Donald Trump lies so much that it’s easy to get lulled into complacency about him. But it’s important to call him out on some made-up “facts,” as I argued at New York:

President Trump says all sorts of wild things on his infamous Truth Social account. But this week in his fury at Fox News for not becoming even more lavishly sycophantic toward him than it already is, he said something so hallucinatory that it really must be called out (emphasis mine):

“Fox should either get on board, or get off board, NOW, but at this point, it just doesn’t make any difference to me. They suck up the Ratings because of us, and then spin them in the Democrats’ direction. They refuse to put up Polls that correctly show me at 65% in Popularity, a Republican RECORD, but if I have a fake bad “Poll,” many of which are done by Fox (One of the worst “Pollsters” out there is the FoxNews Poll), they put them up immediately, and with gusto. Republicans are so tired of this fight with Fox always trying to be so ‘politically correct!’ Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

I have no idea where Trump came up with that 65 percent number, but it wasn’t from any publicly available poll measuring his job-approval rating, past or present. The highest second-term job-approval number I can find in RealClearPolitics’s vast database is from the extremely Trump-friendly outlet Insider Advantage, which showed him at 56 percent approval on the day of his second inauguration (January 20). His all-time-highest job-approval rating in either term was from the equally Trump-friendly Rasmussen Reports, which put him at 57 percent a couple of days after his first inauguration. Neither of those peak numbers, of course, is anything like 65 percent. For context, his net job approval has been underwater every day since March 13 this year according to RCP’s averages, which are generally better for Trump than others. And during his first term, according to the same outlet’s averages, Trump’s net approval rating went underwater, too, a week after he took office and stayed that way until he finally vacated the White House.

As for that “Republican RECORD” Trump cited … well, not really. George W. Bush hit 90 percent and his father, Poppy Bush, hit 89 percent job approval per Gallup (the pollster with the most historical data) immediately after their respective wars with Iraq. Ronald Reagan hit 68 percent job approval twice (in 1981 and in 1986). Gerald Ford managed a 71 percent job-approval rating from Gallup in 1974. Richard Nixon got to 67 percent job approval in 1969 and again in 1973. And Dwight D. Eisenhower got to 79 percent just after his reelection in 1956. Trump is actually the only post–World War II Republican president never to have reached the 65 percent he claims, and he hasn’t even gotten close, not once, ever.

Now it’s entirely possible Trump pays somebody to tell him what he wants to hear about his popularity, much as he apparently hired a failed historian to tell him his narrow 2024 presidential victory was a historic landslide that gave him a mandate to do as he wishes. But if he’s mad a Fox News — or Insider Advantage, or Raz — for not showing him to be the most popular president of them all, he should probably keep it to himself. Better yet, someone he respects should let him in on the not-so-secret reality that even if he believes he’s saved or is saving America, Americans don’t much like him.

With the government shutdown now underway, Democrats need a strategy to fight and win. But first they need to define what victory looks like, as I explained at New York:

2025 has been excruciating for Democrats as they have been playing defense perpetually against a rapacious Trump administration and its lapdog Congress. So now they’re using the one legislative weapon at their disposal by denying Republicans the Senate votes to keep the federal government operating. The move is partially a reaction to grassroots Democratic fury over their unwillingness to take just this step in March when a previous stopgap spending bill expired. Polls currently show a plurality of rank-and-file Democrats favoring a shutdown. And that doesn’t take into account the particular zest for combativeness that is so evident among the donors and activists who tend to dominate intraparty politics, which is mirrored in the incessantly pugilistic language of Democratic politicians these days. I would be rich if I had a dollar for every Democratic public figure who has deplored “bringing a knife/pen/words to a gunfight” recently or has accused the party as a whole of lacking spine.

But now that they have taken on a high-stakes fight with a GOP that controls everything, led by a president who loves conflict and destruction, congressional Democrats and their supporters need to develop a clear understanding of what they can reasonably hope to accomplish. There are three basic outcomes on the table:

Democrats get everything they want

Democrats’ demands for keeping the government open — or, presumably, for reopening it — are clear. They united behind a counterproposal to the GOP’s “clean CR” measure to extend current spending authority until November 21. Democrats called for three major concessions: (1) extension of the enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies enacted in 2021, which are due to expire at year’s end, affecting approximately 22 million policyholders who will otherwise face very large premium spikes; (2) repeal of major Medicaid cuts in the recently enacted One Big Beautiful Act; and (3) reversal of and future curbs on Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought’s efforts to rescind or cancel previously appropriated funds and to abolish congressionally authorized programs. Presumably they will also demand that Vought’s new threat to lay off huge numbers of furloughed federal employees be canceled or reversed.

To be clear, there is almost no chance Republicans will bend on the Medicaid cuts or Vought’s spending clawbacks. So total victory for Democrats is a chimera, and political leaders should find ways to let “the base” know that.

Democrats score a partial win, brokered by Trump

The policy concession Democrats might realistically hope to win, in part if not in whole, is the Obamacare-subsidy extension. The GOP left this extension out of the One Big Beautiful Act because hardcore conservatives hate Obamacare. However, many Republicans, including some in Donald Trump’s circle, fear the midterm repercussions of a premium spike that would hit a lot of middle-class voters in their own coalition. Owing to GOP divisions on the subject, this concession would almost certainly have to be imposed by Trump himself — and he won’t admit it’s a concession at all but simply a reflection of his own policy preferences. On the other hand, even if Trump goes in this direction, conservatives will fight hard to restrict eligibility for the premium subsidy, forcing Democrats to choose between half a loaf and none. Either way, Democrats could rightly claim to be doing whatever they could to protect the popular health-care benefits that Republicans continuously seek to deny or cut.

Since Vought’s threatened mass layoffs are contingent on a closed federal government, it’s also possible Democrats could secure their reversal as part of a deal to reopen the government along with the traditional provision that furloughed employees receive back pay. Altogether, such an outcome really would represent a rare Democratic legislative victory.

Democrats walk away with only a messaging victory

If Trump and Republicans simply refuse to make concessions, pleasing the government-haters in their ranks and risking economic repercussions, Democratic resistance will likely melt away with time. All it would take is eight Senate Democrats to reopen the government. What the party could claim as a prize in any event is the opportunity to preview its midterm messaging with a major focus on health care and Trump’s contempt for laws and norms. Depending on the length of the shutdown and how it plays with the public, Democrats might also satisfy some of the incessant craving for “fighting Trump” while educating the rank and file on the limits of their powers of obstruction.

Ultimately, the most effective weapon Democrats possess is the opportunity to flip control of one or both congressional chambers in 2026. Having done what they could in 2025, they could essentially tell their base it’s its turn to take up the fight by mobilizing and persuading every vote possible. But if the rifts between Democratic politicians and their supporters are to be healed in anticipation of the midterms, leaders would be wise to keep rank-and-file expectations of what “winning the shutdown” looks like quite low. It’s one battle in a long war, and not an ounce of Democratic passion should be wasted in recriminations over how much “fight” and “spine” House and Senate Democrats exhibited.

After watching the messaging coming out of Washington on the brink of the government shutdown, I offered a dissent to its narrowness at New York:

There is a well-worn point of view in progressive politics that ultimately the material interests of voters are all that matters. Cultural issues are “distractions,” would-be opiates of the masses. Concerns about the Constitution and the laws or the functioning of democracy are pointy-headed insider elitist hobbyhorses. What many “economic populists” took away from the 2024 elections is that Americans were happy to restore to power a convicted felon who contemptuously rejected any limitations on his power because they vaguely remembered the economy doing well during his first term and Democrats failed to offer them more money in their pockets. The lesson going forward was that a majority of voters were okay with a little fascism if it meant lower grocery and gasoline prices.

Donald Trump is now well on his way to breaking his campaign promises about living costs, and his party will likely pay a price for that in next year’s midterms. But he’s breaking a lot of other things as well, and Democrats are fundamentally divided as to whether their alarm over his wild power grabs and generally authoritarian demeanor is something they should prominently share with voters. It is not a theoretical issue, as it happens — it’s at the center of how Democrats should explain their position on the federal-government shutdown that began at midnight on September 30.

Democrats clearly do understand the need for unity during the shutdown crisis. Their divisions last time stopgap-spending authority ran out in March left them looking weak and completely ineffectual. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose caucus had the rare power to deny Republicans a stopgap bill via a filibuster, talked tough and then folded when a shutdown grew nigh, enraging Democratic activists and creating the appearance that Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries weren’t on the same page.

This time around they’re united going into the shutdown, with their position on what it would take to earn their votes to reopen the government contained in legislation that covers the waterfront of Democratic concerns. They are demanding an extension of Obamacare premium subsidies that expire at the end of the year (left out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act because a critical mass of Republicans hate anything associated with Obamacare); the repeal of key Medicare cuts enacted in the OBBBA; the cancellation of arguably illegal clawbacks of already-appropriated federal funds via rescissions; and restraints on future executive-branch encroachment of congressional spending authority. So Democrats are in theory placing equal weight on popular government benefits Republicans are seeking to cut, and on the administration’s authoritarian conduct.

But if you look at the issues Democratic voices are emphasizing, it’s all about money, money, money. The Democratic National Committee’s talking points on the shutdown are 100 percent focused on health-care provisions:

“At midnight tonight, Donald Trump and Republicans will be solely responsible for the government shutdown because they are hellbent on making health care more expensive for working families. Trump would rather raise health care costs for more than 22 million Americans and keep disastrous Medicaid cuts as part of his billionaire-first budget than work with Democrats on a common-sense proposal that safeguards health care for working families.”

One reason for this focus is the knowledge that there is some congressional Republican support for extending the Obamacare subsidies to avoid big premium spikes as early as November for millions of largely middle-class beneficiaries. The clearest way to a deal to reopen the government would be a Trump-imposed compromise on the subsidies that Democrats could claim as a victory. A repeal of OBBBA-enacted Medicaid cuts, however, is not happening in a million years. But if (a) this is really all about the Obamacare subsidies, and (b) Republicans have their own incentives for a deal on them, and an emperor-king who might force them to swallow them, then why do Democrats need a government shutdown to make that happen? Why not just keep the government open and negotiate with Trump on their one realizable goal, knowing that if a deal doesn’t happen the president and his party will totally get blamed for the premium spikes?

The reason is pretty simple: The shutdown is not simply about health care. It’s about a congressional minority seizing on the one bit of leverage they have to address the issue that has it in an absolute panic: the complicity of congressional Republicans in Trump’s authoritarian power grabs. The radical position of the Trump administration is that the president’s 2024 “mandate” should give him plenary authority over the executive branch of the federal government, including funding levels for federal programs and the number and deployment of all federal employees. The chaotic DOGE raids on the “deep state,” Russell Vought’s spending freezes and clawbacks, and Vought’s future threats to conduct mass layoffs of federal employees in case of a government shutdown are all part of the plan to give Trump quasi-dictatorial powers. His allies in Congress may privately grumble about being reduced to a choir singing his everlasting praises, but they aren’t doing anything about it.

Democrats can and should point out the material costs to Americans of the GOP’s reverse–Robin Hood economic agenda, which is a tale as old as time. But they shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking voters are too stupid or narrow-minded to understand the threat being posed to their own right of self-government by a trifecta regime bent on consolidating all power in a corrupt, hateful, and egomaniacal old man. One reason parties controlling the White House generally do poorly in midterm elections is that a significant segment of the electorate instinctively wants to place a curb on power-hungry presidents. If there was ever an opportunity to evoke this healthy impulse, Democrats have it right now, and they should be loud and proud about it.

Watching the evolution of the slowly approaching government shutdown crisis in Congress, it’s reasonably clear congressional Democrats are traumatized by what happened in March, and I wrote about how they’re dealing with that at New York:

Congressional Democrats are understandably unhappy with what happened last time they faced a government-shutdown crisis. In March, Republicans forced them into a trap where they either had to vote for another GOP-sponsored stopgap-spending measure, which offered Democrats zero concessions, or obstruct it and trigger a shutdown, punishing the government employees who were already being besieged by Elon Musk’s DOGE and other Trump administration attacks. In the House, where Democrats had no power at all, it was an easy choice: They all voted against the GOP measure. But in the Senate, where a filibuster could have very definitely stopped the bill, Democratic leader Chuck Schumer did a lot of saber-rattling but then caved, rounding up enough votes to end the filibuster and ensure the government stayed open.

Democratic activists were infuriated, and House Democrats suggested Senate Democrats were gutless. The whole episode accomplished nothing other than underlining Democratic Party fecklessness, the lack of unified party leadership, and the whip hand held by the bully Donald Trump and his subalterns in Congress.

Now they’re back to a near-identical point as the spending authority approved in March runs out on September 30. Republicans are again offering an extension of current spending levels — this one a short-term measure until November 20 — with zero concessions to the Democrats whose votes are necessary to keep the government open. To their credit, Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries are moving in lockstep this time around, agreeing to a common strategy and message. But even those gestures reflect an atmosphere of mistrust and an underlying fear of once again angering the Democratic “base.”

In recognition of their leverage, Democrats began talking weeks ago about conditions that needed to be met to earn their votes to head off a shutdown. Some wanted the Trump administration to rein in budget director Russell Vought’s highly provocative and probably unconstitutional spending clawbacks; why agree to spending levels if the people running the country felt free to ignore them? Others were interested in getting a grip on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ravaging of U.S. science, medicine, and public-health infrastructure. But the main focus among Democrats was the issue they’ve long considered their strongest heading toward the 2026 midterms: the damage being done to Americans’ access to health insurance. That meant demanding at a minimum the continuation of Obamacare premium subsidies due to expire at the end of the year, which were omitted from Trump’s megabill because of their cost and the hatred of many Republicans of the president’s signature policy accomplishment. This seemed potentially achievable because at least some Republicans feared blowback from a spike in premiums affecting many millions of middle-class Americans as early as November if the subsidies are allowed to die. And other Democrats wanted to demand the cancellation of some of the Medicaid cuts already enacted in the bill — a sure poison pill for the GOP.

The “counterproposal” unveiled by Schumer and Jeffries late Wednesday includes all the above and more, as the New York Times reports:

“Congressional Democrats on Wednesday proposed adding well over $1 trillion for Medicaid and other health programs to a stopgap spending plan needed to fund the government past Sept. 30, laying out steep demands in a showdown with Republicans that is threatening a shutdown within weeks.

“Democrats put forward a bill that would fund the government through Oct. 31 and permanently extend Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. It would reverse cuts to Medicaid and other health programs enacted this year as part of Republicans’ marquee tax and spending cut legislation.

“The measure would also restrict the Trump administration’s ability to unilaterally claw back funding Congress previously approved, a power that President Trump has repeatedly invoked.”

In addition, the proposal would restore public broadcasting funds and vastly increase the amount of money Republicans have endorsed for boosting security for government officials in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. Overall, the idea appears to be to maximize and publicize the distance between the two parties on ground Democrats think they can defend.

To put it mildly, Republicans are certain to give this “plan” a frosty reception, and that seems to be fine with Democrats. As Punchbowl News reports, the GOP has formed an iron consensus in support of a “clean” stopgap bill (or to use the technical jargon, “continuing resolution” or CR) until November, delaying any concessions at all, and at the same time keeping their own fractious members from issuing their own demands for keeping the government open (mostly involving deeper spending cuts):

“[N]early every provision in this package is a non-starter for Republicans. …

“To be clear, Republicans simply have no interest in negotiating. They feel like Democrats felt in the past: Negotiating under these circumstances is validating the Democrats’ position. Republicans are comfortable saying that they’ve proposed a clean CR, which is what Democrats usually ask for, to buy time for bipartisan full-year FY2026 funding talks.”

So Democrats are complaining that Republicans won’t negotiate with them over their demands, while Republicans are complaining that Democrats won’t keep the government open and negotiate over policies later. They are talking past each other in a way that seems to make at least some sort of shutdown very likely.

But from the Democratic perspective, the big fear is another display of weakness and disunity. Right on the brink of the confrontation in Congress, there were clear signs of what “the base” wants to happen, as Semafor reports:

“A new survey from the progressive firm Data for Progress and research firm Grow Progress, shared first with Semafor, shows seven in 10 Democrats support their party withholding votes unless Republicans make changes even if it risks a shutdown, while a similar share backs their party taking a ‘firmer stand’ than they did in March.

“What’s more, Democrats are arguing voters will blame the Republicans who control government for a shutdown, and the poll shows their voters share that view, 82-14. Large majorities of Democrats also think the party should fight President Donald Trump harder — even if they don’t win.”

So after emphatically rejecting the “clean CR,” Jeffries and Schumer appear to be steeling themselves for an inevitable shutdown and taking the opportunity to do some partisan “messaging” on health care and other Democratic priorities. Its primary purpose is to ensure nobody breaks rank and repeats what happened in March. In effect, Democrats are tying their own hands so that none of them can wave a white flag. This will be a fine tonic for the troops around the country, but it’s unclear where that leaves the federal government. We’re now at the point in every game of “chicken” where someone will have to blink.

Some news from the strange world of Donald Trump took me way down memory lane to the 1970s, as I explained at New York:

There had been vague talk for a while in both major-party circles about holding a pre-midterms national convention (or as it was once known, a “mini-convention”). For Democrats to do something like this would be like turning around a battleship. For Republicans, all it took was one Truth Social post:

“The Republicans are going to do a Midterm Convention in order to show the great things we have done since the Presidential Election of 2024. Time and place to be determined. Stay tuned, it will be quite the Event, and very exciting! President DJT.”

President Trump could change his mind, of course, but it makes some sense from his point of view. He knows preserving Republicans’ governing trifecta is going to be an uphill climb in 2026, given the historical pattern of the White House party almost always losing House seats in the midterms. His iron control of the GOP means it won’t be hard to impose discipline on hand-picked delegates to an event like this, essentially making it a big paid ad for the party and its messages. And let’s face it, this could be the last Trump event, perhaps in conjunction with the Semiquincentennial (250th) celebration of the nation’s founding in July, at which he won’t have to share the spotlight with anyone (presumably the 2028 RNC will have to give a fair amount of stage time to his successor).

On the other hand, the historical precedent for this sort of spectacle isn’t great. Democrats held mini-conventions in 1974 and 1978, and as far as I can remember, nobody much regretted the subsequent decision to stop having them.

The 1974 confab in Kansas City actually took place in December, after the midterm elections; it was basically held to adopt a party “charter” and overcome divisions that threatened to divide the party before the midterms. After more factional skirmishing, the delegates came together over a document consolidating party reforms, and the event was mainly known for introducing the so-called “Watergate class” of newly elected Democrats.

In 1978, Democrats held another post-midterms mini-convention, this one in Memphis. Its main purpose was to unify the party behind a beleaguered President Jimmy Carter. But it was widely shunned by Democratic elected officials, and its overall lack of success was reflected in 1980 when Carter had to overcome a tough renomination challenge from Ted Kennedy, before losing a landslide general election to Ronald Reagan.

We’ll see if Democrats feel compelled to follow suit with their own midterm gathering, presumably before the elections this time, despite their own unhappy precedents. They’d be well advised to think this through carefully before moving ahead. Unlike Republicans, they have no dictatorial leader to make them sing together harmoniously, and a midterm convention could easily become the venue for factional and generational bloodletting, along with a very crowded stage for a potentially vast number of 2028 proto-presidential candidates jostling for attention. Unless Democrats think voters will excitedly greet any sign of free speech and party vitality before they vote in 2026, they might want to spend their limited time on the campaign trail rather than staging an event. But there’s no guarantee the Republican clambake will be a success, either. Given how stale and artificial national political conventions have become, one every four years is probably enough.

In the wake of the assassination of conservative superstar activist Charlie Kirk, Democrats have largely been bystanders as the president decides how to exploit the tragedy for his own advantage. But there is one prominent Republican voice that should be heard, as I explained at New York:

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination in Utah earlier this week, before there was any real information on the identity or motives of the assassin, President Donald Trump addressed the nation with an angry screed blaming the “radical left” (his term for Democrats) for the crime and vowing official vengeance against those who had allegedly inspired the killing by uttering high-volume insults at Kirk and other MAGA folk.

From that point, we all held our breaths in anticipation of the terrible moment when the assassin would be connected tangibly to one of America’s political or culture-war “tribes” and efforts like Trump’s to assign collective responsibility gained real steam.

This morning, after a rather clumsy leak by the president on Fox & Friends, a press conference featuring federal, state, and local law-enforcement figures and presided over by Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, officially unveiled the name of the suspect, 22-year-old Utah student Tyler Robinson, along with some preliminary data from discovered evidence suggesting “anti-fascism” might be his motive. You could hear the engines of partisan and ideological vengeance getting ready to rev up across the internet.

But then Cox seized the spotlight with an extended and heartfelt call for a de-escalation of efforts to assign collective responsibility for the assassination. He even quoted Charlie Kirk himself on the essential nature of “forgiveness” and implicitly repudiated Trump’s claim that the “radical left” had incited the killer with anti-MAGA rhetoric:

“We need moral clarity right now. I hear all the time that words are violence. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. There is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody.”

He went on to cite the pacific reaction from his own state to a crime many of them deplored for ideological, moral, and religious reasons,

As it happens, Cox, who is getting more national exposure than ever before, has made this sort of call for civility a hallmark of his political career. He apologized to a Utah LGBTQ+ group for his own past homophobia after the Pulse-nightclub murders in Florida in 2016. As National Governors Association chairman in 2023–24, he spearheaded a “Disagree Better” initiative to foster less-polarized bipartisan conversation. And when he broke from his own history of disdain for Donald Trump (not unusual among Utah Republicans) to endorse him in 2024, it was because he naïvely imagined that Trump’s own near brush with death might make him more amenable to a “national unity” message.

Now that there is at least a shred of evidence linking the prime suspect to “the left” (though a lot more suggesting he’s a mentally ill young man living in an essentially apolitical gamer fantasy universe), we get to find out if Cox’s pleas that Kirk’s assassination not be politicized strike a chord among his fellow partisans, beginning with Trump himself.

The next move is Trump’s. But he must implicitly or explicitly respond to Cox and his call for peace — the kind of peace we used to expect presidents to supply whenever the country was in turmoil.

I know there’s a lot going on this week that’s more important than still more look-backs at 2024, but one development does require a look within the Democratic camp, and I wrote it up at New York:

The period of finger-pointing and blame-shifting among Democrats for their 2024 election defeat should be near its end, but not before hearing from Kamala Harris. Her book on the 2024 campaign, 107 Days, will be released by Simon & Schuster on September 23, but The Atlantic has published an excerpt about her life as vice-president prior to Joe Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out. The only way to put it is that Harris is seething with anger over her treatment by Team Biden before she was suddenly thrust into the global limelight as the putative replacement candidate.

The excerpt begins on the very day of Biden’s withdrawal, when in her eyes the president subtly disrespected her one more time in his speech to the nation:

“I watched it at the hotel that night. It was a good speech, drawing on the history of the presidency to locate his own place within it. But as my staff later pointed out, it was almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address before he mentioned me.

“’I want to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris. She is experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and leader for our country.’

“And that was it.”

The rest of the excerpt is an indictment of the preparation she was given for the herculean task she inherited when Biden stepped away. The White House staff undermined her from day one, says the former veep:

“When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire,’ the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans …

“They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.”

Indeed, says Harris, Team Biden was encouraging nasty stories about her:

“I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a ‘chaotic’ office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.

Instead of defending her from “unfair or inaccurate” stories, Biden’s “inner circle” came up with an infernal first major policy assignment so that she could be “knocked down a little bit more”: immigration.

Harris dutifully went on a whirlwind trip to the Latin American countries from which migrants were heading to our southern border, a chore that led to the ludicrous but very damaging conservative label of “border czar” that Republicans hit her with right down to Election Day.

“[N]o one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved….

“Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.”

She finally got the task at which she would subsequently shine when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. But according to Harris, she was not assigned the role of chief defender of reproductive rights. She seized the opportunity created by Biden’s inhibitions about discussing abortion publicly:

“Here was a huge issue on which the president was not seeking to lead. Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment. He ceded that leadership to me.”

So when Democrats made a stronger-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections, she should have gotten some real credit, certainly within the White House:

“Joe was already polling badly on the age issue, with roughly 75 percent of voters saying he was too old to be an effective president. Then he started taking on water for his perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza.

“When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging …

“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital….

“His team didn’t get it.”

That’s where the excerpt ends, with a blunt accusation of Biden White House cluelessness, compounding the “recklessness” that Biden himself showed in delaying his withdrawal from the campaign so late in the day:

“’It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

To be very clear, we don’t know yet whether the bulk of the book devoted to her campaign continues this narrative of Team Biden sabotage, or simply treats it as a handicap as she began the uphill climb toward November. In a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, she disclaimed any intention of “piling on” to criticism of the 46th president. But even if you take her word as gospel about her treatment by the president’s “inner circle,” it doesn’t offer much of a rationale for why she lost to Donald Trump.

Yes, some of the attack lines his campaign pursued against her with Elon Musk’s money reflected narratives begun or strengthened during her vice-presidential tenure. But others very clearly went back to positions she took and things she said during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, which for the most part she never bothered to contradict or contextualize. Biden and his staff had nothing to do with the disastrous 2019 interview she did in which she appeared to enthusiastically endorse free gender-transition surgery for imprisoned criminals who were also illegal immigrants, a huge combo platter of MAGA bait that led to an incredible number of attack ads in 2024 and helped obliterate her own message.

More generally, it was the overall Biden administration record on inflation and immigration that sank the Harris-Walz ticket, according to most informed analysis, not insufficient veep prestige within that administration. If she was treated as poorly as she now claims, perhaps she should have talked about it publicly as a way to distance herself from an unpopular president.

Now it all sounds like sour grapes. But she has every right to tell her side of the sad story.

It’s hard to look much of anywhere in discussions among Democrats right now without encountering a lot of hand-wringing over a party leadership vacuum, often combined with demands to purge the congressional leadership. I offered some pointed thoughts on the general topic at New York:

A key object of complaints about the Democratic Party’s performance during the second Donald Trump administration has been the Democratic congressional leadership, and particularly House and Senate minority leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. Both men are from New York and have a vague association with the centrist wing of the party, but otherwise these men don’t necessarily have all that much in common. The House and Senate are very different institutions with wildly varying perspectives on the legislative process and divergent incentive systems. Yet we often hear their fecklessness is responsible for the unsavory reputation of the Democratic Party and the ever-simmering anger of “the base” at the alleged unwillingness of their elected officials to “fight Trump.” A recent example of the monomania over Jeffries and Schumer came from the Guardian’s Mehdi Hasan:

“If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.

“If you want to understand why 62% of Democratic voters say ‘the leadership of the Democratic party should be replaced with new people,’ again, look no further than Jeffries and Schumer.

“Week after week, month after month, they embarrass themselves, undermine their colleagues and demoralize their voters. Theirs is a record of cowardice and capitulation.”

Hasan’s biggest beef with Schumer and Jeffries seems to be that they haven’t yet endorsed Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. To be clear, I think they should endorse him too, mostly because the alternatives to Mamdani are so incredibly bad, not because positions on municipal elections are the litmus test for national leaders. But Hasan also bashes the congressional figureheads for admitting they don’t have much power at present:

“Let’s start with Jeffries. In February, the hapless House minority leader wondered aloud: ‘I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. They control the House, the Senate. And the presidency. It’s their government. What leverage do we have?’ It was a shrug of impotence; a sign of pre-emptive submission only weeks after Trump’s inauguration.”

But you know what? Jeffries was absolutely right. There is no one more “impotent” than a House minority leader, unless it’s a House minority leader at a time when maximum partisan polarization makes coalitions to thwart the Dear Leader in the White House literally impossible. Should he pretend to have power only to disappoint Democrats when he can’t actually exercise it? Indeed, doing just that earned Schumer special contempt from Hasan:

“Remember that cringe chant of ‘We will win’ and ‘We won’t rest’ that he led outside the Treasury building in February, as Elon Musk’s Doge teams rampaged through the federal government?

“Or when he shamefully backed down from a confrontation with Trump over a government shutdown in March and earned the scathing soubriquet ‘Surrender Schumer’?”

On the government-shutdown threat, Hasan has a point. Unlike Jeffries, Schumer and Senate Democrats did have one and only one bullet in the chamber: the ability to shut down the government with a filibuster against a stopgap-spending bill. But you can understand Schumer’s fear of wasting this one bullet, or using it when the prime victims would have been the same federal employees Musk and DOGE were threatening. My sense is that his biggest mistake was brandishing the pistol before putting it away. But it wasn’t going to bring Trump 2.0 to a halt in any event.

Hasan contrasts the feckless leaders with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who toured the country making speeches about the need to resist “oligarchs.” Good for them. But that’s not a proper task for congressional leaders, who have time-consuming day jobs even if they have no power.

A far better idea than deposing Jeffries and Schumer in favor of superior communicators or tougher fighters of fights they can’t win would be for Democrats to stop looking to Congress for national leadership, at least before the next presidential cycle. Even in the best of times, members of Congress are famously unrelatable thanks to their narrow legislative perspectives, their strange parliamentary jargon and their inscrutable traditions. There’s a reason only four sitting members of Congress (James Garfield, Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama) have ever been elected president, with the two most recent being transcendent political talents hardly defined by their congressional service.

It’s actually unclear whether Democrats need clearly defined leaders in order to break Trump’s hold on Washington in the 2026 midterms, and they’ll have a presidential-nominating contest in 2028 to choose a national leader then. But if they do need visible leaders for the Midterms, they should look at the Democratic governors instead of anyone in their powerless ranks in Congress.

Governors are by definition chief executives, not legislators dependent on party status. They can wield executive authority with or without legislative cooperation and can’t be locked out of power like their counterparts in Congress. They have countless platforms for communicating their views, not just unwatchable maneuvers on C-Span. And many of them are very good at talking to voters across party lines. Democrats Laura Kelly of Kansas and Andy Beshear of Kentucky have twice won in deep-red states. Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper is a red-hot Senate prospect because he’s been running for office in that relatively conservative state for over 30 years without a single defeat.

If Democrats consider politicians like Kelly, Beshear, or Cooper too moderate and insist on a fiery “fighter,” they can obviously look to such highly combative governors as Gavin Newsom of California and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, who have battled Trump on a broad front for years and have actually achieved some victories. Nobody in Washington can outdo them for rhetorical volume and intensity, and they tend to speak in language that voters can understand.

Should Democrats flip either congressional chamber next year, then it will be appropriate to expect more of their leaders in Washington. But for now Democrats would be well advised to leave Jeffries and Schumer to their largely irrelevant tasks and look around the country for leaders, not just to governor, but to mayors, attorneys general, and civic leaders who are fighting the good fight without constantly displaying their powerlessness.

The intra-Democratic debate over messaging in the second Trump term has many legitimate perspectives. But as we watch our cities fall under armed military rule and other institutions crumble, it may be time to set some basic priorities, as I argued at New York:

One chronic vice in politics is failing to learn lessons from electoral defeats out of stubborn attachment to priors. But it’s also possible to overlearn lessons, too. That may be happening to Democrats right now, as Ron Brownstein observes at CNN:

“As President Donald Trump openly contemplates sending military forces into more American cities, the leading congressional Democrats almost invariably describe his actions as an attempt to create a ‘distraction’ from something else — whether that’s the cost of living, the massive Medicaid cuts he signed into law, or the controversy around the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“That reflex captures the overwhelming preference of top DC Democrats to frame the 2026 election on familiar partisan grounds, particularly the charge that Trump has failed in his core 2024 promise to bring down the cost of living for average families. It also reflects their hesitation about contesting Trump’s actions relating to immigration and crime.”

The preponderance of evidence suggests that Democratic efforts to depict Donald Trump as a “threat to democracy” in the 2024 election did not move that many voters. What persuadable voters did seem to care about was the cost of living, which they perceived as having been vastly more affordable during Trump’s first term. And Trump also benefited from “issue advantages” over Kamala Harris on immigration and crime/law and order.

Unsurprisingly, many Democrats have been allergic to “threat to democracy” messaging ever since the 2024 election and have also shied away from much talk about immigration or crime on the hoary theory that you shouldn’t “play on enemy turf.” While waiting for Trump’s tariffs to produce the inflation that they rightly regard as a potential disaster for the 47th president, they have typically tried to identify a few narrowly material but broadly shared concerns associated with Trump’s agenda and have mostly settled on the Medicaid cuts that helped finance the high-end tax cuts in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Aside from the fear that swing voters are fine with dictatorship if it delivers cheap groceries and gasoline and are bored with hearing about Trump’s own criminal lawlessness, Democratic monomania about “kitchen-table issues” is also reinforced by the ancient prejudice of progressive “populists” in favor of pocketbook issues at the expense of cultural matters or “insider” institutional concerns they tend to dismiss as distractions from the real politics of class struggle. So there’s a double temptation for Democrats to downplay angst over Trump’s power grabs as “distractions” from the arguments that turn public opinion and win elections.

But there’s a big problem with this tunnel vision: Trump no longer represents a prospective “threat to democracy” who might fail to follow through on his thuggish authoritarian rhetoric, just as he often did during his amateurish first term. Depending on how you view his trajectory, he poses at the very least an imminent danger to democracy and is arguably in the process of converting America into an authoritarian regime. Nearly every step he has taken since last November, from building an administration stuffed with MAGA shock troops, to relentless, almost hourly claims of new presidential turf, to unprecedented assaults on private businesses and universities, to the rapid development of a national police force, shows that something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary — formally still a democracy, but under rigid one-party control — is Trump’s goal. So dismissing creeping fascism as a distraction from Medicaid cuts or the Epstein files is rightly infuriating to many Democratic activists. This approach implicitly legitimizes Trump’s lawlessness as relatively unimportant. When rank-and-file Democrats demand their congressional representatives show more “fight” against Trump, they aren’t asking for more frequent or louder protests about the distributional effects of Trump’s tax cuts. They are alarmed more fundamentally about what’s happening to their country under a proto-fascist regime whose leader treats all opponents as traitors to be jailed, sued, deported, gerrymandered, or physically intimidated.

As Brownstein points out, it’s no accident that the non-congressional Democrats most focused on the fight against Trump’s authoritarianism are becoming rapidly more popular with the rank-and-file:

“[J.B.] Pritzker has been unsparing in denouncing Trump as a ‘wannabe dictator,’ as he put in a fiery news conference last week decrying the president’s threats to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. Surrounded by local business, religious and civic leaders, Pritzker struck a conspicuously more urgent tone than the party’s Congressional leadership. ‘If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm,’ Pritzker insisted, before describing the prospect of troops on Chicago streets as ‘unprecedented, unwarranted, illegal, unconstitutional, un-American.’

“[Gavin] Newsom has attracted even more attention among Democrats by resisting Trump actions he’s portrayed as a threat to democracy through over three dozen lawsuits; speeches; mocking social media posts; and his ballot initiative to offset the Texas Republican gerrymander.”

This isn’t to say that the GOP’s chronic assaults on the material interests of Americans, or its alignment with oligarchs, doesn’t matter, but it’s precisely what history tells us you can expect from any right-wing authoritarian movement with the kind of power Republicans now enjoy. Trump is forever declaring emergencies to justify his endless expansion of his own power. It’s time for Democrats to recognize the real emergency that threatens to make economics a side-show.

As regular readers know, I love historical parallels, and so was intrigued by comparisons between MAGA influencer Laura Loomer and a famous demagogue of the distant past, and discussed it at New York:

Most people in political life have role models from the past that they venerate or imitate. Donald Trump, for example, is a big fan of former presidents Andrew Jackson and William McKinley. Some of his MAGA acolytes love Richard Nixon. Lots of Democrats burn candles, literally or figuratively, to the memories of FDR, JFK, RFK (the senior, not the junior) and such quasi-political titans as Martin Luther King Jr.

In an interview with the Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, the notorious MAGA influencer (or perhaps more specifically, Trump-whisperer) Laura Loomer identified an unusual hero who may help inspire her career: Joseph R. McCarthy.

“I suggested at one point that her effort to get federal employees fired for supposed disloyalty to Trump recalled the Red Scare of the early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited the private musings and personal associations of alleged communist sympathizers to end their careers. She loved that.

“’Joseph McCarthy was right,’ Loomer responded without missing a beat. ‘We need to make McCarthy great again.’”

Loomer may have been kidding; her whole act could be described as having a deadly serious core wrapped in candy-coated trolling. But maybe she wasn’t. Despite his censure by a Republican-controlled Senate and his malodorous reputation as a bully and a demagogue, McCarthy has never lost the allegiance of a significant segment of conservatives who either believe his poorly documented charges of massive communist infiltration of U.S. government or simply admire his “populist” willingness to attack bipartisan elites. There are also some tangible connections between his cause and Loomer’s thanks to Trump’s close relationship with McCarthy aide (and later New York superlawyer) Roy Cohn and the 47th president’s zest for conspiracy theories.

But what’s really fascinating to think about is that Loomer may be as powerful as McCarthy ever was. As Scherer notes, while she’s had her ups and downs in a relatively brief career, she’s having quite a run in 2025:

“In just the first seven months of Trump’s second presidency, she successfully lobbied Trump to end Secret Service protection for Joe Biden’s children. She has pushed the president to fire six members of his National Security Council, remove three leaders at the National Security Agency, end an academic appointment at West Point, fire the director of the National Vetting Center at the Department of Homeland Security, dispatch an assistant U.S. attorney in California, and remove a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. After Trump’s intel chief stripped 37 current and former national-security officials of their security clearance Wednesday, she claimed credit for first labeling 29 of them as threats to Trump.”

Loomer has exercised all this pull and become a global celebrity (with a huge social-media and podcast audience) and an adviser to the president of the United States without trudging up the political ladder like McCarthy did. McCarthy was elected to a local judgeship before serving in World War II, upsetting an incumbent U.S. senator in a GOP primary in 1946, and then winning two general elections. Loomer has twice run unsuccessfully for Congress. McCarthy built his national presence through grueling campaign work for Republicans and years of committee hearings in the Senate. Loomer just needs a well-placed tweet or quote — or a private conversation with her White House friends — to change the course of events and demonstrate her power.

The big question at the moment is whether Loomer could experience a fall from grace and power as precipitous and complete as McCarthy, who faded into political irrelevance after his censure (and then reportedly drank himself to death). By most accounts, McCarthy’s trajectory decisively changed when he began training his fire on Republicans rather than Democrats, for the obvious reason that the Eisenhower administration replaced the Truman administration when Ike took office with Joe’s active assistance. The term “deep state” didn’t exist back then, but McCarthy played on perceptions that there was a permanent bipartisan foreign-policy Establishment riddled with communists who didn’t just go away with a change of party management. As an article in the National Archives concludes, Ike was the secret assassin of McCarthy’s career:

“Former President Harry S. Truman openly denounced McCarthy for three years, but his rhetorical attacks only enhanced the senator’s prestige; Ike ruined him in less than half that time.

“[O]n August 31, 1953, McCarthy launched hearings into communist infiltration into the United States Army—Ike’s Army. While Eisenhower did not respond in public, it was only a matter of time. Joe McCarthy had signed his own political death warrant by assaulting the service to which the general had devoted his adult life.”

Much more obviously than McCarthy, Loomer owes absolutely everything to her president, and there’s not much question she has to remain in his good graces to survive, much less thrive. Yet she has flirted with great danger in recent months by going after some fellow Trump acolytes, as Scherer notes:

“She has no problem going after Republican targets. She has publicly accused Senator Lindsey Graham of being gay, which he denies, and called the podcaster Tucker Carlson a ‘fraud’ and a ‘terrible person.’ Loomer let loose on [Marjorie Taylor] Greene, claiming without evidence that she committed obscene acts in CrossFit gyms. (She did link to a Daily Mail article that had suggested, based on anonymous sources, that the congresswoman had extramarital affairs with people she knew through her gym.)”

But even though she almost certainly has enemies in Trump’s inner circle who resent her influence, she keeps registering wins. Just last week, she trained her fire on an aide to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suggesting the aide was quietly preparing a 2028 presidential run for her boss. Loomer didn’t immediately bag her trophy but did accomplish something arguably more important: a statement from Kennedy ruling out a future presidential bid.

The incident suggests that Loomer has plans for influencing the MAGA movement and the GOP even after Trump goes back to Mar-a-Lago for good, which is precisely what she accuses some of her targets of doing:

“She speaks of the White House overall as a self-dealing den of duplicity, where staff regularly conspire against the president she adores.

“’Everyone is positioning themselves for a post-Trump GOP,’ she told me, adding that Trump is often surprised by what she tells him about his own administration. ‘Every time I have these briefings, he looks at his staff and says, “How come you didn’t tell me this?”‘”

Maybe Trump truly believes Loomer has no motives beyond intense personal loyalty to him and his legacy. But Trump is justly famous for discarding anyone who begins imagining themselves indispensable. Joe McCarthy arguably elevated his anti-communist principles above loyalty to party and president and got fatally burned. Loomer would be wise to avoid his trajectory.