In January 2017, a conservative writer named John Ekdahl asked journalists a simple question: Do you know anyone who owns a pickup truck? The best-selling vehicle in America was — and still is — a pickup truck. The question wasn’t an insult. The reaction was a tell. Reporters raged, deflected, and accused Ekdahl of bad faith — anything but answer.

Ekdahl died of cancer last month at 47. But his question got a sequel this week, courtesy of the Pentagon’s grocery bill and a wave of pundits who’ve never met anyone in uniform.

The scandal that wasn’t

The Open the Books watchdog group published a report on Pentagon spending in September 2025 — the final month of the fiscal year. The numbers sounded lavish: $15.1 million on ribeye steak. $6.9 million on lobster tail. $2 million on Alaskan king crab. The outrage was immediate.

Paul Begala, on CNN, put it this way: Hegseth had spent millions on steak and lobster — “all for himself” — while the troops were stuck eating MREs. Scott Jennings had the obvious reply: You think the Secretary of Defense is eating all the lobster himself?

There are more than 1.3 million active-duty service members across all branches of the military. The steak and lobster wasn’t for Hegseth. It was for them.

The meal before the bad news

Steak and lobster is one of the oldest traditions in the American military. It’s served before deployments, during extensions, on holidays, and at milestones like the Marine Corps birthday. On Thanksgiving, it’s what a 19-year-old stationed 6,000 miles from home eats instead of his mother’s cooking. Service members call it surf and turf. The tradition has been a part of military life for generations.

But the meal carries a bittersweet edge. Navy veterans describe getting their plate of steak and lobster on the mess deck — then hearing the captain announce over the loudspeaker that the deployment had been extended. Another few weeks or months away from home. Another holiday missed. The meal is a small dignity — the least a country can offer people about to sacrifice more.

You’d have to know someone in uniform to know that. You’d have to have sat across from a soldier, sailor, or Marine who told you about it. And that’s where the disconnect stops being a political gaffe and starts being a confession.

A party that lost its fluency

That disconnect runs deeper than anecdote. Ruy Teixeira and the writers at The Liberal Patriot have been documenting this drift for years. The share of Democrats who identify as liberal has more than doubled since the start of the century, from 28 percent to 59 percent. The party’s cultural center of gravity has shifted from union halls to university campuses.

That realignment shows up in more than just policy positions. The people setting the tone on cable news and writing the tweets that go viral don’t know the military, don’t live in rural America, and have no connection to the blue-collar culture that still defines most of the country.

The steak-and-lobster outrage goes deeper than messaging. The commentators who spent this week raging about lobster tails didn’t spin the story wrong. They didn’t know the story.

You can fix a bad talking point. You can’t fix a political class that has lost its fluency in ordinary American life.

The Obamas knew better

On Veterans Day 2010, Michelle Obama surprised troops at Ramstein Air Base in Germany with a steak dinner. She served the plates herself to more than 300 service members and their families. The Air Force covered it. The AP covered it. CBS covered it. Nobody called it wasteful.

Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama would have been caught attacking the Pentagon for feeding troops steak and lobster. Whatever else you might say about their politics, they understood — culturally, not ideologically — how Americans talk about their military.

The fact that a bipartisan military tradition now registers as a scandal tells you where the Democratic Party has drifted — not on policy, but on basic cultural fluency about the country it wants to lead.

The fair objection

To be fair: the September spending spike is real. The federal use-it-or-lose-it budget cycle produces genuinely problematic results — the Pentagon signing more than $50 billion in contracts in the final five days of the fiscal year alone. Fiscal hawks are right to scrutinize that pattern.

But that’s not what happened this week. Nobody led with the budget cycle. They led with the lobster. And the difference between “the Pentagon’s end-of-year spending is structurally wasteful” and “Pete Hegseth is eating $7 million in lobster” is the difference between fiscal seriousness and cultural illiteracy.

The reaction is the answer

John Ekdahl understood something most pundits don’t: the question is the test. Do you know anyone who drives a truck? Do you know anyone who serves? The answer matters less than the reaction. When the question itself feels like an attack, the bubble is confirmed.

A party that doesn’t know what surf-and-turf night means on a Navy ship is a party that has lost contact with the people it’s asking to govern. That’s not a policy problem. It’s a cultural one. And in a democracy, those are harder to fix.