Trump’s takeover of the manosphere left liberals pining for their own Joe Rogan. But the hosts of Chapo, still stung by Bernie’s defeats, would rather let the party establishment burn. “I’m not giving any campaign advice here,” says Will Menaker, “other than to believe different things.”

about the nicest thing anyone on Chapo Trap House had to say about Kamala Harris in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral victory was when cohost Amber A’Lee Frost lamented, “We could have had President Xanax MILF. That would have been way more fun.” The democratic socialist podcasters weren’t blind to the “truly evil” things coming in Trump’s second term, but they weren’t surprised that he won, as cohost Will Menaker put it. Harris’s refusal to engage seriously with protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, her alliance with the family of Dick Cheney, and her inability to articulate a vision for the country were all part of why none of the Chapo hosts I recently spoke with—Frost, Menaker, and Felix Biederman—voted for a presidential candidate in 2024. “Whoever wins,” Menaker said on a pre-election episode, “we lose.”

They weren’t always so fatalistic. Menaker started the show in early 2016 with Biederman and fellow “Weird Twitter” poster Matt Christman. After that year’s election, they added Frost and Justin Cass, who goes by Virgil Texas, as cohosts. By then, subscribers were sending more than $20,000 a month on Patreon, according to data collected by Graphtreon. Their live shows started selling out, and in 2018 they published a best-selling book. Their irreverent humor, edging into hyperbolic surrealism, and hyperliterate delivery brought listeners in, but their message kept them coming back. They were sardonic, not cynical. They spoke to a socialist impulse that had been largely repressed in mainstream media since the Cold War.

Chapo rode the wave of a resurgent electoral left in the wake of Bernie Sanders’s first campaign, becoming the flagship media project of his movement. By March 2020, the podcast was the highest-grossing podcast on Patreon and was bringing in $174,000 a month on the site. And their mission sharpened as Sanders prepared to run again. They urged listeners to travel to early primary states to canvas for Sanders. Many in the more than 700-strong audience at their Iowa show on the night of the caucuses had crossed state lines. “What’s scary is that we’re not just tossing out catharsis and jokes into the void,” Biederman told them. “This is part of something real.”

Even then, they knew Sanders was up against a powerful Democratic Party machine. “Government and big business are coming after our movement, and they’re coming strong, but they won’t win, because we are the biggest and most honest podcast in America!” Menaker shouted to the crowd in Iowa City, mixing facetiousness with a measure of truth and genuine optimism. “Other than Joe Rogan,” corrected Frost. “Looks like Jon Lovett’s just another screenwriter now,” said Biederman, calling out one of the cohosts of Pod Save America, the rival show started by former Barack Obama aides that speaks to the Democratic establishment.

Super Tuesday 2020, when Joe Biden locked up the Democratic nomination, marked a turn for Chapo. “I felt like that was the chance for the left in this country to assert themselves politically through the electoral system, and it didn’t work,” Menaker, who is 41, tells me. “It revealed the actual purpose of the Democratic Party, which is to prevent something like that from happening.” After that March, their Patreon earnings flatlined, not dropping precipitously, but never again rising with the same speed. The locus of the show’s mission had spun out. “During the Bernie years, it was easy to evangelize to the audience,” Frost tells me. “Without that, the second I realize someone is listening, it’s a little more difficult.”

In the Biden years, Chapo’s hosts would confront scandal and tragedy. They’d search for new opportunities in the gloaming of political hope. But the “dirtbag left” community they’d brought together would never entirely dissipate. Though they didn’t have a candidate or a movement to call their own, the show continued to serve a political purpose. “It offers a vocabulary for young dudes that would feel alienated and would maybe fall into the alt-right. It allows them an analysis of the world that doesn’t come down to shitting on women or people of color or people poorer than they are,” says Jason Grote, a screenwriter who has collaborated with the hosts. “It’s about solidarity.”

That wasn’t enough for some liberals after Trump coasted to reelection victory on a series of endorsements from podcasts appealing to young men, most prominent among them Joe Rogan’s. “People all over are being like, ‘Where’s the liberal or the progressive-left thing that speaks to these, kind of, rude young men?’” steamed Chapo’s producer Chris Wade on their first episode after the 2024 election. “I’ve spent 20,000 hours editing it.” Pundits began pining for a Rogan type who could, presumably, sway a young, male electorate into voting Democratic. Menaker tells me that the Democrats’ problem was their message, not its medium. “Joe Rogan was the Joe Rogan of the left back when he endorsed Bernie Sanders,” he points out.

“I’m not giving any campaign advice here,” Menaker adds, “other than to believe different things,” Menaker says.

David Weigel, a Semafor political reporter and frequent guest on the show, doesn’t see Chapo breaking through to Rogan’s audience. “The appeal from right-wing podcasts has been, ‘You need to improve yourself, you need to become an alpha, you need to stop eating seed oils.’ There are a lot of young people who think that—unlike Bernie, who said, ‘I want to fight for somebody I don’t know’—they just want to fight for themselves,” he says. “The Chapo offer is, ‘You can want a better world, you can want socialism, and that will lead to a better life.’ They’re offering something that very successful right-wing media is offering a quicker alternative to, and the quicker alternative is attractive, in part, because Donald Trump wins elections and Bernie Sanders hasn’t.”

Chapo was never going to blindly fall in line behind whoever the Democratic Party anointed in 2024. Their politics aren’t premised on party loyalty like those of, say, Pod Save America, which unsurprisingly was the first stop for the Harris brain trust in discussing their loss. “To the extent that [leftist streamer Hasan Piker] or Joe Rogan have an audience, or a platform, or a large audience that trusts them, it’s because they don’t have the politics of Pod Save America,” Menaker said on that postelection Chapo episode. Biederman, who once appeared on a show hosted by Lovett, articulated the core of Chapo’s critique of the centrist-left podcast in 2018. “All these people have ever done is subscribe to the news and work at a comms department for 30 years and then tell you how to argue with your racist uncle,” he said. “These Obama freaks, they don’t give a shit. They will hang out anyone to dry. They don’t believe in anything.”

The Chapo hosts identified the same problem in their postmortems of Harris’s campaign. “They come up with all these excuses about messaging, the story we tell, the political atmosphere, the political biosphere, and all this hokum to cover the fact that they don’t believe in anything,” said Menaker in one. “Left unsaid in all this about why she didn’t do the shows that appeal to young people, or young men in particular, that Trump did and did so well on, is that if she was going to any nontraditional media forum in which the subject of politics is discussed, and they have an audience that’s politically engaged, she would have had to face questions that she simply cannot answer.”

In May 2020, weeks after Sanders dropped out of the Democratic primary and New York issued a shelter in place order, Chapo too found itself short of answers. “Look, I have to get out of town or I’m going to lose my mind,” Frost texted their group chat. “You’re welcome to come if you want.” So Christman, Menaker, Biederman, and Frost piled into a van and left New York for an Airbnb in the Catskills. “We had invested a lot of our creative energy, our personal time and effort, into making Bernie the Democratic nominee. It didn’t work out. We hit the limits of what our podcast and its effect on the world could possibly be,” Menaker says. “We needed to commune with nature.”

That weekend in the woods was the first time they’d been together since the defeat. “Not to say that we had it any worse than anyone with a real job, but losing like that and then, like, ‘Go sit inside for fucking months’—that really sucked,” Biederman tells me. “But we didn’t talk about any of that when we were there. It just relieved a lot of pressure.” They did acid and watched Scott Adkins’s nonsensical thriller Avengement. “It was a moment to escape thinking about the future,” says Frost, but also, “it was kind of important. Even Felix, the total homebody, he came out. It’s important to maintain your relationships.”

Only one cohost didn’t join them. Cass had been invited, but wasn’t interested. He withdrew after Sanders’s loss, no longer regularly appearing on the show. “It was very obvious that was a breaking point for him,” says David Eisenberg, a longtime friend. “He was a pain in the ass to work with,” says Frost. “I saw our connection to him starting to fray, but Bernie and the mission kept that from completely falling apart. After it was gone, it did. We were staying together for the kids.”

Before the podcast, Cass had been a career extra, appearing in shows like Gossip Girl and Girls, but Chapo’s success seemed to reorient his ambitions toward the political. “He wanted very different things out of his life and career than we did,” says Biederman. “He wanted to be an actual pundit.” The first episode of Bad Faith, a podcast Cass hosted with former Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, aired in September 2020. “He started another podcast without really telling us,” says Frost. Months later, in May 2021, Chapo sent subscribers a statement announcing that Cass was no longer a cohost. “This separation is mutual and amicable,” it read. “We all wish him the absolute best.”

On June 9, 2021, a Twitter user posted a thread claiming they had had a “traumatizing” online relationship with Cass when they were a teenager. “I believed that we were in a long distance, adult relationship as he requested things of that nature from me,” they wrote. “I don’t want to give explicit details of what happened over [FaceTime], but I think you get the idea and it was traumatizing.” They added, “It made me feel so disgusting that someone who is lauded as a champion of my political beliefs did this to me.”

Frost didn’t immediately credit the accusations. “This was an anonymous person on the internet, which is the exact demographic of people who make shit up about us,” she tells me. Nevertheless, she asked Cass about it. “I was like, ‘Hey, are you a piece of shit?’ He was just like, ‘Well, yes, but nothing criminal,’” she recalls. “That’s vague.” Eisenberg says that when he asked, Cass denied the accusations.

At the end of that June, Gray put out a statement. “Although we have discussed his obligation to address this accusation, he has not provided me with any additional insight into the facts of the underlying claim. Not knowing more, I want to avoid weighing in irresponsibly,” she wrote. “My understanding is that Virgil plans to make a statement shortly.” Cass never made a statement, never appeared on either podcast again, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including a detailed list of questions sent to an email he has used in recent months. He still appears on Bad Faith’s cover art, but attempts to reach him through Gray and other former associates went unanswered.

None of the Chapos who would talk about their former cohost could say what he’d been up to since the split, but they indicated that he’s still receiving subscriber money. “We all want to have a Chapo pension for anyone who, no matter what conditions we part under, helped build the show,” says Frost. Wade confirms that Cass receives money, albeit a smaller share than that of the current hosts; he describes the arrangement as “somewhere between pension and contractual obligation.”

Eisenberg, one of Cass’s best friends, eventually cut him off. In late 2021, he was considering Cass to be one of the groomsmen at his wedding. “I had to tell him, ‘I can’t rely on you. I have to let you go from the group.’ He didn’t put up much resistance, if any.”

“He was kind of like a tumbleweed,” says Eisenberg. “He ran away from his problems.”

as one cohost fell away, another struck out in a new direction. In June 2020, Frost took a Xanax and boarded a socially distanced flight to Los Angeles. She started a Hollywood production company called ColdFeet. “I run head first into things,” she explains. “For better or worse, sometimes for worse, I never get cold feet.” Unlike Chapo, where everything is evenly distributed, Frost is sole CEO, though she brought on the rest as owners and lured them West. “I was the pioneer,” she says. “Then I sent back word that it’s bright and sunny here in California.”

In 2016, Menaker talked about expanding Chapo into a site with videos and blogs, but ColdFeet was more than a pivot to video. “Imagine if they actually produced a feature-length film,” says Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine who has known Frost since 2014. “Hollywood is very milquetoast, anodyne, liberal. Democratic Party politics could be produced by bots. Is there space for some kind of spontaneous media experience of left spectacle and entertainment and laughs? Yes. It’s all we have now. We have so little political power.”

It wasn’t long before Christman had an Amber in each ear preaching the virtues of California. He got to know Amber Rollo while swimming in the Rockaways that first pandemic summer. She was a comedian, native to the Golden State, living in a Bushwick loft with no AC, no heater, and no stove. Rollo, who wasn’t a podcast listener, recalls Christman wanting to take “a step back from bigger politics and trying to focus more on his small community.” As winter approached, she and Christman loaded up her 1990 Chevy conversion van with a broken odometer and took off for California.

When the couple later decided to get married, Menaker, an online minister of the Universal Life Church, came out to officiate the wedding at Little Secret, a Hollywood DIY venue where Rollo hosted shows featuring former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and Amazon union organizer Chris Smalls. At karaoke afterward, the bride and groom sang the B-52’s “Love Shack.” Chapo producer Chris Wade and his wife, Molly Mary O’Brien, who sang Tenacious D’s “Fuck Her Gently,” looked around and decided to move. David Weigel attended, but didn’t sing. Biederman didn’t sing either—“I like [karaoke] in the Yakuza series of games,” he says, “not in real life”—but he too succumbed to the Hollywood drift. Menaker, the son of New Yorker and New York Times editors, was the only one to stay loyal to the city. “Go Yankees,” he says.

With mentors like The Big Short director Adam McKay, Uncut Gems codirector Benny Safdie, and Oscar-winning screenwriter Josh Olson, Chapo was quickly entrenched in projects. Jason Grote, who had been a writer on Mad Men, helped Christman and Menaker adapt their podcast series about George H.W. Bush for TV. “I’m a drama writer, so the pitch was coming off as a little bit more prestige TV and a little bit less Chapo,” he recalls. “Safdie advised us to just write it as a pilot.” They wrote an episode where a young H.W. is tricked into dosing John F. Kennedy with acid. “If you play it as drama, people are more resistant to it,” Grote says. “Whereas if you crank up the absurdity…”

In September 2023, with Rollo in a Santa Monica hospital, preparing to give birth, Christman collapsed. By the time Rollo waddled into his hospital room across town, he was unconscious. “He had a stroke. We don’t know if he’ll ever be able to do anything more than this,” a doctor told her. “That was terrifying. I’m about to pop and they’re telling me that the love of my life, the father of my future child, might never do anything,” she says. “That evening, he mumbled, ‘I love you.’ That put the fight in me.”

Frost and Biederman rushed to the hospital. Menaker and his girlfriend, former Elle editor Katherine Krueger, flew from New York almost as soon as they heard. “The first time I saw him after the stroke, he referenced a really stupid thing that I hardly even remembered,” Biederman says. “It confirmed to me he’s still in there. His cognition is absolutely fucking there, it’s just his ability to relate that cognition to the world, he’s going to have to rebuild that. For a guy like him, that’s incredibly fucking tragic.” Before Chapo, Christman was an unemployed Twitter poster in Ohio. Podcasting helped him find a voice. “I used to compare him—and seriously—to Cicero,” says Daniel Bessner, a frequent guest on the show and cohost of the podcast American Prestige. “He’s an orator, fundamentally.”

While Rollo prepared to give birth, Wade and O’Brien mustered friends. “Me and my wife have that element of producer brain,” Wade says. O’Brien made a spreadsheet to make sure there was always someone with Christman. Biederman helped Christman with stretches he learned from Muay Thai, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and his mother’s work as a yoga instructor. Frost painted the nursery and installed handicap bars in his home. “All of us are leftists who strongly believe in community. This was an experience to put that to work,” Rollo says. “I hope the way our community has come together has ripple effects.” After more than a month in the hospital, Christman moved to a rehabilitation facility. Father and daughter learned to walk on the same schedule. “He’s still miles ahead of her on talking,” Rollo says, though he hasn’t fully recovered.

Another crisis rocked Hollywood before Christman’s stroke. After Netflix announced it’d lost nearly a million subscribers, streamers stopped stockpiling content. “We’d been writing pilots, which became worth bupkis,” says Frost. “So we were like, fine, we’ll do other things.” They’ve since been producing a series of short films, are writing a comic book, and invested in Eephus, a feature-length baseball comedy that played at Cannes and the New York Film Festival. Frost attended the festivals with her now boyfriend, Nate Fisher, who cowrote and acts in the film. She partied at David Lynch’s annual Silencio pop-up nightclub at Cannes, but didn’t spot the late director. She assumed he was “in a secret vestibule, two-sided-mirror wall, where he’s observing the goings on and eating a wholesome helping of cherry pie with black coffee.”

Christman has been easing back into work. “He does want to get back to saying something,” says Rollo. “At the beginning, and still now, I was mostly focused on helping him find joy again.” Frost has been helping write his contribution to the comic and Wade self-published a book adapted from Christman’s scripts for a series on the Spanish Civil War. They sold close to 18,000 copies. He’s started sitting in on the podcast again, and, with Rollo’s help, he’s writing poems for a new segment called Strokes of Genius. “Writing poetry is a great release. A Catharsis,” he tweeted recently, thanking Rollo. “With a stroke I never been so lucky because I with you.”

In late October, the Chapo Trap House logo appeared on a billboard above the Olive Garden in Times Square. The podcast’s subscribers hadn’t grown substantially since 2020, but they remained one of the biggest projects on Patreon, taking in approximately $180,000 a month as of December. Patreon asked if they wanted in on some advertising space they were purchasing. “There was trepidation at first,” says Frost. “But we like the idea of tourists seeing it and going, ‘What the fuck is that?’”

There hasn’t been a noticeable bump in subscriptions from the billboard. “You can’t expect exponential growth forever,” Menaker says. “I wouldn’t be satisfied if it was shrinking or we were losing money, but, for me, the feeling of doing the show comes first.” Perhaps the only thing that could revive their growth would be another movement like Sanders’s. “The man and the message matched, broadly speaking, the things that we would like to see in an American government,” Menaker says. “There aren’t any other opportunities for that. What are we gonna do? Start casting another candidate to support? If one comes along, I’ll let you know.”

Not long after the billboard went up, Biederman moved back to New York, tired of drifting through life in Southern California. He ridicules the idea of podcasters fixing politics. “Liberals in the Democratic Party are always fighting the last war. Maybe it would have made sense to have spent the last seven years building a parallel media infrastructure that had these things to prepare for the Biden presidency, in advance of having a chief executive who is constitutionally incapable of communicating,” he says. “But now, I don’t know how anyone can look at the past 40 years of the conservative movement and go, ‘Oh, it’s Joe Rogan.’ No, it’s actual institutional strength that does not have a left-liberal equivalent.”

Biederman doesn’t see anyone building anything like that on the left. “Bernie is still individually popular, but it’s hard to have him as the center of gravity for this movement when he’s spent the past four years telling everyone how great Biden is. The same is true for AOC,” he says. “If anyone is going to recapture that feeling, it’s going to have to be someone who’s a little more courageous than that.” Frost is particularly dubious about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s commitment to democratic socialism. “Without the movement, she’s pretty untethered,” Frost says. “I don’t think she’s particularly focused or serious-minded about politics so much as the left-liberal commitment to forming a little righteous block, which doesn’t resonate with people as much as results. It tends to resonate with people without real problems.”

At least one former guest levels elements of that criticism at Chapo. “We’re increasingly careening into a world where social democracy probably isn’t going to happen and probably wouldn’t fix things, so maybe people need to become more interested in the further radical, revolutionary ideas throughout the history of communism…and they were a soc. dem. show,” says comedian Jake Flores. “They’re never going to be attached to a project like Bernie again. If you’re in a position like Chapo, you get more doomery from here on out, or you just become vague.”

The closest thing to a hopeful comment in Chapo’s postelection episode came from Wade. “I’m thinking back to that post-2016 moment, where everything was very scary, mostly because it was so new and uncharted. One of the scarier parts of now is that we know how this goes and it is charted and that chart is terrifying. But also just thinking about that concept of contingency…and how that post-2016 moment led to a big flourishing of alternative ways to think about and do politics,” he said. “It is still, as it always is, time to look to your friends, look to the people around you that need help and that you can build community and build capacity with, in whatever way makes sense to you, and wait for those moments of contingency.”

The hosts retain their capacity to be astonished by the left’s ability to unexpectedly rise. “One of the most heartening things I’ve seen in my time doing this show came years after a very disheartening defeat for Bernie,” says Biederman. “For the first time in my lifetime, seeing tens of thousands of Americans turning out for Palestine…it was probably the most amazing display I’ve seen.” Frost distills that to an ethic. “Despair is a kind of egotism. It’s a belief in your ability to predict the future,” she says. “I didn’t see Bernie coming. It’s important to remember the world can still surprise you. I hope another weird, good opportunity presents itself for a socialist future.”