If you wanna be a big shot in Big Tech, the secret is to be like Nancy Kerrigan.
In the leadup to the 1994 Olympics, the world was transfixed by the bizarre-yet-riveting spectacle of Tonya Harding, Jeff Gillooly, and “America’s Sweetheart,” Nancy Kerrigan. The tabloid tale pirouetted into high gear when poor Nancy got her knees whacked by a mysterious assailant at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. Before long, the entire plot was unmasked as a desperate attempt by one skater, Tonya Harding, to literally kneecap a rival. (Harding has denied direct knowledge of the attack, insisting her ex-husband was the one behind it.)
It all came to a head at the 1994 Olympics: Tonya Harding versus Nancy Kerrigan. “America’s Sweetheart” versus trailer park trash. Who would reign supreme?
The TV ratings shot through the stratosphere. As CNN noted:
[T]he ladies' short program that featured both Harding and Kerrigan remains the highest-rated Winter Olympic programming of all time.
In 1994, it was the sixth-highest rated program in TV history with 48.5 million viewers. At the time, it was the third-highest rated sporting event behind Super Bowl XVI and Super Bowl XVII.
Then, when the ice had settled and the Olympic Games ended, the winner was… Oksana Baiul of Ukraine.
Nancy Kerrigan came in second. Tonya Harding came in eighth.
But Nancy still “won” the games. She got the commercials. She was paraded around in Disney World. And it certainly wasn’t Oksana or Tonya who hosted “Saturday Night Live.”
You see, first place is just a statistic. It might be a statistic that comes with a first-mover advantage, but in and of itself, it guarantees nothing. The world isn’t built by yesterday’s champions but by tomorrow’s visionaries.
And nowhere is this truer than in tech.
Yahoo came before Google. MySpace preceded Facebook (as well as TikTok and Twitter). Apple wasn’t the first smartphone. And just this week, we learned about China’s DeepSeek chatbot, which piggybacked on the (open-sourced) work of ChatGPT so impressively that the world’s biggest tech companies lost billions.
It’s not about being first. It’s about being best.
And this brings us to the first week of the second term of President Trump: Something is very, very different this time around.
In 2017, Trump was still a political neophyte. His D.C. roadmap was incomplete; the Deep State swamp monsters quickly overwhelmed him with lawfare, targeted media leaks, sabotage, and PR double-teams. All too often, Trump was undermined by those he most trusted to advance the MAGA agenda.
Sure, the nonstop attacks from the left didn’t help, but what stung the most were the betrayals of MAGA’s so-called friends: You expect your enemies to attack you, but when the daggers come from your inner circle, it usually leads to organizational collapse.
So, when Trump won his second term, most of the media predicted an encore of his first. They were looking for the infighting, the name-calling, the political trainwreck. “Bring us the next Omarosa!” they demanded.
But the opposite has happened: This time, Trump knows what the heck he’s doing.
He’s working fast, implementing his MAGA agenda at breakneck speed. He now knows D.C. like the back of his hand. He’s mastered the art of exerting diplomatic pressure on Canada (triggering a collapse of Gov. Trudeau’s government), in Europe (with Greenland), in the Middle East (with the Israel-Hamas ceasefire), and with immigration in Colombia.
The contrast between the rapid-fire, no-holds-barred Trump approach and the meandering, half-dead corpse of Joe Biden is especially striking. It’s just one of the reasons why Trump’s approval rating has been so strong, including an astonishing 69% approval amongst black voters.
Trump 1.0 was fine and good, but Trump 2.0 is simply a superior product. Give Trump credit: He did his homework. He’s 100% prepared — and just as importantly, so is his staff.
In many ways, it’s a liberal’s worst nightmare: Trump as a loony, self-aggrandizing wrecking ball was bad enough! But now?
Now he knows what the hell he’s doing.
It’s like the line from “Better Call Saul,” where attorney Chuck McGill couldn’t handle Saul “Slippin’ Jimmy” Goodman as a practicing lawyer:
“Slippin’ Jimmy I can handle just fine, but Slippin’ Jimmy with a law degree is like a chimp with a machine gun!”
Trump is back with a vengeance. This time, he’s not monkeying around.
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