The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson

The day after the 2026 midterms, I wanted to look at the responses, not the results. Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott in Texas, James Talarico beat Ken Paxton, Troy Jackson beat Susan Collins in Maine, and Democrats won big across the map. For me, the more interesting story is what people said next. It started the day before the vote, when Trump stood at the Reflecting Pool and said that "for some reason, the sitting president doesn't win the midterms." House Speaker Mike Johnson made the same...

Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign ad featuring Amy Acton's estranged mother, JD Vance telling Republicans to stop whining about it, and Amy Griffin's lawsuit: three stories this week, and I break down the moves in each. The Ohio governor's race is a week from Election Day. Ramaswamy's campaign ran an ad featuring Acton's estranged mother, Donna Arthur, and at first would not say whether the ad was theirs. I go through what the ad leaves out, the double down, the quiet edit that dropped the tent lin...

Mel Robbins is on the cover of PEOPLE this week, and Prince Harry told GQ that the most important thing is to reconcile with his family. They are very different stories, and I see the same move in both. PEOPLE's cover story opens with Mel Robbins in her Vermont kitchen, wearing a name tag made from blue painter's tape. The headline says she's proud of the person she's become. I read the whole profile as an exercise in relatability: if she relates to you, you'll trust her. Relatability sells ...

Kelly Clarkson went to Art of Play in Brooklyn, asked about a singing mechanical bird named Molly, and left feeling talked down to. She posted about it that afternoon, and she named the store. The shop answered with a statement, then a longer follow-up full of details. I believe Kelly Clarkson, and the reasons are in the shop's own response. When people are wrong, they tend to offer details instead of accountability. Contempt is hard to hide, too. People know the exact moment someone decides...

Mikayla Nogueira sat down with Jay Shetty and admitted something most creators who got rich on the platform won't. She had no followers, and her first videos were still getting thousands of views. She noticed the algorithm right away. Molly McPherson explains why that matters, and why Jay let it go right by. The episode opens with Emily Gellis and Tanya Zuckerbrot, the founder of F-Factor. Zuckerbrot sued Gellis for defamation and cyberstalking in 2020, and the case settled in September 2026...