As someone ever-attentive to the intersection of political and religion, it wasn’t so much Trump’s explosion at the Bishop of Washington but the follow-on by his clerical allies that struck me, as I explained at New York:

Everything about the Washington National Cathedral, from its vast Gothic architecture to its clergy’s vestments, suggests to the politicians who sometimes grace its pews that they are small players in the grand drama of human events shaped by an omnipotent God. But the most important pol in attendance at this week’s National Prayer Service, right there in the front row, was a newly re-inaugurated president for whom humility and self-restraint are alien concepts, and who has boldly asserted that God prevented his assassination in order to return him to power. So understandably, the clerical leader of the Cathedral, Bishop Mariann Budde, felt constrained in her sermon to beg Donald Trump for some Christian forbearance in how he carried out his vengeful mandate. She begged rather than commanded, using the time-honored language of Jesus Christ by way of enjoining compassion for the poor, the stranger, and those living in fear of state power:

“’Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.’

“‘There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They … may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras, and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.'”

It was also understandable that Trump was annoyed by Budde’s plea, along with the underlying suggestion that he does not personify God’s will for America in 2024. He was undoubtedly aware that the bishop had criticized him during his first term for using one of the churches of her diocese, the White House–adjacent St. John’s, for a photo op in which he held up a Bible in righteous justification for his hard line on Black Lives Matters protesters. And here she was almost literally raining on his inaugural parade.

But when he lashed out at her on Truth Social as a “so-called bishop,” a “radical left hard line Trump hater,” whose sermon was “nasty in tone and not compelling or smart,” he unleashed a lot of MAGA rage aimed not just at Budde but at those liberal Christians who similarly reject a reactionary, Trump-o-centric version of the faith. The New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias hit the nail on the head in depicting the outburst against Budde as representing a submerged iceberg rising to the surface:

“For nearly a decade, American Christianity has been torn apart in every possible way. Christians have fought over whether women should be allowed to preach. Over the place of gay people. The definition of marriage. The separation of church and state. Black Lives Matter. And at the heart of much of it has been Mr. Trump’s rise as the de facto head of the modern American church, and the rise of right-wing Christian power declaring itself the one true voice of God.”

The National Prayer Service incident gave license to a lot of Trump’s clerical allies to deny the legitimacy of any form of Christianity that does not comport with their culturally conservative views. Several uttered their condemnations in interviews with the conservative Washington Examiner:

“’For the past four years, the Left has vilified biblically sound pastors for teaching what Scripture says about marriage, gender, and sexuality — accusing them of preaching politics from the pulpit. Yet, on the very first day of Trump’s return to the White House, a woke clergy member hijacks a church service to promote partisan rhetoric, personally attacks the President of the United States, and distorts the truth about illegal immigration,’ said pastor Lucas Miles, senior director of TPUSA Faith.

“Pastor John Amanchukwu, who has been vocal in his support for Trump in the past, took a harsher tone.

“’Many fear a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but there is nothing worse than a wolf in Bishop garments. She’s heretical, diabolical, and should have NEVER had the opportunity to minister in the presence of President Donald J. Trump,” Amanchukwu said.”

Franklin Graham, who delivered one of the two official invocations at Trump’s inauguration, was equally harsh:

“‘She is a socialist, activist, LGBTQ+ agenda, and that’s, you know, so she’s just wrong,’ he continued. ‘So these are activists, and no question, they hate Trump. I don’t know why they hate Trump. Trump stands for truth.”

So denying that “Trump stands for truth” is apparently grounds for excommunication from the broader community of Jesus Christ. That’s certainly what the extremely influential Pentecostal preacher and musician Sean Feucht suggested from right there in the Cathedral: “This is not a church and she is not a pastor. Time to ditch this tradition of attending this place during the inauguration.”

Maybe these holy warriors will calm down. But for the moment, it’s clear that their relationship with Donald Trump, the most powerful person on the planet, is fully transactional. He’s using them to herd their flocks into the voting booth to back him despite occasional suspicions that he’s more interested in self-promotion and worldly wealth than in doing God’s will. And they are using his authority to monopolize their own power within Christianity, by insisting that the only real Christians are MAGA Christians. These politicized right-wing believers bared their teeth in the reaction to Budde’s decidedly Jesus-oriented plea to Trump for mercy. But their ultimate objective could well be to reduce the influence of liberal Christianity until it’s small enough to be drowned in a baptismal font, leaving loud-and-proud Christian nationalists as the monopoly proprietors of America’s largest religious tradition.

In “Democrats grapple with their own message in Trump 2.0,” Sarah Ferris and Lauren Fox write, ” President Donald Trump is already testing the limits of Hill Democrats who have vowed to be less antagonistic the second time around….Privately, Democrats have largely agreed it’s time to end the capital-R resistance to the newly sworn in president. Then on Trump’s first 24 hours in office, he freed those who violently attacked police officers protecting the Capitol four years ago.”

Elected Democrats know that the chances or reversing Trump’s pardons and commutations of the January 6 perpetrators are nil. But they also know that Trump’s credibility is damaged every time the public is reminded that five police officers died as a result of the insurrection and 140 officers were injured by the rioters. Honest conservatives can’t support ganging up on police officers who were doing their job protecting our elected officials of both parties. The pardons and commutations, on top of Trump’s own convictions, make a mockery of the GOP’s pretense of being the party of law and order.

However, as Ferris and Fox note, “The natural inclination is to fight, fight, fight, fight,” said Rep. Tom Suozzi, a centrist Democrat who represents a Trump-won district on Long Island. Suozzi stressed that Democrats need to be more disciplined in their politics to avoid their more reactionary tactics: “That’s what’s got us to this point.”….Even so, he and others acknowledge they can’t ignore when Trump allows January 6 rioters to go free at the same time he is pushing to deport other violent criminals. “I mean, come on,” an exasperated Suozzi said.”

“On the pardons specifically, [Democratic House Leader] Jeffries privately told Democrats on Wednesday that they should hammer Trump’s decision to free January 6 rioters in a way that makes clear how it risks the safety of the American people, according to two people in the room. And the focus was less on Trump but on the complicity of House Republicans — the ones who will be on the ballot in two years.”

“Democrats have also tried to contrast how what Trump is doing isn’t actually helping the Americans who voted for him,” they write. The flood of executive orders is like Trump’s mass announcement of cabinet appointments, designed to confuse and distract his opponents.

“I think he’s trying to flood the zone,” with executive orders, Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said. “Trump got hired because he thought he was going to help bring grocery prices down, what does pardoning literally hundreds of criminals who attacked police officers have to do with bringing grocery prices down?”

With respect to the confirmation hearings, “While a hearing for Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth saw blistering questioning about Hegseth’s personal life, including one particularly tough exchange with Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia on Hegseth’s marriages and an unexpected pregnancy, other hearings — including those for Treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent and Department of Homeland Security pick Kristi Noem — were relatively civil by partisan standards, and focused far more on policy disagreements than personal animus.”

This is understandable. The Department of Defense is the big prize. It involves 3 million armed services members and workers and a budget of 841 billion dollars, and the potential for contractor corruption is a kleptocrat’s dream. In the modern era, at least, the Secretary of Defense has been headed by a leader who has some gravitas. Those days may be over. The Democrats now need two Senate votes to defeat the Hegseth nomination.

“This guy is clearly not qualified,” Warner said of Hegseth. “I’m supporting a number of Trump’s nominees. I voted for (Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA John) Ratcliffe, I voted for Bessent, but there are some of these that are way beyond the bounds.”

However, “We’ve gone back to our playbook which is, ‘attack him,’ instead of actually dealing with the fact that the party doesn’t have a message, doesn’t really have a spokesperson,” one senior House Democrat said of the strategy. “We’re just going back to the shrill attacks.”

“They have a permanent information ecosystem. We don’t,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, said following the lunch. “They define us and we don’t get to define them. No matter how good our messaging is here, it doesn’t get reflected, reverberated and amplified like theirs does.”

That sounds like something that can be fixed.

Nothing bugs me quite as much as false equivalence, and I’ve been seeing quite a bit of it comparing Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons and those Donald Trump issued the moment he took office. So I compared them and wrote about it at New York:

In trying to sort through all the momentous events marking the transition from the 46th presidency to the 47th, it’s tempting to turn the actions of Joe Biden and Donald Trump into matched sets. In some cases, that’s justifiable; Biden reversed quite a few Trump policies by executive order when he took office in 2017, and in some cases Trump is reversing the reversals right now (e.g., on withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords). But sometimes the comparisons are of apples and oranges at best. Some commentators lumped together Biden’s and Trump’s transition-week pardons as two sides of the same dubious coin of sovereign clemency powers. Here’s Politico Playbook’s take, from its new British editor Jack Blanchard:

“The biggest story of the night … was Trump’s extraordinary tidal wave of clemency, with the new president issuing pardons or commutations for nearly every person convicted of crimes — including serious violence — in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. This was big — about as big as Trump could possibly go. Only hours earlier Biden, of course, had issued his own shocking flurry of preemptive pardons for friends, family, and associates during his final morning — his final moments — in power. It probably shouldn’t take a Brit to tell you that none of this is remotely normal. At all.”

So Biden’s “shocking flurry” of pardons was matched by Trump’s “extraordinary tidal wave.” Thrust, then counter-thrust, an action with a reaction, right? No, actually, that’s wrong.

Biden’s last-minute pardons were legally controversial in that they were preemptive, offering protection to potential Trump-administration targets who have not been indicted, much less convicted, of criminal wrongdoing, as CNN reports:

“Clemency for General Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and members of Congress who served on the committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, was announced early Monday morning. Later, minutes before Trump was to be inaugurated as the nation’s 47th president, Biden also issued pardons for members of his family: his brothers James and Frank, his sister Valerie, and their respective spouses.

“The pardons, coming in the final hours of Biden’s presidency, amount to a stunning flex of presidential power that is unprecedented in recent presidential history. They serve to protect several outspoken critics of the incoming president, including former Republican representative Liz Cheney, whom Trump has vowed retribution against.”

Trump, by contrast, moved to protect over 1,500 people who most definitely have been indicted, tried, and convicted of criminal wrongdoing in connection with the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as the Associated Press reported:

“President Donald Trump has pardoned, commuted the prison sentences, or vowed to dismiss the cases of all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes in the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, including people convicted of assaulting police officers, using his clemency powers on his first day back in office to undo the massive prosecution of the unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.

“Trump’s action, just hours after his return to the White House on Monday, paves the way for the release from prison of people found guilty of violent attacks on police, as well as leaders of far-right extremist groups convicted of failed plots to keep the Republican in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.”

There was a preemptive aspect to Trump’s exercise in clemency, too: “Trump also ordered the attorney general to seek the dismissal of roughly 450 cases that are pending before judges stemming from the largest investigation in Justice Department history.”

In general, though, Biden pardoned people who as far as we know haven’t committed crimes (in this last-minute wave, that is; an earlier pardon for convicted felon Hunter Biden is a different matter). Biden’s list was comprised of people Trump targeted by name for investigation and prosecution during his 2024 campaign. Meanwhile, Trump opened the prison doors and expunged the record for insurrectionists who (whatever you think of them and their actions) did enjoy due process in facing accountability for the events of January 6 (unlike Trump himself, who was protected from prosecution by the U.S. Supreme Court).

The 47th president may understandably rage that the 46th has kept him from embarking on the full vengeance tour he seemed to contemplate in calling for a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family, and in describing members of the January 6 investigative committee as traitors. But the idea that Biden’s pardons were as audacious as Trump’s is itself pretty audacious.

According to a new “CNN Poll: Most Democrats think their party needs major change, while the GOP coalesces around Trump” Ariel Edwards reports at CNN Politics. As Edwards writes, “In the wake of the 2024 election, most supporters of the Democratic Party say it needs to make significant changes and that they feel “burned out” by politics, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. The party faces its lowest ratings in more than 30 years….Donald Trump’s return to office is also remolding the GOP, with a majority of the party’s backers now saying that support for the president-elect is central to being a Republican….Those shifts are playing out against a broader backdrop of political unhappiness, with even Republicans far more likely to say they’re disappointed and frustrated by politics than to express optimism, inspiration, or pride….A 58% majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say that the Democratic Party needs major changes, or to be completely reformed, up from just 34% who said the same after the 2022 midterm elections, when the party retained control of the Senate but lost the House. Over that time, the share of Republicans and Republican leaners who feel the same way about the GOP has ticked downward, from 38% to 28%….Only 49% of Democratic-aligned adults say they expect their party’s congressional representatives to be even somewhat effective at resisting GOP policies, while more than 9 in 10 Republican-aligned adults expect their party’s congressional representatives — who now control both chambers of Congress — to be at least somewhat effective at passing new laws to enact their agenda….But across party lines, the predominant political mood is one of discontent. Most adults in the US describe themselves as disappointed (70%) and frustrated (64%) with the nation’s politics today, with nearly half calling themselves burned out. About 4 in 10 say they’re angry, rising to 52% among Democratic-aligned women. Fewer than 20% say they’re optimistic, fired up, inspired or proud.”

“We don’t need to waste time trying to parse the differences between the last three elections. In all three, he won—and lost—with historic vote tallies,” Robin D. G. Kelley writes in “Notes on Fighting Trumpism” at The Boston Review. “The message has been clear since 2016, when Trump, despite losing the popular vote to Hilary Clinton, still won the electoral college with nearly sixty-three million votes, just three million fewer than what Obama got in 2012. Trump lost in 2020, but received seventy-four million votes, the second-largest total in U.S. history. For an incumbent presiding disastrously over the start of the Covid pandemic, that astounding number of votes should have told us something. And if we were honest, we would acknowledge that Joe Biden owes most of his victory to the uprisings against police violence that momentarily shifted public opinion toward greater awareness of racial injustice and delivered Democrats an unearned historic turnout. Even though the Biden campaign aggressively distanced itself from Black Lives Matter and demands to defund the police, it benefited from the sentiment that racial injustice ought to be addressed and liberals were best suited to address it….Yet in all three elections, white men and women still overwhelmingly went for Trump. (Despite the hope that this time, the issue of abortion would drive a majority of white women to vote for Harris, 53 percent of them voted for Trump, only 2 percent down from 2020.) The vaunted demographic shift in the 2024 electorate wasn’t all that significant. True, Trump attracted more Black men this time, but about 77 percent of Black men voted for Harris, so the shocking headline, “Why did Black men vote for Trump?” is misdirected. Yes, Latino support for Trump increased, but that demographic needs to be disaggregated; it is an extremely diverse population with different political histories, national origins, and the like. And we should not be shocked that many working-class men, especially working-class men of color, did not vote for Harris. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is right to point to the condescension of the Democrats for implying that sexism alone explains why a small portion of Black men and Latinos flipped toward Trump, when homelessness, hunger, rent, personal debt, and overall insecurity are on the rise. The Democrats, she explained on Democracy Now, failed “to capture what is actually happening on the ground—that is measured not just by the historic low unemployment that Biden and Harris have talked about or by the historic low rates of poverty.”

Kelley concludes that “If we are going to ever defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Putting that into practice means thinking beyond nation, organizing to resist mass deportation rather than vote for the party promoting it. It means seeing every racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic act, every brutal beating and killing of unarmed Black people by police, every denial of healthcare for the most vulnerable, as an attack on the class. It means standing up for struggling workers around the world, from Palestine to the Congo to Haiti. It means fighting for the social wage, not just higher pay and better working conditions but a reinvestment in public institutions—hospitals, housing, education, tuition-free college, libraries, parks. It means worker power and worker democracy. And if history is any guide, this cannot be accomplished through the Democratic Party. Trying to move the Democrats to the left has never worked. We need to build up independent, class-conscious, multiracial organizations such as the Working Families Party, the Poor People’s Campaign, and their allies, not simply to enter the electoral arena but to effectively exercise the power to dispel ruling class lies about how our economy and society actually work. The only way out of this mess is learning to think like a class. It’s all of us or none.”

In “The single most unconstitutional thing Trump did yesterday, explained: The president cannot unilaterally repeal parts of the 14th Amendment,” Ian Milhiser argues at Vox: “The most alarming of these immigration orders seeks to strip millions of future Americans of their citizenship….There isn’t even a plausible argument that this order is constitutional. The Constitution is absolutely clear that all people born in the United States and subject to its laws are citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The Supreme Court recognized this principle more than 125 years ago…. Nevertheless, Trump’s order, labeled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” purports to deny citizenship to two classes of Americans. The first is children born to undocumented mothers, whose fathers were not themselves citizens or lawful permanent residents at the time of birth. The second is children whose fathers have similar immigration status, and whose mothers were lawfully but temporarily present in the United States at the time of birth….Almost immediately after this executive order was released, pro-immigration advocates started naming prominent Americans who might not be citizens if this order were in effect when they were born — including former Vice President Kamala Harris. That said, the order does not apply to current US citizens, and is not retroactive: It only attempts to deprive “persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order” of citizenship….It is likely that immigration advocates will obtain a court order blocking Trump’s executive order soon — a group of civil rights groups, including the ACLU, already filed a lawsuit seeking such an order. And, because the Supreme Court has already ruled that birthright citizenship is the law of the land, any lower court judge hearing that lawsuit should be bound by the Court’s 125-year-old decision.” Trump knows that this executive order is toast. But he doesn’t really care because he still gets credit for playing hardball on immigration and that adds to his image as the great warrior against open borders.

From “It’s time for Democrats to go low” by Peter Rothpletz at The Guardian: ”

What the 2024 election results made clear is that the Obama coalition is dead. If Democrats are to have any shot at reclaiming power, so too must be the niceties and mores of the Obama era.

Yes, Democrats must get mean – ruthlessly, bitterly mean. This is not to say, however, that they need merely to cast aside the former first lady’s once-famous, now-infamous messaging mantra. No, what I prescribe is not just a new approach to political discourse but a new theory of opposition party politics.

Trumpism has corrupted America in many ways, but one of the most obvious is how voters now expect lawmakers and surrogates to be truly vicious cultural warriors for them….As the commentator SE Cupp recently observed, “it doesn’t get said enough, but Trump’s enduring legacy will be convincing BOTH parties to lower the bar, and that possessing moral authority on anything is no longer a currency that matters”. Democrats can either bemoan the fact the fundamental rules of politics and discourse have changed or they can adapt to it. In the four years to come, emboldened voices on the right will work to expand the Overton window. Democrats’ reaction to this effort must not materialize as feigned – or earnest – injury and horror. Take the punch and return the favor.

Rothpletz argues further, “This new, more muscular messaging strategy must be combined with a far more aggressive war footing in the halls of Congress….Mike Johnson, the House speaker, will have only a 220-seat majority. However, Republicans are poised to lose three seats (if not more) as members resign to join the Trump administration. That will leave them with a majority of 217-seats, meaning Johnson can only afford to lose one member on major – and minor – votes…..Johnson will need to pass a bill to fund the government. Democrats must not help him.”

Also, “Time and again congressional Democrats have swept in to save Republican leaders – and Republican voters – from their own lawmakers. This generosity must end. The Dems must bleed the Republican party of its political capital at every opportunity….On a Bulwark podcast this week, the writer Jonathan V Last channeled Alan Moore’s iconic comic book anti-hero Rorschach to describe the mentality Democrats should adopt: “The politicians will look up and shout ‘save us,’ and I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no.’”

Democrats do need to toughen up. But they don’t have the luxury of behaving as lawless and morally bankrupt as Republicans, who routinely get away with behavior that would doom any Democrat. For example, ask yourself what would happen if Democrats staged a riot at the U.S. capitol, which resulted in the death of six police officers. Then those rioters are set free by a Democratic president, and the same Democratic senators who condemned the riots later condone it.

Or look at how the double-standard played out with respect to Supreme Court confirmations. It would take a hell of a lot of inflation to enable Democrats to get away with half the sleaze that Mitch McConnell and Republicans shrug off as business as usual. Yes, Dems can play tougher. Few voters would care if Leader Jeffries poached a couple of Republicans to switch parties with political inducements. But any such moves should be carefully calibrated.

“The Democratic Party begins 2025 with several looming questions about its future,” Stephen Fowler writes in “After major 2024 defeats, the Democratic Party searches for a new direction” at apr.org. “Among them: how to recover from losing the White House and the Senate, in an election that saw Democrats lose ground across nearly every demographic group; who will lead its national party apparatus; and how it will handle President-elect Donald Trump’s second term….But as Trump prepares to retake the White House Monday, Democratic leaders have highlighted other results that show November’s losses are not fatal….For example, many down-ballot Democrats outperformed the top of the ticket in competitive races, with the party managing to gain one seat in the House. That shrunk the margin for an already-tight GOP majority that struggled with infighting during the last Congress….Democrats also saw record fundraising last year, and point to years of behind-the-scenes investment in voter data and campaign resources that they say has created a more coordinated and robust party infrastructure for future election cycles….At an in-person forum in Detroit Thursday, candidates seeking to help run the DNC largely agreed on the path forward for Democrats to regain power and the trust of voters who stayed home or supported Trump: year-round organizing efforts, more resources for state and local parties and spreading the Democratic message beyond traditional and friendly media sources.”

In “Democrats’ future crisis: The biggest states that back them are shrinking” Jonathan J. Cooper reports at AP, via pbs.org: “With America’s population shifting to the South, political influence is seeping from reliably Democratic states to areas controlled by Republicans. Coming out of a presidential election where they lost all seven swing states, Democrats are facing a demographic challenge that could reduce their path to winning the U.S. House of Representatives or the White House for the long term….If current trends hold through the 2030 census, states that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris will lose around a dozen House seats — and Electoral College votes — to states that voted for President-elect Donald Trump. The Democratic path to 270 Electoral College votes, the minimum needed to win the presidency, will get much narrower….“At the end of the day, Democrats have to be able to win in the South or compete in the South” if they want to control the levers of government, said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Otherwise, it’s a really uphill battle every time.”….The Brennan Center, which is left-leaning, projects Democratic states in 2024 would lose 12 seats in the next census. The right-leaning American Redistricting Project forecasts a similar blue-to-red shift but pegged the loss at 11 seats, not 12.”

Cooper continues, “To control the White House, House or Senate, Democrats will likely need to do better in the three southern swing states. Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina lean conservative but have elected Democrats at a statewide level….Alternatively, they could try to achieve their long-elusive goal of turning Texas blue or reverse the recent trend toward Republicans in Florida, once a swing state that has shifted hard to the right…. And while Harris won more than half of Hispanic voters, that support was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 Hispanic voters that Biden won, according to AP VoteCast. Roughly half of Latino men voted for Harris, down from about 6 in 10 who went for Biden….Democratic resurgence will require much more investment in state parties and a frank assessment of how to appeal to parts of the country that supported Trump, said James Skoufis, a New York state senator running to be chair of the Democratic National Committee….“It requires a reorientation of how we speak with voters,” Skoufis said. “It requires emphasizing our working class values again. And if we’re being honest with ourselves and we’re owning some of what just happened two months ago, we need to shed this perception that we are an elitist party.”

From “2024 Election Post-Mortems: The Elephant Under America’s Political Rug” by Washburnb at Daily Kos: “The oligarchs have acquired and weakened the ability of legacy news media icons like the WaPo and LA Times to warn their readers about the corporate takeover of the US government. The oligarchs and their theofascist allies have also built a modern, think-tank-driven media ecosystem designed to push RW propaganda and misinformation 24/7 for 52 weeks a year. That media ecosystem includes corrupted and shrunken social media platforms like Facebook and X(Twitter). Even TikTok is vulnerable because of its ownership by a Chinese oligarch with ties to the Chinese government—not to mention the national security issues that ownership raises….President Biden’s January 15th farewell address sounded a clear alarm about the corporate/oligarch takeover of American democracy. His labeling of this authoritarian movement as a new tech industrial complex echoed President Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the threat of a rising military industrial complex to American democracy….The Democratic Party and its progressive allies must build a progressive,grassroots-based media/think tank ecosystem that can effectively counter the RW narrative of fear-based cruelty and domination. This work must be done as the Dems mount an effective 50-state/12-months-a-year campaign to reclaim the White House, Congress, and SCOTUS….It’s time for all of us to reclaim and rebuild our American democracy. Let’s agitate, educate, and organize our communities to build the future that we want for our children and their descendants….No one is going to save American democracy from oligarch-financed theofascism but We the People. President Biden made this point perfectly clear at the conclusion of his January 15th farewell address.”

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

Cast your mind back to the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. It was then that Joe Biden emerged as the “Great Moderate Hope.” Recall that by the time the first Democratic presidential primary debates were held in late June 2019, leading candidates were seeking to outflank one another to the left. The thinking was that a Democratic electorate radicalized by the Trump presidency would respond favorably to maximally progressive positions.

Many of these candidates endorsed a wide range of radical policy options: “Medicare for All” reforms that would eliminate private health insurance; a Green New Deal with an aggressive timeline for reducing reliance on fossil fuels; banningfracking; decriminalizing unauthorized migration over the Mexican border; providing health insurance to illegal immigrants; allowing prisoners to vote; abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and promising reparations to the descendants of slaves.

Joe Biden, by and large, did not participate in this race to the left. Instead, he took advantage of both his primary opponents’ radical ideas and the chaos of Trump’s governance by striking a moderate note, promising to pursue progressive but sensible policies, restore the “soul of America,” provide the help Americans needed to get through the crisis, and, of course and above all, beat Donald Trump. This was a congenial message to the Democratic primary electorate, starting with black voters in South Carolina on February 29 and running through every demographic on Super Tuesday and beyond. It turned out that, despite the strenuous appeals of many candidates to the party’s rising left, most Democratic primary voters had more pragmatic and moderate views than the media-anointed advocates for a more radical party. Other candidates’ failure to understand this emptied the field for Biden, who cruised to the nomination after Super Tuesday.

Then a funny thing happened which was a “tell” on whether Biden intended to govern—as opposed to run—as a moderate. Usually, candidates attempt to move toward the center in preparation for a general-election campaign. But Biden did the reverse. He formed six “unity task forces” jointly coordinated by Biden and Bernie Sanders campaign figures, covering climate change, criminal-justice reform, the economy, education, health care, and immigration. The co-chairs included such lions of the left as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal, then-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the task forces themselves were well stocked with Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren) supporters. The task forces produced a blizzard of positions and language considerably to the left of the “moderate, normie” politics upon which Biden had built his successful campaign. And these positions and language found their way into the Democratic Party platform, were incorporated into Biden’s campaign promises and, importantly, determined how the Biden administration made staffing and policy decisions. Despite Biden and his team’s initial insistence that the strenuous leftism found on Twitter wasn’t real life, by the end of the campaign they seemed to be quite happy to act as though it was.

Sure enough, once the Biden administration was up and running, moderation was conspicuous by its absence. First, there were the executive orders that, among other things, dramatically loosened the rules for dealing with illegal immigrants (pleasing progressive immigration advocacy groups), cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline and paused oil and gas leasing on Federal lands (pleasing progressive climate groups) and instituted a sweeping, government-wide effort to promote “equity” (pleasing the congeries of progressive identity-focused groups). He also signaled his support for transgender activists by appointing a transwoman, Rachel “gender-affirming care is settled science” Levine, as Assistant Secretary for Health and de factoadministration spokesperson on transgender issues. And Biden repeatedly referred to transgender equality as “the civil rights issue of our time.”

None of this suggested a moderate approach targeted to the bulk of voters who had put him in office but rather one focused on pleasing the progressive wing of his party. The ordinary voters that supported Biden had bought the image of moderate “Scranton Joe” who would restore normality to the country after the stormy Trump years and the double whammy of a pandemic and subsequent economic crash. They were not really looking for a “transformational” president.

Biden, however, did aspire to be one, not least in the economic realm where he pursued an amazingly aggressive agenda despite his narrow victory and thin congressional majorities. The first indicator of this was the American Rescue Plan (ARP). While there was a reasonable argument for a stimulus package of some size, Democrats, with Biden’s support, opted for a super-sized $1.9 trillion package that included $1,400 per person direct payments to households, an increased, fully-refundable child tax credit, $350 billion to state and local governments and much, much more. This was on top of well over $2 trillion in stimulus spending already passed at the end of the Trump administration. Larry Summers warned that a stimulus of the size pushed by Democrats had a high probability of spiking inflation.

And spike inflation it did. While some inflation was likely unavoidable due to supply-chain issues as the economy revved up, there seems little doubt that over-stimulating the economy made the inflation surge substantially worse than it would otherwise have been. As it happened, the inflation rate did indeed go up dramatically in the aftermath of the ARP eventually hitting 9 percent, a 40-year high, in mid-2022.

Read more…

In thinking about the choices any new presidential administration faces, something occurred to me about Donald Trump that may be worth considering by Democrats trying to cope with him, so I wrote about it at New York:

Having never lacked faith in himself, Donald Trump probably feels completely entitled to his 2024 election win, the governing trifecta it created, and the relatively high levels of popularity (for him, anyway) that made it all possible. But the odds are very high that between the weighty national problems he inherits and the controversial nature of some of the things he wants to do, he’s probably at the summit of his popularity. As Ross Barkan recently argued at New York, there may be nowhere to go but down:

“Now are the days of wine and roses for MAGA because Joe Biden is still president and Trump’s reign remains hypothetical. On January 20, the script flips: The inflation and affordability crises are Trump’s problems. So is governing, which he has never excelled at. While Trump’s second term may promise, in theory, less chaos than his first, there isn’t much evidence that his White House will evince the grim, rapacious discipline of the Bush-Cheney years, when Republicans actually dominated all policymaking at home and abroad.”

Trump does, however, have some control over how much popularity he is willing to lose. Like anyone who becomes president with some political capital and the ready means to use it (i.e., controlling Congress as well as the White House, and having a lot of friends on the U.S. Supreme Court too), the 47th president will have to decide whether to take some risks on policies that are very likely to reduce his popularity or, instead, play to the galleries. To put it even more simply, he can cash in some chips on stuff he wants to do that could offend or even shock some of the people who voted for him or keep building his stash for the future. Given Trump’s almost unlimited control over his troops in Washington, he can probably go in either direction, but that choice of direction could have an enormous impact on those of us who would greatly prefer a less ambitious MAGA agenda.

There are a lot of reasons Trump may not care if he remains popular while fulfilling his presidential goals. This is the final presidential term of a 78-year-old man; for him, the future really is right now. Yes, forcing unpopular measures through Congress might endanger the fragile Republican control of the House in the 2026 midterms. But history indicates it’s very likely Democrats will flip the House no matter what Republicans do, and let’s face it: The long-range future of the Republican Party may not be of great interest to the president-elect. Even after being nominated as its presidential candidate three straight times while gradually grinding down intraparty opposition to a fine dust, Trump still acts suspiciously toward his party’s Establishment and clearly views it as a vehicle rather than a cause. This is more speculative, but given his personality profile the 47th president may even prefer, or at least not mind, a falloff in the GOP’s electoral performance once he’s gone.

Add in Trump’s impulsiveness, which doesn’t suggest someone for whom delay of gratification comes naturally, and it seems a “go big, then be gone” attitude is likely. Beyond that, it’s unclear how sensitive this man is to changes in popularity: He’s never been in an election he didn’t think he’d won, and he has a tendency to ignore the polls that give him news he doesn’t want in favor of the one or two that show support for his agenda and message always remaining sky-high. If he did something that made his popularity crash, would he even notice it, and if not, would any of the sycophants around him break the bad — and possibly fake — news?

All in all, the best bet is that Donald Trump will pursue his maximum agenda with little regard to how anyone feels about it so long as he’s getting it done. Perhaps Republican officeholders (e.g., his vice-president) who have plans beyond 2028 can talk him into more prudent conduct; but in case you haven’t noticed, he’s stubborn, and it will probably take a lot of blatant, in-your-face adversity to change his course. Democrats can supply some of that, of course, but a stronger than usual popular backlash could matter most.

 

In “Trump’s Tax Plan: A Guide for Advocates,” Navigator Research shares the following “key takeaways” from a poll they conducted last month:

• Democrats are more trusted to make sure the rich and big corporations pay their fair share in taxes, while Trump and Republicans are more trusted to handle the level of taxes paid by the middle class.

• Only one in five have heard “a lot” about Trump’s tax plan, with Americans divided along party lines on initial support.

• The framing of Trump’s tax plan is critical: framing the plan as giving “tax cuts to the rich and big corporations while shifting the burden to the middle class” drives opposition up to more than three in five Americans, while Republican messaging drives support up to a similar level.

Drilling down,

“Americans trust Democrats more on “making sure the rich and big corporations pay their fair share in taxes” (net +11 trust Democrats more), while Republicans hold an advantage on “the level of taxes paid by the middle class” (net +5 Trump and Republicans)….Among independents, Trump and the Republican Party have an advantage over the Democratic Party on both items.

Views of Trump’s tax plan are polarized along partisan lines, as seven in ten Democrats oppose the plan (net -59 support) and two in three Republicans support it (net +58 support).

Framing Trump’s tax plan as giving “tax cuts to the rich and big corporations while shifting the burden to the middle class” drives opposition up to more than three in five Americans (62% oppose), while Republican messaging drives support up to a similar level (64% support).

After reading Democratic messaging about Trump’s tax plan, nearly three in five (57%) say it “would hurt people like me.” By comparison, after reading Republican messaging about the plan, only a plurality (45%) say it “would help people like me.”

Among those who read Democratic messaging about Trump’s tax plan, the top concern was that it “wouldn’t help middle- and working-class people struggling to deal with rising costs” (35% top two concern).

It appears Democrats have much to gain by pressing their case against Trump’s tax policies.

In trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in news from Washington, I pointed out some issues in the Trump transition that ought to encourage Democrats, and wrote about them at New York:

Even before Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, we were being assured — or in some cases warned — that Trump 2.0 would be a lean, mean MAGA machine in sharp contrast to its chaotic predecessor regime. There were an immense number of predictions that the 47th president would “hit the ground running” the very moment he was inaugurated, having gotten a head start with an unusually early roster of major appointments and enjoying total power over a Republican Party in which pre-Trump habits have been hunted to extinction. He claimed a historic mandate to do whatever he wanted, and the only big doubt was whether the revolution he promised in American life and government would be most rapidly promoted by his lapdog Congress or via his own lordly exercises of executive power.

In an interview with Politico, longtime Trump intimate Steve Bannon thought it important to rebrand the transition in order to capture the breathtaking speed with which everything would happen:

““I tell people, “shock and awe was a ’17 concept.” ‘Days of thunder,’ I think are gonna be the concepts starting next Monday,’ Bannon said. ‘And I think these days of thunder starting next week are going to be incredibly, incredibly intense.'”

Despite all the hype, as Inauguration Day approaches, there are signs that Trump 2.0 may actually be off schedule in important respects. The only major nominee who is likely to be confirmed by the Senate on Day One is the least controversial, Marco Rubio as secretary of State. Trump’s fantasy of getting the entire Cabinet instantly approved, which appears to have driven his timetable of appointments, is dissipating rapidly. There’s still considerable uncertainty over the scope of initial executive orders and pardons. But most importantly, the administration’s loyal troops in Congress are still in disarray over their basic legislative strategy for implementing the 47th president’s agenda — disarray that extends to many important details.

In 2017, prior to Trump taking the oath of office, congressional Republicans quickly agreed on a two-stage legislative strategy for the year, with one filibuster-proof budget-reconciliation bill being devoted to the repeal of Obamacare and other spending measures and another designed to enact tax cuts. They enacted a budget resolution to set up all this legislation a week before Inauguration Day (Democrats did the same prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021). But House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have yet to agree on the most basic blueprint for 2025: the number and scope of budget-reconciliation bills, which in turn will determine how rapidly they can move to implement the Trump agenda, as Politico reports:

“Under the best-case scenario laid out by Johnson this week, it will be late February before Republicans find themselves similarly situated this time — and even then, the one-bill-versus-two-bill question might not be settled.

“The inability to answer central strategic questions now foreshadows much bigger problems ahead.”

Even if Johnson bends the knee and agrees to a two-bill strategy enabling an initial budget-reconciliation bill on border security and energy as Thune prefers, it won’t come with the speed that made this strategy compelling to senators in the first place. It appears, for example, that the administration won’t have the money to really get mass deportation rolling immediately, as they wished. And despite the pleas from both chambers that Trump resolve the strategic deadlock between House and Senate, the president-elect has refused to play referee, all but saying out loud that it’s not his job. Beyond the one-bill/two-bill dispute, GOP members of Congress are quietly begging Trump to delete items from his executive-order blitz that they might need legislatively to generate budget savings to pay for border spending and tax cuts. There’s zero clarity about how Elon Musk’s DOGE will enter into the equation, beyond the scary recognition that he commands a gigantic troll army that will order Republicans in Congress to massively cut spending wherever and whenever he and his unpaid tech bros suggest. And there’s no consensus at all as to how Congress will satisfy Trump’s demand for a debt-limit increase, which most Republicans hate like sin itself.

Perhaps the administration’s and Congress’s plans will all come together even as the new president appraises the crowd size at his second inaugural event, but it’s increasingly clear that all the MAGA cackling over the incredible efficiency and harmony underlying Trump 2.0 has been grossly premature. The problems may simply reflect the stubborn resilience of objective reality: It’s really not very easy to remake American government while cutting taxes and deporting millions of immigrants and somehow not denying Americans the benefits and services they want and think they deserve. You can’t “hit the ground running” unless you have a clear idea of where you are going, a realistic sense of feasible outcomes, and a strategy for keeping 77 million Trump voters onboard despite their hallucinatory expectations that he’ll lower grocery prices while ushering in world peace.