As an inveterate poll-watcher, I have been waiting for the moment when Donald Trump’s job approval numbers went underwater, his accustomed position for nearly all of his presidential career. It arrived around the time he made his speech to Congress, as I noted at New York:

Even as he was delivering the most partisan address to Congress maybe ever, Donald Trump’s public support seemed to be regularly eroding. An updated FiveThirtyEight average of Trump’s approval ratings on March 4 (released just as news broke that ABC was shutting down the revered data site) showed him going underwater for the first time since reoccupying the White House, with 47.6 percent approval and 47.9 percent disapproval. That puts Trump back in the same territory of public opinion he occupied during his first term as president, where (per Gallup) he never achieved more than 50 percent job approval, and averaged a mere 41 percent.

Perhaps Trump will get lucky and conditions in the country will improve enough to validate his agenda, but it’s more likely that the same sour public climate that overwhelmed Joe Biden will now afflict his predecessor and successor.

The Reuters/Ipsos survey that pushed Trump’s numbers into negative territory showed a mood very different from the 47th president’s boasts about a new “golden age” for our country:

“Thirty-four percent of Americans say that the country is headed in the right direction, compared to 49% who say it is off on the wrong track. When it comes to several specific issues, Americans are more likely to say things are off on the wrong track than going in the right direction: cost of living (22% right direction / 60% wrong track), the national economy (31% right direction / 51% wrong track), national politics (33% right direction / 50% wrong track), American foreign policy (33% right direction / 49% wrong track), and employment and jobs (33% right direction / 47% wrong track).”

So all the hype about Trump being a popular president who was in the midst of engineering a major realignment of the American electorate is already looking more than a bit hollow. Trump has a solid Republican base of support and a solid Democratic opposition, with independents currently leaning towards the Democratic Party on most issues. Perhaps Trump’s agenda will gain momentum and support, but since he’s not trying to reach out beyond his party’s base at all, he’s going to need a lift from Americans who only voted for him in 2024 as the lesser of evils and may not vote in the 2026 midterms at all.

At present Trump has lost whatever presidential “honeymoon” he initially enjoyed after his return to the White House, and needs to find new converts to return to genuine popularity. He’s not off to a great start.

This coalition of rural, progressive and Democratic organizations from across the United States is urging Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, to substantially shift more of the Party’s time, attention and funding into rural and working-class communities. Regretfully, our earlier post of this petition campaign omitted the link for those who want to sign it. They should click here. Also, here is the link for making contributions and signing up for the coalition mailing list. 

To: Ken Martin, Chair, Democratic National Committee, and fellow DNC officers

As you know, Democrats spent over $4 billion on advertisements in the 2024 campaign cycle, outspending Republicans on the presidential race as well as both Senate and House races. Meanwhile, rural and factory town Democratic committees and candidates were starved for funds, as they have been for many years. Allocating a small percentage of those funds annually to long-term organizing and outreach in these communities would, we are confident, do far more
to broaden our base of voters and win elections.

The signatories to this letter fight for rural and working-class people. Most of us hail from or reside in small towns and rural communities. Whether through local organizing and party building, developing concrete tools for policy and communications, or careful analysis of what
works and what does not, our collective experience can help Democrats change course and
rebuild our base.

We extend this invitation to you to work together in prioritizing and fixing the Democratic Party’s profound deficits with rural and working-class voters. We have an opportunity, right now, to change course and begin to win back millions of people now alienated from our party, including demoralized rank-and-file voters, donors and activists. Anything less than a major course correction will, we fear, lead to the loss of even more voters, including the women,
minorities, youth, and working-class men who once comprised the party’s base.

In the attached addendum to this letter, we highlight what we believe to be the most important causes of our losing trend and propose seven promising steps most likely to reverse our decline in rural America. The DNC has profound influence and moral authority within the Democratic coalition. If the leadership of the DNC would passionately and forcefully call upon the complex network of large and small contributors and Democratic fundraising organizations to explicitly direct just 10% of their resources to rural and working-class districts and candidates, it could produce deeply significant and enduring long-term gains for the Democratic Party as a whole. If Democrats had done this in 2024, we’d now have $400 million in organizing infrastructure to help mobilize and rebuild our base before the midterms.

We offer our partnership to you, committing our experience, tools and resources and on-the-ground networks to this essential mission and work. Thank you.

Signatories below:

Elected Officials and Candidates

Rep. Ro Khanna – Congressman, California’s 17th District

Sam Rasoul – Delegate, Virginia House

Ken Tole – Former State Senator in Montana

Antoinette Sedillo Lopez – New Mexico State Senator, District 16

Javier Martinez – Speaker of the NM House of Representatives

Andrea Romero – NM House of Representatives

Patricia Roybal Caballero- New Mexico House of Representatives

Dayan Hochman-Vigil- New Mexico House of Representatives

Charles Maughan – Mayor, City of Corvallis, OR

Mauree Curry – Councilwoman in Easton, MD

Christopher Wier – OK HD 4 Candidate, 2024

Tegan Malone – OK HD 95 Candidate, 2024

Ellen T Wright- Candidate for GA state senate SD29

State Parties, State and Congressional District Caucuses

Indiana Democratic Party – Mike Schmuhl Chair

Washington State Democratic Party – Shasti Conrad, Chair

Maine Democratic Party – Imke Schessler-Jandreau, Vice Chair, BJ McCollister

Tennessee Democratic Party – Carol V. Abney, Treasurer and Executive Committeewoman

Virginia Democratic Party 9th Congressional District – Rebecca Daly, Chair

Minnesota Democratic Party 7th Congressional District- Jennifer Cronin, Chair

Iowa 4th Congressional District- C.J. Petersen, Chair

Missouri Democratic Party Rural Caucus – Jacqueline Farr

Maryland Democratic Party Rural Caucus – Judy Wixted

Georgia Democratic Party Rural Council – Leonard Fatica

California Democratic Party Rural Caucus – Katie Jaycox

Virginia Democratic Party Central Committee – Joan Kark

Oregon Democratic Party Education Caucus- Liz Marlia-Stein, Communication Secretary

New Mexico Democratic Party Labor Caucus – Sara Attleson, Chair

Arizona Democratic Party State committee – Aaron J Essif

Washington State Progressive Caucus – Sharon Abreu

California Democratic Party – Rocky Fernandez, Regional Director

New Mexico Democratic Party Veterans and Military Families Caucus – Claudia Risner, Chair

Minnesota Democratic Party 9th Senate District – Jane Stock, ChairTulsa Young Democrats – David Wilson, Chair

Maine DNC Committeeperson – BJ McCollister

Democrats Abroad – Sue Alksnis

Eastern Shore, Maryland Democrats- Judy Wixted, Chair

Democratic County Committees

Cecil County, MD, John Dixon

Allegany County, MD, Cresta Kowalski

Druid Hills Community, DeKalb County, GA, Michael St. Louis

Marshall/Wicomico County, MD, Demetria Marshall-Leonard

Garrett County, MD, Judy A. Carbone

Port Townsend Precinct, Jefferson County, WA, John Collins

Tuolumne County, CA, Elaine Hagen

Washington County, NY, Jay V. Bellanca

Eau Claire County, WI, Gloria Hochstein

Cherokee County, NC, Diane Snyder

Coos County, OR, Garrett Kin

Conesus Town, Livingston County, NY, Maureen McCarron

Russell County Democratic Committee, VA – Dustin Keith

Scott County, VA, Patricia Kilgore, Chair

Pottawatomie County, OK – Kerri Keck, Ben Parker, and Sandy Ingram

Montgomery County, VA, Gretchen Distler and Deborah Olsen

Hart County, GA, Margaret O’Neal

White County, GA, Leigh Stephens

Oglethorpe County, GA, Jane Kidd

Lac qui Parle County, MN

City of Radford, VA, Vicki Tolbert

Columbia County, GA, Ron Battista

Benton County, MO, Jacqueline Farr

Talbot County, MD, Naomi Hyman, Rudy Reyes and Kaye Dutrow

Caroline County, MD, Jessica Taylor

Dorchester County, MD, Sydney Bradner-Jacobs

Kent County, MD, Muriel Cole

Morgan County, TN, Joel Derek Hawn

Bernalillo County, NM, Marisol Enriquez

Yamhill County, OR, Bill Bordeaux

Cambria County, PA, John Soyka

Denton County, TX, Anjana ParasharCumberland County, ME, Heidi J Vierthaler

Benton County, OR, Holly Shutta

Staten Island, NY, Elaine A. Friedland

Santa Clara, CA, Margaret Okuzumi

Linn County, OR, Susan Heath

Boone County, IA

Union County, OR, Randy L Knop

Riverside County, CA, Judy Rice

Mansfield Town, Bristol County, MA, Tyler Putnam

Palm Beach County, FL, Jill Sheridan

Trinity, Pasco County, FL, Ronald E Simpson

Wine Country Young Democrats (Sonoma County), CA

Adelante Progressive Caucus, NM, Colton Dean

Tioga County, PA

Grayson County, VA, Terry Dunlevy

Kent County, MD, Paula Reeder

Democratic Women’s Club of Greenbrier, WV, Carol F Evans

Phelps County, MO, Robert Cesario

Tuscarawas County, OH, Mike DiDonato

National Organizations

Progressive Democrats of America- Alan Minsky (Executive Director), Donna Smith (Chair of

National Advisory Board), Mike Fox (Deputy Executive Director)

American Family Voices- Mike Lux, Founder, Director

Rural Urban Bridge Initiative- Anthony Flaccavento, Executive Director

Community Works- Meredith Dean, Director

No Dem Left Behind- Hassan Martini, Executive Director and James Bartosh, Digital Director

Movement Labs/Contest Every Race- Yoni Landau, CEO

State Democratic Party Progressive Network- Sandra J. Klassen, Steering Committee

Dirt Road Democrats

RootsAction- Sam Rosenthal, Political director

Young Men Research Project and Democratic Messaging Project (DMP)- Lisa Liddle

State and Local Organizations

State and regional chapters of Progressive Democrats of America in

● Arizona

● Maryland

● Iowa

● Oregon● Nebraska

● New Mexico

● Florida

Blue Missouri

Rise Up WV

Network NOVA

Giles Political Action

Our Revolution Northern Virginia

New Rural Virginia

Tuolumne County Indivisible

Blue Horizon Texas

Center for Common Ground

Ohio Poor People’s Campaign

NJ Universal Healthcare Coalition

Indivisible VT

Open Democracy NH

California Nurses Association

Healthy Aging Coalition

Indivisible Northwest Indiana

El Dorado Progressives

Fighting 50 PAC

Speak Out Against Hate

Major Democratic Donors

Roger Milliken

Bernard Cossell

Donna Sylvester

Margaret Gupta

Edward Rice

Sally Ketcham

Shashi Gupta

Rural/Working Class Organizers, Advocates, and Analysts

Jim Hightower- Former Texas Agriculture Commissioner and lifelong activist

Andrew Levison- Editor, the Democratic Strategist

Arlie Hochschild- Writer, author of Stolen Pride

Beth Ruck- New York state rural and urban advocateJustin H. Vassallo- Writer/researcher, political economy and American political development

Jared Abbott- Director, Center for Working Class Politics

Bill Hogseth- Rural organizer, Wisconsin

Sage Lawrence- Rural organizer and former Campaign Manager for US Rep. Val Hoyle

Jared Jodts- Former Organizing Director, Wisco Project

John Russell- Founder, editor at The Holler

Georgia de la Garza- Illinois/Jackson-Union Editorial board of People’s Tribune/

Beth Macy – Writer and author of Factory Man

Local Democratic/Progressive Activists
As of this date, over additional 500 people from all walks of life have signed this letter or a petition with the same essential requests.

At The Nation, read “Resistance Is Not Enough. The Left Must Address the Grievances of the Working Class” by Anthony Flaccavento, author of Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real-World Experience for Transformative Change and cofounder of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative.: “The deluge of antidemocratic, generally inhumane actions taken by the Trump/Musk presidency are fulfilling our worst fears. So what should we do in response?…For most left-leaning activists, the answer is resistance. Resistance to Trump’s cabinet nominees; resistance to his mass deportations; resistance to Elon Musk’s ongoing evisceration of critical federal agencies. Team Trump’s destructive plans and actions cry out for resistance—in the streets, the courts, and anywhere else we might have impact. One example of the resistance platform is Indivisible’s “Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink.” The essence of their strategy is encapsulated in one short sentence: “For the next two years, ‘no’ is a complete sentence.” This is “a time for defense,” they advise, rather than “proposing our own policies.”…the left’s almost singular focus on defense—without offering an equally compelling vision that addresses the grievances of rural communities and working-class people—is a grave mistake. If we don’t make our commitment to an economy and politics that serves everyday people loud and clear, we will undermine efforts to fight Trump and further solidify the estrangement of the working class. Our outrage and resistance must encompass the ongoing betrayal of farmers, unions, and workers and US manufacturers and small businesses…As New York Times reporters summarized their conversations with Black and Latino voters who went for Trump in 2024, “Democrats’ dire warnings about threats to democracy felt far less compelling compared with the urgency of their own struggles to pay the rent.” Pushed by some of the most prominent consultants and pundits on the left, that was an unforced error that may have cost Kamala Harris the election. We cannot afford to make that mistake again…the Trump/Musk onslaught of anti-worker, anti-farmer, pro-corporate actions are an opportunity to offer a plan of our own to unrig the system most Americans hate…We can begin by lifting up some of the Democrats who won in Trump-leaning districts, emphasizing their pro-worker or pro-farmer positions and pledges to confront corporate power. From Chris Deluzio in western Pennsylvania to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in rural Washington, to Pat Ryan in New York’s Hudson Valley, the Democratic tent includes people who know that fighting for the little guy against Wall Street’s housing grab or for farmers’ rights over John Deere’s profits is both the right policy and a winning politics…As Representative Khanna put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, “The alternative to Mr. Trump cannot be a defense of institutions as they are. We need to stand for national renewal driven not by nostalgia for some golden past or simplistic anti-system slogans, but by offering transformative solutions to deliver future prosperity for all Americans, rekindling our bonds as citizens and healing our divides in the process.”

Galen Druke of 538/ABC News conducted a discussion with Washington Post data scientist Lenny Bronner and New York Times polling editor Ruth Igielnik on the topic, “Democrats Aren’t Popular. What Should They Do about it?” It went like this:

Former Rep. Tim Ryan has an article worth reading at MSNBC.com, “The right way for Democrats to communicate about Trump,” subtitled “If Democrats want to reach working class voters, they must acknowledge, empathize and recapture the narrative from Donald Trump.” As Ryan observes, “When I reflect on November’s election, two glaring omissions are missing from the Democratic Party’s messaging: acknowledgment and empathy. The lesson Democrats should take away from Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump is the importance of meeting people where they are emotionally. If Democrats don’t do that, their message isn’t going to stick…Democrats should have acknowledged the tough spot a lot of Americans were in. They should have shown voters they’re empathetic. But we also can’t just look in the past and talk about what the Democratic Party should have done. Democrats in Congress have a real opportunity to right that ship and show voters what the party really stands for… There’s an analog element to this, members should be holding town hall meetings as often as they can. They need to get on the local news. It’s time to start building the case for the American people. But that doesn’t mean Democrats should run around with hair on fire over every issue…Don’t take the bait on everything coming out of this White House. Sometimes the smartest strategy is just to play possum. As Democratic strategist James Carville recently suggested in a guest essay for the New York Times, maybe the most daring political maneuver Democrats could implement right now is to “roll over and play dead.”

How would you rate Democrats response to Trump’s speech Tuesday night? It was a tough call, and they ended up playing it safe, maybe a bit too safe. Democratic Rep. Al Green (TX-9 ) was removed from the SOTU for standing up and protesting Medicaid cuts early on during Trump’s speech. There were a few other Democratic walk-outs, but most Democratic members just sat there and grumbled, sometimes loud enough to be heard. It was the “We must maintain decorum and civility” strategy, with some Democratic members waving little signs with protest messages that looked more like those personal fans people used to use when it got hot in D.C., back before air conditioning. That may have been the right strategy. People forget all about the last SOTU within a few days after it is delivered. Why risk anything, when no one cares that much, so shortly after the event? Then there is the strategic priciple, “When your adversary is making himself look bad, get out of the way.” When your political opponent is delivering a speech that history books will characterize as drenched with bile, pique and resentment, why turn a two-day story into a week of coverage that could backfire? But, what if all the Democrats walked out on cue, right after a personal insult directed their way?  We’ll never know if that would have been a better strategy. But it seems like a question worth considering before the next SOTU. There is something to be said for a dignified walk-out, when confronted with personal insults. Nothing wrong with modeling civility, while those across the aisle howl like demented cheerleaders, and their leader finishes his sour speech to a half-empty hall. That’s not such a bad look for Democrats either.

Former U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown has a must-read article at The New Republic entitled “Democrats Must Become the Workers’ Party Again: Reconnecting the Democratic Party to the working class is an electoral and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the rest of my life.” Some excerpts: “Democrats must become the workers’ party again. It is an electoral and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the rest of my life. To win the White House and governing majorities again, Democrats must reckon with how far our party has strayed from our New Deal roots, in terms of both our philosophy toward the economy, and the makeup of our coalition….We cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we are. How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party—the party of the people, the party of the working class and the middle class—no longer matches up with what most voters think….Joe Biden was inarguably the most pro-labor president of my lifetime. He talked about the dignity of work. He ushered in a new era of industrial policy, making dramatic investments to create jobs and move production of crucial technologies home to the United States. He hired economists for top jobs who prioritized worker power in the labor market. He had the most pro-worker U.S. trade representative likely ever. He presided over rising wages and low unemployment. He walked a picket line….But he was horribly unpopular. Americans repeatedly told us that they hated the economy, thought the country was on the wrong track, and feltworse off than ever….So what happened?….The march away from the Democratic Party among working-class voters—now including nonwhite workers—began long before inflation hit. And the road back is going to require more than just waiting for Trump to fail and voters’ memories of inflation to fade….The more that’s been written, the less we seem to have learned. It’s not that complicated. We have an economy today that does not reward work and does not value the work of Americans without four-year college degrees.”

Brown continues, “Over the past 40 years, corporate profits have soared, executive salaries have exploded, and productivity keeps going up. Yet wages are largely flat, and the cost of living keeps getting more expensive….Productivity and wages used to rise together. That changed in the late 1970s. Since then, workers produce more and more, but they enjoy a smaller and smaller share of the wealth they create….And when work isn’t valued, people don’t see a path to economic stability, no matter how hard they work. A couple of years of modestly rising wages are not going to make up for decades of Americans working harder than ever with less and less to show for it….Most people in Ohio believe the system is rigged against them. They’re right. Today, income and wealth inequality rival the Gilded Age. Using one of the most classic definitions of the American dream—that children will be better off than their parents, moving up the economic ladder with each generation—we are going backward. More than 92 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents did. For children born in 1984, it’s only 50 percent….These changes hit working-class kids particularly hard. Children born to parents without college degrees are less likely to get a four-year degree, setting them back in nearly all aspects of life….College graduates have four times the net worth and four times the retirement savings of Americans without degrees. Americans with a bachelor’s degree live eight years longer than those without a bachelor’s degree….In the 1960s, about one in four members of Congress only had a high school degree. Today 96 percent of members are college graduates….If Democrats continue to be seen by voters in places like Ohio as the defenders of a system that rewards a minority of coastal elites at the rest of the country’s expense, we will continue to lose ground among the very people we claim to represent….Today in the Mahoning Valley, I still hear about NAFTA. One member of my Senate staff who grew up in the valley told me last year that, to this day, Clinton is not to be spoken of in his family’s steelworker household, so deep runs the sense of betrayal….People in Youngstown and Dayton and my hometown of Mans­field expected Republicans to sell them out to multinational corporations.

Brown notes, further, “But we were supposed to be the party that looked out for these workers—to be on their side, to stand up to corporate interests….young staffers in the Clinton administration became the seasoned experts in the Obama administration, attempting to ram through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and confidently pushing a vision of an ever-more-interconnected global order. To people in Ohio, that sounded like a recipe for more of the same: more shuttered storefronts, more kids moving away, and more good-paying careers replaced by dead-end jobs at big box stores that have few benefits and opportunities for upward mobility….Most people don’t wantwhat they view as government handouts. Nor do they want to be left to fend for themselves in an unfair market, rigged by multinational corporations, that only benefits the people at the very top….They want a level playing field so their hard work can actually pay off. And they want a government that will actually fight to create that level playing field, which means taking on corporate interests….But instead, the message they’ve heard from party elites, over and over, has been: We know better than you do. Voters sense it. They hate it. And until we fix it, working-class voters will continue to abandon us….Most families at all income levels feel squeezed by soaring housing costs, unaffordable childcare, rising insurance prices, stubbornly expensive health care—not to mention trying to save for retirement, higher education for their kids, and care for aging parents. Life feels unaffordable even for workers whose incomes put them well ahead of their working-class neighbors….And most people get their income from a paycheck, not an investment portfolio. Work unites all of us….We’re all trying to do something productive for our family and our community and our country. We want to develop skills and take pride in them, and we want our work to be valued, and for our paychecks to be enough to provide for our families….That should be our party’s North Star, the foundation on which we build….None of this will be a project measured in months, or in one or two election cycles. We need a generational effort to transform our party, with the dignity of work at the center.”

In “The Democrats’ Working-Class Problem Gets Its Close-Up: A group that spent heavily to defeat Trump is now devoting millions to study voters who were once aligned with the Democratic Party but have since strayed,” Michael Scherer writes at The Atlantic: “The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by….Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?” They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the “phony” and “corrupt” Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.” Read more here (paywall).

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,  and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Take a look at this graphic from the recent New York Times/Ipsos poll. Quick quiz: what is the intersection of the two sets “most important issues for themselves personally” and “most important issues for the Democratic Party”?

That right: it’s health care! There’s no other overlap between the two sets. Health care is the #2 issue for the public and at least makes the leaderboard—at #5—on what respondents think is most important to the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, on other hand, is viewed as sharing three of the public’s top five priorities—the economy, immigration, and taxes—but not health care.

You may see where I’m going with this. High salience issues on which Democrats have a clear advantage are thin on the ground these days—but health care definitely qualifies and has stood out as a robust Democratic advantage for quite some time. Consider these data.

Democrats are consistently the party voters trust more to handle health care. Typically their lead over the Republicans on the issue has been in the double digits.

That trust extends to various health care issues. Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) polling in 2024 found that respondents trusted Biden over Trump by a 12-point margin on determining the ACA’s future, by a 12-point margin on protecting people with preexisting medical conditions, by an 11-point margin on ensuring access to affordable health insurance, and by an 8-point margin on determining Medicare’s future.

After a famously rocky and unpopular start, Obama’s ACA has steadily gained favor. The split of favorable versus unfavorable views on the Democratic-identified health care reform bill is 64 percent to 36 percent in 2025 KFF polling.

On the broad question of the government’s responsibilities for health care, sentiment has shifted back to a strongly pro-government position after dipping during Obama’s second term. According to Gallup, 62 percent of voters now say the government is responsible for ensuring all people have health care coverage, compared with 36 percent who disagree. This sentiment obviously favors the Democrats.

Health care is important to American voters. In a 2023 AEI/NORC survey, 88 percent of voters thought health care affordability is a very or moderately big problem in the country today. That represents the largest consensus on any issue tested in the survey, except inflation. And the sentiment was uniform across most demographics, including the white and non-white working class.

In a 2024 Liberal Patriot/Blueprint/YouGov survey that tested support or opposition to a wide variety of proposals associated with the Democratic or Republican Party, the top-performing proposals—which performed remarkably well—were almost all health care related. In order of net support (support minus opposition), the health care proposals were:

• Increase the number of prescription drugs that Medicare can negotiate the price of for seniors. (Net support was 75 points.)
• Require pharmaceutical companies to charge American consumers the lowest price they charge consumers in foreign countries. (Net support was 75 points.)
• Cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month for every American who needs it. (Net support was 74 points.)
• Protect Medicare and Social Security from funding cuts or increases in the age of eligibility. (Net support was 72 points.)
• Permanently extend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) protections for those with pre-existing conditions. (Net support was 59 points.)
• Cap prescription drug costs at $2,000 per year for all Americans. (Net support was 51 points.)

Support for these policies is strong across demographics but tends to be stronger among working-class voters, particularly white working-class voters. Democrats’ opportunity to cut into the GOP’s coalition through this issue is clear. Remember that in the 2018 elections, when the Democrats performed so well, health care issues were absolutely central to congressional campaigns.

But Democrats face challenges on this front too. One is that elevating health care comes with an opportunity cost that Democrats, with their fervent commitments to “saving democracy,” abortion rights, and climate change, may not be willing to pay. More attention to health care means less attention to these other causes. The Democrats’ educated, liberal base and infrastructure may resist that—even if a net enlargement of their coalition would result.

Consider the Inflation Reduction Act, which included significant health care–related spending on insurance subsidies and instituted Medicare price bargaining and other cost-control measures for some prescription drugs. The act was publicized and understood as involving climate change, renewable energy, and electric vehicles, which completely overshadowed its health care provisions. To this day, the overwhelming majority of voters are not even aware of these provisions, according to KFF polling.

Given all this, surely Republicans would not be so foolish as to hand the Democrats a new opportunity to leverage their big advantage in this area. Or would they? The budget passed on a party line vote in the the House and shortly to be taken up by the Senate implies the need for drastic spending cuts to balance big tax cuts included in the budget. Medicaid is in the cross-hairs for these spending cuts, perhaps to the tune of almost a trillion dollars.

This is a genuinely terrible idea! And it is potentially far more serious than the furor around DOGE/Musk, which is already costing Trump and the GOP some good will. Rachael Bade of Politico reports:

Two…vulnerable GOP lawmakers I spoke to over the weekend were ready to brush off the anti-Musk backlash.

“I’m all in on DOGE,” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) told me Sunday night, arguing that cutting the federal workforce is “wildly popular” with Republicans in his swingy district and “weirdly a non-factor” for everyone else except hardcore Democrats. Another vulnerable member from a drastically different kind of district in another part of the country, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, dismissed last week’s protests as “pearl-clutching” by the media and Democrats.

For both, however, Medicaid is a different story.

“That’s where the battle’s coming,” said Gonzales. “There’s no doubt that there’s waste, fraud and abuse in every program in the government, including Medicaid — but at what point do you stop cutting into the fat and start cutting into the bone? You can’t pull the rug out from millions of people.”

Gonzales, who has a large constituency enrolled in the program, already co-authored a letter with seven other House Republicans representing large Hispanic populations asking Johnson to rethink where the GOP is headed on Medicaid.

This makes sense. Medicaid is an enormous program, whose enrollment has been expanded far beyond the truly indigent by the ACA. According to KFF, two-thirds of American adults have a personal (self, family, close friends) connection to Medicaid through receiving health care coverage, receiving support for pregnancy/home health/nursing home care, or assistance with Medicare premiums.

Small wonder that Medicaid is hugely popular with the public, with 77 percent having a favorable view of the program, including 85 percent of Hispanics, 82 percent of those with under $90,000 in household income, and even 63 percent of Republicans. Just 19 percent think we are currently spending too much on Medicaid and 81 percent are opposed to cutting the program (including 74 percent of Republicans).

Even the shambolic Democrats, who can’t figure out a way to dissociate themselves from the unpopular policies that are dragging them down, might not blow this one! As former Democratic operative Evan Barker notes in a piece on Lee Fang’s Substack, the attack ads practically write themselves:

I predict this is precisely what they will look like: Elon Musk is on stage at CPAC, waving a chainsaw in slow motion, with doom music in the background; cut to a frame with Donald Trump promising no cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, and a final quick transition to a man speaking directly to the camera: “I lost my job, and when I tried to apply for Medicaid, I was turned down. Two weeks later, I got brain cancer. Now I’m homeless because I had to sell my house to pay for chemo.” It sounds dramatic—but the drama is how Dems roll. These ads will be blasted in key swing states in 2028, with the numbers of those who lost healthcare coverage since 2024 tallied on the screens.

Ouch. Of course Trump many times has said he has no interest in making cuts to Medicaid. His cagey political instincts and his “brand” as a working class-oriented populist Republican would appear to lead him against such a move. Judging from the debate in Congress and the views of many in his party, he has his work cut out for him. If he doesn’t succeed, health care really could turn out to be the Achilles heel of his second administration.

At Rawstory, Matthew Chapman takes a look at James Carville’s New York Times op-ed on Democratic strategy, and underscores Carville’s argument that Dems have a “more subtle and simple tool…to play the long game.” As Chapman notes, quoting Carville:

“The Republican Party flat out sucks at governing. Even Tucker Carlson agrees with this. For all the huffing and puffing on the campaign trail in 2016, the first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral. George W. Bush got us into a harebrained war in Iraq and then tried to privatize Social Security while letting our financial system drive smack into the Great Recession. And George H.W. Bush governed his way into a one-term presidency because of the economy.”

Chaman notes further, that “Trump is already falling into the same pattern, Carville argued, abandoning his campaign promises to increase public safety and simply firing droves of key federal workers as a power play, all while assembling “the most incompetent cabinet in modern history.”

How do Democrats fight this? Well, Carville said, they don’t.

“With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” he [Carville] wrote. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss us….Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat….Democrats, let the Republicans’ own undertow drag them away.”

Chapman explains, “This stands in contrast to Dems’ approach in Trump’s first term in which, Carville argued, “we spun ourselves up into a tizzy” over every issue and were too unfocused for voters to pay attention.”

Chapman adds, “Carville concluded by arguing Democrats should fight like boxing champion Muhammad Ali, the master of the “strategic retreat.” “Facing George Foreman who was rolling off 37 knockouts and 40 wins, Ali deployed the famous ‘rope-a-dope’ strategy, retreating to the ropes of the ring, evading punches right and left, absorbing small jabs, until Foreman’s battery was depleted — and in the eighth round deployed a decisive knockout blow. It’s Round 1. Let’s rope-a-dope, Dems.”

Democrats obviously don’t have a lot of leverage over the disastrous decisions that Trump, Musk and their congressional allies are making. But they must use what they have instead of throwing up their hands and relying on the courts, as I argue at New York:

It’s a demoralizing time to be a congressional Democrat. As the Trump-Musk-Vought demolition team continues to dismantle federal government functions and fire personnel, the Republicans who control Congress are standing by passively despite the explicit and implicit threats to their own authority represented by DOGE raids, OMB-ordered freezes and layoffs, and presidential executive orders asserting total control over spending. They may whine about it, but they aren’t willing to buck Trump, who so far seems to be chuckling with pleasure at DOGE’s excesses and even egging Musk on. Meanwhile, Democrats have been excluded categorically from the formal budget process whereby Congress makes long-term fiscal plans, which are designed to be enacted in a huge package (which cannot be filibustered) via a strict party-line vote.

But Democrats in Congress have one big leverage point: Annual appropriations bills, providing the money to keep the federal government going, have to pass both chambers of Congress and can indeed be filibustered in the Senate, which means 41 of the 47 Democratic senators have the absolute power to say no. Democrats have additional leverage in the House, where the tiny GOP majority, combined with an assortment of Republican fiscal hard-liners who never vote for spending bills, means appropriations bills can’t pass without Democratic votes. As the assault on the federal government and on Congress developed in the first days of the second Trump administration, Democrats appeared to be aware of their leverage and ready to use it, as reflected in a comment by Senator Patty Murray to Punchbowl News earlier this month:

“Democrats are, as always, committed to responsibly funding the government, but it is extremely difficult to reach an agreement on toplines — much less full-year spending bills — when the president is illegally blocking vast chunks of approved funding, when he is trying to unilaterally shutter critical agencies, and when an unelected billionaire is empowered to force his way into our government’s central, highly-sensitive payments system [at the Treasury Department]. Democrats and Republicans alike must be able to trust that when a deal gets signed into law, it will be followed.”

With the stopgap spending authority enacted in December due to expire on March 14, now is the time for Democrats to use their leverage to refuse any deal that doesn’t include meaningful curbs on executive usurpation of congressional spending powers. Yes, if executed, this gambit could result in a government shutdown, and Republicans from Trump on down (including those who love all government shutdowns as a way to show how useless government actually is) would seek to blame it on the minority party, despite the GOP’s comprehensive, swaggering control of Washington. But at a time when Democratic constituencies are screaming from every rooftop that they expect their representatives in Washington to do something, refusing to go along with spending bills that the administration will just brush aside seems like a no-brainer.

But now that the moment of truth is approaching, there are signs some congressional Democrats are inclined to flinch in the face of a GOP-engineered choice to shut it or gut it, as Politico explains:

“Democrats are insisting on the guardrails for Trump and Musk amid deep anger on the left about the president’s unilateral dismantling of the federal government. Following a meeting of top GOP appropriators and party leadership Wednesday morning, Republicans officially rejected the proposal.

“Democratic leaders now face a dilemma: Do they hold firm, refrain from bailing Republicans out and allow an unpopular shutdown? Or do they fold and risk the ire of liberal voters eager to see the party stand their ground against Trump and Musk? So far, they are treading carefully.”

In this case, carefully appears to be a synonym for fearfully. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries sure isn’t drawing any lines in the sand:

“[Jeffries] deferred to House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut when asked Wednesday whether Democrats could support a funding deal that doesn’t restrain Trump and Musk.”

This is not exactly a “hell no.” More explicitly, Vermont Senator Peter Welch spelled out how Democrats might rationalize a surrender of their leverage, per Punchbowl News:

“‘What makes us think if we put more language in there, [Musk is] gonna pay any attention to that? He’s on a lawless rampage, and there’s nothing stopping him,’ Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) told us. ‘The big question will be if he faces a judicial order and disregards it.’”

This is another way of just throwing up one’s hands and hoping the courts rein in the stampeding chief executive and his turbulent agents. In the meantime, presumably, Democrats can cut their little deals on spending, keep the federal government open, and hope for the best.

If that’s the way the wind is blowing among congressional Democrats, it may represent an extreme version of the belief that the voters don’t care anything about the Constitution or lawful behavior and can be mobilized only to resist Trump by extremely specific cuts in services or programs they value. But if there’s a silver lining to the vast power Elon Musk has been given by the 47th president, it’s that his indifference and even hostility to the very concept of government having any value is so blatant as to shock even the most diffident or inattentive voter. Here’s how my colleague the longtime Musk watcher John Hermann puts it:

“[H]e wants to fire as many people as possible. Punishing workers is a cause and a purpose unto itself, inseparable from a grandiose conflation of personal desires and successes with the fate of humanity. It’s an ecstatic project with an accelerationist character. “I am become meme,” he declares, as his team of private-sector loyalists harasses federal employees with spiteful emails threatening to get rid of them. The message from the largest employer in the country to its disfavored employees could not be much clearer: You are waste, you are fraud. We want to make a spectacle of your misfortune. We cannot wait to fire you.” 

Musk is already unpopular, and he doesn’t really care if the pain suffered by government workers or the “parasites” who depend on the benefits or services they provide make his project a political handicap for Trump and the GOP. Shining as bright a light on what DOGE is doing as possible is really the only play for the opposition party right now. If that means daring Republicans to trigger a government shutdown that MAGA folk will not be able to stop themselves from conspicuously enjoying, so be it.

 

Are there any lessons for U.S. Democrats in the experience of Europe’s left-center political parties? To help address this question, read Justus Seuferle’s “How the Right Hijacked the Working Class for Culture Wars: The alliance between reactionary forces and the working class is not built on shared economic interests but on a manufactured sense of cultural identity” at Social Europe. As Seuferle writes, “Unlike the post-war era’s material politics—marked by fair wages, strong social safety nets, and democratic expansion—the culturalisation of politics does not lead to tangible material change….This transformation recasts political issues as cultural ones, not only diverting attention from material concerns like wages and social security, but also reshaping fundamentally economic matters into cultural narratives. The latest casualty of this shift is the worker—once defined by economic conditions, now reimagined as a cultural identity….Two competing ideas about the worker dominate contemporary discourse. The first—predominantly found in the United States—is cultural; the second, once prevalent in Europe, is material. The cultural definition, often reflected in self-identification surveys, hinges on the colour of one’s collar. It distinguishes between blue-collar and white-collar workers—those who work with their hands versus those in bureaucratic or intellectual roles. Under this framework, even a small business owner can be considered a worker. The only criterion is a sense of cultural belonging tied to one’s type of work….The misconception that the political right represents the working class stems from the confusion caused by the cultural definition. When identity becomes the central axis of political classification, the struggle for economic justice is reduced to a battle for recognition. The fact that the term “worker” originally denoted a structurally disadvantaged position is now lost in the shallow glow of tribal belonging….In reality, what would materially benefit workers are strong unions, high wages, robust labour protections, good public infrastructure, and universal unemployment insurance to give workers the ability to refuse exploitative jobs—forcing employers to raise wages. Instead, Vance offers only the hollow currency of recognition….The outcome is a hollow anti-elitism, reduced to performative opposition, with no substantive policies to improve workers’ lives.”

In “Trump’s Historically Bad First Month of Polls Should Terrify Republicans,” Bill Scher writes at The Washington Monthly: “President Donald Trump’s net job approval average, in both the Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight averages, has slid about 7 points over the first month of his second term, leaving his approval rating just barely above his disapproval….This is a historically bad beginning for a presidency. The only worse example is Donald Trump’s first presidency….Who cares about poll numbers anymore, you might ask. Congressional Republicans should. They are on the ballot next year, and the GOP could easily lose control of the House. If Trump does not defy political gravity, he could drag them down, as he did in his first term….Presidential polling honeymoons always end, but rarely so fast….Trump’s numbers are sinking because he has swiftly implemented radical policies many people do not want. According to the Washington Post-Ipsos poll, the public opposes mass civil service firings, shutdowns of federal agencies, including the foreign aid conduit USAID, banning transgender people from military service, and scrapping diversity programs. Only 34 percent of respondents approved of Elon Musk’s involvement in the administration, while 57 percent believe Trump has “gone beyond his authority as president.”….Trump’s hold on Republican officeholders remains strong. I doubt many of them support Trump’s echoing of Russian narratives about Ukraine or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan for annual 8-percent cuts in the military budget over the next five years. But they are afraid to say as much and risk the president’s wrath and a primary challenge….Yet a continuing presidential poll slide with a midterm election on the horizon could, and should, focus the mind not just on the president’s temperament but the voters. Trump could become a dead weight to the GOP. Congressional Republicans in swing districts and those not necessarily seen as vulnerable today should think about what has been unthinkable: creating some distance between themselves and Trump.”

From “Americans voted for Trump, but don’t support his agenda: Our look at nearly 300 poll questions finds Trump is more popular than Trumpism” by G. Elliot Morris at 538/abcnews: “Looking at all the polls that have been released since Trump took office, we find that while Americans express support for some of Trump’s immigration policy and broad government reform in principle, they oppose most of what he has done in his first month as president….I began by combing through every publicly available political poll that has been released since he took office on Jan. 20. Specifically, I was looking for any question that asked respondents if they supported* an action that Trump had taken or promised to take. As of Feb. 25 at 2 p.m. Eastern, this review yielded over 270 questions from 49 different polls. 538 has made the data for this analysis publicly available here ….I found 63 questions asking about Trump’s immigration policies, ranging from such topics as the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have been accused of committing violent crimes (supported by 89 percent of voters, according to an Ipsos/Washington Post poll conducted Feb. 13-18) to the removal of undocumented immigrants who arrived to the U.S. as children (44 percentage points underwater, 70-26 percent, according to the same poll) to whether immigrants removed from the country should be held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, while they await transfer to their home countries (average support of just 37 percent across three polls)….Generally the broadest policies possible, such as “deporting all immigrants” and “sending the military to the border to help with immigration,” score rather well with the public (52 percent approve and 36 percent disapprove of using military force at the U.S.-Mexico border in the average poll)….But as pollsters get more specific, net approval of those policies tends to fall and go underwater. The AP found, for example, that deporting all undocumented immigrants “even if they will be separated from their children who are citizens” has just 28 percent of Americans in support and 55 percent in opposition. And arresting immigrants while they are at church or school is opposed by more than half of Americans. Excluding questions that ask about the military or Trump’s declared state of emergency on the southern border, the public opposed Trump’s immigration policies by about 1 point on average….Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants (a power he does not have) is underwater by 12 points on average, with 39 percent of adults approving and 50 percent disapproving of the order.”

Morris adds further, “According to an AP-NORC poll conducted shortly before Trump took office, 67 percent of adults think the U.S. government spends too little on Social Security; 61 percent say too little on Medicare; 65 percent too little on education; 62 percent too little on assistance to the poor; and 55 percent too little on Medicaid. Yet these are the programs Republicans are targeting for cutting in order to offset reduced revenues from lower taxes on corporations and richer Americans….Trump’s allies and conservative commentators have run into a classic finding in political science: Voters are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” That is, they support liberal social programs and government spending at higher rates than they identify as liberals; to put it in inverse terms, people are more likely to call themselves conservative than they are to support the average conservative policy. It is also generally easier to sell people on vague language and abstract goals (“Reduce the size of government! Make programs more efficient!”) than it is to sell them on the steps it would take to accomplish them (“Fire a ton of people! Make benefits harder to get!”)….A related divide is how people feel toward Trump the man versus how they feel toward his agenda. According to 538’s average of presidential job approval polls, 48.1 percent of adults currently approve of Trump and 47.4 percent disapprove. However, in our new dataset of Trump issue polls, average support for his agenda is 7 points underwater, with just 38 percent supporting his policies and executive orders and 46 percent opposing them….Our new data sheds light on the question of whether the American people voted for everything they’re getting under Trump or whether they supported him for other reasons. Given his agenda is currently 11 points lower than the vote share he won in the 2024 presidential election (49.8 percent), the most likely answer is that this isn’t what Americans had in mind when they voted for him.”

As we all watch the ongoing assault on the federal government, I keep asking myself: “Did Trump really campaign on this?” I looked into it at New York, and I think this should be a question Democrats ask regularly.

Amid the chaos of federal hiring freezes, grant freezes, the wild DOGE effort to arbitrarily slash federal payrolls and cancel programs and contracts, and congressional Republican efforts to cut trillions of dollars in spending to pay for tax cuts, you frequently hear that Americans are getting what they said they wanted in November. Even if you laugh, which you almost have to do, at Donald Trump’s absurd claims of an incredible, unprecedented landslide victory and an unlimited mandate to do anything he wants, laws be damned, there remains an underlying sense that he told voters what he’d do and they either supported it or weren’t paying attention.

But that’s just it: Trump didn’t do that. Yes, he promised the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, pledged to melt down the polar caps with a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy, and made it pretty clear any sort of anti-discrimination efforts are as doomed as U.S. support for Ukraine. Trump told voters a lot of things; some of it was dead serious, and other bits were probably for entertainment value. But he did not promise a slash-and-burn austerity budget and a radically downsized federal government. And Trump certainly didn’t reveal that he would give Elon Musk, his campaign’s chief funder, personal power to take over federal agencies and terrorize their personnel, mugging and laughing like a cartoon villain the whole time.

It wasn’t in the Trump campaign platform

There were 20 planks in the Trump-Vance 2024 campaign platform. None of them involved gutting the federal budget and firing tens or hundreds of thousands of federal employees.

• Plank No. 6 promises “large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!” but says nothing about the high-end and corporate tax cuts Trump is now pushing or, even more crucially, how to pay for them.

• Plank No. 9 pledges to “end the weaponization of the government against the American people” (a pretty clear hint that the new administration regards Trump supporters and only Trump supporters as “the American people”). Perhaps that suggests forced turnover in the Department of Justice, but nowhere else.

• Plank No. 15 pledges to “cancel the electric car mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations,” but again, this is a million miles away from reductions across federal agencies.

• Plank No. 16 calls for ending “federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” Instead of this very specific pledge, we’re getting a governmentwide demolition of anything related to gender or race and the firing of any employees who dare utter a list of ideologically forbidden words.

There’s nothing in the platform remotely resembling DOGE, the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to wrest the spending power away from Congress, or the radical shifts in resource allocations necessary to implement a radical federal budget by Congress.

It wasn’t in the RNC platform, either

Was there anything like what we are now seeing in the (more detailed) Republican National Convention platform? There is this one sentence in the section on inflation: “Republicans will immediately stabilize the Economy by slashing wasteful Government spending and promoting Economic Growth.” Okay, that’s in the ballpark, but every candidate in either party opposes “waste.” That doesn’t suggest the arbitrary $2 trillion savings goal Musk has advanced or the $1.5 to $2 trillion of spending cuts contained in the draft House budget resolution under consideration right now. For the most part, the party platform (and Trump’s campaign rhetoric) suggests that “unleashing” energy production is the real key to controlling inflation and growing the economy. And the document includes both a variety of new spending initiatives and redundant promises to leave Social Security and Medicare alone (Medicaid is not mentioned in either the campaign or party platforms).

Trump didn’t talk about it on the trail

How about Trump’s own utterances? His acceptance speech in Milwaukee was a 90-minute presentation of his case for returning to the White House. Again, there was no real hint that massive federal spending cuts would be deployed to deal with inflation or reduce budget deficits; instead, Trump plainly said wildly increased energy production would slay inflation and that tax cuts would pay for themselves through increased growth. In accordance with his focus on energy policy, Trump did make one specific spending cut promise: “They’ve spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the Green New Scam. It’s a scam … And all of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams and we will not allow it to be spent on the meaningless Green New scam ideas.” So yes, he did warn us about that, though again, there was no sense that federal spending was at crisis levels requiring radical austerity budgeting; it was more a matter of spending being directed to ideologically unacceptable goals.

Trump and his campaign spilled many millions of words via speeches, ads, and surrogate appearances without giving any real indication that a pre-Trump tea-party-style attack on federal spending, programs, and personnel was in the offing. But you know who did provide some pretty clear warning signs of the chaos to come? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint.

Decimating the federal government is a Project 2025 plan

One of the four major “promises” addressed in Project 2025’s main report (Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise) is “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.” The foreword to this document argues for executive-branch usurpation of congressional authority over federal spending with this justification of power grabs to come: “The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf.”

Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, penned a chapter on the office of the president that treats as paramount the goal to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” by any means possible. A subsequent chapter on “Managing the Bureaucracy” calls bluntly for an end to the civil-service system as we have known it, and other chapters envision radical reductions in federal involvement in domestic-governance areas ranging from education to housing to transportation. The entire document faithfully reflects a pre-Trump conservative austerity agenda as old as the original opposition to the New Deal and as recent as George W. Bush’s and Paul Ryan’s assaults on entitlement programs. But it’s not what Trump campaigned on; indeed, he repeatedly disclaimed any knowledge of or agreement with Project 2025’s work, notably in this July 2024 Truth Social post:

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Yet a Politico analysis of early Trump executive orders found 37 separate Project 2025 recommendations embedded in them, some lifting language directly from its published recommendations.

Much of what the Trump administration is doing right now is an amalgam of Project 2025’s goals achieved initially through the patented chaos tactics of Elon Musk and subsequently by Trump appointees under Russ Vought’s direction. If it can get its act together, the Republican-controlled Congress is expected to rubber-stamp legislation that decimates the federal government in part to finance tax cuts and in part for the sheer ideological hell of it. Some Trump voters may be happy with this massive bait-and-switch. But for others, it will come as a nasty surprise.

The following article, “DEI Is a Failure Because the Civil Rights Movement Wasn’t About Elite Diversity: The tide is turning against modern diversity bureaucracies. But that’s not necessarily bad news for progressives, at least if they believe in the goals of the civil rights movement” by Zaid Jilani, is cross-posted from substack.com:

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is being challenged, as President Donald Trump recently enacted an executive order that requires his administration to crack down on and remove diversity-oriented offices and policies across the federal government.

To many liberals, Trump’s order is distressing.

“I have to assume that ‘pursuing DEI efforts’ means hiring anyone who isn’t a white man?” asked The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie about the administration’s new initiative to crackdown on DEI.

Indeed, the term DEI has at times become a sort of racist shorthand for corners of the online far-right, where people who in some cases were elected to office by the voters are derided as DEI hires simply because they’re nonwhite Democrats.

But not every critic of DEI is motivated by white resentment. Many people criticize these programs because they have little positive impact on diversity, anyway, and there’s a bunch of evidence that diversity trainings can actually make people more prejudiced.

The outcomes of Trump’s maneuver, however, remains to be seen because the devil is in the details.

Does removing DEI from the federal government mean eliminating potentially discriminatory programs? Or will the order end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater as it guts organizations that do have some proven benefit, like government teams that help protect the rights of disabled employees?

I would argue that the anti-DEI efforts we’ve seen pop up across the country over the past few years are capable of doing both things, and only time will tell what the Trump administration ends up achieving with its new anti-DEI directive.

But something is lost in this debate, where you have conservatives on one side railing against programs and practices they believe discriminate against white men and promote mediocrity and liberals on the other side defending DEI as an extension of the civil rights movement that guarantees the rights of minorities.

The reality is that DEI is only tangentially related to the rights and opportunities of minorities. The civil rights movement was not about diversifying corporate or government offices with a few black or brown faces in places of power.

It wasn’t about diversity trainings where employees roll their eyes as someone hired by HR lectures them for three hours about their privilege.

It was about redistributing power to the masses of people who don’t have it, including white people.

Read more here.