A guide to the streamer dipshits Trump keeps appearing with

What is a Theo Von, an Adin Ross, a Nelk?

Greetings from Read Max HQ, returned to its rightful home base in Brooklyn, N.Y.! In today’s newsletter we’ll be covering some of the many dipshit streamers, YouTubers, and podcasters, appearances on whose outlets seem to be the Trump campaign’s main media strategy for the 2024 election.

A reminder: Read Max sends out one free email a week to everyone. I’m able to keep it free thanks to the support and generosity of paying subscribers, who subsidize the free email for everyone else (and in turn get a weekly paywalled email of movie, book, and music recommendations all themselves). If you appreciate Read Max’s unique and not always successful hybrid of reporting, opinion writing, criticism, and shitposting, and want to keep it open and free on a regular basis, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Think of it like this: for the cost of one beer, you’re getting between 15,000 and 20,000 words every month, almost all of them spelled correctly and in the right order. If that’s not a bargain I don’t know what is.

The funniest component of the Trump campaign’s media strategy so far is its commitment to dipshit outreach.

This week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made an appearance on the podcast of Road Rules and The Challenge contestant Theo Von, who has lately found success as a Zynternet-adjacent stand-up comic and podcaster. A clip from the podcast, in which Von describes the effects of cocaine to Trump, has gone somewhat viral, largely because it’s one of very few recent clips of Trump where he’s neither rambling nor bored. This interview comes on the heels of one with streamer Adin Ross earlier in August, and an interview with YouTuber/podcaster Logan Paul back in June; the same month, the Canadian pranksters of the YouTube channel “Nelk” recorded a TikTok on behalf of Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance.

What do Von, Ross, Paul, and the Nelk Boys have in common? I’ll admit that it’s unfair to lump a harmless and affable dumbass like Von in with a malevolent little twerp like Ross. But they all provide varying levels of access to a large audience of young men who might find Trump appealing--guys who like “edgy,” trollish, hedonistic, attention-seeking personalities. I have filled my pop-sociological taxonomizing quota already this summer, so rather than come up with a cute name or theory for this type of guys,¹ I will simply call these guys “dipshits.”

The thing about dipshit outreach strategy is that while you can invent a kind of clever logic to support it--i.e., the audience for Logan Paul and Adin Ross consists of guys who have some kind of natural affinity for Trump, but are also low-propensity voters (due to being dipshits), and a consistent media campaign among them might increase turnout in the dipshit community--in practice a sizable majority of the dipshit audience is 15-year-old boys who are not legally able to vote. Nevertheless I think Trump in particular enjoys dipshit outreach because (1) the interviewers love him, and (2) he is himself manifestly the same kind of dramatic, gossipy, maldeveloped, attention-seeking nuisance as the creators who populate greater dipshit media economy. For this reason I fully expect Trump to record an episode of No Jumper before the election.

But the question for the rest of us is: Who are all these people? Where did they come from? What follows is a brief Read Max guide to the outlets the Trump Campaign has leaned on for its Dipshit Outreach tour.

Logan Paul

• Who he is: One of the original streamer dipshit freaks. A Vine star who became a YouTuber specializing in very stupid prank and stunt videos. Over the last few years Paul has transitioned to making somewhat more “mellow” YouTube content about his life and recording a weekly podcast (on which Trump appeared in June), while also pursuing a career as a pro wrestler and sometime boxer. (Logan is not to be confused with his younger brother Jake, also pursuing a career as a boxer.)

• Where he came from: Vine

• Main platforms: YouTube and the “Impaulsive” podcast

• Side hustles: In addition to his career as a pro wrestler, Paul founded an energy drink company called “Prime” and launched a failed NFT game called “CryptoZoo”

• Number of words in the “controversies” section on his Wikipedia: Paul’s Wikipedia article, amazingly, doesn’t feature a specific “controversies” section. Instead, the “YouTube Career” section of his page features a subsection called “2017–2018: Suicide forest controversy” and another called “2018–present: boxing, podcast, and further controversies.” All told, these two sections are 1301 words.

• Number of minutes a normal person could feasibly hold a conversation with him before desperately needing to leave: 10

The Nelk Boys

@jdLaunching my TikTok with @NELKBOYS

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

• Who they are: A group of popular YouTubers known for that particularly “YouTube” brand of stupid “prank” that seems less “funny” than it does “irritating” (driving past cops while drinking fake beer, e.g.). The Nelk Boys also record travel videos (Abu Dhabi! Russia! Israel!) and a regular podcast.

• Where they came from: Canada

• Main platforms: Their YouTube channel and the “Full Send” podcast

• Side hustles: A clothing company called “Full Send” and a hard seltzer brand called “Happy Dad”

• Number of words in the “controversies” section on their Wikipedia: 579 (Note that the section is actually called “legal issues and controversies)

• Number of minutes a normal person could feasibly hold a conversation with them before desperately needing to leave: Depends on which Nelk boy, but 30 minutes on the outside

Adin Ross

• Who he is: An annoying but extremely popular livestreamer who hangs out with rappers and plays video games

• Where he comes from: Twitch, where he streamed NBA 2K with LeBron James’ son Bronny

• Main platforms: YouTube and the upstart Twitch competitor “Kick”

• Side hustles: Shockingly, Adin Ross does not have a branded energy/alcoholic drink

• Number of words in the “controversies” section on their Wikipedia: Like Paul, Ross has managed to avoid having a “Controversies” section simply by having his entire “Career” section (275 words) be an enumeration of everything controversial he’s done. However, he does have a “Twitch Bans” section that runs to 163 words.

• Number of minutes a normal person could feasibly hold a conversation with him before desperately needing to leave: 4

Theo Von

• Who he is: A charmingly fratty stand-up comedian filling the Joe-Rogan-15-years-ago slot in culture

• Where he comes from: Road Rules (2000) and Real World/Road Rules Challenge (2002-2006).

• Main platforms: His podcast "This Past Weekend”

• Side hustles: None--Von is a full-time stand-up

• Number of words in the “controversies” section on their Wikipedia: No controversies section

• Number of minutes a normal person could feasibly hold a conversation with them before desperately needing to leave: Honestly, you could probably talk to Von for a couple hours and have a good time. Just because he’s got a sizable dipshit audience doesn’t make him one.

1. I’m not sure these guys need much theorizing, anyway--the audience I am describing is, basically, “annoying adolescent and teenage boys” of a type that has existence at least since I was an adolescent and probably for many centuries before that.