WHY TRUMP ASSUMED IRAN DIDN'T HAVE AGENCY

In a New York Times conversation, Jamelle Bouie and David French discuss a fact Donald Trump doesn't seem able to grasp: that in a conflict, the enemy can fight back. Below I'll try to explain why Trump believes this.

Bouie says:

It’s very strange. I guess I’ve never really seen anything like it in American politics. Just an administration, a set of people, who have no real ability to just conceptualize what their political opponents, or their foreign enemies, might want to do of their own accord. It’s like they really do not believe that other people have independent action.

French says:

One of the reasons they look at the Venezuela situation, and they keep going back to that, is that it’s probably their most successful version of this, that Venezuelan intervention. But you go again and again, and you see the same pattern: “We have to pummel people harder.” And that works with Republican members of Congress, for example, but it doesn’t tend to work with other sovereign nations. Other sovereign nations don’t like to be pummeled. And so, what they’ll do is they’ll find a way to stop or prevent the pummeling, and it’s not always the way you want.

So, for example, if you’re trying to torment Canada, well, you can’t go crying if Canada says, “We’re going to forge a closer economic relationship with China and Europe than with the U.S., because we have self-preservation interests.” No. They keep thinking, if we pummel, then we’ll achieve the results that we want, when sometimes pummeling has the exact opposite effect. What it typically does is alienate people at scale.

I agree that Trump thought he could simply hit Iran as hard as possible and force a surrender, which is how he saw his assault on Venezuela. But "Use overwhelming force and you'll win" has been a successful strategy throughout his political career, at least until recently.

Remember that Trump was a success as a real estate developer, but was a failure after that. Then he had a mixed record as a famous person slapping his name on products. Then he became a TV star and had a show that was a hit, but after a few years it was less and less of a hit.

Politics is the only area in which Trump has failed (he always fails) and then returned to the top of the heap. Which doesn't speak well for politics. There's something wrong with any field that would allow Trump to dominate it twice.

Trump overwhelmed his enemies in 2015 and 2016. His primary opponents were too polite to get into the bare-knuckle brawl that might have beaten him, or to fight him strategically (for instance, with campaign withdrawals that might have cleared the field for a strong opponent). Also, Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media had pushed a coarse, pro-wrestling view of politics for so many years that Republican primary voters were eager for a hatemongering brawler.

Trump's general-election opponent had been pummeled by both the right-wing and mainstream media for years. That's why he was able to win an Electoral College victory.

Trump survived the Mueller report and an impeachment the same way he won the election: He was loud and crude, and the right-wing press defended him more forcefully than the Democratic Party and the rest of the media attacked him.

He lost the 2020 election, though the margins in the swing states were close. He was impeached again and he survived a second time. And then he was given room to mount a comeback. The legal cases against him were built too slowly. His 2024 primary opponents weren't able to kick him when he was down. He defeated a weakened Democratic Party.

To sum up: The political system never gave Trump the thrashing he deserved. Democrats and Republican critics fought too politely. The non-GOP media thought he was the true voice of the Volk and was far more willing to punch "wokeness" than Trump.

So Trump got used to the idea that the enemy doesn't have agency because for years his enemies did a piss-poor job of using their agency.

Until Chris Van Hollen pushed back on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Until Canada put its elbows up with regard to tariffs and "51st state" talk. Until Greenland and Denmark pushed back on annexation. Until anti-ICE protesters pushed back in Minneapolis and elsewhere.

But there were still enemies who chose not to use their agency: big law firms, elite universities, members of Congress in both parties, Democratic consultants, op-ed writers who still obsessed over "wokeness" while demanding that Democrats throw trans people under the bus.

Trump thought they were the rule and the few determined resisters were the exception. He still thought he could work his will pretty much anywhere in the world he pleased. And now we're in a quagmire in Iran.

EVEN WHEN RIGHT-WINGERS CARED ABOUT EPSTEIN, THEY DIDN'T CARE ABOUT THE CHILDREN

I'm sure that Malcolm Ferguson of The New Republic is correct when he says that this is one reason Pam Bondi just lost her job as attorney general, but it's not the main reason:

President Trump has fired Attorney General Pam Bondi after more than a chaotic year marked by her indignant congressional hearings and woeful mishandling of the Epstein files....

Bondi’s ouster is the culmination of Trump’s growing frustrations around the intense, inadvertent scrutiny that she brought upon the administration, as she went from saying the Epstein client list was on her desk, to claiming it didn’t exist, to handing out big dramatic white binders for a photo op with MAGA influencers that contained no new information. She continuously tried and failed to declare the case closed, while exposing Epstein’s victims to more abuse by identifying them in the files. Eventually, even Republicans on the House Oversight Committee agreed to subpoena Bondi over her “possible mismanagement” of the files.

In The New York Times, Glenn Thrush and Tyler Pager appear to rank-order the reasons Bondi lost her job, and their ranking seems plausible:

Attorney General Pam Bondi had a pretty good idea her days were numbered.

President Trump had complained too freely, too frequently, to too many people about her inability to prosecute the people he hates. She was falling short of Mr. Trump’s unyielding, unrealistic demands for retribution against his enemies. She had made mistake upon mistake in her handling of the Epstein files.

Right -- "her inability to prosecute the people [Trump] hates" and to meet his "unyielding, unrealistic demands for retribution against his enemies" is the main reason she's out.

Mr. Trump has been particularly angry about the Justice Department’s failure to win cases involving his political opponents, including against the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the New York attorney general, Letitia James.

One key Trump adviser outside Ms. Bondi’s line of authority, the federal housing official Bill Pulte, had long pushed for her firing, blaming her for slow-walking and bungling the James and Comey cases, among other things, according to people familiar with the situation.

Her firing was primarily because she couldn't mount and win unwinnable cases against Trump's enemies.

Trump's anger is shared by the rest of his party. Listen to Congressman Chip Roy on Fox Business this morning. What's he talking about? Vengeance and propaganda-driven right-wing witch hunts, not Epstein:

Rep. Chip Roy on what he wants out of Trump's next AG: "We want the people who were harassing J6ers held accountable. We want to know the truth on Arctic Frost. We want to see heads roll. We want to see John Brennan and Jim Comey held accountable. The next AG needs to be very aggressive."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 3, 2026 at 8:27 AM

Roy says:

We've got to deal with things like antifa. The president rightly declared them a terrorist organization. We want to see people who are affiliated with these Marxist networks funding antifa, creating all sorts of danger for the American people, we want them held accountable. We want the people who were harassing J6ers held accountable. We want to know the truth on Arctic Frost. My records were targeted under Arctic Frost, Jack Smith. We want to see heads roll. We want to see John Brennan, who the Judiciary Committee referred to the Department of Justice, held accountable, and Jim Comey.

These are all things that we think need to happen. The next attorney general needs to be very aggressive, and I hope the president will pick somebody that will do that.

Arctic Frost was Jack Smith's investigation into Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election -- and yes, all your right-wing relatives know that, and assuming you know what they mean when they say "Arctic Frost." As part of that investigation, calling records of some D.C. Republicans were accessed -- just records of who called whom, not audio of the calls -- and Republicans, both in D.C. and back home watching Fox, will never stop being angry about that.

And here's another GOP congressman from Texas expressing similar views in a Newsmax interview -- and saying that his constituents agree with him:

Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, said Thursday on Newsmax that President Donald Trump's firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared to reflect frustration inside the administration that the Justice Department had not moved fast enough to deliver what many supporters see as long-promised accountability....

Cloud, speaking on "Bianca Across the Nation," said the issue went beyond pursuing Democrats and centered on what he described as abuses under the previous administration....

" ... I will say back when I'm back at home, the number one thing I would hear from people is this is the administration of accountability. And we expected to see action and accountability brought to all that malfeasance that we've seen in the previous one."

This gets us back to Jeffrey Epstein. When your right-wing relatives cared about the Epstein story, it wasn't because children were made to suffer. It was because they believed the guilty parties were exclusively Democrats (and non-right-wingers from overseas). They wanted accountability in the Epstein case in order to bring down their political enemies, not because cruelties were inflicted on children. As soon as it became clear to them that Epstein's circle included people on their side, they lost interest.

Republican voters want their enemies crushed. They still support Trump because they see him pursuing this goal. (His Ahab-like obsessions are their own.) They want their enemies jailed or executed whether or not they believe these enemies consorted with Epstein. Most of them don't connect Jack Smith or James Comey or, say, Anthony Fauci or Barack Obama with Epstein, but they hate them and want them punished. Epstein's crimes are just a pretext for them. They'd want their enemies punished even if there had never been a Jeffrey Epstein. They want it as much as they want all undocumented immigrants, Muslims, and trans people (and liberals, for that matter) killed, jailed, or banished from the United States.

THIS IS WHY LEADERS SHOULDN'T SURROUND THEMSELVES WITH FLATTERERS

I ain't no student of ancient culture, as Fred Schneider of the B-52s once said, so I'm not sure if this is true:

An auriga (plural aurigae) was a slave who drove vehicles in the Roman circuses....

It has also been speculated that this name was given to the slave who held a laurel crown, during Roman Triumphs, over the head of the dux, standing at his back but continuously whispering in his ears "Memento Mori" ("remember you are mortal") to prevent the celebrated commander from losing his sense of proportion in the excesses of the celebrations.

We know that no one plays this role in Donald Trump's life. In fact, it's the opposite: He's regularly treated to flattery sessions at which Cabinet members compete with one another to see who can be the most excessive in their praise for him.

A president who acknowledges the fact that some people doubt his brilliance might start a war of choice and declare victory prematurely, but he'll probably recognize that he needs to create an aura of triumph. So on May 1, 2003, a few months into the Iraq War, President George W. Bush donned a flight suit, boarded a Navy jet, and landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier before delivering a victory speech before a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner. It's now understood that Bush was merely a passenger in that jet, though he claimed he wasn't, as CNN reported at the time:

Bush said he did take a turn at piloting the craft.

"Yes, I flew it. Yeah, of course, I liked it," said Bush, who was an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard after graduating from Yale University in 1968.

The speech is now seen as a debacle, but at the time, it worked.

Compare Trump's speech. Zeteo reports:

... if you are the US commander in chief, and you’re one month into a major war that you launched, the one communications job you have is to be able to go on live TV and project calm, confidence, and reasonably high energy to the American people, when you’re telling them how well the war is going.

On Wednesday night – April Fools’ Day, funnily enough – President Trump couldn’t even be bothered to do that. (He’s a former reality TV star; he is supposed to be good at doing TV.) Setting aside for a moment the typically incoherent jumble that pervaded his televised address, the American president delivered a jarringly listless, elderly-seeming speech that did little to inspire confidence – including in his own ranks.

In his own ranks? Really? Apparently so:

During and after his address, an array of Trump advisers, administration officials, allies on Capitol Hill, and rich Mar-a-Lago buddies gave Zeteo their snap reviews of Trump’s message and delivery. (Yes, they asked for the cloak of anonymity, so as to not piss off God King Donald.) Virtually across the board, the president was panned by his own people, with some denigrating the speech as pointless, and others reiterating how much senior members of the administration never wanted this to happen in the first place.

One Trump administration official said the following on Wednesday night: “It reminded me of listening to Joe Biden speak.”

In Trumplandia, that is perhaps the worst possible thing you could say about anyone, much less the sitting president and leader of the GOP.

At times while watching the speech, I thought that Trump is now so addicted to those Cabinet praise sessions that he decided to conduct an auto-praise session, on live TV. He said:

Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks. Our enemies are losing and America, as it has been for five years under my presidency, is winning, and now winning bigger than ever before.

Before discussing this current situation, I also want to thank our troops for the masterful job they did in taking the country of Venezuela in a matter of minutes. That hit was quick, lethal, violent and respected by everyone all over the world....

Our armed forces have been extraordinary. There’s never been anything like it militarily. Everyone is talking about it....

The United States has never been better prepared economically to confront this threat. You all know that. We built the strongest economy in history. We’re going through it right now, the strongest in history. And one year we’ve taken a dead and crippled country. I hate to say that, but we were a dead and crippled country after the last administration and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world by far....

But he said the war would go on for two to three weeks, and he demanded that other nations reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Global markets flipped out. There's a partial recovery now, but it's Iran's doing, not Trump's:

Stocks clawed back earlier losses to turn positive on Thursday as investors continued to monitor the Iran war and rising oil prices....

The three major indexes ripped higher after Iranian state media said that the Middle Eastern country is working with Oman on a protocol for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

A toll, presumably. That's worse than the pre-war status quo.

Also, maybe it was a mistake for Trump not only to promise two or three weeks more war, but to lecture his critics on how long other wars were:

It’s very important that we keep this conflict in perspective. American involvement in World War I lasted one year, seven months and five days. World War II lasted for three years, eight months and 25 days. The Korean War lasted for three years, one month and two days. The Vietnam War lasted for 19 years, five months and 29 days. Iraq went on for eight years, eight months and 28 days. We are in this military operation, so powerful, so brilliant against one of the most powerful countries for 32 days.

Shut up and eat your quagmire, America, Trump seemed to be saying. This could take a while. No, that didn't inspire confidence.

I WAS WRONG

I've said for more than a year that I believed the Supreme Court would overturn birthright citizenship, but I was wrong.

The Supreme Court seemed poised Wednesday to reject President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship in a momentous case that was magnified by his unparalleled presence in the courtroom.

Conservative and liberal justices questioned whether Trump’s order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens comports with either the Constitution or federal law.

I don't want to give this Court credit for good faith. I think it's possible that Jamelle Bouie is right: the Court looks at mass protests against Trump -- or, more likely, his increasingly dreadful polling -- and doesn't feel inclined to treat him as the embodiment of the nation's beliefs, at a time when a significant percentage of the big brains in the right-wing legal community still support birthright citizenship.

It's also possible that the Court's Republicans believe that a ruling against birthright citizenship could drive Hispanic and Asian voters into the arms of the Democratic Party, possibly for a generation or more. The right-wing billionaires whose interests the Court serves certainly don't want that to happen.

So we dodged a bullet, at least for now. But unless Democrats in the future find a way to rebalance this court, I assume we'll be right back here in twenty or thirty years, and the next time we may not get so lucky.

JAMELLE BOUIE'S INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP IN AMERICA

I always knew that Donald Trump's second term would be bizarre and horrible, but "Trump will try to pull a Vincenzo Pentangeli on the Supreme Court" was a possibility I hadn't imagined:

President Donald Trump plans to sit in on Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, making him the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the nation’s highest court.

Trump is there to glower at the Supremes in the hopes of intimidating them so they won't rule against him on this, the way Vincenzo Pentangeli was brought in from Sicily to intimidate his brother Frank when Frank was a cooperating congressional witness against crime boss Michael Corleone. This is a classic scene from The Godfather Part II, the sequel to one of Trump's five favorite movies. Frank recants, and later commits suicide.

Trump is having the time of his life these days -- the wars! the ballroom! the library! -- but his 2020 election loss is the wound that won't heal. And while the executive order, if allowed to take effect, won't denaturalize anyone retroactively -- the order itself says it "shall apply only to persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order" -- a victory for Trump will apparently soothe his tender ego, because it will suggest to him that he lost in 2020 only because people who shouldn't have been allowed to vote voted against him, never mind the fact that they were citizens and were legally entitled to vote. (I don't think we have any hard evidence that the election was decided by the votes of undocumented immigrants' children. I doubt that it was.)

I don't think Trump's intimidation is necessary. Immediately after the executive order was issued, I said that I expected the Supreme Court to uphold it. I still believe that. It's possible that the Court will rule that the children of undocumented immigrants aren't citizens, but rule against Trump's attempt to deny citizenship to the children of parents whose presence in America is "lawful but temporary." Nevertheless, I think he'll get a win, and his Godfather act is unnecessary.

*****

Jamelle Bouie's column today is about the birthright citizenship case. It's mostly a review of the history of birthright citizenship in America since the ratification of the 14th Amendment. At the end, Bouie speculates on the Supreme Court's response to the case:

... if the Supreme Court decides in favor of Trump, it will have less to do with law or history than the political power of the president and his movement.

... The revisionist case rests less on new evidence than it does on Trump’s claim to embody the nation and its desires. If he is ascendant, then the people must want a closed, cloistered society.

Prior to publishing the column, Bouie expressed this idea somewhat more clearly in a video:



Bouie says (at 8:23):

This case is about politics, and it's about power. It's, I think, about whether the justices believe that Trump is some kind of avatar of the American people, that Trump does represent some essence of the United States, and that his commands, his wills, his decrees, ought to be written into the Constitution as a kind of sovereign act.

If the Court has that view -- which will never be said explicitly, but I think is sort of implicit in the way that it's treated Trump, and the way that it's treated his claims to executive authority -- then he wins on this. If the Court has at least a little fidelity to the text of the Constitution, then I don't think he does.

And all of this is why it is important to engage in active political contestation of this administration, including mass protests. Mass protests show that the public is not with Trump, that his claims to representing or embodying the public are bunk, are nonsense, and that the Court should probably think twice before it goes and allows him to invalidate a critical piece of our constitutional heritage.

I don't think the Court's Republicans will decide this on the basis of "is Trump popular?" I think they'll decide this the way they decide most cases:

* Is this good for right-wing billionaires?
* Is this good for the electoral prospects of the Republican Party -- or, as in the Dobbs decision, does this help achieve a key goal of one or more Republican interest groups?

Bouie does a fairly thorough job of recounting the history of birthright citizenship since Reconstruction, but he skips over the early 21st century, the pre-Trump era when the George W. Bush administration fired U.S. attorneys who wouldn't pursue cases involving (nearly non-existent) voter fraud, and when Fox News and other right-wing media sources darkly insinuated that Democrats commit electoral fraud at every opportunity. Election "experts" such as Hans von Spakovsky -- coauthor of books such as Who's Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk (2012) -- made frequent appearances in the right-wing press.

Von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation fellow, published a Fox News opinion piece in 2011 titled "Birthright Citizenship -- A Fundamental Misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment." In it, he wrote:

The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of “birthright” citizenship.

Bouie thinks the meaning of that phrase is incontestable -- to him, to most legal scholars, and to all federal courts since 1898, it refers to "everyone except the children of most Native tribes, the children of ambassadors and any children produced on territory captured by an invading army." But the Heritage/Murdoch right has been contesting it for many years now.

In his column, Bouie lists a number of right-leaning legal scholars who once said the Constitution was clear on birthright citizenship and now aren't so sure:

[Ilan] Wurman, who argued previously that his originalism compelled the traditional reading of the birthright clause, said after the executive order was issued that the meaning of birthright citizenship was less settled than the consensus supposed. The president, he suggested, might be right.

Randy Barnett, a conservative scholar whose previous work on the 14th Amendment emphasized the monumental influence of abolitionists on the birthright clause, also agreed that there was more to the question than traditionally understood, despite coauthoring a book that never challenged the consensus view.

Yet another conservative scholar, Kurt Lash — whose 2021 essay on the subject affirmed the traditional reading and whose edited volume on the Reconstruction amendments contains hundreds of pages of primary sources, not one of which questions it — also made an apparent about-face to insist that there was something to the president’s executive order.

Well, of course -- when those earlier works were published, some people still believed that the Republican Party might someday open its arms to law-abiding undocumented immigrants again, as some Republicans (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, John McCain) tried to do in the past. These scholars have now concluded that Trump is the one and only "avatar" and "essence" of the Republican Party, which is all that matters to them.

I assume it will be all that matters to the six Republicans on the Supreme Court.

HEGSETH IS SIGNALING VICE TO TRUMP AND VIRTUE TO THE BASE

In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols argues that prominent figures in the Trump White House, particularly the secretary of defense, are doing the opposite of virtue signaling.

The term virtue signaling refers to an annoying moral peacocking that has less to do with politics than with self-gratification. It’s the dinner guest who feels compelled to comment on the climate impact of every course....

But Donald Trump and his administration have embraced the Mirror Universe version of virtue signaling. They’ve pioneered the practice of “vice signaling,” or saying insulting or odious things both as attention-seeking behavior and as a way of showcasing their supposedly transgressive political views. They aim to demonstrate strength by being willing to appall other people....

For instance:

... Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ... has long stewed about the fact that women occupy positions of leadership in the U.S. military, and he has hammered on the idea of “merit” as a way of implying that minority officers have been promoted because of their race rather than their talent. He put those beliefs into action almost immediately upon arriving at the Pentagon by pushing for the firing of one Black and several female senior officers who were then replaced with white men.

A few weeks ago, he did it again: According to The New York Times, Hegseth intercepted the Army’s promotion list, which consists mostly of white men, and struck off four officers—two Black men and two women—preventing them from advancing from colonel to brigadier general.

But in Hegseth's curdled Fox News world, is that really vice signaling? Republican base voters believe that only one form of racism is immoral: discrimination against white people. They regard any effort to ensure that people other than whites are rewarded in life as unacceptable. They feel the same way about efforts to promote women in historically all-male areas of endeavor. So to the GOP base, Hegseth is exhibiting the highest morality.

Meanwhile, every time he steps to the podium, Hegseth ... raps out some inane sloganeering rather than offering real information: “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” He says that America will show “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies”—chesty, movie-villain talk....

Hegseth combines this piety with Bible-thumping:

Last week—during Lent, no less—he prayed in much the same way as the jihadists he hates might have: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth said, asking God to give American forces “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

The base believes that right-wing Christians (and possibly right-wing Jews) are the only good people on the planet. Everyone else is an enemy -- Muslims in particular -- so it's virtuous to exterminate them. (Remember, these are the folks who keep proclaiming that empathy is sinful and un-Christian.)

But Hegseth's boss is no Christian. He believes that there's no morality -- there's only winning or losing. If you fight a war against an oil-producing state, you should just take the oil. If some recreational drugs are being transported on boats, you should bomb the boats, or boats that look like drug boats. If immigrants are in your country without authorization, it's fine to treat them as military enemies and lock them and their children in concentration camps with no due process, or ship them to a torture prison in El Salvador. Trump knows this is evil, but Trump likes evil. He likes being evil. He thinks virtue is for losers.

Trump thinks everybody operates on this principle, and survival depends on being more evil than the other guy. So Hegseth is virtue signaling to voters who have a sick notion of virtue, and vice signaling to Trump, who has a repulsive belief in the value of vice.

REPUBLICANS SCREW THE POOCH AND DEMOCRATS BEAT THEMSELVES UP

Because we have preposterously long presidential campaigns in America, I think it's understable that politicians who want to run for president in 2028 are already campaigning. But please note how a likely Republican candidate is beginning his campaign, and how several Democrats are doing the same thing. Note in particular that the Republican -- who's part of an administration that's failing in every conceivable way, and is massively unpopular as a result -- isn't engaging in self-reflection or self-doubt at all. The candidates who are sniping at their own party are the ones who didn't plunge us into a failed war of choice, aren't presiding over skyrocketing energy prices, aren't defending brutal secret-police tactics in America's streets, and aren't turning airport security into the lowest circle of Hell.

Here's an NBC News story showing us how J.D. Vance is preparing to run for president:

Second lady Usha Vance on Friday ... sat down with NBC News for a 30-minute interview in her new studio ahead of the launch of her podcast, “Storytime With the Second Lady,” which premieres Monday.

And what's the nature of this podcast?

“It’s a podcast that really is just for children. The notion is we will have someone come in — a special reader, we’re calling them — read a fun book, have a very short little conversation about things related to the book, maybe about their career, if they have some sort of interesting background,” Vance said. “And then invite children to pick up books on their own. It’s sort of just an advertisement for reading.”

Usha Vance is a Yale-educated lawyer, but they're positioning her as a tradwife, with three children -- and one on the way! As with most online tradwives, she'll create the illusion that she's focused exclusively on motherly duties, even though podcasting is actually a job. The plan is to make her a warm presence in the lives of voters, especially female voters. Even the labor of creating a podcast is portrayed as housewife-y:

The second lady said her children helped with the design and decor of her podcast studio, where she’ll record episodes of the show.

This is how you run for president as a Republican: Even if most of the country thinks you and your party are failing, you proceed as if millions of people really like you and like your party (which, sadly, is true), and you concentrate on trying to get more people to like you.

That's not how Democrats operate. Ambitious Democrats believe that the key to success is beating up on your own party, even at a moment when we're being ruled by the worst president in American history, a member of the opposition party. So here's Cory Booker:

Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, renewed his calls for new leadership of the Democratic party, saying the party has “failed this moment”.

“As a whole, our party has failed this moment,” Booker said on Sunday. “I’ve called for a generational renewal, because this left-right divide is killing our country and our adversaries know it.” He also said that “purity tests” within the party have led to more division in the US.

During an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Booker also said the Democratic party has “too small of a coalition”, especially as the party seeks to confront “new challenges”, including Trump administration policies and the expansion of artificial intelligence and technology.

Booker was critical of President Trump in that interview -- but at this moment, why should you beat up your own party, too? It's as if Booker has misunderstood the old James Carville line: When your opponent is drowning, throw him an anvil. Booker seemingly wants to add: And jump in with one yourself. (To be fair, Carville these days is no better.)

Then we have Elissa Slotkin on Bill Maher's show a couple of days ago:

Elissa Slotkin: You're not going to get me to defend democratic messaging. We can have a whole autopsy about that.

Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, the American people want something different out of their government. Can we have a little bit more alpha energy? pic.twitter.com/h8li6EAbmq

— Blue Georgia (@BlueGeorgia) March 28, 2026

She begins:

You're not going to get me to defend Democratic messaging. That's not going to be ever something that I'm going to defend. That's part of the problem and why we lost the last election. We can have a whole autopsy about that.

I complain about Democratic messaging all the time, but I'm a blogger with a small readership. I'm not a U.S. senator on a nationally televised TV show. This is not the place to agree with Republicans about how much Democrats suck. It's not the place to be a pick-me -- Yes, my party is awful, but I'm not like the other Democrats.

The rest of this plays into throwback stereotypes of masculinity and femininity -- it's essentially saying that other Democrats are big fags and we need some Democrats who aren't:

I think, for me, what is important, going forward, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, is like: the American people, they're telling us something, they want something different out of their government. They want, they want some alpha energy from their leaders. And they certainly — whether you agree with them or not — are getting that from some of the Republicans. And my plea to my own party is, like, can we have a little bit more alpha energy? Punch and believe in what we believe in and show people that we give a shit, and be simple about addressing the needs that they care about the most. And that has been a struggle, and I'm here to be a part of that change.

It's not likely to work. When a woman says that prominent Democrats (who are mostly male) are effeminate, she's reinforcing an ugly idea on the right that Democratic men are effectively women and Democratic women are really men.

And Democrats don't need to do this. Sure, 1992 Bill Clinton and 2008 Barack Obama had bro appeal, but did anyone think they could kick a tough guy's ass? They weren't muscular and aggressive. They persuaded voters that they "give a shit ... about addressing the needs that they care about the most," but that's the opposite of "alpha energy," which is largely about not caring what anyone else wants or needs.

And then we have another pick-me, Rahm Emanuel:



Here's how the clip begins:

IAN BREMMER: If you look ahead to 2028 for a second, if you're the Democrats, what's the most likely way they blow it (Rahm and audience laughing)

RAHM EMANUEL: Being Democrats. (audience laughing and applauding)

Which is shorthand for Democrats are fixated on trans people, even though that isn't true, and even though trans rights weren't a salient issue in last year's gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, which Democrats won in blowouts.

EMANUEL: We spent two years communicating with people that we were worried about bathroom access and locker room access, and we never focused on classroom excellence.

In a Politico profile, Emanuel culturally stereotypes Democrats as if he's working with Greg Gutfeld's writers:

“I’m not into Democrats sitting on the 30th floor of a Manhattan highrise in their Lululemon outfit with their Yeti cup, talking about, ‘We should go to places that we don’t go’ and then never go,” Emanuel told me before embarking on this trip. “So I don’t talk about it, and I’m just gonna go.”

Dude, you are talking about it. (We're later treated to a scene of Emanuel on a factory floor. Apparently he thinks he's the only Democrat in the 21st century who's ever visited one.)

Stop doing this. Stop echoing Republican messaging about Democrats. Don't be Andy Beshear saying,

The Democratic Party at different times has talked at and not to people. It’s even talked down to people, which is wrong. Our words have to have meaning.

If you're pressed to denounce your party, ask whether your interviewer will demand that Vance or Marco Rubio denounce theirs.

It's Republicans who are losing winnable elections now. Reporters should ask them why their party is failing.

IN DEFENSE OF MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE RESISTERS, AND THE WORD "NORMIE"

A Bluesky thread posted in response to yesterday's No Kings rally is getting some attention. It begins:

I keep hearing this word normies. From what I can tell, a normie is a white American that is so self-absorbed and callous, that no amount of suffering or horror experienced by other people can cause them to inconvenience themselves in the slightest. They only act when they themselves feel discomfort

— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:44 AM

And Black people can't be normies, apparently. Police violence that causes 20% of the Black population of a city to protest, cannot be described as "normies" protesting. Even if it's the first protest that most of those Black people have ever attended. We're not normal I guess.🤷🏿‍♂️

— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:47 AM

I'm supposed to celebrate that even the normies are protesting now. I've heard this many times before. But what am I celebrating? That normies now care about other people? Because that hasn't happened yet. Or that the inconvenience has now reached the normies? Because that has happened before.

— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:50 AM

And to be crystal clear, because I know at least a few people will misunderstand this: I'm not criticizing the No Kings protests. I think they're great! I don't tell people how not to fight fascism. Have fun with it! I'm asking folks to think about what they're really saying when they say normies.

— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:55 AM

At the most basic level, we apply the word "normies" to white people because America is still a majority-white country -- 58% of the country is white.

And I think whites have the privilege of being apolitical if we choose, in a way that Americans of color don't. The system generally doesn't eye us with suspicion -- thus, it politicizes people of color in a way that it doesn't politicize us, especially if we're economically comfortable and heterosexual.

I understand why it would be appropriate to use the word "normie" to describe Black people who came out to protest in 2020 after leading apolitcal lives. But even so, the most normie normies will be white, purely on the basis of demographics.

Now I want to defend angry normie whites in the Trump era. I don't think it's correct to argue that we're incapable of responding to the pain of others.

The protesters are denouncing brutal treatment of immigrants that we aren't subject to. Those of us who are old are denouncing a war we won't be asked to fight in. We're denouncing a cover-up of sex crimes that didn't happen to us.

A mostly young cohort of protesters has been denouncing genocide in Gaza for years, even though it's happening thousands of miles away. Many of these protesters are white. Some are Jewish. Isn't this empathy?

Do whites fully understand what's happening? No. I've been to the "Say Their Names" memorial in Minneapolis's George Floyd Square and realized I only recognized a small portion of the names.

We memorialize Renee Good and Alex Pretti -- two normie whites who died because they weren't self-absorbed or callous -- but we don't know the names of others who've died in conforntations with ICE, or those who've died in federal immigration custody since Donald Trump was reinaugurated (the total is 46, according to a story just published by The New York Times).

We're trying. It's not pure self-interest. Maybe some demonstrators yesterday were motivated by high gas prices, but there were an estimated 350,000 in the streets of Manhattan, where most people don't even drive.

And there's nothing wrong with marching out of self-interest. There's nothing wrong with Black people taking to the streets to protest police brutality against Blacks. There's nothing wrong with young people denouncing a pointless war that they fear they might be conscripted to fight.

Ultimately, though, I agree with Okereke about this:

This hell ends, when 50% of the white people in the US, push in the same direction as 90% of the Black people in the US. This hell would never have started, if 50% of the white people in the US, had pushed in the same direction as 90% of the Black people in the US.

— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 8:14 AM

Pew says 83% of Black voters chose Harris -- not quite 90%, but still an overwhelmingly high percentage (92% voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and 91% voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016). The white vote in 2024 was appalling: 55% Trump, 43% Harris. (That matched the 2020 white vote for Trump and Biden; in 2016, Hillary Clinton got only 39% of the white vote, while Trump got 54%.)

Democrats haven't won the white vote in a presidential election since 1964. It's the result of racism, plus many other hatreds layered on top of that (hippies and war protesters starting in the Nixon era, sexual minorities and feminists from then until now, plus "cultural elitists" and non-Christians). By now I think voting GOP is just a habit for many heartland whites. It seems like the default way to vote.

I say that because, over the years, whites expressed less open racial animus, less discomfort with gay people, and some support for undocumented immigrants (at least pre-Trump) and still kept voting GOP.

Okereke might argue that these whites tell pollsters what they think the pollsters want to hear, and I can't disprove that. But I think at least a certain percentage of white Republicans could be shaken out of their complacency. One argument would be pure self-interest: You say you're dissatisfied with the way things are going in America. Have you tried not voting for the same party that's in been in power where you live for decades? And maybe some of these whites can see that a party rallying around a president who's indifferent to their needs can see the party's callousness toward others. Or maybe I'm just too naive, and white complacency is an insurmountable obstacle. I hope yesterday was a sign that that's not true.