OF COURSE TRUMP COULD WIN IN 2028 -- FOR REASONS THAT MATTER REGARDLESS OF WHO RUNS

This post will seem like doomerism, but I don't intend it to be read that way. It's largely a warning to Democrats and their moderate/liberal/progressive base: If we have fair elections in 2026 and 2028, don't screw them up. I write about a possible Donald Trump presidential run in 2028, which even Trump now concedes is unlikely, but what I'm saying applies no matter who runs.


James Carville and former Wonkette writer Stephen Robinson probably don't agree on much, but they're both arguing that we should pay no attention to third-term talk about Donald Trump, because Trump couldn't possibly be elected in 2028. Here's Carville:

Speaking with Carville, “Politics War Room” co-host Al Hunt answered a listener’s question with “No way, José,” regarding former White House adviser Steve Bannon’s claim in an interview with The Economist that there is a plan for Trump to seek and secure a third term despite term limits enshrined in the Constitution.

Carville said he gets “almost irritated” by being questioned about Trump’s third term comments.

“Understand, Trump couldn’t win — I wish they’d let him run,” Carville exclaimed. “I don’t think he’s anywhere close going to be sufficiently healthy in another three something — over three years to do anything.

“But he would lose so bad ...”

At Public Notice, Stephen Robinson cites Trump's health and his poll numbers:

Trump, who is now 79, is the oldest person ever elected president. His physical and mental decline is undeniable....

What’s astonishing about the media’s “third term” coverage is how it doesn’t clearly state the obvious: Voters are openly rejecting Trump, as seen in poll after poll.

The president’s approval rating in The Economist’s tracker has fallen to -18, which is lower than any point in his first term....

According to CNN’s Harry Enten, Trump’s approval is lower than any president at this point in their presidency or second term on record.

You know where I stand on Trump and dementia: I think it's likely that he has mild cognitive impairment, but there's no evidence that it's progressed to dementia. He's ignorant and incurious and has a head full of Fox News disinformation, as well as a lifelong habit of lying to make himself look good, a habit that still fools the gullible. All of this explains nearly every batshit-crazy thing he says.

As for his physical health, I'm considering my personal experience with elderly relatives and acquaintances who lived for a decade or several decades after cancers, strokes, or heart attacks -- none of which Trump has had yet, as far as we know. In America, if you have good health care, doctors can keep you alive even if you're suffering from conditions that would have been fatal a few decades ago. Trump might die in a few years, but it seems equally likely that his life -- and ability to remain a public figure -- could be sustained through aggressive but fairly routine medical intervention.

As for his poll numbers, let's remember that the Economist poll tracker has the worst numbers for Trump. Real Clear Polling has him at -7.6%, Nate Silver at -10.6, G. Elliott Morris's Fifty Plus One at -14.5%. These numbers are bad -- but so were Trump's numbers in his first term. According to some assessments, they were worse. Here's a chart from The New York Times:

Yet Trump nearly pulled of an Electoral College win in 2020.

But a principal reason that Trump could hang on to win a third term even if he doesn't rig the 2028 election is the state of the Democratic Party -- specifically the divisions within the Democratic Party. And that should concern you even if you think we'll have free and fair elections in 2028 and you assume (as you probably should) that the GOP candidate will be someone other than Trump.

I'm not going to say that progressives make Democrats unelectable by pulling the party too far to the left, as many highly paid Democratic consultants argue. I'm also not going to argue here that a timid, outdated centrism is killing the party, even though I think there's some reason to believe that.

I don't want to address either of those arguments because what concerns me is that the Democratic habit of failing to pull together to defeat the GOP no longer seems limited to elections in which the Republican threat seems like a distant memory. It shouldn't have happened, but I understand why in 2000, after eight years without a Republican in the White House, some voters forgot how terrible the GOP can be and decided it wasn't necessary to vote Democratic. I understand why the same thing happened in 2016 and again (though it was after only four years with a Democrat in the White House) in 2024. I don't agree, but I get it.

What I'm beginning to detect now is a sense that Democrats really might not pull together in 2026 and 2028 even after experiencing the worst and most authoritarian presidency of all time. I worry that both anti-racist progressives and moderate Democrats might reject Graham Platner if he's nominated to run against Susan Collins next year, while pro-Platner progressives might reject Janet Mills as too old and too tied to the Chuck Schumer Establishment if she wins the primary.

I worry about polling showing that Jasmine Crockett would be the favorite in the Democratic Senate primary in Texas if she runs, but would be weaker than Colin Allred and James Tallarico in the general election.

And I worry about the 2028 presidential primaries.

The election -- assuming it happens and isn't subject to Orbanesque rigging by the GOP -- is years away, but it's likely that one of leaders in early polling, Gavin Newsom, will be a strong primary candidate. But if you spend any time in lefty spaces like Bluesky, you know that there are trans people and allies who say they will never under any circumstances vote for him because he's tacked to the right on trans issues.

But another leading contender, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, might struggle to win over moderates if she runs. One recent national poll shows AOC tied with J.D. Vance in a 2028 matchup, while Newsom leads Vance by 4. Even in New York City, the progressive front-runner for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has failed to clear 50% in the polls, even though he has a commanding lead over a divided field.

If we have real elections in 2026 and 2028, Democrats can't afford to stay divided. Don't like the moderate (or progressive) who won the primary? You have to look at the bigger picture. The Republican Party is a pro-fascism party and simply must be stopped. In a two-party system, only Democrats can stop it. If we're given the opportunity to vote freely, we need to avoid squandering our opportunities. We have to go for all the wins we can get, even if we have to hold our noses to get there.

FOX ISN'T NEWS WITH A RIGHT-WING SLANT -- IT'S ANTI-NEWS

This is why I hate Rupert Murdoch more than any person alive, including Donald Trump:

So here's Andrew Cuomo reacting to Maria Bartiromo wondering if Mamdani will "change the look of New York" and have Muslim women "completely covered up," telling her that Mamdani "doesn't understand New York culture" because he has "dual citizenship" and "he's a citizen of Uganda."

[image or embed]

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) October 29, 2025 at 11:50 AM

Many very smart people believe that Fox merely reports the news with a right-wing slant, and gives over airtime to commentators who express right-wing opinions about the news.

Some of these very smart people will acknowledge that those right-wing Fox commentators are demagogic and wildly inflammatory. Yet these smart folks still believe that Fox is, on balance, a news channel.

Opinions can vary widely, but the news is the truth, or it's supposed to be. What Maria Bartiromo says in this Fox Business clip isn't opinion based on reality. What she says is based on lies. That's worse than plain demagoguery. Viewers turn to Fox News and Fox Business to learn what's happening in their world, and they're told lies and implicit lies.

That's not news -- it's anti-news. Viewers walk away from this segment believing they've learned facts when they've learned falsehoods disguised as facts.

Bartiromo says, at 0:31:

I guess I'm wondering if you're expecting New York to look more like London. You go to London right now and it is largely Muslim. Women are completely covered up. I don't know if you expect, if Mamdani were to be in charge, him to change the look of New York as well.

Here are the facts: London is 53.8% white. It's 20.8% Asian or Asian British. It's 40.66% Christian and 14.99% Muslim.

London is, in fact, whiter than New York City, which is 30.9% white. New York has been a majority-minority city since at least the 1990 census. As for religions, New York is approximately 4% Muslim.

Bartiromo wants you to believe that every Muslim in London is covered from head to toe. That's nonsense. Here are London's Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, and his wife, Saadiya Khan:

And what about Mamdani? Well, here's the woman he married earlier this year, an illustrator named Rama Duwaji:

That doesn't look like a niqab to me.

Would Mamdani preside over an Islamic fundamentalist government? I'm pretty sure Islamic fundamentalists don't make a habit of bantering about gaydar with trans people, or release campaign ads commemorating trans activists:




It's contemptible that Andrew Cuomo is trying to leverage this kind of disinformation to win the mayor's race (and yes, there are undoubtedly cops on Staten Island and elderly shut-ins on the Upper East Side who think it's conceivable that London looks like Afghanistan now and New York could be next). Cuomo is contemptible, but it's contemptible that this kind of high-budget mainstream television exists at all. It's filling fact gaps in viewers' minds with lies.

Anti-news is killing America. And it made the Murdoch family rich.

WHY REPUBLICANS LOVE FAKE VIDEOS

In the news section of The Washington Post -- which is still trying to hang on as a reliable source of information, even as Jeff Bezos destroys the paper's opinion section -- we find hard evidence of fakery in videos put out by the Trump Department of Homeland Security:

The Department of Homeland Security posted a swaggering montage to social media in August declaring it had triumphed in its takeover of Washington, D.C. It showed footage of federal agents fighting what a DHS official called a “battle for the soul of our nation” and working “day and night to arrest, detain and deport vicious criminals from our nation’s capital.”

There was one problem. Several of the clips had been recorded during unrelated operations months earlier, in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Florida. The official’s sound bite about deportations in D.C. played over a clip from May showing detainees on a Coast Guard boat off the coast of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island 400 miles away.

Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have used similarly misleading footage in at least six videos promoting its immigration agenda shared in the last three months, a Washington Post analysis found....

The Trumpers are even using Biden-era imagery to prove how tough they are.

The White House ... post[ed] a video this month that claimed “Chicago is in chaos” and said the city “doesn’t need political spin — it needs HELP.”

The video, however, recycled footage from a months-old ICE operation in Florida, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. A fact-checker at Agence France-Presse also found other clips in the video had come from operations in Arizona, California, Nebraska, South Carolina and Texas, some of which had been recorded during President Joe Biden’s time in office.

The latter video would qualify as a "swaggering montage".

An incompetent Mayor. A delusional Governor. Chicago is in chaos, and the American people are paying the price.

Chicago doesn't need political spin—it needs HELP. pic.twitter.com/INR42XBdqA

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 8, 2025

But the first one actually seems more like what Milan Kudera called "totalitarian kitsch," full of sunrises and shots glorifying D.C.'s monuments, embedded in what seems like a human resources onboarding video for the New World Order.

This week, DHS moved to restore our nation’s capital to its former glory, and rid its streets of violent crime, in collaboration with local law enforcement.

Washington D.C. will become a symbol of American Greatness again.@MicahBock pic.twitter.com/UHSgfXlxcj

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 17, 2025

Of course, these videos aren't as fake-looking as the AI slop Donald Trump has posted on social media since his return to the White House. Democrats and independents are appalled by those videos, according to a recent YouGov survey. Republicans, not so much.

Only around one-third of Americans say they've seen a recent AI-generated video posted by Donald Trump depicting himself dropping sewage out of a fighter jet onto protesters, but once shown the video, 70% of Americans say they strongly or somewhat disapprove of it. A new YouGov poll showed Americans this video — as well as two other AI videos posted by the president on Truth Social this year — and found that reactions were generally negative, with many viewing the videos as unpresidential, disturbing, and offensive.

After being shown the sewage video, 96% of Democrats disapprove and only 2% approve; 72% of independents disapprove and only 14% approve. But among Republicans, the numbers are mixed: 42% approve, 42% disapprove.

An AI video of Barack Obama being arrested and imprisoned is met with 96% disapproval and 3% approval among Democrats, as well as 73% disapproval and 13% approval among independents. But a plurality of Republicans (48%) approve, while only 38% disapprove.

And an AI video of a remade Gaza featuring a gold Trump statue and a Trump Gaza hotel meets with 93% disapproval among Democrats (4% approval) and 71% disapproval among independents (13% approval). But a plurality of Republicans approve (44%-34%).

We know that Republicans respond favorably to images of Trump as a young, buff action hero (or rock star or pop star or biker). Why do they like this stuff so much?

I think it's because Republicans don't like the real world.

The rest of us can imagine happiness in settings that aren't quite perfect -- say, a beautiful spring day with people enjoying themselves in a hundred different ways in a big city park. People are throwing Frisbees and hanging out with friends and having birthday parties for their kids. They're bicycling and running and walking dogs and just strolling. There might be potholes on some of the paths or dog poop on some of the lawns, but, mostly, life is good. Maybe this is my big-city worldview -- that the place where I love is scruffy and has decay and human suffering, but can be a place of joy -- but it's what I think Republicans can't appreciate. They need everything to be their way, or the world is unbearable.

I think they actually are happy in their small-town/rural bubble, but they've been conditioned to be angry about everything in the world, because it's not like their world.

There's a lot of talk in the media about liberal contempt for conservatives, even though the feeling clearly goes both ways. But beyond that, it's important to note that while some liberals dislike rural, pickup-driving, gun-brandishing right-wingers, they don't want them to cease to exist. They don't want them denied the vote. They just want to live in a country where those people don't control the government and police everyone else's lives.

Whereas right-wingers don't want anyone to be progressive, or liberal, or LGBTQ, or feminist, or vegetarian, or non-white, or non-Christian, or have dyed hair, or enjoy cities or bicycling or public transportation. They want a world in which everyone is just like them -- or at least a world in which they don't have to share political power with anyone who isn't like them. They think it's possible to imagine a world in which everyone is like them or at least agrees with them, and every human interaction is a morality tale in which they're right 100% of the time and the people they don't like are crushed underfoot because they're evil. In this world, they get all the power, all the glory, all the women. Their president is young and hot and all-powerful and God's agent on Earth. And so are they.

The rest of us recognize that this is a flawed world with moments of grace and happiness and the potential for more if we try to be better people. Republicans think this could be a perfect world if the people they hate ceased to exist and everyone did things the Republicans' way. Only in fake video can the world they seek possibly exist. The world they want is impossible to attain.

IS AMERICAN AUTHORITARIANISM IRREVERSIBLE?

When I read this Axios piece by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, my first thought was to mock it for bothsidesism. VandeHei and Allen seem appropriately alarmed by Donald Trump's massive power grab, but they also seem to believe it's evolutionary -- a natural outgrowth of our recent preference for a strong executive branch -- and they think both sides will just keep doing what Trump is doing:

President Trump is asserting the right to unilaterally use the military wherever, whenever and be the sole judge and jury of his own actions.

Why it matters: Of all the unprecedented actions, these might carry the most sweeping consequences — not just now, but for future presidents....

Neither the conservative Supreme Court nor the GOP-led Congress has shown much interest in limiting this executive.

This dynamic frees Trump to use federal troops in U.S. cities over the objection of a state's governor, or kill people overseas without war authorization or scrutiny, or prosecute his critics in U.S. courts, or seize congressional powers over tariffs and spending.

It's important to reckon with the logic behind this, which will ultimately be validated or invalidated by the Supreme Court. Future presidents will be able to claim the same power Trump does.

They seem to be saying that the real danger is Omigod, a Democrat might be this powerful someday! As they wrote in an earlier piece:

Trump and future presidents hold the power, backed by precedent, to wield their vast authority to harm critics, help allies and chill free speech. Remember the payback precedent: When you get power back, at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, do unto the other what they've been doing to you!

Do you believe that a Democratic president elected in 2028 would rule like a king? I don't. I see who's leading the Democratic pack: Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They have some ideological differences, but they all believe in the rule of law. None of them seem likely to grab power and dare the system to stop them. And even if Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2028, congressional Democrats won't rubber-stamp what a Democratic president wants. There will be friction. With Democrats, there's always friction.

And our corrupt, partisan Supreme Court will undoubtedly take powers away from the Democrat that it recently granted to Trump. Everyone knows this, or should.

But maybe none of this is relevant. It seems increasingly unlikely that we'll have a fair election in 2028, or even in 2026. (David Graham's "The Coming Election Mayhem" in The Atlantic is a must-read on this subject; this gift link should work.) It could take a while before we exit the era of Trumpian authoritarianism. We might need a force or movement other than the Democrats to overthrow the Republican authoritarians.

VandeHei and Allen see Trumpism as part of a gradual evolution of executive-branch power. They write:

Trump is hardly the first president to stretch the bounds of emergency authority: President George W. Bush's administration relied on post-9/11 powers to wiretap Americans without a warrant. President Obama invoked 9/11-era powers to set new precedents for drone strikes. President Biden tried to rely on emergency powers to forgive student debt, but the Supreme Court stopped him.

It seems almost comical that VandeHei and Allen are comparing these limited power grabs to Trump's effort to seize absolute power in literally every area of political interest. Even if you're horrified by what Bush and Obama did in the War on Terror, note that they didn't try to fully upend democracy, remake the structure of the government by fiat, attempt to sue media outlets and universities into complicity or nonexistence, or militarize large swaths of U.S. territory.

If you see what's happening now as evolutionary, it's understandable that you might think, Oh wow, I don't want President Ocasio-Cortez to have these powers, duly given to her by a Supreme Court that sees nearly unlimited power as her due according to the Framers' wishes. That's not what's going to happen.

If, somehow, we have a legitimate election in 2028 and a Democrat wins, the Supreme Court will suddenly discover that presidents were never intended to have absolute power. Showboating contrarian Democrats will block even well-intentioned presidential efforts to use power aggressively.

But it's more likely that we'll have a couple of decades of Trumpists in the White House -- and after that, we might lose any muscle memory of rule-based governance. We might have one authoritarian regime following another, as in Russia or some parts of Latin America, because we've forgotten how to do it any other way.

If that happens, I guess you could say that VandeHei and Allen were half-right.

THE WORLD SHOULD ACKNOWLEDGE THE ILLEGITIMACY OF A TRUMP THIRD TERM

We're just allowing this to happen:

President Trump refused to rule out an unconstitutional bid for a third presidential term on Monday....

Steve Bannon, a MAGA podcaster and former Trump adviser, turned heads in a recent interview with the Economist by suggesting there was "a plan" for Trump to stay in office....

When pressed if he would rule out a third term, he replied, "Am I not ruling it out? You'll have to tell me."

Here are the words I want to hear from a Democrat in response to this:

"Donald Trump cannot be president on January 21, 2029, or any day thereafter. The words of the Constitution are unambiguous: 'No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.'

"I recognize that Donald Trump might still be sitting in the Oval Office after his term expires, because of his own brazen lawlessness and the complicity of a supine Congress and a partisan Supreme Court. We have seen so many grotesque violations of the law and the Constitution in just the past nine months that we know any depravity is possible from Trump and his enablers.

"But if he is in the Oval Office after his term expires, then America will have an illegitimate government. No nation on earth should recognize it. None should accept Trump as America's legitimate president. No state in the union, no city or town, should recognize him as legitimate. No one should feel legally obligated to send tax revenues to Washington, or to recognize federal law. No federal office in any state in the union should be allowed to remain open. Permitting a man who is not legally qualified to remain in office as president is an act of war against the Constitution. If it happens, America as we have known it for 250 years will no longer exist.

"There are many people who believe the government of the United States is already lawless and illegitimate. It's easy to understand that perspective. But Donald Trump was, at the very least, legitimately elected president in 2024. He cannot be legitimately elected in 2028. He cannot remain in office past the end of his term through any legitimate means.

If he prevents the 2028 presidential election from taking place, that is a lawless act. If he runs again, that is a lawless act. If he wins, through fair means or foul, that is a lawless act. If he remains in office through any other means, that is a lawless act.

"I call on every government to recognize this -- every foreign government, every state and local government. I call on every U.S. citizen to recognize this. Any 'plan' Donald Trump and his cronies might have to keep him office is a crime against the United States."

There is no legitimate workaround short of a constitutional amendment -- which could never be ratified by the necessary 38 state legislatures. (There are more than a dozen Democratic-leaning states where an amendment allowing Trump to run again would be dead on arrival.) And even Trump has ruled out running as vice president so he can become president after the person at the top of the ticket resigns. In any case, as Kevin Kruse notes, a vice presidential candidate needs to be eligible to be president in order to run for vice president -- "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States," the 12th Amendment says.

I already believe the second Trump presidency is lawless and illegitimate, but it's understandable that this notion is not universally accepted. Democrats should make it clear, however, that seating a president in unambiguous defiance of the Constitution unquestionably delegitimizes the United States government.

I know this won't happen, but if it were to happen, it might change the conversation around the "Oh, isn't he cheeky?" mainstream narrative surrounding Trump's daily defiance of American law.

MAYBE TRUMP'S WORKING-CLASS FANBASE JUST LIKES THE IDEA OF LIFE WITH NO RULES

In The New York Times, Ben Rhodes has published an op-ed titled "The Thread Tying Together Everything Trump Does." What's the thread?

For Mr. Trump, the common thread weaving together so much of what he does — at home and abroad — is power. Whether he is seeking a cease-fire in Gaza or Ukraine, bombing boats off the coast of Venezuela or deploying troops to American cities, the desired result is his personal aggrandizement and the empowerment of his presidency. When he pursues peace, it is personalized — a deal made with other strongmen rarely addresses underlying causes of conflict. When he makes war, it is also personalized — there is no expectation, for instance, that Congress must authorize his actions.

But is it strange that he's the guy millions of working-class voters prefer to the Democrats? Why don't those voters find his grandiosity offputting, not to mention his policies?

I've grown tired of Ezra Klein, but he sometimes asks the right questions, as in his most recent podcast, in which he interviews Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics. At one point Klein says this to Abbott:

... Democrats are still the party that wants to raise taxes on rich people. Republicans are still the party that wants to cut them. Democrats are still the party trying to create universal health care — and under Obama, get a hell of a lot closer than we’ve ever been before. Republicans are still the party trying to repeal that, trying to cut Medicaid, which they just did in the Big Beautiful Bill.

Republicans are voting for these trade bills. George W. Bush is very pro-free trade. Republicans have proposed a lot of these bills. Republicans vote for NAFTA in the House and Senate in very, very high numbers.

There is this story that I hear — that the Democrats abandoned all of these economic policies. Biden is, I think, probably the most left president on economics of my lifetime. More aggressive on antitrust than any other president since I was born — on labor issues, on everything....

How do you make that add up?

Obviously, Democratic policies have been incremental and piecemeal, and thus haven't been enough to make many working-class voters feel their lives are significantly better as a result. Democrats don't try hard enough to remind voters that Republican policies make their lives worse, but working-class voters who vote Republican might notice that on their own, and simply conclude that neither party does them much good.

So maybe they vote for the party that's a more comfortable fit on cultural issues, or whose politicians seem more like them. That's Klein's usual argument. But does Trump seem like them when he wields power like a mad king? Does he seem like them when he covers the White House in gold and tears down the East Wing to build a massive ballroom?

I think maybe they're voting for him because they've given up on the idea that either party will make their lives materially better and they just want politics to let them live vicariously. They stick with Trump not because they necessarily want a lavish ballroom in place of the East Wing, but because rooting for him, a guy with absolute power, lets them live out the fantasy that they have absolute power -- to blow up (alleged) drug dealers in boats, to blow big buildings up, to build a fantasy mancave with no one able to intervene or object.

These people vote Republican because Republicans hate the people we hate -- but they also vote Republican because Trump lives the way I'd live if no one could stop me. If no one could stop me, I'd just do whatever the fuck I wanted to do 100% of the time.

The specifics don't matter -- I'm sure most of Trump's working-class supporters don't share his taste for swank. (Ronald Reagan was the same, in a slightly more tasteful manner.) They just like the fact that Trump, like Reagan, seems to be livin' the dream, which is to be above it all and beyond accountability. (George W. Bush, whom they also loved briefly, wasn't fond of swank, but they could see he was a low-achieving goofball who'd been handed the keys to the mansion. As I say, livin' the dream. And while neither Dubya nor Reagan was as norm-shattering or lawbreaking as Trump, both said and did things that were seen as beyond the pale.)

Maybe Democrats can beat this with a program that significantly improves workers' lives. Maybe they can beat it by finding more candidates whose flannel shirts don't seem fresh out of the packaging. But, sadly, I think the missing element might be the fantasy of power without consequence.

CRAZY RACIST BILLIONAIRE ILLEGALLY DONATES TINY PORTION OF U.S. MILITARY WAGES

The New York Times has identified the rich man who's making it possible for President Trump to pretend he's found a clever workaround to get the troops paid during the shutdown:

Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump, is the anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump announced the donation on Thursday night, but he declined to name the person who provided the funds, only calling him a “patriot” and a friend.

This is a drop in the bucket.

It remains unclear how far the donation would go toward covering the salaries of the more than 1.3 million troops who make up the active-duty military. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Trump administration’s 2025 budget requests about $600 billion in total military compensation. A $130 million donation would equal about $100 a service member.

So it doesn't remain "unclear how far the donation would go toward covering the salaries" -- it won't be even one day's pay.

Also, this is completely illegal.

... the donation appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending money in excess of congressional appropriations or from accepting voluntary services.

As Fortune noted last year, Mellon's politcal donations to Trump in the last presidential cycle exceeded those of a better-known billionaire:

One of the largest donors to help President-elect Donald Trump was Timothy Mellon, an heir to the generational fortune of Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Mellon.

In the 2024 election cycle, Mellon, 82, donated $125 million to the super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc. that supported Trump, according to Federal Election Commission documents.

... Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave at least $119 million to a PAC he set up to re-elect Trump.

And as an earlier Times profile notes, Mellon also gave $25 million to Robert Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign. He has also been "a significant donor to Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense," bankrolling RFK Jr.'s dangerous anti-science crackpottery. Fortune notes that Kennedy blurbed Mellon's memoir:

“Tim Mellon is a maverick entrepreneur who embodies the most admirable qualities of what FDR called ‘American Industrial genius,’” Kennedy wrote of Mellon.

That memoir is full of racism.

Throughout the book he referred to Black people with racist stereotypes that they have a poor work ethic and are aggressive. “Black people, in spite of heroic efforts by the ‘Establishment’ to right the wrongs of the past, became even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations,” Mellon said in his book.

Decades ago, Mellon ran a regional railroad and an airline like a stereotypical supervillain.

Under his control, the railroad cut costs and rejiggered operations, battling with unions and regulators over wage cuts, layoffs, worker deaths and safety concerns. In the 1980s, strikes stretched on for months, disrupting service and, in at least one case, prompting congressional intervention....

His companies were repeatedly accused of violating environmental and safety standards. In 2006, they were convicted by a jury and fined $500,000 in Massachusetts for covering up an oil spill. (Mr. Mellon was not charged.) In 2008, federal regulators revoked certification for the airline company he had tried to rebuild after finding the company was falsifying financial records and operating in poor financial condition, forcing it to shut down. And in 2014, a jury awarded a worker $400,000 after finding he had been fired for reporting environmental concerns to the authorities.

An audit completed last year by the Federal Railroad Administration into two fatal employee accidents that occurred during Mr. Mellon’s ownership cited “critical safety concerns” and attributed them to the “apparent failure of Pan Am’s leadership” to develop a “positive safety culture.”

As he's aged, he's indulged in eccentricities, including right-wing politics and Amelia Earhart, sometimes in conjunction:

Years ago, Mellon was fascinated by the disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhardt, even donating $1 million to explorer Ric Gillespie who was trying to find her missing plane. In exchange for the donation, Gillespie let Mellon join the expedition. Mellon’s posts on an online forum about Earhardt, moderated by Gillespie, eventually turned into political screeds against the IRS, the intelligence agencies, and climate change. Gillespie had to limit his ability to post on the site.

The latter screeds weren't just about climate change, but about the scientists who study it:

When another forum member took exception to Mr. Mellon’s comparing climate-change scientists to terrorists, he did not back down.

“Not when people use phony science as a pretext to take political action to ruin the world economy and unilaterally relinquish our sovereignty in order to control human behavior,” he wrote. “Join their phalanx, if you wish, but not I.”

Mellon's theories about Amelia Earhart were utterly bonkers, and he was (to use his own term) belligerent in defending them after participating in Ric Gillespie's expedition.

The expedition failed to find Earhart’s plane. But in subsequent online discussions, where members of Mr. Gillespie’s forum shared theories about the Earhart mystery, Mr. Mellon became increasingly fixated on video taken during an earlier underwater search.

He wrote hundreds of posts over many months, some with annotated screenshots of the ocean floor, where he claimed to see airplane wreckage, personal effects and, eventually, bodies. Others tried to explain that he was only seeing rocks and coral, but Mr. Mellon insisted he could discern items they had missed: a banjo, a severed hand, even 75-year-old rolls of toilet paper.

It was apparent, he said, that the heads of Earhart and her navigator were encased in cellophane bags connected by a hose to a nitrogen tank, and that they had committed suicide.

Mr. Gillespie, fielding complaints from members about Mr. Mellon’s “outlandish ideas,” eventually limited his forum privileges. Mr. Mellon sued, claiming his $1 million gift had been unnecessary because the expedition team already had video evidence of Earhart’s plane but did not act on it.

He spent at least $150,000 on his own forensic experts trying to prove his assertions and pursued the case all the way to an unsuccessful appeal.

While a judge dismissed Mr. Mellon’s claims as “no more than theories and opinions,” the case dragged on for two years, imperiling the group’s finances.

“Tim gets pissed off at somebody, and he uses his wealth and the legal system to punish them,” Mr. Gillespie said.

I assume he's the reason Trump announced plans to open the Amelia Earhart files late last month.

Rich head cases like Timothy Mellon run our country. We're required to defer to their whims. And now that we have a president who's effectively dismantled the non-punitive parts of the government and created a culture of government by large donation, the country will be run according to rich lunatics' whims more than ever before.

SOME DISCONNECTED, PROBABLY OFFENSIVE THOUGHTS ABOUT GRAHAM PLATNER

A couple of days ago, like Scott Lemieux and others, I was ready to write off Graham Platner's Senate campaign in Maine. The old Reddit posts seemed bad, and I didn't trust Platner's apology.

... he referred to himself as a communist, seemed to make light of sexual assault in the military, offered racially insensitive comments about Black patrons’ tipping habits, and called “all” police officers “bastards.”

... He quickly put out a direct-to-camera apology that blamed post-war PTSD for “some of the worst comments I made, the things that I think are least defensible, that I wouldn’t even try to defend.”

This was followed by the revelation that Platner had an old tattoo of a death's head, an image linked to the Nazis, the significance of which he claimed he didn't understand until recently. (Headline of a Wall Street Journal editorial: "Oops, I’ve Had a Nazi Tattoo for 18 Years.")

All this happened around the time Maine's governor, Janet Mills, entered the race. Mills will be 78 years old in a couple of months, and she was recruited for the race by Chuck Schumer, but she has stood up to Donald Trump. Before the Platner scandal broke, Mills was beating Collins in polling. (Platner was tied with Collins.) And there are other Democratic candidates, including Jordan Wood, a well-funded former chief of staff to ex-congresswoman Katie Porter of California.

But I think we need to wait and see on Platner. I say for that for two reasons. One is the polling, at least among Maine Democrats:

The survey ran from 10/16 - 10/21. The Reddit text story ran on 10/16, so Maine Dems were cool with those (or at least accepted his apology). The Nazi tattoo story broke on 10/21, the last day of the survey. So the next poll will give an indication of whether they give a shit about that.

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— Charles Ghoul-ba ✡️ (@charlesgaba.com) October 23, 2025 at 10:22 AM

I've seen insurgent candidates go from nowhere to front-runner, but not this fast. Barack Obama became a contender quickly, but it took a while before he led the 2008 Democratic presidential race. And it took months for Zohran Mamdani to gain the lead in the New York mayoral contest.

To me it's obvious why Platner is doing as well as he is. It's not just the full-throated rejection of economics as usual. It's Platner's skill at delivering that message. I keep trying to tell people that, in an era when people barely read, even online, Democrats need compelling speakers. I believe we're in this Trump nightmare largely because Joe Biden couldn't talk -- couldn't speak the words that would persuade us that he understood our struggles and was working to make our lives better.

Platner is a very, very good speaker -- I can't think of a white male Democrat anywhere who's better (though that's a low bar to clear). Which leads to the second reason I think he still has a shot: I watched this video and it's compelling. I think he makes a strong a case as he possibly can for why we shouldn't abandon him.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine)

Platner has had the tattoo re-inked -- it's now a Celtic knot and a dog's head. He claims he was vetted as both a soldier and a State Department contractor after getting the original tattoo and it was not treated as a red flag. (I'll remind you that Pete Hegseth was prevented from serving at Joe Biden's inaugural as a National Guardsmen because his "Deus Vult" tattoo was seen as possible evidence of political extremism.) Platner seems contrite, although, obviously, he's expressing contrition because he got caught.

Nevertheless, he's good at this. Voters now might prefer a flawed person who can talk this way to a cautious candidate who doesn't leave much of an impact.

Platner is staying in the race, and I think we just have to sit back and watch this unfold. Will the state's Democrats abandon him? Will more scandals emerge? And while his 58%-24% lead is substantial, that's a primary poll -- the general election wasn't polled.

After this primary, Democrats in Maine and nationwide should respect the outcome and pull together afterward. But it probably won't be that simple. It's not just that Platner might win and then be vulnerable to attacks on his past. It's that, because he's a foe of economics as usual, it's easy to imagine Platner getting the Mamdani treatment: billionaire Democratic donors lining up against him and Establishment Democratic officeholders withholding their endorsements -- possibly including Mills herself.

And it's equally easy to imagine Mills winning the primary and the general election being a repeat of the 2016 presidential election, with disaffected progressives refusing to rally around an older woman who's an eastablishmentarian. (Would Platner withhold an endorsement from Mills? He might.)

I've expressed some of these thoughts on Bluesky and I've been told I'm a Nazi enabler. "So you think Nazi candidates are fine if they are eloquent. Interesting take," says one critic.

But Platner isn't a Nazi candidate. A Nazi is a person who has Nazi ideas. Platner has -- had -- a Nazi tattoo. He's never expressed Nazi ideas.

Platner has had bigoted ideas. I don't know if he's sincerely past them. But he doesn't sound like a bigot now. This is from a Vanity Fair report on a town hall he held in Ogunquit, Maine:

“I went from being a communist on Thursday to a Nazi on Monday,” Platner said, to laughter. “If anybody’s done any of the reading, that’s a rather hard political trajectory to navigate.” He then addressed the tattoo more seriously, and acknowledged there are things in his past he isn’t proud of. “And now,” he said, “I would like to get back to talking about wealth inequality and Medicare for all.”

Platner is a powerful, straightforward speaker, preaching about a future in which tax dollars go to community support rather than “funding somebody else’s genocide,” and repeatedly emphasizing the importance of organizing....

He spoke about understanding why people voted for Trump: “People aren’t stupid. They might be misinformed, they might be propagandized, but they’re not stupid. They understand that they’re getting screwed and we need to tell ‘em that they are getting screwed, but they’re not being screwed by immigrants. They’re not being screwed by trans kids. They’re being screwed by the same people that have been screwing us the entire time, and that is this class that is the upper echelons, the rich, the ultra powerful, the corporate interests.”

I've been told a few times that Platner, if he wins, will inevitably tack right, just like John Fetterman. Why assume that's inevitable? Why generalize from a sample set of one?

The primary is next summer. Let's allow it to play out -- and if you think you can find a candidate who can win this thing who isn't Platner or Mills, go for it. I'm in a city where the ability to generate grassroots enthusiasm rewrote an electoral script in which a mayoral race was supposed to lead to a vile man's coronation. That's why I'm reluctant to write off Platner, or assume that someone else can simply galvanize voters the way he and Mamdani have. But whatever happens, we need to pull together and beat Collins -- and it's disturbingly easy to imagine how Democratic infighting could help her pull off a come-from-behind win.

IS DONALD TRUMP A WOMAN?

David French's column today bears the misleading headline "How Women Destroyed the West." French doesn't actually believe women destroyed the West, but the subject of his column -- a prominent anti-feminist writer named Helen Andrews -- believes that women are on the verge of destroying the West, as she's made clear in a recent speech to the National Conservatism Conference and an essay for Compact magazine called "The Great Feminization," which, as French notes "is the toast of parts of the right on X, where it is hailed as 'electrifying,' 'incisive' and 'provocative.'" (I'll note in passing that all of the linked praise comes from men.)

Andrews says that Western civilization is in a crisis of wokeness, and it's all the fault of women, or at least women in groups, who've been allowed to take over every profession because of sinister affirmative-action and DEI laws and policies.

According to Andrews, the "cancellations" of the early 2020s happened because women just can't let go of grievances, the way men can:

... men developed group dynamics optimized for war, while women developed group dynamics optimized for protecting their offspring. These habits [were] formed in the mists of prehistory....

The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored after the dispute is settled. Men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday. Females, even in primate species, are slower to reconcile than males. That is because women’s conflicts were traditionally within the tribe over scarce resources, to be resolved not by open conflict but by covert competition with rivals, with no clear terminus.

French notes that this is absurd:

The past and present are littered with interminable conflicts. It was a male-dominated world during the Hundred Years’ War, and the Thirty Years’ War, and any number of protracted conflicts throughout world history. Women aren’t responsible for the endless carnage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The list could go on and on and on, but men are very capable of holding grudges, and the history of the masculine-dominated world is one of persistent, brutal conflict across continents and cultures.

But let's say Andrews is right. Let's say women are the real grudge-holders.

Does that mean Donald Trump is a woman?

After all, he's the one who doesn't want peace to be restored after his victory in the 2024 election. Democrats in Washington responded to that win with calls for bipartisan cooperation, but Trump wants to stop funding what he calls "Democrat programs," wants cash reparations for legal battles he blames on Democrats (even though all the cases have been quashed), and still wants to relitigate the 2020 election, which he lost to a Democrat.

Trump doesn't believe in "reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people [he was] fighting yesterday." He believes in conflict "with no clear terminus."

So, Helen Andrews, is Trump a woman?

Andrews writes:

The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

Literally every day, Trump rejects written law in order to follow his emotions and gut instincts.

A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama.... they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties....

Losing the right to confront your accuser? An end to the concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties? This sounds exactly like immigration law under Trump. It must be because Trump is a woman -- or Stephen Miller is a woman!

Clearly, there are a lot of allegedly male Republicans who are secretly female. Andrews writes:

Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza.

So is Trump a woman because he showed the leaders of Ukraine, France, and Azerbaijan his display of "Trump 2028" hats and other campaign merchandise during a meeting last summer? Is Pete Hegseth a woman because he insists that all members of the military, including aging generals, make a public show of their buffness and beardlessness? Was Elon Musk revealing that he's a woman when he attended Cabinet meeting wearing a hat that said, "Trump Was Right About Everything"?

It seems to me that if Helen Andrews is right, America is absolutely being run by women now -- most of whom are Trump men.

THE FAT ELVIS PRESIDENCY?

The Trump presidency will continue to be a militarized and fiscal assault on the right's enemies, but the president himself seems to be losing a bit of focus on that aspect of his rule. Instead, like Elvis in his later years, he's wallowing in self-indulgence.

Trump wants. He wants his cravings fulfilled. He wants a fancy ballroom in place in the old East Wing -- Chris Geidner of Law Dork reports that the demolition of the wing is nearly complete.

The New York Times reports that Trump wants a nine-figure sum from taxpayers.

President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit.

The situation has no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.

The focus of the Times story is on the conflict of interest, which is understandable, but the important point here isn't that Trump is demanding cash from the Justice Department, it's that he's demanding cash from us -- in a year when he and his family have already become at least $3.4 billion richer as a consequence of his election and efforts to exploit the office. And no, I don't take seriously the claim that if he gets the $230 million, he'll give it to charity.

Trump also continues to be obsessed with the notion that he really won the 2020 election:

... Mr. Trump and his allies, despite a clear victory last year, remain consumed with the belief that the 2020 election was stolen — and ... the president is using the powers of the government to upend an electoral system that he insists helped Joseph R. Biden Jr. take the White House.

In the past few months, Mr. Trump has elevated multiple proponents of his fraud claims into high-level administration jobs. Now, as government insiders, these activists could wield their newfound power to discredit future results or rekindle old claims to argue for a federal intrusion into locally administered voting systems.

There's a fair amount of overlap between what Trump wants and what other Republicans who seek to turn America into a one-party pseudo-democracy want -- obviously, if no opposition party can ever defeat Republicans, Russell Vought and Stephen Miller will be happy, as will the J.D. Vance/Peter Thiel crowd -- but even in this area, Trump seems to be focused primarily on what exalts him, not what might create a thousand-year Republican Reich.

Apart from the tariffs, there isn't much Trump wants that anti-democracy Republicans disapprove of -- but I wonder if they think he's occasionally taking his eyes off the prize they want, or at least providing unpopular distractions from what they want. Even CNN's principal Trump toady, Scott Jennings, thinks the pursuit of the $230 million is a bad look for Trump:

“My personal advice, if he asked me, would be, you having to table this until you leave office. The process started before you came to office, you then won an election and, you look, I think he maybe was damaged and he’s entitled to the process. If it were me and I were advising him, I would just say you could table it and put it off until you leave office.”

And the demolition of the East Wing just looks terrible.

But I suspect that Trump will focus more and more on vengeance and self-indulgence in the future. The schemes of Vought and Miller make him feel powerful, so he's happy to let them proceed, but he cares about himself in ways they don't. We may see his priorities diverge from those of his allies even more in the future.

IS MALIGNANT NARCISSIST TRUMP WRECKING THE EAST WING BECAUSE HE THINKS HE'S CLOSE TO DEATH?

I'm sure you know about this:

Demolition crews on Monday began tearing down part of the White House to build President Donald Trump’s long-desired ballroom despite his pledge that construction of the $250 million addition wouldn’t “interfere” with the existing building.

Construction teams were demolishing a portion of the East Wing, with a backhoe ripping through the structure....

As Shawn McCreesh notes in The New York Times, arrogant contempt for cherished edifices is is a family tradition for Trump:

In 1980, he ka-blammed the old Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan so that he could raise up Trump Tower. He promised to preserve the treasured limestone friezes atop the old building but then went and jackhammered them into oblivion....

He went to the “21” Club with the Vanity Fair journalist Marie Brenner and asked her, “What do you think? Do you think blowing up the sculptures has hurt me?”

She answered yes.

“Who cares?” he replied. “Let’s say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement. I’ll never have the goodwill of the Establishment ...”

In 1966, his father, Fred Trump, tore down a 19th-century amusement park in Coney Island. Trump père threw a party at the demo site, complete with bikini-clad, hard-hat-wearing models. He handed out bricks for people to chuck at the glass front of the park’s pavilion, a beloved local attraction known as “Funny Face.”

Another family tradition is declaring that everyone's preferences align with those of the alpha Trump. Donald tells us that he's just doing what at least 27 previous presidents wanted done:

He ... posted on his Truth Social platform that the “much-needed project” had begun.

“For more than 150 years, every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, State Visits, etc.,” the president wrote.

Fred Trump also had a psychological need to have everyone share his taste, as Donald's first wife, Ivana, told us before her death:

"Fred Trump was [a] really brutal father," she told ABC News. "We went to Tavern on the Green for the brunch one Sunday and [Trump’s] father ordered a steak. So all the, you know, the sisters and brothers, they ordered a steak."

However, Ivana really wanted a filet of sole, so she ordered it, as one usually does when they decide what meal they want at a restaurant. But "Fred looked up at the waitress and, 'No, she's going to have a steak,'" Ivana explained. But she wasn't having it.

"I look up at the waiter, I said, 'No, Ivana is going to have a filet of sole,' — because if I would let him just [roll] right over me, it would be all my life and I would not allow it."

Trump has obviously decided to demolish the East Wing -- and tear up the Rose Garden, and drown the West Wing in gilded gewgaws -- because he thinks the presidency gives him limitless power and because he assumes everyone shares his opinions and tastes (or believes he can browbeat everyone into sharing his opinions and tastes).

But I think another thought is weighing on Trump: the possibility that he could die soon.

Trump's hand bruises and recent absences from the public eye suggest that he has medical problems that could kill him if they're not effectively managed. On the other hand, he's probably getting excellent care and could live for many more years.

But he seems concerned. He's been talking a lot lately about whether he'll get to heaven.

Even a power-mad narcissist knows he can't keep the world from turning after he dies. Trump knows that people will continue to change the world after he's gone.

But I think he can't bear the thought that anything under his control now will continue to bear the marks of people who preceded Trump after he's dead. Trump can't control the future, but I think he wants to obliterate the past.

I think he wants the White House to be his White House, just as he wants the country to be run by his laws (which are really Russell Vought and Stephen Miller's edicts issued in his name). If he ever gets the ballroom built, he'll want it to be called the Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom (which is the official name of the largest ballroom at Mar-a-Lago). He might even want the White House itself to be renamed in his honor. (I guarantee you that some Republican will propose naming it the Trump House, or the Donald J. Trump White House, after he dies.)

Trump is a psychologically unhealthy man who's thinking about his legacy. That might explain the backhoe.

THE NEW YORK TIMES ED BOARD DROPS ITS OWN LOAD OF FECES ON THE NO KINGS CROWDS

I'm sure you know how Donald Trump responded to the No Kings rallies: by posting an AI video depicting him as a crown-wearing fighter pilot dropping feces on protesters.

Trump posts AI video showing him literally dumping shit on America

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) October 18, 2025 at 10:36 PM

The editorial board of The New York Times would never be quite so gauche. Its response to the No Kings rallies, posted this morning, is an editorial titled "America Still Has a Political Center, and It’s the Key to Winning."

There's nothing in this editorial that directly references Saturday's protests, but I'm certain that the ed board made a calculated decision to publish the editorial today. I don't agree with many of you that the Times is Trumpist -- I believe the Times's ideal political candidate is moderately liberal on social issues (pro-choice but no trans athletes, please) and right-centrist economically. The Times ed board represents urbane but greedy plutocrats whose ideal president would be Mike Bloomberg, Joe Manchin, or Larry Hogan.

Or, apparently, candidate Donald Trump, at least in the ed board's telling:

Extreme as he is in many ways, he moved the Republican Party toward the center on several key issues. He won the party’s nomination and the general election in 2016 partly by rejecting unpopular conservative positions on Social Security, Medicare and global trade. Last year he broke with prominent Republicans and said he would veto a national abortion ban. He also focused his 2024 campaign on areas in which the Democratic Party had moved left over the previous decade and was out of step with public opinion, such as immigration, transgender issues and parts of education policy. Voters noticed. Polls in 2024 showed that most voters considered their policy views to be closer to Mr. Trump’s than to Kamala Harris’s.

Is that the guy who won the last presidential election? I seem to recall him being much less moderate -- and, in fact, some observers noticed his immoderation during the 2024 campaign. This is from a July 2024 editorial called "Donald Trump Is Unfit to Lead":

Mr. Trump has shown a character unworthy of the responsibilities of the presidency. He has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people. Instead of a cogent vision for the country’s future, Mr. Trump is animated by a thirst for political power: to use the levers of government to advance his interests, satisfy his impulses and exact retribution against those who he thinks have wronged him.

... his words and promises ... have little to do with unity and healing and a lot to do with making the divisions and anger in our society wider and more intense than they already are.

That piece appeared on ... the editorial page of The New York Times. In other words, the same editorial board that saw Trump as a danger to America during his 2024 campaign now recalls him as a centrist on the stump.

In the new editorial, it's acknowledged that, gosh, Trump really isn't very moderate:

Despite Mr. Trump’s rhetorical nods to the center, he is governing as a radical who rejects longstanding governing constraints and uses the power of the presidency to enrich his family, protect his allies and punish people he dislikes. He threatens American democracy, and congressional Republicans have been complicit.

Well, duh. Millions of us could see that last year. The Times ed board could see that last year. I question the extent to which voters really thought he was a fine, even-tempered, middle-of-the-road guy. And yet nearly half of them voted for him anyway.

And there's the problem with the editorial. It argues that voters prefer moderates to extremists, but it ignores the fact that Republican extremists seem to do just fine. It begins with an image of

16 candidates ... Democrats who won in places that backed Trump and Republicans who won in places that backed Harris.

It treats them as shining examples for both parties. But there's one problem: Only 3 of the 16 are from the GOP. And yet the GOP controls both houses of Congress. So how necessary is moderation to electoral success, really? Apparently it isn't -- if you're a Republican.

We're told:

Candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left....

On the Democratic side, there are no progressives in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who represent a swing district or state. Instead, the Democrats who win tough races work hard to signal to voters that they are less progressive than their party.

But on the Republican side, there are quite a few states that are purple or near-purple but have elected very right-wing senators: Wisconsin (Ron Johnson), Texas (Ted Cruz), Ohio (Bennie Moreno and, before him, J.D. Vance).

The editorial says that both parties should recognize the appeal of centrism, but can't point to any electoral consequences the Republicans have faced for failing to be centrist. The editorial tells us that

many Americans see the Democratic Party as too liberal, too judgmental and too focused on cultural issues to be credible, and voters are moving away from it. “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,” The Times reported this summer.

But if both parties are ignoring the appeal of centrism, why are only the Democrats losing voters?

You know my answer. Democrats don't try hard enough to paint the entire GOP as radical. Democrats don't remind voters that they're the party that wants a higher minimum wage, legal abortion, higher taxes on the obscenely rich, universal background checks, and an assault weapons ban, and the Republican Party unalterably opposes all of these things. Democrats avoid proudly taking any position at all on most issues -- mustn't upset the Baileys! -- preferring instead to mutter generalities about healthcare. Democrats praise bipartisanship and attack fellow Democrats as extreme, suggesting that they agree with Republicans that their own party is badly falwed and the GOP is the better party.

But Establishment Democrats' lack of basic political skills is of no interest to the ed board, which is determined to send the message "Democrats should be neoliberal on economics and throw trans athletes under the bus."

(We're told that voters "think that corporations and the wealthy have too much power," but also that "most voters prefer capitalism to socialism and worry that the government is too big" -- just what Bill Ackman wants to hear. We're also told that "Most support job protections for trans people and believe that trans girls should not play girls’ sports" -- and yet Democrat Andy Beshear, who vetoed a bill banning trans athletes from competing in school sports, won reelection as governor of Kentucky a year after that veto.)

The ed board does some funny things with numbers to arrive at its conclusions. We're told:

... in Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes, a progressive Democrat with a history of supporting cuts to immigration enforcement and police funding, lost his 2022 Senate race, while Ms. Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers have won by running to the middle.

We're not told that Barnes was trying to beat an incumbent (Ron Johnson) and lost that race by only one point, while Baldwin and Evers were incumbents and won by less than a point and by three and a half points, respectively. (We're also not told that Barnes was a Black candidate in a very white state.)

The editorial also tells us this about Bernie Sanders:

Mr. Sanders’s arc is instructive. Earlier in his career — when he took just as feisty a stance on the economy but spoke more about his concerns about immigration and support of hunting — he received more votes than the Democratic candidates at the top of the ticket. He no longer does. His story is a microcosm.

Do you know what Kamala Harris's victory margin was in Vermont last year? It was 63.83% to 32.32%. Do you what Sanders's victory margin was? It was 63.16% to 32.07%. It's practically the same margin.

It's true that in his only other Senate race that coincided with a presidential election, Sanders outpolled the presidential candidate. But that was 2012. Sanders got 71% of the vote and Barack Obama got 66.57%. But Obama's opponent was Mitt Romney, whom many Vermonters undoubtedly recalled as the former moderate governor of neighboring Massachusetts. (Remember, Vermont currently has a moderate Republican governor.)

This is a flawed editorial that scolds Democrats and lets Republicans off the hook. It was published now because the Democratic Establishment doesn't want all those No Kings protesters to get crazy notions in their heads about progressivism. What if those radicals win? Billionaires might not be able to afford that fifth yacht.

The Times ed board thinks Trump is dangerous, but so is progressivism. That's why it dropped this load of feces on the post-No Kings Democratic Party today.