Don Lemon Sure Sounds Like He Wants to Run for President
This wasn’t the first time Lemon has publicly toyed with the idea of running for president. He first sounded receptive to running when he went on Pod Save America back in March. I headed to the green room after his discussion with Swisher to see how long Lemon would maintain what seemed like little more than his latest bit. There I found Walter Isaacson, New Orleans–born biographer of luminaries living and dead, who was waiting for his turn to take the stage.Lemon, a fellow son of Louisiana, soon arrived. The two men were glad to see each other. It had been a minute. Don was sorry to miss Walter during his most recent visit to New Orleans, where he’d stopped by for the day after returning to his hometown of Baton Rouge following the death of his aunt. Perhaps they could get together this month, Don suggested, in Sag Harbor, where he now lives.The men share more than a home state. Isaacson briefly ran CNN in the early 2000s: the network where Lemon had been a marquee name for 17 years until 2023, when he fell from grace after describing Nikki Haley on air as not “in her prime.” (He was, he maintains, only describing the way society sees women.) Lemon’s ouster precipitated his entry into the independent-media game earlier than most—long before Jim Acosta, Ryan Lizza, and the rest began trumpeting the oh-so-great freedom offered to them by Substack.Lemon, a far bigger name, briefly set up his new show on X before clashing with Elon Musk—the subject of Isaacson’s 2023 biography—in an abortive launch interview two years ago. (He had the temerity to challenge him on his drug use, among other things.) Lemon turned to the deeper waters of YouTube, where multimillion-follower accounts thrive in obscurity, and leaned into the house brand, creating the Lemon Media Network: a place where “Lemonheads” could gather, express themselves, and stop Don in the street to let him know they were part of the club.Lemon’s new hustling life brings with it certain demands, familiar to anyone running a lemonade stand of their own across the vast reaches of the internet: always be selling. It was hard to see his half-mooted presidential bid as more than a steadfast commitment to that mantra. But you also got the sense that Lemon, who could charm a pot of paint, was charming himself with the idea as he spoke.“Well, I think the country needs me,” he said once we found a lurid orange sofa to sit on. He’d been thinking a lot about his arrest by federal agents in January, after he had entered a Minnesota church to cover an anti-ICE protest live on his channel. (He was charged with conspiracy to deprive rights and interfere with religious freedoms, to which he pleaded not guilty.) “I think that the freedom of the press—freedom of speech, freedom of the press—is the bedrock of our Constitution. Without it, nothing else stands.”We ran through the job. What did it demand? “The essential qualification is to listen to people. To listen to the American people. To listen to the experts and to people who know more than you.” What kind of candidate did Democrats need? “I think someone who’s savvy about digital media and social media would make a better candidate than most. And that person would be me.” Where had the party gone wrong? “The party took a wrong turn—I don’t know if it became obsessed with identity issues, but I do think that Democrats sometimes tend to eat their own and to alienate their allies, right?”
