Rahm Emanuel, former US Ambassador to Japan, Mayor of Chicago, Chief of Staff to POTUS Barack Obama, key advisor to POTUS Bill Clinton, and older brother to Hollywood billionaire power broker Ari “Entourage” Emanuel, is teasing a run for President in 2028.
Emanuel is exactly the kind of widely despised, utterly uncharismatic, scandal-ridden figure that I would dismiss out of hand if the Democrats hadn’t nominated Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris back-to-back-to-back.
Emanuel, who embodies the failed Democratic strategy of always tacking to the right and showing deference to the GOP, would likely lead the party back toward the kind of ideas that got it in this mess.
But you really have to read Rahm Emanuel’s own words, as spoken to centrist seer Ezra “Abundance” Klein to really get the flavor of the man, which is total B.S.:
I think there’s two seminal moments that explain the last 20-plus years in American politics. One, the Iraq war, where the American people were deceived into a war of choice. We lost thousands of young men and women. Thousands of young men and women are maimed for life. And we spent a trillion dollars in a failed endeavor and a war of choice. And we’re lied to, and nobody — and I mean nobody — is ever held accountable.
Six years later, the financial industry, housing crash, near depression, people lose not their lives like in the Iraq war, but they lose their livelihood, their homes.
So you have people losing lives, livelihood, and the elite and the top of the society totally unaccountable and never act like they did anything wrong. People out of the foreign policy establishment — they’re on boards, institutions, universities, bankers yelling for their bonuses, and the American people are fed up.
And then you fast-forward through Covid, and I think that what happens is the Democrats go — in the prior years, President Obama, the ’06 elections, etc. — from anti-establishment to the establishment and the elite, with the whole way we dealt with Covid, the way we dealt with science and talked to people.
This is a triple play of mendaciousness since Rahm Emanuel supported the Iraq invasion, was Obama’s Chief of Staff when they protected the banksters who caused the crash at the expense of millions of formerly middle-class Americans, and his brother Zeke was a key architect of Biden’s COVID “new normal” policies (while managing to personally distance himself from the worst of the decisions).
Believe me, Rahm Emanuel knows all about “nobody is ever held accountable.”
In a fascinating “process” piece Jonathan Martyn of Politico lays out the steps that Rahm Emanuel has been taking, I’ve bolded the last and least important step at the end “looking for an issue he can make his own”:
Name the political podcast and Emanuel has likely been on it or will be shortly. He immediately snagged a CNN contract and regular Washington Post column, no small accomplishment for a former official at a moment of retrenchment for news organizations.
He’s also hitting the lecture circuit, appearing for paid and gratis gigs before audiences such as the Realtors and the Chicago Economic Club. Emanuel is pointedly avoiding Ivy League campuses and later this month will make his first stop on a service academy tour when he speaks at West Point.
Just as striking is to talk to anybody in high-level Democratic politics who knows Emanuel — which is to say most everyone — and hear how matter of fact they are about the inevitability of his candidacy.
The biggest Rahm-may-run tell, though, is that he’s already road-testing the first outlines of a stump speech, or at least an issue he can make his own.
Martyn goes on to approvingly quote Rahm attacking US AID workers and the trans community.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Rahm is also attacking the newly nominated Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York City, in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal no less.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 1, 2025
Rahm opened his WSJ piece with this claim:
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is more important to national elections and the future of the Democratic Party than the Upper West Side of Manhattan. America doesn’t necessarily go the way of the Big Apple.
Typically of Rahm’s claims, he’s got his fact set exactly backwards. The Upper Peninsula voted for the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016; the Upper West Side voted for Cuomo last week.
But it shouldn’t be a surprise that he’s attacking Mamdani (who’s notably been congratulated by Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jefferies, and Bill Clinton but not by Barack Obama), for as Lydia Polgreen of The NY Times points out, “Nothing could be more dispositive for Rahm Emanuel’s presidential bid than Andrew Cuomo’s face plant. Democrats are just done with this kind of figure. In 2015, beset by scandal, Rahm’s approval rating sunk to *18 percent.*”
It’s also useful to remember why the Biden administration packed Rahm off to Tokyo instead of giving him a plum cabinet spot like Transportation Secretary or U.S. Trade Representative:
The White House announced Friday that President Joe Biden intended to nominate Rahm Emanuel to be the next ambassador to Japan. The nomination, which comes after Emanuel was apparently rejected for other positions in the administration, belies Biden’s claim that he was running for president to restore “the soul of this nation.” Emanuel is responsible for one of the more soulless moves by a Democratic politician in recent memory.
As Emanuel was fighting for re-election as mayor of Chicago, he kept video of the police murder of Laquan McDonald hidden from public view. Emanuel’s administration spent more than a year arguing against releasing footage of the 17-year-old’s death to the public, only relenting because of a judge’s order.
While Emanuel has denied that a cover-up ever took place, blaming his lack of transparency on “city rules,” the normally staid Associated Press pulled no punches when the city’s full investigative report was released after he had left office: “There is no incident in recent Chicago history that has created such distrust of City Hall and the police department than then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s unsuccessful legal battle to keep under wraps the dashcam video showing Officer Jason Van Dyke shoot the teen 16 times.”
And how did Rahm fare in Japan? The Financial Times put it pithily, partly blaming a troubled G7 meeting on “Rahm Emanuel…a man who could start a diplomatic incident in an empty room.”
Perhaps it wasn’t solely the buffoonery of the Trump administration that resulted in Japan’s sudden refusal to attend a NATO summit in June.
And I won’t even get into the old Netroots hatred of Rahm over his credit-claiming for the Democrats’ reclaiming of Congress in 2006.
No, there’s a much bigger problem with Rahm’s candidacy than his personal repulsiveness and obvious weaknesses as a candidate: Rahm’s little brother Ari.
Ari Emanuel is best known to Naked Capitalism readers as a “Hollywood power broker” but what made him a billionaire is his huge stake in TKO, the holding company he formed to merge the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) with World Wide Wrestling (WWE).
And as some of you may be aware, the UFC’s figure head Dana White is legendarily close to President Donald Trump.
Fight business insider newsletter The MMA Draw explained some of Ari’s shell game last summer when Trump made his post-conviction public debut at a UFC event:
Ari will pay no political cost for putting his chips down on red in the presidential election. The one whose outcome our very democracy is riding on. At least that’s what the “credible centrists” in old-line legacy media have been saying.
Which is why Ari isn’t even risking his own personal brand on the Trump deal. It’s officially Dana White’s deal after all.
And besides, the UFC under Endeavor is willing to partner with people who sell very expensive magic rocks. How influential can they really be?
That’s just Ari’s kayfabing everyone. He has absolute control of this entity and Dana White.
Dana White was never willing to openly court controversy or take an openly partisan political stance under Zuffa’s ownership.
That was back when the Fertittas needed to be seen to be professionalizing the product in search of legitimacy with major network, advertising and ultimately acquisition partners.
The UFC beast had to be washed up before it could be taken to slaughter.
That changed immediately under Ari’s ownership in 2016.
And given that Ari made Dana fire his long-time best bros (and UFC legends) Chuck Liddell and Matt Hughes, we can presume that he’s making the big decisions here.
All of which is a roundabout way to say, any Republican or right-wing extremist who’s endorsing Trump for idealistic reasons, who is sincerely reading this and going ‘Dana White as vice-president? HELL YEA!’ should spend a minute or two examining the man behind the Dana curtain.
Ari Emanuel, despite owning one of Trump’s most high-profile corporate allies, is still a major player in Democratic politics. He proved it with his mid-campaign call for Biden to step aside that led a parade of Hollywood donors to abandon the senile POTUS.
As always Ari was playing multiple angles. The Dump Biden effort greatly weakened rival Hollywood inside player Jeffrey Katzenberg who co-chaired Biden’s campaign.
It will be very interesting to see how long Ari can maintain his status as a mega-player inside the Democratic party even as his UFC and WWE properties feast at Trump’s trough.
And they put all that together even before the big blockbuster book on Biden’s senility came out:
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s blockbuster new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, it is revealed that Rahm Emanuel’s hotshot Hollywood super-agent brother Ari Emanuel screamed at former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain over Biden’s condition.
It was late September 2023, five months after Biden announced he would run for reelection, and Ari Emanuel had invited members of the president’s team to his annual ‘Power Players’ retreat.
‘For months now, Ari Emanuel – CEO of Endeavor, a talent and entertainment company, and a major Democratic donor – hadn’t been able to believe what he was watching,’ the authors wrote.
It’s classic that no mention is made of Ari’s chairmanship of TKO/UFC/WWE like….ever, despite the reality that it’s the source of his fortune and his lucrative political connections to Trump.
One thing I learned in the “Public Affairs” business is that having a frontperson — even the most ridiculous and implausible one — stops 99% of further inquiries into “who’s behind this B.S.?” cold.
Ironically, Ari’s Hollywood empire had to be delisted in a take private earlier this year because it made no sense to investors.
But that’s a side issue, the main point is that Rahm’s billionaire brother is the king of Democratic fundraising in Hollywood AND a key Trump insider who hosted POTUS, Elon Musk, and David Ellison cageside at a UFC event in April.
Oh and remember the urgent Democratic quest to find their own Joe Rogan? There’s some reason to believe Ari is the reason Rogan endorsed Trump in the first place:
Trump basically wrapped his campaign by appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast to collect Joe’s endorsement, something Rogan had pointedly refused to do as recently as 2022.
Rogan’s long painted himself as a left-leaning Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders supporter who has called the former president “so fucking dangerous … a guy can incite a bunch of morons to do something really fucking stupid.”
Rogan publicly credited Elon Musk for leading him to support Trump, but I’d be very curious to know if he talked about his decision with Ari Emanuel, who is after all his boss at the UFC.
Rogan’s endorsement of Trump was a big deal:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 2, 2025
Ellison (son of Oracle founder Larry) was there to do some business and seemingly gained Trump’s support for a mega-merger he wants to execute:
Ellison was photographed in a close circle around Trump the night before, apparently a guest of TKO chief Ari Emanuel, who, like Ellison, is Jewish and skipped the Passover celebration to be there. He socialized with the president’s inner circle that night, Oliver Darcy first reported in his Status newsletter.
The Skydance CEO was spotted alongside Elon Musk, Ted Cruz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others, with photos posted on Reddit and X. TheWrap has confirmed the details from Darcy’s report.
All of this is to say, that if Rahm’s billionaire brother, who I’m told is already locking up major Hollywood Democratic money in support of Rahm Emanuel 2028, wins either way, regardless of which party is in the White House in 2029, maybe Rahm’s candidacy is as much kayfabe as campaign.
I’ll close with this from Rick Perlstein’s epic 2015 New Yorker take down of Rahm and what he’s really all about:
Obsessive fund-raising is also the foundation of Emanuel’s political operation in Chicago. When two reporters for the Chicago Reader filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the mayor’s private schedule in 2011 (unlike previous mayors, his public schedule was pretty much blank), they discovered that he almost never met with community leaders. He did, however, spend enormous blocks of time with the rich businessmen, including Republicans, who had showered him with cash.
The Emanuel political family is all about one thing and one thing only — raising money. Getting the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination will be one hell of a cash grab, win or lose.
It’s clear Rahm cares about the cash and unclear that he or Ari care about anything else.
