Opinion

Say, remember all that happy talk about how younger voters were going to save us in the most important elections of our lives?

Good times …

If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, “How?”

The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direct way that not only won them multiple elections but also altered the electoral map of America: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There are multiple lessons to learn from both.

Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, Sherrod Brown, and many other longtime Democrats have been pointing to this pre-1992 truth: if the Democratic Party is to win, it has to go back to its FDR/LBJ roots and become the party of the bottom 90 percent, instead of embracing those with a college education, movie and rock stars, and progressive billionaires like Mark Cuban. God bless them all, but Dems really need to reinvent themselves as the blue-collar party and repudiate much of the Clinton/Obama agenda of low taxes, free trade, and private/public partnerships (like Obamacare).

Amazingly, even The New York Times’ conservative columnist David Brooks agrees, writing: “The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. [This is actually an untrue GOP talking point.] … As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet. His Queens-born resentment of the Manhattan elites dovetailed magically with the class animosity being felt by rural people across the country. His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot.” Amen. Finally, check out this troubling article from data scientist Stephen Spoonamore raising questions about manipulation of vote totals in the swing states in a way that doesn’t appear in the non-swing states. I’m agnostic on this for the moment, but it’s worth reading; he’ll be on my program Monday.

In a ‘just kidding’ smirk for anyone who bought his schtick about lasting peace, Trump has chosen stunningly unqualified cranks and loyalists to help him burn down the government.

Matt Gaetz, more barking clown than lawyer, is under investigation relating to alleged sex with a minor. In an SNL skit that writes itself, Trump would name him Botox King Attorney General. Tulsi Gabbard, who thinks it’s ‘defensible’ to gas civilians then bomb the clinics treating them, would be Director of National Intelligence. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, the dead-eyed Stephen Miller, says red states will send their National Guard units into blue states to execute mass deportations. (Civil war, anyone?) Pete Hegseth, a white nationalist, tattoo-sporting Fox News commentator, would lead the Defense Department, condoning preemptive strikes and seeking pardons for war criminals. Too bad Jeffrey Epstein is gone, he's missing a short window of opportunity at the Education Department.

When Trump was elected, many Americans wondered if we were in for a brutal nationwide reign of terror, or if he’d merely content himself with more tax cuts for billionaires and a repeat of his last term’s personally profitable crony capitalism.

While the mainstream media has treated him (for years) as if he’s just another, albeit quirky, politician, others among us, as Carole Cadwalladr noted at The Power, remember that, when Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines (whose constitution is modeled after ours), within a mere 6 months he was imprisoning opposition politicians, protesters, and journalists.

Donald Trump campaigned against consensual reality and won. Every plank of his platform – from the economy to immigration to abortion – was based on easily provable lies.

Despite Trump’s bombastic assertions to the contrary, inflation is down, growth is up, illegal border crossings are down, crime is down, and vaccines work great. Tariffs are taxes on imports and American companies say they’re planning to raise prices.

This morning I want to start with some facts by vividly setting the scene …

Donald Trump is a dirty, old man, and a convicted felon, who attacked the United States of America, and most white people are completely good with it. Their notion of law and order, and Christian values are as completely phony and as pathetically weak as they are.

America has made a terrible mistake. Despite everything we’ve seen from the right, voters have nonetheless moved toward it.

Rather than the mandate Trump/Musk/Christo nationalists are claiming from the election, however, US voters merely reflected the same pattern emerging from around the globe, almost universally: Incumbent leaders and parties worldwide have been defeated, or their majorities reduced, in a global ‘radicalizing effect’ still lingering from the Covid economy. Across the political spectrum, voters have punished incumbent parties in Japan, South Africa, Italy, Austria, the UK, France, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands. As Matthew Yglesias wrote for the NYT, “everywhere you look in the world of affluent democracies, the exact same thing is happening: The incumbent party is losing and often losing quite badly.”

We just elected a guy who’s fine with the planet melting down, kids getting shot in school, insurance companies going back to denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and wanting to weaponize the federal government in a way dictators do.

What happened?

I have absolutely no regrets.

This time, I fully knew what my country was capable of, and I did everything I could to work toward a better outcome.