The man behind the so-called “DOGE Dividend,” investor James Fishback, joins NewsNation’s “CUOMO” to discuss Trump’s promise that tax-paying Americans could receive a $5,000 check — thanks to DOGE. Fishback proposed that 20% of all DOGE-identified budget cuts should go directly to the people, an idea Elon Musk says he pitched to Trump. “I regret nothing,” James Fishback tells me. The Republican Party’s only prominent right-populist insurgent is polling at around 10 percent, well behind Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed, state-party anointee who, though refusing to debate his opponents, appears poised to become Florida’s next governor. Still, Fishback warns against counting him out: “There’s a secret sauce. I’m not gonna spill the beans on how we’re doing it.” He’s preparing for an “absolute landslide.” Without providing polling, he claims that both his campaign and Donalds’s have found the race “neck-in-neck.”
Since launching his campaign last November, Fishback has become a lightning rod for the discourse and a darling of Gen Z right-wingers in Florida and nationwide. The half-Colombian, half-fourth-generation Floridian campaigns against “data centers, Flock cameras, the H-1B scam, [and] foreign nationals from India and China flooding public colleges,” — and revels in bombast. He calls his Black opponent a “slave” to AIPAC and turns his contempt for pornography into viral clickbait — see his weeks of sparring with the OnlyFans top-model Sophie Rain. Most conspicuous are his overtures to Groypers, adherents of white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes. Fishback adopts the subculture’s vocabulary, decrying public-school cafeteria food as “goyslop.”
Fishback’s candidacy has always faced steep odds against the state’s Republican establishment, which has boxed him out of key events. He is now the target of AI-generated ads depicting him alongside Candace Owens, the ex-Daily Wire conspiracy theorist, and Dan Bilzerian, the brazenly antisemitic challenger to Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.). The intended audience is low-information, high-propensity older voters who hardly constitute Fishback’s base. “It’s becoming clearer that there isn’t enough support for his brand of politics to actually win the primary,” Richard Hanania, a prominent right-wing writer and Fishback detractor, tells me.
When I sat down with Fishback, however, he dispensed with the theatrics and emphasized the universality of his message. “Younger voters will recognize the online focus of the campaign because that’s who it’s targeting. Older voters will recognize me because I’m at a diner in Lake City or Live Oak or in The Villages. When I’m with my parents and grandparents, I’m talking about not a different set of issues, but a different perspective on the issues,” he says. “Our campaign has held more events than Byron Donalds has.”
Fishback professes to “not have studied” far-right subcultures, which strains credulity. Yet casting him as the “first Groyper politician,” as The Bulwark has, misunderstands Fishback’s politics. He’s drawn less to the Groypers themselves than to their capacity to make him relevant, much as he courts the fanbase of, say, looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular. Fishback can be a cipher, but beneath his bluster lies an intelligible program of what he calls “unbridled capitalism [and] economic nationalism,” championed by the nascent Tucker wing of the party. For the same reason, I can’t describe Fishback himself as an antisemite. His culture-war jockeying appears so thoroughly instrumental that any definitive claim about his convictions risks mistaking political theater for belief, or vice versa.
Fishback anchors his provocations in a moral absolutism that owes something to his Catholicism, or at least a very online, vibes-based version thereof. (He also invoked his faith when I asked about his whirlwind marriage.) His break with Republican orthodoxy on Israel came last summer, according to him, amid events that included Israel’s strike on Gaza’s lone Catholic church and his discovery of “unconstitutional” antisemitism laws in Florida.
Voters will see right from wrong and “know he’s not an antisemite,” nor any other fraud, he assures me, pointing to his solidarity with Spirit Airlines employees after the company’s bankruptcy and standing outside an abortion clinic declaring “this place needs to be burned to the ground.”
For all his red-pilled excursions, Fishback is mindful of his words. “You don’t judge someone by the words that they use. You judge them by what actions they take,” he tells me. Even his edgiest humor, he insists, stops short of disrespect. “[Byron’s] depicted me as a fish flopping around a boat. I’ve called him By’rone. I laugh at the things he says. I wish he would laugh at the things I say as opposed to freaking out,” he said. To understand Fishback’s politics, one must resist reading too deeply into every bit of reactionary blather. Nothing he wrote for The Free Press in 2023, while he was chummy with that publication’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, prevented him from forging alliances with Weiss’s sworn enemies three years later.
But one must not read too shallowly, either. Populism divides society between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite.” Purity is constitutive of populism, and right-populism tends to define it ethnically, religiously and morally rather than economically. Fishback’s purity is moral before it is ethnic even as his rhetoric flirts with the ethnic kind. The far right represents a detour from class consciousness, but it can still serve as a conduit for genuine class grievances, however shamefully redirected toward “the Jews,” at least in rhetoric.
It would be a mistake, then, to underestimate Fishback. His strain of populism is more substantive and adaptable than his social-media presence might suggest, and his influence is already visible. Tom Tiffany, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin, has adopted Fishback’s video aesthetic while placing data-center moratoriums and opposition to private-equity purchases of homes front and center.
Fishback says he would never run in any other race in any other state. Yet in all likelihood, it’s not the last we’ll see of him.
William Liang is a writer living in San Francisco. He volunteers for Connie Chan’s congressional campaign in California’s 11th District.
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