Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Grifters all the way down

President Shitposter cannot find time to work at lowering the cost of your groceries or your rents. Donald J. Trump is too busy having his boots licked, issuing overnight extortionist threats by “truths,” suing people (including the government he leads) for damages, and taking bribes. In his spare time, he’s finding even more creative ways to turn his public office into private profit. It’s a pastime enjoyed by many members of the federal government, but most are discrete about it. Not Trump the Shameless. He may not be the Antichrist, but he’s certainly earned “the anti-George Washington.”

Heather Cox Richardson noticed:

On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.”

Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.

You’ll recall, as Richardson does, that Trump has cut off funding for new tunnel construction under the Hudson River. Because DEI, something-something, and until you rename Dulles Airport and New York City’s Penn Station after oh, marvelous me.

In 1789, when George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States of America, no one knew what to expect of leaders in a democratic republic. Washington understood that anything he did would become the standard for anyone who came after him. “I walk on untrodden ground,” he wrote in 1790, the year after he assumed the office of the presidency. “There is scarcely any part of my conduct w[hi]ch may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.”

After watching colonial lawmakers under royal rule demand payoffs before they would approve popular measures, Washington rejected the idea of profiting from the presidency. In his short Inaugural Address, he took the time to state explicitly that he would not accept any payments while in the presidency except for an official salary appropriated by Congress.

Washington noted that the support of the American people for the new government was key to its survival. He hailed the pledges of the new nation’s lawmakers to rule for the good of the whole nation, not for specific regions or partisan groups. He also predicted that the power of the government would come not from military might but from its determination to serve the needs of the public. He promised “that the foundations of our National policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; and the pre-eminence of a free Government, be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its Citizens, and command the respect of the world.”

[We pause for those who did a spit-take to wipe the coffee off your monitors and keyboards. ]

Fifty-odd years ago, Richardson reminds readers, “Republican senators warned Republican president Richard M. Nixon that the House was about to impeach him for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.” Not these Republicans. All but a tiny handful lick his boots and smile meekly. The anti-Washingtons read the first U.S. president’s Farewell Address as a how-to manual for undoing 250 years of government of, by, and for the people, and the unsteady expansion of human rights and dignity. They’ve turned America’s temple of democracy into a den of thieves.

Washington presciently warned the new nation against the temptations of power:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more
formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.

A wise people would shun that temptation. Such a faction would surely agitate “the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms.” It would kindle “the animosity of one part against another,” foment “riot and insurrection,” and open the door to “foreign influence and corruption.” Thus, Washington warned, “the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”

But modern Americans are not a wise people. “Washington’s dire warnings have come true,” Richardson laments.

In fact, Americans remember and revere Washington because of his reluctance to promote himself, not in spite of it. John Trumbull’s portrait of him resigning his wartime commission after negotiators had signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War hangs in the U.S. Capitol as a moment that defined the United States: a leader voluntarily giving up power rather than becoming a dictator. Then, when voters made him president of the new United States in 1789, he refused a second time to become a king, emphasizing that he was the servant of the people and then, after two terms, voluntarily handing power to a successor chosen not by him but by the people.

As Washington predicted, the presidents Americans revere despite their faults—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—are those who used the enormous power of the U.S. government not for their own aggrandizement but to secure and expand the rights and the prosperity of the American people.

Trump has made no secret of wanting his image carved onto Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved the busts of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln in the Black Hills of the Lakotas. Beginning his sculpture in 1927, Borglum chose President Washington because he had founded the nation, Jefferson because he had launched westward expansion, Lincoln because he had saved the United States from destruction, and Roosevelt because he had protected working men and helped fit democracy to industrial development.

The anti-Washington, would-be fifth head on Mount Rushmore, is a walking atrocity, a shit stain on everything Americans and presidents before him achieved. He may yet order construction of a colossus of himself to stand astride New York harbor as the fabled sun god Helios once did on the island of Rhodes. It’s a wonder Trump I hasn’t thought of it already.

Bush Jr. steps up (a little bi)t for a change. In a President’s Day essay he discusses Washington’s stellar character and leadership qualities — which are obviously the polar opposite of the 12 year old bully-boy in chief’s:

Bush waxed poetic on several of George Washington’s qualities, but paid particular attention to ones that are currently in short supply. Those included “humility,” a deep appreciation for history, a reverence for knowledge superior to his own, and an unwillingness to retain power “for power’s sake.”

“Our first president could have remained all-powerful, but twice he chose not to,” Bush wrote. “In so doing, he set a standard for all presidents to live up to.”

Bush also dissected Washington’s commitment to a code of conduct that was considered, at the time, to be the “gentlemanly arts.” Washington, according to Bush’s research, “schooled himself” by copying “the 110 maxims from Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” a text authored by French Jesuits in the late sixteenth century.

“Many of the qualities that came to be associated with Washington’s leadership, from self-control and courteousness to modesty and diplomacy, can be traced to that short book on manners,” Bush wrote.

Washington’s repeated decisions to step down from power were critical lessons for the nation, according to Bush, who argued that Washington’s decision to step down as commander of the U.S. Army after the Revolution, and his later decision to end his presidency after two terms,  “ensured America wouldn’t become a monarchy, or worse.”

[…]

“Our first leader helped define not only the character of the presidency but the character of the country,” Bush wrote. “Washington modeled what it means to put the good of the nation over self-interest and selfish ambition. He embodied integrity and modeled why it’s worth aspiring to. And he carried himself with dignity and self-restraint, honoring the office without allowing it to become invested with near-mythical powers.”

Those used to be the character traits everyone taught their children and aspired to themselves. Today, our leaders model dishonesty, brutality, ignorance, immaturity and vainglory. You’re a sucker if you care about anything but self-aggrandizement.

The only thing I’ve ever heard Trump say about Washington is that he should have named Mt. Vernon after himself so people would remember him.

By the way:

An exhibit about nine people enslaved by George Washington must be restored at his former home in Philadelphia after President Donald Trump’s administration took it down last month, a federal judge ruled on Presidents Day, the federal holiday honoring Washington’s legacy.

The city of Philadelphia sued in January after the National Park Service removed the explanatory panels from Independence National Historical Park, the site where George and Martha Washington lived with nine of their slaves in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was briefly the nation’s capital.

The removal came in response to a Trump executive order “restoring truth and sanity to American history” at the nation’s museums, parks and landmarks. It directed the Interior Department to ensure those sites do not display elements that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe ruled Monday that all materials must be restored in their original condition while a lawsuit challenging the removal’s legality plays out. She prohibited Trump officials from installing replacements that explain the history differently

History is very woke. The only way to restore truth and sanity is to lie about it.

Li’l Marco gave a big slurp to Trump’s wingtips today:

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday enthusiastically endorsed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ‘s bid to serve a fifth straight term after upcoming elections in April, emphasizing during a visit to Budapest the strong personal relationship between the nationalist leader and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Orbán, who has led Hungary since 2010, is one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the European Union, and has actively curried the U.S. president’s favor leading up to the April 12 vote in which he will face the toughest challenge of his last 16 years in power.

Rubio was in the Hungarian capital for meetings with Orbán and his government where he signed an agreement on U.S.-Hungarian civilian nuclear cooperation that includes the possible purchase of compact nuclear reactors — known as small modular reactors or SMRs — as well as U.S.-supplied nuclear fuel and spent fuel storage technology.

Jesus.

At a news conference in Budapest, Rubio said U.S.-Hungary relations — which both he and Orbán described as experiencing a “golden age” under Trump — go beyond mere diplomatic cooperation.

“I’m going to be very blunt with you,” Rubio said. “The prime minister and the president have a very, very close personal relationship and working relationship, and I think it has been beneficial to our two countries.”

“That person-to-person connection that you’ve established with the president has made all the difference in the world in building this relationship,” Rubio continued, addressing Orbán. “President Trump is deeply committed to your success because your success is our success.”

It seems like only yesterday that he thought Orban was an undemocratic, Russian stooge:

Every last one of these people are absolutely worthless lackeys. It is unthinkable that this whore could ever become president.

The latest revelation:

EPSTEIN: Hell of. Year.   Next will be biblicl

BANNON: We either own 2019 or it will surely own us

EPSTEIN: Im back in the f and b biz only

BANNON: F and B director

EPSTEIN: No it does not stand for f*ck and bl*w

EPSTEIN: Spoke to my dems. This weekend. Boy are emotions running high

BANNON: Going to blow him up right our of the box– WH has zero plan to punch back– Fort Apache with no cavalry enroute

EPSTEIN: And no soldiers in the fort.    He really is borderline.  Not sure what he may do.

BANNON: I think it’s beyond borderline — 25 amendment

Now he ‘s telling everyone that Trump is running for a third term and he is for it.

Bannon is something else. I want to see the movie made about him. Jesse Plemons is the guy to play him. He’ll be about the right age when Bannon is finally out of the picture.

Better late than never:

If Joe Rogan is any indication, February 2026 may go down as the month that the Epstein files saga cemented itself as a lasting political liability for President Donald Trump and Republicans. The podcaster has spent the last week discussing the disjointed release of files by the Department of Justice, analyzing emails and redactions, and concluding that a myriad of conspiracies might actually be true.

And what is he saying? That the slow-walked and highly censored presentation of information by the Trump administration is “the gaslightiest gaslighting shit I’ve ever heard in my life,” that “none of this is good for this administration,” and that “this is not a hoax…if you’re not protecting victims…then who are you protecting?”

Rogan is representative of a large swath of voters who delivered Trump his 2024 victory: distrustful, low-propensity, and anti-system voters. And what he and other spokespeople for this suspicious segment of America — Tim Dillon, Shawn Ryan, Andrew Schulz — are saying matters: it suggests that these anti-system voters, who were once thought to be a permanent part of the new GOP coalition, are nothing of the sort.

Those voters tend to skew politically moderate, independent, and, perhaps most importantly, young. They don’t tend to follow the news or know too much about Trump or politics. They get informed through nontraditional avenues like podcasts and social media, and aren’t wed to a political party or identity.

In 2024, all of this created an opportunity for the Trump campaign — to promise to release the so-called Epstein files. But what these Americans are hearing and thinking now is very different. They feel like they are being lied to again, being gaslit, and seeing another cover-up happen in real time.

I will hold my tongue about the extreme naivete of these people. If they are having their minds opened by Trump and the GOP’s obvious cover-up, that’s all to the good. The fact that most of them (not Rogan who’s almost 60!) have only vaguely paid attention to politics before mitigates in their favor. Gotta live and learn. Hopefully this lesson will stick.

It’s key to what’s got people so pessimistic and angry:

“There’s a sense that this is a pretty chaotic administration,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster and political consultant with 40 years of experience, speaking with Politico Monday.

“And it seems to remind people of the pandemic period in the first term. Joe Biden’s fundamental message in 2020 was to restore normalcy, and that seemed to be persuasive to enough people to get him elected.”

Indeed, many have described Trump’s second stint in the White House as “chaotic,” with its unpredictability only increasing in recent months.

For instance, the Trump administration has increasingly pivoted from its previous positions. Trump has backtracked on his bid to acquire Greenland, the administration announced plans to end its immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, and Trump’s recent threat towards Canada over a bridge came and went with no follow-through.

That chaos, Ayres argued, had largely been responsible for bringing Trump’s approval ratings to “his lowest point in the second term.” As of Friday, a new AP-NORC poll found that Trump’s approval rating sits at 36%, a figure that Ayres warned could spell doom for the Republican Party this fall.

The problem is that the chaos is intentional and even if it wasn’t Trump doesn’t know how to operate any differently because he still doesn’t know how to do the job. It’s all flash and PR and hurtling headlong from one thing to the other. They call it “shock and awe” but that’s just another word for chaos. And people are tired of it.

It’s been a rough six years since the pandemic. People were severely traumatized and Biden suffered from the hangover. Too many people thought that Trump would magically restore us to the time before it happened and instead he’s made it worse.

THAT is what’s happening in our society. It isn’t just the economy although that’s key. It’s the fact that we just keep getting battered, over and over and people are starting realize who is at fault for most of it. It’s not just the last six years. It’s the last decade — ever since that moment when Orange Julius Caesar came down that escalator and took a wrecking ball to America.

On Wednesday America was subjected to a monumentally outrageous performance by one of the most powerful people in the federal government — and for once it wasn’t by Donald Trump. Pam Bondi was called to Capitol Hill to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, and she chose to behave like a bratty schoolgirl having a temper tantrum in the principal’s office. If the stakes weren’t so high, it would have been almost comical to see an adult behave so childishly in such a formal setting. As it was, the attorney general embarrassed herself, the Justice Department and the country with the insulting, irrational attitude she apparently adopted to impress her boss and mentor, who has worked to shatter the rule of law.

The next Democratic-appointed attorney general will have a mess to confront and clean up. They will need their ethical, intellectual and political wits about them to craft reforms and regulations, and to restore a sense of confidence in the department’s independence. But they can also look to the not-too-distant past for inspiration.

There was a time when Americans considered the attorney general to be one of the most distinguished, consequential appointments in government. Occupants of the office were assumed to be people of high integrity and good character, qualities considered necessary to remind Americans of the commitment to dispense justice fairly and impartially.

Of course this was not always the case. The office of the attorney general is a political position tasked with carrying out the priorities of the president, and that may inevitably lead to at least the appearance of partisanship. It also opens the door to abuse of power by a president inclined to go there. 

Richard Nixon’s behavior during Watergate brought those prospects into clear focus. The president attempted to use the Justice Department to block investigations into the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, as well as many other abuses that slowly came to light as the scandal unfolded. Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed to head the investigation, prompted Attorney General Elliot Richardson to resign, followed swiftly by Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, crystallized for the public the corruption at the core of Nixon’s presidency.

After Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, Congress realized that reforms were needed to insulate the Justice Department from political pressure by the White House. Years of congressional investigations and in-depth reporting had made the country aware of massive abuses of power by the executive branch. J. Edgar Hoover, who led the FBI for 48 years, had established a personal fiefdom devoted to consolidating power and pursuing his own personal obsessions, sometimes with blackmail and coercion. The intelligence community was implicated as well, along with Nixon’s exploitation of the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies for partisan and personal gain.

Advertisement:he Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which was passed by Congress to, among other provisions, prevent conflicts of interest and create the Office of the Independent Counsel, a position designed to be insulated from political pressure by the president. (The independent counsel statute was allowed to expire 20 years later following the debacle that was the Starr Investigation in the late 1990s.) 

Presidents Gerald Ford and his successor Jimmy Carter took up the mantle of reform, instituting new norms and rules designed to rein in an out-of-control presidency. Edward H. Levi, a respected legal scholar who served as Ford’s attorney general, began working to mend the department from within, which included limiting the scope and power of the FBI. His successor Griffin Bell, who served under Carter, came up with the idea of making the Justice Department a “neutral zone,” which was designed to formalize the idea that the White House would not directly involve itself in any law enforcement decisions. This led to new oversight mechanisms, including the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Personal Responsibility, to keep the abuses in check. Carter’s administration instituted the most sweeping reforms of the civil service since 1883’s Pendleton Act, which replaced the spoils system and created a professional, merit-based system.

According to Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, with the exception of the Independent Counsel Act and the War Powers Resolution — legislation from 1973 that required congressional authorization for military intervention — those reforms held up quite well, even as various presidents attempted to push the envelope. 

In retrospect, George H.W. Bush’s pardons of Iran-Contra participants was an early attempt by the executive branch to circumvent the post-Watergate reforms. But it wasn’t until the election of Donald Trump that the full scope of the reforms’ inadequacies in the hands of a real tyrant became obvious. Having had no ethical boundaries in his business and personal life, he saw no purpose in observing any such guidelines in government. 

One of Trump’s first scandalous acts as president was firing James Comey. The FBI director ran afoul of Trump early on when he refused to publicly state that the president was not under investigation in the Russia probe or to let his newly-named National Security Adviser Michael Flynn off the hook for lying to the bureau. Since then, Trump has never looked back in treating the norms and rules established after Watergate as rubbish. He would simply ask if he had the power to do something and that would be all he needed to know, ethics and traditions be damned.

In his second term, Trump hasn’t even bothered to ask that question. He simply does what he wants, and if the courts tell him he can’t, only then might he consider pulling back. When it comes to Bondi’s Justice Department and Kash Patel’s FBI, the results are clear. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye laid out in detail, the department is being decimated from top to bottom. The brain drain is overwhelming, with hundreds of career prosecutors being fired or leaving voluntarily; they are being replaced by unqualified lackeys and loyalists. 

The wreckage left behind is what will await the next Democratic attorney general who, with an equal commitment from Congress, will have no choice but to reform the entire department from the bottom up. At the end of Trump’s first term, the New York Times’ Peter Baker reported that Goldsmith and former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer created a bipartisan blueprint for what such a rebuilding would require. They proposed to restrict the president’s pardon power and private business interests, enhance protections for journalists and give more powers to future special counsels among other things. 

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and others in the Congress have similarly drawn up plans to overhaul the ethics rules and create various mechanisms to prevent the gross abuses of power that Trump and his loyalists are practicing. According to Baker, these would include  “limits on a president’s authority to use declarations of national emergencies to take unilateral action; more protections for inspectors general and whistle-blowers; and an accelerated process to resolve disputes over congressional subpoenas.”

With a Supreme Court determined to give presidents more power rather than less, even in light of Trump’s absolute monarchical power grab, it remains to be seen whether any of these restraints will come to fruition. Democrats will have to do everything in their power, including such bold acts as expanding the high court, to make it work. If they don’t, the damage done by Trump will be permanent. 

Once they have seen the door is open to abuse, future tyrants will eagerly walk through it — and there are plenty more waiting in the wings and willing to take advantage of what Trump has wrought.

On fighting, flexibility, and getting out of your own way

A couple of lengthy essays last week spoke to chronic problems (blind spots?) plaguing the Democratic Party. Handy advice for a party self-aware enough to recognize it. DNC Chair Ken Martin commissioned a post-2024 review and then buried it. So Mark Leibovich addressed the topic in The Atlantic, as did Michael Tomasky in The New Republic. But before we get to their critiques, indulge me. I’m just a simple country blogger.

I was the state party’s Get Out The Vote Coordinator (GOTV) for NC-11 in 2006. A week ahead of Election Day, candidate Heath Shuler’s field director and I made a tour of western counties to check on their preparations. We asked one group of county leaders what they’d done and/or still needed to do.

“We’re done,” they told us.

Excuse me?

“We called through the phone list and put out the signs.”

They caught us looking sideways at each other.

“You mean, you want us to do … more?“

Um, yes. They weren’t being lazy. They’d done all they knew to do. They’d done all their county had ever done. What they’d learned from the people before them, who’d learned it from the people before them, etc.

All this time I’d thought that was a problem for rural counties where the presidential nominee isn’t parachuting in a team from national headquarters to show them how the big kids GOTV. Now I see it as a party-wide problem: Democratic activists keep doing what they first learned and will not adapt to changing political realities.

My current obsession is with turning out more independent voters (“unaffiliateds” in NC), especially now that they outnumber Democrats. When I point out deficiencies in standard practice for identifying them, deficiencies that I can document with data, I’m assured that our people will address it by doing the same thing they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done it. Just more of it.

Democrats’ national voter database, for example, was conceived and implemented around the time in North Carolina that Democrats were 48% of state registrants, Republicans were 34%, and UNAffiliated were 18%. Decades later that mix is UNAs 39% (45% in my county), with Ds and Rs tied statewide at 30%. Yes, Democrats have updated their software, but they haven’t updated their strategy for using it. That was conceived a long time ago in a political galaxy far, far away. Democrats need a new targeting paradigm and won’t admit it. They’re comfortable with what they’re used to. Just like my friends from 2006. It’s cultural as much as technical. They don’t innovate, don’t experiment, don’t take chances.

Tomasky identifies four other problems.

Problem 1 is summarized by Navin Nayak: “Democrats come to Washington to get things done, and Republicans come to Washington to fight.” Democrats just telling people they are fighting for them is meaningless. They have to be seen doing it:

Americans want to root for a fighter, to cheer for the underdog who punches back. The fictional George McFly who meekly takes it is cringe-worthy. Nobody wants to vote for him. The guy who cold-cocks Biff Tannen elicits cheers.

How many times have I referenced all those Rocky movies American paid to watch over and over and over? They want to root for the little guy with heart. Facing insurmountable odds. Risking it all. People don’t want to vote for Democrats committed to playing it safe.

Problem 2: Democratic infighting over ideology. Tomasky cites Drew Westen (“The Political Brain”):

“Democrats are fundamentally committed to issues and policies, and they lose sight of the values that underlie those issues and policies,” he said. “It’s a difference with Republicans. They start with values, but they never bother to get around to policy, because they’re not really interested in running anything.”

When you begin from values, Westen said, you inevitably are emphasizing points of commonality with others in your coalition, because you share those values. Whereas when you begin with policy, you inevitably end up emphasizing differences, because policies are particular, and people have different ideas about them.

The meta message voters hear is that Democrats can’t get their shit together. How can voters know what Democrats stand for if Democrats don’t? A checklist of policies may flow from values but the values should come first and prepare the ground.

Problem 3: Centrists “always want to believe on some level that it’s still 1989, and the left either has just led or is about to lead the Democratic Party to ruin.” Except 1989 was in another century. The country is not permanently somewhere in the middle.

It’s true that not many middle Americans would identify themselves as leftists or even liberals. But they don’t want to live in a cruel country. Their moral sentiments are not directed toward the rounding up of millions of decent people or the attempted erasure of a tiny and powerless percentage of the population. Centrists ought to link arms with progressives and play offense on these issues.

The centrists’ second mistake is worse: the presumed yearning for “normalcy.” I hear some centrists say: People don’t want all these big plans; they don’t want Democrats to remake society. They just want things to get back to normal, by which they mean some sort of pre-Trump idea of business as usual.

We’re not going back. Ask someone who understands that it’s a new day:

AOC on why she's at the Munich security conference:

"I think this is a moment where we are seeing our presidential administration tear apart the Transatlantic partnership, ah, rip up every democratic norm, ah, and, you know, really calling into question, as was mentioned by,… pic.twitter.com/Cd3n5V2ZeB

— Winter (@LeftyWinter) February 13, 2026

Problem 4: The left is in its own bubble. A lot fewer Americans identify with the left than they think. At the end of the day on Nov. 3, we don’t count ideology. We count votes.

It also feels as if many people on the left forget that the first job of any political party is to win a majority. If the Democrats don’t win 51 Senate seats and 218 House seats, they aren’t doing anybody a lick of good. That means they have to win in states and districts that are purple at best. Candidates in those places are going to have to take some positions that progressives won’t like. The left has to show more tolerance for these candidates.

Say it with me: Duh.

Tomasky has a slew of suggestions for resolving these issues. Too many to mention, but go here.

Leibovich’s critique gets more at the Democrats’ cultural self-owns. In particular, its attempt to mollify each and every sub-interest group in the tent. The subhead puts it bluntly: “They say they want to save democracy. First they’ll need to get out of their own way.”

“It’s reflective of a broader problem within the party,” said Simon Bazelon, lead author on the “Deciding to Win” project. “We are scared of ever making anybody in our coalition upset.” That, along with the party’s reluctance to fight or to make enemies makes them appear weak.

“Weakness is the toxicity of our brand,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom observes.

There is a lack in the party of fresh perspectives untainted by years of going along to get along. To remain vital, the party must be continually fed by new blood:

One recurring resentment among Democratic voters is the disconnect between the party’s red-alert anti-Trump rhetoric and the musty vehicles—Biden and Harris, as well as Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and the various other dust-gatherers—it keeps deploying to resist him. “People continue to say, ‘Oh my God, Trump is an authoritarian; the world’s going to end,’ all this stuff,” David Hogg, the 25-year-old gun-control activist and advocate for recruiting young progressive leaders, told me over the summer. Hogg, who had a brief and tumultuous stint as a DNC co–vice chair in early 2025, is contemptuous of the party’s lingering cohort of elder leaders.

“It’s like, ‘Okay, look who your members of Congress are: Some of them literally cannot stand for a press conference,’ ” he said. “You cannot credibly tell the American people that democracy is in danger and the world is ending, and the people that you are putting up on the front lines of fighting back against that genuinely belong in a nursing home.”

I complain regularly that party elders fail to recruit and train their replacements, young ones. Locals just asked me again to take shifts troubleshooting electioneering/voting challenges that arise during our primary. I agreed. But I asked for a young mentee. I may not be ready for the nursing home either, but I know when it’s time to step back. Many Democrats in Congress do not. That’s not just about age. Sen. Bernie Sanders is sharp and still hard at the fight. But it’s a lot about age, especially if you want less engaged independents under 45 to vote.

Former president Barack Obama, 64, recently chalked up his wins to being younger when he ran for president. “There is an element of, at some point, you age out,” he told Brian Tyler Cohen. “You’re not connected directly to the immediate struggles that folks are going through,” reports Politico:

“I’m not making a hard and fast rule here, but I do think that Democrats do well when we have candidates who are plugged into the moment, to the zeitgeist, to the times and the particular struggles that folks are thinking about as they look towards the future, rather than look backward toward the past,” Obama told Cohen.

Leibovich speaks with other younger Democrats with fire in their bellies who are trying to get establishment Democrats out of their way. And yet, he sees advantage in, as James Carville advised, staying out of Republicans’ way when the other side is destroying itself. Liebovich concludes, “there are worse things to be than the alternative.”

Except that’s the kind of visionless, election-cycle thinking that’s turned the Democrats into a gerontocracy, one that’s failed to invest in its own future and led by people perceived as in it for themselves. Not unlike a drug maker starving new drug research funding so it can keep quarterly earnings high. Instead, the company lobbies to extend profits from existing patents until the CEO retires. If it feels stagnant, it’s because it is. If it feels like a party holding onto a normal that isn’t coming back, it’s because that’s true too. Its national leadership is coasting into irrelevance.

Obama warns:

“That spirit, that energy, it’s out there, and you can feel it, but it’s bottled up,” he said. “We haven’t given enough outlets for young people to figure out, ‘How do I become a part of that?’ That’s this enormous, untapped power that we have to get back to.”

Party leaders can start by knowing when they’re past their “best by” date. There’ are few places for fresh faces to go when people up the ladder won’t leave.

Not just in general

The Bulwark has a post up about Democrats believing the key to winning is increasing voter turnout. It’s claims such as “Texas isn’t red or blue; it’s a non-voting state.”

Laura Egan obviously concurs, citing data from David Schor, Nate Cohn, and David Wasserman that shows instead that increasing voter turnout harms Democrats:

The party’s commitment to this idea has even perplexed Republicans. In a 2022 interview, former Texas GOP chair Steve Munisteri told Texas Monthly that Democrats were misunderstanding the partisan allegiance of unregistered voters and argued that they were investing too heavily in voter registration. “They just don’t understand the numbers or haven’t done the research,” he said.

In another quote, Lakshya Jain, political analyst at Split Ticket, an election-modeling and data-analysis group tells Egan, “Election after election proves that this idea of high turnout being the key to Democratic wins is completely wrongheaded. The lean of low-propensity voters in states like Texas, etc.—they are all pretty Republican.”

I don’t have time this morning to address the “nonvoting state” theory in detail. But while I won’t dispute findings referenced above that increasing voter turnout in general harms Democrats, those experts are talking about average turnout across the board. The key is to know where to increase turnout. I’ve addressed the weakness in Democrats’ voter targeting theory before.

Half the time when I log into their national database, VoteBuilder, a familiar deep voice in my head says, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.” Democrats over rely on what comes out of a computer because it comes out of a computer. I was an engineer; I’m skeptical. You’d better be looking at the right data and know how to interpret what the computer is spitting out … and not spitting out. VoteBuilder was developed and deployed in my state decades ago to help turn out Democrats when the registration breakdown was D: 48%, R: 34%, and Unaffiliated 18%. Today in North Carolina it’s D: 30%, R: 30% and UNA: 39%.

Democrats are still using a tool developed a long time ago in a political galaxy far, far away in one that has turned on its head. And using that tool the way they always use it, in our seven largest and bluest counties, Democrats are leaving tens of thousands of independent votes on the table, I believe, because their targeting tool (and the way they are taught to use it) does not see them, and because Democrats don’t even ask them to vote. It’s not enough to flip the state blue, but enough to avoid nail biters that took down Cheri Beasley in 2022 and plagued Allison Riggs in 2024. The reasons are technical and, as much as any other reason, involve a party culture highly resistant to change.

Egan writes, “low-propensity voters have tuned out of politics for a reason. If Democrats want to build lasting majorities, they need to more seriously engage with why.” I posit that one reason is that they are not engaging them at all. And one reason doesn’t involve messaging or policy. In “The Experience of Grassroots Leaders Working with the Democratic Party,” one complaint stands out:  A majority of respondents said the party does a terrible job targeting voters, saying that its lists are far too narrow. I have the receipts.

I rarely ask people to sign petitions but this one is worthwhile — on the merits and on the politics:

The editors of In These Times are joining the editors of The Nation in formally nominating the city of Minneapolis and its people for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

Please sign this petition right away to join us in amplifying that nomination and demonstrating mass public support.

In recent months, the Trump administration’s deployment of thousands of armed federal agents to the Twin Cities and indiscriminate raids under “Operation Metro Surge” have brought horrific state violence to Minnesota’s streets. Local residents, ICU nurse Alex Pretti and mother, Renée Nicole Good, were murdered by federal officers, sparking outrage and accelerating a movement of resistance across Minneapolis and beyond.

In the face of these attacks, the people of Minneapolis have stood their ground with nonviolent protest, mutual aid, and solidarity, confronting fear and authoritarianism with dignity and resolve. Thousands marched in freezing temperatures; communities have organized legal observers, delivered groceries to those in hiding, and whistled warnings in demand for human rights and constitutional freedoms.

You can sign it here.