IN 2028, COULD THE CRAZIEST SON OF A BITCH IN THE GOP PRESIDENTIAL RACE BE ... PETE HEGSETH?

Most people were paying attention to other stories early this week and missed this:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday is traveling to Iowa in his “personal capacity,” the Pentagon said in a statement, further fueling speculation that the former Fox News personality is mulling a run for president at some point.

The visit ... comes five months after Hegseth was scheduled to appear at a political rally and fundraising event with Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), who is running for reelection this year. That trip was postponed after several U.S. troops from Iowa were killed early in the war with Iran.

(Emphasis added.)

Monday's appearance was on behalf of Congressman Nunn, who won in 2022 by just four points and is in a competitive race now. So even though Hegseth has a -22 net approval rating according to recent polls from both Quinnipiac and Marquette, he's popular enough among bubble-dwelling Republicans that Nunn apparently said, "Sure, Pete, come campaign for me. That would be awesome." (Among Republicans, Hegseth's job approval is 79%, according to Quinnipiac.) Previously, in May, Hegseth campaigned for Ed Gallrein, who went on to defeat Thomas Massie in a House primary.

We know that millions of Republicans still think Donald Trump is doing a great job and apparently feel the same way about Hegseth, but is that enough to win him the Republican presidential nomination two years from now? Matt Gertz of Media Matters thinks it's possible:

Hegseth, a bombastic former Fox News weekend host ... may be uniquely attuned to the right's attention economy. He could become the presidential candidate of the right-wing media’s id, running a furious culture war campaign fixated on domestic political enemies that checks all the boxes for authoritarian-minded pundits indifferent to traditional policy issues.

Anti-Muslim. Hegseth ... has decried the “Muslims’ birth rates” in multiple states and fearmongered about the success of Muslim political candidates, warning that “Islamists” are trying “to seed the West with as many Muslims as possible.” ...

Anti-DEI. At Fox, Hegseth was at the forefront of the right’s assault on policy initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.... He’s now put that into practice at the Pentagon....

Anti-press. ... He’s smeared news outlets as unpatriotic for not running headlines like “Iran increasingly desperate,” and mocked and derided individual reporters, even denouncing his former Fox colleague Jennifer Griffin as “the one who misrepresents the most intentionally.” ...

Anti-immigrant. ... “When you import the Third World, you get Third World hierarchy, values, and chaos,” he said in a November 2024 Fox segment.... As defense secretary, he used a speech in France marking the anniversary of D-Day to attack the “invasion” of migrants hitting European beaches, asking, “When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

Pro-war crimes. ... At the Pentagon, Hegseth [has] carried out operations in the Middle East, Indian Ocean, eastern Pacific Ocean, and Caribbean Sea that experts say could include war crimes....

Pro-Christian nationalism. ... He invited Pastor Doug Wilson, “a self-described Christian nationalist who wants to repeal a woman's right to vote, has defended slavery and believes homosexuality should be a crime,” to give a sermon at the Pentagon earlier this year.

In his Iowa appearance on Monday, Hegseth very calculatedly used a transphobic slur: “At the Department of War, we do training, not trannies.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a transphobic slur while speaking at the Iowa State Fair Monday, where he appeared in support of Republican Rep. Zach Nunn, who is running for a third term in Congress.

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— CNN (@cnn.com) August 19, 2026 at 7:22 PM

Would Hegseth actually win the nomination? After Trump won three times, I don't want to argue that any Republican is too extreme to win. But GOP voters thought Trump was a winner, even after he lost the 2020 election (which, of course, they think he won). Given the Iran debacle, Hegseth will have a hard time making the case for himself as a winner.

But Republicans have a history of nearly nominating failed politicians who toss out a lot of red meat. In 2012, they embraced two such candidates, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, before finally settling on Mitt Romney. Hegseth could be the Gingrich or Santorum of 2028.

If he did win the nomination, I think Hegseth would be easier to beat than Vance or Rubio, because he seems more distasteful, with his hair gel, his tattoos, and his Pentagon's open racism and sexism. If he makes a serious run for president, his history of domestic abuse might finally get the spotlight it deserves, as might the weirdness of his church and its repellent pastor, Doug Wilson:

In one famous passage from his book on marriage, Wilson suggests that sexual violence is women's fault for not being submissive enough. "[T]he sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party," he writes. "A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts." The alleged failure of women to submit, he continues, leads men to "dream of being rapists," deprived of the "erotic necessity" found in women's submission....

During the election season, he argued that women's suffrage was a mistake and part of "a long, sustained war on the family."

Post-Trump, I'm not ruling out the possibility that Hegseth could win the nomination. I keep returning to something said in 2017 by Thomas Massie, who's a libertarian, and who saw voters supporting Donald Trump after previously supporting Massie and fellow libertarian Ron Paul:

"All this time," Massie explained, "I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."

In 2028, especially when measured against J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, Hegseth might come off as the craziest son of a bitch in the Republican primary race.

THE LIMITS OF NATALIE

I've been thinking about the Natalie Harp story and the possibility that it's not doing as much damage to Donald Trump as we're all hoping it is.

The main problem with the story is that it suggests two possible realities, which point to two very different views of Trump. One is that Trump is having an affair with a young blonde who's less than half his age. The other is that he's a weak, doddering old man who demands constant reassurances that he's brilliant, at a time when America has real problems and we want the president to be focused on those problems, not on his own delicate ego and waning powers.

One problem with the latter narrative is that, for some reason, Americans have never found it odd that the president is addicted to praise. Many times during his two terms, the president has arranged live broadcasts of meetings in which cabinet secretaries compete to offer Trump the most obsequious compliments. In a more rational country, such orgies of praise would shock the public and drastically lower the president's approval ratings. But while Trump's approval numbers are very low, we know what causes them to decline: high prices, an unwinnable war, a brutal and incompetent crackdown on immigrants and their defenders. Not the praise-orgies. When they happen, they're a one-day story at most. Trump haters notice them, but the rest of the country mostly ignores them.

I think that's because we live in a culture of fandom. We think it's normal to feel tremendous attachment to celebrities (or even fictional universes -- here in Manhattan this week, fans lined up days in advance to get tickets to the new Dune movie in 70mm IMAX). I'm not sure we think this is particularly weird:

Natalie Harp wouldn’t take no for an answer.

It was October 2023, and Donald Trump was due at a New York City courthouse to fight his latest set of legal troubles. But as the motorcade idled outside his Trump Tower residence, staffers confronted a more immediate problem: There wasn’t room for Harp, the hyper-loyal aide whose devotion to Trump had quickly entrenched her within his orbit.

A screaming match in the lobby ensued, with Harp insisting that Trump had personally asked her to attend the court appearance, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Denied a seat but determined not to be left behind, Harp jumped into an SUV trunk, according to the two sources and confirmed by a photo obtained by CNN.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, served as an encapsulation of the role Harp has carved out in recent years as a constant and intensely dedicated presence at Trump’s side.

If we think it's weird, it's because we'd never express that kind of devotion to Trump -- but many of us might to some other politician or celebrity (or comic universe) we admire more. The stories of Harp's obsessiveness suggest that Trump still has the power to inspire that sort of loyalty, whether or not two of them are romantically involved.

We still think it's embarrassing for a politician to cheat on a spouse -- or, to be precise, to be caught cheating (or, in this case, possibly cheating). That's the reason Jon Ossoff's campaign speech broke through.

But we need to do a lot more work to get the country to understand Ossoff's real point: that the president is indulging himself in golf, corruption, redecorating plans, and the adoring presence of a young aide when he should be doing his job.

And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job; he wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.

Right now, Democrats should have some message discipline. There should be many Democrats out there reinforcing -- and elaborating on -- Ossoff's message. Since Ossoff is being accused of sexism, maybe some Democratic women could give Ossoff some backup. (Republicans know enough to deploy black party members when one of their number is accused of racism, and women when the charge is sexism.)

It's going to take more than one speech to put across Ossoff's real message: that Trump is extraordinarily bad at his job, and that he isn't even trying to do it well because he sees the job -- and the flattery that goes with it -- primarily as self-care. So lend Jon Ossoff a hand.

HAS JON OSSOFF FOUND THE SWEET SPOT WHERE MALADMINISTRATION MEETS GOSSIP?

Running for reelection in Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff drew blood with this:

Ossoff says that Trump doesn’t want to do his job but wants to “travel with Natalie”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 16, 2026 at 6:23 PM

“While the sailors on the [USS Abraham Lincoln] fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” the senator told a crowd at a campaign rally. “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie [Harp] on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

A hit dog will holler:

“Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Steven Cheung, the ever-cantankerous White House communications director, posted on X. “Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat.”

“Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said on X, launching a homophobic insult at Ossoff.

This is great. Just think: a Democrat is going viral for attacking Republicans, not fellow Democrats. That never happens!

As I said earlier today on Bluesky:

I've often tried to imagine strong anti-Trump, anti-GOP messaging. Whenever I suggest a strong message, someone inevitably responds, "Yeah, but if a Democrat said that, the media wouldn't cover it." The virality of Jon Ossoff's Natalie Harp attack proves that Dems can break through if they try.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) August 18, 2026 at 6:32 AM

But a couple of things concern me.

First, Ossoff isn't just gossiping -- he's stirring some gossip into a critique of Trump's mismanagement of ... well, everything he's in charge of. Ossoff is talking about sailors who aren't getting the resources they need in a war that every informed person knew should never be started. He's talking about Trump's fixation on monuments and interior decoration (Maggie Haberman has said, "If you looked at a chart of his mindshare ... 70 percent of it would be on his renovations") and the president's professed uninterest in Americans' real problems. He's talking about Trump's corruption and gullibility, as embodied in his acceptance of a plane from Qatar that lacks proper security. And he's talking about Trump's preference for surrounding himself with flatterers, which is where Natalie Harp comes in.

But this risks being reduced to smutty gossip about the possibility that there's something sexual going on between Harp and Trump. Don't get me wrong: that's good. To normal people (by which I mean non-Republicans), this looks like an amour fou, a doddering old man feeling besotted with a young, overly worshipful admirer, whether or not they're actually doing the deed. ("You are all that matters to me," Harp has written to Trump, according to Haberman and Jonathan Swan in their book Regime Change. We're also told that Trump has said, "All of you will go off and make money. She'll never leave me.")

I hope Ossoff's attack on Trump's failure to act like even a minimally competent president sticks, not just the gossip. I hope America is coming for the gossip and staying for the argument that Trump is extraordinarily bad at his job and isn't even trying to do it right. I'll take the sexual ridicule, but I want more.

I also don't want this moment to be exclusively about Ossoff -- his skills, his looks (Ossoff features prominently in an Axios story headlined "Democrats Enter Their Thirst Trap Era"), his potential 2028 presidential camapign. We already have Politico quoting an unnamed Democratic strategist who says that Ossoff looks like presidential timber, but if he's perceived as presidential timber, he might lose his Senate race.

“The moment the national political organization gets a whiff that Jon Ossoff is thinking about running for president is the moment that [the] Senate campaign falls from under him,” said a longtime Democratic strategist.

However: “That doesn’t take away from the fact that ... national leaders, national supporters are paying close attention to a guy who should be ahead by, you know, by one point at the most in a state like Georgia.”

This appears under the headline "Ossoff Just Went Viral Again. That Was Probably the Point: Behind the Viral Moments Is a Candidate Who Is Closely Involved with All Aspects of His Reelection Campaign." NEWSFLASH! Jon Ossoff carefully reads and edits his speeches before delivering them! Must credit Politico!

What we need now is for every Democrat to attack Trump and the Republican Party with the fierceness and wit of Jon Ossoff, or as much of it as they can muster. Ossoff is over the target, but he needs backup. Don't strand him out there.

CENTRIST DEMOCRATS STILL HATE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS MORE THAN REPUBLICANS, GOOD COP EDITION

A new Axios story suggests that mainstream Democrats are starting to understand why so many of the party's voters are choosing progessives and democratic socialists rather than centrists:

The Democratic establishment's ideas deficit

The centrist Democratic group Third Way recently declared "war" on democratic socialists to head off what they fear could be a far-left hijacking of the party ahead of 2028.

But establishment Democrats have made clear what they're against without making much of a case for what they're for.

Why it matters: It's hard to beat something with nothing.

Democratic socialism, whatever you think of it, is easy to grasp: Tax billionaires and redistribute wealth. Provide government-funded health care and child care for everyone. Rely less on markets for housing and education. Empower workers with stronger unions.

The establishment vision is murky. Raise taxes, but not too high; use government to make health care and child care more affordable, rather than taking them over; rein in the excesses of capitalism without upending capitalism itself.

That's a tougher vision to sum up, let alone rally behind.

"Without question, we agree with the left that we have failed to convince working-class voters that their lives will be better if they put us in charge," Third Way co-founder Matt Bennett told Axios. "You'd have to be insane to disagree."

So with fewer than ninety days to go before Election Day, it's finally dawned on these schmucks that they could have spent this year giving voters a reason to vote for them. They didn't, and now they're paying the price.

But the point of the story isn't to try to rectify that act of political malpractice. It's to put a nicer face on the centrists' war with their real enemy (DSA, not the GOP).

Third Way recently announced a $15 million campaign to take on the progressive left.

Bennett said Third Way has 100-plus people working on a policy menu — a "new kind of offer for working-class voters who have abandoned Democrats" — that he hopes 2028 Democrats will draw from.

The story reporting on Third Way's declaration of "war" appeared in The New York Times and revealed Third Way's "bad cop" side:

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.

Third Way apparently realized that this was offputting, so it planted the new Axios story, which depicts the group's "good cop" side: Hey, this isn't really an attempt to beat the democratic socialists into submission -- we're actually planning to compete with them in the marketplace of ideas! It's a healthy rivalry! May the best ideas win!

But the ideas seem a tad ... weak:

There are already clear examples of centrists drawing a bright line with democratic socialists, [Bennett] added. "Where we strongly differ with them is around the particulars. They're for Medicare for all, and we're for ... a health care bill of rights that would improve the existing system, not throw it out and replace it with a $30 trillion socialization of the health care space."

(Did he really say "health care space"? Centrists say that Democrats alienate ordinary Americans by using what they call "faculty lounge language," then they turn around and use corporate boardroom language.)

Why didn't the centrists start developing an agenda two years ago, so they could have had it ready for the midterms? Why don't centrist Democrats simply have an agenda ready to go at all times, because, y'know, they're in politics and politicians are supposed to have ideas?

And even if this is the "good cop" side of the war on democratic socialists, why is this more important, at this moment, than a war on Republicans?

Even Axios seems to know that centrist ideas aren't very exciting:

Some liberals have tried to chart a fresh direction for the party. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argued in a 2025 book that Democrats should become the party of "abundance" — building more housing, infrastructure and clean energy — by cutting red tape and making government work better.

But it hasn't caught fire.

The Axios story quotes Rahm Emanuel apparently conceding that democratic socialists are winning the ideas war:

"Give progressives credit for bringing ideas to the table. Pragmatists haven't been as good as we need to be about offering our own ideas and agenda," potential Democratic presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel wrote on X.

But when you read his entire tweet, which he posted just after David Crowley's victory over Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, you can see that his message appears to be: We outnumber you commies! We don't really need ideas!

Another Election Day, another result the pollsters and the conventional wisdom misread. The DSA and the far left get the press while the pragmatists notch key wins: WI, MO, HI, VA.

The turnout surge across the South has been driven by the party's most reliable voters, not its loudest online voices. Each wing of the party knows the game's rigged for insiders at the expense of those trying to stretch every paycheck; we just disagree on the fix.

Give progressives credit for bringing ideas to the table. Pragmatists haven't been as good as we need to be about offering our own ideas and agenda. You can't beat something with nothing, and too often we're prisoners of the moment. But what these elections are showing is that the pragmatic wing isn't a faction of this party. It's the majority, it's awake now, and it's exerting itself.

Yesterday we had Hakeem Jeffries on Meet the Press offering elements of a centrist agenda (basically progressivism, but diluted)...

Jeffries stop short of committing to holding a vote to abolish ICE is he's House Speaker next January, but says he's "committed to dramatically reforming ICE ... the masks should come off, body cameras should come on, judicial warrants should be required."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 16, 2026 at 10:35 AM

... while also playing bad cop, smearing democratic socialist candidates by linking them to ideas most don't espouse, even if the DSA itself does:

WELKER: Do democratic socialists belong in the Dem Party? JEFFRIES: What I can say is I do not support defunding the police, I do not support open borders, I do not support abolishing the Senate. We're focused on actually solving the problems hard-working American taxpayer want us to solve ...

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 16, 2026 at 10:32 AM

The fighting rages. The fight against Republicans seems, if anything, like a second front. The battle against DSA is the main war.

YOU SAY "TEA PARTY MOMENT" AS IF THAT'S A BAD THING

In The New York Times, Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck have a dark warning for Democrats:

Is the Democratic Party Facing Its Own Tea Party Moment?

A movement of young, progressive outsiders has stormed Democratic politics this year, sparking a wave of contentious primary contests across the country and fueling a fraught debate over whether these new, left-wing candidates are remaking the party in their image.

But as primary season winds to a close, the results reveal not only the strength but also the potential limitations of this insurgent movement.

In Minnesota last week, Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor, won a Senate primary by a double-digit margin, pressing a fiercely progressive message to defeat a more moderate opponent. Just a week earlier, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a left-leaning Democrat, won a Senate primary in Michigan despite being vastly outspent. And Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, came close to winning a primary for governor in Wisconsin, falling short by less than one percentage point.

As I told you on Wednesday, the mainstream political world expected Hong to win her primary, which would have confirmed the preferred narrative of mainstream journalists: that radical barbarian outsiders are taking over the Democratic Party, and hurting the party as a result. When Hong lost, Flanagan -- who's not an outsider (she's been the state's lieutenant governor for nearly eight years and was in the state legislature for four years before that) -- was simply swapped in. A few paragraphs later, Lerer and Glueck write:

The next major tests for the left will come this fall in a smattering of battleground House districts, and as Dr. El-Sayed and Troy Jackson, a progressive former state senator in Maine, fight to win seats that Democrats need to capture control of the Senate.

Jackson is also not an outsider -- he served in the Maine House of Representatives for six years and in the Senate for fourteen years; he was the Senate president for six of those years. A party committee chose him to replace Graham Platner (an actual outsider) on the ballot. But the narrative is more important than the facts.

According to the narrative, progressive Democrats want to build a Tea Party of the left, but this will probably cause the party to lose winnable races, which means the movement is doomed. Lerer and Glueck write:

As left-wing candidates have notched victories in primary after primary, many progressives hope they will be able to move the Democratic Party further to the left — mirroring, in some ways, how the rise of the Tea Party movement nearly two decades ago pushed the Republican Party much further to the right. But the results raise questions about whether these candidates can piece together a broad enough coalition of Democrats, independents and moderates to win general elections in swing states that could determine whether Democrats are able to regain power in Congress and, eventually, the White House.

But Tea Party Republicans lost their share of winnable races, too. Here's a Politico story from October 2010:

Tea-party-backed outsider candidates became the superstars of the midterm elections, drawing national attention after big Republican Senate primary wins — and leading tea partiers to pour millions into those campaigns, seeking credibility. But on Nov. 2, the tea party itself could get a mixed return on those investments.

With about a week to go until Election Day, several candidates stamped with the tea party seal of approval are either locked in statistical ties with their Democratic opponents or sinking in the polls....

Examples included several Senate candidates -- Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Joe Miller in Alaska, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware.

Angle, Buck, and O'Donnell lost to Democrats. Miller lost to incumbent Lisa Murkowski, who won as a write-in canddiate after losing her party's primary. (This was before the days of ranked-choice elections in Alaska.) Rand Paul won, of course. Democrats held the Senate and maintained their hold in 2012.

But you can't call the Tea Party a failure because some of its candidates lost races the party could have won. On balance, the Tea Party made the GOP a lot stronger than it was after the 2008 Democratic blowout. Here were the numbers at the end of Barack Obama's final term in office:

... the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower....

President Obama entered the White House with his party touting a 60 seat majority in the Senate and 257 seat majority in the House. Democrats now hold a 48 seat minority in the Senate and 194 seat minority in the House — a net loss of 12 and 64 seats respectively....

The midterm elections delivered significant blows to Congressional Democrats. In 2010, Democrats lost 6 seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House, costing them the chamber. In 2014, Democrats lost another 13 seats in the House and a staggering 9 seats in the Senate; this time losing them the Senate and completing a Republican takeover of Congress.

So it's okay -- or at least it can be okay -- if an insurgent movement produces a few candidates who prove to be unelectable, as long as the infusion of energy makes the party more competitive overall.

(It helps not to attack your own candidates. Mainstream Republicans did a lot less of that establishment Democrats are doing now.)

Elsewhere in the Times, data guy Nate Cohn asks:

Could El-Sayed Cost Democrats Michigan?

Cohn begins his analysis with a factual error:

When the midterm election campaign began, Michigan seemed like a state that Democrats could take for granted in their pursuit of the Senate. Yes, it’s a presidential battleground state, but that makes it the kind of state that Democrats would ordinarily win easily in what seems like a strongly Democratic midterm cycle.

No, Michigan never "seemed like a state that Democrats could take for granted." It's a state Donald Trump had won twice. In 2020, the only year Trump lost the state, the incumbent Democratic senator, Gary Peters, won reelection by less than two points. The state's other Democratic senator, Elissa Slotkin, won the state by less than half a point in 2024.

And as of the end of January, two of the three top Democratic candidates for the Senate seat -- El-Sayed and Mallory McMorrow -- were trailing Republican Mike Rogers in the Real Clear Polling averages. Only Haley Stevens was leading Rogers, and that was by a margin of just 1.3 points.

Cohn continues:

It’s not a state Democrats can take for granted anymore. There are clear signs that the newly minted Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, could underperform a typical Democratic candidate’s vote share by enough to endanger the party’s chances.

According to Cohn, "ordinary" progressive Democrats like Senators Tammy Baldwin and Cory Booker "do only about a point worse than other Democrats," but candidates "of the activist progressive left" do noticeably worse. How does he define the latter group?

They might ally themselves with the democratic socialists, define themselves in terms of their support for activist causes like Gaza or the climate, run against the Democratic Party, engage in righteous fights with Republicans, post clap-backs on social media, or champion activist slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the Police.”

This is how far we've fallen: In a year of massive heat waves and wildfires, "climate" is deemed one of the "activist causes" that can get a candidate branded as a radical. Also radical: being a candidate who "engage[s] in righteous fights with Republicans." Fighting your opponent makes you an extremist outlier in the Democratic Party -- as does posting "clap-backs on social media." (Apparently, it's extremist to be better at online messaging than Chuck Schumer.)

I suspect that past support for defunding the police can be a drag on a candidate's popular support. Criticism of Israel? Maybe that too, if only because it worries some Jewish Democrats and leads other voters to believe you're one of those crazy radicals.

But I also have to wonder how Abdul El-Sayed would be doing in the polls if he were running the identical campaign under the name Al E. Sanders. Michigan might be no more ready for a Muslim senator than America was for a Catholic president when Al Smith got trounced in 1928. The national Republican Party is certainly running against Islam nationwide. But neither of these Times pieces mentions El-Sayed's religion as a reason why he might be underperforming other Democrats trying to win Senate races in purple states. The narrative -- radicalism bad! -- can't be challenged.

GIULIANI: YOU WHINY KIDS NEED TO BE SMACKED AROUND BY SOMEONE WITH STRONG VALUES, LIKE MY THUG FATHER

Yesterday, Media Matters posted this clip from the Wednesday edition of Rudy Giuliani's podcast:

Rudy Giuliani: Young people struggling economically are “privileged little shits” who need “somebody like my father to kick the shit out of them”



TED GOODMAN (PRODUCER): Look, some folks in this country of the younger generations are feeling the squeeze a little bit economically.

RUDY GIULIANI (HOST): Well who cares if they’re squeezing? Their grandparents felt the Depression and were pro-American.

GOODMAN: Yep, right.

GIULIANI: They don’t have anything like the Depression. They’re a bunch of privileged little shits.

GOODMAN: You’re right.

GIULIANI: What they really need is somebody like my father to kick the shit out of them.

Recalling the Great Depression, one Bluesky poster responded:

I think I heard something about some sort of deal that put people to work on, like, public works or something. I don't know. Maybe I dreamed it.

In the clip, Giuliani goes on to speculate about the parents of disgruntled young people: "A lot of the parents of these kids, they’re a bunch of ex-hippies, they were smoking their marijuana and these assholes are smoking even stronger marijuana."

He doesn't go into detail about his own father. I think I know why.

ABC News reported this in 2000:

... a new book now claims that Giuliani’s father served time for armed robbery and had ties to organized crime.

The book, Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani, by Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett, contains a string of claims about Gotham’s controversial mayor and his family.

According to Barrett, Harold Giuliani served a one-and-a-half year term in Sing Sing prison after robbing a milkman at gunpoint in 1934, a decade before his son, the mayor-to-be, was born.

Rudy also alleges that Harold Giuliani served as the “muscle” for a loan-sharking outfit....

More, from The Washington Post:

It seems that the mayor's dad, Harold Giuliani, was a 5-foot-11, big-knuckled man who wore Coke-bottle glasses and made a living as "muscle." Which, in Brooklyn at that time, meant working as a debt collector for a loan-sharking operation. He swung a mean baseball bat and was a most skilled craftsman.

According to the book, Harold Giuliani "shoved people against walls, broke legs, smashed kneecaps, crunched noses. He gave nearby Kings County Hospital a lot of business. 'People in the neighborhood were terrified of him,' said a frequent customer at Vincents," the Giuliani bar.

Giuliani's father enjoyed signing his love letters to his future wife "Your Savage."

The New Yorker added:

During his mayoralty, Giuliani often invoked his father. He liked to say that he had adapted his principles for running the city from the formula his father used for running the family: it is better to be respected than loved. When, in April, the Mayor was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the same disease that killed Harold Giuliani, in 1981, he said, “I miss my father every day of my life. And he’s a very, very important reason for why I am standing here as the mayor of New York City”

It is unclear whether the Mayor himself was aware of his father’s robbery conviction. He was not born until ten years after the crime, but he grew up among many people who must have known about it, including his mother, née Helen D’Avanzo, who had been dating Harold for several years at the time of the robbery....

Harold Giuliani tried to go legit.

He took a job as a groundskeeper at a Long Island high school but lost it because of absenteeism and drifted back to his post at the bar. His travails included ulcers, heart trouble, and some sort of nervous breakdown. All in all, he comes across in Barrett’s account as an irascible and pathetic figure, who, one presumes, would have been at least as hard for a son to respect as to love.

For instance:

Rather than risk having to serve in the Second World War, Harold Giuliani appears to have tipped off the local draft board to his own arrest record.

This is Rudy Giuliani's main role model. This is the kind of father he thinks today's young people needed.

IS TRUMP NOSTALGIC FOR EVERYTHING ABOUT HIS YOUTH, EVEN THE CRIME?

The federal government will spends billions of tax dollars on President Trump's orders so the U.S. Navy can live in the past:

President Trump has directed the Navy to tear out a complex system for launching jet fighters from its aircraft carriers and instead go back to using steam catapults, a move Navy officials have fought for years and will likely cost billions of dollars.

U.S. officials say Trump signed a national security memorandum Thursday directing the change, which would involve removing the electromagnetic catapult system used by the ships in the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers.

One of fascism's most effective tactics is making the populace nostalgic for a lost nation that never really existed, or at least wasn't the utopia it's portrayed as. Trump is good at invoking this kind of nostalgia, but in moments like this it becomes clear that he doesn't just express yearnings for real or imagined aspects of the past that matter to (some) Americans -- bygone race and gender relations, economics, and so on. Trump seems to express nostalgia for everything from the past, even things most Americans don't care about (or would actually prefer to be modern).

The story of the catapults goes like this:

Nearly a decade ago, he claims he spoke to a sailor who had positive things to say about steam catapults, and soon after, he told Time magazine that he directed the Navy to re-embrace “goddamn steam.”

From the transcript of that 2017 interview:

You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology]. I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”

It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said–and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be–”Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.

Trump is very stupid, so he liked the idea that the current catapults are needlessly complex: I'm not a moron. I'm smart! This technology is too damn complex! But the newer technology is actually better, in many ways:

Replacing the electromagnetic catapults with steam will be a complex endeavor that will likely cost billions of dollars, according to Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank....

“Electric is more reliable,” Clark said. “If I can turn these components to be electric instead of steam, it eliminates all the steam related mechanical parts.”

The maintenance on the electrical systems is cheaper, he added. There are 500 fewer sailors on the Ford, in part because fewer technicians are needed to work on the ship’s existing steam equipment.

Do even the Trump followers who take the phrase "Make America great again" very literally want our military to go backwards technologically? I doubt it. But Trump is compulsively nostalgic.

All his favorite songs are decades old. He keeps trying to memify the notion that America is now "the hottest country," a phrase that sounds like sloganeering from the Mad Men era.

And I believe he's even nolstalgic for some problematic things about the past, or at least for the self-righteous backlash to those problems. I think when Trump talks about cities today, he's not talking about any currently existing cities -- he's talking about the cities of his youth, and he's describing them the way critics described them then.

You may have seen this clip earlier this month:

Trump: "Look at the blue cities. What do they have in common? They're all dirty. They're filthy dirty. Their streets are dirty. Their streets smell. Their storefronts are broken. Their trees are all gross. Everything about the place is dirty. It's really all of them."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 3, 2026 at 2:28 PM

Trump had been asked about the war in Iran. He wandered off the subject and said:

I said it the other day that maybe doesn't sound that important, but when a country goes bad, like, look at the blue cities. What do they have in common, aside from massive crime? Much more crime. The Republicans have very little crime. But what do the blue cities have in mind? And also, you can say this with nations, when they go bad. The blue cities have something in common -- crime, high crime, vicious, violent crime -- but what do they have in common? They're all dirty. They're filthy dirty. Their streets are dirty. Their streets smell. Their storefronts are broken. Their trees are all gross. Everything about the place is dirty. And I don't want to mention any specific city. It's really all of them. But you go into these cities that are blue, they're crime-ridden and they're filthy, dirty. They're like Washington, D.C., was a year and a half ago, with graffiti all over the place, with crime all over the place, with people afraid to be here.

(I added the end of that final sentence from this transcript.)

How would Trump know this? As far as I know, Trump hasn't walked a block in any American city this century. He's a guy who goes from the building lobby to the limo to the building lobby. His windows are always tinted. He's not describing anything he's seen with his own eyes. He's describing cities the way they were portrayed on the news in 1973 and 1982, and the way they were portrayed in twentieth-century movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish.

And look at the way he described the city of Washington a year ago, when he announced the deployment of National Guard troops there:

In declaring a “crime emergency” in Washington, Trump wrongly claimed at an Aug. 11 press conference, “Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever. They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means because it just goes back 25 years.”

... The city’s murder rate did increase in 2023 to the highest rate in 20 years, but it wasn’t the highest ever.

Nope:

And murders have decreased since.

Statistics released by the Metropolitan Police Department on the same day as Trump’s remarks showed the number of homicides had decreased by 32% from 2023 to 2024 and by 12% so far from 2024 to 2025. In addition, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia reported in January that violent crime overall for 2024 was down 35% from the previous year and was “the lowest it has been in over 30 years.”

As the one-year anniversary of Trump's deployment approached earlier this month, Trump said of D.C., “This was the crime capital, frankly, of the world.”

That was D.C.'s reputation decades ago. Crime has dropped since then. But Trump doesn't know that. He's tapping into memories of the D.C. he saw on TV back in the late twentieth century.

A year ago, he said, "We're getting rid of the slums, too" -- evoking a bygone era when one of the goals of "urban renewal" was "slum clearance."

Trump has a first-hand familiarity with the places he's lived in and the places he's played golf -- the White House, Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, Trump Tower. Everything else he knows mostly from television -- old television. He lives in the past.