Jennifer Welch, who co-hosts the profanity-soaked liberal show “I’ve Had It Podcast,” tore into First Lady Melania Trump in a curse-laden rant that spread widely online and was reported on Wednesday, September 9, 2026. “I don’t like anything for Melania,” Welch said. “And I wish I could be the bigger person and say that I do, but I don’t. She is, I think, just an absolutely horrific person.”
Set off by Amazon’s $40 million purchase of rights to the “Melania” documentary, Welch said the first lady “cared enough in the bogus $40 million payoff she got to make sure that everybody — not only in the United States, but in the world — knows she does not screw her husband.” The country, she added, is “elevating the most dysfunctional family in the United States, and wrapping it up in traditional Christian values.”
None of that was new territory. Recording above Welch’s design studio in Oklahoma City, she and co-host Angie “Pumps” Sullivan have built one of the fastest-growing podcasts in precisely that register. “You want to go low, we’re gonna go lower,” Welch told The Guardian last year.
Two Oklahoma Moms and a Growing Audience
The show launched in 2022 as entertainment fare, opening with an episode titled “Toddlers Are Assholes.” The two old friends, who had co-starred on the Bravo reality series “Sweet Home Oklahoma” in 2017 and 2018, later pushed the format toward blunt political talk. Guests soon included Mary Trump, in October 2023, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in January 2024. By September 2024 the hosts were sitting down with former President Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
An episode posted September 13, 2026 featured a guest discussing “recent claims hurled at her from Elon on Twitter,” and pushed pre-orders of Welch’s new book, “Not Today, Fascists.”
The audience keeps growing. About 1.75 million subscribers now follow the pair on YouTube, and roughly 1.3 million follow them on Instagram. Twelve months earlier, when a Guardian profile ran on October 5, 2025, Apple’s weekly rankings had the show second in the society and culture category, while their news offering, “IHIP news,” sat 18th on YouTube’s podcast charts.
That growth has turned the pair into a favorite answer for Democrats. Those Democrats are hunting for a counterweight to the male-dominated right-wing audio ecosystem, an ecosystem credited with helping propel President Donald Trump to victory in 2024. “Everyone always talking about we need to find the Joe Rogan of the left when they’re right here!” Gibson Johns, a podcaster, wrote on X, and he paired the post with a photo of Welch and Sullivan. That framing has drawn pushback from Welch, who says the hunt for one left-wing figurehead is too narrow because the left does not revolve around a leader in the way the right revolves around Trump.
Nicknames, Insults and a Place on the Charts
The hosts trade in insults. When a weekend of rumors about the president’s health took off, the two went live on YouTube and joked about his condition, reaching for their nickname for him, “Cankles McTacoTits,” trimmed, they said, to “Canks” for expediency and spite. Vice President JD Vance gets “Lil Smokey,” short for “Smokey Eye Failed Drag Queen.”
Welch defends the approach openly. Liberals, she has said, should quit trying to police themselves into perfection and should instead go after Republicans aggressively, since in her view Republicans respond to being bullied. A broad coalition is something else she has argued the left needs, and she casts the show’s community — jokingly, a “cult” — as gay listeners alongside suburban white women becoming politically radicalized.
Welch and Sullivan are hardly alone in the wider liberal move into online video. Joshua Citarella started the YouTube interview program “Doomscroll” in September 2024; he is an artist and researcher who studies political radicalization among young internet users. Ezra Klein turned up as a guest the following April.
Welch also took the NewsBusters “Worst Media Quote of the Week” poll for a second consecutive week, pulling 57 percent of the vote in results announced on September 14, 2026. ABC “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg trailed her with 31 percent, and MS NOW host Peter Alexander drew 12 percent.
The entry that won came from the September 1 episode of the podcast, in which Welch said: “There is nothing radical about not taking corporate money. There is nothing radical about wanting health care for everybody. There is nothing radical about having a politics that is more empathetic, inclusive, and accepting. MAGA is none of those things. The only thing they can offer, the American public right now, is fear-mongering, scare-mongering, xenophobia, and racism, and Islamophobia, and it has worked for a very long time since 9/11.”
A Year After the Kirk Assassination
The anniversary of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought fresh scrutiny to personal-attack politics. Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. Fox News marked the date with an opinion column by Dan Gainor, who argued that Kirk’s death pulled the worst impulses out of American media and celebrity culture. Gainor pointed to the false claims that spread online identifying the suspect as a registered Republican, and to the barrage of attacks aimed at Kirk, his widow, Erika Kirk, and conservatives in general.
The claims did not hold up. Utah records show that the man charged, Tyler Robinson, registered as unaffiliated and that he had not voted in the two previous general elections; a different Tyler Robinson turned out to be the source of a political donation attributed to him. A judge ruled that Robinson will stand trial and that prosecutors may seek the death penalty, a decision handed down on September 1, and he pleaded not guilty the next day.
The column named Matthew Dowd, then an MSNBC political analyst, along with far-left podcaster Hasan Piker, veteran broadcaster Katie Couric and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel charged that Trump’s supporters were trying to deny that Kirk’s killer had come from their own political ranks, and ABC responded by pulling him off the air for six days in September 2025. Kimmel said weeks later that the remarks had been “intentionally, and I think maliciously, mischaracterized.” What Dowd said on air the day Kirk was shot cost him his MSNBC job, and he later blamed the firing on what he called the right-wing media mob.
Much of the press rallied around Kimmel. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called the suspension “the most straightforward attack on free speech from state actors I’ve ever seen in my life.” CNN media analyst Brian Stelter said America is a less free place if late-night hosts cannot do and say what they want, and his network devoted an hour to the subject, “No Laughing Matter: Free Speech Under Attack,” reported by Jake Tapper. Gainor also faulted coverage of Kirk’s widow, pointing to a Washington Post piece by Ashley Fetters Maloy about her clothes.
He would not reprint the most venomous commentary about Kirk, Gainor wrote, because those profiting from attacks on a grieving widow would only be enriched by the repetition. The anniversary itself has turned into a battleground a year later — and Welch’s broadside at the first lady suggests the political insult trade is not cooling.
