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The Shutdown Goes On

Published by digby on November 7, 2025

I thought this rundown of the current situation by Punchbowl was pretty good:

Bipartisan negotiations are expected to continue, but there’s not much hope for an immediate solution. Democrats will keep the shutdown going as they push for new concessions from Republicans on health care, federal layoffs and more.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune may send senators home for the weekend following the CR vote, but no decision on the schedule has been made yet. Either way, it’s pretty much guaranteed that the shutdown will drag into next week at the least. And the fallout from the impasse will continue to worsen.

There’s enormous confusion — and consternation — over the Trump administration’s handling of the SNAP program, which helps feed more than 40 million Americans. A federal judge ordered the administration to fully fund the program on Thursday, but the Justice Department said it would appeal the ruling.

In the meantime, a 4% reduction in flight capacity at major U.S. airports takes effect today and will increase by 1% each day until it reaches 10%. That means thousands of flight cancellations per day, impacting millions of Americans, as well as those visitors flying in and out of the country.

A bipartisan deal to end the shutdown seemed within reach earlier this week. But Senate Democrats spent a two-hour caucus meeting Thursday taking stock of where things stand and came to this conclusion: Why on earth would we fold now?

[…]

Here are just a few reasons why Senate Democrats feel comfortable continuing to block floor action on reopening the government:

Negotiators haven’t decided on an end date for the CR. The three-bill minibus still isn’t finalized, even among Republicans. There isn’t an agreement on the structure or exact timing for an Obamacare subsidies vote, including whether there will be a side-by-side vote on a GOP alternative, as Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) called for during a closed-door meeting Tuesday. Even though Democrats have multiple chances to filibuster any such agreement, they don’t think they should help advance what would become the vehicle for a deal that’s not even done.

After Tuesday’s election victories, Democrats believe voters gave them a mandate to keep up the shutdown fight. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), among others, implored their colleagues to “keep fighting” during Thursday’s closed-door session.

Republicans have told Democrats they’d be willing to discuss language reversing President Donald Trump’s mass layoffs of federal workers. Democrats want to push hard on this, as well as overturning OMB’s blue-state funding cuts.

 Trump is at his most volatile and vulnerable right now, and Democrats think they can take advantage. Trump is picking fights with Senate Republicans over the filibuster. The president privately told GOP’s senators that the election results show that the shutdown has been “worse for us than for [Democrats].” So Democrats will try to stoke Trump’s anger and see what happens.

It’s very interesting that Republicans are so spooked that they’re willing to talk about reversing the federal layoffs. That cuts the heart out of DOGE and Russ Vought. I doubt it will go anywhere but it’s a tell that they at least realize how politically toxic all that is.

So, it doesn’t appear that we’re going to see a breakthrough this weekend but the GOP is starting to go wobbly. Good.

Update — By the way, Mike Johnson and the House wingnuts are throwing sand in the gears too:

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday sharply diverged from the direction that Senate negotiations were headed in to end the government shutdown.

Johnson told reporters Thursday that he would not commit to holding a vote on extending COVID-19 pandemic-era enhanced Obamacare subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of this year without congressional action…. “The House did its job on Sept. 19. I’m not promising anybody anything. I’m going to let this process play out,” Johnson said.

[…]

The issue of enhanced Obamacare subsidies has been a matter of debate within the GOP, with some Republicans in more moderate districts calling for at least a year-long extension to give lawmakers time to create a new healthcare deal in its place.

But House conservatives are rejecting any such extension out of hand. Fox News Digital first reported that leaders of the 189-member Republican Study Committee issued an official position earlier Thursday demanding the credits not be extended.

Trump is the only one who can fix that and he’s busy snoozing and schmoozing.

Update: It appears that there might, might be a deal to extend the ACA subsidies for another year — at least Chuck Schumer has offered that. No idea yet if the Senate GOP is willing and who knows what the weirdos in the House will do. But that’s the latest.

The Scared Little ICE Men

Published by digby on November 7, 2025

Lisa Needham at Public Notice makes an important observation about the masked marauders terrorizing the streets of America — for all their cos-playing swagger, they’re the most fearful, delicate li’l fellas in the country. She writes:

The Trump administration only wants the most formidable warriors, real stone-cold-killer types, to join his war on immigrants.

They should be white, of course, and ideally ‘roided up. These guys are the sort that can take a punch and not even blink, the hardest MFers you’re ever going to see. Just look at all the sizzle reels DHS is putting out, and you can feel the toughness through the screen, right? And you just know that if those dudes want to take you down, you’re going down.

Now, it’s not at all unusual for authoritarians to treat even the smallest pushback on law enforcement officers as an attack on their authority and an excuse to be rabidly violent. But that’s not quite what the administration is doing. In public, they want everyone to know that these thugs they’ve deployed to terrorize cities are battle-hardened and impervious to pain. But on the other hand, they are also such delicate flowers that if they are, say, lightly grazed by a sandwich, they are entitled to justice because of the horrific assault they have suffered.

Call it tough guy in the streets and widdle guy in the sheets (of paper for court filings).

This piece was spurred by the testimony of the officer who claimed to have felt threatened by a Subway sandwich. The man who threw the sandwich was acquitted of charges yesterday for obvious reasons. The case was a joke. But it does highlight what Needham points out above and which I’ve gotten thought to myself as I watch the footage of a group of ICE and CPB agents decked out in full kit military gear swarm one lone day laborer or a woman driving her car to wrestle them to the ground, grind their faces into the pavement and otherwise brutalize them. The masks and the violence are obviously overkill.

But when anyone files a complaint about all this they are met with denials that any of this is happening or the excuse that the agents are in great danger and fearful for their lives requiring them to use excessive force to protect themselves. Even the masks are ostensibly needed to protect them from reprisals from the antifa terrorist commie vermin against whom they are apparently helpless.

Cops in this country have never worn masks. They haven’t felt the need to be decked out like they are invading Falluja. But these big, macho tough ICE and CPB men are so terrified of the people they are terrorizing that they must act like animals under color of law and can’t show their identities. They’re cowards.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Judges

Published by digby on November 7, 2025

The Vice President says the president will decide what’s legal and what isn’t. This isn’t the first time he’s said this:

Trump is so addled he doesn’t have a clue what any of this means. But Vance knows that they are challenging the entire system by saying they have the authority to ignore orders. It’s happened a time or two in the past but even in the most contentious of times the executive has always deferred to the courts and used the normal process to adjudicate the dispute.

They seem to still believe they must adhere to the Supreme Court so perhaps this has to make it all the way up to the top in order to be resolved. And so far they haven’t had much of a problem with them issuing emergency stays so they really don’t need to do this. Simply ignoring the lower courts is an escalation.

Cruelty Is The Point … Of ICE

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 7, 2025

Not Timmy and Lassie’s America

https://bsky.app/profile/mluckovich.bsky.social/post/3m4yc2x22k22m

The cruelty and sadism with which Trump-Miller ICEmen go about snatching and disappearing anyone browner than a palette approved by DHS Secrtary Kristi Noem is worthy of Dolores Umbridge. Trump’s deportation pogrom program against immigrants is, like his decision to inflict hunger on SNAP recipients, taking an emotional toll. As intended:

Concerned residents of an Oregon city spoke out at a council meeting earlier this week about ICE activity in their community, including a 16-year-old boy who broke down worrying that authorities may take away his immigrant parents.

“I just want to tell you guys that I’m scared for my parents to walk out their house because I might not be able to say goodbye to them if they go to work,” the boy, who was identified as Manny, told the Hillsboro City Council at a meeting held on Tuesday, Nov. 4.

“I might not ever be able to say bye or see them again if you guys don’t side with us,” he said. “And I’m scared because of it, because they fought so hard to come here and choose a life for their kids.”

This week agents snatched a documented teacher from a Chicago Spanish-language-immersion preschool (WLS):

A day care worker was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in front of young children on the North Side Wednesday morning, witnesses said.

Several witnesses said it happened inside the Rayito de Sol in the 2500-block of West Addison Street, in North Center and Roscoe Village area. The business remained closed Wednesday after the incident.

Federal authorities say they did not specifically target the day care and that the teacher was in the country illegally, but local officials maintain she has a work permit and a pending asylum case and that agents entered the day care without a warrant.

 

 
View on Threads

 

CBS News Chicago reports that the teacher is being held at the Broadview Detention Center:

Parents told CBS News Chicago they want to know why agents went into the daycare in the first place. Spokespeople from the Department of Homeland Security say they didn’t.

Video captured the teacher’s arrest Wednesday morning, and other video shows pre-K teacher Diana Galeano in the back of the unmarked car federal agents sed to detain her. Parents, staff and officials said children were present when she was taken into custody.

“We had agents with guns who were walking around the facility with teachers inside, with children inside,” said Ald. Matt Martin, who represents the 47th Ward.

Martin said Galeano is at the Broadview ICE detention center and that, in detaining her, federal agents were inside the daycare building with no warrant. Martin, U.S. Rep Mike Quigley and U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez all said they had seen video from inside the facility showing ICE agents indoors.

DHS claims Galeano was not arrested for being in the country illegally, but for allegedly paying smugglers to bring her children, 16 and 17, into the U.S. near El Paso.

But the goulishness with which Trump fans and its principle actors celebrate the deportation regime is anything but the idyllic, Timmy-and-Lassie America MAGA types think Trump is recreating for white-nationalist Christians.

The BBC last year described the Dilley Meme Team, makers of the AI video below, as “a dedicated, mostly pseudonymous group that produces a slew of pro-Trump videos and images, many of them crude, offensive, satirical or conspiratorial – while others are more traditional and religious-themed.” Despite the original poster’s claim to be “Servant of the Most High! Lover of God, Family, America!” and “Chaplain to Trump’s Online War Machine,” the video’s vile content is diametrically opposite the teachings of Jesus.

Naturally, Kristi Noem retweeted the video featuring brown-skinned men and women dancing their way onto deportation flights to Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration.”

Dolores Umbridge would be so proud.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Let Them Eat Nothing

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 7, 2025

Gatsby party boy insists poor kids go hungry

Vice President J.D. Vance on Thursday told a White House conclave of Central Asian leaders, “It’s an absurd ruling because you have a federal judge effectively telling us what we have to do in the middle of a Democrat government shutdown.”

Vance knows from “absurd.” He is absurd every time he looks lovingly at his South Asian wife and looks away as the Trump administration’s ICE thugs violently abduct and detain the American-citizen children of non-white immigrants like his wife.

Vance’s complaint referred to U.S. District Judge John McConnell last week directing the Trump administration to continue paying SNAP benefits to 42 million Americans from an emergency fund allocated for that purpose. Regular SNAP funding ended on November 1. “SNAP benefits have never, until now, been terminated,” McConnell said in a hearing. That the government is in shutdown is no reason to withhold them:

“It’s clear that when compared to the millions of people that will go without funds for food versus the agency’s desire not to use contingency funds in case there’s a hurricane need, the balances of those equities clearly goes on the side of ensuring that people are fed,” the judge said.

The administration could either restore full funding by Monday (Nov. 3) or partial funding by Wednesday (Nov. 5). The same evening Trump threw a garish Great Gatsby themed Halloween party, he began crafting excuses to delay, saying his administration needed more clarity from the court. He claimed he did not have legal authority to tap the emergency funds:

“If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding, just like I did with Military and Law Enforcement Pay,” Trump said, referring to the shifting of funds that has been used to pay troops as the shutdown has stretched on.

So much for honor

But ahead of sweeping Republican election defeats on Tuesday, Trump the Petulant defied the court, saying he would release funds only when the government reopens.

So McConnell on Thursday ordered the administration to make full funding for November available by Friday (today):

“People have gone without for too long, not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable,” said U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr.  

Judge McConnell directly rebuked President Donald Trump for stating “his intent to defy” a court order by saying earlier this week that SNAP will not be funded until the government reopens from the ongoing government shutdown. 

Families are going hungry while Trump pouts. He is reportedly planning to appeal the court’s order that Americans on SNAP continue to go without food.

I wondered if Trump would double down on his contempt for Americans even after voters on Tuesday demonstrated their contempt for his actions. He did not disappoint.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Nobody’s Buying The Economic Hype Anymore

Published by digby on November 6, 2025

I’ve always wondered what Trump thinks people have always called “grocery” stores. “Food store”? Restaurant supply place?

Everyone in America has been using the word grocery forever. His belief that he just plucked the word out of obscurity and it caused the nation to suddenly focus on food prices is such an indicator of his out-of-touch billionaire status that I’m surprised that even his MAGA people aren’t cringing at this.

Now that the Republicans had their asses handed to them in the off-year elections because of “groceries” (among other things — what until the health insurance and electricity bills come rolling in over the next couple of months) he’s going to get a little of the medicine he doled out to Joe Biden. In his case, it’s going to be true. He’s making everything worse.

The One True MAGA

Published by digby on November 6, 2025

She’s running:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has become increasingly vocal in her criticism of the Republican Party and its leadership, particularly in the House, is telling people she wants to run for president in 2028.

Greene has been working on reinventing herself over the past year — and for good reason.

She has confided to colleagues that she wants to run for president, according to four sources familiar with the matter, including one who has spoken with her directly about it.

One source says her conversations have centered around her belief she is “real MAGA and that the others have strayed,” adding that she believes she has “the national donor network to win the primary.”

After publication, Greene texted NOTUS, saying she “saw you posted a baseless article.” NOTUS sent an inquiry to her communications director ahead of publication, but Greene asked why NOTUS had not reached out to a different person in her office.

“Who is your source? Laura Loomer? She claimed I was running for governor last week and announcing it in the view. Once again you publish baseless gossip. Very disappointing. Don’t text me again,” Greene said.

While the conversations lack specifics and she hasn’t officially decided anything, she has brought up on multiple occasions that she is interested in launching a campaign. Sources point to her recent media run on CNN, “The View” and “Real Time with Bill Maher” as evidence that she is trying to connect with a more national audience outside of the hardcore MAGA base.

During an October appearance on comedian Tim Dillon’s podcast, Greene dodged a question about whether or not she would run in 2028.

She seems to be creating an image of a populist, feminist, MAGA leader which is original, I’ll give her that. She’s breaking with Trump and leading the charge on the Epstein files, insulting all the GOP men as wimps, total isolationism, and fighting for health care and SNAP. And she’s just as nasty and rude as ever. It’s an interesting approach, especially since it really does make her GOP colleagues look like the cowards they are.

Bill Maher: “It looks bad at this moment that [Trump] is giving $40B to Argentina at this moment. Does it not?”

Marjorie Taylor Greene: “Yeah, I disagree with that.”

Bill Maher: “Really?”

Marjorie Taylor Greene: “I’m so far America first, I’m America only right now. I want good trade with other foreign countries, but I don’t want to be involved in their foreign wars or their bailouts or their foreign causes or their foreign aid.” “I think the American people deserve all the attention from the government that they fund with their taxpayer dollars.”

Bill Maher: [Trump] made a big deal with China, which looks like kind of what we had before… his big problem with China is that he can bully the Arabs… He can bully NATO. China is not that.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: China has become extremely powerful… We have to have even policies. Companies need to be able to plan. If the tariffs are continually going up and down, it hurts companies.

Bill Maher: I would love to know what the Republicans really want to do about healthcare.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Me too. I’m waiting for the plan. I haven’t seen it yet… Republicans have never done anything to correct the problems that exist with [Obamacare]. And I blame my own party… Mike Johnson, for a month now, cannot give me a single policy idea.

Welcome to the Resistance, Marge.

Embrace The DEI

Published by digby on November 6, 2025

It’s a strength, not a weakness

As long as we’re doing election postmortems I thought this point by Philip Bump was especially insightful:

In his victory speech, Mamdani challenged the Democratic Party and its leadership.

“If tonight teaches us anything,” he said, “it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind.”

His latter point is obviously true. But it’s the highlighted part that’s interesting.

Mamdani is saying that the Democratic Party has been too timid. He’s echoing the argument that the party has tried too hard to triangulate its politics to public opinion, approaching campaigns the way a helicopter parent approaches a playground. He’s siding (as one would expect) with the left in the left-vs.-centrism bickering that’s consumed Democratic political discussions since 2024. Give or take a few decades.

One thing the results on Tuesday can show us, though, is that this is a false choice. Mamdani won while embracing left-wing policies and politics in New York City. Spanberger won while running a more moderate campaign in Virginia. Democrats won in a lot of places while running a lot of different campaigns. This was in part because, like in California, they provided an opportunity for voters to rebuke Trump. But they still won.

It is a reminder that democracy is centered on diversity. Democracy is the idea that people from various backgrounds can unite and decide on common leadership that represents them — meaning them in their town or their county or their state. Maybe the president isn’t someone you agree with or maybe your city councilman isn’t, but democracy provides the opportunity for everyone’s voice to be heard on the subject.

Particularly at the moment, this seems like a valuable idea for the Democratic Party itself to lean into. Trumpism is about homogeneity, about forcing Americans into his views and his systems. His panicky response to the results on Tuesday reinforces how uncomfortable he is with divergent viewpoints and centers of power. The Democratic Party could easily position itself as the home of diverse argument and diverse policy positions reflecting America’s diverse population — a rejection of the uniformity Trump wants to impose. It’s the party of Spanberger and Mamdani, not the party of Donald Trump and various Donald Trumps Jr.

He points out that centrists are always saying that candidates should tailor their messages to the electorate but notes that they end up muddying this message by insisting that candidates should downplay civil rights and follow a national message, which ends up being carried out on the field of Republicans choosing.

He writes:

If, instead, your approach and your party’s approach is that you are a big tent that is centered on democracy and diversity? You have a built-in response to efforts to nationalize your views: That’s New York, not Richmond. Our community’s priorities and theirs are different. Our party provides the space for Americans to make different choices in different places. I and many other have observed that the Democratic Party, needing to win with diverse populations in diverse places, has to be a big-tent party. So why not center that at the heart of the party’s rhetoric?

You can see how such an approach would work on nights like Tuesday. How it did work, if tacitly. But it has a broader advantage, given that it reflects the promise and values of America itself — or at least of the America that we understood to exist until noon on Jan. 20.

Ten million Californians came out to stand up to Donald Trump. A million New Yorkers voted for Mamdani. Two million backed Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia. Diverse candidates, diverse issues, overlapping but distinct priorities. It was a good night for big-D Democrats and for little-d democracy. Perhaps the party should sew those things together.

Democrats can come together nationally around values and certain priorities but it is, by necessity, a diverse party. The GOP is homogeneous and they want the entire country to either be exactly like them or bow down to them. There is no room for cultural variety or philosophical argument. Pluralism is a dirty word.

I guess they’ve made DEI their watch word and I’m sure Democrats will not have the nerve to embrace it now. They won’t even use the word liberal and they’restarting to run from progressive now too. But they should at least welcome the concept. It’s a strength not a weakness.

As an L.A. Dodger fan I had a few rare light and happy days over the past couple of weeks as my team won the world series. But one of the reasons I am such a fan, aside from geography, is that the team is the team of Jackie Robinson and Fernando Valenzuela and now this incredible contingent of masterful Japanese baseball players among many others. They’ve embraced diversity from the start, seeking talent from wherever it hails, and a lot of people didn’t like it. But a lot of people did.

They turned out an estimated 250,000 people to the parade to celebrate the win this week and if you looked at that crowd it couldn’t be more diverse. There was an especially heavy Latino presence, which makes sense since a huge part of the fan base is Hispanic. But there was every race and ethnicity in that crowd celebrating the team that looked just like them.

ICE and CPB didn’t have a presence at that event for obvious reasons. They wouldn’t dare Wade into that crowd of thousands of Latinos and Asians, women, Black people and white people all together enjoying the same shared moment of pleasure and excitement.

As I watched the team wend its way through downtown LA being cheered on by my city’s incredibly diverse population I thought to myself, “this is the future, Trump. You can’t hold back this tide.”

It’s Not Either/Or

Published by digby on November 6, 2025

It’s both!

Greg Sargent has this 100% right. The carnage to our democracy and carnage to our economy require the same message:

The Democratic Party’s blowout wins on Tuesday night underscore a fundamental reality about the Donald Trump era: Anti-Trump politics is affordability politics, and affordability politics is anti-Trump politics. It’s not just that there is no need to choose between attacking Trump’s lawlessness and addressing the “price of eggs,” in the hackneyed shorthand for costs and inflation. It’s that the two missions are inseparable from one another.

In the weeks leading up to the elections—in which Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races by 15 points and 13 points, respectively—a strange, contrary media trope took hold. Various news analyses suggested that Spanberger and Sherrill were erring by obsessing over Trump rather than focusing on what actually matters to voters. Some Democrats fretted that while attacking Trump was “seductive,” an opportunity was being missed to offer a substantive “alternative.”

Tuesday’s results decisively refute that false-choice narrative.

Start with this finding in the updated exit polls: Both Spanberger and Sherrill entirely erased the GOP advantage with voters who lack a four-year degree. Spanberger tied her Republican opponent among them, with each getting 50 percent, a huge swing from four years earlier, when Glenn Youngkin won them by 59 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, Sherrill also tied her GOP opponent among non-college voters by 50 percent to 49 percent.

And here’s a striking nuance: While both Democrats lost non-college white voters by large amounts—a demographic the party continues to struggle with—Spanberger did reduce that margin relative to 2021. Critically, both made up for that by winning huge margins among non-college nonwhite voters: The spreads were 85–15 for Spanberger and 75–23 for Sherrill. Given that Trump’s 2024 victory unleashed a hurricane of analysis about his inroads with the nonwhite working class, those margins are heartening indeed.

True, there are nuances and caveats here. Virginia and New Jersey are blue-leaning; turnout differentials could help explain these shifts; they might not hold in a higher-turnout presidential election; exit polls are not the final word; and so forth. But still, such success for Democrats with non-college voters—relative to recent performances in the same states—suggests they may be starting to repair the damage Trump did to their coalition.

There’s a bizarre tendency in our political discourse to treat criticism of Trump—including his lawlessness and consolidation of authoritarian power—as somehow evading the “real” issues that working-class voters actually care about. Tuesday’s results sorely test this false dichotomy. On one front after another, the Democrats’ attacks on Trump were directly linked to voters’ material concerns.

For instance, many of Spanberger’s ads attacking Trump were also about the economy. One ad ripped her GOP opponent as a Trump stooge while decrying soaring costs and rising unemployment due to his policies. Another ad labeled her GOP foe a “MAGA Republican”—that’s just Resistance talk, right?—while decrying rising grocery prices and health care costs under Trump. Yet another ad attacked MAGA while casting Trump’s big budget bill as a giveaway to “billionaires.”

Meanwhile, Sherrill’s labeling of her opponent the “Trump of Trenton” was sometimes treated as little more than anti-Trump obsessiveness. But Democrats ran ads that tied her GOP opponent to Trump while also blasting Trump’s massive Medicaid cuts and his tariffs for the economic harms they’re inflicting. When Trump killed the tunnel project connecting New York and New Jersey, in an authoritarian move designed to inflict pain on only Democrats, the party’s ads blasted this as a job killer, and Sherrill also forthrightly called it “illegal” and vowed to “fight” it.

Trump’s tariffs, his killing of the tunnel project, his potentially illegal federal-worker firings, his DOGE bloodbath, and more show that the economic carnage he’s unleashed is inseparable from his consolidation of autocratic power. Democrats can say these things are bad because they’re both authoritarian abuses of power and have terrible economic consequences, while vowing to stand up to that lawlessness—and do well with the working class.

It is a false choice to say that Democrats should focus on “kitchen table issues.” Sure, they should talk about the shitty economy constantly — and place the blame on Trump’s corrupt, authoritarian, policies. People will get it. It’s not that hard. He’s destroying us, one self-serving, undemocratic decision at a time.

“This firewall that exists in the punditry between Trump and economic messaging—that is not how working-class voters thought about these issues,” a Democratic strategist familiar with strategic thinking in both gubernatorial races tells me.