Toxic Work Atmosphere

You know vaguely, if you're like me, about the DOGEboys who have been uploading huge amounts of data from the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and voter data from some states, and dumping it all into a "data lake" of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Servces at the Department of Homeland Security, where they keep records of interactions between immigrants and the USCIS, information that agencies like ICE, if they wanted to commit serious violations of the governments's privacy rules, could put together and use (for one thing) to geolocate undocumented immigrants and hunt them down, and you've probably heard vaguely about this week's whistleblower complaint from Charles Borges, chief information officer of the SSA, documenting how Social Security data had been illegally uploaded to a cloud server where it could possibly be hacked by who knows what kind of reprobates, though not necessarily any more malign than the Boys who are seemingly authorized to collect it.

Borges has now resigned, and it was his letter that got my attention; it was an "involuntary resignation", he said:

After reporting internally to management and externally to regulators serious data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens' most sensitive personal data, I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable....

I have been made aware of several projects and incidents which may constitute violations of federal statutes or regulations, involve the potential safety and security of high value data assets in the cloud, possibly provided unauthorized or inappropriate access to agency enterprise data storage solutions, and may involve unauthorized data exchange with other agencies. As these events evolved, newly installed leadership in IT and executive offices created a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination, and general organizational dysfunction. Executives and employees are afraid to share information or concerns on questionable activities for fear of retribution or termination, and repeated requests by me for visibility into these events have been rebuffed or ignored by agency leadership, with some employees directed not to reply to my queries.

We've seen bunches of resignation letters showing up on social media in recent years, in a pretty regular format ("it has been my honor..."). I've never seen anything like this before. This is the trauma Christian nationalist Russell Vought said last year he wanted to inflict on "the bureaucrats" 

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

and which he is now overseeing as head of the Office of Management and Budget and Elon Musk's replacement as unofficial leader of DOGE; he and the Boys are the newly installed leadership to which the letter refers, along with whoever he has managed to hire in the quest formerly known as Schedule F to replace qualified civil servants with certified Trump loyalists—

GONE FOR THE WEEKEND

I'm going to be out of range until Tuesday. I'm not sure what will happen here, while I'm gone, but there might be some stirrings, so stop by.

FOX'S JESSE WATTERS GOES RADIO RWANDA ON TRANS PEOPLE (updated)

Two children died and 17 victims were wounded in a shooting in Minneapolis yesterday. The 23-year-old shooter, Robin Westman, who later committed suicide, was trans:

As a 17-year-old, she filed a court document to change her first name, to Robin from Robert. It was also signed by her mother. The document noted that Ms. Westman “identified as female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”

On social media, some conservative activists have seized on the shooter’s gender identity to broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill.

That's true.

The right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh suggested [on X that] Wednesday’s shooting was the result of growing anger within the trans community that their “agenda is losing.”

“They’re losing on every playing field, in every area of American life. We’ve defeated them politically. We’ve defeated them culturally,” he said. “But understand this: now is precisely the moment when trans militants are the MOST dangerous. They’ve lost. The game is over. Now they’re more desperate than ever. More full of hatred and anger than ever. They’re going down, but they’ll take as many sane, normal people with them as they can. It’s going to get worse from here. Be on your guard.”

“Today’s evil church school shooter was a trans who was likely groomed and transitioned as a teenager,” said Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Congress MUST PASS my bill ‘Protecting Children’s Innocence Act’ to make it a FELONY to perform sex change surgeries and all forms of medications on minors!”

Bo Loudon, who has been described as Barron Trump’s best friend, was among those who linked the entirety of the trans community to Westman’s horrific acts.

America does NOT have a "gun problem."

America HAS a transgender problem.

Transgenderism needs to be labeled as a MENTAL ILLNESS!

— Bo Loudon (@BoLoudon) August 27, 2025

Breitbart's top editor agrees, and has some draconian policy proposals:

On Wednesday’s “Alex Marlow Show,” host and Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow discussed the shooting in Minneapolis and mass shootings.

Marlow stated, “We need to take guns, probably from the trans, provided that there is a legit process.... Open up the asylums, start diagnosing the trans stuff as a mental disorder as fast as humanly possible.”

The right has been blaming trans people for America's epidemic of mass shooting for a while now. Reuters published a fact-check in 2023 debunking this notion:

A list of perpetrators in four shootings in the U.S. who identified as transgender or non-binary represent the minority of suspects in mass shootings, but users online are sharing the list without this context. Data collection on mass shootings varies by methodology, but experts told Reuters data shows the majority of mass shootings are carried out by cisgender men....

One tweet said: “The Colorado Springs shooter identified as non binary. The Denver shooter identified as trans. The Aberdeen shooter identified as trans. The Nashville shooter identified as trans. One thing is VERY clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists” (here). Another example can be seen (here). Other posts with similar language can be seen (here).

Reuters notes that several high-profile mass shooters have, in fact, said they were trans or non-binary. However:

The Gun Violence Archive, which began collecting data on gun violence in the U.S. in 2013 (here), (here), recorded more than 4,400 mass shootings in the last decade, Executive Director Mark Bryant told Reuters via email. Its definition of mass shooting is four or more people shot resulting in injury or death (excluding the perpetrator).

Of those, “the number of known suspects in mass shootings which are trans is under 10 for the last decade,” which translated to “1:880 [or 0.11%] of the 4,400 shootings” they recorded, he said.

Further, the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC), which studies all forms of targeted violence including mass casualty attacks, published a report with data from 2016 to 2020 (here).

The report examined 173 attacks in the U.S. that “that resulted in harm to three or more individuals in public locations,” Justine Whelan, press secretary for the U.S. Secret Service, told Reuters via email, and “three attackers (2%) were transgender, assigned female at birth, but were known to identify as male at the time of their attacks.”

But the right is coming for trans people the way it has already come for immigrants. I think we should be ready for the possibility that there'll be efforts to ban transitioning altogether, even for adults, and that there'll be involuntary incarceration of trans people, at least in red states. And as noted above, Breitbart's Alex Marlow makes clear that trans people are among the few groups the right would be happy to disarm. To conservatives, gun ownership is the most fundamental right citizens have, so Marlow is essentially saying that trans people can't be citizens.

But the most chilling response to the Minneapolis shooting came from the man with the highest-rated prime-time show on cable, Fox's Jesse Watters. You might still think of Watters as a lightweight, but he's fully capable of going fascist with the menace of the man he replaced in Fox's 8:00 P.M. slot, Tucker Carlson. Just watch this:

VERY IMPORTANT: Everybody stop what you’re doing and watch this.

Jesse Watters just delivered his most important and powerful monologue ever.

He blew the lid off the trans violence epidemic, the media’s cover-up, and how Democratic leaders created it:

"The media is bad at… pic.twitter.com/rblfklypKQ

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 28, 2025

Here's some of what Watters says:

So a suicidal transgender who hates Trump, Christians, and Jews shoots up kids at a Catholic school, and the media wants to take away your handgun. So how are we supposed to protect ourselves from trans shooters?

The media is bad at pattern recognition. We aren't. Just two years ago, another trans twenty-something walked into a Christian school in Nashville with a rifle and shot three kids and three adults. They buried the manifesto and locked down the case.

We've seen trans shootings in Colorado and in Maryland. They even shot up an ICE facility in Texas. And it seems like half of Antifa is trans. A couple of they/thems just got popped for firebombing Teslas....

I don't hate anyone who thinks they're trans. I feel sorry for them. But statistically, the trans population has been prone to violence. That's not villainizing, that's reality. And if you can't recognize reality, you're in danger....

Society shouldn't be trying to produce more trans kids. We shouldn't be encouraging an emotional disorder....

But the left's weaponizing trans kids and turning them into culture warriors, and they've been turned loose against the church, schools, and Trump. You see it, I see it. The trans clan has a militant wing, and it's out for blood.

All this is intercut with clips of politicians such as Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey talking about respect and empathy. The message is clear: Trans people and the evil cities and states that try to make them feel welcome are killing Real Americans.

Watters pays condescending lip service to the idea that adult Americans are free to be trans. ("A grown man can wear a dress if he wants to do that in America. He has that right. We're a pretty darn tolerant society.") But he ignores the fact that, at 23, Robin Westham was an adult choosing to continue identifying as a woman.

Watters is stirring up hate, and if it's not exactly done the way Hutus in the early 1990s stirred up hate against Tutsis on Radio Rwanda and other stations, it's a lot closer than mainstream American media should ever get.

But the non-Republican press will ignore this hate speech, the same way it spent the post-Reagan era ignoring the hatemongering of right-wing talk radio, which radicalized millions of Americans and helped build the foundations of the Tea Party and then MAGA.

They're coming for trans people. Pastor Niemoller can probably tell you what will happen after that.

*****

UPDATE: The eliminationist rhetoric in the dialogue below includes "respectable" Chris Rufo. The tweet immediately below is from an influencer who's followed on X by, among others, Donald Trump Jr., Dan Scavino, Sebastian Gorka, Rudy Giuliani, and Kellyanne Conway.

They're openly calling to lock up every trans person by force. We need every ally to speak out forcefully against this because trans folks cannot do this on our own.

[image or embed]

— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) August 28, 2025 at 1:05 PM

BRING BACK "WEIRD" (updated)

In the early days of Kamala Harris's presidential campaign, her running mate, Tim Walz, was known for calling Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and other Republicans "weird." This clearly rattled both Trump and Vance. It was working. But the consultants urged Walz to stop using the term, and he did, as Politico noted earlier this year.

“He was encouraged to stop focusing on the ‘weird’ criticism,” said [a] former Harris aide. “I think it is fair to ask whether, even if ‘weird’ wasn’t quite right, his instinct about how to approach Trump, to make him seem small, and a huckster, wasn’t closer to correct than the more self-serious tone that may have made us sound too in defense of the status quo.”

It might be time to bring "weird" back, for many reasons. Start with this:

In President Donald Trump’s longest on-camera appearance of his second term, he soaked up credit from his Cabinet....

“Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker,” Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told Trump, referring to a three-story banner of his visage unfurled across the front of the Labor Department....

Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and Russia, Steve Witkoff, took his turn pushing one of Trump’s personal quests: “There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about,” he said.

It's sickening to watch a lot of this, but I'll give you one clip:

Witkoff: "There's only one thing I wish for: that that Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since that Nobel award was ever talked about."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 26, 2025 at 2:09 PM

Henry Farrell has a good post about what the political scientist Xavier Marquez calls "flattery inflation" in authoritarian regimes. Some examples from Marquez:

Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauescu was routinely called “the Giant of the Carpathians”, “the Source of Our Light”, “the Treasure of Wisdom and Charisma”, “the Great Architect”, “the Celestial Body”, and “the New Morning Star” by major public figures, and “court poets” wrote embarrassing encomiums to his rule … In Zaire in 1975, Mobutu Sese Seko was hailed as a new “Prophet” and “Messiah”, and his Interior Minister at the time even proposed replacing crucifixes in schools with Mobutu’s image.

It's weird. It's weird for a president to want this, and it's weird that Trump thinks Americans want to see it. Trump is an addict desperate for a daily fix of what psychoanalysis calls "narcissistic supply," and he's making us watch the injections. It's creepy and weird, as Walz used to say -- and Democrats should be saying this now.

*****

Turning Point's Charlie Kirk, who's very close to the Trump White House, had a weird, creepy response to the news that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged.

But maybe one of the reasons why Taylor Swift has been so, just, kind of annoyingly liberal over the last couple of years is that she's not yet married and she doesn't have children.... Taylor Swift might deradicalize herself. She might come back down to reality. I want them to have lots of children.

... we want Taylor Swift on team America. We want you to leave the island of the wokeys. And we would welcome you with open arms. One of the reasons why so many people on the right have been just skeptical or at least a little bit negative on Taylor Swift is, up until this point, that's not a great role model for young women, to wait all the way until you're 35 and just put your career first.

... I hope will make Taylor Swift more conservative. Engage in reality more and get outside of the abstract clouds. Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You're not in charge.

Yes, he really said, "Submit to your husband."

People my age with long memories remember that while many aspects of Reagan-era conservatism were quite popular, the oily sanctimoniousness of the religious right alienated many of the people we now call "normies." In a speech in 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle chastized Murphy Brown, the fictional title character of a popular TV show, for having a baby out of wedlock. Quayle offended many Americans whose sexual history didn't quite follow the edicts laid down by right-wing moralizers (many of whom didn't follow those edicts themselves). Those Americans didn't appreciate being scolded, and I don't think it's a coincidence that six months later America voted out Quayle and George H.W. Bush, replacing Bush with Bill Clinton, a man we knew had cheated on his wife.

The president we have now is a libertine and undoubtedly a part-time pedophile, but he seems to have made the political calculation that he'll make himself unpopular if he pursues a national abortion ban or other aspects of the religious right's agenda as it relates to heterosexuals. But if, as many people seem to believe these days, Trump is mortally ill, we could soon have a president who's steeped in this finger-wagging barefoot-and-pregnant ideology. The belief that women's role in life is bearing children unites the Andrew Tate manosphere and the Bible-beaters who surround Trump subordinates such as J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth. Democrats and liberal commentators should talk about this dangerously weird worldview.

Kirk doesn't simply endorse this lifestyle choice. He says it's "reality," as if every other way of conducting your life is somehow an illusion. He says that only those who share his ideology are on "team America." It's creepy that Kirk and so many others in the post-Trump generation of Republicans believe that a woman can't be an American unless she's a tradwife and a broodmare.

*****

And then there's this weirdo.

A far-right MAGA congressional hopeful has posted an unhinged campaign ad in which she sets fire to the Quran with a flamethrower.

Valentina Gomez, a Republican running for Texas’ 31st District in 2026, shared the extreme video on social media as part of her vow to “end Islam” in the Lone Star State, which has a Muslim population of roughly 1 percent....

“Your daughters will be raped and your sons beheaded, unless we stop Islam once and for all,” Gomez said before torching a copy of the holy book. “America is a Christian nation, so those terrorist Muslims can f--- off to any of the 57 Muslim nations. There is only one true God, and that is the God of Israel.”

Here's a pixillated version of the ad (you can see an uncensored version here):

@morocco_world_news

Texas Republican candidate Valentina Gomez, 26, has ignited widespread controversy after posting a video in which she burns the Quran. The footage, captioned “I will end Islam in Texas, so help me God,” quickly went viral, drawing sharp condemnation across social media. This incident marks the latest in a series of provocative actions by Gomez targeting Muslim and immigrant communities.

♬ son original - morocco world news

Gomez isn't a major figure in the GOP -- she's a "try-hard" who's been pulling stunts like this for years, with little to show for it except a few brief moments of virality.

Gomez’s previous stunts included a December 2024 video in which she staged a mock execution of an immigrant by shooting a dummy tied to a chair with a black bag over its head.

... Gomez once told Black Americans to “kindly” leave the U.S. if they “don’t like” the country in a message posted before the Juneteenth national holiday celebrating the end of slavery, which she called the “most ratchet” of holidays.

She also has a history of homophobia. In February 2024, while campaigning for Missouri secretary of state, Gomez also used a flamethrower to burn a pile of LGBTQ+ books, including titles aimed at teenagers.

In a May 2024 video, she also jogged through a pro-LGBT+ area of Missouri in a bulletproof vest, declaring: “In America, you can be anything you want. So don’t be weak and gay.”

Gomez crashed out of the Republican primary in that race in sixth place.

She's been kicked off Instagram, and even X is limiting the visibility of both her new ad and the previous flamethrower ad.

Gomez reminds me of Laura Loomer, whose early stunts also seemed like overkill, and who can't even win an election in Florida. Then again, Loomer is now a top adviser to the president of the United States.

I don't think Gomez will ever rise that high, and she probably won't win a seat in Congress. But at a time when Democratic candidates are being condemned for the use of progressive jargon by random academics who have no ties to the Democratic Party, why shouldn't the entire GOP have to answer for this person who proudly affiliates herself with the party and runs for office as a Republican?

Gomez, Kirk, and Trump are creepy and weird. We should say so.

*****

UPDATE: Here are some "thoughtful" conservatives -- National Review, Washington Examiner -- discussing Taylor Swift's fertility:

Talking like this in mixed company might get you punched in the face just fyi

[image or embed]

— The Alan Alda Resembler (@reedonly.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 11:17 AM

Very weird and very creepy.

SUDDENLY, DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS AND DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS DON'T SEEM TO BELONG TO THE SAME PARTY

Yesterday, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker delivered a defiant speech in response to President Trump's threat to send federal troops to Chicago.

Pritzker: This is not about fighting crime. This is about the President and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.

[image or embed]

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) August 25, 2025 at 5:07 PM

Illinois Gov. Pritzker vows to pursue Trump officials who participate in an illegal National Guard deployment to Chicago: "If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."

[image or embed]

— Adam Schwarz (@adamjschwarz.bsky.social) August 25, 2025 at 4:36 PM

Up to this point, the highest-profile Democrat expressing open defiance of Trump has been Governor Gavin Newsom, who's backing a redistricting plan meant to increase the number of California Democrats in Congress while continuing to troll Trump and other Republicans on social media. But it's not just Pritzker and Newsom getting salty. Facing threats of a Trump occupation of Baltimore, Maryland governor Wes Moore invited Trump to walk Baltimore's streets with him, and when Trump rejected the offer, Moore stopped playing nice:

President Bone Spurs will do anything to get out of walking – even if that means spouting off more lies about the progress we’re making on public safety in Maryland.

Hey Donald, we can get you a golf cart if that makes things easier. Just let my team know.

— Wes Moore (@iamwesmoore) August 24, 2025

Shortly afterward, Moore, a decorated combat veteran, went there:

Did Donald Trump, the President of the United States, lie about an injury to dodge the Vietnam draft?

— Wes Moore (@iamwesmoore) August 24, 2025

In Minnesota, Tim Walz continues hammering away at Trump:

Walz says Harris "would have been a fantastic president... we wouldn't wake up every day to a bunch of shit on TV. We would wake up to an adult w/ compassion & dignity doing the work, not a manchild crying about whatever is wrong with him. May his fat ankles find something today. Petty as hell."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 25, 2025 at 12:24 PM

And even the governor of New York is running for reelection as a Trump-basher:



But congressional Democratic leaders? They're still meek as lambs. In response to the occupation of D.C., they're listening to consultants who tell them to sidestep the issue in media appearances and pivot to talk about the economy when they're asked about the crackdown.

If you’re mad about Dems avoiding talking about DC, you can blame the Democratic quants, as demonstrated in this memo from David Shor’s Blue Rose Research

[image or embed]

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) August 24, 2025 at 1:59 PM

I wish I could tell you why this is happening. I don't have any inside information to explain it.

You might assume that the governors have a greater sense of urgency because Trump is directly threatening a jackbooted occupation of their cities. But New York is one of the cities where Trump has threatened an occupation, and the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate -- Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, both from Brooklyn -- have responded meekly. You might say that the governors have no connection to the D.C. Democratic Party. But Walz was on the presidential ticket last year, and Newsom, Pritzker, and Moore are all obviously considering presidential runs. You might say that governors from solidly blue states can get away with saying things that the national party, which needs to win nationwide, can't risk saying. But Democrats won Minnesota by only 4 points in the 2024 presidential election, while Tim Walz won his last race by less than 7 points. Hochul's victory margin in 2022 was also less than 7 points.

Maybe the apparently untreatable PTSD that spread among D.C. Democrats after the party badly lost three straight presidential elections in the 1980s has somehow spared Democrats in the states, even as it continues to spread in Washington, infecting even D.C.-based Democrats who are too young to remember the 1980s.

But I think it's something else.

I think the main battle being fought by billionaire Democratic donors is the battle to keep the D.C. party even-tempered and centrist. To these donors, righteous anger mean progressivism, and progressivism means a threat to their tax status. They like Schumer and Jeffries. They want more Democrats like Schumer and Jeffries.

There seems to be a groupthink among D.C. Democratic leaders that favors the interests of the wealthy and the advice of don't-rock-the-boat consultants. But the governors don't seem to be shaking off this mindset.

In reality, most of the angry governors aren't flaming progressives. Newsom has tacked to the right on issues such as trans rights and the homeless. Hochul is a centrist who still won't endorse her party's nominee for mayor of New York. Moore is an ex-Wall Streeter.

But the D.C. Democratic establishment believesthat an angry Democrat is a dangerous Democrat. The D.C. party's consultants agree. Let's hope there are more governors and mayors who are listening to other voices.

TRUMP BUILDS HIS CULT COMPOUND

According to Axios, Trump is trying to make D.C. his Utopia.

President Trump is molding D.C. into his own personal Epcot — a political theme park where troops keep the peace, the White House glitters like Mar-a-Lago and museums answer to MAGA.

... Trump's pressure campaign against D.C. leadership culminated this month in the declaration of a crime emergency and the deployment of over 2,000 National Guard troops, some of which are now carrying firearms.

Up next: Trump plans to ask Congress for $2 billion to "beautify" D.C. — eyeing a massive facelift for the city's parks, fountains, streetlights, roads and more.

Trump says he's reducing crime in D.C. already, but the result of his crackdown so far is a city where people go out less than they used to.

Jim, this is amazing. I was a 26-year resident of DC. Never felt scared mid-day in these places and really not even at night. They would ordinarily be packed on a beautiful day like this. Trump's deployment as an anti-crime measure is batshit crazy.

[image or embed]

— Dean Baker (@deanbaker13.bsky.social) August 24, 2025 at 7:27 PM

Compare that to the crowds in the alleged urban hellhole Trump intends to target soon, probably after the likely inauguration of Zohran Mamdani in January. Here's what New York City looked like yesterday at the first stop of the scavenger hunt Mamdani staged as a campaign event:

I think there are more people here for Zohran's scavenger hunt than voted for Cuomo

[image or embed]

— Miser (@misernyc.bsky.social) August 24, 2025 at 2:19 PM

I wasn't there, but I went to Riverside Park in Manhattan, and it was full of walkers, runners, bicyclists, cafe eaters and drinkers ... No one was afraid. But I kept thinking, A year from now, there'll be tanks here.

We know that restaurant reservations are down 31% in D.C. We know that Gestapo tactics at the border are leading to an $8.5 billion reduction in spending by international tourists.

Are these unintended consequences of jackbooted Trumpism? Or is this what Trump wanted?

For all his talk about making America great again and cleaning up cities, there's been little or no effort by the White House to demonstrate to the world that things are better -- to generate imagery of spiffy tourist attractions and safe streets, in order to send the message that Trump's efforts are working, in D.C., Los Angeles, or anywhere else. Instead, the visuals in the regime's messaging have been all about the crackdown itself. It's understandably making people afraid -- and it's as if Trump likes it that way.

Trump seems like a cult leader or domestic abuser who wants to drive outsiders away. It appears that he's trying to create a hermetically sealed realm where he can dominate and terrorize everyone, while people from the outside world keep their distance. He clearly doesn't want the troops in the streets to succeed in their mission and go home -- he likes having them there, as a display of his menace and power. He's building a North Korea or a Jonestown, or household where the neighborhood kids are afraid to retrieve an errant ball and the adults wonder why no one ever sees the wife and children leaving the house.

He's redesigning the White House and promising to redesign D.C.'s parks.

Even the White House itself is being remade: Trump's gold-drenched renovations and plans for a $200 million ballroom mark the biggest changes to 1600 Penn in generations.

... "I know more about grass than any human being anywhere in the world," Trump told reporters Thursday. "We're going to be re-grassing all your parks, all brand-new sprinkler systems."

But that's so they'll look the way he wants them to look, not the way anyone else wants them to look. It's all for him to gaze upon. (Who wants the grass in a city park to look like a golf course? Grass in city parks is meant for picnics and games of Frisbee. It's not meant to be soulless and pristine.)

Trump's mad scheme is to construct a world where nothing non-Trump exists. Sadly, while he tries to construct it, we have to live here.

RUBEN GALLEGO, YOUNG FOGEY

Many frustrated Democratic voters believe that the party will change only when it's no longer in the hands of the weak, cowardly Baby Boomers who control it now. However, this Washington Post story about 45-year-old first-term senator Ruben Gallego suggests that generational change might not cure what ails the Democratic Party.

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) brought up his party’s “national brand problem” early in his visit here this week and said some of its politicians were “lying to themselves that things were getting better” economically during the last election. He capped his day with a pitch for winning voters who backed President Donald Trump.

He did? Why? Democrats have won New Hampshire's presidential vote six consecutive times. Why not appeal to voters in your own party? And while it's true that New Hampshire voters are free to vote in any primary they choose, there'll be a contested Republican primary in 2028 (assuming we have normal elections, and assuming Donald Trump doesn't run in defiance of the Constitution). I'm certain that the vast majority of New Hampshire Trump voters will be voting in that primary. So why try to win them over?

But a desperation to please Republicans is instinctual for so many Democrats. It's sad that a young Democrat has apparently learned this at the feet of his elders.

As he has traveled the country, Gallego ... has been especially outspoken about why he thinks his party fell short in 2024. He has suggested that Democrats continued losing the trust of the working-class because they failed to effectively acknowledge concerns about high costs and alienated voters worried about immigration, because many in the party have not championed border security measures alongside other proposed overhauls when they talk about the issue.

I think there's some truth to this -- but why lead with it? As I've been saying lately, why do so many Democrats think Democrats suck -- vote Democrat! is a winning message?

... Gallego mentioned just as many Republicans by name in a positive context — Sens. Bernie Moreno (Ohio) and Jim Banks (Indiana) — as Democrats.

This is classic Democratic self-hate. Bernie Moreno? The guy who said, "Republicans are independently minded. Democrats are monolithic sheep that follow the Fuhrer Schumer’s orders" -- a reference to Chuck Schumer, who's Jewish? Jim Banks, who was so proud of calling a fired Department of Health and Human Services worker a "clown" and telling the worker "You probably deserved it" that he posted the confrontation on X? Gallego might think it's fine that these Republican senators are abuisive pricks, but some of us don't want to be in an abusive marriage with the GOP.

[Gallego] called Trump a bully and accused the administration of taking actions that he argued would make the country “sicker and poorer.” But he also emphasized a need for compromise.

“The president wants some of his nominees through. I think there’s some that we could work on,” Gallego said, later pointing out that he voted to confirm Doug Burgum as interior secretary.

Dude, you voted to confirm ten of Trump's cabinet appointees -- the same number as John Fetterman. Why? Did any voter anywhere ever say, "Gosh, I planned to vote for this Democrat, but he voted against a Republican president's interior secretary three years ago, and that was a dealbreaker for me"?

Gallego apparently wants a cookie for backing a Republican immigration bill.

Gallego’s swing through New Hampshire also included a town hall alongside Democratic Rep. Maggie Goodlander, who, like the senator, voted in support of the Laken Riley Act, the first bill Trump signed into law in his second term. The law mandates detentions and potential deportations of undocumented individuals accused of certain crimes.

But as it tuned out, his audiences didn't care.

Immigration was not a dominant topic during Gallego’s speaking events on Friday....

Attendees at his town hall mostly voiced concerns about tariffs, the economy, the social safety net and care for veterans.

All subjects on which Democrats have better ideas than Republicans. Why not emphasize those issues?

Gallego was asked about a Republican hot-button issue, and his answer was not terrible.

When asked if he supports transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports, an issue that Democrats have struggled to navigate politically in recent years, Gallego offered a careful response, saying, “We have to understand and be supportive of all parents — both the parents of trans kids as well as the parents of non-trans kids.” Such matters should be decided at the local level, not federally, he said.

Beth Scaer, a Republican who asked Gallego the question about transgender athletes, said after the town hall that she was “happy to hear a shift in what people are saying” about the issue.

So did Gallego convert this Republican voter? Nahhh.

But when asked if a response like Gallego’s would sway her to vote for a Democrat, Scaer said, “That’s not likely.”

There you go. If you're running as a Democrat, run as a Democrat. You can take centrist positions, but just take them. Don't beat your chest and say, Look how much better I am than all these other awful Democrats! That just reinforces inaccurate stereotypes of other Democrats, which drags down the party as a whole, while winning over very few (if any) Republicans. And don't beg Republicans for votes. You won't get them.

IN WHICH I TRY TO POLICE THE LANGUAGE POLICE WHO ARE TRYING TO POLICE THE LANGUAGE POLICE

One positive consequence of the FBI raid on John Bolton's house and the release of the Ghislaine Maxwell interview is that the Bolton and Maxwell stories helped bury this story, first reported by Axios:

A blunt memo from Third Way, a center-left think tank run by lifelong Democrats, implores opponents of President Trump to ditch jargon that's off-putting and even "deeply alienating" to many of the mainstream voters the party needs to win back.

... Third Way warns Democrats to be wary "of words proliferating in elite circles that have closed off open conversations and have made it uncomfortable for many people to engage in hard topics."

The words Third Way says Democrats shouldn't use include "Therapy-Speak" (dialoguing, othering, microaggression, centering, and so on), "Seminar Room Language" (subverting norms, systems of oppression, cultural appropriation, heuristic, and other terms), "Organizer Jargon" (for instance, stakeholders), and words connected to race and gender (the dread Latinx, as well as pregnant people, chest feeding, heteronormative, et cetera).

I want to un-bury this story briefly because it reveals quite a few of the mistakes Democrats make in this political climate. Most of these mistakes aren't mistakes of language usage.

The first mistake: Why make this a news story? Third Way is free to recommend that Democrats avoid the use of certain words -- but why go public with this scolding? Why did Third Way run to Axios with this memo and say, Here, publish this? Too many Democrats believe it's good for the party to publicly proclaim that party members are screwing up. This sends a message that quite a few Democrats bafflingly regard as persuasive to voters: We suck! Vote for us! Third Way's memo should have been privately circulated.

The release of the memo also reveals a big difference between the two parties. When Newt Gingrich was trying to conquer Congress for the GOP, he circulated a list of words Republicans should use -- "Optimistic Positive Governing Words" such as change, opportunity, truth, moral, and courage, alongside "Contrasting Words" party members should use in reference to Democrats (decay, failure, crisis, destructive, sick, pathetic, and others). When will a Democratic group compile a list of words that say good things about their own party and bad things about their opponents? Are establishment Democrats simply unable to imagine themselves as the good guys?

I agree that Democrats should avoid using most of the words on Third Way's list -- they're jargony and sterile. But they're words Democrats actually do avoid using. Can you name a single Democrat who was on the ballot in 2024 and used heuristic or chest feeding on the campaign trail, or anywhere else? I bet you can't. Scott Lemieux is right:

I'm honestly not sure what to do about the media consensus that Democratic politicians are responsible for everything ever said at an obscure academic conference but Republicans are not responsible for the rhetoric of Republican presidents

[image or embed]

— Scott Lemieux (@lemieuxlgm.bsky.social) August 22, 2025 at 8:38 PM

Fox News and other right-wing media outlets have worked very hard to persuade their audience that every random person on the left-liberal spectrum who says or does something even remotely embarrassing is a stand-in for every member of the Democratic Party. But the liberal-left media won't flood the zone with days and days of embarrassing coverage of, for instance, right-wing preachers who say women shouldn't vote, or a Republican gubernatorial candidate who called himself a "Black Nazi" on a porn bulletin board. And Democratic politicians won't do it either.

Republicans have a more highly developed propaganda infrastructure, but that's not the only problem. Democrats could try to hang every embarrassing right-winger around the necks of the rest of the Republican Party, but most Democrats shy away from a simple message: The Republican Party is bad. Democrats are okay at attacking individual opponents on the campaign trail, and they're willing to tie Donald Trump around other Republicans' necks, but they treat Trump as an anomaly, someone who's not a normal Republican, apparently because they can't stop arguing that the Republican Party is full of fine people they really want to work with on a bipartisan basis.

Democrats need to get over this. The Republican Party is bad. Democrats need to say it's bad. If they're afraid they'll alienate Republican voters, please note that Republicans have categorically described Democrats as evil and morally bankrupt for decades, and this hasn't prevented former Democratic voters from switching to the GOP. Democrats should try making We're right, their wrong the party's main message -- and they should focus on using language to attack Republicans, not fellow Democrats.

RIGHT-WING VOTERS HALLUCINATE LIKE AI

Remember this story from yesterday?

Trump to patrol DC streets with police and military

President Trump said he plans to go out on patrol with the Metropolitan Police Department and National Guard troops around Washington, D.C., on Thursday night amid a federal crackdown on crime.

“I’m going to be going out tonight, I think, with the police and with the military, of course. So we’re going to do a job,” Trump told conservative radio host Todd Starnes on his show.

Did Trump actually go out on patrol last night? No, he didn't.

No patrol but Trump visits police, military in DC as he touts anti-crime push

... Trump visited the U.S. Park Police Anacostia Operations Facility in Southeast D.C., which is serving as the gathering point for all the agencies involved in the operation, thanking officers and members of the military and delivering hamburgers from the White House and pizza.

Trump left the White House in the presidential limousine -- nicknamed "the Beast" -- with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller Thursday afternoon to visit the facility....

The president spoke for several minutes....

In a radio interview earlier Thursday, Trump said he would be "going out tonight" with the law enforcement and military, but he returned to the White House after the visit to the facility.

But it doesn't matter, apparently. Like AI hallucinating "facts" that aren't real, or legal or scientific citations that don't exist, Trump fans immediately began making memes of the Trump patrol that never happened.

More:

Trump on D.C. night patrol!

Holy Cow Caped Crusader! 🦇 pic.twitter.com/hDM5SXGHVB

— Farm Girl Carrie 👩‍🌾 (@FarmGirlCarrie) August 21, 2025

🇺🇸👮🏻‍♀️🇺🇸👮🏽‍♂️🇺🇸🪖🇺🇸👮🇺🇸
President Trump will be “on patrol” with the police and military, tonight, as part of the crackdown on crime, in DC pic.twitter.com/mAL7J7iQBc

— Andrew C ™️ (@Sheckyi) August 21, 2025

Republican voters will remember this as something that actually happened, because right-wing media said it would and then they saw fake video of it.

Republicans' brains are so cooked that they see every moment in life as an End Times battle between pure evil and pure good. I'm particularly gobsmacked by their response to the Cracker Barrel rebranding.

Sure, the new logo is bland and sterile, and it's not clear why it needed to be changed (except for the fact that top executives of aging corporations think they get paid the big bucks to do this kind of tinkering -- see the recent ridiculous rebranding of HBO Max as Max, then as HBO Max again, but with a slightly redesigned logo). But Republicans think this is all about "wokeness" and liberalism:

In college, I worked at @CrackerBarrel in Tallahassee. I even gave my life to Christ in their parking lot.

Their logo was iconic and their unique restaurants were a fixture of American culture.

No one asked for this woke rebrand. It’s time to Make Cracker Barrel Great Again 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/rqsPgPxwxY

— Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) August 21, 2025

Blackrock owns a lot of @CrackerBarrel stock..and they influence the board of directors.

You can see their globalist, national-cohesion destroying grubby hands on everything they touch.

— Rick McCargar (@RickMcCargar) August 21, 2025

More:

Yes, this is all about Joe Biden, as we learn from an actual U.S. senator:

There's still time to make this right, @CrackerBarrel... pic.twitter.com/23pcfyFMAy

— Marsha Blackburn (@VoteMarsha) August 21, 2025

The new logo was released during the second Trump administration. The old logo endured throughout the Biden presidency. But Republican voters are hallucinating that the change is all Biden's fault.

They want revenge against this woke mass hallucination:

They may be getting what they wanted:

Cracker Barrel shed almost $100 million in market value after its stock plunged Thursday following the release of a new logo. The new design eliminates a longstanding drawing of an overall-clad man leaning against a barrel, in favor of a cleaner logo featuring just the chain's name.

Shares of Cracker Barrel fell $4.22, or 7.2%, to $54.80 in Thursday trading, shedding $94 million in market value. The stock had dipped to a low of $50.27 earlier in the day, representing a loss of almost $200 billion in its capitalization.

This is how ordinary Republicans think. They're trained to see undiluted evil in everything that isn't part of their world, which they see as purely virtuous. And someday they may kill or imprison us all in response to their hallucinations.

THEY HATE (SOME) WHITE PEOPLE, TOO

Over the years, I've been skeptical of the idea that Donald Trump and other right-wing extremists rose to power simply because America is racist. I agree that racism is a major reason for the ascendancy of the GOP since the 1960s, but I've never been fully on board with the idea that Donald Trump came to power exclusively because, as many people put it, we elected a Black president and white America went crazy. I think there's a high level of racism in the Republican base, but Republicans have been taught to hate many other people as well. Among them: gay and trans people, feminist women, and plain old white liberals and lefties.

It's that last category of hatred that the most racist man in America, Stephen Miller, is cynically tapping into here:

Stephen Miller: "All these demonstrators that you've seen out here in recent days, all these elderly white hippies, they're not part of the city and never have been ... we're gonna ignore these stupid white hippies that all need to go home and take a nap because they're all over 90 years old."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 20, 2025 at 12:57 PM

Echoing Miller's denunciation of "stupid white hippies" was the equally cynical J.D. Vance:

Vance chimed in to say that it was “kind of bizarre that we have a bunch of old, primarily white people who are out there protesting the policies that keep people safe when they’ve never felt danger in their entire lives.”

Republicans can play the demonization game a hundred different ways. They can tap into anti-Black racism, then turn on a dime and pretend to be Black people's best friends, arguing (as they have for years) that the troubles Black people suffer all stem from the fact that most of them are stuck on the "Democrat plantation." But despite the phony show of sympathy here, Republicans' favorite stereotypes portray all people of color as violent and/or parasitical.

Yet Republicans also despise white people who, in their view, betray their whiteness by holding left-of-center views and voting for liberal or left-wing candidates. White people on the left are regarded as unnatural freaks -- in the George W. Bush years, they were seen as people exposing their necks so swarthy Islamists could cut their heads off. Here they're depicted as enablers of criminals. White liberals and leftists are always depicted as enthusiasts of crime, violence, and cultural decay.

The right has hated left-leaning whites for decades. Remember how Ronald Reagan described hippies in the 1960s: "For those of you who don't know what a hippie is, he's a fellow who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah." Right-wingers today see leftists as overweight, ugly grotesques. Here are just a few examples:

The right's cartoonists are probably hard at work on "hippie granny" grotesques right now.

To Republicans, left-leaning whites are "the enemy within" -- people who could be your neighbors, white man! Racism allowed the GOP to dominate American politics over the past half-century or so, but Republicans have a lot more hate to go around.

NO ONE GAVE THOSE LOST VOTERS A REASON TO REGISTER AS DEMOCRATS

Despite everything else that's going on in America and the world right now -- Russia and Ukraine, anger about Texas redistricting, Trumpist goon squads on America's streets -- this was the lead story on the New York Times site when I woke up this morning:

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.

Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot....

All told, Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections in the 30 states, along with Washington, D.C., that allow people to register with a political party. (In the remaining 20 states, voters do not register with a political party.) Republicans gained 2.4 million.

There are still more Democrats registered nationwide than Republicans, partly because of big blue states like California allow people to register by party, while red states like Texas do not. But the trajectory is troublesome for Democrats, and there are growing tensions over what to do about it.

The Times is obsessed with this topic. "The Democratic Party's Troubles" has its own banner (click to enlarge):

I'll admit that the numbers above aren't great. I'll also note that during the years in question, the party was led by the worst public communicator in the modern history of the presidency. Joe Biden did a better job than most Americans give him credit for on many issues, but he was a black hole of inarticulateness just as American politics fully entered an era in which social media and short videos became the dominant means of political communication. Biden also led a party that seems to believe that voters voters should just ... know that the government has done good things for them, and he naively believed that red-staters would reward the party for policies that were intended to create blue-collar jobs and build modern infrastructure. Add all that to temporary but unnerving post-pandemic upheavals (inflation, upticks in crime and border crossings) that Biden never spoke about in a compelling way, and it's not surprising that these registration numbers are bad.

The Times story tells us that even former skeptics see the extent of the problem:

Tom Bonier, one of the Democratic Party’s leading experts on voter registration trends, spent much of 2024 downplaying the seriousness of his party’s registration woes. He has now come around.

“I was wrong,” he said in an interview.

“Clearly, in retrospect, we can say the Democratic Party had dug itself in too deep a hole in the preceding four years for the Harris campaign to dig itself out in the last few months,” added Mr. Bonier, referring to the 2024 bid by former Vice President Kamala Harris. He now calls the registration figures “a big flashing red alert.”

Yes, but:

Here is what things looked like among new registrations in PA last year, from the election up to the inauguration, Republicans were crushing Dems in new registrations... pic.twitter.com/6vgGw69bHW

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) August 11, 2025

What was happening that week?:

- No Kings protests
- Trump's military parade
- Bombing Iran

Were any of those related to the registration surges? I don't know. It will be interesting to continue to watch though.

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) August 11, 2025

Hell, maybe Zohran Mamdani's upset victory in New York's Democratic mayoral primary (June 24) was a factor.

The Biden administration did many good things, but Biden himself was uninspiring, and the Kamala Harris campaign became more focus-grouped and less inspiring as it went on, to the candidates' detriment. In the second Trump era, party leaders such as Hakeem Jeffries have boasted about their lack of emotional engagement.

We'll see whether registrations tick up if people start identifying the party less with Biden, Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer and more with Mamdani, or Nicole Collier and other Democrats in the Texas legislature who are protesting mistreatment at the hands of majority Republicans, or Gavin Newsom and his Twitter feed -- or even this candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Susan Collins:

look I'm not myself a political scientist so I can't say what effects it would have for a spate of politicians to crop up saying "the enemy is the oligarchy" and "the enemy is billionaires" while swinging a kettlebell but I think we should try it for science and see what happens

[image or embed]

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) August 19, 2025 at 12:38 PM

To some of you, Platner's campaign might seem a bit inauthentic, and made up of too many poll-tested attributes (military background, blue-collar job, ad featuring boomer-dad-friendly blues guitar). But I really like the fact that Platner calls for universal health care, backs unions, and denounces the oligarchy. (It wasn't long ago when Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin, who wants to be seen as a "tough" Democrat, was telling us that the word "oligarchy" is elitist, despite the massive crowds who turned out for the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "Fighting Oligarchy" tour.) And I love the line "We've fought three different wars since the last time we raised the minimum wage."

Democrats can't engage voters simply by trying not to offend them. That's the Schumer-Jeffries strategy. It's not working. It's hollowing out the party.

IN DEFENSE OF DOOMERISM

After President Trump announced that his lawyers were working on an executive order banning mail-in voting in America, Jamelle Bouie was one of several commentators who were dismissive:

and also, an executive order banning mail-in voting has the legal authority of a social media post

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) August 18, 2025 at 8:46 AM

He expressed contempt for people who think Trump might get away with this:

need people to understand that accepting or conceding that he has the authority to do these things is tantamount to giving him the authority, and so your preemptive dooming is actively counterproductive

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) August 18, 2025 at 8:55 AM

I'm one of those doomers:

I don't accept that Trump has the authority to do these things. I accept that six members of the Supreme Court will assert that Trump has the authority to do these things, and that will decide the matter.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) August 18, 2025 at 10:39 AM

Bouie believes that you simply can't be a doomer if you understand how congressional elections work. As an example, he uses his home state of Virginia, where Democrat Abigail Spanberger is likely to win this year's gubernatorial race, and then appoint a new secretary of the commonwealth, who will oversee the state's 2026 congressional elections.

"trump will just end mail in balloting in a blue state" yeah, so, how exactly is trump going to force the elected secretary of state to break state law and end mail-in balloting?

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) August 18, 2025 at 5:45 PM

like, is trump going to force governor spanberger to appoint a new secretary of the commonwealth next year?

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) August 18, 2025 at 5:47 PM

Probably not -- but what will prevent Trump from rejecting the certification of Democratic victories in Virginia's elections, or in elections in any other state, citing nonexistent mail-ballot fraud as the reason for the rejection? And if you say that nothing in the law gives the president the right to decide these things (I agree), do you seriously believe that the lame-duck Republican Congress will defy Trump and insist that these Democrats be seated, especially if seating them will result in a change in party control of the House, and possibly the Senate? And even if the Supreme Court doesn't ultimately ratify this radical move, doesn't the recent history of the Court suggest that it might allow Trump to have his way while a case challenging him gradually works its way through the lower courts, on the premise that seating members of Congress who didn't really win is a mistake that can be reversed in the future without irreparable harm?

I'm not a doomer because I want people to give up hope. I'm a doomer because I want people to recognize how many angles Trump and his partners in crime might be trying to work, and how far all three branches of government have strayed from the law and the Constitution. I want people to be ready to fight abuses of power they previously assumed couldn't take place in America.

It's obvious that Trump and his fellow Republicans don't intend to just let the chips fall where they may in 2026. They're redisticting in Texas, and while California and a few other Democratic states hope to retaliate, there are more Republican than Democratic states where redistricting could happen. In addition, there's talk of a mid-decade census. And there's this:

The Department of Justice is conducting a state-by-state review to scrutinize how officials manage their voter rolls and remove ineligible voters.

The effort is so far focused on battleground states....

In nearly identical letters to state election officials in Minnesota, Nevada and Pennsylvania, the DOJ asked them to describe how they identify people who are felons, dead, nonresidents, or noncitizens, and how they remove them from their voter lists.

That's from a late July USA Today story. AP now reports that this fishing expedition has spread to 19 states, the majority of them Democratic.

And there was this, from the meeting between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy:

During one part of their press conference, the U.S. president latched onto a statement by Zelenskyy about pausing elections during wartime, and spun it to hint at the possibility of him outlasting his two-term limit in 2028.

"So you're saying during the war you can't have elections," he said, interrupting the Ukrainian president's remarks. "So, let me just say, three and a half years from now... if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections. Oh, that's good."

That's Trump trolling us, but maybe he's not trolling, and maybe he's not just talking about 2028.

America, unlike Ukraine, conducts elections during wartime. It conducted elections even during the Civil War in 1864. But there's been a massive reordering of American life based on Trump's claims of nonexistent emergencies and "wars" that aren't wars -- for instance, against immigrants. We've now seen two cities occupied by masked federal troops, with more undoubtedly to follow. If you're sure Trump can't do anything to rig the 2026 midterms because the law and the decentralized nature of our elections makes rigging impossible for him, can you say with certainty that Trump won't have his goons at the polls in blue cities fifteen months from now?

If you respond to this with despair, that's a you problem. I think the proper response is a concerted effort to warn America of what Trump and the GOP might be planning. Prominent Democrats should publicly describe some of these scenarios and make the White House and congressional Republicans deny that they have any such ideas in mind. Democrats should accuse the Supreme Court of being a thumb on the scale for Trump, in the hope that they'll shame the Court into backing off.

We need to alert people to what the GOP is trying to do before we wake up and found out that it's already happening. We need to direct Americans' attention to how corrupt and un-American Republicans have been, in all three branches of governmnent, and put those Republicans on notice that we're on to them now. That's the purpose of doomerism.

GAVIN NEWSOM IS SUPPOSED TO STAY IN HIS LANE

John Stoehr believes that Donald Trump has dementia, and that the press is in denial about this self-evident fact.

You may have noticed something. I used to talk about the president’s dementia pretty regularly, but haven’t in months. That’s because I’ve lost faith. I used to believe the Washington press corps would see the plainly obvious. I no longer believe that. The hypocrisy is too baked in.

The double standard that prevents political reporters from seeing Donald Trump’s totalitarianism is the same double standard that prevents them from seeing his dementia. He doesn’t make choices. Only Democrats do. He can’t be held responsible for what he says.

Regualr readers know that I don't believe Trump has dementia -- mild cognitive impairment, probably, but not dementia. I think what's mistaken for dementia is mostly ignorance and a head full of Fox News oversimplifications. But I don't want to get into that now, because Stoehr and I agree that Trump talks a lot of nonsense, and the press seems determined to normalize it.

I know why the press does this. I'll explain below.

Stoehr thinks Gavin Newsom's mockery of Trump's social-media style will open the press's eyes to Trump's fascist tendencies and cognitive deficiencies.

... the California governor has been pursuing a media strategy that is a model for other ambitious Democrats to follow. It also has the potential to expose Trump’s weakness. And he’s doing that by the most unlikely means: copying Trump’s confabulated style.

At a news conference last week, a reporter asked Newsom a question about his tweets mocking Trump's prose style. Stoehr quotes Newsom's answer:

“I hope it’s a wake up call for the president of the United States,” he said. “I’m just following his example. If you have issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns with what he’s putting out, as president. To the extent that it’s gotten some attention, I’m pleased, but I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets and Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice.”

But the press will never get it, for a simple reason: Our political culture puts the two parties in separate lanes. Trump's incoherent-simpleton social media posts keep him comfortably in the Republican lane. Newsom's parodies are the work of a Democrat refusing to stay in his party's lane.

The nature of the Republican lane was codified in the Reagan era. Ronald Reagan's utterances were aggressive and simplistic. Using simple language, he verbally attacked Russia as a force of pure evil, and he mocked Democrats and liberals with humor that was more mean-spirited than it appeared.

Reagan's electoral success, especially with blue-collar white men, led the press to conclude that Reagan was talking in the simple, elemental language of real Americans with dirt under their fingernails.

A few years into the Reagan era, Oliver North's self-righteous hostility during the Iran-contra hearings gave the media a variation on the Republican temnplate. Republicans didn't have to be winky and folksy like Reagan -- instead, they could be blustery, contemptuous, menacing macho egomaniacs wrapped in the American flag. That was seen a variation of the True Voice Of The Volk. (During those hearings, Ollie North probably invented both right-wing talk radio and modern country music.)

In 1988, George H.W. Bush, a New England preppie, decided to run using this Republican persona. He ate pork rinds and campaigned with country stars. He mocked his opponent -- a son of immigrants -- as an elitist. And he won big. He ran a vicious campaign, but the press wasn't appalled, because he had learned to speak The True Language Of The People and Michael Dukakis hadn't.

We see this pattern repeating in the two campaigns of Poppy Bush's son. George W. Bush was simple-minded and inarticulate, but that meant he was "authentic," and both Al Gore and John Kerry were elitist phonies. And now we're in the Trump era, and the press is so certain that misinformation and macho bluster are the true Song of America that Donald Trump can say anything and get away with it.

The press can't process Gavin Newsom's parodies of Trump because Newsom is far out of the lane Democrats are meant to occupy. Democrats are supposed to sound like brainiacs and approach conflict as low-pulse-rate conciliators. (See, for instance, the soft-spoken, soporific Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.) The two Democrats in the post-Reagan whose stardom the press has been willing to acknowledge, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, made their names calling for bipartisanship and comity. In his star-making 2004 Democratic convention speech, Obama said that "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America," an assertion that was utterly wrong. But he was talking the way Democrats are supposed to talk.

This is why the press can't learn the lesson Gavin Newsom is trying to teach. Republicans are expected to communicate in ways that are crude and ignorant; Democrats are expected to be nerds who keep the peace. If we had a single standard for all politicians, Newsom's approach might change mainstream political thinking -- though if we had a single standard for all politicians, what Newsom is doing wouldn't be necessary. In any case, we haven't had a single standard for the two parties in the last 45 years.