In September 2023, with Rollo in a Santa Monica hospital, preparing to give birth, Christman collapsed. By the time Rollo waddled into his hospital room across town, he was unconscious. “He had a stroke. We don’t know if he’ll ever be able to do anything more than this,” a doctor told her. “That was terrifying. I’m about to pop and they’re telling me that the love of my life, the father of my future child, might never do anything,” she says. “That evening, he mumbled, ‘I love you.’ That put the fight in me.”

Frost and Biederman rushed to the hospital. Menaker and his girlfriend, former Elle editor Katherine Krueger, flew from New York almost as soon as they heard. “The first time I saw him after the stroke, he referenced a really stupid thing that I hardly even remembered,” Biederman says. “It confirmed to me he’s still in there. His cognition is absolutely fucking there, it’s just his ability to relate that cognition to the world, he’s going to have to rebuild that. For a guy like him, that’s incredibly fucking tragic.” Before Chapo, Christman was an unemployed Twitter poster in Ohio. Podcasting helped him find a voice. “I used to compare him—and seriously—to Cicero,” says Daniel Bessner, a frequent guest on the show and cohost of the podcast American Prestige. “He’s an orator, fundamentally.”

While Rollo prepared to give birth, Wade and O’Brien mustered friends. “Me and my wife have that element of producer brain,” Wade says. O’Brien made a spreadsheet to make sure there was always someone with Christman. Biederman helped Christman with stretches he learned from Muay Thai, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and his mother’s work as a yoga instructor. Frost painted the nursery and installed handicap bars in his home. “All of us are leftists who strongly believe in community. This was an experience to put that to work,” Rollo says. “I hope the way our community has come together has ripple effects.” After more than a month in the hospital, Christman moved to a rehabilitation facility. Father and daughter learned to walk on the same schedule. “He’s still miles ahead of her on talking,” Rollo says, though he hasn’t fully recovered.

Another crisis rocked Hollywood before Christman’s stroke. After Netflix announced it’d lost nearly a million subscribers, streamers stopped stockpiling content. “We’d been writing pilots, which became worth bupkis,” says Frost. “So we were like, fine, we’ll do other things.” They’ve since been producing a series of short films, are writing a comic book, and invested in Eephus, a feature-length baseball comedy that played at Cannes and the New York Film Festival. Frost attended the festivals with her now boyfriend, Nate Fisher, who cowrote and acts in the film. She partied at David Lynch’s annual Silencio pop-up nightclub at Cannes, but didn’t spot the late director. She assumed he was “in a secret vestibule, two-sided-mirror wall, where he’s observing the goings on and eating a wholesome helping of cherry pie with black coffee.”

Christman has been easing back into work. “He does want to get back to saying something,” says Rollo. “At the beginning, and still now, I was mostly focused on helping him find joy again.” Frost has been helping write his contribution to the comic and Wade self-published a book adapted from Christman’s scripts for a series on the Spanish Civil War. They sold close to 18,000 copies. He’s started sitting in on the podcast again, and, with Rollo’s help, he’s writing poems for a new segment called Strokes of Genius. “Writing poetry is a great release. A Catharsis,” he tweeted recently, thanking Rollo. “With a stroke I never been so lucky because I with you.”

In late October, the Chapo Trap House logo appeared on a billboard above the Olive Garden in Times Square. The podcast’s subscribers hadn’t grown substantially since 2020, but they remained one of the biggest projects on Patreon, taking in approximately $180,000 a month as of December. Patreon asked if they wanted in on some advertising space they were purchasing. “There was trepidation at first,” says Frost. “But we like the idea of tourists seeing it and going, ‘What the fuck is that?’”

There hasn’t been a noticeable bump in subscriptions from the billboard. “You can’t expect exponential growth forever,” Menaker says. “I wouldn’t be satisfied if it was shrinking or we were losing money, but, for me, the feeling of doing the show comes first.” Perhaps the only thing that could revive their growth would be another movement like Sanders’s. “The man and the message matched, broadly speaking, the things that we would like to see in an American government,” Menaker says. “There aren’t any other opportunities for that. What are we gonna do? Start casting another candidate to support? If one comes along, I’ll let you know.” X content

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Not long after the billboard went up, Biederman moved back to New York, tired of drifting through life in Southern California. He ridicules the idea of podcasters fixing politics. “Liberals in the Democratic Party are always fighting the last war. Maybe it would have made sense to have spent the last seven years building a parallel media infrastructure that had these things to prepare for the Biden presidency, in advance of having a chief executive who is constitutionally incapable of communicating,” he says. “But now, I don’t know how anyone can look at the past 40 years of the conservative movement and go, ‘Oh, it’s Joe Rogan.’ No, it’s actual institutional strength that does not have a left-liberal equivalent.”

Biederman doesn’t see anyone building anything like that on the left. “Bernie is still individually popular, but it’s hard to have him as the center of gravity for this movement when he’s spent the past four years telling everyone how great Biden is. The same is true for AOC,” he says. “If anyone is going to recapture that feeling, it’s going to have to be someone who’s a little more courageous than that.” Frost is particularly dubious about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s commitment to democratic socialism. “Without the movement, she’s pretty untethered,” Frost says. “I don’t think she’s particularly focused or serious-minded about politics so much as the left-liberal commitment to forming a little righteous block, which doesn’t resonate with people as much as results. It tends to resonate with people without real problems.”

At least one former guest levels elements of that criticism at Chapo. “We’re increasingly careening into a world where social democracy probably isn’t going to happen and probably wouldn’t fix things, so maybe people need to become more interested in the further radical, revolutionary ideas throughout the history of communism…and they were a soc. dem. show,” says comedian Jake Flores. “They’re never going to be attached to a project like Bernie again. If you’re in a position like Chapo, you get more doomery from here on out, or you just become vague.”

The closest thing to a hopeful comment in Chapo’s postelection episode came from Wade. “I’m thinking back to that post-2016 moment, where everything was very scary, mostly because it was so new and uncharted. One of the scarier parts of now is that we know how this goes and it is charted and that chart is terrifying. But also just thinking about that concept of contingency…and how that post-2016 moment led to a big flourishing of alternative ways to think about and do politics,” he said. “It is still, as it always is, time to look to your friends, look to the people around you that need help and that you can build community and build capacity with, in whatever way makes sense to you, and wait for those moments of contingency.”

The hosts retain their capacity to be astonished by the left’s ability to unexpectedly rise. “One of the most heartening things I’ve seen in my time doing this show came years after a very disheartening defeat for Bernie,” says Biederman. “For the first time in my lifetime, seeing tens of thousands of Americans turning out for Palestine…it was probably the most amazing display I’ve seen.” Frost distills that to an ethic. “Despair is a kind of egotism. It’s a belief in your ability to predict the future,” she says. “I didn’t see Bernie coming. It’s important to remember the world can still surprise you. I hope another weird, good opportunity presents itself for a socialist future.”