Religious warriors and cynical centrists won’t stop scheming
No rest for the weary
Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.
The first full week of the prologue to Trump 2.0 has felt like something of the Twilight Zone. We shook off a nightmare, trudged forward with our lives, and now the old ghosts are slowly reappearing, priming us for the chaos and stupidity that Americans actively invited back into our lives.
We’ve had dumb presidents and we’ve had evil presidents, but never one with such an insatiable appetite for attention and zero impulse control. During Trump’s first term, it was impossible for anybody with any interest in the public welfare to go more than an hour without being forced to think about him, which is how I wound up starting this newsletter in the first place.
The next four years — or however long Trump lasts — are going to be exhausting, and as I’ll discuss below, we already seeing some Democrats responding in the worst ways possible.
This weekend, I’ll have a feature on an ultra-successful campaign that I think can be instructive for anyone invested in making things better everywhere.
Note: This is going to be a long four years — and perhaps much longer, if Donald Trump and his newly empowered Republican Party accomplish their goals.
As right-wing media metastasizes, billionaires use outlets as tools of appeasement, mainstream media fails, and corporations sell off news divisions, we need independent media to step into the breach. Please make this work possible — just $5 a month makes all the difference.
Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters sent an email to every local school district superintendent in the state on Thursday night that instructed them to show a video about school prayer to all of their students, then email it to their parents.
The video features Walters at his desk, announcing the establishment of Oklahoma’s new Department of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, which he portrays as a necessary bulwark in a struggle for the moral future of the United States.
“For too long in this country we have seen the radical left attack individuals’ religious liberties in our schools,” Walters insists. “We have also seen patriotism mocked and a hatred for this country pushed by woke teachers’ unions.”
From there, Walters offers a brief prayer, asking the almighty to bless President-elect Donald Trump before moving on to parents, teachers and children.
Walters previously tried to bless Trump with millions in taxpayer dollars with a scheme that would have forced the Oklahoma Department of Education to purchase 55,000 copies of a Trump-endorsed bible that retails for $59.99. The department was compelled to backpedal after the plan was exposed by a local news site and outrage ensued. The state’s request for proposal was amended and the deadline extended until late October.
Walters did at least manage to purchase 500 Trump bibles for use in AP Government classes, according to a video he posted to Twitter on Thursday.
Superintendents in at least seven of Oklahoma’s biggest districts declined to show the prayer video to students, a stance blessed up by the state’s attorney general’s office.
“There is no statutory authority for the state schools superintendent to require all students to watch a specific video," a spokesman for AG Gentner Drummond. "Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents’ rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights.”
Drummond and Walter have clashed on a number of occasions over the latter’s aggressive efforts to inject religion into public schools. The AG refused to have his office represent the state against a challenge to the constitutionality of a Catholic public charter school. The state Supreme Court ruled that the school, which Walters promoted, violated the separation of church and state.
Dangerous nominees and cynical centrists
President-elect Donald Trump has spent the past few days staffing his cabinet and executive agencies based seemingly on fan fiction written by men heavily invested in crypto and powdered milk.
The list of nominees is a who’s who of Fox News regulars, perverts, and grifters. Many were chosen for being loyal Trump sycophants, others as reward for helping him get elected. Several nominees seem to be tests to see just how far Republicans in the Senate are willing to debase themselves. Some check multiple boxes. It’s a different kind of cabinet than the one that professional conservatives helped Trump assemble the first time around, with more clowns than committed movement conservatives.
For all the justified anger and disbelief over picks like Matt Gaetz, who may soon be officially exposed as a child predator, I’m actually more interested in the deputies and staffers who fill out these departments. They are the appointees likely to be plucked from the right-wing clone army, programmed to bring down the government.
In 2025, America enters its Find Out era
That said, we’ve spent a decade of talking about Trump as an American Stalin and warning that he represents the fascist endpoint of the republic, only to see him win the popular vote with a multiracial coalition that gave Republicans full control of government. At this point, there is no political utility in getting the vapors over every new nominee, because voters simply don’t seem to remember the chaos of Trump’s first term or believe that he is as bad as MSNBC hosts insist.
Apocryphal warnings come off like patronizing finger-wagging from the elites, unfortunately, so it is going to require tangible harms for Americans to turn on Trump once again. It’s remarkable to say that about a guy who tried to overthrow the government, but the reality is that there is no longer any shared understanding of reality, the result of a shattering of public trust in the people and institutions that were supposed to guide and protect us.
There is no better example of this deterioration than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s rapid ascent from pariah to Trump’s nominee to run the Health and Human Services Department: Four years removed from being rescued from a mass death plague by the science of vaccines, the US is going to have a literal worm-brained anti-vaxxer as its top health official.
Kennedy is probably the one nominee who could be taken down with a full-blown backlash campaign, given his track record and the danger he presents beyond the execution of political orders. Beyond that, I think that the best use of progressives’ time over the next few months involves focusing inward.
The priorities: moving Democrats beyond the corporate neoliberal shills vying to re-seize total control of the party, as well as concrete actions that lawmakers can take to stop or at least mitigate the disasters that Trump and the GOP plan to unleash upon everyday Americans.
The two tasks are intrinsically linked, because there are some Democrats who would rather see the party move to the right than pursue a populist progressive agenda. And liberals, as much as they saw through Trump, are themselves very susceptible to cynical strongmen acts who peddle fear and revanchism.
The war for the Democratic Party begins
Tonight, Politico published a piece that captures this dynamic in annoyingly clear terms. The authors, looking to stir intramural drama, granted a bunch of DNC members the comfort of anonymity so that they could snipe at the party’s supposed obsession with “identity politics.” That’s a catch-all buzzword, but in this case, it clearly implies gender identity.
“I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us,” one anonymous DNC member from Florida said. “You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”
We don’t know who said this, but it’s rich coming from a political operative from Florida, where Democrats have been pummeled into irrelevance over the past three election cycles. Nowhere in the story is there any example of this supposed Democratic fealty to wokeness, because other than some executive nondiscrimination orders and White House meetings, Joe Biden didn’t do much at all to help trans people. Democrats in Congress did even less.
Democrats like the anonymous coward from Florida can only cite the modern Willie Horton-style ads that Republicans made ubiquitous on television this fall.
This isn’t just a matter of ideological jousting, either. DNC chair Jamie Harrison is not running for re-election this coming spring, and without an influential outgoing president or obvious next nominee, leadership of the party is going to be up in the air for the first time in two decades.
The field is wide open, and while there aren’t any declared candidates, speculation has swirled around progressive, organizing-focused state chairs like Wisconsin’s Ben Wikler and Minnesota’s Ken Martin. Unfortunately, it looks as if former Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who was allowed to cool his heels in Japan after being chased out of Chicago, may also be running.
Emanuel re-emerged earlier this week in an interview earlier that proved that he is incapable of any kind of personal development. Ripping on “identity politics,” Emanuel, who has spent his career servicing Wall Street donors (including literally working for them), deliberately conflated the economic populism that works for Democrats with the cultural conservatism that works for Republicans.
That’s one reason certain Senate candidates, including members of the ’06 class such as Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown, outran Harris in red states, he said. And it explains why winning candidates Tammy Baldwin, Ruben Gallego, and Jacky Rosen have white-knuckled their way to victory. They didn’t let their races get nationalized, and they worked overtime to talk less about Trump and the culture wars, and more about the kitchen table.
“We don’t understand that working-class people are more than just the summation of their wallet,” Emanuel said. “They have kids that go to school. They care about public safety. Like, we are telling people crime is going down, but they go to CVS and everything is locked up and no one is working there? That doesn’t compute, I’m sorry. Save your academic presentations for the Aspen Ideas Festival.”
Kamala Harris’s problem was not that she was too woke; she ran as a prosecutor, told Oprah that she’s a gun owner, refused to allow even one anti-genocide activist speak at the DNC, came down hard right on immigration, and did not talk about trans people whatsoever. The issue was that she did not run on economic populism, which is the exact opposite of the kind of politics that Rahm is known for pushing.
On the other hand, those Senate candidates did focus on economic issues, which goes a long way toward explaining why they so dramatically outperformed Kamala Harris in their states.
The more populist the candidate, the more they outran Harris, both in closer states and states where the vice president got blown out of the water. You could never imagine Rahm supporting someone like independent union leader Dan Osborn, who managed to outrun Harris by 14 points in Nebraska. Osborn fell short of flipping the state, but he did win Nebraska’s second Congressional district, which went for Trump by 13 points.
One final note on this: Rep. Josh Gottheimer officially announced that he’s running for governor of New Jersey, entering an increasingly crowded Democratic primary field. Unless former Sen. Bob Menendez decides to run from prison, Gottheimer will be for my money the biggest sleaze in the race; former state Senate President Steve Sweeney is more of a crook, but Gottheimer’s long history of shilling for Wall Street and private equity, as well as his lead role in killing more significant prescription drug price reform, means that he’s hurt far more people.
The field will continue to grow, but for now, the progressive pick here is likely to be Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, who has also been running the longest. If you are itching for a way to get engaged in an important election in the coming year, the Democratic primary in New Jersey is a good one.
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I like the plausible outline you see for the far right take over but there are opposition groups, such as Pregnancy Justice that have been fighting and winning stste by state. I see this as like 1969-72 where many groups eventually checked abusive power in an upswell that incorporated many formerly opposed. (But they will have to suffer from unchecked rt. extremism first). I am on a fixed income and can’t offer payment. But appreciate your work.
Why is Rahm Emmanuel?