This afternoon, Emine Yücel, Josh Kovensky and John Light will join me on our YouTube channel to discuss their investigation from last week showing that the Trump administration has on multiple occasions withheld funds from blue states just because they voted blue — you know, the kind of story that would have been leading every news program for a month in the Before Times. Anyway, join us at 1 p.m. ET.
PSA: We’re going to be very active over on YouTube going forward. If you like hearing our voices and seeing our faces, please subscribe so you don’t miss anything!
Sometimes I write a post which is about information that is not new or secret but new to me. This is one of those posts. I’m sharing it because the information is new to me and I suspect many TPM readers. It’s helpful for me in thinking about the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America as the most visible left faction within the current Democratic Party. Recently I noticed that many or most of the DSA elected officials who’ve achieved some level of electoral success have been denounced, censured or rejected by the local affiliates or council who endorsed them in the first place. Along similar lines, the national DSA is consistently more doctrinaire and left-wing not only than it’s candidates but its local chapters in the major metros where its power is strongest. This isn’t surprising or really new. It’s a general pattern for ideologically-based organizations, an unsurprising feature of the tensions between ideology and complex electorates.
Back to those prominent DSA-backed politicians. I and many others have argued for a while that “socialist” seems more a matter of branding for a lot of DSA candidates, whereas the actual policies and positions sound a lot like pretty ordinary New Deal-style liberal-labor politics. Of course, what counts as “socialism” is wildly over-determined. You’ve certainly see those memes that show like the Socialist Party platform from the 1910s or 1920s and it mostly matches things we take for granted or did take for granted as the mid- and late-20th century New Deal state.
This afternoon, Emine Yücel, Josh Kovensky and John Light will join me on our YouTube channel to discuss their investigation from last week showing that the Trump administration has on multiple occasions withheld funds from blue states just because they voted blue — you know, the kind of story that would have been leading every news program for a month in the Before Times. Anyway, join us at 1 p.m. ET.
PSA: We’re going to be very active over on YouTube going forward. If you like hearing our voices and seeing our faces, please subscribe so you don’t miss anything!
Sometimes I write a post which is about information that is not new or secret but new to me. This is one of those posts. I’m sharing it because the information is new to me and I suspect many TPM readers. It’s helpful for me in thinking about the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America as the most visible left faction within the current Democratic Party. Recently I noticed that many or most of the DSA elected officials who’ve achieved some level of electoral success have been denounced, censured or rejected by the local affiliates or council who endorsed them in the first place. Along similar lines, the national DSA is consistently more doctrinaire and left-wing not only than it’s candidates but its local chapters in the major metros where its power is strongest. This isn’t surprising or really new. It’s a general pattern for ideologically-based organizations, an unsurprising feature of the tensions between ideology and complex electorates.
Back to those prominent DSA-backed politicians. I and many others have argued for a while that “socialist” seems more a matter of branding for a lot of DSA candidates, whereas the actual policies and positions sound a lot like pretty ordinary New Deal-style liberal-labor politics. Of course, what counts as “socialism” is wildly over-determined. You’ve certainly see those memes that show like the Socialist Party platform from the 1910s or 1920s and it mostly matches things we take for granted or did take for granted as the mid- and late-20th century New Deal state.
One of our great doctrines here in the Editors’ Blog is that all power is unitary. Lose or gain it in one place, and you lose or gain it in equal measure everywhere else. That’s catching up with Donald Trump. He got into the Iran War as a way to escape the emotionally crushing experience of declining popularity and power at home. But his ebbing power went with him to the Persian Gulf. And now it’s arrived in Israel, too. This was obscured for a while by the fact that the U.S. has almost unimaginable military power and a constitution which, as it has evolved if not how it was originally intended, puts almost no short-term limits on a president’s ability to wage war. But the two were always umbilically connected. It was the pain of bad news at home that spurred Trump to jump so recklessly into his Iran debacle. And it is the same unpopularity that has him so desperate to end high gas prices and inflation before the midterms. They’re all connected.
Trump has no poker face. To live in Trump’s era is not only to see his inner life but to be engulfed by it. It’s hard to think of a case in which the deciding player between warring powers has more clearly signaled his desperate desire to get out of a conflict on almost any terms. The Iranians have internet too. And they can see all of this. They have now issued a fresh set of new demands: end sanctions, leave the region, pay reparations, release frozen assets and more — in addition to make the Strait of Hormuz a permanent Iranian toll road. More or less total capitulation.
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It’s impossible to look at the run-up to the 2026 midterms without examining the repackaging and reuse of the conspiracy theories that got us here. The midterms might be the last chance we see some of them used with any real efficacy, and nobody is missing their shot.
