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.”
