Republican Party

Meet the Future of the Democratic Party

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By Robert Reich

Last Thursday, populist Democratic candidate Graham Platner shook up the Democratic establishment when his primary competitor, Maine Governor Janet Mills, suspended her Senate campaign amid polls showing her badly trailing Platner, an oyster farmer who had come out of nowhere to win a national following.

Platner is the latest example of the rise of anti-establishment outsiders in the Democratic Party — a trend that also includes self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who last year defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for New York City mayor.

Yet the Democratic establishment — corporate Democrats, wealthy Democratic donors, entrenched Washington “centrists,” the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer — still don’t get it.

Hell, the Democratic establishment didn’t get it a decade ago when Hillary Clinton was the presumptive Democratic nominee (and, not incidentally, Jeb Bush was considered a shoe-in for the Republican nomination).

I remember interviewing voters about their political preferences in the late spring of 2015, in the Rust Belt, Midwest, and South, for a book I was then writing. When I asked them whom they wanted for president, they kept telling me Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Often the same individuals offered both names. They explained they wanted an “outsider,” someone who would “shake up” the system, ideally a person who wasn’t even a Democrat or a Republican.

The people I met were furious with their employers, with the federal government, and with Wall Street. They were irate that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirements, indignant that their children weren’t doing any better than they had at their children’s age, and enraged at those at the top. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the financial crisis or the Great Recession that followed it.

They kept reiterating that the system was “rigged” in favor of the powerful and against themselves. They didn’t oppose government per se; most favored additional spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and roads and bridges. But they hated “crony capitalism” — large corporations using their political clout to gain special favors and changes in laws that often hurt average people.

The following year, Sanders — then a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primaries — came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucus and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention from primaries and caucuses. Had the DNC not tipped the scales against him by deriding his campaign and rigging its financing in favor of Clinton, Sanders would probably have been the Democratic nominee in 2016.

Trump, then a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elected office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about almost everything, of course won the Republican primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America. Granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and he had some help from Vladimir Putin, but he won.

Something very big was happening in America: a full-scale rebellion against the political establishment.

That rebellion continues to this day. Yet much of Washington’s Democratic elite is still in denial. They prefer to attribute the rise of Trump and, more broadly, Trumpism — its political paranoia, xenophobia, white Christian nationalism, misogyny, homophobia, and cultural populism — solely to racism. Well, racism is certainly a part of it. But hardly all.

In 2024, Democrats didn’t even get to choose their nominee from the primary process, since Biden dropped out after a dreadful debate performance and was replaced by Kamala Harris — leaving some Democrats feeling like higher powers were picking their nominee.

The anti-establishment groundswell has by now spread to independent voters — who are now a whopping 45 percent of the electorate and have moved sharply against Trump. It’s one of the most dramatic shifts in recent political history.

Trump’s approval rating among independents now stands at 25 percent, while 68 percent of independents disapprove of him. In 2024, independents were evenly divided, with 48 percent voting for Harris and 48 percent for Trump. In 2020, independents favored Biden by 9 percentage points.

The Democratic establishment still doesn’t see the groundswell — or is actively fighting it.

In Iowa, whose primary is June 2, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is quietly backing state Rep. Josh Turek against state Sen. Zach Wahls. That’s probably a mistake. Turek is a good candidate, but Wahls is a young, dynamic progressive — similar to Platner in his ability to inspire and rally. (In Iowa, independents who want to vote in the Democratic primary need only declare themselves Democrats by June 2.)

In California, whose primary is also June 2, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee just rejected Randy Villegas as its preferred nominee for the 22nd Congressional District and instead endorsed doctor and assemblywoman Jasmeet Bains. Villegas, known as a strong progressive, has been endorsed by the congressional progressive caucus and the congressional Hispanic caucus’s campaign arm. “This is about party leadership and D.C. elites putting their thumb on the scale for who they know will bend the knee to party leadership and corporate interests,” Villegas says.

In Arizona, whose primary is July 21, the DCCC has endorsed Marlene Galán-Woods in a Democratic primary to replace Representative David Schweikert, the Republican who is leaving Congress to run for governor. The DCCC rejected Amish Shah, a doctor and former state legislator who won the primary in 2024 and came within a few points of defeating Schweikert. (That year, Ms. Galán-Woods finished third in the primary.) Shah has been leading Galán-Woods by a 3-to-1 margin in the only public poll of the race. Shah says Democrats should stop backing the party apparatus if they want to win the House majority.

In Michigan, whose primary is August 4, the DSCC is backing Rep. Haley Stevens, who’s in a tight race against rival Abdul El-Sayed. Also probably a mistake. El-Sayed is another young progressive who’s showing a remarkable ability to galvanize Democrats and independents. (Michigan has open primaries in which any voter can participate.)

I could go on, but you get the point.

If Democrats fail to connect with the frustrations of average hardworking Americans and decide instead to side with big corporations and Wall Street, they’ll have given up the most crucial opportunity in a generation both to take back control of Congress and to lead the way on a new progressive agenda.

What does this anti-establishment surge — including the remarkable growth of independents and their sharp rejection of Trump — mean for the presidential race in 2028?

For one thing, it suggests that the current presumed Democratic frontrunners — Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom — are frontrunners only because of their name recognition. As voters find out more about the alternatives, it’s unlikely that either of them will make the cut.

For another, it suggests that anti-establishment candidates are the ones to watch.

Obama chief of staff and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel told a packed crowd at the Milken Institute Global Conference this week that the biggest challenge both parties have faced over the last quarter-century has been the battle between establishment forces and anti-establishment forces.

Emanuel was correct. But he then went on to suggest, absurdly, that he’s anti-establishment. Emanuel’s cozy ties to corporate America, his closeness to Citadel founder Ken Griffin (who praised Emanuel from Milken’s main stage), and even Emanuel’s presence at the Milken conference, belie his claim.

But the mere fact that Emanuel thinks it important to claim anti-establishment creds underscores that the biggest force in American politics today — and in the Democratic Party — is anti-establishment rage at political insiders.

Despite the Democratic establishment, a younger and more charismatic generation of populist and progressive Democrats is on the way to winning primaries and general election races across America. If Graham Platner beats Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine, which seems likely, he’s the kind of candidate who (in my humble opinion) will be the future of the Democratic Party.

Source: Meet the Future of the Democratic Party – Robert Reich

After he critcized Trump and Hegseth, John Bolton is charged with eight counts of communicating “secret information”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

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Heather Cox Richardson

October 16, 2025

Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would pay furloughed troops by using funds Congress appropriated for research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDTE) for fiscal year 2026. Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump had “found a creative solution to keep the troops paid. And rather than congratulate the president for doing that, this unprecedented action to get our troops paid, the Democrats want to sue him for it. They’re saying that it’s illegal.”

Democrats are saying it’s illegal because it is illegal. The Antideficiency Act, a law that has evolved over time since 1870, prohibits the government from spending money that Congress has not appropriated for that purpose, or agreeing to contracts that spend money Congress has not appropriated for that purpose.

This summer, Democratic senators charged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with triggering the Antideficiency Act by overspending her department’s budget, but Trump’s claim that he can move government money around as he wishes is an even greater threat to the country than Noem’s overspending.

There is more at stake here than a broken law.

Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776. The Founders stood firm on the principle articulated all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215 that the government could not spend money without consulting those putting up that money by paying taxes.

That principle was at the heart of the American Revolution. The 1773 Tea Act that sparked Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, to throw chests of tea into Boston Harbor did not raise the price of tea in the colonies; the law lowered those prices. To pay for the cost of what colonists knew as the French and Indian War, Parliament in 1767 had taxed glass, lead, oil, paint, paper, and tea, but boycotts and protests had forced Parliament to repeal all the taxes except the one on tea. It kept that tax to maintain the principle that it could tax the colonies despite the fact they were unrepresented in that body.

Then, in 1773, Parliament gave a monopoly on colonial tea sales to the foundering British East India Tea Company. That monopoly would have the effect of lowering the price of tea. Lower prices should persuade colonists to buy the tea despite the tax, thus cementing the principle that Parliament could tax the colonies without their consent. But colonists protested the maneuver. In December 1773, the Sons of Liberty held what became known as the Boston Tea Party, ruining newly arrived chests of tea by throwing them into the harbor, thus paving the route to the American Revolution.

When leaders from the former colonies wrote the U.S. Constitution in 1787, they made sure the people retained control over the nation’s finances in order to guarantee that a demagogue could not use tax money to concentrate power in his own hands. They gave the power to write the laws to the legislative branch—the House of Representatives and the Senate—alone, giving the president power only to agree to or veto those measures. Once the laws were enacted, the president’s role was to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

To make sure that the power of the purse remained in the hands of the people, the Framers wrote into the Constitution that “[a]ll Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.”

Trump’s declaration that he will ignore the laws Congress passed and take it upon himself to spend money as he wishes undermines not just the Antideficiency Act but also the fundamental principle that the American people must have control over their own finances. That Leavitt suggests giving up that principle to pay the troops, which lawmakers agree is imperative but cannot write into law because Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will not recall the House of Representatives, echoes the Tea Act that would have thrown away the principle of having a say in government for cheaper tea.

Since Trump took office, his administration has undermined the principle that Congress controls funding. It had withheld funds Congress appropriated, a practice that violates the 1974 Impoundment Act and the Constitution. The cost of such impoundment became evident on Sunday, when catastrophic flooding hit the village of Kipnuk, Alaska, a disaster Andrew Freedman of CNN notes was exacerbated by the lack of weather data after cuts left a critical shortage in weather balloon coverage in the area.

Earlier this year the administration cancelled a $20 million Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant awarded to the community to prevent flooding. Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman of the New York Times noted that when EPA administrator Lee Zeldin cut grants this year, he boasted that he was eliminating “wasteful [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and Environmental Justice grants.”

Now that the government is shut down, Trump has told reporters that his administration is using the shutdown to take funds Congress appropriated away from Democratic districts. Tony Romm and Lazaro Gamio of the New York Times estimate that the administration has cancelled more than $27.24 billion in funds for Democratic districts and states while cutting $738.7 million from Republican districts and states. Speaker Johnson told reporters he thought such withholding was both lawful and constitutional but did not explain his reasoning.

Today Annie Grayer and Adam Cancryn of CNN reported that not just Democratic representatives but also Republicans are out of the loop of presidential funding cuts, finding out about cuts to their districts through press releases. Even Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said “we are really not consulted.”

Speaker Johnson told CNN that he hasn’t received details about the administration’s offer of $20 billion in public money and another $20 billion in private-sector financing to Argentina to prop up the government of Trump’s right-wing ally Javier Milei before upcoming elections there.

Trump is also taking control of the previously nonpartisan Department of Justice (DOJ). Yesterday, in the Oval Office, Trump stood in front of three top officials from the DOJ and called for investigations into former deputy attorney general in the Biden administration Lisa Monaco; former FBI official Andrew Weissman, who led the team investigating the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives; former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated and indicted Trump for the events of January 6 and for retaining classified documents; and Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the House impeachment team in Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Glenn Thrush of the New York Times noted the DOJ officials “smiled, nodded and shuffled in place as he spoke.”

Today a federal grand jury in Maryland indicted John Bolton, who served as national security advisor in Trump’s first term, alleging that he shared classified information in the form of a diary with two of his relatives. That material later informed his book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, which covered his time in the first Trump administration and so infuriated Trump that he tried to stop its publication.

The grand jury charged Bolton with eight counts of communicating secret information with those not entitled to receive it, and ten counts of having unauthorized possession of documents containing secret information. These charges are similar to those Jack Smith brought against Trump himself, although Trump’s election to a second term stopped that prosecution.

The indictment references Bolton’s criticism of the Trump administration’s handling of secret information, in particular Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to plan a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen, especially after a journalist had been added to the call, and Hegseth’s additional Signal chat about the strike with family and friends.

A court will determine the merits of the case against Bolton, but there is no doubt it is intended to send a signal to others in government that Trump will persecute those whom he perceives as disloyal.

Today, Steady State, a group made up of more than 340 former U.S. intelligence officers from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department, and other intelligence agencies, released a report assessing the state of American democracy. Applying the tools of their craft to the U.S., they assess that the nation is “on a trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism: a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.”

The report, titled Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline, finds that American democracy is weakening as the Executive Branch is consolidating power and “actively weaponizing state institutions to punish perceived opponents and shield allies,” and that Congress is refusing to check the president, “creating openings for authoritarian exploitation.”

“We judge that the primary driver of the U.S.’s increasing authoritarianism is the increased frequency of Executive Branch overreach,” the report says, noting that “President Donald J. Trump has leveraged emergency powers, executive orders, federalized military forces, and bureaucratic politicization to consolidate control and weaken checks and balances.”

But the Trump administration is increasingly unpopular. Trump loyalists are working overtime to portray those who oppose the administration as anti-American criminals and terrorists. Today White House press secretary Leavitt told the Fox News Channel that “[t]he Democrat Party’s main constituency are [sic] made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals,” and administration loyalists have spent the week claiming that the No Kings rally scheduled for Saturday, October 18, is a “hate America rally.”

Joe Perticone of The Bulwark noted that Indivisible, the organization sponsoring the No Kings protests, “has an extensive track record that shows a longstanding emphasis on safety and nonviolence.” Perticone spoke to Ezra Levin, co–executive director of Indivisible, who said: “Go to a No Kings rally. What do you see? You see moms and grandmas and kids and dogs and funny signs and dancing and happy displays of opposition to the regime that are foundationally nonviolent. And on the other end, you’ve got a regime that’s led by a guy who cheered the January 6th insurrection.”

Levin noted that authoritarian regimes fear mass organizing and peaceful protest because they reveal a regime’s unpopularity and show that it is losing its grip on power.

Much as tossing chests of tea into Boston Harbor did about 250 years ago.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Trump: “We are closing up Democrat programs that we disagree with, and they’re never going to open again.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

October 14, 2025

The government shutdown, which started on October 1, is entering its third week. As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) explained this morning, the Senate is in session, and it keeps voting on two bills to reopen the government. Majority leader John Thune (R-SD) keeps having the Senate vote on the measure passed by Republicans in the House. That measure funds the government until November 21. It has failed repeatedly to get past the 60 votes necessary to avoid a filibuster. The Democrats have offered an alternative measure, which extends the healthcare premium tax credit—without which health insurance costs on the Affordable Care Act market will skyrocket—and restores nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid. That measure, too, has repeatedly failed to pass.

Murphy notes that normally the two sides would negotiate. But, he says, President Donald J. Trump is telling Republican senators to “BOYCOTT NEGOTIATING,” and they are “following orders.”

The House of Representatives is even more dysfunctional. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pushed the continuing resolution through the chamber on September 19, the Friday before leaving town for a week. Then Johnson canceled the House sessions on Monday and Tuesday, September 29 and 30, both to jam the Senate into having to accept the House measure and to avoid swearing in Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who was elected on September 23. Grijalva will provide the 218th signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on the release of the files collected during the federal investigation into the crimes of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump and his officials promised to release those files, but have tried to avoid doing so since news broke that Trump, who was a close friend of Epstein, is named in them.

Emily Brooks of The Hill notes that jamming the Senate as Johnson tried to do was a tactic employed by the far-right Freedom Caucus, and they are cheering him on. But Democratic senators refused to vote in favor of the House measure, standing firm on extending the premium tax credits before their loss decimates the healthcare markets. Now, although Democrats are in Washington, D.C., ready to negotiate, Johnson says he will not call House members back to work until the Senate passes the House measure.

Brooks notes that not all Republicans are keen on the optics of staying out of session during a shutdown. Mike Lillis of The Hill reported on Sunday that the cancellation of all House votes since late September has some Republicans warning that the tactic will backfire. In addition to the question of healthcare premiums, there is the issue of military pay stalled by the shutdown, and the fact that, by law, Congress was supposed to deliver its 2026 budget by September 30.

Over the weekend, the administration tried to ratchet up the pressure on Democratic senators to cave when it announced it would fire about 4,200 federal employees. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo notes that the threat seemed at least in part to be designed to follow through on a threat Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought had made to pressure Democrats before the shutdown. When those layoffs didn’t happen, the administration then suggested it would not pay furloughed workers after the shutdown ends. After backlash, they walked that threat back. The new announcement seemed in part an attempt to prove they would do something.

On Friday night, hundreds of workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received notices they were being fired, only to receive a follow-up letter less than a day later saying they were not fired after all. As Tom Bartlett of The Atlantic put it: “No explanation, no apology.”

Marshall points out that other cuts seem to have come from agencies Trump especially dislikes, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which Trump has hated since its then-director Chris Krebs said the 2020 presidential election was not hacked. The administration also gutted the office responsible for special education in the U.S. Department of Education serving about 7.4 million students with special needs.

Today, Trump tried to pressure Democrats by telling reporters the slashing of government programs will hurt only Democrats. “We’re not closing up Republican programs because we think they work,” he said. “So the Democrats are getting killed, but they’re not telling the people about that…. So we are closing up Democrat programs that we think that we disagree with, and they’re never going to open again.”

The administration continues to try to demonstrate its power. Today it announced its fifth known attack on a boat “just off the coast of Venezuela” in international waters. Once again, Trump asserted that the boat was trafficking narcotics. The U.S. has now killed 27 people in this and similar attacks, making the argument that drug smugglers are enemy combatants. This is problematic not just because the administration has never produced any evidence that those killed have been smuggling drugs but also because lawyers say these killings are illegal. Charlie Savage of the New York Times points out that the administration has not produced any legal analysis that defends its position.

Conservative lawyer George Conway posted: “That’s twenty-seven flat-out murders. That’s twenty-seven lives taken without even a semblance of a legal justification under domestic or international law.”

The administration’s attempt to portray itself as powerful is running not just into the law but into popular perception. The administration insists it needs extraordinary powers to fight back against South American gang members illegally in the U.S. The attack on the boats serves the idea that drug cartels are invading the U.S. to kill Americans, a theme the administration hits when it insists that those it is rounding up in the U.S. are “the worst of the worst.”

But as Jacob Soboroff and Kay Guerrero of MSNBC reported today, the Department of Homeland Security announced on October 3 that more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants had been arrested in and around Chicago since September, when their operation began. It said those arrested included “the worst of the worst pedophiles, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers.” But it has produced little evidence for that claim, and federal data shows that more than 70% of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees as of last month had no criminal convictions.

So the administration is upping its claims. Today the Fox News Channel reported on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allegation that “narcoterrorists in Mexico are reportedly working in coordination with domestic extremist groups to place bounties worth thousands of dollars on the heads of federal immigration officers in Chicago.” DHS called it “an organized campaign of terror against agents just trying to do their jobs.”

The administration is attempting to paint immigrants as violent criminals and those opposed to their raids as terrorists. They are producing slick videos to make that point. But protesters have deprived them of photo opportunities by dressing in animal costumes. ICE agents staring down a giant frog and Mr. Potato Head don’t look very dominant.

Cracks are showing elsewhere in the administration’s picture of strength. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that media outlets agree they would not publish any material about the Defense Department—even if it were unclassified—unless it was explicitly authorized by department officials. He set a deadline of 5:00 tonight for them to sign an agreement or hand over their press badges.

Every major press outlet, including the Fox News Channel, refused, saying such a demand is an assault on the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Airports around the country are refusing to air the video Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recorded to be shown at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints, which blames Democrats for the shutdown. Some have noted it violates the Hatch Act that prohibits the use of government assets for partisan purposes.

As the administration faces resistance, Republican lawmakers seem worried about the upcoming No Kings rally scheduled for Saturday, October 18. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark notes that Republican lawmakers are scrambling to get in front of a potentially large protest event with a prebuttal. House majority whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) has alleged that those protesting are “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, “playing to the most radical, small, and violent base in the country…. They just do not love this country.”

While Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) retorted that the No Kings event is about loving America, not hating it. “It’s a rally of millions of people all over this country who believe in our Constitution, who believe in American freedom and are not going to let you and Donald Trump turn this country into an authoritarian society.”

Today, Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo of Politico reported on 2,900 pages of messages exchanged on the messaging app Telegram between leaders of the hardline pro-Trump factions of Young Republican groups in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. In the edgy messages, the leaders used racist themes and epithets freely and cheered slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents. They expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

One of them wrote to the others, “If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked [for real for real].”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American