea by William Mill Butler)

The promotion frothed up interest: Curious individuals wrote to their local newspaper asking where to buy yerba mate, and farmers searched for information on how to grow it. Newspaper articles from the time prophesied a future when yerba mate might displace tea and coffee. Entrepreneurs formed new companies hawking yerba mate; some saw Prohibition as a perfect opening for the buzzy nonalcoholic drink. It was peddled hot and cold. In the 1930s, the United States Army even considered distributing daily rations of the beverage to soldiers.

And yet, by the end of the 1930s, demand remained low. Marketers were perplexed, writing, “When can we expect an increase in consumption? The United States and France have proven themselves impervious to all temptation.” Americans just didn’t seem to have a taste for yerba mate; one 1921 review in the New York Herald read, “The flavor and taste were of a peculiar rank and insipid nature. If our South American friends can relish this beverage they are very welcome to all of it that grows.”

Read: The quest to make the best worst cup of coffee

True, yerba mate is bitter and tastes like freshly cut grass. But coffee tastes like burnt rubber the first time you try it, and Americans can’t get enough. Something deeper is going on here. Ximena Díaz Alarcón, an Argentinian marketing and consumer-trends researcher, says it makes sense that Americans never put down their mugs of coffee or tea to pick up a gourd filled with yerba mate. “There’s no cultural fit,” she told me from her home in Buenos Aires.

Traditionally, yerba mate is consumed from a shared gourd through a shared straw called a bombilla. “Here in Argentina,” Alarcón said, “mate is a cultural habit, it is a tradition, and it is about sharing with others.” But sitting down for an hour or two and sharing a beverage, especially from the same straw, is not something Americans are accustomed to.

Still, even when entrepreneurs of the past stripped away the communal aspect of yerba mate and sold it to North Americans in individual tea bags, coffee and tea definitively won out. That makes sense: A huge part of the appeal of mate is the ritual and community of it, not just the compounds it contains. Bagged mate simply doesn’t have as much going for it. In order to persuade Americans who have no connection to the tradition of yerba mate to incorporate it into their lives, the drink has to be both convenient and superior to coffee or tea—in the process, losing the very things that make it so beloved in South America.

From the April 2020 issue: Capitalism’s favorite drug

Over the past decade, Americans’ burgeoning thirst for healthy, plant-based caffeinated drinks has helped bring yerba mate into food fashion—at least superficially. Today, you can find it at the corner store and at major grocery chains such as Whole Foods and Walmart. But the yerba mate that fits American culture has no leaves, no straws, and no gourd. Instead, it is an ingredient mixed into canned and bottled energy drinks. This style of yerba mate is convenient and fast, and requires no swapping of spit.

Although carbonated, canned yerba mate has been around since the 1920s, the demand for it is new. Today, “people want more natural products and simpler ingredient lists,” says Martín Caballero, an editor at BevNET who grew up drinking yerba mate when visiting family in Argentina. “So using yerba mate as an energy caffeine source has been something we’ve seen more of.” Like, a lot more: In 2021, the Coca-Cola Company launched Honest Yerba Mate; Perrier now has an “Energize” line featuring yerba mate, and the start-up Guru sells an organic energy drink “inspired by Amazonia’s powerful botanicals.” (For the record, yerba mate doesn’t actually grow in the Amazon.)

At least one company has directly felt the difference between marketing real yerba mate and the diluted stuff. Guayakí, founded in 1996, built its entire business around working with indigenous communities in Paraguay to sustainably grow the plant. At first, the company sold only tea bags and loose-leaf yerba mate, but in the mid-2000s, it shifted its focus to selling yerba-mate energy drinks. Adding bubbles and sugar paid off, as did an ambitious marketing campaign targeting college students: Over the past decade, Guayakí has likely introduced more Americans to yerba mate than all previous marketing efforts combined. And although I admire their efforts and business philosophy, their canned “Classic Gold” tastes an awful lot like watered-down Diet Coke. But perhaps that’s the strategy.

Read: Always have three beverages

These days, it’s easy to find young influencers promoting the canned version of yerba mate—or, as they often call it, “yerb.” Meanwhile, I’ve mostly given up my role as an ambassador for old-school yerba mate. My friends and colleagues just aren’t interested in sharing a green, bitter drink. But my baby couldn’t be more excited about it. Every morning, we offer her our gourd and silver straw (after sucking up the warm water so she doesn’t get jacked up on caffeine), and she grins before placing la bombilla between her tiny lips. I like to think she loves it for the same reason I do: not for the taste, but for the intimacy and ritual.

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Lauren Silverman

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January 24, 2023
A Simple Rule for Planning Your Fall Booster Shot

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In less than two weeks, you could walk out of a pharmacy with a next-generation COVID booster in your arm. Just a few days ago, the Biden administration indicated that the first updated COVID-19 vaccines would be available shortly after Labor Day to Americans 12 and older who have already had their primary series. Unlike the shots the U.S. has now, the new doses from Pfizer and Moderna will be bivalent, which means they’ll contain genetic material based both on the ancestral strain of the coronavirus and on two newer Omicron subvariants that are circulating in the U.S.

These shots’ new formulation promises some level of protection that simply hasn’t been possible with the original vaccines. “A bivalent vaccine will have some benefit for almost everybody who gets it,” Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “How much benefit that is, we’re still not exactly sure.” People who aren’t at high risk could end up only marginally more protected against severe outcomes, and no one thinks the shots will banish COVID infections for good. There is, however, a simple rule of thumb that nearly everyone can follow to maximize the uncertain gains from a shot: Wait three to six months from your last COVID infection or vaccination.

Put that rule into action, and it plays out a little differently, depending on your circumstances.

If you haven’t had an Omicron infection:

If you haven’t had COVID since about November 2021, the advantage of a bivalent booster over the original formula is obvious, and as long as you haven’t gotten boosted recently, there’s every reason to get the new one right away. (If you have been boosted in the past few months, your antibody levels are probably still too high for a new shot to do much for you.) Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told me that Americans who have already gotten three or more doses “have probably maxed out the protective capacity” of the original shots. By contrast, the bivalent vaccines offer something new to those who have so far escaped Omicron: a lesson on the spike proteins of the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, which will help the immune system fight the real thing should it get into your body. “I’m just super excited to get the bivalent vaccine,” says Jenna Guthmiller, an immunologist at the University of Colorado who has not yet had COVID. “I think it’ll be really nice and ease my mind a little bit.”

Read: The pandemic’s soft closing

If you have had an Omicron infection:

Veterans of Omicron infections might still have something to gain from seeing the BA.4 and BA.5 spike proteins—especially if your goal is to avoid getting sick with COVID at all. Past a certain number of shots, boosters’ impact on your long-term protection against severe disease is unclear, Goel told me. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me he doesn’t plan on getting a booster at all this fall because, after three vaccine doses and an infection, “I think I’m protected against serious illness.” But if you want to stave off infection, Goel said, “the bivalent vaccines, or really any variant-containing vaccines, have real value.” That’s because formulas based on a given variant have been shown to temporarily increase your stock of antibodies that target that variant.

How long that extra-protective state lasts, or whether it’s sufficient to prevent any infection whatsoever, is still a scientific puzzle. The original boosters were shown to increase antibody levels to a peak about two weeks after the shot, then decay steadily over the following three months. We don’t know yet whether a bivalent formula will change that timeline, Goel said.

But you can still use it to estimate approximately when your protection will be at its highest. You might, for example, choose to err on the early side of that three-to-six-month timeline if you have a particularly high-risk event coming up in the next few weeks. “If all we had was the original booster and I was going to an indoor wedding or something, I think it would be reasonable to get that booster,” Pepper said.

Read: The BA.5 wave is what COVID normal looks like

If you had an Omicron infection this summer:

“You’re still riding the wave of antibodies that you generated as a result of that infection,” Guthmiller told me, so a shot won’t do much for you yet. That’s true regardless of which Omicron subvariant you might have been infected with, she said, because BA.2 infections have been shown to protect fairly well against today’s dominant strains, BA.4 and BA.5. (BA.2 became dominant in the United States back in March.) The severity of your illness doesn’t really matter either, Goel said. A higher fever and more intense cough might indicate that your immune system got extra revved up, he said, but they could just as easily mean that your body needs more help responding to the coronavirus. In either case, once a little more time has passed, getting the bivalent vaccine could help extend your body’s memory of its last COVID encounter, and keep infection at bay.

If you’re at high risk:

Certain groups of people should get any booster as soon as it’s available to them, the experts I spoke with emphasized to me: immunocompromised people, people over the age of 50 or so, and people with medical conditions that put them at high risk of severe disease. If you fall in one of these categories and haven’t received all the boosters you’re eligible for, “I wouldn’t wait for the bivalent,” Offit said. For people in these high-risk categories who have already gotten the recommended number of boosters, you should get the new one as soon as it’s available to you. (The FDA and CDC have not yet indicated whether they will recommend a waiting period between your most recent shot and the bivalent booster.) Goel recommended waiting at least a month after your most recent infection or shot, but if you’re very worried about your risk, you don’t need to stretch the delay to three months. Your body might still have extra antibodies floating around, but with no practical way to check at scale, “I’m honestly in favor of recommending boosting as a way to maximize individual benefit,” he said.

Read: America’s fall booster plan has a fatal paradox

If you want to wait and see:

Waiting is always an option if you want to know more about how the bivalent vaccines perform. The FDA and CDC are set to green-light the shots based on human data from the existing boosters and other experimental bivalent boosters that didn’t make it to market in the U.S.—plus trials on the new formula in mice. Pfizer and Moderna simply haven’t progressed very far in their human trials. While there’s no reason to suspect that the new shots won’t be safe, Offit recommended opting for the original boosters until more safety and efficacy data are available, which could be as soon as a couple of months after the rollout—as long as the vaccine makers or the government collects that information and makes it public. But Guthmiller and Goel said they weren’t concerned about the lack of human data, and the bivalent shot is almost certainly the better bet.

There is one significant reason to avoid waiting too long for the bivalent shot: It offers the greatest protection against infection from the subvariants it’s actually designed around. BA.4 and BA.5 might be with us through the fall and winter—or they might give way to a different branch of Omicron, or even a variant that’s entirely unlike Omicron. You’d certainly be better off against this new variant with a bivalent booster than no booster at all. But if you want to maximize your anti-infection shield while you have it, consider putting it up against the enemy you know.

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Rachel Gutman-Wei

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August 27, 2022