The Daily Populous Sunday February 23rd, 2025 morning edition
Authored by jacobin.com and submitted by brave_plank

For years, prominent Democrats warned us against Elon Musk and the latent authoritarianism of Donald Trump. But now that these two billionaires have created a constitutional crisis as they thumb their noses at democracy and lay waste to the government, the leadership of the supposed opposition party is flailing.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries pathetically unveiled a new nickname for Trump this week: “Captain Chaos.” People across the political spectrum cringed. As one conservative New York City councilwoman asked, “Why do they insist on making him sound cool?” The moment, to many, evoked Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated moniker “Dangerous Donald.”

Like his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer, Jeffries seems entirely unequal to this moment. He has also started a — wait for it — “task force” on Trump and Musk’s destructive and illegal assaults on the federal government and its employees. In defense of this project, it does involve Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, one of the few House Democrats who does seem to be fighting tirelessly to expose and prevent the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) destruction. But the term “task force” almost seems deliberately chosen to sound pathetic and useless.

Earlier this month, Jeffries whined, “What leverage do we have?” Even respectable voices in the mainstream media are losing patience with him: a Bloomberg opinion headline Friday read, “Hakeem Jeffries needs to get it together.”

“It’s their government,” Jeffries has said of the Republicans. No, Hakeem, it is our government. The government belongs to the people, not to the unelected Elon Musk. Trump was elected president, but that does not make him “king,” as he proclaimed himself the other day on Truth Social when announcing the end of New York City’s hard-fought congestion pricing policy.

This Democratic weakness is particularly catastrophic given that people are ready to support opposition to Trump.

Let’s look at his “ratings,” a metric that the former reality star is particularly obsessed with. Throughout this month, according to a range of opinion polls, voters have disapproved of Trump in proportions ranging from 42 percent to a whopping (and historic) 54 percent.

Democratic voters extend that dissatisfaction to their own party. According to a recent CNN poll, a large majority, 73 percent, of Democratic-leaning voters feel that Democrats in Congress are doing too little to oppose Trump. And the approval rating of Congress itself is at an all-time low, suggesting that voters would also like to see some opposition from Trump’s own party too.

The Democratic leaders’ inaction is particularly bewildering in the context of a growing opposition movement.

All over the country, federal workers organized by the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), a new group that has been preparing for months for this onslaught, Jenny Brown has reported for Labor Notes, have been protesting Trump and Musk’s massive and in many cases illegal firings. Musk has begun the process of firing 200,000 federal workers, and an estimated 20,000 have already been dismissed. The government functions affected include food safety, environmental enforcement, veterans affairs, consumer financial protection, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and much more.

On Wednesday, such workers took part in a nationwide day of action, gathering in over thirty cities for “Save Our Services” rallies, including in Boise, Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. Hundreds rallied in front of the Department of Health and Human Services, objecting to recent firings and their impacts on such necessary public goods as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease research. Federal workers have also been targeting Tesla showrooms, from Red Hook, Brooklyn to San Francisco, to highlight the unelected and especially unpopular critical role of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, in the rampage.

The federal workers’ resistance is growing and is supported by citizenry outside the government workforce, organized by groups like Indivisible, who don’t want to see billionaire Musk eviscerating the numerous vital services that the government provides, as well as more conservative people who are showing up in American Revolution costumes. All over the country, on Presidents’ Day, “No Kings” protests were unified in opposition to the Trump-Musk power grab.

Rather than taking these protests as a sign of the growing grassroots opposition to Trump and a mandate to do everything they can to stand up to him, Jeffries and others in the Democratic leadership have simply been annoyed by the resistance, according to an Axios article describing them as “pissed” and “very frustrated” with the activists.

Not all Democratic leaders have been asleep at the wheel. Although New York governor Kathy Hochul has refused to remove compromised New York City mayor Eric Adams from office, she has been standing up for the city’s independence in resisting Trump’s efforts to dismantle congestion pricing. Senator Chris Van Hollen and others have been showing up to the protests.

But the Democratic Party leadership in Washington appears hellbent on proving that they’re the only federal workers who really don’t deserve their jobs.

StormOk7544 on February 22nd, 2025 at 21:14 UTC »

Voters are in a coma. How much reporting was there on Musk giving out 1M a day to register Republicans? And no one cared. Voters are immune to this stuff. I don’t think anything will change unless there’s severe economic pain.

brain_overclocked on February 22nd, 2025 at 21:07 UTC »

Christ, Democrats — perhaps start by fucking addressing the American public every single day? Youtube, ads, broadcast air time, anything! Use your goddamn social media/communications teams to broadcast the protests that mainstream media is reluctant to cover. Start interviewing all of the fired federal workers. Start drawing media attention to yourselves, fucking bang pots if you have to. Show the receipts of how the Trump admin is screwing the general public. Hammer over, and over, how grocery prices are not being addressed by this Admin, juxtapose it with the several dozens of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman actions that this Admin is prioritizing. Expose how the Admin is trying to end no-fault divorce, how Musk is buying the Wisconsin judicial election, how Trump recently said that there won't be blue states in 2026. Do AMAs every single day. Get on podcasts. Start meeting with union leaders. Show people how Trump's actions are affecting their lives right now, make it fucking personal, throw up easy to use tools to demonstrate how much they are losing. Show people how a rising tide lifts all boats, start combating this inane zero-sum rhetoric being pushed by conservative media, combat the "empathy is a sin" nonsense. Lead a general strike. Help grow people's self-sufficiency and community organization in the face of an autocratic government.

If you can't do it, then step out of the goddamn way and let the members of your party who actually understand how to communicate take the lead. There are rich fucking Democrats among you, put some skin in the game and put up that wealth for the public good.

Hidden_Landmine on February 22nd, 2025 at 21:04 UTC »

So was/is our entire national defense industry. All those tax dollars for the NSA, CIA, FBI and they couldn't even arrest trump despite having all the evidence they needed. Unfortunately it took pretty much everyone not doing their jobs to get to this point.