Trump’s Cruelty, Candace’s Chaos, and the War on Women

When politics stops pretending to be human...

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

Jennifer Welch is not your typical Bravo alum. She’s an Oklahoma native from the Bible Belt who somehow became one of the most fearless Democratic truth-tellers in the podcast ecosystem. She’s the rare progressive willing to punch in every direction, including her own on her hit show IHIP News.

The Sweet Home Oklahoma star brings a kind of prairie-fire energy to politics: unscripted, unsentimental, and allergic to bullshit. You’ve seen her go after Rahm Emanuel, Elon Musk, and what she calls the “Kirk industrial complex.” Elon once labeled her an “evil ghoul.” Her producer swears no guest wants to end up on her bad side. And operatives hate her for one simple reason: Jennifer Welch has the instinct they can’t control. She can smell sincerity, or the lack of it, from across the room.

That instinct is why her clips don’t just travel on the left. They ricochet on the right, too.

This week, we started with a story that should have been treated with basic human decency, and wasn’t.

Trump’s response to the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele didn’t just read as cruel. It read as personal. He framed it as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as if the most urgent thing in a tragedy is whether the deceased insulted him at some point. Even some of Trump’s allies recoiled. Piers Morgan called it “dreadful” and urged him to delete it. Republican members of Congress, including conservatives, called it “not presidential,” “nasty,” and “disrespectful.”

And yet: the bigger point here isn’t just Trump’s cruelty. It’s what Welch zeroed in on immediately — what this story is actually about.

Addiction.

Welch spoke with the kind of blunt empathy that doesn’t show up enough in political media, especially when the incentive structure is to turn every death into a culture war. She talked about loving someone in recovery and the anger, the exhaustion, the terror, and the quiet thoughts people are ashamed to say out loud. It’s grim. It’s real. And it’s universal, no matter how you vote.

That’s the moment we’re living in: everything gets politicized instantly, and the actual human truth gets flattened.

From there, we moved to another kind of American psychodrama — the right-wing media ecosystem eating itself in public. The Candace Owens vs. Erika Kirk feud isn’t just gossip; it’s a case study in how conspiracy content spreads now: cat video, vacation reel, viral clip, “save this tweet,” repeat. Welch put it bluntly: you can get fed thirty seconds of coherence wrapped in a bigger pattern of chaos and it’s exactly how smart, persuasive people drag audiences deeper.

Then we widened the lens: the war on women which is increasingly prosecuted by women in the conservative movement, often while living the exact opposite of what they preach. Welch called it “gender washing.” I’d call it power laundering. Either way, the hypocrisy isn’t a bug, it’s the point.

And because I’m equal-opportunity annoyed, we also got into what’s rotting inside the Democratic Party: the stale messaging, the podcast allergy, the risk aversion, the corporate discipline that reads like focus-group residue. Democrats don’t need better slogans. They need to sound like real people again and stop acting like the internet is a hostile environment instead of the battlefield where politics actually happens now.

We closed with a rapid-fire “Had It / Hit It” that was exactly as chaotic as it sounds — men in eyeliner, tuxedos on airplanes, Pantone’s white-washing, and politicians on TikTok (Welch has one exception: Governor Wes Moore, whose dance moves apparently qualify as a national security threat for Republicans).

It’s a funny episode. It’s also a serious one. Because beneath the clips and the feuds is the same core theme: the country is exhausted, institutions are losing authority, and the people who thrive in that environment are the ones who can perform certainty even when they’re peddling nonsense.

Jennifer Welch is entertaining. She’s also a warning flare.

If you want the full conversation, it’s on The Tara Palmeri Show.