Last week, when Team USA Olympic skier Hunter Hess expressed mild displeasure about the state of affairs in his home country, the Ruthless podcast lived up to its name.
“If he’s going to exhibit that level of selfishness, it’s time to punish the entire Olympic team,” said Comfortably Smug, an infamous social media personality and cohost of the conservative talk show. “I oppose the US Olympic team. I’m rooting for them to do extremely bad.” His cohosts shook their heads, but he was off to the races. “I want nothing to do with that team of commies and these trashbag people,” he added, before offering a solution to Hess’s insolence: “Kick him off the team. Deport his ass. Send him to China!”
After some more back-and-forth, Smug jumped back in. “We’ve gotta punish it,” he said, still talking about Olympic freestyle skiers. “These people want to burn the flag and they want to kill us. I don’t think that telling them that that’s a bad idea is gonna be enough. I think you lock them up. Animals go in cages.”
“Jesus, fuck,” reacted cohost Josh Holmes, suppressing laughter. “I mean, my God.”
The exchange epitomized Ruthless, a podcast cohosted by three Republican operatives and, well, Smug, which has found success in the Trump era thanks to its blend of insider political analysis and edgy own-the-libs humor. The show has 182,000 subscribers on YouTube, and the four hosts recently penned a licensing deal with Fox News that also signed them up as contributors to the network, part of an effort to extend the organization’s mighty influence beyond the cable box.
“We identified at the time a serious lack of humor in conservative media,” Holmes said of the show’s beginnings when I met the hosts for a drink at Joe’s Stone Crab in Washington, DC, a short walk from their studio. The program is led by Holmes, a former chief of staff to Mitch McConnell, alongside fellow Republican operatives Michael Duncan and John Ashbrook. All three are partners at the same strategy and communications firm just off K Street. Then there’s Smug, whose real name is Shashank Tripathi. If you’ve been in the trenches—of vintage MAGA Twitter or the New York Magazine sex diary comment section—you will know the nom de guerre.
The podcast was conceived as a conservative iteration of the humor-inflected politics shows that have thrived on the left, like Pod Save America, but its influences are further toward the edge. Duncan—a self-described “right-wing radical” who cut his teeth working for Ted Cruz—is a closeted fan of leftist podcasts Chapo Trap House and the now-defunct Cum Town. He has a PR-ready explanation. “I think knowing what the opposition thinks is the most valuable thing you can do,” he told me. But did he enjoy Chapo Trap House? “I fucking loved it,” he confessed. “It’s authentic, dude. That’s the currency of the realm.”