Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

“Just a normal human”

Something has shifted. Not completely shifted. But shifted.

You see it in the polling. Donald Trump’s support is cratering. His legitimacy is draining away.

Our friend Darcy Burner explains:

For the most part, people stop at red lights even when there is no cop in sight. They stop because they accept that traffic laws make sense, that the system is fair enough, that the rules apply to them the way they apply to everyone else. Multiply that by every American filing a tax return, every soldier following an order, every bank honoring a check, every foreign central bank parking its savings in U.S. Treasuries. None of that is force. All of it is built on consent, on the consent of the governed.

Consent is what makes force cheap.

It is the legitimacy subsidy that runs underneath every powerful regime in history, and it is the most undervalued asset on any government’s balance sheet. With it, you can run a country on a normal-sized police force and borrow money at four percent. Without it, you need East German numbers of secret police and you pay fourteen percent.

Force at full price is ruinously expensive.

Trump is ruined. He’ll never admit it, but it’s true. “He is not consolidating power,” Burner writes. “He is spending the subsidy that made his power cheap, and he is spending it fast.”

Five rush hours a week, I see it out on the streets and the overpass where Sign Guy performs since Trump attacked Iran and sent fuel prices soaring. I wrote up an incident report last night for organizers of a weekly street-corner sign protest:

I’ve seen a marked increase in middle fingers in the weeks since Trump attacked Iran. And of course they’re braver about it when I’m out there solo. I’ve noticed that these betrayed MAGAs are easily triggered. But tonight was highly unusual. 

Along with the usual honks, waves, and hand signs, the posing for pictures on the bridge and the passersby thanking me, this happened tonight.

Moderately heavy westbound traffic about 5:15 pm. A logo’d work truck in the fast lane. I didn’t catch the name (might have been a personal company). One driver, and one passenger (pretty sure). 

Going about 35 mph, the driver opens his door, steps out onto the running board, and screams at me over the roof, “Get off the bridge, you fucking asshole! … something something.” 

I watched over my shoulder to make sure the truck didn’t take the next downtown exit, planning to double back. 

My sign this week simply reads: PLAN NOW FOR YOUR $5/GAL STAYCATION

Sign Guy deliberately avoids mentioning parties, personalities or policies. But that’s not enough to ward off misdirected anger. The MAGAs know Trump has betrayed them. And they really resent any reminders, even oblique ones. Except perhaps among fellow MAGAs.

About that, Open Letters by Mersault recently infiltrated a MAGA focus group with intent to disrupt. Turns out, disruption was unnecessary. The 11 subjects and one imposter were on the same page.

“What letter grade would you give Trump?” the moderator asked. Final tally: 6 Ds, 6 Fs.

Economic Pain is Central

“When I see the price of groceries and gas, I want to scream.”

“Food and fuel prices are skyrocketing. Absolutely outrageous.”

“We go to Walmart every week. The exact same items increased exponentially every single time.”

“My main concern is inflation. The prices for food and gas.”

“We go to war in Iran and the prices just keep going up… but my bank account is shrinking.”

“It is affecting us personally.”

“I can’t even afford daycare.”

“I want to be a stay-at-home mom, but I have to work… how do you do all those things?”

“The job market… opportunities are very hard right now.”

“My mom’s on Social Security, and she worked for the federal government for 25 years. She does have Medicare and that doesn’t mean she’s a, what do you call it, freeloader. And Trump was like, oh we don’t have money. What did he say? We don’t have money for this anymore? I almost rolled over. I was like, are you kidding me? People pay into this so that they can retire… she’s 73, she can’t get a job now, you know.”

About that congressionally unsanctioned Iran war:

The Iran War Is a Failure

What they said:

“The war in Iran is unnecessary. My brother was in the Marines. I wouldn’t want him to die for this… it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

“What happened to America first? Let’s take car of our own before we start blowing up other countries.”

“He actually said we needed to get over it… and he was very flippant… ‘we don’t have money… we’re at war’… I was like, are you kidding me?”

“First and foremost, I wholly 100% disagree with what’s going on with Iran… it’s been a disaster and completely contradictory to what he ran on… no more wars. Propaganda machine at its absolute finest…”

“I’m just intellectually insulted by being told… by Fox News… that this was justified.”

“It’s so much like a war for oil… like the speech last night said, if we’re producing all this oil and all this energy, so why do we care what goes on over there?”

“I’m very disappointed right now with the war in Iran… and how he treats our allies in Europe.”

“It’s about the integrity we used to have as a country… we used to be able to have diplomacy and negotiate and not bomb the negotiators… And I just kind of feel like we have slid… now we’re the country you can’t trust… we used to be the good guys.”

“All of the… foreign affairs… the way that he speaks and certain actions that he takes… in some senses, I regret my vote.”

Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein was another sore point. The group was not buying that Trump wasn’t involved. “It does feel like a mockery,” said one. “I voted Republican for Christian values… and now it’s turned into something completely different.”

He sold them out. They know it. Even if they won’t admit it in public but will in a “safe space.”

And they were done pretending everything was fine.

And while the themes had been broken promises and failed execution, there was something else that caught me off guard.

They were sick of him.

His behavior. His character. The constant divisiveness. The everything-is-about-him fatigue. The social corrosion. The sense that the country just feels worse to live in.

What they want now, one subject offered, is “a normal Republican candidate and not a Donald Trump crony… just a normal human… that’s all I want.”

I titled this post “The Great Divorce.” The title comes from a 1945 novel by British author C. S. Lewis. The plot involves ghosts consigned to Hell (or Purgatory), imagined as a vast grey city where it always rains. Some of them take a bus trip excursion to the outskirts of Heaven. They might, if they choose, remain and experience joy there. If they still can. In the most memorable scene, a heavenly woman, Sarah, speaks to her husband-ghost, Frank. She appeals for him to stay. But he cannot let go of earthly bitterness and his need to manipulate her. He, or what’s left of him, will return to the Hell he’s embraced. Sarah’s joy is undiminished in Heaven. His melodrama cannot touch her there.

A quick summary:

Frank’s character is a complicated metaphor for the way humans use pity and self-loathing to manipulate other people, though he only appears toward the end of the novel. In life Frank knew and was loved by Sarah Smith, and would take advantage of her love by pretending that she’d hurt his feelings. Indeed, Frank has a long history of pretending to be sad in order to make other people feel guilty—even as a child he would do so. In the afterlife, Frank appears as two different ghosts, one small (the Dwarf), the other tall (the Tragedian). The Dwarf represents Frank’s inner life: his self-hatred, and his manipulative tendencies. The Tragedian, on the other hand, represents the “image” of pain and sadness that Frank tries to project in order to make other people feel guilty. Thus, in the afterlife Frank takes on a form that externalizes the psychological processes by which Frank would try to “blackmail” Sarah into feeling sorry for him.

Trump began his MAGA movement by giving supporters others toward whom to misdirect their anger over miseries real, imagined, or manufactured: immigrants, liberals, “wokeism,” a Black president, etc. But while these MAGAs are done with Trump, they are not done with the grievances that led them to him and that he exploited.

Mersault writes:

So this is not the moment to exhale.

They hadn’t abandoned all their beliefs.

They still wanted hardline border crackdowns driven by exaggerated fears about who was crossing, repeating inflammatory claims about “rapists and murderers.”

They still clung to a “pro-life” identity while ignoring the very real human cost of Republican policies that erode care, stability, and survival for the very people they say they value.

They still invoked “freedom” to reject vaccines, masks, and other public health measures, elevating anecdote (“I know someone who had a heart attack a week after the COVID vaccine.”) over overwhelming scientific evidence.

They still gave oxygen to conspiracies about stolen elections and hidden cabals of Democratic elites running child-trafficking rings out of pizza parlors.

They still distrusted expertise and institutions, except when those same institutions confirmed their own biases.

“They may be ready to fire the CEO, but not abandon the business model,” Mersault concludes. Any more than Frank can let go of needing to control Sarah or Rupert Murdock can let go of stoking hatreds. MAGAs need to control the country, their lessers, and any others.

Sign Guy dancing on an overpass with PLAN NOW FOR YOUR $5/GAL STAYCATION set off Reckless Endangerment Guy in a big way. (And I mean, he was out of control.) He still needs someone else to blame for his own disillusionment. Even with Trump’s favorables in the golden toilet, his political enemies remain. With Republicans facing a 2026 wipeout, it’s possible we’ll see more hysteria.

(h/t SS)

We’re all on a star trek

What Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch saw when she looked back at Earth was not the beautiful, blue marble celebrated in photos from decades-old Apollo missions. What struck her more was all the blackness of space surrounding it. She had a revelation. Not unlike what William Shatner experienced, only different, but just as profound.

When in 2021 legendary Star Trek actor, William Shatner, 90, took a ten-minute, sub-orbital flight aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, it reduced him to tears:

Shatner: I saw the spaceship coming through the blue, and an instant later it was through the blue; this bullet exploded into the blackness of space, so in that instant I saw the blue suddenly disappear, and suddenly space is smack up in my face. I saw death there. The suddenness with which I looked at that blackness, I thought, “whoa, suddenly you go out there and then you’re dead.”

People often cry when they first see Earth from space, space philosopher Frank White wrote in his 1987 book, “The Overview Effect.”

Shatner told NPR:

“I wept for the Earth because I realized it’s dying,” Shatner said. “I dedicated my book, Boldly Go, to my great-grandchild, who’s three now — coming three — and in the dedication, say it’s them, those youngsters, who are going to reap what we have sown in terms of the destruction of the Earth.”

Koch saw that blackness too, the same blackness surrounding the Artemis II capsule. She realized we are all astronauts. On a lifeboat.

“Planet Earth: You. Are. A. Crew.”

when christina koch said ''You. Are. A. Crew.'' she literally summed up a whole philosophy in one line. like humanity is one crew on this planet and we either make it together or we dont. this aint just a moon mission tbh its a message for all of us down here.

— B. Mohammed (@BMohammedl) April 11, 2026

The bar is low for running a failed state

One reason people go to protests like No Kings is the reassurance they give that you’re not alone when the world feels like it’s going to hell around you. Even for MAGAs threatened by the presence of taco trucks and Mexican roofers. It’s why MAGAs go to Trump rallies. As the woman told a reporter, “He [Trump] says what I’m thinking.”

Matt Bai provides a touch of that in between mass rallies with a Rolling Stone piece about “the mind-blowing incompetence” of the Trump administration in its 2.0 incarnation. Trump learned in his first term that for his purposes (having nothing to do with actual governing), competence just got in his way:

Competence — and by that I mean the most fundamental, entry-level, don’t-blow-up-the-world kind of competence — was more of a thing in the first Trump term, when the president cycled through a series of senior aides, old-line party and military types, who saw themselves as buffers between Trump and the various agencies. Four years in exile liberated Trump from all of that. His second-term team comprises mainly fringe players and pugnacious pundits, people more comfortable with pancake makeup than managing complex bureaucracies, for which they have nothing but contempt anyway. It’s a bold experiment, but one that seemed ill-fated from the start.

Except for the nihilistic thirst Trump 2.0 has for destruction.

Exhibit A:

Put it this way: When Trump finally replaced Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin, a former plumber and MMA fighter who keeps intimating that he’s been some kind of secret military agent but can’t talk about it, every sane person in Washington applauded as if this were the second coming of James Baker in his prime. That tells you all you need to know.

Guys like that are all you need to preside “over a failed state.” It’s been a long road.

We know now that George W. Bush’s decline into chaos wasn’t merely a temporary nadir for the right. It marked the end of a 40-year run for neoconservatism and ultimately led to Trump’s hostile takeover of the party. Similarly, whether MAGA outlives Trump as a viable political force won’t only depend on whether it can still appeal to some slim margin of white voters. It will also depend on whether Republicans can shake the image of a party that seethes with contempt for government but is fundamentally unserious about running it.

You mean like “trickle down economics” unserious? Or “make the pie higher” unserious? Or “A whole civilization will die tonight” unserious? America’s problem is broader than the Republican Party. We as a people are “America elected Donald Trump president twice” unserious.

Federal court dismisses Trump defamation case

Another Trump lawsuit bites the dust (The New York Times):

A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal over its report of his lewd birthday greeting to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Judge Darrin Gayles in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida said in his decision that Mr. Trump had not “plausibly alleged” that The Journal published the article with actual malice, meaning that it knew what it was publishing was false, or had acted with reckless disregard as to its accuracy. He dismissed the complaint without prejudice, allowing Mr. Trump to bring the same claim again.

Trump will try, of course, or find some less-monetary way to exact his revenge on the Journal, the Times, or other outlets that publish news he finds unflattering. It costs him money to bring such suits, but it costs his enemies to defend against them, so that works for Trump.

Now if the MAGA rubes still supporting Trump will stop donating to his lawsuit funds, maybe these frivolous lawsuits will dry up before Trump’s dessicated corpse does.

Has there ever been a more petty person in the history of the world?

This should count for something but I’m afraid it won’t…

Americans vote on personality, looks and charisma not accomplishment and a lot of people just don’t like Newsom. (Is it the hair???) But he has been a good governor of a huge and often ungovernable state. I just think it’s good to point that out once in a while before we decide which candidate we’d like to have a beer with.

Anyway:

Of all the prevailing media narratives around Gavin Newsom, the one that is most conspicuous by its absence is how under its two-term governor California became the top performing economy not just among its 49 siblings but also any developed nation…

Amid the thousands of headlines referencing California failings with wildfires, droughts, floods, mass transportation, aging roads, education, homelessness, unaffordable housing, widening inequality and poverty along with the exodus of billionaires, corporate headquarters and longtime residents — never mind the “slick” label whenever the betting favorite for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination is mentioned in the press – the Golden State (population 39 million people), just supplanted Japan (123 million) as the fourth-largest economy.

Gross domestic product surged 40% to more than $4 trillion, accounting for more than 14% of US output, after Newsom took office in January 2019. China’s, the world’s second-largest economy, expanded 32% and No. 3 Germany increased 16%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. (The US dollar’s appreciation was as little as 1.6% since the end of 2018 as measured by the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, so the currency wasn’t a primary factor behind California’s performance.)

The US is an also-ran competing with California’s prosperity, based on indexes compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that take state level nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing by production employees, the unemployment rate and wage and salary disbursements that are then deflated by the consumer price index.

“We have had a theory” for California’s superior performance “but it hasn’t been validated in the way these numbers obviously provide,” said the 58-year-old Newsom during an April 1 Zoom interview. “So the timing could not be better.”

California’s not-so-secret sauce happens to be the diversity between its citizens’ ears instead of the fossil fuels generating the biggest share of Texas growth. Of the 10,000 companies in the Bloomberg World Large, Mid & Small Cap Index, the technology sector’s 20% share of their total value is the largest of any sector. And within that subset of technology, California leads with 41-based firms producing a 603% total return (income plus appreciation) over the past decade. That’s almost four times the gain of their global peers the past two, three and five years. Tech’s contribution to California’s GDP increased 59% since 2019, outperforming the 40% gain for states overall.

Healthcare shows a similar trajectory. The industry’s contribution to California GDP increased by 52% since 2019 and including 2025, a year when President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans enacted major cuts to Medicaid and reduced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, resulting in an estimated 15 million people losing health coverage. California’s uninsured rate declined to a record-low 6.4% in 2023, the largest drop in the US, from more than 17% a decade ago, helped by the Covered California and Medi-Cal expanded coverage programs.

Although “some of California’s most prominent venture capitalists have a proclivity for slamming their state, arguing that fiscal mismanagement and high taxes will cause startups to form elsewhere,” the opposite is happening, according to Axios. “California startups raised a whopping 62% of all U.S. venture capital dollars in 2025,” Axios notes, citing the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, more than either 2024 (54.2%) or 2023 (46.9%), as well as the decade-earlier mark of 47.2%.

Even when artificial intelligence giants OpenAI, Anthropic and DataBricks dominate, the state remained “home to 31.5% of US VC deals last year, compared to 31.7% in 2024 and 29.1% in 2023,” according to data referenced by Axios. “In 2015, California’s market share was 32.5%. For context, the runner-up in 2025 was New York with 13.3%. Massachusetts was next, just ahead of Texas — both below 6%. The bottom line: California’s crown may be tarnished on social media. On spreadsheets, however, it still sparkles.”

California companies are similarly booming, spending $527 billion annually on acquisitions during Newsom’s tenure, almost three times the $179 billion spent annually in the 20 years prior to 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Software and technology services accounted for $1.9 trillion, including SpaceX’s $250 billion offer for xAI. The healthcare industry initiated $410 billion of transactions, including Thousand Oaks-based Amgen’s $27 billion purchase of Ireland’s Horizon Therapeutics PLC in 2023. The deal enabled the biotechnology medicines company to increase its market value 39% to $200 billion.

Even accounting for less than 12% of the US population, California contributed more than 40% of the growth in the value of nation’s publicly traded equities as measured by the companies in the Russell 3000 Index, which returned 182% for investors since 2019. California accounted for 70 percentage points, more than triple No. 2 Washington (20 points), almost five times No. 3 Texas (15 points) and No. 4 New York (13 points) and almost 12 times No. 5 Ohio (6 points), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. California-based companies overall returned 328% to investors, crushing the equity returns from the world’s largest economies: US, 182%; China, 89%; Germany, 110%; Japan, 96%; and India, 63%, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

None of this is accidental. Sixteen years after it became a state in 1850, California passed its first compulsory education law, requiring children aged eight to 14 to attend school. With more than 600 colleges and universities, California today has no peers in higher education, whether in the US or any of the world’s developed economies. No. 2 New York has 423, Germany 420 and the UK no more than 300. California graduates more engineers than any state and pays the highest wages when they join the workforce.

California’s relative value among investors is reflected in the municipal bond market, where two of the top 10 performing issuers tied to education are based. The University of California, No. 1 in total return, accounts for 12% of the 800 issuers’ gains, and No. 3 California State University contributes 5%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s another way of saying investors in California are getting 11% of their return from the University of California, the Los Angeles Unified School District and California State University. California’s investment in education translates as one college or university for 64,000 citizens compared to 266,000 in the UK and 199,000 in Germany.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Newsom became “the first sitting governor to visit the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach… since Ronald Reagan,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, the biggest US gateway to global trade, handling more than $300 billion of cargo annually. “That’s a statement,” Seroka said during an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York earlier this year. “In the line-item budgets of the last three fiscal years,” Newsom “has helped with additional infrastructure spending, hard infrastructure line-item budgets, our transition to zero emissions on both equipment and electricity.”

Whatever criticism Newsom receives from environmentalists for not doing enough to hold corporate polluters accountable, he still gets relatively high marks for promoting investments in resilience, clean energy and clean transportation. The eight California-based clean energy companies with a minimum market value of $100 million have seen the value of their stocks appreciate an average 56% since 2019, compared to 40% for their global peers. Their 7% average annual gain in revenue crushes the 5% global average. California renewable energy companies will see 17% revenue growth in the coming year, more than doubling the 7% increase of global peers, according to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

San Francisco, where Newsom began his political career and was its two-time mayor, is the only US city that reduced pollutants by more than 20%, according to the analysis of almost 100 cities around the world.

The global transition to zero-emission vehicles — decreasing air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and greenhouse gases — began in Fremont, California, with Tesla, the world’s largest automaker with a market capitalization of $1.4 trillion, or more than four times perennial sales leader Toyota Motor Corp. Even after Musk, Tesla’s CEO, decried California as “a land of taxes, over-regulation and litigation” when he moved the company’s headquarters along with its research and development leadership to Texas in 2021, the world’s richest person admitted a year later that Tesla couldn’t succeed without California-based engineers.

“I will never forget” when Musk “called me,” said Newsom. “He said, `I’m surprised you’re picking up the phone. I may actually ask you for some help” because “I can’t find the talent in Texas. Don’t say a word.’”

Yes, I know we suck and Newsom has creepy hair. And there are many negatives about him on the culture front (along with some positives.) But nobody’s perfect.

Maybe, as a nation in deep, serious decline, we should at least consider looking at him seriously?

“The Pope is weak on crime”

Lololol!!!!

And then he posted this:

You cannot make this stuff up, you really can’t.

Marco Rubio, that’s who.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio at UFC in Miami tonight as diplomatic negotiations with Iran fail

(Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AFP via Getty) pic.twitter.com/XKlD1yn3mA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 12, 2026

Trump sent JD Vance to Budapest to campaign for Viktor Orban and he lost, bigly. Then he flew off to run the peace talks with Iran and once again failed. Oops.

JD Vance: "Will you stand against the bureaucrats in Brussels? Will you stand for western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers? Then, my friends, go to the polls and stand for Viktor Orban!"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-04-07T16:12:00.042Z

Meanwhile, the national security advisor and Secretary of State was partying with the boss at a UFC fight and staying as far out of the limelight as possible.

Score one for the new Viceroy of Cuba.

Courage is contagious

“The American people are unhappy with Trump. They do not like this war. But they need a dose of truth right now,” Alan Elrod wrote last week at Liberal Currents:

The truth is that the American people twice elected Donald Trump over more qualified Democratic women. The first time, Hillary Clinton warned explicitly that he did not have the temperament to be trusted with the nuclear codes. The second time, they overlooked an insurrection, a deadly pandemic, and a campaign full of bellicose and racist rhetoric, all despite the American economy being in the midst of one of the best post-covid recoveries in the world. 

In our representative democracy, the people speak to the president, and the president speaks to the people, but, crucially, the president also speaks for the people. That idea is at the heart of the whole enterprise. We cannot pretend that Trump’s monstrous words this week don’t reflect on us. We cannot pretend that we are well as a nation. No morally healthy country would put this man in power twice—the second time after he so clearly showed us and the world who he truly is. 

Elrod looks back at President Carter’s “malaise” speech, panned at the time, that called out America in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate as suffering “a crisis of confidence.”

Carter said (and Elrod quotes):

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

It was as much sermon as political speech. And prophetic, if not simply ahead of its time.

Trump, the Seven Deadly Sins on two legs, personifies self-indulgence. He models it, recommends it. He offers followers “an easy out” from the personal responsibility Republicans once extolled, even if mainly as a racial dog whistle. Trump is a papal indulgence who hates the pope.

Elrod reflects on what Trump’s elections say about us as a nation, as reflections on our national character that clearly troubled Carter. He speaks this morning to Greg Sargent on The Daily Blast podcast:

And what I mean by that in the essay is that if we don’t take seriously some of these more underlying problems—that we are a deeply isolated and lonely and distrustful country that is focused on material wellbeing and status and is more dislocated and civically apathetic than maybe we’ve ever been—that we’re going to get more Trumps, because that’s just fertile breeding ground for people like him.

And so it’s not so much that I think there’s just 50-something percent of the country that is committed to Trumpism. But I do think there’s just a huge amount of the country that is not doing well—and I mean that in an emotional way, I mean that in a political way, civically. And so I think those conditions, so long as they persist, continue to make us vulnerable to more cycles in the future of this kind of politics.

Is there a way out? Elrod tells Sargent:

Elrod: You know what? I think organizing and winning the elections are great. I think doing things in your community is more important. This is a generational fight. And beating Trump and beating MAGA at the polls is great. But if you don’t get out there and know your neighbors, if you don’t get out there and try to fix the social capital problem we have—a book club, start a movie night club, do something like that—if you don’t do those things and engage in those kinds of face-to-face interactions that really revive civic life around you, where you are, then I don’t think that this is a problem that we’re going to get out of anytime soon. That’s my hopeful message, actually, because I am hopeful about it. But winning an election is actually the short-term fix. Doing this stuff is the long-term.

Simple, visible actions matter.

Magyar is in. Swalwell is out.

Regarding MAGA darling Viktor Orbán’s stunning defeat in Hungarian elections on Sunday, a couple of observations about Péter Magyar’s landslide victory before mine.

Bottom line, writes Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, “if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.” Carry that with you everywhere like a key ring fob.

Applebaum details many of Orbán’s structural advantages that Magyar’s Tisza Party had to overcome, including an “extraordinary web of international illiberal and far-right supporters” and Orbán’s control of the media.

After 16 years of what Orbán himself described as an illiberal regime, the Hungarian leader’s political party, Fidesz, had come to control much of the judiciary, bureaucracy, and universities, as well as a group of oligarchic companies that in turn controlled a good chunk of the economy.

Michelle Goldberg adds:

The geopolitical consequences of Magyar’s victory could be profound. Under Orban, Hungary has vetoed aid to Ukraine and sanctions on both Russia and Israel. Magyar’s movement is hostile to Russia; people at his rallies have taken up the chant “Russians, go home,” a slogan from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. “There is a strong narrative of commitment to the European Union and NATO,” said Zsuzsanna Végh, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund. And since Magyar doesn’t have a personal relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she said, “some sanctions against Israel would likely be acceptable” to a Tisza government.

But what Hungarians faced inside their country, Goldberg suggests, “was a choice between the center right and the authoritarian right.” Tisza is not a left-leaning alternative to Orbán’s Fidesz Party. Orbán has all but eliminated the left in Hungary. But Magyar should be less likely “to demonize L.G.B.T.Q. people the way Orban did.” It’s a start.

The incoming Parliament “will be the first since 1989 with no left-wing representation, in part because many progressive candidates stood down to avoid splitting the anti-Orban vote.” What remained of the Hungarian left viewed the contest as a matter of practical, if not Machiavellian politics. Their support for Magyar did not rely on his passing purity tests. The result? Orbán is out.

Which brings me to Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) of California.

Amidst allegations of sexual misconduct that collapsed his campaign for governor in California, Swalwell announced on Sunday that he would withdraw from the race:

“I am suspending my campaign for Governor,” he posted on X. “To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past. I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made — but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.”

Owing to California’s “jungle primary” system (the top two vote-getters advance to the general), Democrats now face a choice ahead of the June 2 primary. Swalwell was leading the polls on the Democratic side. It’s not clear where his supporters go now. If California Democrats cannot coalesce support behind one of the remaining Democrats, they could in theory hand the next governorship to Republicans. Especially if Republicans consolidate their support. It’s not likely, but then neither was Donald Trump in 2016.

Newsweek reports that according to the Kalshi prediction market, Tom Steyer now has a 56 percent chance of becoming governor, up from 51 percent on Sunday. Katie Porter’s odds are now 17 percent, up from 5 on Sunday. Also, “The Democratic Mayor of San Jose, Matt Mahan is close behind Porter. There is a 16 percent chance that he will win the race.”

I know nothing about Kalshi betters or if they even understand how California’s top-two primary works.

Already I’m seeing talk that, despite their progressive credentials, Porter’s staff issues and billionaire Steyer’s being able essentially to buy the governorship are deal breakers for some on the left. Maybe Xavier Becerra can come from behind to edge out one of the Republicans on June 2? Who will Swalwell support? And does anyone want his support at this time?

Whatever. California progressives should be at least as strategic as their counterparts in Hungary. Set aside the purity tests long enough to ensure that two Republicans don’t advance to the November election.

Over at The Bulwark, Tim Miller advises lefties to welcome MAGAs who feel betrayed by Donald Trump into the fold. Take yes for an answer “from various and sundry cranks and kooks not because we agree with their crazy or bigoted ideas but because any successful political coalition will contain some cranks,” Miller observes:

If you feel tempted to dismiss this welcoming approach as arising from an overly earnest, soft-boi impulse, just look at the question from a purely Machiavellian perspective: The more people who bail on Trump the better.

For a political party, what is the good in shunning or mocking these people? If some former Trump voters enter into an uneasy alliance with the Democrats, even temporarily, because they are pissed about the war—great!

Similarly, how about a little Machiavellianism among friends, California? Get it together.