In Washington, Republicans are trying to bring a budget bill to term that will slash programs for the needy to furnish a one-time payout for plutocrats, throw millions off their health insurance, and explode the budget deficit. Beyond that, we have the ongoing crimes of the administration that I laid out last week, up to and including the needless deaths that will occur at the hands of Elon Musk’s destruction of critical aid agencies and Robert F. Kennedy’s lethal grotesqueries of public health. All of which is to say: There will be no reason in the world for any Democrat worthy of office to be on any kind of apology tour by the time 2028 rolls around.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be critical litmus tests for Democrats—or that all of them will pass with flying colors. Right now, the most important way that the Democratic leaders of the future are going to distinguish themselves will be the extent to which they devote their lives to fighting Trump, tooth and nail. As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall wrote this week:
The overriding problem Democrats have today is a general belief that they’re not effective at fighting for what they believe in or what the country needs to be protected from. There’s a related, but secondary issue that they worry that Dems are most focused on issues that are obscure or not connected to the lives of the great majority of people struggling to make ends meet. That lack of fight is shattering for self-identified Democrats as well as highly damaging for genuine independents and low-information voters who genuinely flip from party to party from election to election. That is overwhelmingly the challenge Democrats have right now.
“The idea,” Marshall adds, “that up-for-grabs voters are waiting for important signals out of a bizarre intra-party score settling over Joe Biden’s age is just such unreal bubble thinking that it beggars belief.” Meanwhile, if we are looking to recent events for Democrats failing those crucial litmus tests, consider the fact that 16 of them joined Trump’s Senate acolytes in passing a crypto-friendly deregulation bill, in just the latest example of the party’s willingness to cave to that scam industry. The fact that this bill would most likely set the clock ticking on the next great financial crisis, in much the same way that the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 paved the way for the last one, is to my mind a more massive failure than anything that Biden’s inner circle did as they conspired to hide his enfeeblement.
Impossible-Topic9558 on August 30th, 2025 at 16:15 UTC »
"We are watching and we are taking names"
Verum_Orbis on August 30th, 2025 at 15:38 UTC »
The USA will have to go through a process of demagaification the same way Germany went through process of denazification.
ChiGuy6124 on August 30th, 2025 at 15:29 UTC »
" He has firmly planted himself in the same “fighter” lane as California Governor Gavin Newsom—the better to distinguish himself from, say, whatever it is that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer thinks she’s been doing lately."
"Pritzker ended up being the headline figure of that Monday news conference, thanks to the simplicity and directness of his message. “Mr. President, do not come to Chicago,” he said. “You are neither wanted here nor needed here.” He offered some satisfying digs at the evident decline of Trump’s mental faculties. He hit many of the right notes for someone who wants to establish himself as a leader of a dissident movement. But Pritzker saved his best for last, when he promised to take the fight against Trump a step farther than most Democrats have allowed themselves."
" Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: We are watching and we are taking names."
"This is where Pritzker has leveled up over his fellow Democrats, by promising a future of accountability and retribution for the destruction Trump and his minions are doing to the constitutional order and our individual freedoms. As I wrote back in May, the Trump White House and the GOP are no longer a political party by any definition; rather, they are a sort of criminal syndicate with an extensive portfolio of white collar crimes, violent offenses against our civil rights, and an ongoing sort of imposed cultural tyranny that is killing off the well-paying jobs of the future by decimating academia, and literally sparking public health crises at home and abroad through the Lysenkoism of key administration figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr."
“There is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate.” The only thing we were lacking then was an ambitious political figure who was willing to say that they were ready and willing to make accountability a key plank in their platform. Pritzker has made a timely arrival."
"As Discourse Blog’s Rafi Schwartz points out, this isn’t the only uniquely consequential aspect of Pritzker’s speech. The Illinois governor—channeling the feelings of so many who’ve forewarned of what was to come in a second Trump term—told those assembled, “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”
"And it sure sounds like Pritzker wants to put his hands to the task right now.“If you hurt my people,” he said, “nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.”
"In a week where Beltway Democrats passed their time pointlessly debating whether or not they were using words like “food insecurity” too much, and congratulating each other for calling the D.C. occupation a “stunt” or a “distraction,” hearing a Democratic politician speak in plain English is pleasingly bracing. These are, indeed, encouraging words to hear after Democrats long implored us to “look forward, not backward” and allowed misrule to go unpunished, thereby paving the road for Trump’s fascist second act."