On the menu today: When we contemplate our options for the next president, we should not swoon at the thought of a television celebrity with a bombastic personality and outspoken opinions who has never served in any role in government at any level — at least, not another one. And yet, a whole lot of people in the U.S. political media world either want to take ESPN host and commentator Stephen A. Smith seriously, or they want you to take him seriously, or they want to play along with the notion of Smith running for president, just because it is fun and exciting and a break from the boredom of dealing with the thorny problems and messy situations that make up the news cycle. But even if you like Smith — and I do! — the notion of turning another presidential campaign into TMZ is a terrible idea. Read on.
You CANNOT TELL ME This Is Stephen A. Smith’s Presidential Moment!
On Sunday, ESPN host and commentator Stephen A. Smith told Robert Costa on CBS Sunday Morning that he’s not ruling out a presidential bid in 2028.
In just the last 24 hours, Bill O’Reilly* — still around and kicking, and making guest appearances on Chris Cuomo’s program on NewsNation — has told Smith on-air that he should consider a presidential bid to “expose the charlatans” dominating the national debate. Smith told O’Reilly and Cuomo that if he enters the race, it would be to win. Jemele Hill, a former ESPN commentator very much on the left, has warned, “If I’m the Democrats and I see Stephen A. constantly talking about running for president. . . . The Democrats need to take him seriously. He’s a threat.”
Over at Fox News, David Marcus wrote, “Democrats have a real problem here, because if they use their usual backroom self-dealing tricks to deny Smith a place on the debate stage, he can do exactly what RFK Jr. did, and say, “I gave it a shot, but these people are crazy. At least I can talk with Republicans.” . . . Forget about the alt-right influencers on social media. Every 27-year-old dude with a FanDuel account knows and respects Stephen A.”
And our old friend Matthew Continetti writes over at the Wall Street Journal, “Mock Stephen A. Smith all you like. He may never make it to the debate stage. But others with little or no political experience will surely be tempted. And in today’s media environment, what begins on the fringe often turns into the main event.”
As Smith himself would put it, you CANNOT TELL ME that Smith should be taken seriously as a potential presidential candidate. I dare say it is BLASPHEMOUS. I feel this FROM MY SOUL.
That’s not to say he won’t be taken seriously as a potential presidential candidate.
The American political media hungers for novelty, and almost all of the biggest players on our political scene have been around for a long time. Donald Trump has more or less ruled our national political discourse since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015. As noted in this newsletter earlier this week, Gavin Newsom has been in elected office since 1997 and has been governor of California for seven years. Marco Rubio was part of the GOP wave in 2010. JD Vance is a comparably fresh face, elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022.
Stephen A. Smith seems like a smart guy, and I know that he talks about more than just sports on his program and in his guest appearances. He’s a classic American success story, climbing his way to the top of the sports media world from humble roots in Hollis, Queens. He has a larger-than-life bombastic personality.
But the job of the president is not to be entertaining. As I wrote during the GOP presidential primary in 2023, “Anybody who wants to be president should think long and hard about whether they’re ready to write letters of condolence to the families of U.S. service members who are killed carrying out their orders.” In some cases, the consequences of presidential decisions are literally life and death.
Back in 2020, during the Covid pandemic, I wrote:
A significant part of the modern American presidency is indeed performative. But arguably the more consequential part of the job is what happened behind closed doors — think of John F. Kennedy meeting with his military advisors during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Presidencies stand or fall based on what a president concludes from briefings, sorts out through discussion and debate with his advisors, and what decisions he reaches. The presidency is a managerial position, and arguably the toughest in the world.
The fact that a significant portion of the American electorate likes the idea of an entertaining personality sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office doesn’t change the fact that the job of the presidency is still primarily a managerial one.
As noted on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, the Congressional Budget Office has updated its figures for Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund, which pays out retiree and survivor benefits, and is projected to run out of money in 2032. Whoever we elect as president in 2028 is going to have to deal with that problem before the fourth year of their first term. The Disability Trust Fund is scheduled to run out of money in 2033. We are fresh out of “later.”
(Apparently the Social Security Administration has come up with one potential solution to reduce the number of people collecting benefits: “The Social Security Administration has instructed employees newly assigned to answering phones to tell callers expressing suicidal thoughts that suicide is ‘one option,’ raising concerns from employees and experts in the field who called the approach unorthodox.” I just hope that some lawmaker named Logan can formalize this new approach to the costs of the elderly, and we can call the new program “Logan’s Run.”)
The U.S. national debt is currently $38.7 trillion. Over the course of 2025, it increased $2.23 trillion. Earlier this month, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget warned, “Debt held by the public is currently around 100 percent of GDP, roughly double the 50-year historical average. Under CBO’s baseline, debt will surpass the 106 percent of GDP record set after World War II by FY 2030 — just four years from now — and will continue to grow to 120 percent of GDP by 2036.”
You may really enjoy watching Stephen A. Smith argue about hot topics in the sports world. Do you want him being the man directing the U.S. government’s response to the long-predicted entitlement crisis?
I would bet that Smith has a better answer on what the U.S. should do if the People’s Republic of China invades Taiwan than Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does, but that’s an exceptionally low bar to clear. The future of warfare is drone swarms, military application of artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, hypersonic missiles, and perhaps quantum computing.
Do you want Stephen A. Smith answering the 3 a.m. phone call? How confident do you feel with Smith in the White House Situation Room, responding to the news that a border skirmish between India and Pakistan has escalated, and both countries are putting their nuclear forces on high alert?
Even if every researcher in every Chinese state-run virus research laboratory remembers to wear their personal protective equipment in the coming years, the world has naturally occurring viruses and bacteria that represent public health threats. Last month, Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned, “Two emerging pathogens with animal origins — influenza D virus and canine coronavirus — have so far been quietly flying under the radar, but researchers warn conditions are ripe for the viruses to spread more widely among humans.” Research indicates that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are growing more common; “In 2023, roughly 1 in 6 infections tested by labs worldwide were resistant to antibiotic treatment, according to the World Health Organization. The report says nearly 40 percent of antibiotics used to treat common urinary, gut, blood and sexually transmitted infections have lost effectiveness over the past five years.”
I suspect Stephen A. Smith has a surprisingly deep knowledge about torn anterior cruciate ligaments, concussions, and other common sports injuries. I don’t know how useful that knowledge would be to an American president.
I have no idea whether the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence means, as my colleague Phil Klein writes, “jobs that have to this point required significant knowledge and experience will be done faster and cheaper by a bot. This will rapidly make large percentages of the white-collar workforce unemployable.” But it does seem that AI is going to lead to at least some degree of economic disruption.
An entertaining personality is not a disadvantage when confronting these big, thorny, complicated, multifaceted impending crises. But it’s not sufficient, either.
About a month after taking office in his first term, as he and congressional Republicans found repealing Obamacare to be much more difficult than expected, President Trump complained, “It’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” Only someone who had never bothered to take even a cursory glance at the issue of health care could be surprised that it is complex. The president was woefully underprepared for the task before him. Nine years later, Obamacare is still largely intact.
As former General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt said, “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.” Or as our old friend Kevin Williamson observed, “Everything looks simple when you don’t know the first thing about it.”
The American electorate, and certain corners of the American political media, are in love with the romantic idea of “outsiders.”
It is a complicated and messy world, with complicated and messy problems, and there is a widespread hunger for simple answers. I suspect there’s a belief that the “insiders” or those with experience in government are somehow responsible for the complicated and messy problems facing the country, and in some cases, they are — or at least have kicked the can down the road on avoiding addressing worsening problems.
But picking a guy whose knowledge of the problems is . . . let’s just say modest, and who has never managed anything, is a formula for at best a president with a steep learning curve. At worst, you get a president who finds the real problems facing the country too difficult and frustrating to deal with, and he spends his time focusing on a new White House ballroom and renaming the Kennedy Center and Penn Station and Dulles Airport and annexing Greenland and raising tariffs on Switzerland because he didn’t like the tone of their head of state during a phone call and conspiracy theories of Dominion voting machines switching votes.
But I suppose if elected, we would never have to worry about President Stephen A. Smith engaging in cowboy diplomacy.
*The last time I was on O’Reilly’s radio program, many years ago, the combative host held to habit and offered me “the last word.” It required all my self-control to not declare that the last word was “falafel.”
ADDENDUM: Les Wexner, a retail mogul best known as the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret, gave Jeffrey Epstein his power of attorney and “authorized him to borrow money on his behalf, to sign his tax returns, to hire people and to make acquisitions.”
Wexner testified before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday, and told them that he did not have a close personal relationship or friendship with Epstein. He told the panel, “I was naive, foolish and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein.”
Once again, isn’t it amazing that all these seemingly smart, accomplished elites of American life all turned into naïve fools the moment Epstein walked into the room?