In this edition of #ListenFirstFriday, the 17-year-old founder of YAP Politics discusses efforts to bridge the polarizations between political affiliations.
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Brain science explains why voters reward charisma over results — and why the leaders who "fix" the most get credit for the least. A behavioral look at elections.
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The Résumé Should Outvote the Smile
Sep 21, 2026
There's an old joke about a couple who finally solved years of arguing over decisions. "Since you're the man of the house," the wife said, "you handle the big things -- our stance on foreign wars, who we send to the Senate. I'll take care of the small stuff: groceries, the mortgage, where we live, what we eat." The husband agreed happily, certain he had won the better half of the deal. A few years later he realized the trade had gone entirely the other way. He held forth on geopolitics at dinner parties while his wife quietly ran every detail that actually touched his life: what he ate, where he lived, how his money was spent. What looked like ultimate authority was, in practice, near-total abdication over the things that shaped his days.
Voters make the same trade, and pay for it the same way. We keep hiring leaders for the qualities we would want in a spouse -- warmth, charm, a commanding voice, the sense that they see us -- instead of the qualities we would want in a mechanic: someone who can find what is broken and fix it before the whole system fails. We evaluate candidates the way we choose intimate partners, not the way we hire people to run complex, high-stakes systems.
A Brain Built for the Wrong Timescale
This is not just a cultural blind spot. It has a biological driver. Brain-imaging research over the past two decades has linked our response to an inspiring speaker with a fast release of dopamine and oxytocin, the same chemical reward system engaged by a great meal, a new romance, or a win at the slot machine. A charismatic leader delivers that hit in real time, on stage, in a two-minute clip that circulates for days. Studies of split-second judgment go further still: shown a candidate's face for less than a second, with no policy information at all, people guess election winners correctly roughly seven times out of ten, based purely on a snap read of competence and warmth.
Good policy does not work on that clock. A tax reform, an infrastructure project, or a shift in interest rates typically takes twelve to eighteen months before its effects show up in the data, and years longer before ordinary voters feel them in daily life. The Federal Reserve itself estimates that the full impact of a single interest-rate change can take up to two years to reach the broader economy. By the time results arrive, the brain has already moved its emotional credit to whoever gave the most recent good speech, whether or not that person had anything to do with the actual work. Slow, structural improvement carries no dopamine spike, so it goes uncredited. Fast, emotional performance carries a large one, so it gets over-credited. The mismatch is not a character flaw in any one voter. It is a design feature of a brain built for a much smaller, much slower world.
When the Audition Beats the Résumé
This mismatch explains why screen presence so often beats governing experience at the ballot box. In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger won the California recall election with under half the vote in a field of more than a hundred candidates, arriving with zero governing experience and a résumé built entirely in front of a camera. He left office seven years later with the state carrying a budget deficit in the tens of billions of dollars, a gap that outlasted his tenure and shaped California's finances for years afterward. Ronald Reagan followed a similar route into the same office in 1966, defeating the incumbent governor by nearly a million votes on the strength of his screen presence and radio-honed delivery, not his record in public administration, of which he had none. His later political career is remembered as substantively consequential, which complicates any tidy conclusion. Charisma and competence are not always opposed. They are simply poorly correlated at the exact moment people cast a ballot, which is precisely when it matters most.
The clearest case of all sits in Tamil Nadu, India. In 1977, film star M. G. Ramachandran, known across the state as MGR, was elected chief minister after three decades of building a screen persona as the untouchable defender of the poor. His fans did not distinguish the role from the man. When he died in December 1987 at age 70, roughly one million people flooded Chennai's streets for his funeral, some standing in line for over a day. By multiple contemporary press accounts, around 30 grieving fans took their own lives in the days after his death, unable to process the loss. That grief was never about tax policy or administrative competence. It was the sudden loss of a one-sided emotional attachment as real, to the people who felt it, as losing a parent.
Charisma Is a Luxury Good
The divide runs along economic lines too, and this is the part most commentary on charisma leaves out. Voters with enough material security to treat politics as a form of entertainment can afford to prioritize a leader's decorum, stage presence, and rhetorical polish. For the much larger share of any electorate whose week is defined by grocery prices, rent, fuel costs, and job security, charm is an expensive luxury they cannot afford to indulge. They need competent mechanics who can diagnose and repair broken systems, not a warm and reassuring presence who makes them feel better about a system that keeps failing them. When the roof is leaking, you do not hire the contractor with the best smile. You hire the one who actually stops the leak, even if he is short with you on the phone.
Evolution built us for small tribes of a few hundred people, where a warm, confident face reliably signaled a trustworthy ally worth following into danger, and where the entire consequence of a bad choice was visible within days. That heuristic misfires today, in a world of roughly 8.2 billion people governed by institutions too large, too specialized, and too interconnected for any one charismatic figure to run on instinct and stage presence alone. The scale has changed by many orders of magnitude. Our wiring has not.
What Breaks the Spell
None of this means charisma is worthless, or that voters are foolish for responding to it. Communication matters; a leader who cannot explain a plan cannot build support for it. The fix is not to prize dullness over eloquence. It is to separate the two judgments that charisma tends to fuse into one: does this person make me feel confident, and has this person actually delivered results before. Structured evaluation helps here in the same way it helps in hiring for any other high-stakes role: a specific record of past performance, checked against verifiable outcomes, weighs more than a stage presence, no matter how persuasive that presence feels in the room.
We keep choosing leaders for spouse-like qualities and then act surprised when we get senator-like failures. The bill for that confusion comes due in stalled reforms, wasted budgets, and a public that trusts government less with every cycle, in country after country. Fixing it does not require voters to stop feeling anything at the ballot box; feeling is not the enemy. It requires one honest substitution, repeated at every election: stop asking who you would most want to have dinner with, and start asking who you would trust to fix what is actually broken. Until we make that substitution a habit rather than an exception, we will keep overpaying for charisma and underinvesting in the competence that actually improves lives. The résumé should outvote the smile.
Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D. is Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he focuses on the analysis of human behavior, public health, and global affairs, drawing on an interdisciplinary background. He published in multiple RealClear platforms, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., Fulcrum, The Humanist, AFRO American, South Asia Monitor (on editorial board, and host of a show), and others.
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a group of soldiers in uniform
Photo by Oleg Ivanov on Unsplash
Moral Leadership Can Protect Service Members' Psychological Well-Being
Sep 20, 2026
It has recently been reported that President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth disparaged the mental health concerns, including suicide attempts, expressed by the sailors serving aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during the carrier’s record deployment. Their comments brought back the disquiet I felt several months ago while attending a performance of the US Naval Academy Glee Club at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan. Usually, when I attend choral concerts in the church’s imposing Baroque sanctuary, my mind quiets, and I find myself immersed in the music. But not on that occasion. Instead, as I enjoyed the exuberant singing, my mind filled with resentment. The Glee Club, handsome midshipmen in formal dress, is a multiethnic group of men and women. The harmonious singing of a chorus composed of individuals of widely varied backgrounds seemed a metaphor for how our country and its military should work.
My upset originated with the realization that during their time at the Naval Academy, these midshipmen had witnessed the firing of the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C. Q. Brown, Jr., as part of an apparent purge of those supporting diversity in the military. Even uglier was the implication that Brown, a highly decorated officer, had been elevated to his position as a ‘DEI’ hire. They also had seen the firing of trailblazing women leaders in the military, including Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman Coast Guard Commandant, and Admiral Yvette Davids, the first woman Superintendent of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, the very institution they were attending. I was offended and angered by the message these firings conveyed to the men and women of the Academy’s Glee Club, especially the women and minority midshipmen, who had volunteered to serve their nation and, ultimately, to place themselves in harm’s way for it.
I also wondered about the message and potential consequences of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s firing of top military lawyers whose responsibility is to advise military officers and help them avoid violating U.S. law and the laws of armed conflict. It was in this context that I recalled being moved by the sight of former Marines weeping in front of pictures of what they had wrought during their time of combat when visiting the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi some years ago. What I witnessed served as a vivid reminder of the price paid by Vietnam vets who suffered with PTSD across their lives. The prevalence of that diagnosis has increased for those who served in operations Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom, as have the clinical consequences of moral injury in those who have found themselves at odds with their deeply held values during their time of service. As a psychiatrist, I found myself concerned about how such firings may increase the likelihood of the young midshipmen I was listening to, as well as that of others who serve, experiencing moral injury, PTSD, and, ultimately, difficulty reintegrating into civilian life after deployment.
Our service men and women deserve leadership, both civilian and military, which they can respect and which in turn demonstrates respect for them by preparing them for the successful execution of their missions, shows equal esteem for all who serve regardless of their gender, ethnicity, or faith, and strives to minimize the likelihood of their incurring physical and psychological harms. Unfortunately, from my perspective, those currently serving lack the thoughtful and moral civilian leadership they deserve.
Dr. Barry B. Perlman is a retired psychiatrist. He was president of the New York State Psychiatric Association and past chair of the New York State Mental Health Services Council. “Rearview: A Psychiatrist Reflects on Practice and Advocacy In a Time of Healthcare System Change,” his memoir, was published in 2021.
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Donald Trump, September 09, 2026
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Trump, Kennedy, and the Monkey’s Paw
Sep 11, 2026
The hardest deal to judge is one you helped sell.
In 2024, I served as North Carolina state director for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign and co-founded We The People of North Carolina, the independent party that put him on our state’s ballot.
When Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, those of us who had worked the campaign faced a difficult choice: Who would we vote for?
My answer carried implications beyond my own choice. As the party’s vice chair, I signed the letter officially requesting Kennedy’s removal from North Carolina’s ballot, closing the door on a campaign I helped build and clearing the path for Trump. As Election Day neared, I made the case for Trump to Independents and Kennedy voters.
Our coalition was large enough to matter. In North Carolina, Kennedy was drawing an estimated 240,000 votes before leaving the race. Trump carried the state by roughly 183,000 votes. A similar pattern appeared across all the battlegrounds, where small shifts among Independent voters helped Trump sweep all seven.
After Trump won, I wrote an article stating Kennedy’s selection to lead HHS showed that our trust in Trump’s “unity administration” was “well-founded.” I said we should move forward together as a country, but also hold Trump accountable.
Trump won us over with five central promises, each meant to fix problems we laid at Biden’s feet. (Independents had been pivotal to Biden’s victory four years earlier.) Trump’s promises spoke to a broad range of Independents, from kitchen-table voters most concerned about the economy and border to medical-freedom advocates, anti-interventionists, and anti-corruption reformers drawn to Kennedy, Gabbard, and Rogan.
Each promise gets one of three verdicts: Kept, Broken, or Monkey’s Paw, meaning we got what we wished for, but not what we bargained for.
Promise 1: “Make America Affordable Again”
Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again.” (Trump, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Aug. 17, 2024) For Independents feeling the strain of inflation, the promise of lower prices sounded like much-needed relief.
Record: The administration’s first major economic move had the perverse effect of raising the price of practically everything. In February 2025, Trump began imposing new tariffs on imports, and by April they hit nearly every U.S. trading partner. The center-right Tax Foundation called them “the largest tax increase since 1993,” as American households absorbed roughly $1,000 in tariff-related costs.
We were told the tariffs would revive U.S. manufacturing and increase jobs. Instead, manufacturing jobs fell by 108,000 in Trump’s first year.
Homeownership remains out of reach. The median existing home now sells for about $440,000, with an average mortgage rate of 6.66 percent. Affording a home requires more than $110,000 a year, while the typical household earns about $84,000.
Trump did not create the affordability crisis, but that isn’t the point. He promised to end it. Independents gave him our votes to reduce prices that had risen under Biden, but all we’ve gotten is more partisan finger-pointing. The party in power has changed, but the strain on our wallets has not. Remember those “I did that” gas pump stickers? The honest version shows both presidents pointing together: “We did that.”
This promise had the broadest appeal and the most immediate effect on daily life. As of June 2026, consumer prices were 4.3 percent higher than when Trump took office. He promised prices would fall. They rose.
Verdict: Broken.
Promise 2: “Secure the Border”
I will end the illegal immigration crisis by closing our border and finishing the wall.” (Trump, Republican National Convention, Milwaukee, July 18, 2024) Independents overwhelmingly supported securing the country, but many of us didn’t anticipate what that enforcement would look like.
Record: Strictly speaking, Trump delivered on border security. Southwest border encounters fell to fewer than 10,000 a month, and the fiscal-year total dropped to its lowest since 1970, according to Pew. While these numbers are a positive result, the deportation methods are much harder to reconcile: chained transfers, raids at school drop-offs, agents posted outside courthouses, and unaccompanied children, some as young as six, facing deportation proceedings without lawyers.
Federal courts repeatedly confronted the administration over compliance with immigration orders. In one instance, deportation flights to El Salvador continued after a judge ordered them turned around.
ICE also detained U.S. citizens and removed citizen children from the country with their deported mothers, including a four-year-old with stage 4 cancer.
Between September 2025 and February 2026, DHS officers shot at least 14 people, four fatally, including U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good. In 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody, the highest number in more than two decades. While you may argue the merits of any particular case, it is difficult to explain them all away.
Trump promised to secure the border, and he did. But Independents didn't sign up for enforcement that repeatedly ran afoul of the courts, made good law enforcement agents look like villains, spread fear through our communities, and saw dozens die, including American citizens.
Verdict: Monkey’s Paw.
Promise 3: “Drain the Swamp”
We are going to drain the swamp, and we’re going to do it once and for all.” (Trump, Mosinee, Wisconsin, Sept. 7, 2024) Few promises spoke more to Independents. We wanted an end to corporate capture, cronyism, and officials cashing in on their office.
Record: Trump promised to drain the swamp and instead let the Reflecting Pool turn into one.
For decades, presidents of both parties kept their personal finances separate from the presidency through blind trusts or divestment. Trump broke with tradition. Trump disclosed more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s crypto ventures in 2025.
Nearly a million wallets bought the $TRUMP memecoin, which has no underlying business or revenue. Most held relatively small amounts, suggesting ordinary buyers. The value of their holdings fell by a combined $3.81 billion. The Trump family took in $636 million.
USD1, World Liberty’s stablecoin, offers Trump another path to profit. Each coin is backed by a dollar’s worth of reserves, and those reserves earn interest. By February 2026, Binance, a crypto exchange, held about $4.7 billion in USD1, potentially generating $150 million a year in interest. A Trump-family entity indirectly owns 38 percent of a World Liberty company entitled to a share of that interest.
And where did the billions earning that interest come from? In large part, Abu Dhabi.
In May 2025, Abu Dhabi’s state-backed MGX used USD1 to invest $2 billion in Binance, boosting the interest its reserves could earn. Two weeks later, Trump announced he was expanding the UAE’s access to advanced American AI technology. Five months later, he pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had served four months in prison for failing, of all things, to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program.
No public evidence proves either decision was exchanged for the investment. The conflict is that the president's family could profit from the very actors seeking decisions only his administration could make.
The crypto deals are only one part of the swamp.
The Campaign Legal Center counts 47 former lobbyists in senior posts; more than 15 likely would have faced limits under earlier ethics restrictions. Trump imposed no such rules. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is a former lobbyist, and six former clients lobbied White House offices she oversees. Her former firm, Ballard Partners, became Washington’s top-grossing lobbying firm in 2025, taking in $88 million from clients hoping it had Trump’s ear.
In his 2026 State of the Union, Trump mocked Nancy Pelosi while calling for a congressional trading ban. Yet that quarter, his accounts recorded 3,642 trades, roughly 40 a day, worth between $220 million and $750 million. Trump says managers placed the trades, but that doesn’t remove the conflict or the hypocrisy.
Nothing’s been drained except our trust.
Verdict: Broken.
Promise 4: “Make America Healthy Again”
I'm going to let him go wild on health. I'm going to let him go wild on the food. I'm going to let him go wild on the medicines.” (Trump, Madison Square Garden, New York City, Oct. 27, 2024) Winning over Kennedy voters and the MAHA movement was critical to Trump’s coalition. We expected him to give Kennedy real power and the freedom to use it.
Record: On April 22, 2025, Kennedy and the FDA announced the phaseout of six petroleum-based synthetic dyes that have colored America’s food for generations. Advocates had spent four decades seeking their phaseout — Kennedy did it in ten weeks.
In January 2026, Kennedy and the USDA overhauled the Dietary Guidelines, reviving the Food Pyramid, tightening limits on added sugar, and drawing a hard line against ultra-processed foods. States led by both parties followed with similar reforms. \
That same month, Kennedy overhauled the childhood vaccine schedule, cutting recommendations from 17 diseases to 11 and bringing it closer to Denmark’s. The backlash crossed party lines. Democrats condemned the move, while Republican Senate health chairman Bill Cassidy called it “based on no scientific input.” Medical groups sued, and a federal judge blocked the changes. Trump nevertheless backed Kennedy with an executive order on August 10 to formally cut the schedule.
For many Independents, these moves showed what Kennedy could accomplish when he had freedom to act. But there were limits to that freedom.
Those limits were clearest on glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup and a longtime Kennedy target. Trump made boosting its production a national priority. Kennedy publicly backed the order but later admitted on Rogan he was “not particularly happy” with it. Trump’s Justice Department later backed Monsanto before the Supreme Court, which issued a ruling undercutting thousands of Roundup cancer claims.
Kennedy moved to close the “generally recognized as safe” loophole, which lets food companies declare ingredients safe without FDA review. Industry lobbying against the proposal surged, and the White House sat on it for six months. His definition of ultra-processed food, a category linked to chronic disease, met the same resistance and still awaits White House approval. Kennedy needs the federal definition before he can require companies to label their products as ultra-processed.
The MAHA promise has come closest to being kept. Kennedy moved quickly and won meaningful reforms, but the freedom Trump promised has proved conditional. His authority is real, but it narrows when those efforts threaten industry profits.
Verdict: Monkey’s Paw.
Promise 5: “End the Forever Wars”
I will end the endless wars.” (Trump, Bitcoin Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, July 27, 2024) For Independents tired of forever wars, we believed Trump would stop feeding the military-industrial complex.
Record: U.S. strikes on Iran began Feb. 28, 2026. After notifying Congress on March 2, Trump had 60 days under the War Powers Resolution to end hostilities or seek congressional authorization. He did neither. At the deadline, he declared the hostilities “terminated,” even as the blockade of Iranian ports continued and missile strikes resumed.
Joe Kent resigned as counterterrorism director, saying Iran had posed no imminent threat. Thomas Massie, one of the few Republicans to oppose the war and a Trump critic on several other fronts, lost to Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein after roughly $37 million flooded the race, making it the most expensive House primary in history.
Trump has repeatedly called the war almost over, but the U.S. and Iran were still exchanging strikes well into July. Eighteen American service members have been killed and 624 wounded. The Pentagon put the war’s cost at $37.5 billion and is seeking another $67 billion.
The war machine slouches toward profit under either party. In 2020, Trump requested $741 billion for national defense. Biden’s administration asked for $895 billion. Trump now proposes $1.5 trillion for national defense in 2027. Each administration outbids the last.
Never-ending war is the duopoly’s business model.
Verdict: Broken.
In the end, none of the five promises have been fully kept. Three were broken outright, and two came with a catch. Trump still has more than two years to make good on them, but I am not optimistic.
A partisan promise is either a straight lie or a Monkey’s Paw.
So long as each party can keep our votes by making the other seem worse, neither has to earn them by keeping its promises. I made the case to Independent voters and wrote that our trust was “well-founded.” The record says otherwise.
It's easy to blame Republicans now, just as it was easy to blame Democrats then. But we cannot keep blaming the parties while casting our ballots for them. Independents are the country's largest political group, but we don't yet act like one.
We must organize, stop fighting over the same voters, and build shared infrastructure like ballot-access operations, candidate pipelines, and donor networks. And we must stop bargaining away our votes.
The lesser of two evils is still evil, and we will never get leaders we trust by voting for parties we don’t.
Ryan Rabah is an attorney and founder of Independent Campaign Strategies, a political consulting firm serving Independent candidates and organizations. He served as North Carolina state director for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign, co-founded We The People of North Carolina and Our House PAC, and will speak at the Independent National Convention in Washington, D.C., this September.
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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.