“Make some noise if you’re competitive!”
As the entrepreneur and podcaster Patrick Bet-David greeted a Fort Lauderdale audience on election night, he took stock of the booming crowd that was on hand for his watch party. It had gathered at the new headquarters of Valuetainment, his media company, for a marathon live recording of the PBD Podcast with guests that included a rapper, former mobsters, and Ultimate Fighting Championship competitors. The parking lot was dotted with Ferraris and Tesla Cybertrucks; the men in the seats wore tight pants, PBD merch, and precisely shaped beards. The host at the center of it all was their political guide for the evening, as well as their motivational speaker.
Over the past several months, as Donald Trump made his final push to return to the White House, he courted an alternative media sphere in which Bet-David is a key player. At the president-elect’s Palm Beach victory speech on Tuesday night, UFC CEO Dana White thanked an increasingly recognizable group of personalities in this orbit, including Adin Ross, Theo Von, and “last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.” Bet-David has had a fairly head-spinning assortment of guests on his show—George W. Bush, Reza Pahlavi, Tom Brady, Mark Epstein (Jeffrey’s brother), Suge Knight, Trump—but hardly made an imprint in the mainstream press. His party on Tuesday night, about an hour south of Trump’s own at Mar-a-Lago, served as a culmination of this largely male, largely young demographic’s emergence as a political class.
The Miami rapper Lil Pump took the stage in a suit with no shirt, a thick layer of chains, and a MAGA hat. Trump has courted rappers, and vice versa, since the ‘90s in New York—they have often found common ground in their indignant ambition. In more recent years, his political career has become a magnet for embattled or lapsed celebrities, who seem to see something of themselves in him. Lil Pump ran off a brief string of musical successes in the late 2010s, but by and large he is known for antics.
“We don’t want censorship, we don’t want none of that,” he told Bet-David, whom he referred to as Bet. (Bet-David, 46, was later lightly chastised by the 23-year old conservative influencer and minor sports personality Emily Austin for calling his guest “Little Pump.”)
When he endorsed Trump four years ago, Lil Pump continued, “I lost 4 million followers, I lost $20 million deals. Guess what? I did not give a fuck about that.”
The crowd cheered loudly, but the enthusiasm didn’t last. As Lil Pump was leaving the stage, Bet-David asked those in the audience to name their favorite song of his. A few people shouted “Gucci Gang,” a single released not long after Trump took office in 2017.
“What a strange list of guests to have,” Bet-David said as two new panelists entered the conversation. Former Mafia members Michael Franzese and Sammy “The Bull” Gravano were on hand to offer their support for Trump.
“This is what America wants,” Bet-David went on, in a refrain he made throughout the night. “Not people who went to Columbia or Yale.”
Franzese and Gravano have each become YouTube personalities in recent years, regaling viewers with mob stories and lessons. (Franzese uploaded an interview with Andrew Tate on Tuesday.) Trump, their experience taught them, was what they needed.
“It’s not revenge,” Franzese said, pondering a second term for the Republican candidate. “It’s justice.”
Abortion, Gravano said, wasn’t the issue the media had made it out to be, because women had plenty of choice as it was: “They’re all over the place in everything. As they should be.”
The pair were briefly interrupted by a video call from Chris Cuomo, who was beamed onto the stage’s screen to offer Bet-David his congratulations on the event. Franzese summed it up for the crowd by explaining how his cohort had come to embrace a candidate who, along with his running mate, holds an Ivy League degree. Everyone “from the streets” is behind Trump, he said, because “he’s the best good gangster we’ve seen in our lives.”
UFC fighters Jorge Masvidal and Michael Chandler joined the fray to bemoan the softening of men’s sports. Alex Jones called in to the show, and Madison Cawthorn was in the audience. All throughout, Bet-David kept an eye on the number of live YouTube viewers—around 257,000 near midnight. He was proud that his show was outpacing mainstream networks by this metric, and it prompted him to ask the audience a purely rhetorical question.
“Why is America flipping to this?”
On Monday night, Rogan, newly convinced by Elon Musk, announced that he was endorsing Trump. Ross—a 24-year old streamer and friend to A-list rappers who interviewed Trump at Mar-a-Lago this summer—posted a screenshot of the $1 million bet he had placed on the Republican candidate. The Trump campaign resurfaced a recent interview in which Mark Zuckerberg, in his now-standard look of a gold chain and zoomer curls, described the president-elect’s fist pump after his attempted assassination as “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
This intergenerational, ascendant strain of online masculinity is hard to capture in a word. For the purposes of the 2024 election, it might be best understood as the layer of culture and celebrity in which Trump most squarely took hold. His whirlwind tour of the podcasts, streams, and YouTube shows around which this ecosystem is organized was the subject of sustained media attention as his campaign came to a close. After leaving office in disgrace after the 2020 election, it repositioned him as a pop culture figure much as The Apprentice did two decades ago. Where the indie band The National once sat with Barack Obama, the Nelk Boys now sit with Trump.
Bet-David’s podcasting rise follows a string of lesser-known but ultimately lucrative ventures. A refugee from Iran, he recalled in a recent profile published by The Spectator how he spent his early adulthood partying before joining the Army and, he claimed, working for a time as a bodyguard for a leading Los Angeles cocaine dealer. He found God and success. In 2009, Bet-David started an insurance company that was acquired two years ago by a major provider. But as a young man, “I wanted to be the next Arnold,” he told The Spectator. “You know, marry a Kennedy, be a governor, Hollywood actor, all this stuff.”
Jennifer Lopez was one of the primary targets for the PBD Podcast on election night, having spoken at a Kamala Harris rally days earlier. Her relationship with Sean “Diddy” Combs in the 1990s was reliable fodder for the panelists, and her face was displayed several times for the purpose of being booed. (“She’s not that good of an actress,” one audience member in a PBD hat said aloud to himself.) “A Beyoncé endorsement used to work for them,” Candace Owens said as Trump’s victory became clear, a point she made at regular intervals during her time onstage. “The world is rejecting corporate, overtly partisan media types in favor of independent voices,” she told me on Wednesday, and her web shop has now begun carrying mugs decorated with images of Lopez, Cardi B, and LeBron James crying.
It was a theme throughout a mostly staid night revolving around seven-plus hours of conversation—that some fundamental reorganization of fame and recognition had taken place. As he was waiting for Trump’s victory speech, Bet-David told audience members that their companies and families needed to buckle down for the future, but for now, to savor the moment. “For the rest of our lives we will share this night together,” he said, and he played them a just-cut highlight reel of themselves at the show they had attended.
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