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Louise Thomas
Editor
How long will the Democratic Party persevere with Joe Biden? With public faith in the 81-year-old president’s cognitive abilities nosediving, fears of a Trump victory in the forthcoming election grow ever louder. The American public seems to be crying out for a younger, more dynamic candidate; a popular and conscientious politician to unite a divided country. Enter: MrBeast. On Saturday, MrBeast – the professional sobriquet of YouTuber and 26-year-old North Carolina native Jimmy Donaldson – wrote on X/Twitter: “If we lower the age to run for president I’ll jump in the race.” At least 568,000 people seemed to approve of the idea (via “likes”). How many more would approve in a voting booth?
To be clear, Donaldson isn’t just any run-of-the-mill YouTuber. He is, with 299 million subscribers, the biggest YouTube star in the world. His videos largely spotlight elaborate and expensive stunts or challenges (“I Spent 50 Hours In Solitary Confinement”, or “I Paid a Hitman to Hunt Me Down”), as well as acts of flashy generosity – handing out thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars to ordinary members of the public. Donaldson’s most watched video ever saw him stage a real-life version of Squid Game, minus the murder and viscera. Even his less successful videos now pull in audiences two or more times the size of the Super Bowl viewership. If you were born too early, don’t have kids, or simply aren’t online enough, it’s possible the name MrBeast means nothing to you. But to people of a certain generation, this strange, goateed content savant is more famous than Tom Hanks.
If you leave aside the practicalities of US presidential age requirements – the rules require hopefuls to hit 35 before running – the idea of a MrBeast presidency might not actually be the farce you would assume. In a post-Trump (and post-Ronald Reagan) world, the notion that politics is the exclusive domain of the career politician has been comprehensively rubbished. To some extent, this is a good thing: politicians are just people, after all, and if you surround yourself with the right advisers, good intentions can probably go a long way towards compensating for a lack of senatorial experience.
There are plenty out there who dislike Donaldson, who find him offputting, or exploitative, or slightly, unplaceably inhuman. Each of his videos is thumbnailed on YouTube with a big, beaming picture of his face, in front of or beside the video’s premise. For instance, “1,000 Blind People See For the First Time”, a video from last year, follows Donaldson as he bestows costly sight-restoring surgery to a mass of followers. The thumbnail depicts Donaldson, overlit and grinning like an inflated balloon, with his arm around the shoulder of an elderly woman, bandage around her head. There’s no explaining why, but it simply looks odd. His philanthropy is by its very nature performative; that doesn’t necessarily make it any less important. But the way in which it is packaged conveys a degree of callous cynicism, or simply tone-deafness.
Donaldson’s iron sway over his own fanbase has led some people to liken the MrBeast machine to a “cult”; sometimes, he does little to dispel this idea. When in 2023 Donaldson was made aware that the MrBeast-branded chocolate bars, Feastables, were on supermarket shelves being nudged, upturned and jostled – ie, handled normally like any other product – he issued a plea on Twitter for fans to “clean up the presentation and make it look better” (what supermarket workers will no doubt know as “facing”). This solicitation of free labour was justly criticised but – significantly – it worked. Fans uploaded photos of themselves touching up the shelving displays, genuflecting at the confectionary-lined altar of MrBeast.
Now, on the one hand, this was a throwaway incident, an isolated example of the sort of irrational celebrity worship that makes you drive your palm into your forehead and curse those who discovered electricity that would one day give rise to YouTube. But it’s also an indicator of Donaldson’s ability to mobilise his followers, to translate social media clicks into real-world behaviours. If he was able to harness this to optimise the selling of supermarket chocolate, what’s to stop him from using this power for political purposes? Low voter turnout among the youngest demographics is one of the main reasons right-wingers such as Trump remain politically viable in an age positively gagging for radical progressive change. If anyone has the influence to corral politically inert Zoomers into the voting booth, it’s probably Donaldson.
Exactly what a MrBeast presidency would look like, of course, is very much a mystery. In interviews, he has said that he tries to sand off idiosyncrasies and “personality” from his screen persona, in an effort to make his content as unobjectionable and algorithm-friendly as possible. (Parallels could be drawn, I suppose, with the UK’s new prime minister.) Despite this, he’s not been completely unwilling to wade into politicised territory. He has demonstrated an eagerness to redistribute wealth – albeit in a personal rather than systemic capacity – and he appears, as an adult, broadly tolerant and unbigoted. In 2023, regular MrBeast co-star and long-time friend Ava Tyson came out as transgender; in the months since, Donaldson has repeatedly condemned and called out transphobic abuse she received. (Fewer Starmer parallels there.)
It will probably not shock you to hear that, no, MrBeast probably won’t save Western democracy – now or when he’s 35. Ten years on the internet is a lifetime; who knows which empires will have crumbled to dust? By the time Donaldson is old enough to run for Potus, saying you’re a YouTuber might be akin to telling people you’re a town crier.
But for now, it’s a comforting fantasy to live in. Imagine a world in which the president need not pre-date the invention of the microwave oven. A world in which the president is elected by a wave of young voters, reshaping the US’s entire political topography. Can you picture him there, on the podium? He’ll be the one grinning. Of course he will.
