NO COLLECTIVE ACTION, PLEASE, WE'RE BILLIONAIRES

This might be the most disheartening sentence I've read this morning:

House Republicans raised $35.2 million last night from a glitzy black tie dinner with President Donald Trump, money that will be used for the reelection campaigns of dozens of lawmakers.

It's disheartening because I know how much power rich donors have in our political system. It's clear that the rich don't like President Trump's tariffs, and it's clear (to me at least) that donor pressure on congressional Republicans could help get a bill passed that would require congressional approval for new tariffs, with a backup plan of an impeachment threat if Trump won't comply, but it's also clear that rich Republican donors don't want to use the power they have, either out of fear, or because they're in the denial stage of grief and don't believe Trump is serious about a prolonged trade war, or because they know they're stinking rich and will be the last people in this society to suffer if -- when -- things go haywire.

A NOTUS story (free to read here) makes clear that rich donors aren't ready to use the power they have:

Some notable donors have openly questioned the president’s strategy, and a Republican strategist familiar with the party’s big donors said they were aware of one major contributor who temporarily suspended all political giving because of the economic uncertainty related to the tariffs.

Just one major contributor has suspended donations -- temporarily!

Other longtime donors could do the same if economic conditions don’t improve, warned the source, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive fundraising issues.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them are reevaluating where things are at the moment,” the strategist said. “And it’s early off in the cycle that they can do that without any real repercussions.”

And by "repercussions" they mean handing control of one or both houses of Congress to Democrats, which they feel would be a fate worse than death, and even a fate worse than control of Congress by a party that is complicit in the total destruction of the global economy. So even if additional big donors stop giving, they're likely to make up for it as elections get closer. So it will almost be as if they never suspended donations at all!

Clearly there's an element of fear at work here, as The Atlantic Jonathan Chait notes (free to read here):

A few days after “Liberation Day,” the MAGA financier Bill Ackman briefly succumbed to despair. “I don’t think this was foreseeable,” he posted on X. “I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.”

Among the MAGA faithful, this statement amounts to a shocking apostasy. And yet, even so, it was tightly circumscribed. Ackman wrote the entire passage in the passive voice—“this was foreseeable”; “rationality would be paramount”—omitting the need to identify any protagonist behind these disasters. Like so many Trump supporters, especially among the financial elite, he refused to believe that Trump would do the things he’d promised to do, precisely because they were so irrational, without pausing to ask if the very fact that Trump was promising to do crazy things was itself a reason to keep him out of power. Ackman’s little soliloquy ended, fittingly, on a note of personal contrition. The only person he could blame was himself.

Some of the most powerful men in the world are clearly terrified of Trump, Chait writes:

Ackman, firmly grasping the euphemistic protocols necessary to jockey for influence in MAGA world, tried a number of gambits. He blamed corrupt advisers for manipulating the great leader: “Just figured out why @howardlutnick is indifferent to the stock market and the economy crashing. He and Cantor are long bonds. He profits when our economy implodes” (a charge he subsequently withdrew).

Ackman wrote that surely the great and powerful Trump wouldn't engage in such an obvious act of destruction as this tariff war on his own -- it must be the fault of Howard Lutnick and his former firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, because they have big investments in bonds. (If that were true, it would have been a terrible gamble -- right now bonds are plunging along with stocks.)

Chait continues:

[Ackman] tried flattery: “An important characteristic of a great leader is a willingness to change course when the facts change or when the initial strategy is not working. We have seen Trump do this before. Two days in, however, it is much too early to form a view about his tariff strategy.”

When even these indirect complaints drew pushback, Ackman reaffirmed his unwavering loyalty: “Some have misinterpreted my thoughts on tariffs. I am totally supportive of President @realDonaldTrump using tariffs to eliminate tariffs and unfair trading practices of our trading partners, and to induce more investment and manufacturing in our country.”

Weak. Weak. Come on, Bill. Try harder. Rally some of your rich friends.

But this is a collective action problem, and rich donors aren't much for collective action, unless they're colluding to fix prices or engage in some other practice more directly related to business.

Also, they'll barely suffer, while the rest of us are on the street selling pencils like it's 1932.

And it's hard for the rich to shake the belief that Republicans are always better for them. In normal times, they ignore the strong economic growth that usually comes when a Democrat is in the White House, because the improved cashflow to their businesses seems less important than the fact that Democrats want them to pay slightly higher tax rates and scrutinize their businesses and deals somewhat more closely. They see what Trump is actually doing and they still seem to believe it's not something he would do. And while they remain in this state of denial, we'll be badly hurt. But the leopard is coming for their faces, too.

TRUMP DOESN'T WANT ANYTHING IN THE WORLD TO BE GREATER THAN HE IS

One sentence in Paul Krugman's latest Substack post jumped out at me:

By now it’s obvious to anyone willing to see — which many people still aren’t — that Donald Trump is, in practice, waging war against American greatness.

Krugman is right. From his early fight against USAID, which diminished America's soft power worldwide, to his tariff mania, which gives America a trade policy suitable to an emerging country rather than a global superpower, Trump is clearly making America less great, whether he consciously realizes it or not. Beyond tariffs, Krugman cites Trump and Elon Musk's attacks on the functionality of the Social Security website, with further assaults on the system clearly to come. Krugman also cites Robert Kennedy's vaccine skepticism and the administration's "savage funding cuts and layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes for Health," which "are already having a catastrophic effect on medical research." Krugman writes:

Even if research funding is restored, even if NIH and other agencies try to rebuild, U.S. science will have suffered huge long-term damage. So will the world trading system, which will never be the same even if the Trump tariffs are reversed, and the effectiveness of the federal bureaucracy, which will be impaired for many years even if DOGE’s depredations stop.

I think Trump wants this because he doesn't want any entity in the world -- not just anyone, but anything -- to be more powerful than he is.

He knows on a gut level that the America of NATO and other global alliances, and of soft-power agencies such as USAID, was big and powerful before he entered politics and would have remained big and powerful long after he dies if he'd merely made minimal changes to them, as he did in his first term. So they had to be brought down to size.

The same is true of America as an economic force. The country was big and powerful when he was a child and had no influence on it, it was big and powerful when he wasn't president, and it was on course to remain big and powerful long after his death. So it needs to be diminished, and its economy had to be completely remade as his economy.

Science was big. It had the power to give life. Therefore, it was far too powerful for Trump to bear. So it also had to be brought down to size.

And, obviously, the Constitution and the rule of law predated Trump and have been, up till now, bigger and more powerful than he is. That was intolerable to him.

Trump was never the most powerful real estate developer in New York, much less the most powerful businessman in the world. He never built the world's tallest building, though he tried. The wives and girlfriends he treated as arm candy were never the most super of supermodels. He was a TV star, but he was never the star of a show spoken of with reverence, like Seinfeld or The Sopranos. He became president, but he lost the popular vote when he won and he couldn't get reelected as an incumbent.

Now he sees the opportunity to be more powerful than anyone or anything on the planet. He's not the richest man in the world, but the richest man in the world works for him. Elon Musk is dismantling government agencies that predate Trump, would have outlived him, and have in some cases threatened him. Trump loves having power over them.

I suspect that Trump is enjoying the global market crash. Who has ever wielded such power? Who has ever taken a global economic order that was fundamentally sound and destroyed it by sheer will? It took bad decisions by many firms to cause the Great Recession in 2008. Trump has that much power all by himself!

For all its flaws, America was strong and resilient in 2024. Even if Trump had somehow been a great president in his second term, he would have been perceived as someone who merely made a good thing better. Making a good thing abysmal clearly shows that he's much more powerful than someone who's just a great president.

I know that Trump believes that everything he's doing is brilliant, and that he's making the country unimaginably great. But I think he's really happy with where America is now. He's changed everything -- sure, it's a shambles now, but the ability to destroy this much this fast is power, isn't it?

WALL STREET SHOULD DEFUND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

America's Mad King isn't backing down on tariffs, although Kevin Hassett of the National Economic Council didn't express outright disapproval when a Fox interviewer floated hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman's idea of a 90-day pause. (UPDATE: The White House has dismissed rumors that there might be a pause as "fake news.") The New York Times reports that the financial world's Masters of the Universe feel helpless:

There was little rest on Wall Street this weekend. There was plenty of anger, anxiety, frustration, and fear.

Anger at President Trump for a brash and chaotic rollout of tariffs that erased trillions of dollars in value from the stock market in two days. Anxiety about the state of the private equity industry and other colossal funds with global investments. Frustration among Wall Street’s elite at their sudden inability to influence the president and his advisers.

It's true that Trump seems unreachable. The Washington Post reported this on Friday:

Inside and outside the White House, advisers say Trump is unbowed even as the world reels from the biggest increase in trade hostilities in a century. They say Trump is unperturbed by negative headlines or criticism from foreign leaders. He is determined to listen to a single voice — his own — to secure what he views as his political legacy....

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” said a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

Wall Streeters are accustomed to having access to presidents and wielding a great deal of influence, as the Times notes:

For generations, Wall Street enjoyed a role advising the leaders of both major political parties, and there was hope that the appointment of Scott Bessent, a hedge fund manager and onetime Democrat, as Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary, meant the industry had a friend near the Oval Office.

Mr. Bessent, however, has shrugged off the tumult. “The market consistently underestimates Donald Trump,” he said on the NBC program “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

That has left even some of Mr. Trump’s bigger Wall Street defenders with little to do but gripe publicly.

But they can do more than "gripe publicly." They can still wield influence, because there are people in the government other than the president and his subordinates, although you'd never know it from the way America has been run since Inauguration Day.

Why aren't Wall Streeters putting pressure on Congress? Republicans have tiny margins in both the House and the Senate. Congress could seriously challenge Trump on tariffs if it wanted to. All it would take would be a handful of Republicans plus every Democrat, or nearly every Democrat. (By the way, even John Fetterman is critical of the tariffs.)

I don't know if we'll have real elections in 2026 or 2028, but most people in Washington think we will. Elections cost money. Political parties and individual members of Congress spend massive amounts of time raising money for future election cycles, much of it from people like ... Wall Street billionaires.

These billionaires should be telling the GOP: We're cutting you off without a cent unless you impeach the motherfucker and remove him from office, or at least start the process and get him to back down on these tariffs. No money for individual candidates. No money for party campaign committees. No money for Republican-aligned PACs.

They could start by focusing pressure on candidates in swing districts, for whom breaking with Trump might actually be electorally advantageous. Oh, and they should also tell congressional Democrats to grow a spine and unify around the idea of impeachment if the tariffs persist.

The pressure shouldn't just come from Wall Street. The muckamucks in every affected industry should cut off the congressional GOP, or threaten to. They need to scare the bejeezus out of Mike Johnson and John Thune.

Last week, Congressman Al Green promised to present articles of impeachment against Trump within thirty days. I'm sure his impeachment articles will resonate with liberals and progressives. I'm sure I'll agree with every word. But I know that he's perceived as the crazy old coot who brandished a walking stick during a presidential address. He might not be the best face for this effort.

I think Green should proceed, but there should also be an impeachment bill that's moderate-friendly. Maybe it should just be about Trump's illegal usurpation of Congress's tariff power.

In any case, I think Democrats should go all in on impeachment. As 401(k)s crater and economic uncertainty worsens, this will start to seem like a good idea even to Middle American moderates.

If enough people talk about impeachment, it will become thinkable. It's the right moment to start this conversation.

WHEN YOU OPPOSE A TYRANT BUT THINK HIS MAIN OPPONENTS ARE ICKY

I regularly criticize The New York Times, but there are writers at the paper who understand the dangerous nature of Donald Trump's presidency. On Friday, the Times opinion section published a roundtable discussion in which M. Gessen, Lydia Polgreen, Zeynep Tufekci, and (yes) David French described Trump as an authoritarian comparable to the worst tyrants around the globe. Gessen set the tone:

[Trump] has successfully destroyed more in two and a half months than even I, ever the catastrophizer, thought possible. He has enabled a secret police force, inflicting terror on millions of people in this country. He is rapidly normalizing disregard for the judiciary. He has brought a leading university and several giant law firms to their knees, and some large media companies have arguably assumed a supplicant position as well. That is a spectacular amount of institutional and societal damage....

Today the Times editorial board chastises law firms and universities that have bent the knee to Trump:

... the most likely path to American autocracy depends on not only a power-hungry president but also the voluntary capitulation of a cowed civil society.

... This is a moment for courage.

The playbook begins with a recognition that capitulation is doomed. Some law firms and corporations, as well as Columbia University, have made a different bet, obviously. But the example of law firms demonstrates the problems with capitulation.

... Mr. Trump can threaten the firms again whenever he chooses and demand further concessions. These firms are in virtual receivership to Mr. Trump. So is Columbia, which yielded to Mr. Trump after he threatened its federal funding. The university did not even win the restoration of that funding when it agreed to his demands; it won merely permission to begin negotiating with the administration.

Standing up to the abuse of power is inherently difficult.... But crises usually do not end on their own. Resolving them requires courage and action.

But elsewhere in the paper, the people who have opposed Trump since before his second inauguration are othered. Yesterday, the Times published a story headlined "7 Americans Weigh In on Trump’s Sweeping Tariffs." Of the seven, five voted for Trump in 2024 and one -- a Trump admirer named Dave Abdallah from Dearborn, Michigan -- voted for Jill Stein. Only one voted for Kamala Harris. The Times has interviewed these voters before, in one instance under the headline "What Some Reluctant Trump Voters Thought of His Speech." But here and in other Times stories they're presented as just "Americans" or "voters," as if they're a representative cross-section of the country -- as if, in other words, Harris voters aren't really American.

But Democrats exist. Democrats are Americans. We've been reminding the media of that this week, even if the conventional wisdom is still that we're weird outliers and also insufferable elitists. Here's Nate Cohn in a Times newsletter today trying to reconcile reality with his priors:

This week, the next two years of American politics began to come into focus, and it does not look like a MAGA or Republican “golden age.” The special House elections in Florida and the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin confirmed that Democratic voters were not, in fact, stunned into submission by last November’s election....

In one key respect, the elections on Tuesday were not significant: They do not suggest that Democrats solved any of the problems that cost them the last election. Instead, they mostly reflect the party’s advantage among the most highly informed, educated and civically engaged voters. This advantage has allowed Democrats to excel in low-turnout elections throughout the Trump era, even as he made enormous gains among the disaffected and disengaged young, working-class and nonwhite voters who show up only in presidential elections.

Still, Democrats won’t have to face many of those disaffected and disengaged voters until 2028. The results last Tuesday thus offer a plausible preview of the next few years of elections: major Democratic victories, including in next year’s midterm election.

Translation: The Democrats did okay on Tuesday, though they're still a bunch of cringe elitists. That cringe elitism is why they did well, and will probably keep doing well enough to have a decent midterm cycle.

In fact, the Wisconsin contest was a high-turnout election by special-election standards -- 2.3 million people voted, compared to the roughly 2.7 miilion who voted in gubernatorial contests in November 2018 and November 2022, and the 1.8 million who voted in the last state Supreme Court contest in 2023. This is lower than the 3.4 million who turned out in Wisconsin to vote for president last year, but it's high turnout for a special election in April.

And as for that new Republican coalition that includes "disaffected and disengaged young, working-class and nonwhite voters," don't assume that it's durable:

And this polling was done before Trump announced his tariffs.

Also, despite the emerging conventional wisdom that Democrats are all rich coastal elitists, I'll note that the one Harris voter in that "7 Americans Weigh In" story is a black South Carolina retiree on a fixed income who needs to replace a beat-up car soon.

Which brings us to yesterday's demonstrations.

On Friday I said I was I worried that turnout would be diminished in the big cities as a result of smaller demonstrations elsewhere. That wasn't a problem. Turnout in Washington, Boston, Chicago, and especially New York was huge -- and there were impressive crowds in smaller cities and towns all over America. From the Times:

Mass Protests Across the Country Show Resistance to Trump

Demonstrators packed the streets in cities and towns to rail against government cutbacks, financial turmoil and what they viewed as attacks on democracy.

They came out in defense of national parks and small businesses, public education and health care for veterans, abortion rights and fair elections. They marched against tariffs and oligarchs, dark money and fascism, the deportation of legal immigrants and the Department of Government Efficiency.

Demonstrators had no shortage of causes as they gathered in towns and cities across the country on Saturday to protest President Trump’s agenda. Rallies were planned in all 50 states, and images posted on social media showed dense crowds in places as diverse as St. Augustine, Fla.; Salt Lake City and rainy Frankfort, Ky....

On Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the protest stretched for nearly 20 blocks. In Chicago, thousands flooded Daley Plaza and adjacent streets, while, in the nation’s capital, tens of thousands surrounded the Washington Monument. In Atlanta, the police estimated the crowd marching to the gold-domed statehouse at over 20,000.

Interviewees include "Marilyn Finner, 65, who works in customer service" in Chicago; "Don Westhoff, a 59-year-old accountant"; and "Fiona Smythe, 56," who mentions concern about cuts to the Forest Service at a rally in Ketchum, Idaho.

So now can the press please stop saying that (a) the resistance is dead and (b) all Democrats are un-American weirdo elitists from the Acela Corridor? Probably not, but let's hope. We've provided enough evidence for a significant change in the conventional wisdom.

THE ATOMIZATION OF THE RESISTANCE

I won't be posting tomorrow because I've made plans to go to D.C. for a rally at the Washington Monument. When I made these plans -- which, for various reasons, I can't change -- I hoped that this would be the biggest anti-Trump demonstration in Washington so far. Sadly, the demonstration is unlikely to be "the big one," simply because there'll be hundreds of other demonstrations taking place simultaneously all over the country, including many right here in the New York metro area. Around here, there's going to be a rally in midtown Manhattan, another rally uptown at Columbia University, and yet another rally on Staten Island. A bit upstate and on Long Island, there'll be rallies in Mamaroneck, Hastings-on-Hudson, Mineola, Nanuet, Mount Kisco, and Stony Point. In New Jersey, there'll be rallies in Weehauken, Jersey City, Teaneck, Upper Montclair, Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, Maplewood, West Caldwell, Metuchen, Morristown, Red Bank, and Piscataway. There'll be a rally in Greenwich, Connecticut, and also in Stamford. And that's an incomplete list.

Is this a good idea?

On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump's first inauguration, the Women's March in D.C. drew close to half a million people. There was also a very large rally in Manhattan. I know there were smaller rallies all over the country, but the protests weren't localized to this extent. I'm sure there weren't three rallies in New York City alone.

This bothers me because the media has spent much of its time since Election Day proclaiming that "the resistance" seems like a spent force, and one of its key metrics is the fact that there hasn't been a large national protest like the Women's March.

Discontent at congressional town halls and protests at Tesla dealerships -- which, obviously, are localized and relatively small -- has led journalists to conclude that there's some life in the resistance, as have the results of recent off-cycle elections, the crowds at rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Coertez, and even the response to Cory Booker's round-the-clock speech on the Senate floor. But the media still argues that the country is rallying around Trump now -- or at least was rallying around him until the "Liberation Day" tariffs -- in a way that it didn't during his first term. The Women's March impressed the media. Also, it helped plant the seeds for electoral victories in 2018 and 2020.

We need another big, undeniable, centralized protest. But we're in an atomized world now. When a major media outlet bends the knee to Trump, the response online is "Cancel your subscription to The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times/New York Times and subscribe to my one-person Substack instead." Many of these are great, but you need to subscribe to dozens of them to replace what you got from a legacy media outlet. It's as if we've all made a virtue of the isolation we experienced in 2020.

We need to break out of that. We need to band together -- and to be seen banding together -- to fight Trump.

ONE REASON WE'RE IN THIS MESS: THE RICH DON'T NEED A SURVIVAL INSTINCT

President Trump's tariffs are a disaster -- ask Paul Krugman, ask The Economist, ask U.S. stock markets, which are experiencing a huge selloff -- but they're a disaster that the world of business appearently didn't foresee:

Mike the Mad Biologist is right:

We know what JPMorgan's analysts believed: Trump is a fine fellow, and he's one of us -- he'd never do anything that would seriously hurt our interests. We were fine in his first term, so why worry now?

The signs were there, but they didn't think they needed to take them seriously.

They thought the "guardrails" would hold the way they (more or less) did in his first term -- even though the "guardrails" were mostly Cabinet members and others in his administration who challenged or thwarted his worst instincts, and he was making it clear that he planned to stock his second administration with people who would never challenge him. Also, he was afilliating himself with Project 2025, which had a stated goal of firing apolitical career government bureaucrats and replacing them with loyalists.

All the signs were there. Millions of ordinary people didn't put them all together and see the risks inherent in a second Trump presidency -- although, as Mike says above, some of us did -- but we're talking about analysts whose job it is to understand all information relevant to their task of protecting and increasing their clients' money. Why didn't they realize this was a possibility?

In part I think it's because, in the post-Reagan era, we've made it too goddamn easy for the rich to stay rich. They don't need to be on alert for signs of peril because they do okay even under the worst circumstances, and they often do extremely well even if they're only half-trying. Look at the 2008 crash and the Great Recession that followed -- the government made certain that most of them barely got their hair mussed, and many big firms came out richer.

Ordinary people who saw the warning signs knew that Trump could do great damage in their own lives, or in the lives of people they cared about. Rich people who missed the warning signs assumed they'd be fine no matter what, because they always are. That helps explain how we got into this mess.

NOW WHO'S LIVING IN AN IDEOLOGICAL BUBBLE?

Susan Crawford, the Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate who was endorsed by Democrats, beat the Republican Party's preferred candidate, Brad Schimel, by 10 points yesterday. The biggest loser in this race is, of course, Elon Musk.

Musk and groups he backed, including his America PAC, funneled $20 million into the election through splashy and controversial tactics, including doling out $1 million checks to Republican voters and paying people $100 each to sign a petition to quell “activist” judges.

In case you didn't notice, two of those million-dollar winners had links to the Republican Party, though I'm sure most voters didn't notice.

... Nicholas Jacobs ... identifies himself as the chair of the Wisconsin College Republicans....

[Ekaterina] Diestler is a graphic designer, according to LinkedIn, for a packaging company in the Green Bay area called Belmark Inc — which has strong ties to major Republican donors. Coupled with Jacobs’ affiliation, it raises questions about how the “spokespeople” for [Musk's] America PAC were selected.

Musk made it personal, showing up in the state to dispense checks and speak on Schimel's behalf. Republicans thought that was an awesome idea:

“I’m honestly shocked. I thought we had it in the bag,” said Pam Van Handel, chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County. “I thought [Musk] was going to be an asset for this race. People love Trump, but maybe they don’t love everybody he supports. Maybe I have blinders on.”

Rohn Bishop, the mayor of Waupun, Wisconsin, and former chair of the Republican Party of Fond du Lac County, admitted that the race “throws up a bunch of warning signs for the midterm election.”

“I thought maybe Elon coming could turn these people to go out and vote,” Bishop said. Instead, he added, “I think [Musk] helped get out voters in that he may have turned out more voters against [Schimel].”

Democrats are regularly accused of being in an ideological bubble that prevents us from understanding people with different points of view, but who's in a bubble now? Anyone who can read a poll can see that Musk is unpopular. His unpopularity is made clear in survey after survey. Just yesterday, a national poll released by Marquette Law School delivered these results:

Approval of how Elon Musk is handling his work in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) stands at 41%, with disapproval at 58%. Musk’s personal favorability is 38%, with 60% unfavorable.

Imagine wanting a guy who's at 38%/60% approval to be your top campaign surrogate, just because your party likes him. That's bubble thinking.

But I suspect that Musk won't stop. I'm sure he'll continue donating heavily to Republican candidates. My guess is that he'll also keep giving away million-dollar checks and paying people to sign petitions wherever he thinks he can get away with it, though I imagine he'll ask right-wing celebrities (Kid Rock? Riley Gaines?) to hand out the checks on his behalf.

Democrats should seize the moment and introduce bills in Congress and in all fifty state legislatures banning Musk-style electoral bribes. In blue states, they should pass these laws quickly and with great fanfare. If Elise Stefanik were still planning to leave her upstate New York House seat, do you think Musk would have hesitated to conduct a similar giveaway in her district? That's why these bills are worth passing in blue America. Everywhere else, they'd be messaging bills. Democrats can draw attention to GOP opposition, saying, Why do Republicans support bribery in our elections?

They should do this now in case Musk lowers his profile by leaving the government. Politico now reports that the president is telling "his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role." (We'll see if that's true.)

Democrats lost both House races in Florida yesterday, but the results were encouraging:

In the state’s conservative Sixth District, State Senator Randy Fine, a Republican, had won by 14 percentage points as of early Wednesday. In November, when turnout was much higher, then-Representative Michael Waltz — now the embattled national security adviser — won the same seat by more than 30 points.

And in the First District, a Democratic House candidate appeared to have won a county that Mr. Trump had carried last fall by 19 percentage points, though she lost the seat overall.

Michel Nevin writes:

We shouldn't assume that we'll have real elections in 2026, but if we do, the supposedly comatose Democratic Party could do well.

And that makes sense. Why are Democratic voters disgusted with the Democratic Party? Because we feel that Democrats won't fight. But in election campaigns, Democrats challenge Republican ideas and promise to fight for Democratic ideas. We want Democrats to be like that all the time. But if they're like that in campaigns, and we believe they're serious about fighting after they're elected, we'll vote for them.

After that, though, they need to deliver. They could do more now: Immediately following Cory Booker's 25-hour speech on the floor of the Senate, Democrats granted unanimous consent for the confirmation of Trump appointee Matthew Whitaker as ambassador to NATO. Even if, in this case, Whitaker's approval was inevitable, they shouldn't have stopped fighting. Why be considerate of Republicans who are enabling totalitarianism?