In reading Andrew's piece and listening to Sam and Will's excellent coverage of the WHCD, I got the distinct impression that Trump wanted to be Obama, who got huge laughs and applause at that event. All these years I thought Trump hated Obama, but it's increasingly clear that he wants to BE Obama.
I've sometimes thought the best way to capture it is that he needs, psychologically, to be BETTER than Obama in a weird fusion of racism and narcissism. In a way, when I can view everything from a distance, I think there's a sort of classical tragedy element to it all... because Trump managed something INCREDIBLE in becoming the President at all and forcing the party to change in his image. He kind of achieved what he wanted to do, he's more transformative than Obama. I can imagine him being discussed in histories of this time more than Obama in some fashion. The only problem being of course that his warped character means that he'll be remembered for awful things and being so unpopular. If only he could have used his powers for good... but of course to do that he'd need to be a different man. I can hear the Greek chorus in my mind in a future play.
I don't think he wants to *be* Obama but he wants to score higher than Obama by whatever stoopid metric is rattling around in his brain. Nobel Peace Prize tally: Obama, 1. Trump, NIL. Scoreboard, b!tch, look up at it.
Andrew: "He’s spent his presidency raking in billions of dollars and luxuriating in the obeisance of the wealthiest and the most powerful people in the world. And yet somehow he still has a hunger to go into a black tie event to try to win the affection of people he sees on TV, no matter how hopeless his prospects."
Trump isn't a borderline personality, but what Andrew describes is borderline-esque behavior. It's classic "I hate you, don't leave me" behavior; Trump spends an evening of insulting everyone under the sun, and then wonders why people don't love him the way he'd like them to. Trump's self awareness these days is hovering near zero. The fact that the United States elected this mentally ill man twice should forever be a stain on our national character.
Trump's self-awareness has always been basically zero. A key factor is that he always wanted to be part of the elite crowd of NYC. The elite crowd of NYC wanted nothing to do with him because he is... Donald Trump--a man w/o any culture, taste, or positive personality traits.
Something that he has demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt since becoming President. Especially in Trump 2.0. A man (for example) who thinks gold leaf is the height of interior design.
Being loved by the rubes is not enough. He has no respect for them.
Since Trump cannot have their love and acceptance, he has tried to force them to at least pretend to love him... and to punish them when they do not.
He’s like the Vogon captain who has Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect captive, and before ejecting them out the airlock first wants them to tell him how much they enjoyed his poetry.
I'd rather listen to Vogon poetry than anything trump has to say. trump makes you wish that they did demolish Earth for that intergalactic highway project.
Please reinstate the posted date on articles. It's common practice to include the date along with the author's name in a byline. This was part of the site design before the upgrade. The only way to know if an article is new is the comment count. I have no doubt that "Substack" is a content management system and, as such, the only thing you need to do to include the date on an article is check a box. I will get gobs of "likes" on this comment.
Calling people who are mildly making fun of you “coastal elites” feels very Trump-y to me. Also I’m really tired of politicians acting like the only “real” Americans live in the Midwest.
That’s what pisses me off. She’s clearly playing into the anti-east coast, anti-California BS that all these Republicans use. The last thing Democrats should be doing is mimicking their harmful rhetoric. And it’s not like Michigan is Kansas. She doesn’t have to run that way to win. I don’t like it.
She means Jews, feminists, and Black people is my guess. At least that’s how “coastal elites” codes in the USA, and it’s not like she doesn’t know that very well.
Stevens represents part of Detroit, she's not taking a pot shot at African Americans or feminists here. She's been getting blasted online by a specific type of leftist podcast bros, which is clearly the context she's talking about.
Well, that sounds like her criticism is coming from the very opposite of coastal elites. She’s painting with a broad brush. I’m not in Michigan but every politician needs to handle personal criticism. It’s a very key part of the job. If she means her political opponents to the left, I must conclude she thinks her political opponents are coastal elites and vice versa. I’m trying to be fair and I think that’s fair. But I won’t believe she didn’t know what her words and simultaneous hand gestures implied and have a history.
I agree. If she specifically meant some podcast hosts, she should have said that. Coastal elites codes a very specific way. It’s also kind of pathetic that she can’t take some criticism calling her goofy and cringey.
Realistically the media should have walked out several times last night. The attack on Kaitlin Collins would have been a great time for it. His 2028 hat would have been another one.
These people put themselves in the position to be allowed to be used as props. Backslapping and laughing with an administration that treats half the country with contempt. It was a shameful display and indicative of why so many people have lost respect for mainstream media over the last decade.
As someone else pointed out, the correspondents care more about the proximity, access, and prestige of working in the White House than they do about any kind of professional or human decency.
Trump bombs thoughtlessly when it matters, and even when it doesn't. Now about this Bulwark redesign. Can we have a do-over? I don't like the typeface, I don't like the graphics, I don't like the way it presents on my phone. Bad, unnecessary, and doggone it, ugly.
Donald Trump's attempts at jokes sound like something a primitive AI program would spurt out if its only ideas for punch lines were from one-liners from Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman. To be honest, I'm wondering if his staff members actually did just that and had Trump read them.
What's really tragic is what some pundit said about it the next morning...that afterwards Trump was immediately surrounded by a bunch of people telling him how great he was. Trump absolutely believes he killed it.
Ok... I honestly, for the life of me, can't understand how that "joke" the President told is even intended to be funny. Is it just meant to be the lamest, and sort of bizarrely nonspecific, way to say "The Senators are old men... isn't that hilarious?!"
I'm from Michigan, and no one in the Bay Area or NYC or DC (where I live now) has ever made fun of how I talk. Ever. If your pitch is populist resentment, you deserve to lose. Grow up.
Peace because we're running out of bullets doesn't seem reflective of very good planning, but I'll take it. And the Dem Party Planning Commission or whatever it is seems to be distrusted because of many of its signals that, once it sucks in us plebes to vote against Trump it's going to defer back to its hefty basket of balkanized special interest groups. But certainly it has to be the opposition party of choice, and it doesn't seem a good bet that if victorious it can go back to regular order. That's just dumb.
That's the thing that worries me the most. Democrats want to win, certainly, and they're being told they have to "sound normal." So they do ... for now ... because they HAVE to.
But they don't believe any of it.
As soon as they get back into office, we can all forget about controlling the border, 'cuz that ain't happening. What's going to happen? A bunch more "ban gas stoves"-type stuff and pronoun enforcement. Land Acknowledgement, anyone?
The land acknowledgements and "ban gas stoves" weren't really major mainstream pushes. It was local stuff that might have made sense in that context. Same with "pronoun enforcement". What does that even mean? I don't love a lot of what the progressive and SSA wings of the party are pushing, but the sort of nonsense that the online slacktivist wing was always obsessing over isn't what anyone is talking about anymore.
Well, see my comment above. I can say from personal experience that, in Chicago, in front of, I dunno, 10,000 people, the most prominent Democrats in the state, including Dick Durbin and his chosen successor, emphasized EXACTLY those things by putting them right up front on the agenda.
This happened in a city where armed, masked ICE goons chucked teargas grenades at grade schoolers walking to a Halloween parade, so I think their priorities are pretty clear.
It worries me too. I was going to add--but my first comment was long enough--I didn't know that much about Kamala Harris before she ran. I knew she was VP and her background in CA, but her initial run for President petered out and I never got why she was running. But once she was handed such a horrible scenario to replace President Biden, last minute withdrawal and requirement of fidelity to all his policies, I thought she did an admirable job in warning about what a second Trump term would do. I have no real preference for who Dems should nominate in '28, but it's worrying that there's obviously a campaign to sideline her now for another run, at least to my sensibilities, and it sure seems consistent with the old guard and interests angling to carry on in the same old way. Dems should be careful--the country obviously wants to get rid of the Republicans--no wonder they want to avoid the midterms by any means--but if we get by them the Dems will be next. This shouldn't be so hard--the American people need good government, policies, and esp follow-thru, the rest of this party crap is just pissing people off cause they can't eat. Remember what the French said about that. "When the poor can't eat . . ." etc.
I've commented here before about my experience at the No Kings rally in Chicago. I was really struck by the difference between what was motivating the crowd and what the speakers talked about.
In the crowd it came down to three things: ICE, the war and Trump's corruption.
The speakers started out with a Land Acknowledgement. The first two speakers helpfully provided their pronouns and talked about LGBTQ issues. Then there were some people who talked about the importance of unions. It went on and on. The SEVENTH speaker -- by now we were about an hour and half in -- was a high school student who had to run through teargas thrown by Greg Bovino's goons to get to school. She was last.
So I have no patience at all with the argument that it's the REPUBLICANS who are pushing all this culture war nonsense. Go to one of these events. Pick one. Anywhere. Pay attention to what Democrats prioritize. They put the stuff that's REALLY important to them up front.
I won't vote for Republicans. I voted for Kamala Harris. But I have no trouble at all understanding why Democratic politicians have trouble convincing voters that they know what time it is.
I'm 76 years old and I've voted for Democrats all my life. And I've been driven crazy by the Democrats and their extreme timidity for that entire time.
I still vote for them, but good grief!! They do make it hard.
Honestly, you just reminded me of Bovino and his thugs and tear gas around Northwestern U. I have my only nephew in the vicinity and I don't recall having ever been so enraged. This isn't a game or a talking point, and we're damn lucky these "people" aren't very good at much of anything including to stand-up a fascist dictatorship. The guy who gave us 1/6 doesn't believe in voting and a democratic process--who could have foreseen that. Jesus C.
Absolutely. My level of rage has no bounds. That's why I was at No Kings. The notion that it's alright to have armed, masked, untrained, unaccountable goons terrorizing people, killing them in the streets...
I wanted to see those speakers come out and express the rage I felt. Brandon Johnson is a good public speaker. He was there. He spoke. Did he talk about ICE at all? No. He said not a word about any of it. How about Durbin? Nope. He just stood there. Juliana Stratton? Great public speaker too, but did she mention any of that? Nope. Chuy Garcia. Talked about unions. Great. Thanks for stoppin' by. Those were the heavy hitters. That's our A Team.
I started wondering why I was there. These people were conducting some kind of student rally on the quad.
Here in Illinois, we have people getting snatched off the streets and sent into "detention" in Texas. We have a US Attorney so corrupt he can't conduct a Grand Jury proceeding properly. We had a goon squad running around for weeks with no accountability at all.
And the Democrats here are talking about Land Acknowledgements. FFS. Wake up, Democrats.
The current state and future of the Democratic Party is at once irrelevant and fascinating w/ huge potential consequences.
Irrelevant because who the hell else are people supposed to vote for? That Dems are only ahead by +/- 7% on the "generic ballot" is another symptom of how sick this country is.
Fascinating because I don't think either of the parties can continue in their present form. We are at the cusp of a sea change in how we organize and think about ourselves politically and neither party seems equipped to survive much less lead those changes. That kind of fundamental institutional change will cause great hardship and lots of chaos before it's over. I only hope that it occurs without [a lot of] violence.
A big problem with the Dems is the "Old Guard" are running the show and trying the "govern" a country that no longer exists following rules that no longer apply. Then there's the "Middle Aged Guard", too wrapped around the axle about cultural issues and identity politics to see the forest for the trees. (I use those terms not to denote physical age but to haphazardly describe their time in office) Both work against the "Youngsters" who understand what needs to be done. It would be amazing if they could pull their heads out of their asses and run against authoritarianism and for improving the lives of all Americans.
As an old lady, I defer to the young people whenever possible. They are, after all, the ones who have to live in this heating, increasingly insane world we've left them. And contrary to many people of my generation, they aren't dumb or checked out at all.
Regarding parties, I really like the idea of ranked choice voting. I think it could really end the issues we have with the political parties.
I think the problem isn't "who the hell else are people supposed to vote for" but that they won't vote at all. Democratic candidates needed a higher turnout of their voters to offset the commitment from MAGA voters to cast their ballots.
Yeah, I have to admit that I have a hard time understanding the "I don't vote" mindset so I'm not often focused on that particular problem. But from where I'm sitting that's another angle on the same problem.
I see grassroots groups doing yeoman's (yeoperson's?) work trying to register voters and get out the vote, the Dem Party not so much. It isn't even necessarily lack of effort (though there's some of that) it's the insistence on sticking with the same methodologies that worked reasonably well once but don't any more. Anybody you know answer the phone for anyone other than a known number? Anyone you know ever home during "prime door knocking hours" and if they are do they come to the door and if they do, are they listening?
Since the Dems are having money issues, hopefully they have at least enough money to spin their penury into an asset. Just tell the American people, Look, we're not swimming in oligarch money like the other party because the Epstein class wants to see them get elected, not us.
The Democratic Party is sure if they just keep the course they will win. The problem is that we the voters, have moved on beyond the machine. The machine needs to be put out to pasture, and the higher tech model needs to come forward. I'm sick of hearing the same old tropes. We're in a different time.
And yes, I will vote blue because the MAGA crap has got to be stopped. BTW, I am an Independent voter!
In reading Andrew's piece and listening to Sam and Will's excellent coverage of the WHCD, I got the distinct impression that Trump wanted to be Obama, who got huge laughs and applause at that event. All these years I thought Trump hated Obama, but it's increasingly clear that he wants to BE Obama.
Trump's self awareness never attained such a lofty height as zero...
I've sometimes thought the best way to capture it is that he needs, psychologically, to be BETTER than Obama in a weird fusion of racism and narcissism. In a way, when I can view everything from a distance, I think there's a sort of classical tragedy element to it all... because Trump managed something INCREDIBLE in becoming the President at all and forcing the party to change in his image. He kind of achieved what he wanted to do, he's more transformative than Obama. I can imagine him being discussed in histories of this time more than Obama in some fashion. The only problem being of course that his warped character means that he'll be remembered for awful things and being so unpopular. If only he could have used his powers for good... but of course to do that he'd need to be a different man. I can hear the Greek chorus in my mind in a future play.
Everything but the dark epidermis.
Are you sure about that? The man uses a shirt-ton of bronzer.
I hear in Trump 1.0 he really wanted the orange tint of his bronzer to be golden.
Have you seen his skin color without it? That orange hue is better than Casper.
He hates and loves the Ring (Obama) as much as he hates and loves himself.
Solid LotR reference
I don't think he wants to *be* Obama but he wants to score higher than Obama by whatever stoopid metric is rattling around in his brain. Nobel Peace Prize tally: Obama, 1. Trump, NIL. Scoreboard, b!tch, look up at it.
Obama occupies a multi-story luxury penthouse in what remains of Trump's brain.
Those two motivations are not mutually exclusive.
Andrew: "He’s spent his presidency raking in billions of dollars and luxuriating in the obeisance of the wealthiest and the most powerful people in the world. And yet somehow he still has a hunger to go into a black tie event to try to win the affection of people he sees on TV, no matter how hopeless his prospects."
Trump isn't a borderline personality, but what Andrew describes is borderline-esque behavior. It's classic "I hate you, don't leave me" behavior; Trump spends an evening of insulting everyone under the sun, and then wonders why people don't love him the way he'd like them to. Trump's self awareness these days is hovering near zero. The fact that the United States elected this mentally ill man twice should forever be a stain on our national character.
Trump's self-awareness has always been basically zero. A key factor is that he always wanted to be part of the elite crowd of NYC. The elite crowd of NYC wanted nothing to do with him because he is... Donald Trump--a man w/o any culture, taste, or positive personality traits.
Something that he has demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt since becoming President. Especially in Trump 2.0. A man (for example) who thinks gold leaf is the height of interior design.
Being loved by the rubes is not enough. He has no respect for them.
Since Trump cannot have their love and acceptance, he has tried to force them to at least pretend to love him... and to punish them when they do not.
He also wanted to be part of the "NFL Owners Club" but they turned him away because his business practices were too criminal, even for them!
I don't think he wants the press to love him but he wants them to fear him and demonstrate their fealty by applauding and laughing at his "jokes."
He’s like the Vogon captain who has Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect captive, and before ejecting them out the airlock first wants them to tell him how much they enjoyed his poetry.
I'd rather listen to Vogon poetry than anything trump has to say. trump makes you wish that they did demolish Earth for that intergalactic highway project.
Please reinstate the posted date on articles. It's common practice to include the date along with the author's name in a byline. This was part of the site design before the upgrade. The only way to know if an article is new is the comment count. I have no doubt that "Substack" is a content management system and, as such, the only thing you need to do to include the date on an article is check a box. I will get gobs of "likes" on this comment.
Calling people who are mildly making fun of you “coastal elites” feels very Trump-y to me. Also I’m really tired of politicians acting like the only “real” Americans live in the Midwest.
Also, have they looked at a map of Michigan? It's filled with coasts populated with elites.
That’s what pisses me off. She’s clearly playing into the anti-east coast, anti-California BS that all these Republicans use. The last thing Democrats should be doing is mimicking their harmful rhetoric. And it’s not like Michigan is Kansas. She doesn’t have to run that way to win. I don’t like it.
She means Jews, feminists, and Black people is my guess. At least that’s how “coastal elites” codes in the USA, and it’s not like she doesn’t know that very well.
Stevens represents part of Detroit, she's not taking a pot shot at African Americans or feminists here. She's been getting blasted online by a specific type of leftist podcast bros, which is clearly the context she's talking about.
Well, that sounds like her criticism is coming from the very opposite of coastal elites. She’s painting with a broad brush. I’m not in Michigan but every politician needs to handle personal criticism. It’s a very key part of the job. If she means her political opponents to the left, I must conclude she thinks her political opponents are coastal elites and vice versa. I’m trying to be fair and I think that’s fair. But I won’t believe she didn’t know what her words and simultaneous hand gestures implied and have a history.
I agree. If she specifically meant some podcast hosts, she should have said that. Coastal elites codes a very specific way. It’s also kind of pathetic that she can’t take some criticism calling her goofy and cringey.
Realistically the media should have walked out several times last night. The attack on Kaitlin Collins would have been a great time for it. His 2028 hat would have been another one.
These people put themselves in the position to be allowed to be used as props. Backslapping and laughing with an administration that treats half the country with contempt. It was a shameful display and indicative of why so many people have lost respect for mainstream media over the last decade.
As someone else pointed out, the correspondents care more about the proximity, access, and prestige of working in the White House than they do about any kind of professional or human decency.
Yes! And that’s exactly the problem.
The should've walked out because Trump & co would have tried to stop them somehow.
That would have been a scene worth watching.
I hope no one picked up that damn hat at least.
Trump bombs thoughtlessly when it matters, and even when it doesn't. Now about this Bulwark redesign. Can we have a do-over? I don't like the typeface, I don't like the graphics, I don't like the way it presents on my phone. Bad, unnecessary, and doggone it, ugly.
Donald Trump's attempts at jokes sound like something a primitive AI program would spurt out if its only ideas for punch lines were from one-liners from Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman. To be honest, I'm wondering if his staff members actually did just that and had Trump read them.
What's really tragic is what some pundit said about it the next morning...that afterwards Trump was immediately surrounded by a bunch of people telling him how great he was. Trump absolutely believes he killed it.
Ok... I honestly, for the life of me, can't understand how that "joke" the President told is even intended to be funny. Is it just meant to be the lamest, and sort of bizarrely nonspecific, way to say "The Senators are old men... isn't that hilarious?!"
Especially coming from an 80 year old guy who’s definitely off his game.
“They're old and fat!” [Crowd erupts in laughter]
I'm from Michigan, and no one in the Bay Area or NYC or DC (where I live now) has ever made fun of how I talk. Ever. If your pitch is populist resentment, you deserve to lose. Grow up.
Peace because we're running out of bullets doesn't seem reflective of very good planning, but I'll take it. And the Dem Party Planning Commission or whatever it is seems to be distrusted because of many of its signals that, once it sucks in us plebes to vote against Trump it's going to defer back to its hefty basket of balkanized special interest groups. But certainly it has to be the opposition party of choice, and it doesn't seem a good bet that if victorious it can go back to regular order. That's just dumb.
That's the thing that worries me the most. Democrats want to win, certainly, and they're being told they have to "sound normal." So they do ... for now ... because they HAVE to.
But they don't believe any of it.
As soon as they get back into office, we can all forget about controlling the border, 'cuz that ain't happening. What's going to happen? A bunch more "ban gas stoves"-type stuff and pronoun enforcement. Land Acknowledgement, anyone?
The land acknowledgements and "ban gas stoves" weren't really major mainstream pushes. It was local stuff that might have made sense in that context. Same with "pronoun enforcement". What does that even mean? I don't love a lot of what the progressive and SSA wings of the party are pushing, but the sort of nonsense that the online slacktivist wing was always obsessing over isn't what anyone is talking about anymore.
Well, see my comment above. I can say from personal experience that, in Chicago, in front of, I dunno, 10,000 people, the most prominent Democrats in the state, including Dick Durbin and his chosen successor, emphasized EXACTLY those things by putting them right up front on the agenda.
This happened in a city where armed, masked ICE goons chucked teargas grenades at grade schoolers walking to a Halloween parade, so I think their priorities are pretty clear.
I don’t see anything wrong with with that. First two are just being decent and the last is a health issue. Compare that to the maga stuff!
It worries me too. I was going to add--but my first comment was long enough--I didn't know that much about Kamala Harris before she ran. I knew she was VP and her background in CA, but her initial run for President petered out and I never got why she was running. But once she was handed such a horrible scenario to replace President Biden, last minute withdrawal and requirement of fidelity to all his policies, I thought she did an admirable job in warning about what a second Trump term would do. I have no real preference for who Dems should nominate in '28, but it's worrying that there's obviously a campaign to sideline her now for another run, at least to my sensibilities, and it sure seems consistent with the old guard and interests angling to carry on in the same old way. Dems should be careful--the country obviously wants to get rid of the Republicans--no wonder they want to avoid the midterms by any means--but if we get by them the Dems will be next. This shouldn't be so hard--the American people need good government, policies, and esp follow-thru, the rest of this party crap is just pissing people off cause they can't eat. Remember what the French said about that. "When the poor can't eat . . ." etc.
I've commented here before about my experience at the No Kings rally in Chicago. I was really struck by the difference between what was motivating the crowd and what the speakers talked about.
In the crowd it came down to three things: ICE, the war and Trump's corruption.
The speakers started out with a Land Acknowledgement. The first two speakers helpfully provided their pronouns and talked about LGBTQ issues. Then there were some people who talked about the importance of unions. It went on and on. The SEVENTH speaker -- by now we were about an hour and half in -- was a high school student who had to run through teargas thrown by Greg Bovino's goons to get to school. She was last.
So I have no patience at all with the argument that it's the REPUBLICANS who are pushing all this culture war nonsense. Go to one of these events. Pick one. Anywhere. Pay attention to what Democrats prioritize. They put the stuff that's REALLY important to them up front.
I won't vote for Republicans. I voted for Kamala Harris. But I have no trouble at all understanding why Democratic politicians have trouble convincing voters that they know what time it is.
I'm 76 years old and I've voted for Democrats all my life. And I've been driven crazy by the Democrats and their extreme timidity for that entire time.
I still vote for them, but good grief!! They do make it hard.
Honestly, you just reminded me of Bovino and his thugs and tear gas around Northwestern U. I have my only nephew in the vicinity and I don't recall having ever been so enraged. This isn't a game or a talking point, and we're damn lucky these "people" aren't very good at much of anything including to stand-up a fascist dictatorship. The guy who gave us 1/6 doesn't believe in voting and a democratic process--who could have foreseen that. Jesus C.
Absolutely. My level of rage has no bounds. That's why I was at No Kings. The notion that it's alright to have armed, masked, untrained, unaccountable goons terrorizing people, killing them in the streets...
I wanted to see those speakers come out and express the rage I felt. Brandon Johnson is a good public speaker. He was there. He spoke. Did he talk about ICE at all? No. He said not a word about any of it. How about Durbin? Nope. He just stood there. Juliana Stratton? Great public speaker too, but did she mention any of that? Nope. Chuy Garcia. Talked about unions. Great. Thanks for stoppin' by. Those were the heavy hitters. That's our A Team.
I started wondering why I was there. These people were conducting some kind of student rally on the quad.
Here in Illinois, we have people getting snatched off the streets and sent into "detention" in Texas. We have a US Attorney so corrupt he can't conduct a Grand Jury proceeding properly. We had a goon squad running around for weeks with no accountability at all.
And the Democrats here are talking about Land Acknowledgements. FFS. Wake up, Democrats.
Charles - “Peace because we're running out of bullets” sounds like a new category of FIFA Peace prize!
The current state and future of the Democratic Party is at once irrelevant and fascinating w/ huge potential consequences.
Irrelevant because who the hell else are people supposed to vote for? That Dems are only ahead by +/- 7% on the "generic ballot" is another symptom of how sick this country is.
Fascinating because I don't think either of the parties can continue in their present form. We are at the cusp of a sea change in how we organize and think about ourselves politically and neither party seems equipped to survive much less lead those changes. That kind of fundamental institutional change will cause great hardship and lots of chaos before it's over. I only hope that it occurs without [a lot of] violence.
A big problem with the Dems is the "Old Guard" are running the show and trying the "govern" a country that no longer exists following rules that no longer apply. Then there's the "Middle Aged Guard", too wrapped around the axle about cultural issues and identity politics to see the forest for the trees. (I use those terms not to denote physical age but to haphazardly describe their time in office) Both work against the "Youngsters" who understand what needs to be done. It would be amazing if they could pull their heads out of their asses and run against authoritarianism and for improving the lives of all Americans.
As an old lady, I defer to the young people whenever possible. They are, after all, the ones who have to live in this heating, increasingly insane world we've left them. And contrary to many people of my generation, they aren't dumb or checked out at all.
Regarding parties, I really like the idea of ranked choice voting. I think it could really end the issues we have with the political parties.
I think the problem isn't "who the hell else are people supposed to vote for" but that they won't vote at all. Democratic candidates needed a higher turnout of their voters to offset the commitment from MAGA voters to cast their ballots.
Yeah, I have to admit that I have a hard time understanding the "I don't vote" mindset so I'm not often focused on that particular problem. But from where I'm sitting that's another angle on the same problem.
I see grassroots groups doing yeoman's (yeoperson's?) work trying to register voters and get out the vote, the Dem Party not so much. It isn't even necessarily lack of effort (though there's some of that) it's the insistence on sticking with the same methodologies that worked reasonably well once but don't any more. Anybody you know answer the phone for anyone other than a known number? Anyone you know ever home during "prime door knocking hours" and if they are do they come to the door and if they do, are they listening?
Since the Dems are having money issues, hopefully they have at least enough money to spin their penury into an asset. Just tell the American people, Look, we're not swimming in oligarch money like the other party because the Epstein class wants to see them get elected, not us.
re: the senator/wife joke bombing - had to be the delivery cuz that line killed in the Catskills when Henny Youngman used it a century ago
Not a single reporter who went to the WHCD has any self respect or deserves the respect of any American reader. They are corrupt, cowardly, or both.
The Democratic Party is sure if they just keep the course they will win. The problem is that we the voters, have moved on beyond the machine. The machine needs to be put out to pasture, and the higher tech model needs to come forward. I'm sick of hearing the same old tropes. We're in a different time.
And yes, I will vote blue because the MAGA crap has got to be stopped. BTW, I am an Independent voter!
So Trump again hits pause on bombing Iran just in time to... to carpet bomb the WHCD instead?
What, he can't walk and chew gum at the same time?