Spin Class Case Study: Bipartisanists, Brand Death, and What Comes Next

A better way to think about bipartisanship in Trump 2.0

I’ve been thinking about the marketing term “brand death” a lot lately: when the gap between people’s awareness of a product and their willingness to buy it becomes un-closeable. In other words, when a brand’s liabilities outweigh its value.

It’s safe to say the of brand of bipartisanship was in trouble even before the Trump administration showily yanked its senior officials at the last minute from appearing at the Aspen Security Forum earlier this month. Before the Pentagon subsequently announced it will no longer participate in think tank events, leaving both its civilian and military workforce scrambling to understand what that actually means in practice. And before Democratic governors Tim Walz (Minn.) and Laura Kelly (Kan.) announced they will stop paying dues to be members of the National Governors’ Association.

Tellingly, the explanations of those moves shared an implicit retort: what, exactly, are we all getting from all this bipartisanship?

A Defense Department spokesperson celebrated the agency’s efforts to distance itself from the Washington foreign policy establishment. “DOD officials attending think tank events is not a priority whatsoever at this Department of Defense,” Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said. “This is the 21st century, and there is more than one way to get our message out to the American people and our allies than through the lens of globalist think tanks.”

“When you are also paying dues with taxpayer dollars, it has got to be worth it, and they are going to have to demonstrate that. Right now they are not doing that,” one of these sources said. “There have been ongoing concerns about the NGA among the Democratic governors and staff, off and on, for years.”

Statements like these demonstrate profound impatience with the brand of elite DC that I think of as the Bipartisanists: the centrist old guard (D and Rs) who publicly perform bipartisanship in elite spaces and places, who welcome new voices only in tightly controlled ways, and who believe in and promote bipartisanship as an objective in of itself (not just a means to an end).¹

I’ve spent 20 years in and around Bipartisanist Washington, at times actively managing its branding. I’ve seen up close how most Bipartisanists are smart, accomplished, and well-meaning people (and sure, some of them are smug assholes). I’ve seen how too often, what DC elites call “bipartisanship” is actually code for “civility” or “centrist.” It’s a definition that is more about the performance of bipartisanship than the actual, real-world policy impacts.

What the Bipartisanists often don’t understand - and what Hegseth, Walz, and Kelly seem to grasp - is that American voters aren’t rewarding those old ways of performing bipartisanship. In marketing terms, Bipartisanists are still hawking a dying brand that most Americans just aren’t buying.

President Biden was a classic Washington Bipartisanist, who maintained that bipartisan policy could marshal voters. But 2024 was a brand election, not a policy election, and it was crystal clear that voters were not buying what the Bipartisanists were selling. As a Bipartisanist President, Biden was actually an aberration of recent history. Trump, and Obama before him, share a reflexive aversion to Bipartisanists (though Obama was more willing to actually seek bipartisan policy outcomes - not because he believed them to be inherently better, but because the Congressional math required it after 2010).

This reflects what voters actually believe about the prospects for bipartisan policy consensus. A June 2024 Pew Research study found that Americans see very little bipartisan common ground on major domestic policy issues like guns, reproductive rights, and immigration (with slightly more optimism on foreign policy - but still, pretty dreadful).

Researching an earlier version of this essay I kept coming across similar studies, frequently pushed by elite institutions, that show members of Congress who attract a larger portion of their bill cosponsors from the opposing party are more successful at passing legislation. This is usually framed by the Bipartisanists as proof positive that bipartisanship is objectively better than going it alone, that it creates more durable policy outcomes, etc.

But look at the methodology, and you’ll see what they’re measuring is whether legislation was passed - not whether it was implemented effectively, achieved its stated goals, or survived transition to a new administration.² Those things are harder to measure, but better reflect how voters actually experience outcomes.

Of course, you don’t need to unpack methodologies to see how many of the Biden administration’s much-touted bipartisan legislative wins, including on semiconductor manufacturing, infrastructure, and veterans’ health care, have been unwound or gutted in just the first six months of Trump 2.0. It’s perfectly reasonable to ask what does “bipartisan” even mean when anything branded “Biden” or “Democrat” becomes a CTRL-F target for MAGA, or when a Republican Congress defunds previous bipartisan legislation via mass recissions.

Clearly, the bipartisan = durable line is being upended. But Bipartisanists have trouble admitting how making bipartisanship the objective has helped both Republicans and Democrats dodge accountability by focusing on process, not results. And so bipartisanship as a brand, in practice, comes to be perceived as something that insulates policymakers, conveners, and tastemakers from being judged on results. Understandably, this makes voters who care about impact impatient and frustrated. Because when you’re implicitly telling your audience that they care about the wrong thing, your audience will interpret that as you gaslighting them.

When bipartisanship becomes an objective, not a tactic, it also stymies peoples’ abilities to accurately describe reality. Viewed this way, the Pentagon’s new policy is actually doing bipartisan policy institutions a favor. Secretary Hegseth is proudly stating out loud what many in bipartisan Washington secretly believed but couldn’t be caught admitting: that there’s no accommodating MAGA Republican politics in a bipartisan framework because MAGA doesn’t care about bipartisanship. If anything, performing bipartisanship hurts their core brand.

Here’s Vivek Ramaswamy at the Aspen Security Forum in December 2024, talking about DOGE was going to lay off feds with dignity. It was pretty weird and farcical for most everyone involved. A few weeks later he was let go on Trump’s second day in office.

This has been pretty obvious to a lot of us for a long time. But Bipartisanist institutions were trapped in continuing to perform bipartisanship as if MAGA was an outlier, not the core brand identity. This resulted in a lot of weird kabuki performances that, frankly, were also pretty rough on the Bipartisanist brand. When you aren’t able to say the obvious thing out loud, you come across as feckless and weak. People may pity or sympathize with a person desperately trying to win a bully’s affection or attention. But they don’t respect them.

The takeaway seems pretty clear: Voters don’t believe bipartisanship is even really possible. So if you believe bipartisanship is important (and to be clear, I do), then focus less on performing bipartisanship in blue chip centrist spaces, and more on getting real-world impacts with allies of convenience.

To that end, there’s something really interesting happening right now: while Bipartisanists have been trying to stave off total brand collapse, there’s an actual real-time bipartisan coalition emerging on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. And it’s looking like these unlikely bedfellows could, maybe, shake up the longstanding bipartisan consensus on U.S.-Israel policy.

It’s too soon to assess what if any long-term impact this unlikely coalition will have on Trump’s Israel policy, but it’s telling that it includes Democrat and MAGA voices who disagree wildly on most everything else. These folks will definitely not perform bipartisanship in the ways Washington typically expects. MAGA populists and progressives who have been speaking out on the catastrophe in Gaza for years are not gonna appear on think tank stages together. They will never write joint op-eds calling on Netanyahu to permit humanitarian aid into Gaza.

But when Marjorie Taylor-Green is calling what’s happening in Gaza a genocide and AIPAC is accusing Bernie Sanders of blood libel, the old bipartisan consensus brand is looking pretty obsolete.³ Instead, we’re seeing how tactical, temporary alignments can activate their respective bases, upend the usual narratives, and potentially impact the Trump administration’s rhetoric in ways that those old school performances of bipartisanship never could.

Bipartisanists would never call this a bipartisan effort. But it absolutely is.

To be clear: I don’t know if this new informal coalition will ultimately change Trump’s approach to Israel. But I do know that the Bipartisanist crowd never could have convinced either Joe Biden or Donald Trump to change their approaches to Netanyahu. To be honest, they never really publicly tried - not because they were bad people or unmoved by the crisis in Gaza, but because they knew they had extremely limited leverage and didn’t want to disrupt their carefully cultivated networks by pressing for something they knew they wouldn’t get.

Many Americans see that calculation, rational though it may be, as just another in a series of bipartisan elite failures in their lifetimes. Like the intelligence failures that led to 9/11, or that bipartisan consensus begat failed wars and nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. The financial institutions that nearly collapsed the global economy in 2008 got bipartisan bailouts, but experienced no real accountability for their recklessness. A bipartisan inability to regulate tech companies that invade our privacy, get rich off our data, and sell ads against content that tells us to fear our neighbors.

This may sting, but you need to hear it from someone who loves you: when many people hear “bipartisanship” they receive it as “elite failings that led to things like Epstein.” Yes, Jeffrey Epstein was Donald Trump’s creepy friend for years, but an Epstein association has tainted plenty of Democrats and Bipartisanist institutions over the last two decades. When Harvard, Bill Gates, and Bill Clinton all have to apologize for their ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Bipartisanship the Brand has bigger problems than an ambiguously-worded directive on think tank events.⁴ Fair or not, that’s the brand reality Bipartisanists are up against.

Yet ironically, Jeffrey Epstein is also an emerging area of new bipartisan consensus. For a whole slew of reasons, many of them not especially noble, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-Ky.) joint call to release the Epstein Files attracted enough bipartisan support that Speaker Johnson felt forced to shut down the House early. It’s hard to deny the impact of that joint effort, especially on all the terrible things that are now slowed or postponed. But the traditional Bipartisanist view tends to treat moves like this as obstructionist or unproductive, even if they’re objectively the right political call.⁵

So maybe we need a new definition of bipartisanship in Washington: one that doesn’t rest on the performance of bipartisanship, or center its intentions, but instead focuses on real-world results as voters actually experience them. Importantly, to achieve real bipartisan outcomes in MAGA Washington, you don’t actually have to call them bipartisan! If anything, that probably hinders your ability to get stuff done these days.

That’s anathema to the Bipartisanist mindset, where the branding has been central to the whole deal. For a long time, performing bipartisanship in certain circles got you access, credibility, and clout (and yes, a certain class of clients).

But to all my Bipartisanists: you may not want to see it, but this is a huge opportunity. Your brand is in real trouble, friends. People simply aren’t buying what you’re selling. Your challenge is to get people excited about your brand again, in a way that feels authentic to them. There’s potential in this model.

The Pentagon’s directive just said out loud what those of us in the game have known for a while now: gone are the days where you get stuff done in Washington just by buying a table at the White House Correspondents Dinner, sponsoring a centrist think tank, or appearing on the right Very Serious Policy Panel. But that frees you up to think in new ways. To experiment. To build new bridges, to new audiences.

This can be both fun and productive! Just don’t expect to get credit for your good intentions in the same ways. MAGA audiences are just not going to give credit to their progressive partners. Nor will progressive audiences give credit to MAGA politicians. Their brands are too far apart, and too oppositional. If you insist on credit for the fact of your bipartisanship and center that as one of your outcomes, then congrats: you’ve made your job that much harder with many of your key audiences.

But if you stop caring about getting credit for bipartisanship, you can get some really cool stuff done in Washington these days (maybe even some stuff that might have been harder before). There are still PLENTY of opportunities for tactical cross-aisle cooperation in this town. I see it every day in my consulting work: there is a ton happening to shape legislation, fund projects, and advance priorities away from the media spotlight’s glare (including and especially in the national security space). It’s just that certain modes of performing it no longer fly.

And look: I still believe bipartisanship matters. Not because elite lawmakers passing bipartisan bills is an inherently good thing. But we have to have ways to reach people with whom we disagree profoundly. We just have to. And I’ve seen plenty of examples of tactical bipartisan cooperation unsticking and shaking up the status quo in healthy, productive ways.

If they can seize this moment, the Bipartisanists have a real opportunity to get serious about changing how they convene and perform their work. And no, this doesn’t mean aligning around a new vision of populism - Americans are just way, way too far apart on basic policy issues for that. This tactical approach to bipartisanship doesn’t mean that we all will get along better, like each other more, or even that we necessarily develop habits of cooperation on other issues.

But maybe we can do what the Bipartisanists always say they want Americans to do: think outside the box a little. Challenge our priors. Prove it’s still possible to get stuff done with people we mostly can’t stand, even if for ignoble reasons like that it will really annoy our shared enemies. Take our wins where we can get them, and build from that.

Or maybe at the very least: make just one thing, somewhere, a little less awful for a while.

1. This is a similar but distinct brand from the Nonpartisanists. The two brands overlap in the CFR coatroom, the Tatte by the White House, and the terminals of the Halifax and Aspen airports (where they commiserate over the absence of a United Club lounge).

2. Other studies have similar methodological issues, including this one asserting that enacted laws are almost as bipartisan as they were a half-century ago (but gives equal weight to major legislation like the Affordable Care Act and bills naming post offices) (and then when it controls for major/minor legislation decides to exclude megabills like the ACA, the American Rescue Plan, and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act - all of which were party-line votes, and all of which arguably had a way bigger impact on the average American than the balance of the bipartisan legislation actually included).

3. Also, when the Bipartisanists are so twisted up on this that they’re unable to call out AIPAC for using such an offensive slur against a Jewish Senator, that’s pretty telling.

4. To be clear: I’m not giving a pass to Trump’s actions (or inactions) by noting this. Anyone in public life who associated with Jeffrey Epstein should absolutely and at minimum be issuing a full, transparent, and unequivocal apology and accounting of their actions. Obviously, Trump has failed to do this.

5. I said in an earlier Substack that I didn’t intend to talk about Epstein more. Writing this has made me confront how that’s in part because my Bipartisanist conditioning has taught me to reflexively demur from talking overtly about topics that are coded as unserious, salacious, or conspiracy-driven, for a whole slew of reasons. We’re all learning.