Good morning and Happy Wednesday. I’m happy you’re here today.
A few days ago, The Atlantic published a piece titled “The Democrats Aren’t Built for This,” which made the rounds on social media, and on which everyone had an opinion. And while I, too, grind my teeth over the constant narrative of “Why did Democrats lose to Trump?” instead of the real question, “Why has the GOP been taken over by a crew of murderous sociopaths?”, I get it. I shake my head in disgust at congressional Democrats roughly 500 times a week.
There is no way to make me white hot with rage faster than to ask me, “What do you want Schumer/Jeffries to do? They’re in the minority!” Clearly, there’s a divide in the party between those who want to wait Trump out until the Midterms and those who want the Dems to go all Mitch McConnell on Congressional Republicans and obstruct them in every way possible. I’m in the latter camp.
So I found this piece illuminating about how party insiders think, even as I wanted to throttle Democratic Chair Ken Martin.
Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, who co-leads the Democrats’ candidate-recruiting efforts for the House, told me Democrats need to project confidence in their policy positions: “People respond to confidence, and they respond to strength.” But because Trump and the Republicans have been so effective in slapping extreme liberal caricatures on their opponents, Democrats are gun-shy. “We can’t be apologetic for our own positions, and second-guessing ourselves, and being weak and timid about it,” Crow said.
“I’ve never seen the party so unsure of itself, and so kind of lacking its own footing,” Colin Allred, the former NFL player and representative from Texas who lost the 2024 Senate race to Ted Cruz, told me. Allred, who is running for a Dallas-area House seat, described the state of the Democratic Party’s brand as “terrible.”
Crow and Allred get right to the heart of the matter. Guys like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are too afraid of alienating centrist voters to move further to the left, where they might actually have some principles to stand on. Instead, they hem and haw on issues like trans rights and immigration, instead of just stating plainly that the trans community is entitled to the same rights as everyone else and that ICE is a monster that should be abolished. This is why politicians like Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and AOC (D-NY) resonate with people — they take firm positions on divisive topics, and they stand by them.
If you follow me on social media, you know that I’m no fan of Gavin Newsom, who platforms the extreme right, throws trans kids under the bus, and brutalizes the homeless. But he’s right about the Democrats’ response to what Trump is doing to America.
As I spoke with Newsom, I realized that pretty much everything he said was some variation of “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” Conversations with him on this topic tend to be a bacchanal of profanity and exasperation. “Wake the fuck up; wake the fuck up,” he kept saying. “This thing is being torn down.”
Newsom’s aggressive trolling of Trump has helped combat the long-standing view of him as a slick opportunist and has won him new admirers. “When people see someone fighting, they get really, really excited, and when they see someone folding, they get really, really demoralized,” Beto O’Rourke, the former representative from Texas and onetime presidential candidate, told me.
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There’s a need for fighters, O’Rourke said, because Trump is now a “cornered animal”—one that happens to be “the most powerful animal in the country, who controls the House, the Senate, the White House, the Supreme Court, the National Guard, and has a secretary of defense who is in concert with him on using American cities as the training grounds for the military. So this is some dark stuff.”
Onto this battlefield, we see Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries walk with their bullet points on ICE reforms to fund DHS. It makes no sense, particularly as Republicans won’t even agree to basic protections that are already in the Constitution, like needing a search warrant to enter a residence and a prohibition against deporting American citizens. And while Americans have taken to the streets to defend their communities and what they were told America stood for, Democrats have decided to pivot to talking about the economy ahead of the November midterms.
Just got this forwarded. Here are the talking points Schumer's team just emailed out to their allies TODAY - this afternoon. The words "Minnesota" or "ICE" don't appear anywhere here.
— Murshed Zaheed (@murshedz.bsky.social) 2026-01-15T20:52:38.313Z
It’s hard to imagine a party more out of touch with what its base wants. Yes, the GOP is vulnerable on the economy, and that’s a great thing for Democrats. But look at what “regular” Americans are screaming about in their local town halls. It’s ICE. It’s the secret police kidnapping people off the streets. It’s losing their healthcare. It’s watching their hardworking neighbors disappear into concentration camps.
Americans may have voted solely on inflation last November, but given what’s happened since, it’s hard to imagine that issue will rule at the polling places again this time around. The time for Democrats to have the huge fight over the economy was before the Big Ugly Bill passed. That ship has sailed. Now, ICE is funded through 2029, and there’s little Democrats can do to rein it in. And what did they get in exchange? Not much. The Senate didn’t even vote on extending ACA subsidies.
Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown isn’t a strong enough metaphor for the Democrats constantly falling for whatever ruse Republicans use on them.
And it’s not just congressional Democrats. “Regular” Americans, most faced with the creep of authoritarianism for the first time in their lives, have shown a thousand times the courage of those in positions of power.
He was disappointed that it had taken so long for a robust resistance to Trump to coalesce. “My complaint is not about regular folks,” Pritzker said. “What I’ve been frustrated by is people who hold leadership positions. And I’m not talking about elected Democrats only. I’m talking about CEOs of companies. I’m talking about boards of universities. I’m talking about people who have influence, who have the ability to stand up, but are afraid.”
Pritzker talks a lot about Nazis. He does not hesitate to compare Trump’s authoritarian gambits to the rise of the Third Reich. A descendant of Jewish refugees whose family fled Ukrainian pogroms, Pritzker was talking like this even before the Chicago raids. In February 2025, he gave a speech about how “it took 53 days for the Nazis to tear down a constitutional republic,” he told me. “Authoritarianism happens fast.”
Even as we in Illinois support our governor, we, too, have been frustrated by a lack of action. Illinois is a solidly blue state, on par with California and Massachusetts, despite being constantly lumped in with other “purple” Midwest states like Minnesota and Wisconsin. So why aren’t we redistricting to take away congressional seats from the GOP? Why are we not talking about withholding federal income tax from a federal government that is using our money to send federal agents into our streets and to deny us funding already appropriated by Congress? Why aren’t our leaders standing up for us the way we are standing up for each other? These are questions I’m hearing more and more from friends and neighbors.
It was with all this swirling around in my head that I came across this piece, about Democrats preparing to investigate corporations that have bent the knee to Trump. Trump’s predilection for bribes disguised as legitimate payments is well known, and he’s turned the Oval Office into his own personal mint, increasing his net worth by $1.4 billion since taking office in January, 2025.
The corporate pilgrimage to Donald Trump started before he even took office. Millions flowed to his inaugural committee, then to the White House ballroom. Diversity programs were not-so-quietly dismantled. Public praise was issued on cue. Tech giants, oil companies, defense contractors and Fortune 500 CEOs all made their calculations about how to stay on Trump’s good side.
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For now, Democrats are in the minority — limited to issuing strongly worded letters and exercising a mostly toothless investigative authority to rein in a president who has applied a maximalist approach to executive authority. But with increasingly rosy prospects for the party to win back the House in 2026, Democratic lawmakers are laying the groundwork for a sweeping expansion of oversight targeting the companies and CEOs who have done business with the Trump family, or sought favorable regulatory treatment, merger approval, or policy changes from the administration — from Paramount to Palantir.
It is a strategy that Democrats believe could reshape corporate America’s relationship with Trump: By threatening future investigations into companies that curry favor with the administration, they hope to make CEOs think twice before opening their wallets or bending to presidential pressure.
This is something I’ve heard Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-NY) talk about quite a bit, and it’s the kind of thing Democrats should be leaning heavily into. “Think long and hard about what you agree to with this guy, because as soon as we get control of Congress back, we’re coming for you.” This is what Democrats should have been saying in 2025, as we watched universities, big law firms, and corporations line up to bend the knee to Trump.
“Trump’s running the presidency like a mob boss and everyone who has agreed to bribe him is a target for an investigation,” said a senior congressional staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. “And although there’s a spectrum of wrongdoing with Elon Musk at one end and not much more than small businesses trying to get by on the other, there are very wealthy CEOs who know better. And we’re taking names.”
While all this sounds very hopeful, I have my doubts that anyone will follow through on it. If Democrats do take back Congress in the fall — and the White House somewhere down the road — putting our federal government back together is going to take so much time and energy that I fear the idea of “retribution” is going to fall by the wayside. I can already hear Chuck Schumer and Patty Murray telling us we need to “move on in order to heal.” But I, like many Americans, I suspect, do not want to move on. I will heal by watching every single person who enabled this administration pay for their role. And that’s the only way I’ll heal.
As town halls and “listening sessions” with our reps ramp up ahead of the midterms, the American people must make it clear that those who cleared the decks for Trump to do as he pleased can not walk away scot-free. They must be held accountable. That includes bureaucrats like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Stephen Miller, corporations like Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook, and everyone else who played a part in the Nazi-esque hellscape we currently live in.
The High Note
Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.
I’ve discovered short-track speedskating. Sure, I remember Apolo Ohno winning back in the day, but have you ever seen a guy cross the finish line backwards and force a photo finish between his butt and another guy’s skate?
The video: www.tiktok.com/@olympics/vi...
— Julie DiCaro (@juliedicaro.bsky.social) 2026-02-17T19:04:21.509Z
Now you have. You can also watch it here, but YouTube won’t let me embed it.
Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
