Democrat congressman dragged for ‘weird' TikTok ‘aura farming' trend video
In the short clip, Subramanyam appears on the House subway wearing sunglasses, striking poses and waving his arms before locking in on the camera.
Subramanyam's 'aura farming' appears to have backfired, with some commenters calling it out as tone-deaf, hypocritical and 'cringe.'
Left-leaning viewers frustrated with perceived inaction from Democrats under President Donald Trump took aim at the VA-10 congressman in the comment section.
One of the top-liked comments asked flatly, 'By doing nothing…?' Another read, 'Representatives have got to stop doing this. Actually do something.'
Many commenters linked the post to Subramanyam's past voting record, including his controversial decision against his party just weeks ago not to move forward with a House impeachment resolution against Trump.
3 Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., posted a clip of himself dancing solo in the congressional subway.
@repsuhas/TikTok
On June 24, 2025, Subramanyam voted to table (i.e., block) a resolution to impeach President Trump over 'high crimes and misdemeanors.'
The resolution was introduced by Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, but was halted by a wide House majority.
Several comments mocked the tone and delivery of the video. One read, '-1000 aura,' while another said, 'Our taxpayer money hard at work…' Another commenter wrote, 'So what exactly are you on your way to do? Because so far democrats have not really done anything at all.'
A top comment simply read, 'This feels weird idk.'
3 The clip was captioned 'omw to hold this administration accountable.'
@repsuhas/TikTok
One lengthy reply said, 'Not trying to be disrespectful. But? Less of this sh–. More fire on the floor please. I get wanting to do outreach. But this? Isn't the action an average American needs from their representatives right now. We're approaching no taxation without representation territory here. Do better.'
Another suggested, 'Introduce a new amendment for every one performative TikTok a Congress person posts they have to cosign 3 bills that work to limit the power of money in politics.'
Subramanyam, a former tech advisor in the Obama White House and the first South Asian elected to Virginia's General Assembly, has gained a reputation as a more moderate Democrat.
3 Some social media users called the clip tone-deaf, hypocritical and 'cringe.'
Getty Images
He won Virginia's 10th District in 2024 and often plays up his immigrant roots in political messaging.
The 'aura farming' trend, popular among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, refers to pulling off effortless, cool gestures usually while standing still.
It took off after a now-viral video of 11-year-old Indonesian boy Rayyan Arkan Dikha danced stone-faced and confident while wearing sunglasses aboard a racing boat.
Most 'aura farming' clips on TikTok are soundtracked to 'Young Black & Rich' by Melly Mike, which includes the lyric 'I ain't even gon' get mad, I'm young, black and rich.'
Fox News Digital reached out to Subramanyam's office and TikTok for comment.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
27 minutes ago
- USA Today
EPA cuts its scientific research office, as layoffs set to take effect
The research and development office had been in the crosshairs of organizations allied with President Donald Trump. The Environmental Protection Agency eliminated its scientific research office in the Trump administration's latest cuts to the federal workforce. The change, announced July 18, affects the Office of Research and Development, which provided EPA with information to make decisions on standards for human health and the environment. EPA will now have a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions, according to an agency news release. 'Under President Trump's leadership, EPA has taken a close look at our operations to ensure the agency is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback,' Lee Zeldin, the agency's administrator, said in a statement. 'This reduction in force will ensure we can better fulfill that mission while being responsible stewards of your hard-earned tax dollars.' Officials said the creation of the applied science and environmental solutions office would allow EPA to prioritize research and science while putting it 'at the forefront of rulemakings and technical assistance to states.' EPA said organizational changes are saving nearly $750 million. The agency had already been subject to cuts in the new administration. A July 8 Supreme Court ruling allowed the Trump administration to implement sweeping reductions by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. In January, EPA had 16,155 employees, but the agency said it will now have 12,448 workers. It's unclear how many staff are affected by the July 18 announcement, while some will be reassigned in the agency. In an email, an EPA spokesperson said the next step would be sending notices to individual employees. The office includes biologists, chemists, epidemiologists and toxicologists. Scientists deal with emerging pollutants, including researching environmental emergencies such as floods, train derailments and wildfires, according to Nicole Cantello, legislative and political director for the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents EPA workers. "EPA is hellbent on destroying the foremost environmental research organization in the world," Cantello said. "That will only result in dirty air, dirty water and more health risks for the American people." Justin Chen, the union president, said the research and development office also sets regulatory guidelines for measuring pollutant levels. The restructuring places scientific research closer to the administrator, a political appointee, who "you can very well see turning a blind eye on things that may be inconvenient to friends of the administration," Chen said. In March, Democrats on the House science committee said there were about 1,540 employees across the country in EPA's reorganization plan of the Office of Research and Development. Lawmakers warned the plans would eliminate the EPA research and development office staffing by about 50-75%. The New York Times first reported on the plans. 'The obliteration of (the Office of Research and Development) will have generational impacts on Americans' health and safety,' Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-California, the committee's ranking chair, said in a July 18 statement. 'This is a travesty.' The research and development office had been in the crosshairs of organizations allied with Trump, as the Times reported. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, specifically cited the EPA science office in Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump to reconfigure and downsize the federal government. Eduardo Cuevas is based in New York City. Reach him by email at emcuevas1@ or on Signal at emcuevas.01.
Boston Globe
27 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Democrats' 2024 autopsy is described as avoiding the likeliest cause of death
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad. Advertisement Producing a tough-minded public review of a national electoral defeat would be a politically delicate exercise under any circumstance, given the need to find fault with the work and judgment of important party leaders and strategists. It is particularly fraught for the new DNC chair, Ken Martin, who promised a post-election review from his first day on the job but whose first few months in the role have been plagued by infighting and financial strains. Advertisement 'We are not interested in second-guessing campaign tactics or decisions of campaign operatives,' said Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska Democratic chair, who heads the association of Democratic state chairs and is a close ally of Martin. 'We are interested in what voters turned out for Republicans and Democrats, and how we can fix this moving forward.' Locked out of power at the federal level, Democrats are struggling to show that they have taken to heart the message that voters sent in November and are well suited to regain power in future elections. The review, which was begun in March and is being led by Paul Rivera, a veteran Democratic operative, is not yet complete and the report is not fully drafted. Rivera nonetheless has begun briefing people on what the report has found so far, and those briefings suggest that the Democratic autopsy will avoid addressing some of the likeliest or leading causes of death. Among those is whether Biden should have run for reelection. Some of Harris' top aides have faulted him for dropping out so late that she had just 107 days to campaign as the presidential nominee. But Biden's son Hunter said on a podcast this past week that Democrats lost 'because we did not remain loyal' to his father. Top Democrats said they did not intend for the report to address strategic decisions made by leaders of the Biden and Harris campaigns. Indeed, in a sign of the report's narrow scope, more than half a dozen people who were senior officials on the campaigns say they have not yet been interviewed. Advertisement DNC officials cautioned that interviews were still taking place and the report's conclusions might change before it is released this fall. 'We're glad to see there's so much interest in an after-action report on how Democrats can win again,' Rivera said. 'But folks might be better off holding their applause, or their criticism, until we have had a chance to complete our work and people can actually read it.' People briefed on the report's progress said they had been told it would focus more on outside groups and super political action committees that spent hundreds of millions of dollars aiding the Biden and Harris campaigns through advertising, voter registration drives and turnout efforts. Kleeb said she expected the report to accelerate the party's diversion of resources from advertising to organizing. 'The days of us spending millions and millions of dollars on traditional TV ads are over,' she said. 'And I do think that this report will put an exclamation point on that.' In particular, the people briefed on it said, the after-action review is expected to place blame with Future Forward, the party's main super PAC, which spent $560 million to support Biden and then Harris. They said the report would argue that Future Forward spent far too much propping up Harris and not nearly enough attacking Trump. It is expected to argue that Future Forward's advertising approach was too focused on television programs to be effective. And it will review the lack of coordination between the super PAC's advertising and the Harris campaign's, which were often not in sync. A Future Forward document that was distributed to donors and reviewed by The New York Times said about half of the super PAC's advertising was delivered on digital platforms, which includes television-like streaming services. The group said it spent more than $51 million just on YouTube ads. Advertisement A Future Forward aide, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the group's operations, said just 13% of its advertising was positive about Harris, with the rest attacking Trump. ( The critiques of Future Forward will not be new to Democrats who read real-time coverage of the campaign last year, along with more recent book-length and magazine accounts of the Biden and Harris campaigns. A DNC official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Future Forward had been reflective and candid in its conversations with the review's authors, denied that Future Forward would be blamed for the loss and insisted that any criticisms of the group would also apply to the broader Democratic world. Rivera has conducted more than 200 interviews with officials from all 50 states, an aide said. 'The DNC's post-election review is not a finger-pointing exercise; it's about bringing together Democrats across the ecosystem to adopt an actionable playbook to win, not just for 2026 and 2028, but to dominate for cycles to come,' said Rosemary Boeglin, a spokesperson for the committee. 'Democrats are clear-eyed about the challenges facing the party — many of which are rooted well before the 2024 cycle — and it requires all of us to make structural changes in how we run campaigns.' Rivera's team has included aides to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Rep. Raul Ruiz of California. Walz, the party's 2024 nominee for vice president, has spent time since November on an atonement tour publicly explaining what he thought went wrong in the campaign, including what he saw as his own missteps. Advertisement The DNC's election review, which will extend to contests for Congress and state offices, is not the only one underway. Jen O'Malley Dillon, who oversaw the Biden and Harris campaigns, is involved in a separate monthslong project being led by Melissa Williams, a former top official at Emily's List who oversaw the group's independent political spending. That project is seeking to piece together as comprehensively as possible the technical and tactical decisions made both by the campaign and leading outside groups, and to document the results from those spending decisions, according to three people with knowledge of the research. The results are not expected to be made public but rather to be circulated privately among Democratic strategists to provide a fuller record and greater understanding of what happened, the people said. A third look back is being led by the Strategic Victory Fund, a network of liberal donors and organizations. Scott Anderson, the group's president, said it had so far interviewed more than 100 people, including top officials from the Biden and Harris campaign and the DNC. Anderson said he did not intend to make its report public but would instead use it to inform Democratic donors and decision makers. 'So many people in my world, after 2016, jumped into a resistance mode that there wasn't a real thoughtful moment to talk for a minute with all the key people about what we're doing right and wrong about every aspect of politics and culture,' Anderson said. 'We really need to take a step back in a way that I don't feel was done after 2016, and have hard conversations.' Advertisement The DNC's report is expected to be far different from the so-called autopsy that Republicans produced after the 2012 election of Barack Obama. In March 2013, the Republican National Committee released a 100-page 'Growth and Opportunity Project' report that declared the GOP was in an 'ideological cul-de-sac' and called for moderation on immigration along with a number of other changes. While Republican leaders did adopt many of its recommendations in time for the 2016 election, Trump's campaign ran counter to many of the changes the RNC had proposed, and he has since remade the Republican Party in his image. This article originally appeared in
The Hill
27 minutes ago
- The Hill
Hegseth reassigns first female Naval Academy head
Navy Vice Adm. Yvette Davids, the first female to serve as superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy is being reassigned, the Defense Department announced Friday. Davids was instead tapped to serve as deputy chief of naval operations, plans, strategy and warfighting development, according to a press release. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Michael J. Borgschulte was named to lead the Naval Academy in her place — making him the first Marine to lead the institution. 'The Naval Academy remains one of the most consequential institutions in American public life. It forges leaders of character, men and women of integrity, resilience, and intellect who will guide our Fleet and our Nation through the challenges of an increasingly contested world,' Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan said in a statement. 'Lt. Gen. Borgschulte is uniquely prepared to lead the next generations of naval and marine officers and ensure they are ready for the future fight,' Phelan added. Superintendents at the Naval Academy are there for at least three years typically, but the stint can be shorter. Davids, a 1989 graduate of the academy in Annapolis, Md., had been the leader of the institution since January 2024. Her reassignment, which was first reported by USNI News, comes as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has overseen the shake-up of top military leaders. Trump removed Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr. in February and nominated Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan 'Razin' Caine, who was eventually confirmed by the Senate for the role. The administration also fired chief of naval operations Adm. Lisa M. Franchetti, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump also removed Adm. Linda Fagan, the first female U.S. Coast Guard commandant. Phelan congratulated Davids on her appointment, adding that she commanded 'at every level and has led with distinction in some of the most complex security environments of our time.' 'Her strategic vision and operational depth will be an exceptional asset to the Navy and the Department of Defense,' Phelan said. Davids said in a statement that she was honored to be nominated to her new role. 'I look forward to continuing to serve alongside America's strongest warfighters,' she wrote.
