MAGA’s Cracker-Barrel Meltdown
Why let things go quietly when you can make them die violently?
Today’s newsletter is breezier than usual, but a grim story broke just as we were putting it to bed: FBI agents this morning searched the home of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser who has in recent years become one of the president’s most stringent critics. “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission,” FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted as agents descended on Bolton’s house.
Lawfare’s Ben Wittes livestreamed a portion of the operation on his Substack; JVL has a quick post up on the website going deeper on the context of the ax Trump has to grind against Bolton. We’ll be all over this story as it develops. Happy Friday.
A Crack in the Barrel
by Andrew Egger
Lord help me, but we’ve got to talk about the Cracker Barrel.
Yesterday, the hokey old-timey restaurant chain suddenly found itself the subject of a big honking spasm of the culture war. The cause of the trouble was a corporate rebrand involving a simpler, sleeker logo and more minimalist restaurant interiors—changes the online right denounced as a shameful capitulation to “wokeness” by the nostalgia-drenched brand.
“Cracker Barrel is done,” wrote the Federalist’s Sean Davis with characteristic restraint. “Woke executives killed it, wrapped the corpse in a rainbow flag, and then made it do a little puppet show in New York City for the entertainment of all their woke little friends.”
“We must break the Barrel,” antiwoke boycott maven Chris Rufo proclaimed, extolling the importance of “creating massive pressure” against companies considering “any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”
I found all this a little confusing—not just because it seemed like a lot of rage to spill over a new coat of restaurant paint, but because I’d been under the impression Cracker Barrel had already been canceled for its woke crimes.
First was the 2022 grouch-off about Cracker Barrel’s addition of woke plant-based sausage to their breakfast menus. “I just lost respect for a once great Tennessee company,” one fan wrote on Facebook. “Cracker Barrel used to be so good, we looked forward to eating in them but not anymore,” said another.
Then came the 2023 e-outrage over Cracker Barrel’s acknowledgment of Pride Month, which included a rainbow-themed rocking chair and some corporate-speak about “diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging at Cracker Barrel.”
“We take no pleasure in reporting that Cracker Barrel has fallen,” the organization Texas Family Project wrote at the time. “A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob.”
The reality is that Cracker Barrel is rebranding, not as a villainous act of sabotage by the women and gays who supposedly control corporate America, but because the restaurant is slowly dying off. The reason why this is happening is obvious to anyone without terminal right-wing brainworms: It’s a store selling the nostalgia of an era pretty much nobody’s around to be nostalgic for anymore. Behold the whole issue in one tweet:
Nostalgia has been the point of Cracker Barrel since the restaurant’s launch in 1969. Its business model of plopping down decent facsimiles of old-time general stores and Southern home-cooking restaurants conveniently just off America’s interstates was, frankly, a triumph of the capitalist imagination, and has made a lot of money for everybody involved for more than half a century. But the pre-war general stores Cracker Barrel evoked were just a couple decades gone in 1969. Today, they’re a relic of a vanished past. The only nostalgia Cracker Barrel evokes for most people today is their memories of eating at Cracker Barrel—a Xerox of a Xerox.
The American urge to eat cheapo slop in a nostalgic setting hasn’t gone away. It’s just that younger consumers are nostalgic for their own childhoods, not Chuck Grassley’s. You can see that energy in the increasingly nostalgia-focused branding of august American dining institutions like Pizza Hut, which is quietly retrofitting more and more of their restaurants into old-school “Pizza Hut Classics,” or Taco Bell, which began testing a “Nostalgic Menu” at certain locations last year.
The gradual vanishing of Cracker Barrel, in other words, is simply the natural order of things—which makes the MAGA freakout over it seem particularly apropos. The rage at “wokification” is actually despair at the vanishing image of a past that was imaginary to begin with.
What to do with all that rage? It might as well be Trump’s mission statement: Why let something go quietly when you can make it die violently?
Habba in Limbo
by Andrew Egger
What’s more important to Donald Trump: bringing justice to criminals, or ensuring the government is 100 percent staffed with his personal toadies? The ongoing meltdown surrounding Alina Habba in New Jersey suggests it’s the latter by a mile.
Back in March, Donald Trump nominated Habba, formerly his personal defense lawyer, to serve as U.S. attorney for New Jersey. While he waited for the Senate to take up her nomination, he also appointed her to the same position on an interim basis. By federal law, the interim appointment can last only 120 days. But when the deadline came and went with no Senate confirmation for Habba, the Justice Department—rather than let someone else take over for a bit—went ballistic, taking a series of unprecedented steps to try to keep her in the role.1
Yesterday, a federal judge looked at these bold innovations in the field of skirting the laws on vacancies and appointments and said: Yeah, no. Here’s the New York Times:
“Faced with the question of whether Ms. Habba is lawfully performing the functions and duties of the office of the United States attorney for the District of New Jersey, I conclude that she is not,” the judge, Matthew W. Brann of the Middle District of Pennsylvania, wrote.
“Because she is not currently qualified to exercise the functions and duties of the office in an acting capacity,” he added, “she must be disqualified from participating in any ongoing cases.”
The judge said his ruling wouldn’t go into effect immediately in order to give Habba time to appeal. It was a tacit acknowledgment of just how much chaos the situation is causing in New Jersey, which is suddenly having to grapple with defendants who can plausibly claim the person charging them has no authority to do so in every federal criminal case in the state. The uncertain state of affairs has meant that, while Habbagate has unspooled over the last six weeks, even routine matters have ground to a near standstill. The Times again: “Mark E. Coyne, a lawyer from Ms. Habba’s office, acknowledged that few proceedings, other than preliminary actions by magistrate judges, were being held. Certain upcoming trials, he said, ‘likely will be adjourned.’”
It bears repeating: The White House decided to short-circuit the operations of an entire state U.S. attorney’s office indefinitely rather than allow a non-MAGA career prosecutor to run it even for a short while. All Trump had to do was wait—or, if he really wanted to throw his weight around, bully Senate Republicans into confirming Habba quickly. Instead, their One Weird Trick strategy seems to have backfired—Trump had to withdraw her nomination to make the loophole strategy work, so Habba’s ultimate fate in the position is uncertain. It’s a mess all around, and only one group stands to benefit: criminal defendants in New Jersey.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Putin Tanks Trump’s Supposed Peace Effort… But don’t expect actual tough measures to penalize the Russian dictator’s obstructionism, writes CATHY YOUNG.
‘Americana’ Review… SONNY BUNCH on westerns, the arts, and the pursuit of happiness.
Pam Bondi’s Overreach Blows Up in Her Face… GEORGE CONWAY explains to JVL how Pam Bondi’s failed attempt to seize control of DC’s police exposed Trump’s push for total power—and why it’s a warning of what could come next.
Democracy Can’t Defend Itself… While Trump keeps working hard on his own monetization and glorification—and delivers a Watergate practically every hour—the pro-democracy coalition must stay focused on winning next year's midterm elections. JERUSALEM DEMSAS and GARRY KASPAROV join TIM MILLER on the flagship pod.
California Republicans Are Scared of Losing Their Seats… The Golden State’s new district map could leave the state’s Republicans in the dust, reports JOE PERTICONE.
Quick Hits
PRESIDENT TIKTOK: Donald Trump has only been on TikTok three days, but it’s already starting to feel like he’s always been there. Twitter (and now Truth Social) have always been the natural home for Trump’s unique personal voice, but TikTok’s context-free bursts of shortform video are a perfect match for the MAGA brand.
A typical clip splices random Trump threats—“You’d better comply, because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding,” “You don’t have the cards right now”—together with ominous sound effects, footage of troops applauding Trump, and non sequitur clips like his trademark YMCA dance. The subjects of the threats aren’t named or even in frame; neither they nor even the content of the individual threats are important. All that matters is the mood being evoked: a general posture of presidential threat, fuzzed and softened by a deliberate layer of ironic absurdity, that the viewer is emotionally invited to endorse. “I was the hunted,” the caption reads, “and now I’m the hunter.”
By law, TikTok isn’t even supposed to be operating in America today. Tech experts have long warned about the app’s ludicrously handsy data-collection policies and its parent company ByteDance’s close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. A law signed last year by President Joe Biden presented ByteDance with an ultimatum: Sell or be banned from U.S. app stores. It was an idea Trump himself had championed during his first term, but that was before the youth vote swung in his favor last year, a phenomenon for which he gave TikTok partial credit. In naked violation of the law, he’s been giving ByteDance regular extensions to find a buyer ever since.
We wonder, though, whether Trump’s venture onto TikTok will sour him on the place faster than U.S. law or the warnings of security experts could. His posts are, of course, getting a lot of traction—but every single one is also being buried instantly by a monsoon of flippant mockery in the comments. Maybe the big guy will decide the kids’ app isn’t so noble after all.
NAZIS WITH INTERESTING VIEWS: Remember how, almost a year ago, Tucker Carlson got some grief for a lengthy interview with “popular historian” Darryl Cooper, who argued that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II and Adolf Hitler was basically a man of peace? At the time, Carlson retreated into snarky outrage about being attacked for merely talking to someone with “eccentric views.”
Well, Tucker’s latest “eccentric” guest is Arthur Collum, a Cornell chemistry professor with lots of opinions: about COVID (actually engineered in a lab in North Carolina), the war in Ukraine (actually a benign Russian police operation), January 6th, etc. Guess what: One of those opinions is that “the story we got about World War II is all wrong” and “one can make the argument that we should have sided with Hitler,” because Joseph Stalin was a very bad guy. (He was, but you remember what Churchill said about putting in a good word for the Devil if Hitler had invaded Hell.)
Amusingly, even author Diana West, whom Collum cites as his source—herself a far-right crank—showed up on X to protest that she’s not on board with the aligning-with-Hitler thing. Other posters have debunked Collum’s claim that George Patton thought we should have fought against Stalin alongside Hitler.
Carlson, however, doesn’t challenge anything his guest says; he just asks softball questions and nods along with a grave mien and a furrowed brow. Gee, why would anyone think he was platforming Nazi sympathizers?
—Cathy Young
Cheap Shots
Attorney General Bondi fired the career prosecutor who was set to take over the interim job, then appointed Habba “special attorney” for the region, then promoted her to first assistant U.S. attorney, then claimed that—because the position of interim U.S. attorney was suddenly vacant—Habba would take back over as acting U.S. attorney. Loophole!
I hate that this administration is making me even consider sympathy for John F'ing Bolton.
Thanks for the lightness of the Cracker Barrell story and this was hilarious: "It’s just that younger consumers are nostalgic for their own childhoods, not Chuck Grassley’s" And could not have been more succinct