KILLERS NEEDED

Why Dems Have No Room to Be Nice After Burying Trump

One self-dealing elite is quite enough.

Opinion

It seemed every major election story that broke on Tuesday and into the wee hours of Wednesday was another shovelful of dirt onto the grave of Donald Trump’s political career.

Aging, losing his marbles, never that sane to begin with, Trump now confronts the fate of watching himself decay and decompose in relevance with each passing day.

Once lavished with attention by world leaders and CEOs, Trump will be reaching out to call his one time buddies and getting a “New phone, who dis?” in response. Tech bros who attached themselves to him like barnacles on the great orange hull of a sunken ship will be among the first to try to distance themselves from him. Because they got brutally walloped and repudiated on election day as well. Every pro data center ballot measure lost. Champions of data centers and AI lost. Elon Musk spent half a billion dollars and he might as well have tossed it in the blender and guzzled it down it with his daily ketamine smoothie. If any group got as roundly rejected by the American people as their decrepit president it was the techies. (Who will now spend the next few weeks desperately trying to Demwash their companies by hiring Obama and Biden-era formers to front for them and send the message that they never liked Trump that much to begin with.)

While Trump tries to deflect blame away from himself for the catastrophic consequences of the electoral Blunami that swept across America, he is failing. Poll after poll showed that the voters were rejecting him, his corruption, his policies, his war, his tariffs with their votes.

After ten years center stage, the curtain has come ringing down on our clown prince. MAGA as a movement is circling the drain and caught up in its vortices are many of its loyal supporters like AIPAC and politicians who went all in on the racism, misogyny, violence, and assaults on our institutions and fundamental freedoms that lay at the heart of the Trumpist-Putinist ideology.

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Speaking of which, let’s pour one out for Vlad. His number one boy is a rapidly depreciating asset. While Putin will surely try to squeeze a few more drops of traitorous betrayal of the U.S. out of his little Trumpushka, surely he realizes the glory days of his most useful idiot are now him.

Trump lost. Tech bros lost. MAGA lost. AIPAC lost. Putin lost. What’s not to like?

Well, candidly, there’s plenty in all that to celebrate—along with the individual victories that marked the evening, the big Dem margin in the House and the substantial one in the Senate, the fact that no Trump initiative will ever again make through the Congress, the lasting impact some of these victories may have on the electoral map.

But a big question remains. Will Democrats Democrat this up? Will they seize the moment and take the steps necessary to make a landmark victory into a political watershed that will transform the landscape of American politics for many years to come?

Are Democratic leaders up to it? Will new leaders emerge? The early signals were mixed. While the House speaker presumptive spoke of transformational change, frankly he did not sound convinced. He also said Americans don’t want retribution (a carefully chosen word to make going after MAGA sound bad) but that they do want accountability (a word that makes it sound like a necessity.)

He focused on affordability which left people imagining the many 2 percent cost-of-living adjustments to Medicare dental plans Dems would propose and then see vetoed by Trump and did not speak of any specific changes or initiatives consistent with the apparent impact or scope of the Democratic victory.

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The remarks offered by likely Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer were not much better. They already seem vaguely exhausted and we know they are compromised by the compromises of their past.

Most importantly, they did not seem to pick up on the gestalt of this election or the clear message of its biggest winners (like Ossoff or Talarico or Hinojosa or El Sayed). It is a message that was reflected in exit polling regarding the biggest concerns of voters. Atop the list alongside affordability was corruption.

Voters get it. They recognize that corruption and the affordability crisis, inequality and the threats of the broligarchs to our economy are all different faces of the same problem. You can’t solve the affordability crisis without ending not just the stealing of our mafia government but also the role money plays in our elections.

Investigating and holding Trump and his cronies to account is therefore essential. That’s not retribution. That’s justice and a clear message that we should no longer have a two speed system of justice, one set of rules for the rich (who also happen to fund our political elites) and another for the rest of us. Structural changes are needed.

And when addressing “affordability” the nice snack-sized reforms preferred by corporate Dems are not enough to deal with the damage done. It’s time for health care for all. It’s time to tax the billionaires to restore services that are essential to the lives of average Americans. That’s the message that winner after winner yesterday offered (regardless of where they might describe themselves on the political spectrum).

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Perhaps the studied “let’s all try to get along” namby-pambiness of Dem leaders was a cover. They will play good cop and let their committee chairs be the attack dogs. Certainly there was a sense of that when in the middle of election night, Robert Garcia, incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee issued a very strong, clear, encouraging message about accountability featuring the admonition that offenders need to “lawyer up.”

Maybe the Democrats are playing four-dimensional chess for a change. Maybe corporate Dems are not too intoxicated with the taste they get of the money that is corrupting our politics to do the right thing and end the gravy train for pols who play along with CEOs, Wall Street and big tech. Or maybe they have actually heard the clear message of voters on election night.

We will see soon enough. We will see whether investigations are undertaken, the policy ideas being proposed are big ones, whether structural reforms are sought… and whether if these things are blocked Dems will have the savvy and talent to make sure the world knows what they were trying to do and that Trump personally stood in their way with the support of the GOP.

After such a cathartic day in American politics, a day in which we sent the world the message that our democracy still works and that we have not lost our collective minds as it has often seemed during the past few years, we are entitled to hope.

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And should those hopes be dashed then we need to recognize the responsibility we all have to remind the new leadership in the U.S. Congress and in newly blue states across America, that the reason the election result was so sweeping and stunning was because we are fed up.

We see our nation as in crisis. We see how the self-dealing of elites and their perversion of our institutions is posing profound costs and hardships for the rest of us.

And we demand that the consequences of the election be every bit as profound as its results were stunning.

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David RothkopfChief Global Affairs Columnist

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