To begin with, and for what little it’s worth, I want to be recorded as deploring the instinct to try to win a difficult argument by resorting to ad hominem slurs—“He’s a coward!”—against folks who disagree with you. It’s entirely illogical. It is an extraordinarily poor way to think yourself out of a hard problem. And it gives aid and comfort to the enemy.
So please don’t do it.
If you think Chuck Schumer’s analysis is wrong, fine, but explain why.
If you think my points are wrong, fine, but explain why. Don’t hurl ad hominem slurs.
Second, as sure as God made little green apples, Trump and his minions would have used those extraordinary powers as tools to wreck the federal government.
Third, and relatedly, the extraordinary legal powers that the law purports to confer on the president during a shutdown would have been used to give what lawyers call the “color of law” to Trump’s wrecking ball. Our side is winning in court on Trump’s abuse of power. We don’t want to give ourselves another legal hoop to jump through.
Fourth, a government shutdown would have supplied Trump and his minions with a splendid “argument” to further confuse an already confused public. “It’s not Trump who’s causing your pain,” they would scream, “it’s those damn Democrats who shut down the government.”
With no government shutdown, ALL THE CHAOS IS ON TRUMP AND HIS ENABLERS.
Fifth, because of points one, two, three, and four, there would be little incentive for Trump and the Republicans to negotiate to get out of the shutdown.
A shutdown is to the Trumpistas as the briar patch was to Brer Rabbit.
Over the past two months, the United States has confronted a bitter truth: The federal government has been taken over by a nihilist.
President Trump has taken a blowtorch to our country and wielded chaos like a weapon. Most Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have caved to his every whim. The Grand Old Party has devolved into a crowd of Trump sycophants and MAGA radicals who seem to want to burn everything to the ground.
Now, Republicans’ nihilism has brought us to a new brink of disaster: Unless Congress acts, the federal government will shut down Friday at midnight.
As I have said many times, there are no winners in a government shutdown. But there are certainly victims: the most vulnerable Americans, those who rely on federal programs to feed their families, get medical care and stay financially afloat. Communities that depend on government services to function will suffer.
This week Democrats offered a way out: Fund the government for another month to give appropriators more time to do their jobs. Republicans rejected this proposal.
Why? Because Mr. Trump doesn’t want the appropriators to do their job. He wants full control over government spending.
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He isn’t the first president to want this, but he may be the first president since Andrew Jackson to successfully cow his party into submission. That leads Democrats to a difficult decision: Either proceed with the bill before us or risk Mr. Trump throwing America into the chaos of a shutdown.
This, in my view, is no choice at all.
For sure, the Republican bill is a terrible option. It is deeply partisan. It doesn’t address this country’s needs. But even if the White House says differently, Mr. Trump and Elon Musk want a shutdown. We should not give them one. The risk of allowing the president to take even more power via a government shutdown is a much worse path.
To be clear: No one on my side of the aisle wants a government shutdown. Members who support this continuing resolution do not want that. Members who oppose it do not want that.
Members who oppose this resolution want the Republicans to take their responsibilities more seriously and to negotiate spending bills that will address the many needs of the American people.
I respect my fellow Democrats for that. Unfortunately, this Republican Party is the party of Trump.
As bad as passing the continuing resolution would be, I believe a government shutdown is far worse.
First, a shutdown would give Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk permission to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now.Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have wide-ranging authority to deem whole agencies, programs and personnel nonessential, furloughing staff members with no promise they would ever be rehired.
The decisions about what is essential would, in practice, be largely up to the executive branch, with few left at agencies to check it.
Mr. Musk has reportedly said that he wants a shutdown and may already be planning how to use one to his advantage.
Second, if we enter a shutdown, congressional Republicans could weaponize their majorities to cherry-pick which parts of government to reopen.
In a protracted shutdown, House and Senate Republicans could bring bills to the floor to reopen only their favored departments and agencies while leaving other vital services that they don’t like to languish.
Third, shutdowns mean real pain for American families.
For example, a shutdown could cause regional Veterans Affairs offices to reduce even more of their staffs, further delay benefits processing and curtail mental health services — abandoning veterans who earned, and depend on, those resources.
A shutdown could continue to slash the administrative staffs at Social Security offices — delaying applications and benefit adjustments and forcing seniors to wait even longer for their benefits.
A shutdown could further stall federal court cases and furlough critical staff members — denying victims and defendants alike their day in court, dragging out appeals and clogging the justice system for months or years.
Finally, a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda.
Right now, Mr. Trump owns the chaos in the government. He owns the chaos in the stock market. He owns the damage happening to our economy. The stock market is falling, and consumer confidence is plummeting.
In a shutdown, we would be busy fighting with Republicans over which agencies to reopen and which to keep closed instead of debating the damage Mr. Trump’s agenda is causing.
I believe it is my job to make the best choice for the country, to minimize the harms to the American people. Therefore, I will vote to keep the government open.
This is a very long article from the New York Times magazine. It takes 53 ½ minutes to read it aloud. (If you would like to hear it, go here.) In support of the thesis that is the headline of this post, the article covers a great deal of ground (geographically and historically), is well researched, and argues the case in great detail.
If you think that all US working class anti-immigrant feeling is grounded in simple racism—if you believe that the Democratic Party’s position on borders is coherent, well advised, and politically saleable—then I challenge you to read this article, consider it carefully, and articulate wherein you think it goes astray.
A central focus is the anomalous continuing political success of Denmark’s Social Democratic Party. Leonhardt writes,
Since the Social Democrats took power in 2019, they have compiled a record that resembles the wish list of a liberal American think tank. They changed pension rules to enable blue-collar workers to retire earlier than professionals. On housing, the party fought speculation by the private-equity industry by enacting the so-called Blackstone law, a reference to the giant New York-based firm that had bought beloved Copenhagen apartment buildings; the law restricts landlords from raising rents for five years after buying a property. To fight climate change, [Prime Minister] Frederiksen’s government created the world’s first carbon tax on livestockand passed a law that requires 15 percent of farmland to become natural habitat. On reproductive rights, Denmark last year expanded access to abortionthrough the first 18 weeks of pregnancy, up from 12 weeks, and allowed girls starting at age 15 to get an abortion without parental consent.
All the while, the country continues to provide its famous welfare state, which includes free education through college (including a monthly stipend of about $900 for living expenses), free medical care and substantial unemployment insurance, while nonetheless being home to globally competitive companies like Novo Nordisk, the maker of the anti-obesity drug Ozempic. In 2022, Frederiksen won a second term, defying the anti-incumbent mood that has ousted incumbent parties elsewhere since the Covid pandemic. As part of her success, she has marginalized the far right in her country.
But there is one issue on which Frederiksen and her party take a very different approach from most of the global left: immigration. Nearly a decade ago, after a surge in migration caused by wars in Libya and Syria, she and her allies changed the Social Democrats’ position to be much more restrictive. They called for lower levels of immigration, more aggressive efforts to integrate immigrants and the rapid deportation of people who enter illegally. While in power, the party has enacted these policies. Denmark continues to admit immigrants, and its population grows more diverse every year. But the changes are happening more slowly than elsewhere. …
Leftist politics depend on collective solutions in which voters feel part of a shared community or nation, [the prime minister] explained. Otherwise, they will not accept the high taxes that pay for a strong welfare state. “Being a traditional Social Democratic thinker means you cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come,” Frederiksen says. Otherwise, “it’s impossible to have a sustainable society, especially if you are a welfare society, as we are.” High levels of immigration can undermine this cohesion, she says, while imposing burdens on the working class that more affluent voters largely escape, such as strained benefit programs, crowded schools and increased competition for housing and blue-collar jobs. Working-class families know this from experience. Affluent leftists pretend otherwise and then lecture less privileged voters about their supposed intolerance.
“There is a price to pay when too many people enter your society,” Frederiksen told me. “Those who pay the highest price of this, it’s the working class or lower class in the society. It is not — let me be totally direct — it’s not the rich people. It is not those of us with good salaries, good jobs.” She kept coming back to the idea that the Social Democrats did not change their position for tactical reasons; they did so on principle. They believe that high immigration helps cause economic inequality and that progressives should care above all about improving life for the most vulnerable members of their own society. The party’s position on migration “is not an outlier,” she told me. “It is something we do because we actually believe in it.”
In this video, the two talking heads cover a whole lot of ground. I mostly agree with them. If you don’t, then God bless, and have a nice day.
Toward the end, they turn to trying to suss out what’s going on in Trump’s brain. I particularly commend that part of the video.
In case you don’t know:
Rick Wilson is a former Republican and former Republican political consultant. He currently writes political opinion pieces and is a political talking head on YouTube and elsewhere. He has written two books, including Everything Trump Touches Dies.
During the video Wilson refers, at one point, to his “misspent youth.” He may be thinking about the time he created the ad that defeated Max Cleland—a war hero paralyzed by his wounds—by implying that Cleland supported Al-Qaida.
Will Saletan has been writing on public affairs since 1996. He has also written two books. Sometimes he’s right, and sometimes he’s not. In 2003 he wrote a book arguing that conservatives had won the public debate about abortion rights. Well, if they had won it in 2003, they have lost it now; look at the headlines out of Missouri today. In 2023, he wrote The Corruption of Lindsey Graham: A case study in the rise of authoritarianism.
The last time Donald Trumpwas president, he travelled to Youngstown, Ohio, among the most depressed of America’s rust belt cities, and promised voters the impossible.
The high-paying steel, railroad and car industry jobs that once made Youngstown a hard-living, hard-drinking blue collar boom town were coming back, he said. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” he crowed to a rapturous crowdin 2017. “We’re going to fill up those factories – or rip ”em down and build brand new ones.”
None of that happened. Indeed, within 18 months, General Motors (GM) announced that it was suspending operations at its one remaining manufacturing plant outside Youngstown, throwing 5,000 jobs into jeopardy in a community with little else to cling to. Trump’s reaction was to say the closure didn’t matter, because the jobs would be replaced “in, like, two minutes”.
That, too, did not happen. People moved away, marriages broke down, depression soared and, locals say, a handful of people took their own lives.
Ordinarily, politicians who promise the moon and fail to deliver get punished at the ballot box. But that did not happen to Trump either. Instead, he has steadily built up his popularity in Youngstown, a city that was once a well-oiled Democratic party machine but has now turned into one of his most remarkable bases of working-class support.
“Does [Trump] understand at all what you’re going through?” Joe Biden asked Ohio votersduring the 2020 presidential campaign, referring directly to the GM closure. “Does he see you where you are and where you want to be? Does he care?”
To which the answer, in Youngstown, has been an astonishing and vigorous “yes”.
Trump might have lost to Biden overall that year, but he became the first Republican presidential candidate in almost half a centuryto win in Youngstown and surrounding Mahoning County. This past November, he extended his margin there to a decisive 13 points, giving so much cover to local Republican party candidates that they won a majority of county-wide offices for the first time in 90 years.
Anyone seeking to understand the earthquake that has shaken US politics – to the point where a convicted felon, serial liarand twice-impeachedformer president can return to the White House in triumph, as Trump will do on 20 January – might learn a lot from the disillusioned working-class voters of northeast Ohio.
They tell blunt, profanity-laden stories of watching their city slump ever deeper into decline and express a real bleakness about the future. They see a political class corrupted by big-money donors who, they say, don’t care about communities like theirs. White voters point to conversations about justice – for racial minorities, for the children of immigrants, for women worried about losing their reproductive rights, for transgender teenagers – and question why nobody ever talks about justice for them.
Few expect Trump to fix everything or believe him when he says he will. What they do believe is that the system is broken and corrupt, just as Trump says it is, and that a candidate who promises to tear it down and start again might just be on to something. …
When Youngstown first sank into decline in the 1980s, voters turned to a populist congressman named Jim Traficant, a Democrat who had a Trump-like disregard for the ordinary rules of political decorum and was widely adored because he would stand up for his constituents in Washington and yell at his colleagues to stop ignoring them.
Traficant was also a crook, with long-standing ties to the Youngstown mob and a pattern of taking bribes and falsifying his taxes that eventually sent him to prison for seven years – but most of his working-class voters didn’t care. In their view, politics was corrupt and government authority fundamentally untrustworthy, but he at least was on their side. “We got the best politicians money can buy,” Joe the former railroad worker joked.
Now they see the same virtues – and the same flaws – in Trump. As Acierno explained: “The Democrats and the Republicansare all a den of crooks. Only one side lies about being crooks, and one doesn’t. If you’re going to be a crook, I’d rather know it than be lied to.”
Trump, in other words, comes across as someone who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is, and that perceived authenticity counts for more with many Youngstown voters than his character flaws or even his policy positions. They’d rather have his gut instincts, ugly as they often are, over the carefully scripted messaging of a Democrat like Kamala Harris or even a mainstream Republican.
Tex Fischer, a Republican state representative who cut his teeth working on Mitt Romney’s doomed 2012 presidential campaign, said Trump had done the party a huge favour by ripping the old order apart because it chimed with voters’ anti-establishment instincts and gave them real hope for the change they thirst for.
“When Romney came to Youngstown,” Fischer recalled, “he wore blue jeans and rolled up his sleeves, and nobody bought it. Trump doesn’t pretend – here he comes in his suit and tie and gold jewellery, and people respect that.”
Local Democratsdon’t necessarily disagree. “American voters have a unique ability to smell bullshit, and they smell bullshit with the Democrats,” said Dave Betras, a former Democratic party county chair who believes his party’s brand has to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Betras said Trump’s success was a symptom of the Democrats’ failure to address the catastrophic impact of international trade agreements on manufacturing jobs in the US – a failure he pins on Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – and its further failure, under Obama, to take any meaningful action against Wall Street or the big banks after the housing collapse of 2007-08.
“Most Americans think the system is rigged. And Trump shuffled the deck on us,” Betras said. “Not only does Trump say this thing is rigged, but he says: ‘I know, because I rigged it. I was part of the rigging.’”
Trump, in other words, has exposed the Democrats as hollow and ineffectual as much as he has proposed any viable alternative. …
In contrast to other parts of the country, where political disagreements over Trump have ended lifelong friendships and split families apart, Youngstown is remarkable for the consensus between people of opposing views about the underlying problems and the frustrations that stem from them. They disagree only on the remedy.
Some Trump supporters are actually alarmed by parts of his platform – one cigarette shop patron said he was worried the future administration might make his kidney dialysis unaffordable – but their anger at the Democrats outweighs those concerns.
Some anti-Trump voters, conversely, agree that the Democrats have abandoned the working class but believe that backing Trump is the worst possible answer. “I never liked Trump even when he was only a builder in New York … because he stiffed union workers and he generally seemed like a douche bag,” said Tim O’Hara, a former president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union at Lordstown. “One thing I wasn’t then and I’m not now is a racist, misogynistic, uninformed dipshit who enjoys supporting a rapist, felon, traitor … These people have no clue yet what they’ve done, but they will find out.”
Then there is a third group of voters who loathed both presidential candidates and wished they’d had some other choice. “We were screwed either way,” said Sonja Woods, one of the GM workers forced out in 2018 who is also an official with the UAW. “We’ve been lied to, let down. It’s disappointing.”
Woods’ personal story expresses much of the heartache and frustration felt across the community. After the closure of GM’s Lordstown plant – presented not as a closure at first, but as something more temporary – she was forced to commute to a GM job in Kentucky. Between the cost of renting an apartment and driving back and forth, she lost money over the next six years and had to rely on her husband’s salary to make ends meet. When she returned to Youngstown to work for a car battery company called Ultium, a new joint venture between GM and a South Korean firm, she was devastated to see that the old Lordstown plant, once a symbol of US industry, now belonged to Foxconn, a Chinese company. The job losses had gutted the community, including a number of schools and businesses that had shuttered in her absence.
“It was desolate, eerie,” she said.
Woods, like many in Youngstown, sympathises with Trump’s zero-sum view of the world – that if one group is benefitting, it is usually at the expense of another. Seeing Afghan refugees move into government-subsidised housing when she had to finance her move to Kentucky infuriated her. Reading about Biden’s plans to forgive student debt when she paid off her daughter’s student loans in full struck her as deeply unfair.
She was unwilling to give the Biden administration much credit for spurring clean-energy businesses like her current employer, and she was too angry at GM to place much, if any, blame on Trump for allowing the old plant to close. What she saw, rather, was a general indifference from the political class, especially now that Ohiois no longer regarded as a swing state. “Nobody showed up in Youngstown this time, not Trump or Kamala,” she observed. “There are a lot of bitter people, and I’m one of them.”
Conversation at the Struthers cigarette shop reflected many of these complex, contradictory feelings. The retired blue-collar workers offered hints of the misogyny O’Hara mentioned – they said they didn’t like Harris’s “Hollywood girlboss” energy – and clearly responded to the Trump campaign’s aggressive but unsubstantiated charge that the Democrats were more interested in subsidising gender reassignment surgery than in helping working people.
None, though, were Trump ideologues. They spoke with contempt of two Maga true believers who came into the cigarette shop and started swinging fists at anyone who disagreed with them. Their worries were about the cost of living and taking care of friends they’ve loved for decades and what it means to be working class in an era that has either outsourced or mechanised the work they used to do.
“They are waiting for us older white guys to just die and get out of the way,” Paul the retired aluminium worker said. He did not say it forlornly, though. He and his friends are tough people, and nobody in Youngstown is going down without a fight.
If Americans under Trump are demonstrably and undeniably hurting as much as they were under President Biden, he’ll weave stories and hurl accusations that absolve him of responsibility and assign it to his political foes. And he’ll find many more takers than he would have before we could all customize the reports we receive so that our designated heroes remain unblemished, our appointed villains irredeemable, our biases affirmed.
And before our entrenchments in such cinched corridors of pseudoreality zapped our powers of discernment. “We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds,” George Packer wrote in The Atlantic this month. “Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth.” …
The next best thing to results is illusions. And a record of accomplishments isn’t necessary in a hall of mirrors, not if it’s big and blinding enough.
By contrast, Jerusalem Demsas, who writes for The Atlantic, writes,
[T[he Democratic Party’s performance in the 2024 presidential election has led some to doubt whether the feedback loops necessary for good policy—and a healthy democracy—even exist.
This episode of Good on Paper pushes back against the pessimists. Interpreting signals from voters is complicated, and so much is contingent on which issues are salient when they head to the ballot box. But the political scientist Hunter Rendleman’s research indicates that when states rolled out Earned Income Tax Credit programs—a benefit for working-class Americans—voters rewarded governors who implemented the policy with higher vote shares and approval ratings.
“I think I’m an optimist on sophistication,” Hunter told me. “I think a lot of times political scientists are a bit pessimistic on individuals’ capacities to actually know what’s going on to them because it is quite complicated. But we don’t often set up our analyses or studies in a way to give voters the benefit of the doubt.”
George Packer, also writing in The Atlantic, tries for a balanced view:
The Trump Reaction is more fragile than it now seems. Trump’s behavior in the last weeks of the campaign did not augur a coherent second presidency. He will surround himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots, and because he has no interest in governing, they will try to fill the vacuum and turn on one another. The Trump administration, with a favorable Congress, will overreach on issues such as abortion and immigration, soon alienating important parts of its new coalition. It will enact economic policies that favor the party’s old allies among the rich at the expense of its new supporters among the less well-off. It’s quite possible that, approaching 80, Trump will find himself once more among the least popular presidents in the country’s history. But in the meantime, he will have enormous latitude to abuse his power for enrichment and revenge, and to shred the remaining ties that bind Americans to one another, and the country to democracies around the world.
The Trump Reaction will test opponents with a difficult balancing act, one that recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about a first-rate intelligence holding two opposed ideas in mind while still being able to function. The Democratic Party has to undertake the necessary self-scrutiny that starts with the errors of Biden, Harris, and their inner circle, but that extends to the party’s long drift away from the most pressing concerns of ordinary Americans, toward the eccentric obsessions of its donors and activists. But this examination can’t end in paralysis, because at the same time, the opposition will have to act. Much of this action will involve civil society and the private sector along with surviving government institutions—to prevent by legal means the mass internment and deportation of migrants from communities in which they’ve been peacefully living for years; to save women whose lives are threatened by laws that would punish them for trying to save themselves; to protect the public health from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s security from Tulsi Gabbard, and its coffers from Elon Musk. …
A few weeks before the election, Representative Chris Deluzio, a first-term Democrat, was campaigning door-to-door in a closely divided district in western Pennsylvania. He’s a Navy veteran, a moderate on cultural issues, and a homegrown economic populist—critical of corporations, deep-pocketed donors, and the ideology that privileges capital over human beings and communities. At one house he spoke with a middle-aged white policeman named Mike, who had a Trump sign in his front yard. Without budging on his choice for president, Mike ended up voting for Deluzio. On Election Night, in a state carried by Trump, Deluzio outperformed Harris in his district, especially in the reddest areas, and won comfortably. What does this prove? Only that politics is best when it’s face-to-face and based on respect, that most people are complicated and even persuadable, and that—in the next line from the Fitzgerald quote—one can “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
This is a companion to the post immediately below, What Word Best Describes Trump Suppporters?—wherein another blogger debates with herself about whether that word is “stupid” or something even worse.
Well, dear reader, if you are a person of some maturity, you have learned that there are many ways of being smart, and many ways of being stupid.
And if you are situationally self-aware you are aware that Trump managed to put together a plurality based on a portfolio of folks suffering from a very wide variety of ways of being stupid.
And if you are capable of strategic thinking, you will have figured out that the way forward is to bust open the Trump’s fragile coalition of racists, anti-vaxxers, Christianist nationalists, people in a moral panic over transgender rights, and the terminally illiterate and uninformed.
James Carville writes,
I thought Kamala Harris would win. I was wrong. While I’m sure we Democrats can argue that the loss wasn’t a landslide or take a little solace in our House performance, the most important thing for us now is to face that we were wrong and take action on the prevailing “why.”
I’ve been going over this in my head for the past two months, all the variables, all the what-ifs, all the questions about Joe Biden’s re-election decisions and what kind of Democrat or message might have worked against Donald Trump. I keep coming back to the same thing. We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is and it always will be the economy, stupid. We have to begin 2025 with that truth as our political north star and not get distracted by anything else. …
Mr. Trump, for the first time in his political career, decisively won by seizing a swath of middle-class and low-income voters focused on the economy. Democrats have flat-out lost the economic narrative. The only path to electoral salvation is to take it back. Perception is everything in politics, and a lot of Americans perceive us as out to lunch on the economy — not feeling their pain or caring too much about other things instead.
To win back the economic narrative, we must focus on revving up a transformed messaging machine for the new political paradigm we now find ourselves living in. It’s about finding ways to talk to Americans about the economy that are persuasive. Repetitive. Memorable. And entirely focused on the issues that affect Americans’ everyday lives.
This starts with how we form our opposition. First of all, we have got to stop making Mr. Trump himself our main focus; he can’t be elected again. Furthermore, it’s clear many Americans do not give a rat’s tail about Mr. Trump’s indictments — even if they are justified — or about his antidemocratic impulses or about social issues if they cannot provide for themselves or their families.
Mr. Trump won the popular vote by putting the economic anger of Americans front and center. If we focus on anything else, we risk falling farther into the abyss. Our messaging machine must sharply focus on opposing the unpopular Republican economic agenda that will live on past him. Vocally oppose the party, not the person or the extremism of his movement. I don’t always agree with Wall Street, but Jamie Dimon was right when he saidthat Democrats’ railing against “ultra-MAGA” was insulting and politically tone-deaf. Denouncing other Americans or their leader as miscreants is not going to win elections; focusing on their economic pain will, as will contesting the Republican economic agenda. …
Let’s start by forcing [Republicans] to oppose a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Let’s make Roe v. Wade an economic messaging issue and force them to block our attempts to codify it into law. And let’s take back the immigration issue by making it an economic issue and force the G.O.P. to deny bipartisan reform that expedites entry for high-performing talentand for those who will bring business into our nation. This year the Democratic Party leadership must convene and publish a creative, popular and bold economic agenda and proactively take back our economic turf. Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress and force them to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.
Finally, Democrats must trudge headfirst with this economic agenda into the new media paradigm we now live in. I am an 80-year-old man and can see clearly that we are barreling toward a nontraditional and decentralized media environment. Podcasts are the new print newspapers and magazines. Social platforms are a social conscience. And influencers are digital stewards of that conscience. Our economic message must be sharp, crisp, clear — and we must take it right to the people. To Democratic presidential hopefuls, your auditions for 2028 should be based on two things: 1) How authentic you are on the economy and 2) how well you deliver it on a podcast.
The road ahead will not be easy, but there are no two roads to choose from. The path forward could not be more certain: We live or die by winning public perception of the economy.
Thus it was, thus it is, and thus it forever shall be.
Facing MAGA 