Bad at being bad
Biggest news of the first 11 weeks? Incompetence on the right. Restraint on the left.
Imagine you spent the last ten weeks1 on a silent meditation retreat.
You know nothing that transpired between Trump’s inauguration and today, although you had some coherent priors.
When you departed society on January 20th, Trump was more popular than ever.
Would Trump make America less prosperous and more cruel? Yes.
Would Trump follow through on his retribution tour? Probably.
Would Republicans lose power over it? Ehhh …
While Democrats were heavily favored to win back the House, the Senate looked impossible. Trump had a path to sustain his popularity. The most successful entrepreneur of the century, a former Democrat, had jumped aboard to identify swing voters’ favorite finding: waste, fraud, and abuse. Years of Democratic overreach and government inefficiencies provided plenty of low-hanging fruit.
The culture felt like it was shifting rightwards, maybe for a generation.
The economy was booming. Just weeks ago, Democrats were worried “Trump would win, inherit a growing economy with low unemployment and (relatively) low inflation, then cut taxes and declare victory again”
Plus, you could count on Democrats overreacting when Trump goaded them into playing on turf friendly to him: immigration, foreign aid, cultural liberalism, etc.
Well, here's what I’d tell you about the GOP trifecta after your eleven weeks of zen:
They’re worse than you thought
They’re more incompetent than you thought
We still have elections, and Dems really need to win them
Saving Disgrace
The “Trump 2.0 is worse than you thought” part is pretty far-reaching (PEPFAR, measles, mistaken deportations to foreign prisons, following the authoritarian playbook2, etc).
But since you just got out of a meditation retreat, let’s skip that part.
Incompetence will have longer-term implications. And it was not guaranteed. The scariest sentence muttered over the last eight years was “The next Trump-type figure will be far more capable.”
And all the talk of Project 2025 and Silicon Valley talent and billionaire capitulation indicated Trump 2.0 could launch with devastating effectiveness.
But, for now at least, the “Next Trump” figure is just Trump. And it turns out that having undisciplined leaders with fourth-rate middle managers3 leads to tremendous dysfunction.
As Jonathan Cohn noted, “Over and over again, we’re seeing basic, sloppy errors from this administration on everything from selecting people for layoffs to vetting immigrants for deportation. And these are just the visible ones. Makes me wonder what mistakes we aren’t seeing.”
On the one hand, it is shocking that these guys can’t text a group chat without mistakenly adding a reporter or create a sensible tariff chart after five months to prepare or keep 9/11 truthers from firing National Security Council staff or make sure that their nominee for a Pennsylvania state Senate special election can win an R+15 district.
But on the other hand, think about the middle management required to do these things.
The Department of Health and Human Services just clumsily fired 10,000 people before realizing that 2,000 of them were by mistake. Anyone who has worked at a big company knows layoffs require a lot of talented people to spend significant time on design and implementation.
Now imagine the resume pool available to RFK Jr.
Is it really a surprise the Administration is incompetent?
MAGA’s Razor
Hanlon’s Razor counsels us to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Achieving total malice takes a level of disciplined talent that MAGA appears unable to muster.
And that starts at the top. As Jonathan Chait put it, “the good news is that it's harder to build an authoritarian system when the authoritarian leader is totally bonkers.”
And MAGA incompetence does not just apply to governing. Having undisciplined leaders directing low-grade middle managers also matters for winning elections.
Which brings us to the biggest news:
We still have elections! And Republicans are faring very poorly in them.
Protect democracy by practicing it
Last August, I surprised myself in conversation with Vox reporter Zak Beauchamp for his article titled One way that Kamala Harris needs to be more like Joe Biden.
As noted in the article, Beauchamp had just released a book:
In my new book The Reactionary Spirit, I study how pro-democracy candidates — in the United States and around the world — beat authoritarian rivals in elections. One of the most consistent findings is that it’s possible, and quite effective, to campaign on democracy in conjunction with other issues: showing how anti-democratic politics affects voters’ lives in concrete ways.
I disagreed with him, in the way that happens when something comes out of your mouth confidently before you have internalized it:
“Our mantra has become ‘you defend democracy by practicing it.’ And you practice it by focusing on voters in the middle,” says Liam Kerr, co-founder of the Democratic WelcomePAC. “A lot of gettable voters — especially at this point, after eight years — don’t believe that stormtroopers are going to come into the streets the day after the election.”
But whatever message you think this group wants — be it tough-on-the-border centrism, a liberal focus on abortion bans, or middle-class economic populism — it’s not obvious that it trades off with pro-democracy messaging.
There are real tradeoffs between focusing on a democracy message and addressing the top concerns of voters - and even on taking the extra step to try connecting democracy with voter concerns.
This was a key finding of Ezra Klein and David Shor’s much-discussed podcast last month, as well as other postmortems.
Harris bet on democracy as a closing message, and trying to connect it to voter priorities didn’t save it.
Non-Strategic Safe Seat Dems
By talking about democracy instead of practicing it, Democrats lost it all.
But we still have elections, and Democrats are mostly acting responsibly by fighting where conflict is productive and restraining the worst impulses of progressives elsewhere.
This will be a constant battle. A few days ago, we covered the wrongheaded argument from a former Pod Save America honcho to arrest Elon Musk.
In a new post on Friday,
doubled down:Influential centrist commentators4 like Noah Smith and Liam Kerr all counseled their allies in Congress to strike a better balance between policy moderation and partisan confrontation: Bending to public opinion on issues like border security shouldn’t also entail allowing Republicans to shove you into lockers.
He criticizes Senator Ruben Gallego’s restraint on immigration issues as “a window into the minds of the Democratic strategic class and its front line members.”
This is an important phrase. Beutler and his fight-everything allies belong to the opposite group: the non-strategic class of safe seat members.
Listen to winners & betting markets
Beutler calls this approach “a stain on the party” without grappling with how Gallego ran 8 points ahead of Kamala to win a Trump state.
That is the non-strategic safe seat mindset. We’ve been writing for years about listening to the Democrats who are actually trying to win. As
has written, too often Democratic political history is written by the losers.Democrats have largely resisted the worst impulses of the resistance, keeping the government open and keeping the cuffs off Elon while fighting him & Trump on favorable issues that help win elections.
Can you imagine if Democrats had shut down the government, distracting voters from who is responsible for today’s worldwide chaos?
Everyone is focused on the stock market these days, but there’s another scoreboard: the betting markets.
Democratic odds of winning the Senate jumped from 17% to 24% when I drafted this on Friday ... and went past 28% this morning.
Odds of winning the House jumped from 67% to 80%.
The best place to fight is the ballot.
We still have elections. Democrats need to focus on winning them.
We are now 5% through Trump’s term
The authoritarian playbook - retribution, pressuring law firms & CEOs, etc, - does seem to be going better for Trump than his other two jobs: effectively governing with a trifecta and leading a political party to electoral success.
MAGA’s middle management may contain both nefarious people and capable people, but it is apparently difficult to find people with both qualities.
Note: while we do some commentating, our main thing is supporting centrists who focus on winning and govern responsibly
I have Jayapal as my rep. She is the epitome of this mindset. It's awful. She is a walking sound bite for Republicans.
It would have been helpful to include a list of races we should focus on.