Rebecca Cooke takes on DVO & Dark MAGA
Welcome candidate Rebecca Cooke is taking on Derrick Van Orden and Dark MAGA in 2026.
Trump’s second term has loosed upon the nation a crueler version of MAGA, what we’ve come to call “Dark MAGA.” Dark MAGA is extreme, violent, and ruthless. But the good news is that Dark MAGA can be beaten by localizing, depolarizing Welcome candidates. Rebecca Cooke is one of those candidates, and she launched her campaign in Wisconsin’s third congressional district today. You can support Rebecca here.
Dark MAGA was exhibited in a recent interaction between Cooke’s opponent, Republican Congressman Derrick Van Orden, and an employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
But first, some background.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (WI-03) has always been an extremist. He participated in the January 6th insurrection rally and said of his participation, "I went there to stand with them, to stand up for electoral integrity." He has been seen yelling and cursing at teenaged Senate pages after partying in his office where alcohol was spotted, drawing rebukes from members of his own party. Van Orden also wrote a book called the Book of Man: A Navy SEAL's Guide to the Lost Art of Manhood that included a story about exposing a man's genitals to female officers. He has missed a number of key votes, but did find time to vote against expelling serial liar and fraudster George Santos.
In Trump’s second term, he’s sunk to new lows.
Tony Ruiz, a former Veterans Affairs employee reached out to him. Ruiz is the type of person that a Republican on the Veterans Affairs committee would typically want to respond to:
“Tony Ruiz, a 47-year-old disabled Army veteran who worked as a veterans service representative in Los Angeles, said he was specifically hired to help process the PACT Act claims amid a surge in claims.
[…]
In August, Ruiz was awarded the employee of the quarter and received a cash bonus, according to files from the Office of Personnel Management he provided to the Washington Examiner. During that time, Ruiz met Joshua Jacobs, the Under Secretary for Benefits at the VA, who congratulated him on his accomplishments.
“My boss told me at one point, he goes, ‘Man, god damn it, you’re doing more claims yourself than 20 people.’ He told me they were looking at my numbers and that’s why I got the award,” he said.”
Ruiz was hired to help the VA address the surge in claims caused by the PACT Act, bipartisan legislation to protect veterans who were exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances.
A week after he was laid off, Ruiz told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he sent Van Orden a message on LinkedIn urging him to help veterans like him and stop the mass firings.
Seemingly unaware that Ruiz was no longer a federal employee, Van Orden’s response to Ruiz was:
I am a member of Congress on the VA Committee.
I have absolutely no say in the employment status of any individual in the executive branch however, I will be referring you to DOGE as it seems that at 13:46 on a Monday you should have been working for veterans, not posting trash about your boss, President Trump.
There needs to be accountability.
Now.
Have a great day.
Several days before this, he threatened to prosecute activists for interfering with DOGE. Veterans Affairs was once a bipartisan matter (PACT had overwhelming bipartisan support), and Republicans used to pride themselves on protecting veterans. But in the age of Dark MAGA, veterans and those who serve them are just another group whose livelihoods and well-being will be determined by Elon Musk and his efforts to take a hatchet to the federal budget. Rather than exerting Congress’s right to manage the purse, Van Orden is tossing the keys to the teens at DOGE.
But the story doesn’t end there.
In 2024, Welcome candidate Rebecca Cooke put up the strongest performance against Van Orden that he’s ever faced, coming within three points of winning and over-performing Harris at the top of the ticket by 5 points.
At the end of 2024, The New Yorker wrote a deep dive on Wisconsin featuring Cooke.
Rebecca Cooke saw the same forces at work in rural western Wisconsin, where she challenged Derrick Van Orden, an incumbent member of Congress and Trump admirer who attended the January 6th rally. Raised on a dairy farm, she worked as a political fund-raiser before opening a shop in Eau Claire and creating a nonprofit that offers grants to women-owned businesses. She now works as a waitress at an upscale restaurant in Eau Claire. During the campaign, Cooke said, she avoided making unrealistic promises that she feared could feed into voter mistrust and cast herself as “somewhere in the middle,” a Blue Dog Democrat who would avoid extremes. She lost by three points, but in a mostly rural region where Trump scored his biggest gains in the state, she fared considerably better than Harris. She is strongly considering another run, anticipating a midterm election cycle that is likely to be more favorable to Democrats.
Cooke doesn’t engage in the politics of evasion, instead calling out decisions made by others in her party.
Cooke believes that there is a problem with the national Party’s image, which was reinforced by Harris’s messaging choices. “The Democratic Party brand is far left right now, when that’s not the majority of the country,” Cooke said. “We don’t have an agenda that really tells people what we’re going to do, how we’re going to make things better, and how we’re going to improve people’s lives.” She went on, “There was a lot about joy, but there are a lot of people that aren’t feeling joy in their lives right now.” It didn’t help to tell voters that the economic numbers were getting better when they weren’t feeling it. Nor, from the vantage point of her mostly working-class district, did Cooke think Harris’s courting of celebrities was wise. “Most people can’t afford to go to a Beyoncé concert,” she said.
Because of Cooke, Van Orden is now in a swing district, and a few days after his message to Ruiz, he finally seemed to realize that. He told Fox News he raised concerns about farmers and veterans being affected by DOGE to Musk. He then told a reporter the firings were not a DOGE decision, but rather a department decision.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is laying off nearly 80,000 employees, touching a third rail in American politics: you’re not supposed to screw over American veterans.
Last cycle, Van Orden’s erratic behavior nearly cost him his job. This cycle, let’s finish the job.
In 2024, we endorsed Rebecca Cooke in her Democratic primary because we knew she has what it takes to take down a Republican extremist.
Image of Rebecca Cooke from Rebecca Cooke for Congress.