There were two good explainers about the Michigan US Senate race this week, despite their titles. One, by , has Abdul El-Sayed’s name and the L word in it. The other, by , has just El-Sayed’s last name and the word “bad.” As someone compelled by the power of framing as conveyed by George Lakoff, this aches me. Because bad framing too often betrays the truth.

And the truth is, Mike Rogers is a huge loser. If he were any bigger a loser, Michigan Republicans would have nominated him to run for governor.

The plain-brand W. Bush-era congressman who helped drag us into losing two wars, during his 15 years in the U.S. House, lost to Elissa Slotkin. He lost as Donald Trump won Michigan by more than any Republican in 36 years. He got 122,956 fewer votes than Trump. In contrast, John James, the bigger loser Republicans have nominated for governor, got 7,619 fewer votes than Trump in 2020.

Over 100,000 Trump Voters Said No

This is a flaming red flag! Michigan has straight-ticket voting. It’s as easy to just vote the whole ballot for one party as it is to vote for Donald Trump. The most generous explanation for why Rogers’ lag with Trump voters was 16 TIMES LARGER than James' is that Elon Musk brought in a hell of a lot of low-information voters who didn’t even know how our ballot worked? Because the less generous explanation is that over 100,000 Trump voters went out of their way not to vote for Mike Rogers just because he’s Mike Rogers.

And James was facing a much better candidate!

Gary Peters is a vet who seemed a credible populist for minutes at a time but mostly played it down the middle in the Senate. He’s a much better candidate than Elissa Slotkin, who seems to think getting 23,847 fewer votes than Harris/Walz makes her a 2028 frontrunner. That drop-off makes her look a lot worse than James did, but still nowhere near as much of a loser as Mike Rogers.

Importing Rejects to Lose the Next War

The point here is that there is no reason to expect Rogers to do better in 2026 than in 2024 unless there’s something in the water in Florida.

Michigan’s Republican Party, much like Pennsylvania’s GOP, is such a mess that they have to import rejects from the Iraq War to help lose the Iran War. Why? The Flint Water Crisis is too simple an answer. Rick Snyder was able to win by positioning himself as not really being a Republican because we’ve seen in this state what these guys do and how they do it. We’ve watched the DeVoses ravage the state with their fundamentalist proto-Trumpism. And we still beat them any time it’s a fair fight.

Growing the Base vs. Burning It

I’m counting on Abdul to win. I’m counting on him to win in large part because Rogers cannot defend the indefensible or really explain why he’s running, other than that Trump made him do it. And that’s really all you need to know. He’s running to help Trump rule Michigan, even if it means stealing our votes.

Meanwhile, Abdul is a different type of politician, the kind that wants to make sure we all have Medicare that covers dental, vision, and hearing.

Michigan Democrats have lucked the hell out this year.

MAGA Mike Duggan decided not to play spoiler in the governor’s race. Republicans nominated proven statewide losers. And voters picked Abdul, who will bring in key new anti-system voters to the Democratic coalition while, hopefully, helping begin the process of rebuilding a Democratic Party after our failures to stand up for the people of Gaza. Stevens would have done neither. This is called growing the base.

It’s the exact opposite of what a loser like Mike Rogers did in 2024. And think about that when you’re trying to process the potential outcomes for 2026.

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Did you hear that Natalie Harp is a racist?

Or did you at least hear that Donald Trump’s much younger consort is probably the person who posted the infamous image of the Obamas as Apes and made Rosseane Barr jealous by suffering absolutely no consequences for this obvious racism?

If you did, there’s a good chance it’s because Marcy Wheeler and a few other vets of the blog wars were trolling on X.

Marcy has been relentless in insisting that Harp’s posting of that video be a part of this conversation. Notably, that has become part of the second wave of coverage of what we can now call the Harp scandal, ignited after Jon Ossoff expertly inflamed the whole affair by simply saying the name of Trump’s Comfort Blonde aloud.

CNN noted Wednesday:

Within Trump’s orbit, allies and advisers privately speculated that Harp was responsible for the post, as she was one of a small number of aides with access to Trump’s Truth Social account.

But they were reluctant to name her, one source told CNN. If they did, they worried the fallout would only further strengthen Trump’s support for Harp.

Stabbing into these rifts inside MAGA is a huge reason Marcy is still on what she calls Xitter. And she has a strong case for those rifts being significant. She started calling for the release of the Epstein Files days into Trump’s second term.

And the issue kept bubbling to the point that the man X exists to serve (Elon), to the point that Musk was seeking to hit Trump hardest, he inflamed the Epstein Files itch by claiming Trump refused to release them because Trump was in them.

The cover Trump’s largest donor, and the largest political donor in the history of money, provided on the Epstein issue eventually caused Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump to lose Duma-like control of the House for the first time.

Marcy isn’t saying she did all that. She’s just saying that the strategies she employed can have an effect. And her analysis of what works is informed by the knowledge of how trolling on Twitter was professionalized (by a literal Nazi) and now has become one of the chief purposes of the site due to the owner of the platform (a literal Nazi).

Is that a good enough reason to visit the Nazi bar?

Marcy has many more, and all of them tie into her work as one of the planet’s most incisive exposers, educators, and explicators about the Republican Party, national security, the law, authoritarianism, and how all these things overlap.

My reasons for staying are far less noble or clear. Mostly because I left X in 2024 for Bluesky and only visit it like I’m Elon Musk, and it’s one of my 87 kids. I guess I’m proud I saw the fascism coming earlier than most. And I made a point of begging the left to move off X to Bluesky, and they finally seemed to listen to me! After Trump won.

If you know me, it’s because of Twitter.

There are contacts and relationships I’ve formed there that only exist there. I still have a tiny ability to boost things into the conversation with hundreds of thousands of followers, but do I with that algorithm? Marcy notes it has recently become more favorable to anti-MAGA. But do I? I don’t know. And for my writing and video editing, I literally need to get into the site sometimes.

But I feel ashamed when I post there, even when I boost stuff I think matters, though I continually wrestle with the context that, while both Marcy and I believe in the big picture, Meta is worse! And the Twitter-left world has increasingly moved to Threads, not Bluesky, the only social media platform with tens of millions of users that is not owned by a billionaire.

One thing Marcy and I both agree on is that there’s no Trump I without Twitter. And there’s no Trump II without X. And there’s no Elon verging on trillionaire without Trump. So these are serious concerns. Life-and-death of democracy stuff.

My contention is that we have to act as if 2026 is different, meaning we do not repeat the SAME EXACT mistakes of 2024.

And the biggest mistake is acting as if any of this is normal.

It’s still absurd to me that, as the app owned by the GOP’s largest donor became the main digital vehicle of the effort to elect Republicans, Democratic politicians and orgs not only kept posting there but also sent people there by making news on the platform.

And as I described my worries about how this gets worse in 2026, Marcy gave me the term I’m looking for: “Cambridge Analytica,” the company that was scandalized in 2016 for attempting to use private data to swing votes. I think she means that at least semi-derisively, as people largely doubt how much, if any, effect that had. But 2026 ain’t 2016.

Elon has the black box to all our data, and he’s using it in a way people who do politics for a living have never been able to before. And I mean that literally.

The biggest revelation I had while making the first episode of the Trillionaire Kill Chain is that in 2024 something happened that may be the biggest untold story of this decade.

In legal terms, here’s what “a game-changing advisory opinion on political coordination for a Texas PAC” did:

“The Commission concluded that door-to-door canvassing involves individual people talking face-to-face with voters and is not a ‘public communication’ under 11 CFR 100.26... Therefore, the production and distribution of canvassing literature and scripts do not satisfy the content prong of the coordinated communication test, even when coordinated with federal candidates or political party committees.”

That’s a vague way of saying it quietly became possible for dark money to take over a presidential campaign—down to the voter contact machinery that had always been walled off from Super PACs and non-profits.

In other words, one billionaire can effectively fund and take over a presidential or really almost any federal campaign. And the first time it became legal for one person to buy the presidency, Musk did.

That’s why stories about Trump’s cash troubles and the Harris cash advantage disappeared in the summer of 2024.

That’s why I predicted Musk, and other billionaires, would do the same or something similar with Senate campaigns this fall. And don’t look now, but I think I’m right about Musk trying to DOGE Ken Paxton’s flagging Senate effort in Texas.

Our democracy is on the line in this election as it is any time a country votes after an autocratic event. What’s also on the line is any real oversight of Musk and DOGE, and the deaths of the millions abandoned by USAID cuts. Elon will do everything he can to make sure the public never has power over him.

I don’t know how much Marcy can change that by staying on X, or I can change it by leaving. But it’s a time for choosing. And I’m struggling! That’s not a great sign.

I know for sure we can outrun all of that on our own. We can’t, not without a systemic response. The machinery that produced this — the destruction of our campaign finance system, of education, of the media — could drown out what should be a landslide for Democrats this fall. But the systemic factors in this election have a lot more to do with gas prices and the house of Jokers this economy is wobbling on. Along with various other likely catastrophes.

But we cannot expect midterm gravity to just work as it always does.

In the Supreme Court, like online media, like the press in general, the GOP has built an anti-gravity infrastructure largely funded by Musk and his fellow Nerd Reichers to give us Trump II and wants to give us worse (Vance I).

Still, this time, I’m not going to just be quiet and embarrassed about my ambivalence. I’m going to be loud and embarrassed about it. I’m absolutely renewing my call that anyone of any reach AT LEAST go Twitter Last.

Post there if you must after everywhere else, but never send people there. And Marcy agrees. She thinks just about everyone should leave there for Bluesky, where you’ll be unbothered as long as you never brag about LLMs or let Marcy catch you expecting Chuck Schumer to save us from fascism.

This is the first time we’re publishing a conversation like this between Marcy and me. This is how we talk pretty much normally, usually in the form of recording episodes when I can’t stop myself from taking advantage of my time and asking questions and then blathering.

Here are 10 things I learned or was reminded of from this conversation, but listen to the whole thing. I think it’s kind of fun to hear two very different Michiganders speak across the Atlantic.

1. X’s radicalization wasn’t organic, and it didn’t start with Musk. Marcy dates the real damage to 2015–2016, years before he bought the platform, and names who did it: Weev, the Daily Stormer’s webmaster, running coordinated chat rooms that figured out how to hijack Twitter’s dynamics. And I argue that hijack is now the blueprint for how Musk runs the app.

2. Musk’s own radicalization has a trigger almost nobody but Marcy names. Marcy pushes back on giving Elon too much credit as a strategist, arguing instead that he became vulnerable to being pulled rightward around a specific stretch — after his daughter transitioned, and after Grimes left him for Chelsea Manning.

3. Stephen Miller is a human algorithm for Trump. Miller’s entire function in Trump’s orbit is telling him what he wants to hear, on a loop, tailored to his ego. You argue the X algorithm now does that same job for everyone else at once — a confirmation machine. It’s the right’s constant Comfort Blonde.

4. X still matters, but not because it’s popular anymore — because it’s concentrated. Marcy’s read is that Twitter was actually more valuable to the far right in 2016, when the takeover was invisible, than it is now, when everyone can see what it’s become. It’s lost users and lost its claim to being the public square. What’s left is disproportionately the people who stayed on purpose. I add that this is mostly MAGA and reporters with health insurance. But Marcy notes the cybersecurity community, for instance, is still there.

5. There’s a real historical playbook for this. Marcy points to Peter Pomerantsev’s book on Sefton Delmer, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, about the British propagandist who fought Nazi Germany during WWII by never attacking Hitler directly — only his aides — and by working through grievance rather than argument. In other words, Marcy just tries to feed the scandal-mongering that already exists.

6. The Ossoff/Natalie Harp episode is the play. Marcy walks through it in real time: Ossoff’s anti-corruption videos were landing hard, so the right’s first move wasn’t to rebut the substance — it was to say he “isn’t manly,” then pivot to painting him as smearing a supposedly fragile Natalie Harp. Not working. This whole edited video is coming soon.

7. The left doesn’t have an equivalent to what makes the right’s disinformation actually spread. Usually. We both love Kate Starbird’s “participatory disinformation” work and think of it constantly. Starbird’s point: successful propaganda now runs on ordinary people choosing to “go chase” and amplify a claim themselves, not on a single source pushing it top-down — and the left doesn’t have a comparable grassroots amplification layer.

8. Wisconsin’s the way. Former WisDems Ben Wikler has written specifically about how Wisconsin turned Musk’s own intervention into what sank his candidate. Marcy wants me to interview Ben. I agree, but I’ll read the book since it’s not working out.

9. There’s a live, boring counter-example to “nothing beats the algorithm,” and it’s working. Marcy points to grassroots data-center organizing in Minnesota, Chicago, and Kentucky, local reporting feeding into national pickup by outlets like the Wall Street Journal. It’s a version of the “human connection beats the machine” thesis actually happening in real time. Like what we saw after Good and Pretti’s deaths. But I’d note that the algorithm is helping here because of its connection to real organizing. And that’s the left’s version of politics as improv theater.

10. Beating Musk and removing him from our lives are different tasks but require each other. We have to force Elon out of roles at SpaceX. Marcy adds that we have to make Palantir toxic enough that police departments won’t touch it. I say Democratic politicians need to treat working with Musk or Thiel the way you’d treat hackers who broke into the government — not a partnership to manage, but intruders to eject. And only then can you restore the sanctity of our systems.

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This week's episode looks at what it means to be in the middle stages of a concentration camp regime—which is where the United States is at now. Andrea Pitzer discusses how the shift from performative incidents of violence and terror at the beginning gives way to a more institutionalized and methodical approach, one in which the bureaucracy of the police state becomes more entrenched and self-sustaining. This explains the transition from theatrical street actions, like those of Gregory Bovino, former face of the Border Patrol, to the lower-profile, more methodical approach of (relatively) new DHS head Markwayne Mullin.

To consider how this quieter entrenchment and creation of a self-sustaining concentration camp machine unfolds, Andrea looks at who makes the physical means of detention and harm, and how the ideas on how to harm are spread. She focuses on two historical examples--that of Oliver Brothers of Pittsburgh, the company that made barbed wire for the first concentration camps in Cuba, and the evolution of the tactic of la parrilla—"the grill"—a form of electrical torture used under dictatorship in Chile a half-century ago. She then turns to modern appliances that aid in atrocities: electroshock gloves, ankle monitors, and omnipresent surveillance cameras. She notes a new airline contract supporting ICE deportations—possibly involving running detention facilities as well. The episode ends with a look at ways to stall, block, and shut down the torturers' club and the businesses that profit from the deliberate infliction of human misery.

00:00 - How Concentration Camp Regimes Actually Form

02:18 - The 1890s U.S. Tech Supply Line Behind Reconcentración

05:14 - The Evolution of Extrajudicial Torture Tactics

07:15 - How Police State Systems Move from Malice to Institutionalization

10:13 - Inside the Modern Private Detention & ICE Expansion

12:12 - High-Tech Surveillance: Flock Cameras & Electric Shock Gear

14:55 - How Local Resistance is Shutting Down Detention Sites

17:42 - Grassroots Tactics: Organizing, Protests, & Documenting Abuse

21:30 - Ending Human Rights Violations at the Local Level

The latest episode of Next Comes What by Andrea Pitzer gets at the whole reason I do any of this.

Consider the America we claim to be. Consider eighteen months of a government attempting to brute-force a network of concentration camps across a supposedly free country. Now look at it through Andrea Pitzer’s eyes.

The author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps has spent more than a decade watching how authoritarian regimes fracture reality. She’s documented how they work outside the law to lock civilians away indefinitely and has made possible some of the worst horrors of humanity.

In this latest episode, “Breaking Ice,” Andrea brings all of that weight to bear on what is turning out to be the most terrifying descent into a specific sort of madness. She describes how this administration seized power with the explicit intent to build Stephen Miller’s vision of ethnic cleansing at maximum speed. His target figure of 20 million removals would exceed the total number of people who entered the Soviet Gulag over its 53-year history. And he wants to do it… today.

And Andrea documents the often remarkable response from Americans who’ve refused to accept concentration camps in their backyard.

The opposition has to be overwhelming to match the unprecedented dumping of resources into funding a secret police tasked with filling camps with anyone the courts will let them hold. To force Miller’s vision into reality, Republicans funneled unprecedented taxpayer capital to build a deportation machine unlike anything that has ever existed in human history.

• The $45 Billion Cash Overdose: Congress handed ICE $45 billion under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to ramp up kidnappings in the street. That single detention carveout—part of a massive $170 billion total enforcement windfall—is a budget 62 percent larger than the entire federal prison system’s, enough to run more than 135,000 beds through 2029 according to the American Immigration Council.

• Absurd Scale of Detainment: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared a target of 100,000 daily detainees, while ICE’s own internal plan aimed for 107,000 beds by the end of 2025. Holding 100,000+ human beings daily means constructing the equivalent of a medium-sized, heavily fortified, militarized city.

Yet as Pitzer notes in the episode, all the funding in the world hasn’t overcome the regime’s two greatest obstacles: its own malice-driven incompetence, and the goodwill of the American people.

Trump and Miller’s lethal mix of cruelty and administrative failure has been checked again and again by the only two forces—short of invasion or regime change—that have ever closed concentration camps: courts and crowds.

We know enough

Every time this government has rolled out a new phase of the camp system, people found out, raising hell and raising costs. We pay them, but hey, better than a bunker ballroom.

When ICE pivoted to buying up warehouses to feed detainees into seven megasites planned to hold 10,000 people each, communities across the country found out about it and organized fast enough to sink the plan before it finished. Often succeeding.

The rallying cry of “We know enough” resounded among tens of millions of Americans who led the movement, shifting the narrative from where “immigration” was Trump’s most popular rallying cry to just another issue where his polling is deep underwater.

Gregory Bovino got run out of Minneapolis after his agents shot and killed two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, for the crime of standing up for their neighbors. And the movement to watch ICE and take care of neighbors inspired the entire country, sparking the largest single-day protest in US history.

Backpedaling from that failure, but still fixated on continuing its terror, ICE has revealed Miller’s next move by posting a solicitation worth up to $10 billion to build detention facilities strictly on land it already owns, in an attempt to bypass the zoning battles and environmental disputes that killed the warehouse rollout.

What Pitzer makes clear is that this isn’t an unstoppable autocratic machine; it’s a desperate regime trying to manifest a nightmare Americans have rejected and now must repudiate by any means possible.

The Purposeful Panic Will Continue

And right now, that deliberate, calculated manufacture of panic is the engine that drives the Republican Party Donald Trump’s dominated for a decade.

As inspiring as the opposition to concentration camps in our backyards has been, the awesome power of the federal government is still making white nationalists’ dreams come true.

We cannot ignore the Haitians who’ve lived and worked legally in Ohio for years are now bracing for deportation. JD Vance built his entire career on that lie, slandering his own constituents just to industrialize a racist panic at scale.

That panic is now fueling a machine built, in no small part, to target people who look like his own children. He called every other harm this administration is doing, including gutting Medicaid for millions, “immaterial” next to that goal.

This is all that matters to both Trump and the man who aims to lead the GOP for decades more. And our job isn’t just to comprehend how our story fits into history, but to change it.

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Kat Abughazaleh did what she does better than almost anyone.

The journalist-turned-candidate posted a video. She was protesting outside the Broadview ICE facility in September 2025 when an agent drove an SUV into the crowd of demonstrators. An ICE agent had tried to run protesters over on a public crosswalk, the post noted.

The next day, former Chuck Grassley aide Mike Davis quoted the video, listed the criminal statutes he imagined were violated, and asked, “Where are the arrests?”

A former Trump White House staffer accused her of blocking a federal agent’s car. Ted Cruz joined the pile-on, also calling for her indictment.

By September 30, the Department of Justice had opened an investigation into Abughazaleh and at least five people connected to her.

A month later, a grand jury indicted six protesters on federal conspiracy charges carrying up to six years in prison. Davis posted Kat’s video explaining her indictment in celebration and said, “Nobody is above the law.”

We soon learned how desperate the Trump regime was to turn Davis’ trolling into criminal charges. The US Attorney in Chicago later admitted in open court that prosecutors had committed comical amounts of misconduct to obtain that indictment.

The entire case collapsed.

Trolling 3.0

Marcy Wheeler has spent decades years covering national security and the law.

Along the way, she discovered how online trolls learned to hijack American politics. She traced the lineage from GamerGate to Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, the neo-Nazi webmaster who trained a generation of trolls to weaponize hashtags and bots against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

She has repeatedly explained how Douglass Mackey and a cooperating witness who went by “Microchip” built entire troll campaigns around a single insight: it doesn’t matter if something is true; it only matters if it goes viral before anyone can debunk it. Like Trump himself, these trolls do not lie to be believed. They lie to be repeated, or retweeted.

How does that connect to the Broadview Six case?

The specific persecution of Abughazaleh shows this theory operationalized as law enforcement policy.

The pattern used to work like this: trolls manufacture a controversy, legacy media covers the controversy, the controversy shapes an election. That’s how Podesta’s emails became a scandal about nothing. That’s how PizzaGate became QAnon.

The pattern now works like this: a protester posts a video, an online influencer names the crimes he wants the person in the video charged with, and four days later, the Justice Department opens a federal investigation into that person.

Mike Davis doesn’t need to make up bullshit controversies anymore. He just names a target on X, and DOJ delivers an indictment.

What’s changed in 2026 is how that outrage becomes realized.

The author of Invisible Rulers, notes that figures like Mike Davis act as “narrative entrepreneurs.” They operate in the loop between the crowd, the influencer, and political elites. Davis soaks in crowd-discovered content on X, identifies viral rage, and frames it around specific targets.

He no longer needs to wait for legacy media to cover a fake controversy; by naming crimes directly on X, he bypasses standard investigative channels and signals straight to Main DOJ, turning online agitation into a direct pipeline for federal indictments.

The fix is in the DOJ

So who made the call?

Who was the bridge between Davis on X and the DOJ, since Marcy notes the US Attorney has admitted there was a meeting with Main DOJ about videos around Broadview.

Now that the charges have been dismissed, Abughazaleh and her co-defendants want to know.

And they have a pretty good guess.

Aakash Singh, Todd Blanche’s 33-year-old “brashest enforcer”, who told a January call of all 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices that Donald Trump is their “chief client.” Singh said that anyone uncomfortable with that arrangement should step aside for someone who is comfortable.

Singh was named as an agitator in what a judge has now determined was a vindictive prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man mistakenly deported to a torture camp in El Salvador and punished for wanting to come home.

Singh, who was endorsed for his current job by Mike Davis himself, also advised prosecutors, according to the New York Times, to impanel new grand juries when a sitting grand jury refused to indict.

In the Broadview Six case, prosecutors didn’t wait for a new grand jury.

They vouched for the case directly to jurors and excused the ones who disagreed, according to grand jury transcripts that shocked even Judge April Perry, a former prosecutor herself.

Blame John Roberts

The turn from the DOJ becoming Trump’s law firm, as it has been since last January, to Trump’s SEAL team targeting his political opponents would not be possible without one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history, a decision that wrote king-like powers into a document designed to prevent those powers from ever being accumulated by one person.

And there’s a “nuclear bomb” in that ruling that rarely gets mentioned but has been on Marcy’s mind since 2024.

In Trump v. United States, John Roberts’s majority decided that the president can discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his attorney general as part of his official duties, immune from any accounting for it.

That ruling was written to protect Trump retroactively, covering his attempt to install Jeffrey Clark as attorney general to help steal the 2020 election. But its language reaches to today too.

When the Broadview Six defendants sought to determine whether Singh or Blanche had directed their prosecution, prosecutors cited Trump v. United States to argue that they had no obligation to disclose.

They’re presenting a ruling meant to immunize Trump from accountability for a coup attempt as now immunizing his entire Justice Department from accountability for prosecuting his critics.

Troll heaven

Weev and Mackey and Microchip spent a decade building the infrastructure to manufacture outrage at scale. Elon Musk bought the platform and tore out the last guardrails standing in the way of that infrastructure.

What Marcy’s new reporting shows is how that infrastructure is used once it’s fully connected to the government it helped install.

It isn’t just about discrediting journalism anymore, the way it did with the Durham investigation or January 6. It’s about perp-walking defendants.

Jim Comey, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Don Lemon, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and Kat Abughazaleh have all faced prosecutions that may trace back to the same fixer and definitely the same immunity shield forged by the Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The Broadview Six prosecution fell apart because a judge caught the misconduct on the record. The protesters sentenced to decades in Prairieland, Texas, and Spokane, Washington, were not so lucky.

That same machinery is now operating in Minnesota, perhaps the most blatant case of criminalizing dissent yet. Following the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during the Twin Cities resistance, the Trump regime responded by deploying federal surveillance against the entire local anti-ICE movement.

The 2016 troll network helped hijack an election by making up stories in a troll room about Hillary Clinton’s emails. In 2026, virtually all of X is that troll room.

Now they just post a name.

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Make sure you see and share this excellent report on the Trump regime’s attempt to prosecute protest as if it’s terrorism, by Jacob Soboroff, for MS NOW.

You know this.

If a president who wasn’t a Republican lost a war within days and left Americans with an $80 billion spike in energy costs, the press would demolish him, non-stop, like Jake Tapper would get his own streaming service just to shake his head derisively. The Ellisons would acquire it.

Look at how the press covers the USS Abraham Lincoln. Or how it doesn’t. The warship has endured a record-breaking, uninterrupted 250+ days at sea amidst this disaster in the Gulf, with families and lawmakers sounding the alarm over decaying ship conditions, severe mental health crises, and multiple sailors attempting to go overboard.

Secretary of Losing Wars Pete Hegseth casually hand-waves these human tragedies away as "fake news," while Donald Trump publicly sneers, like a timeshare salesman bristling after a question about equity, that nine months at sea is "not nearly long enough".

Imagine for a second if a Democrat were president. If a Democratic administration stranded thousands of troops in a combat zone for nearly a year without hot water, functional plumbing, or basic supplies, cable news would run a 24/7 countdown clock titled DISRESPECTING OUR TROOPS ALERT, with endless panel participants screaming at the nodding token Democrat about 'executive incompetence,' 'cruelty to service members,' and 'a #BENGHAZI every day!'

But because it’s Trump, the press treats actual, material harm to active-duty military as a minor administrative hiccup rather than a major national scandal. Why?

For the same reason, our media has had difficulty treating Trump’s endless declarations of 'victory,' timed usually to juke the stock market, as what they truly are: an endless stream of humiliations.

Our political press buys into Trump as the personification of what George Lakoff calls “strict-father” morality. I’m not saying that’s their morality. I’m saying they respect it, even more than their own, sometimes.

Because a strict-father figure can never admit defeat, the press becomes incapable of acknowledging it, too. Cable news ends up framing every retreat as a feat of tactical genius—either caught up in the con or terrified of triggering the regime’s legal or regulatory wrath.

But the public isn’t buying it. They know exactly who is paying for Trump’s floundering (and ballroom).

Within weeks, the Iran War became more unpopular than the Vietnam War, the decades-long debacle Trump, in a classic framing error, keeps comparing his lost war to.

Every trip to the gas pump is a reminder that when Trump bankrupts everyone else, he’s the only one who walks away richer.

Sabotaging Peace

On February 28, Israel and the United States struck Iran, killing its supreme leader and gutting its military and government. Trump declared he would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender, only to claim days later that the war was “very complete.”

Wrong. On both counts.

Iran immediately choked off the Strait of Hormuz—the pipeline for a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Six months later, the strait remains effectively closed while American warships maintain the pretense of a blockade, and Trump continues promising a deal “any day now.”

Historian Phillips O’Brien summed up how history will view this miscalculation: start a war of choice, burn through your weapons stockpiles, and leave the target country dictating terms from a position of strength.

The verdict is obvious: Trump lost this war.

Trump also ignored clear warnings that a deal was within reach. Days before the strikes, Oman’s foreign minister appeared on “Face the Nation” to message Trump the only way he could: through television. The minister assured the American public that a peace deal was achievable. Iran had agreed to zero uranium stockpiling and full IAEA inspections. Striking first, he warned, would only prolong and complicate the crisis.

Oman asked for months to negotiate. Trump gave them hours.

His envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—real-estate cronies with zero nuclear expertise—told the White House Iran was stalling, an assessment diplomats and nuclear experts dismissed as flat wrong.

War hawks around Trump, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, moved to strike before Iran could sign. Pete Hegseth cheerled from the Pentagon.

Senator Lindsey Graham bragged about pushing Trump over the edge. Hopefully he’s not resting in the peace he sought to deny millions.

Complete Lack of a Strategy

Trump probably knows he was played, or at the very least misled. Either way, he knows for sure what Iran is doing is exactly what he’s always wanted to do. It’s taking the oil, but with the sea. It’s what Strict Father Daddy would do.

The geezer was gassed into a fantasy. Bibi and others had him thinking that a horrific and heartless regime that has spent nearly fifty years preparing to fight off America would fold as easily as an off-brand dictator like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

Whoops.

Now, Trump just can’t ever admit that he blew it. He wants to blame someone but knows the power dynamic that would betray.

A strict father isn’t supposed to be pushed around. He’s the decider, and he owns it.

But he knows that we know that he got owned.

Trump let a chorus of Netanyahu, Graham, Hegseth, and two unqualified real-estate negotiators talk him out of a deal Oman’s own mediator was begging him to take.

The bluster keeps curdling faster and faster.

By August, any memory of the demand for surrender had vanished a thousand news cycles ago, and he was telling Axios he’s “low-keying it,” insisting the war will simply work itself out, like a chess game, while Iran’s economy craters. Asked this week whether an Iranian plot to kill him with a shoulder-fired missile worried him, he didn’t even reach for tough-guy language. He just said: “Whatever.”

The strict-father pose requires steady wins or chest-beating. Without a reason for either, even Trump seems bored of his own threats.

And Tehran knows Trump is behaving like a trapped rat.

A senior adviser to the Revolutionary Guard commander told PBS NewsHour this week that Iran may simply wait Trump out, prolonging the war “until we get to the next term of the presidency” to establish deterrence. Iran has separately signaled it won’t even negotiate with Washington until after the November midterms.

And this is the big difference between these regimes that are similar in too many ways. One has a strategy. The other is just a human id.

Trump is constantly terrified of losing power, status, and the legal shield that comes with the Oval Office. Tehran knows Trump plays a madman and occasionally acts like one. But the incentives and competing interests in the Gulf favor him acting like a coward.

Intimidation is his only real move. But this isn’t twisting a cowardly GOP congressman to pass a bill. This is demanding that your opponent play by the rules after declaring to the world that the old rules were dead. And when that fails, distraction is all he has left.

This isn’t Trump the cat toying with John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy, daring them to cross him after destroying their careers. He’s the one chasing the laser pointer.

And he’s doing it to keep Wall Street from realizing the truth, which, luckily for him, it seems to have no interest in doing.

Yet.

A Lost President

Democrats have a narrow opening to define this disaster in a way the press never will, as they try to force an immediate end to the war. But the framing has to be surgical.

Describing him as the “loser” he is could be seen as tarring the troops who did what they were told. Instead, say the war, like the president himself, is “lost”—a thing that happened to the country rather than a verdict on the people who fought it.

Skip “weak,” too, since it still contrasts him inside his own frame of strength. A sharper word for that is “doddering”: a man led around by louder, angrier voices because he cannot settle on a decision longer than a press conference.

Underneath both words is the same charge: he lies constantly to the American people, and worst of all, he betrays the military he sent to fight a war. He did this by sending them to war with no achievable goal and no coherent endgame.

Trump being so lost costs us all. Even a deal weaker than what Oman had on the table in February (and what Obama achieved a decade ago) beats more months of a blockade that only inflicts misery on innocents.

We must accept reality. For now, Donald Trump has handed Tehran’s theocrats a tollbooth on one of the world’s easiest-to-close waterways, costing America credibility, deterrence, and the post-1945 order that built its dominance. He didn’t lose to a superior enemy; he lost to his own psychology by starting a war he was bound to lose.

The troops carried out the mission they were given. They deserve a commander who can admit the mission was garbage. We all do.

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This has never happened before.

No president and his party have ever taken away health insurance from millions of Americans while shoveling trillions to some of the richest humans alive.

It’s bizarre, nonsensical, and brutal. And it’s one of those things that’s so bad that even though Republicans have been promising to do exactly this for decades, voters and focus groups refused to believe Republicans could be that homicidal and, perhaps, suicidal.

And their disbelief will be allowed to linger for a few more months. Given the way Trump’s big budget bill from last year gutted funding that could lead to scores of rural hospitals closing (while spending tens of billions opening rural concentration camps), the people won’t begin to feel the true pain of these cuts until about sixty days after the last vote is counted this November. And then the hell begins.

Few Americans have any idea what’s coming. And even fewer have any idea what this hell will look like, given that it has literally never happened before, or if Republicans, because of the evilly clever way they’ve framed these cuts to be delivered through the tiny knives of red tape, will be blamed.

That’s where Democratic candidates come in: for Congress, for governor, even for president. We need everyone.

For decades, Democrats did Republicans a favor no one thanked them for. They blocked massive cuts like this before rural voters ever felt them. That era is over. This time the bill passed, and the pain must land on the cynical Republicans who voted for it.

The paper trail is already metastasizing

Nonprofit hospitals just finished three straight years of improving margins, helped along by Democrats strengthening the ACA, strong patient volume and new tools. Fitch Ratings says that streak is over. The ratings agency called Trump’s bill the “dominant near-term threat” to hospital finances, with Medicaid enrollment cuts, work requirements, and payment caps set to hit starting in 2027.

Public Citizen reviewed financial records from nearly every hospital in the country and found that 446 were at high risk of closing or cutting services due to the law’s roughly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts. The hospitals most exposed sit in blue states like California, New York, Illinois, and Washington, and the damage falls hardest on Black and Latino communities.

There’s nothing hypothetical about this for the actuaries whose business depends on Medicaid.

Michigan’s Trinity Health already expects to lose $1.5 billion and has cut a tenth of its billing staff. A hospital it runs in Georgia closed its maternity unit. Alameda Health System in California is bracing for more than $100 million in annual losses and nearly 300 layoffs.

Rural America gets hit hardest of all. Nearly 200 rural hospitals have closed since 2005, and more than 400 others, over a fifth of all rural hospitals left standing, are at risk right now. New paperwork requirements and eligibility checks every six months instead of every year are expected to knock 1.5 million rural Medicaid recipients off their coverage. A new cap on state payments to hospitals will speed up closures even further.

States don’t get to run a deficit the way Washington does. When H.R. 1 phases down the provider taxes states use to fund their share of Medicaid and caps what they can pay hospitals directly, states have to make up the gap in the same budget year, not the same decade. Colorado already cut Medicaid provider rates and capped payments to family caregivers to close a $1.5 billion gap. Montana stopped covering doula services. Oregon ordered every state agency to find cuts. This is the same law terrorizing the same states twice (at least), once through the hospitals and once through the statehouse.

Republicans built themselves an alibi, of course.

They tacked on a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Fund to make it look like they were softening the blow. It isn’t working.

In Nebraska, a rural hospital shut down its dialysis unit the same week state officials were celebrating $219 million in new rural health money, because that money is earmarked for new programs and can’t be used to prop up care that’s already disappearing. A clinic CEO in Lincoln expects to lose $600,000 a year and up to 15 percent of his patients, mostly to paperwork rather than any actual failure to work. Clinics in New Hampshire have already closed. Hospitals in North Carolina project they’ll be operating at a loss by 2032. A health system in Oklahoma is shutting down dermatology, pediatric, and mental health services due to a $130 million funding shortfall.

Call it Clue for the “Cruelty is the point” era: it was the red tape, in the waiting room, with the missing form. Researchers modeling the coverage losses project roughly 7,000 to 9,000 additional deaths a year once the boot of the paperwork requirements is fully on the throats of every family that relies on Medicaid.

The law’s paperwork requirements (YES, call them “paperwork requirements” always) were supposed to exempt anyone who’s “medically frail.” The Trump administration issued a rule this summer that narrows who qualifies, tying the exemption to whether someone can prove in writing that their illness prevents them from working 20 hours a week. Twenty-five states and Washington, D.C. are suing over it. Patients with terminal cancer and people on dialysis three days a week are the ones being told to produce more documentation.

The cruelty gets worse the redder the state. Washington offered a one-year grace period, letting people stay covered through 2027 if they simply swear, under penalty of perjury, that they’re too sick to work. Eight red states are refusing it. Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Utah will all demand documented proof starting in January, a full year ahead of the federal deadline. Much of the push came from the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Koch-funded group that spent the past year lobbying statehouses to close what it calls a loophole. Arkansas already tried a looser version of this and watched 29 percent of its Medicaid patients lose coverage anyway. These eight states are choosing to go further still. In states this red, Republicans answer to primary voters, and the people who’ll lose coverage don’t get a vote that counts.

This is the tiny knife. It works through an endless trial of bullshit and small denials: a missed form, a lapsed recertification, a closed dialysis unit two counties over.

Democrats have from now until November to make voters see what’s coming and where it’s coming from. This requires naming names: which hospital in their district, which clinic down the street, which neighbor on dialysis. The cuts are coming. The pain is inevitable, unfortunately. The fight now is over who gets blamed when the hell arrives. So the people who actually care if rural Republicans live or die get to fix this.

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This week, Andrea Pitzer reviews what has happened with the Trump administration's strategic violence against immigrants in the U.S. during the year and a half since his return to office. Andrea mentions three crises that the government hopes people will simply ignore, but which are causing tremendous suffering: cuts to USAID, climate change, and the systemic persecution of immigrants. All three are critical to attend to, but for this episode, she focuses on what has happened since January 2025 on the immigration front.

Running through the Trump administration's attempts to use wartime laws to deport detainees to a gulag in El Salvador, and Stephen Miller's longstanding dream of building tent cities, she shows how those dreams played out in reality. Those deported to El Salvador faced horrific abuse, and two tent-style concentration camp projects led to Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss in Texas, and the Everglades camp in Florida that the administration named "Alligator Alcatraz." Both camps have inflicted tremendous suffering on detainees. The Florida camp has been shut down, but Camp East Montana still holds thousands of detainees.

The tent-city project went badly enough that the government has pivoted repeatedly to other approaches, including a short-lived attempt to use Navy overseas contracting architecture to build concentration camps domestically. This also hit roadblocks. Next, Trump and his allies turned to trying to acquire existing warehouses and retrofit them for Amazon-style mass detention in a nationwide network of concentration camps. Local resistance to these sites was fierce and fast. Now the government is pivoting to building new facilities at sites it already owns or controls, which will make pushing back against them a more complicated and challenging effort. Andrea closes the episode with a few thoughts on how people have resisted thus far, and the innovating spirit that has inspired everyday people to find novel and effective means to put sand in the gears of the deportation machine.

00:00 - Introduction & The Three Growing Crises 03:15 - Day One: Early Moves & Expanding ICE Power 06:42 - Tent Cities & The Everglades Detention Infrastructure 10:15 - Federalizing Police & Los Angeles Deployments 13:50 - Border Operations & Community Resistance Tactics 17:30 - Minneapolis Crackdown & Gregory Bovino's Removal 21:10 - Warehouse Expansion: ICE's Strategic Shift 25:05 - Local Movements Stopping Detention Centers 28:40 - The History of Camp Resistance & Lessons Ahead

In 2013, she’d just had her first child and was dealing with preschool waitlists. That led her to vaccination rate data for her schools. That led her to online anti-vaccine communities, then to mapping how a small sliver of accounts produced an outsized share of Internet noise. From there: the Obama White House’s digital service, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 interference, and eventually Stanford, where she did research that helped all fifty states coordinate on election security.

Then MAGA built a different person with her name. Well, almost her name.

“CIA Renee” — a shadowy deep-state fixer, a censorship czar, a character with, by her own account, very little resemblance to her actual politics. She got sued. Personally. By a group funded in part by Stephen Miller. A congressional committee demanded five years of her emails to feed the narrative.

In a world of “AI slop melodramas” and endless digital confusion, she remains one of the clearest-minded people about the critical ways influence and information travel on the internet. Her book Invisible Rulers just came out in paperback, and her newsletter Agents of Influence is one of the world’s best sources for what deceptive freak Matt Taibbi continually reveals himself to be.

Speaking to Renée was like having a professor explain a score, a literal 20 years, of my life back to me. I’ve been tweeting since 2007 with various levels of following and influence. I found myself at Netroots 2013 speaking on a panel on how to use social media to win because people on the Obama campaign thought I’d done some of that. And in 2016 I found myself on lists of the most influential tweeters and, unwittingly, in an online war with and occasionally an alliance with what I didn’t know were Russian bots and ops, especially when we were dunking on Ted Cruz. My influence has become much less influence-y since the rise of the algorithm during the first Trump era. Meanwhile, my clarity about and passion for democracy have increased, and I’ve become less about LOLs. Maybe that’s no coincidence.

When you hear Renée explain how influence often works, you may end up believing that online little is left to chance. Reality is being constructed around us by those who have the means, time, and incentives.

Get Invisible Rulers!

EIGHT THINGS RENÉE TAUGHT ME ABOUT INFLUENCE, ALGORITHMS, AND THE CENSORSHIP BACKLASH

• The 90/9/1 rule. Ninety percent of people online barely engage. Nine percent like, comment, and occasionally post. One percent make almost everything you see. Influence concentrates in a sliver of accounts, and the rest of us are the audience, an audience that often forgets our agency.

• The audience is not passive. Every share and like is a vote that trains a curation algorithm. DiResta calls this the crowd, and she says most people never think consciously about the role they play in making something go viral.

• Unconnected content changes who’s actually talking to you. Platforms now show you posts from accounts you don’t follow and have never engaged with, based on a mathematical guess about who resembles you. Influencers often don’t know which of their own followers ever see their posts.

• Influencer, algorithm, and crowd move as one system. Creators build for the algorithm as much as for people, which is why so much online video front-loads its hook in the first three seconds.

• Content moderation, reframed as censorship, became a durable grievance industry. DiResta traces the current backlash to a deliberate reframe: normal moderation calls got rebranded as a “censorship industrial complex,” a story that reinforces itself because it drives fundraising and activates a base.

• The Twitter Files ran on selective releases, not new evidence. Mainstream outlets debunked the early claims and moved on, allowing an uncontested narrative to calcify into what DiResta calls a cinematic universe. And they dragged that fiction into reality. Once members of Congress could cite the Twitter Files under oath, they became pretext for a document demand covering five years of her emails.

• Moderation failures produce a Streisand effect, then get weaponized anyway. Twitter’s overcorrection on the Hunter Biden laptop story amplified it, since Facebook had already let it rack up half a million views before taking any action. Politicians still cite the story as proof of suppression years later, DiResta says, even though the numbers show the opposite happened.

• Hack-and-leak materials and “files” narratives carry outsized weight. A document billed as secret or declassified gets picked up even when it says nothing, DiResta argues, because it lets people feel like they are little sleuths themselves. That’s the same engine behind the Twitter Files, the Epstein files, and USAID grant databases. And I’d add, though it goes without saying, WikiLeaks.

Will Bunch followed his nose this week, tracking the stink of death from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. It wafts from a Guatemalan couple executed weeks after ICE deported the husband over a $200 fine. It drifts from a Haitian asylum seeker dumped at a Pittsburgh bus stop in a February cold snap, found dead three days later. It even reaches across the sea from a 2,000-pound American bomb that killed a taxi driver, his wife, and their son on an Iranian island.

Bunch tries to count the bodies because someone has to.

Reading it, I kept thinking about death as strategy. Regimes that run on cruelty need despair to feel like realism. They need you exhausted, cynical, and quiet. They need the reaper to be the reminder of what’s waiting behind any wrong turn against them.

Andrea Pitzer’s latest Next Comes What episode, “Despots, Cockroaches, and Flamingos,” digs into the antidote to death: people bound together by embracing absurdity. That's how you break through the absurd horrors sick regimes want us to nod along to.

In India, the chief justice compared jobless young graduates protesting a rigged entrance-exam system to cockroaches whining online. So they formed the Cockroach Janta Party, a mocking mirror of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, and turned the insult into a mascot, a rallying cry that refused to be defamed by a system that runs on their defeated sense of fate and caste. Weeks later, thousands filled the streets of Delhi, and the education minister resigned as the Cockroach Party’s Instagram account surpassed the ruling party’s follower count.

In Albania, protesters were inspired by a relatable provocation: A Trump on a podcast. Ivanka Trump bragged about a Jared Kushner development deal on a protected wetland. The wetland is dear to the country’s history and famed for the magnificent creatures that call it home. Protests erupted. The ruling regime overreacted. And a movement was born. These Albanians didn’t organize as an anti-Kushner coalition. They became the Flamingo Revolution, named for the birds nesting in the lagoon he wants paved over. A joke turned a corruption story into a fight anyone could picture: thousands of pink birds against one developer’s blueprint.

Andrea’s point isn’t that jokes alone topple governments.

It’s that absurdity does something dread and death can’t. It makes resistance feel essential, even fun, which is exactly what a movement needs to pull in people who’ve never marched before.

That idea is epitomized by Otpor!, the Serbian student movement that helped end Slobodan Milošević’s rule in 2000. Andrea has used this example before in one of my favorite episodes she’s done on using humor against authoritarians.

Ivan Marović, one of its founders, made the strategy brilliantly clear in Bringing Down a Dictator, a documentary we featured in this episode.

“We succeeded because we simply loved life more than them,” he said. “Those guys were the preachers of death... we were a group of fans of life, and this is why we succeeded.”

Otpor baked Milošević a birthday cake to mock how he was slicing up the country and let a barrel bearing his face take punches in a public square. The jokes weren’t a distraction from the stakes. They were the strategy, because a regime built on fear has no answer for people who look like they’re having a better time than the people running the country.

Trump’s regime smells like death because it has to. Death is the only leverage a strongman has in the end. The question becomes how many bodies can he pile up before the people refuse to feed the machinery rigged to crush their spirits.

Trump wants you to feel the claustrophobia of death, because a demoralized public doesn’t organize, doesn’t vote, doesn’t show up. The cockroaches and the flamingos found the countermove. Love life more than they love death, and love it loud enough that other people can’t help but want to join in.

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Susan Collins needed a cover story. Senate Democrats wrote it for her, and threw in a “Bipartisan Problem-Solver” sash over her shoulder for good measure.

The stopgap funding deal Collins and Patty Murray released Sunday keeps the government open through December 11, pushing any shutdown fight past the midterms. In exchange for routine transportation money and healthcare extensions, Democrats settled for a temporary pause on an OMB grant rule. This leaves the White House entirely unchecked in its lust to weaponize the federal government against fair elections.

And that is the generous interpretation, given that they’re basically acting like a Susan Collins Super PAC.

The deal reads like Democrats found the single point of leverage Republicans actually feared—a government shutdown blamed squarely on Trump’s cronies—and traded it away for a regulatory pause that expires almost the moment votes are counted.

Here’s the realization Senate Democrats keep trying to bargain away: voters do not reward quiet compliance in the face of an autocratic power grab. They reward fight.

Democrats led the generic congressional ballot by roughly a point when Trump took office in January 2025. That lead grew to about seven points by July 2026, with the sharpest jumps tracing directly to moments of clear, confrontational pushback. When Democrats stood their ground during the fall funding fight, one national survey found Democrats up 14 points among registered voters. A CNN poll released this week put the Democratic edge at eight points, with a massive 20-point advantage among the voters most motivated to turn out.

None of those gains happened because leadership managed to negotiate a cute appropriations rider. They happened because millions of Americans, terrified of watching their democracy dismantled in real time, saw Democrats finally act like an opposition party willing to stand in the breach.

This isn’t a victory. It’s handing a lifeline to a party desperate for any sort of win that makes them look less like the ballroom-obsessed, Epstein-cloaking orange freak busy re-losing the Iran War every weekend.

It gives Susan Collins a pristine “bipartisan” talking point to run on in Maine, while handing Trump’s budget director, Russ Vought, a bill he can sign without forfeiting a single inch of power before November. The grant rule provision Murray is touting doesn’t ban the rule; it only blocks OMB from finalizing it through December 11. That leaves Vought completely free to reissue it the very day the CR expires. Pretending that four extra months of breathing room is a strategic victory requires forgetting everything this administration has done when given a pass.

Meanwhile, the oligarchs funding this regime aren’t summering in France, celebrating bipartisan civility.

Elon Musk isn’t just sitting on his nannies, waiting to see if Senate Democrats eventually find their nerve. Fresh off spending over $260 million to install Trump in 2024, he is reviving America PAC with $100 million to $120 million aimed at Senate and House races in at least eight battleground states, including Maine and Michigan. That nine-figure public pledge isn’t the total—it’s just the portion he’s required to report. In a post-Citizens United landscape, unlimited anonymous cash makes that estimate laughably modest. What we see of his spending is what he wants us to see. And what he sees is less than 0.01% of his net worth, a tiny transaction fee to buy an election and ensure no one ever applies any law to him ever.

While the regime deploys DOJ “monitors” to intimidate state election workers and threatens to purge voter rolls, Musk is building a high-tech field machine designed to drag low-propensity conservative voters to the polls and drown key districts in AI-generated deepfakes and dark-money microtargeting.

Republicans understand that the political environment is hellish for their candidates. Their strategy is simple: flood the zone with hundreds of millions of dollars and filth. That means multiple, disgusting narratives like “They’re eating the cats…,” seeing which catch on and then putting millions behind it so no one can have a healthy conversation about anything.

And instead of forcing a public showdown over this corporate capture and democratic backsliding, Democrats just handed Musk’s money a soothing headline to run alongside: Bipartisan deal reached, shutdown averted, Washington works.

That is the real cost of this CR. It isn’t just the absence of concrete election safeguards—though leaving the Justice Department free to lean on state election officials is a catastrophic oversight. It’s the psychological signal it sends to an anxious public. Every poll this cycle tells the exact same story: Democrats gain ground when they position themselves as the sole wall standing between the country and autocratic overreach. They lose ground the moment they look like junior partners helping manage the new normal.

Nobody expects a Senate minority to unilaterally pass voting rights legislation or reform campaign finance overnight. But minority parties can still choose their battlegrounds. They choose when to create friction and when to go quietly. And when literal democracy is on the line, and the president practically vows to steal the election daily, the time to fight is always.

Skipping a high-stakes fight over the one thing voters actively reward—uncompromising, visible resistance—while a billionaire-funded machine spends nine figures manufacturing public delusion isn’t high-minded governance.

This is forfeiting the match while your opponent is getting a standing 8-count.

If Democrats want to protect their lead and turn out the voters who actually care about stopping this regime, they need to stop trading away their biggest weapons for temporary regulatory crumbs. Force Republicans to own the consequences of a president trying to subvert the upcoming election.

The generic ballot didn’t move because Democrats negotiated well; it moved because, finally, they looked like they meant it.

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Play our new game—Data Center Invaders.

Why can’t we take Elon Musk seriously? His public image is almost completely divorced from reality, which leaves us with the shameful distinction of being even more divorced than Elon Musk.

Last week, Jamelle Bouie took a stinging look into how Musk’s descent into fascist, racist apartheid politics became impossible to ignore online and nearly invisible on CNBC or anywhere normal people (not us) get news. Musk’s real influence comes from the hours he spends fomenting violence and pushing the same ideology behind some of the deadliest shootings in American history. The cars and the rockets are marketing that funds and veils his real addictions.

Some of this denial is just good old American supremacy. If you hate minorities or women, that’s your business, while even the slightest critique of a rich white man requires videotape evidence, a signed confession, and a team of lawyers.

Underestimating his racism and underestimating his corruption stem from the same childish delusion: a desperate refusal to admit the guardrails are gone, and a naive hope that someone else will step in to stop it. We tried to convince ourselves a presidency wasn't for sale. Trump had no such illusions. He completed the transaction in public, handing over the federal government and turning the White House into a Tesla dealership to pay off the debt.

America doesn’t want to admit we’re facing world-historical con men, maybe the two greatest con men to ever live. Their real talent is working sleight of hand while being underestimated, picking your pocket while you’re busy looking for a brown person to blame.

A huge part of the problem is normalcy bias. We turn Elon into the meme he wants to be because laughing at a buffoon is less terrifying than admitting an unhinged oligarch holds the reins of power. Mockery can be good resistance—like Otpor! in Serbia—but it can also just be a defense mechanism. It lets us treat a major power grab like a bad reality show. Or a good one.

We keep assuming we’re living inside the same America we grew up with, the one with something like real checks and real limits.

That system is gone. It’s been gone since 2010.

Citizens United told the country that spending unlimited money on elections counts as speech, and speech can’t corrupt anyone. The Shelby County ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance protections in the same decade, and the states freed by that decision moved quickly, passing strict photo ID laws, closing polling places, and purging voter rolls. Then—this year—the Republicans on the Supreme Court effectively finished off the law Ronald Reagan once called “the crown jewel” of our democracy by making it effectively illegal for states or courts to worry about Black representation in Congress.

Layer those rulings together and reality gets insulting. A voter in much of this country now needs a government-issued ID and hours of patience just to cast one ballot. At the same time, a billionaire can spend anonymously through a dark-money vehicle and buy an entire election without a single voter ever learning his name.

Why don’t people get insulted by this? Why weren’t we in the streets after Citizens United, or the gutting of the VRA? Psychologists call it system justification theory. We desperately need to believe the system still works. Admitting that someone simply bought the election and dismantled federal oversight forces us to accept that the guardrails aren’t just damaged; they’re gone. So, our brains reject the premise to avoid the panic.

And why wouldn’t a billionaire buy the presidency? Look what Musk got for the paltry investment of a rounding error of his wealth. The IRS unit that audits billionaires had lost 38 percent of its enforcement staff; SpaceX had already disclosed $1.9 billion in tax breaks the company itself believes would likely be disallowed on audit. He decimated the part of the government that could have made him pay for what he owed. Add that to the investigations dropped, the rules he helps write that hurt his competitors, and the contracts with little to no oversight from the regime, and Musk turned our elections into an episode of “Who Wants to Be a Trillionaire?”

Psychology gives us half an explanation for the appeal behind both Musk and Donald Trump. There’s a whole literature on why some people crave a strongman who promises order and needs an enemy to blame. That research explains followers. The rest of us keep asking whether the men on top are geniuses or fools, as if grifter and dangerous were mutually exclusive.

And even the keenest minds alive can be fooled by their own sense that the villains they’re facing cannot be as evil as their actions suggest.

Charlie Chaplin ran into that trap eighty years ago, mocking Hitler as a buffoon in The Great Dictator. He later said that knowing the true scale of the concentration camps would have stopped him from making a comedy of Hitler’s cruelty.

We don’t get his excuse. Models published in The Lancet project that gutting USAID could cause more than 14 million deaths worldwide by 2030, over 4.5 million of them children under five. Those are real kids in real countries, dying of causes a trillionaire and a president found too boring to bother stopping.

We’ve already paid for underestimating them once. In 2024, Anat Shenker-Osorio told me that the single best predictor of whether swing voters rejected Trump was whether they believed he would actually follow through on his threats. Most didn’t. Incredulity, not apathy, decided the election.

We don’t have that excuse now.

Musk just reopened America PAC for the midterms days after Democrats posted their widest generic-ballot lead of the cycle; Musk reactivated America PAC for the midterms, leaning into the same escalation that has defined this administration from day one.

Authoritarian personality theory explains why followers jump into the fire. It does not oblige the rest of us to keep debating whether the men holding the match are geniuses or clowns. They are con men—arguably the two most successful in American history—operating a system tailored for them by Citizens United and a gutted Voting Rights Act.

The naivety that brought us here was a category error, a refusal to accept that a man can be a ridiculous fraud and still be dangerous, or that a rigged system can still be beaten once we stop waiting for karma to do the work for us.

Stop asking if he’s serious. Start asking what he’s costing us, and what he will do if we fail to stop him.

Stop the Trillionaires was built for a single purpose: to force Musk and Trump to pay for precisely what they have proven themselves capable of doing.

July 29, 2026 was the day reality rebooted.

Right up until Axios reported that Elon Musk was reopening America PAC for the midterms, we were looking at a brief window of normal political gravity: a growing Democratic lead, a floundering regime, and an election not yet swallowed by one billionaire’s bottomless needs, endless resources, and terrifyingly vast supply of free time.

The real danger isn’t that people throw up their hands in fatalism. It’s how stealthfully the new normal accumulates as the dollars pile up against reality.

The second the cash floods back in, the absurd gets treated like standard political gravity. We start treating half a billion dollars of corporate influence like background noise, adjusting our expectations until everyone pretends this is just how things always were.

But we knew this was coming.

A man who spent $291 million of his own money on top of the $44 billion he and his allies paid for X doesn’t retire his Bitcoin wallet after one win. Not when autocratic consolidation is underway, and the regime he installed is polling below Katrina-era W. and nearing Watergate-era Nixon.

There are still so many taxpayer-funded contracts for him to grab, competitors to screw with new regulations, and investigations to kill. The regime has more power than any in world history, thanks to the conservative majority on the stolen Supreme Court, and fewer pretensions to preserving the dignity of our elections than any that came before it.

I know why this matters. I’ve spent a year explaining this to anyone insisting 2024 was just a fluke or simple backlash. That’s a comfortable lie. The uncomfortable truth is what Musk actually proved: the moment one man could self-fund a presidential victory, he did—and walked away with a trillion dollars, at least for a few days.

Waking up to what half a billion dollars buys is terrifying. But the risk isn't hypothetical; it's the predictable outcome of a sixty-year machine designed around a single rule: Republicans refuse to lose.

This Is an Emergency

Musk is reviving the super PAC that spent over $260 million in mere months to elect Trump in 2024. This time, it’s aimed at door-knocking, digital ads, and direct mail—all designed to drag low-propensity conservative voters to the polls. Including voters consultants ignore, drowning them in the same sort of manipulative grift that sells crypto, prop bets on the invasion of Cuba, or an NFT of a nudified Mona Lisa.

Trump’s senior political adviser, James Blair, called the 2024 operation an “essential partner” and welcomed the sequel. Ashley St. Clair, a Musk baby mama and former associate, has been offering insights into what Musk was up to at the time, based on the bragging he did to impress her.

A paranoid few think Musk literally rigged votes—an impossibility at scale. Voter fraud is the one crime we've solved, making it rarer and less consequential than a lightning bolt hitting a unicorn. Naturally, that hasn't stopped it from being the favorite fixation of freaks like Donald Trump and Ken Paxton, two of the incredibly few Americans who seem to have actually committed voting fraud.

He isn’t just buying TV ads; he is funding a massive ground operation because turnout is where democratic backsliding is either locked in or reversed.

Data from the V-Dem Institute reveals a brutal reality: once a country enters an episode of autocratization, the fatality rate for democracy exceeds 80%. Autocrats almost never step back voluntarily once executive aggrandizement begins. But V-Dem’s research on democratic resilience yields a critical lesson: acting in the early stages, within a single 4–6 year electoral cycle, is decisive.

Miss that immediate window, and the regime degradation becomes nearly permanent. Musk and his Nerd Reich intuit what Washington commentators ignore: the midterms are the “one-cycle window” where executive consolidation is either broken at the ballot box or finalized.

AI Deepfakes, False-Flags, and Mass Fabrication

To understand how dangerous America PAC’s return is, look at Musk’s record of campaigning without moral guardrails.

In 2024, dark-money networks aligned with Republicans pioneered covert false-flag ad campaigns—microtargeting Jewish voters with messages framing opponents as anti-Israel while targeting Arab-American communities with opposite messaging to depress turnout. Musk didn’t just tolerate this deceptive campaigning; he personified it, weaponizing his platform to amplify unverified narratives and dubious giveaway schemes to harvest voter data.

In 2026, those tactics are escalating exponentially. AI-generated campaign ads and voice clones are tricking vulnerable demographics. With two more years of leaps in generative AI and hyper-personalized microtargeting, America PAC is funding what Andrea Pitzer calls “a past that never really went away.”

When you combine half a billion dollars, zero ethical boundaries, and generative AI tools, the result isn’t a traditional ground game—it’s an automated engine for the mass-fabrication of public delusion.

Flooding the Zone Against an 11-Point Lead

Days before the Axios story broke, Emerson College Polling put Democrats up 11 points on the generic ballot—their widest margin yet—with Trump’s approval underwater by 18 points and “threats to democracy” listed as the top national concern.

That’s not a week a rational actor waits out. That’s the week you flood the zone before the narrative crusts over reality.

Legislatures and formal institutional checks often fail to halt autocratization. Elections remain the primary channel to force a turnaround. Musk knows that an 11-point lead for Democrats means nothing if America PAC can engineer turnout among low-propensity voters or depress enough Democratic voters to keep them home.

The Regime’s War on Our Votes

While Musk provides the capital and field operations, the Trump administration is using the weight of the federal apparatus to tilt the electoral field.

As efforts to restrict mail-in voting hit legal roadblocks, Trump is deploying executive strategies to control state election administration:

• Decimating Bipartisan Oversight: Trump fired all remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), opening a path to rewrite national voter registration forms.

• Weaponizing the DOJ: The Civil Rights Division announced plans to deploy federal “election monitors” to 15 key jurisdictions across six swing states, aiming to exert a federal presence at polling places in Democratic-leaning areas like Detroit, Phoenix, Minneapolis, and Boston.

• Intimidating State Chiefs: The DOJ issued warning letters threatening criminal prosecution against state election officials who fail to carry out voter purges.

• Extorting Federal Funding: A FEMA notice threatens to withhold 20% of Homeland Security grants unless states comply with new federal election-security demands, putatively placing millions in local funding at risk.

Pro-democracy states are actively “Trump-proofing” their infrastructure by banning federal enforcement at polls and shielding data. But the regime is already creating confusion, intimidating voters, and forging pretexts to contest the midterms.

Half a Billion Dollars Doesn’t Whisper

Money this size moves elections. It funds the exact field infrastructure required to swing close margins. Anyone claiming otherwise agrees with the five justices who authored Citizens United v. FEC—holding that unlimited spending is protected speech.

Go test that theory against a man who ran this exact play, watched $2.37 billion in federal liability disappear, became a trillionaire, and is trying to secure that status permanently.

American fascism isn’t a mystery about human nature; it begins as a campaign finance story. Every stage traces back to a court ruling or an unchecked transfer of capital. Musk capitalized on the door opened by Citizens United and executed the blueprint greenlit by the FEC’s 2024 Texas Majority PAC advisory opinion—which allowed candidates and super PACs to coordinate directly on voter contact.

Even with a gridlocked FEC, Musk isn’t entirely clear of legal risk.

His 2024 $1 million daily voter sweepstakes triggered civil fraud lawsuits and state challenges over lottery laws. The Department of Justice issued formal warnings regarding election law. While mega-donors often treat fines as a cost of doing business, legal exposure remains a vulnerability if state authorities step up enforcement.

Wisconsin Already Told Us How to Win This

In 2025, Musk spent over $21 million attempting to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court during the Peak of DOGE. When he was named, targeted, and tied directly to the money, he lost by 10 points. When ignored or laundered through silent super PACs, he wins by default.

The Tesla Takedown proved this mechanism: sales cratered, the brand took damage, and pressure forced tactical retreats. But public attention drifted.

It is time to reactivate that strategy. A billionaire whose companies shed $1.2 trillion in a single month doesn’t get to run quietly while we celebrate a favorable poll. Republican-aligned donors already outspent Democratic counterparts $880 million to $290 million in the first half of this year.

Musk and his imitators aren’t slowing down.

What Is a Rational Response?

How do we create a national Wisconsin effect?

First, we establish that this isn’t normal. The political architecture has been rigged to serve oligarchs seeking to leave voters out of their own destiny.

In a rational ecosystem, Democratic politicians would go X Last: using X strictly for official announcements while directing active engagement toward platforms not owned by right-wing billionaires, such as Bluesky. Meta presents similar structural issues, but Musk is the immediate threat.

We must see him clearly. In a July 29 New York Times column, Jamelle Bouie highlighted Musk’s posts following an Economist interview, where he claimed “anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor” and boosted rhetoric endorsing violence. As Bouie observed, Musk views opponents of forced remigration as traitors to “the West.” This isn’t an eccentric billionaire writing checks; it’s an ideological actor using an algorithmic megaphone to dismantle pluralistic norms.

Understanding that shift is essential, because America PAC isn’t just funding a political party. It’s funding a worldview. And that worldview is, for most of us, a boot in the face forever.

The leverage lies in economic vulnerability. SpaceX has dropped nearly half its value since its June IPO peak, sliding from $225.64 to roughly $113. Tesla fell 18 percent in a single week. Combined, the two companies lost over $1.2 trillion in July alone.

The man financing electoral suppression is doing so while his core business assets are unstable. That instability and the pilfered gains of his purchase of the 2024 election aren’t just the background of this fight. They’re the core to overcoming him.

What We Do

Defeating an autocratic effort funded by unlimited capital requires shifting from defense to offense.

As cognitive strategist Antonia Scatton argues, internalizing helplessness validates oligarchic power. We aren’t “the resistance”—we represent the majority.

Erica Chenoweth’s research on civil resistance demonstrates that nonviolent campaigns succeed when they leverage targeted pressure against key pillars of support rather than relying solely on moral persuasion. Real leverage occurs when public pressure affects the commercial foundations that back political power—eroding brand value until buying an election costs more than it yields.

Former Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler outlined the blueprint: direct grassroots organizing focused on material issues defeats high-dollar ad dumps by stripping donors of anonymity and naming the key actors directly.

Wisconsin proved Musk’s money is only effective when it operates in the dark. Stripping him of that advantage takes four steps:

1. Expose the map: Map the links connecting judicial rulings, FEC exemptions, and dark-money field operations.

2. Target economic engines: Apply pressure to corporate valuations, brand equity, public subsidies, and legal exposure.

3. Frame the story: Focus on material conditions and the reality of corporate political capture.

4. Mobilize: Supply organizers and voters with actionable intelligence during this decisive electoral cycle.

Ridiculously, nearly all the media bought the lie that Musk backed out of politics when DOGE collapsed. And though all the press is on X, they refuse to treat the horrific micro Sieg Heils and the eliminationist spirit that litters his posts as news. The media’s refusal to treat Musk’s radicalization as news leaves voters with a sanitized image of "Mr. Businessman." Breaking that illusion demands a national response that proves our elections aren't for sale—and there’s no one better to lead that effort than the man who ran Musk out of Wisconsin.

Breaking the Chain

The entire point of the Trillionaire Kill Chain isn’t to catalog elite overreach—it’s not a 300-page infographic explaining that rich guys have more money than you, which is a fact everyone over the age of eight already understands.

It’s a vision board for how small-d democracy attempts a counter-offensive.

We have this weird, collective tendency to treat oligarchic power like an untouchable, monolithic force operating on a plane of existence the rest of us aren’t even allowed to offend. But that’s an illusion created by scale. When you actually unscrew the casing and look at the wiring, oligarchy isn’t a god or even the Pope; it’s a series of repeatable, surprisingly clumsy, and remarkably predictable tendencies.

Once you realize the machine is just a set of leverage points held together by apathy and legal overreach, you realize it can be broken. It stops being an existential crisis and becomes a mechanical problem. The threat is systematic, sure. But the response has to be just as ambitious, even if it never can be as well funded.

Join the Trillionaire Prevention Society here to map and break every link in that chain.

• 00:00 – Everyday Resistance & The Limits of Authoritarian Power

• 03:30 – Defeating ICE: How Local Communities Blocked PA Detention Facilities

• 06:45 – Dismantling Authoritarian Infrastructure: The Closure of Alligator Alcatraz

• 10:00 – Albania's Flamingo Revolution: Resisting Jared Kushner's Island Development

• 15:30 – India's Cockroach Janata Party: Youth Uprising Against Exam Scandals & Modi

• 20:45 – Student Activism Under Fire: ICE Arrests, Columbia Expulsions & UMich Indictments

• 25:00 – Symbols of Resistance: Lessons from Serbia's Otpor! Movement

• 28:30 – Organizing for Long-Term Political Change

Trump is snoozing, losing, and eating shit… everywhere. His net job approval is -24, the worst of his presidency, and it hasn’t cracked -10 in a single Economist/YouGov poll since June 2025.

Democrats should be cruising toward a historic landslide, as opposition parties with extremely unpopular new presidents have in nearly every midterm election for generations. But they may not be, because Democrats are almost as unpopular. A Fox News poll this month put the Democratic Party at -15 favorability, worse than the Republican Party’s -10 — the first time in over a decade Republicans have out-favored Democrats.

YouGov’s polling shop dug into why the generic congressional ballot hasn’t moved to match Trump’s collapse. They found 58% of registered voters disapprove of him. Only 44% of those disapprovers say they’ll vote Democratic.

As G. Elliott Morris highlighted in Strength In Numbers, that remaining 14-point gap isn’t made up of reachable swing voters looking for moderation—40% of that gap consists of “Republicans at heart” who will never vote for a Democrat. The remaining 60% of the gap is split between uncommitted Democratic-leaning voters (40%) and low-turnout, politically disengaged voters (20%) who dislike Trump but rarely follow news or show up at the polls.

John Ray runs polling for YouGov Blue. He posted the numbers on Bluesky this week, then added his read:

He’s right but only because he’s getting at a much bigger point.

Republicans have created a machine to help a GOP president survive nine Watergates and two Iran-Contras a day, something JD Vance bragged about recently when he said, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

That machine wasn’t built overnight, nor was it built just for Vance, Trump, or Musk.

It was refined through George W. Bush’s second term—when two endless, disastrous wars and the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression should have permanently rendered the GOP brand toxic. Instead, the right-wing media apparatus spent the next six years re-engineering the public narrative, converting historic governing failures into a tea party revival that swept Democrats out of Congress just two years later.

What Vance is bragging about is the machinery the right has spent 60 years building against Democrats and, thus, democracy itself. Let’s survey their works and despair for a moment because it’s grown even more powerful and unchecked since Trump turned January 6th into a campaign asset.

The GOP’s Large Hadron Collider for Fascism

• Fox News, 24 hours of hate. Not a network with a conservative lean — the GOP’s assignment desk that decides what counts as news for the entire right side of the country, every hour of every day, with nothing on the left built at that scale to compete.

• X, rigged for Elon’s pleasure and influence. Marcy Wheeler calls it, “The Machine for Fascism.” A randomized 2026 Nature study put nearly 5,000 real users on the algorithmic feed for seven weeks. They moved right, grew more sympathetic to Trump and to Russia’s position on Ukraine — and switching them back to a plain chronological feed didn’t undo it. The shift stuck.

• Meta, running the same play without Elon’s erratic tells. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t just deprioritize political content on Instagram and Threads; he neutered fact-checking and algorithmically choked news distribution, handing the advantage directly to right-wing outrage machines that thrive on engagement over accuracy. Now it’s just basically an AI hell of casual racism and boobs bouncing in your face—forever.

• CBS, now Diet Fox. One more legacy outlet that used to be a check drifting into stenography while killing the stories 60 Minutes would likely be telling about the horrific corruption of Trump’s Gilded Age.

• Fox’s imitators and AM radio. The infrastructure that reaches the voters who never opened a newsletter or a podcast app in their lives.

• The Bro-Cast Pipeline. While Democrats buy billions in ads, conservatives dominate low-information environments—the endless web of comedy, sports, and lifestyle podcasts where millions of politically disengaged voters get passive, low-key right-wing messaging without ever tuning on Hannity.

• Local TV and Sinclair Broadcasting. For voters who still tune into local news for traffic and weather, conservative syndicates deliver forced, scripted right-wing editorials directly into living rooms across battleground states—disguised as trusted hometown journalism.

• Legacy Media, hooked on false balance. Outlets like CBS, The New York Times, and CNN remain trapped in a 1990s “bothsidesism” doom-loop—treatments that normalize authoritarian rhetoric and historic corruption as routine political gamesmanship to avoid accusations of bias.

• Elon’s money, spent like he’s running a scam, not a campaign. Musk has abandoned the traditional ideas of targeting high-propensity voters. He wants to hook anyone, and he knows that the less informed a mark is, the more Trump-friendly they are likely to be. It seems comical but if you doubt Elon Musk can be successful shamelessly selling people crap based on fraud, think harder.

• The money. Flush with Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and an AI bubble inflated beyond all human ken, Republican-leaning donors have outspent Democratic-leaning donors $880 million to $290 million in just the first half of 2026, per a Washington Post analysis. Musk alone has put in roughly $90 million since June. In 2024, his PAC ran an 18-day “$1 million a day” sweepstakes for registered voters — his own lawyers later admitted in court the “winners” were preselected. That’s not the gentle old approach of two candidates shaking hands with somebody’s baby. That’s a mark getting worked.

• The Voting Rights Act, finished off this spring. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais on April 29, 2026 left Section 2 what Justice Kagan called “all but a dead letter.” States are already redrawing maps because of it.

• A neutered FEC. No quorum since April 2025. It cannot investigate, cannot enforce, cannot do anything but watch super PACs and dark money run past whatever’s still nominally on the books.

• The lag from Biden’s real shocks. Inflation exploding, Roe dying, and Democrats failing to stop a second Trump term all happened on the last watch. That damage to trust didn’t clear when the administration changed. It’s still being spent down.

• Corporate centrists and “Never Trump” Republicans who barely exist as voters but dominate the microphone. The persuadable, Republican-aligned Trump-disapprovers — the actual data says — are 89% already going to vote Republican anyway. A rounding error at the ballot box. And yet that same small slice controls a wildly outsized share of what the “earlyworms” — the fifth of the country that follows news first and tells everyone else what it means — actually hear.

And let’s not forget what this is all built on: right-wing created people power that has effectively overwhelmed and, in red states, drowned out organized labor:

• The evangelical Christian Nationalist Borg. Beyond political organizations, a vast, deeply entrenched network of increasingly politicized evangelical churches actively promotes Christian nationalism alongside gun rights groups—outnumbering retail chains like McDonald’s and operating directly within local communities.

• Gun culture as a way of life. NRA chapters, local shooting clubs, and gun advocacy groups form a pervasive, grassroots infrastructure that continues to organize, radicalize, and drive right-wing turnout long after any individual political administration leaves office.

What Ray and Morris are getting at, without always calling it out explicitly, is that sixty years of GOP investment in exactly this architecture is paying off, possibly saving the most unpopular president in modern polling history from the comeuppance voters have already decided he’s earned.

None of it is a mystery. It’s an attack that’s been running since before most of the people reading this were born, hitting a target that’s spent two years disapproving of the man in charge without anywhere near enough of a counter-machine to catch what that disapproval should be worth in November.

Stop Waiting for Sense to Save Us

Democrats, with their enlightenment brains, keep waiting for the gravity of Trump’s scandals, his tanking approval numbers, or the next historic collapse to do the work for them.

If six decades of conservative media engineering prove anything, it’s that a scandal is only as fatal as the information environment allows it to be. The GOP built a machine designed to absorb Watergates, outlast economic meltdowns, and turn structural failures into base-mobilizing outrage.

Winning that 60% pool of uncommitted and disengaged voters won’t happen by waiting for them to wake up to the news—it happens by building the infrastructure required to reach them where they actually live, as the projects funded by the Movement Voter Project do. Until Democrats invest in their own media ecosystem with the same long-term, ruthless aggression, they will stay locked in a dogfight against a machine designed to never lose.

What We’re Doing About It

Now let’s stop despairing. Trump will only get worse. And Democrats, we hope, can only get better as they show the fight voters have been hoping to see for at least a decade now.

Reaching the voters who’ll decide this election means Democrats have to build narratives the way the right does — positive and negative, continuous, occupying the room instead of waiting for it — without the malice, but with the same discipline. That’s the whole argument of The Trillionaire Kill Chain: every stage of the machine documented, the money traced, the playbook named, before the disengaged third of the country makes up its mind on someone else’s terms.

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Play our new game—Data Center Invaders.

If you have a brain soaked in the Enlightenment, you can only imagine politics as thoughtful, committed citizens winning a polite debate contest—moderated by God or Oprah, depending on one’s religious inclination. Person A presents a pristine argument, Person B counters with a thoughtful thesis, and an imaginary public sits back with a pencil—magically shedding their race, gender, class, and bias—to weigh the evidence and make a rational choice.

It’s a sweet story. It’s also sad nonsense.

Because what if people don’t actually change their minds based on logic or evidence at all? What if human beings are largely liquid—say, 60% water—just constantly expanding to fill whichever valley they happen to mosey into?

What if we’ve known that forever?

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything,” Lincoln observed during the first Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858. “With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.”

What if we’ve simply lied to ourselves—or, even more annoyingly, lived inside someone else’s lie?

In the first making-of episode of The Trillionaire Kill Chain—“How We Got Rid of Our Trillionaire”—we break down a pretty terrifying exploit in how political messaging, tech money, and public consensus actually work. Terrifying because only one side actually gets it.

The Accidental Authoritarian

At the center of this episode is a concept I’m calling the persuasion vacuum.

If you look at a recent study out of the Norwegian Armed Forces, you hit a reality that sounds absurd until you think about your own family for five seconds: almost nobody changes their mind because someone won an argument. Instead, we constantly read the room to figure out what everyone else is doing, and then quietly adjust our internal settings so we don’t look weird.

When Norwegian researchers randomly assigned army recruits to barracks, recruits placed in a bunk next to an authoritarian roommate became measurably more authoritarian themselves in just eight weeks. No debates. No dunks. Just pure proximity. When researchers ran a follow-up survey experiment where they fed recruits manipulated feedback claiming a specific political view was widely popular among their cohort, people conformed anyway. They just said, “Oh, we’re doing fascism now? Cool,” and shifted their entire worldview.

Disposition vs. Signal (The Adorno & Altemeyer Core)

Of course, we all start from different set points: Theodor Adorno (writing about Nazi Germany in 1950) and Bob Altemeyer (measuring authoritarianism over four decades) have shown that a fixed slice of the population consistently presents an underlying authoritarian disposition. They are primed for it by default.

Fox News and social media algorithms didn’t create that disposition—they provided a signal in the air clear enough to find those people every night and keep the switch flipped to ON. What rhetoric scholar Jennifer Mercieca calls demagoguery isn’t persuasion; it’s battering people into agreement and calling the trauma a consensus.

A 2026 study in Nature proved this algorithm-as-bunkmate dynamic at internet scale: when 5,000 X users were put on algorithmic feeds for seven weeks, their political baselines permanently shifted toward right-wing talking points. When researchers switched them back to chronological feeds, the shift didn’t reverse. Brain fry is real.

Spraying Cash into the Vacuum

For decades, right-wing media and tech oligarchs understood that free speech creates an information vacuum—and vacuums don’t care who fills them. They treated the open space like they treat everything else: as a game of thrones. They used it to make money, until they had so much cash they literally didn’t know what to do with it except use it to buy even more power.

Capital is the engine that has stepped in to co-opt the vacuum. Elon Musk’s brief, surreal run as the world’s first trillionaire wasn’t because he was a hyper-genius playing 4D chess. It was what happens when unlimited capital meets post-Citizens United loopholes. He bought a global platform to tweak what millions see on their phones, used Super PACs to bypass campaign finance limits, and folded a bleeding AI bet into a car company trading at a hilarious 255x price-to-earnings ratio (compared to Toyota’s 9x!).

He put on a leather jacket, smoked a blunt on a podcast, and manufactured an ambient reality where his dominance felt completely inevitable.

That’s how you take a trillion dollars: you use capital to flood the zone until corporate plunder feels like the default factory setting of modern life.

Captain Renault/Louis

But nestled inside this terrifying machine is something close to Nirvana—an emptiness, a Beginner’s Mind. Because the vacuum blows in either direction.

Think of Captain Louis Renault at the end of Casablanca. Louis doesn’t have deep ethics or principles; he just reads the room. The second Rick shoots the Nazi officer, Louis looks around, realizes the ambient vibe in the cafe just shifted, and immediately goes: “Round up the usual suspects.” He didn’t need a debate. He just needed to see a new consensus.

We saw this play out in real time in Minneapolis. When local neighborhoods organized whistle networks—shipping over 150,000 whistles nationwide—the sound moved faster than text messages and completely drowned out cable news narratives. Nobody had to win an online argument or convince a troll in a comment section. People just heard their neighbors standing up, realized, Oh, this is what we’re doing here, and joined in.

Musk’s slide from trillionaire status down to $800 billion proves these artificial consensus bubbles are remarkably fragile. The moment real community counter-mobilization and oversight show up to claim the space, the bubble pops.

You don’t have to debate an oligarch. You just have to show up and make resistance as ambient, obvious, and unavoidable as they tried to make cruelty.

Listen to the new episode of The Trillionaire Kill Chain or find out more at stopthetrillionaires.com.

Support this project at https://www.patreon.com/lolgopstudios.

Or just enjoy a game of Data Center Invaders.

The latest Next Comes What by Andrea Pitzer, “Booed, Sued, and Blocked,” steps into what’s working and, I pray, what can eventually finish off this regime’s authoritarian honeymoon, the way the people of Hungary sent Viktor Orbán and the jackals profiting from his ponderous pilfering packing.

And it has me thinking, like almost any sampling of the news in 2026, about corruption.

A complete catalog of the Trump family’s bald corruption since the new regime took power would fill a rare-earths mine in Kazakhstan.

But that mine is a good place to begin.

Last September, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trump cut a deal with Kazakhstan, previously only a concern to America as the homeland of Borat. The deal gave the U.S. access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of a mineral used in missiles, fighter jets, and chips. Within weeks, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Lutnick’s own sons had equity stakes in the private entities positioned to grab the rights. Six days later, Kazakhstan granted exclusive access, and the U.S. government backed the deal with up to $1.6 billion in federal financing.

The mineral rights weren’t a one-off, either. The Times reported just today that Trump’s nuclear-energy push, including a new deal opening Saudi Arabia to American reactor technology, runs through the same family. Same donors, different rocks.

Trump Media is merging with a nuclear fusion startup, TAE Technologies, in a $6 billion deal. TAE has been living on Energy Department grants since Trump’s first term. Eric Trump and Don Jr. are in on a nuclear fuel company called Quantum Leap Energy, partnered with a Rick Perry outfit chasing federal reactor money in Texas. Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners is sitting on $2 billion from the Saudi wealth fund, arranged by MBS right after Kushner finished negotiating Saudi nuclear access for the U.S. government the first time around. Howard Lutnick’s old firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, spent the year raising money for Oklo, Energy Fuels, and enCore. Peter Thiel’s General Matter picked up a $900 million DOE contract plus $4.2 billion in Export-Import Bank financing, from a board Lutnick himself sits on.

Tungsten, uranium, fusion fuel: pick the resource, and the government is short on it. A Trump son already owns a piece of the company selling it back to them.

Credit Mobilier needed a web of fake construction companies to skim money off the transcontinental railroad. Teapot Dome needed an Interior Secretary willing to go to prison for backroom oil leases. Tammany Hall needed an army of ward bosses buying votes one delivered favor at a time. Neither the tungsten deal nor the nuclear one needed any of that. Nobody bothered hiding it behind a shell company, because in this administration, the shell company is the government.

And while the Trump family hoards more money than they could ever spend, unless the law eventually gets to them, kids who were born into families that didn’t make them millionaires at age 8 starve.

A Lancet-published study projects that USAID cuts could kill up to 4.5 million children worldwide by 2030. When Congressman Ro Khanna cited that number out loud, Elon Musk called him a liar and threatened to sue him — which tells you which part of the sentence actually scared him. Meanwhile the “One Big Beautiful Bill” delivered the deepest SNAP cuts in American history, stripping food assistance from more than 4 million Americans, 1.5 million of them children, to help fund trillions in tax cuts for people who do not need trillions.

Courts and Crowds

Andrea’s been saying, over and over, since she launched Next Comes What: courts and crowds decide how long an authoritarian keeps his grip. This week she dug into some rich, recent examples of how both work.

E. Jean Carroll’s attorneys finally forced Trump to pay the $5.6 million he owed her, over his objections, after a federal judge rejected his last effort to delay the payment. Separately, a federal judge blocked the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, a deal Trump ally Larry Ellison was counting on to hand one family two studios, two streamers, and two news networks. And a West Virginia judge threw out the DOJ’s suit demanding the state’s unredacted voter rolls, the thirteenth straight loss in the administration’s push to build a national voter file before the midterms.

The crowd side is cheaper and just as effective, and a boo does more work than applause ever will: it’s an on-the-record verdict a public figure can’t spin, redact, or sue into silence. The Township Council of Montclair, New Jersey pulled more than $91 million out of Citizens Bank over its financing of CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two biggest private ICE jailers in the country. State Senator Gustavo Rivera told Andrea that when moments like that come, “you have to actually bask in them a little bit.” Three days later, Citizens folded and cut its ties to both companies. Down in Frederick, Maryland, the Trump administration threatened to pull funding and Olympic placement from any sport that let trans women compete. The Baltimore Ferals suited up anyway. When USA Rugby banned trans women from the sport, the team’s answer came from former Flamingos president Val Pizzo: “We’re not asking for permission to be here. We’re playing.”

The Hungary Model

The trap where everything is a funnel that juices the poor for the benefit of the richest and their allies in the regime is what Viktor Orbán ran for sixteen years, until Péter Magyar showed what breaks it. Orbán had a lock on state media and an opposition that only talked to itself in Budapest. Magyar skipped state TV entirely and built Tisza Islands — local networks, livestreamed town halls, citizen reporters — and carried the evidence of regime graft into hundreds of rural towns the opposition had written off a decade ago.

On April 12, 2026, Magyar’s Tisza party won 141 of 199 seats — a supermajority that ended Orbán’s rule outright. Not a coup. Not a courtroom. A guy with a camera who went to the towns the state press had given up on and showed people what their government was actually doing to them.

The Job

Here’s what the tungsten deal, the nuclear deal, the SNAP cuts, and the tax windfall have in common: they’re the same theft, wearing different clothes for different audiences.

Loot a kid’s school lunch on Tuesday, hand a billionaire a bigger yacht on Wednesday, and call both of them fiscal responsibility. It’s the GOP’s actual governing agenda and has been for generations: move the country’s money to the people who already have the most of it, and count on the scale of the theft to make it sound too abstract to be theft at all.

Our job is to keep it from sounding abstract. Name whose sons got the equity stake. Name which kid lost the lunch so a senator’s donor could bank the tax cut. Then turn that into something with teeth: pulled accounts, divestment votes, primary challengers, judges willing to follow the money all the way home.

Every court ruling, every bank that pulls out, every crowd that shows up says the same thing back: we saw that, and we’re not shrugging.

This ends with these people out of power — voted out, prosecuted out, whatever it takes — because a protection racket only survives as long as courts and crowds keep treating it like business as usual.

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Never Trump Republicans are cute until they forget that if they knew how to beat MAGA, they’d still be Republicans. You represent a slice of voters that essentially doesn’t exist: Republicans who never voted Trump, a rounding error. Excellent critics of Trump from a limited government point of view, essential for a popular front, and the least representative demographic group in America.

Mona Charen gave that rounding error a column at The Bulwark this week.

Democrats who nominate Democratic Socialists, she argued, are handing Republicans a gift. She named names: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Melat Kiros, Janeese Lewis George, and Zohran Mamdani, whose smile she says disguises an authoritarian movement. Her case rests on a voter disgusted with Trump but recoverable by his party — if Democrats stop frightening her with socialism. Reject the DSA, the argument runs, or hand Republicans their best distraction from prices, a terrible war, and an immigration crackdown that’s “shocked the conscience.”

Charen is describing a real person. She has the wrong one. The real one is smaller, poorer, younger, and has never heard of the DSA.

ran the numbers this spring. That’s when Trump’s net approval sat at -20.8; the Democratic generic-ballot lead was D+8.1. Pundits treat that 12.7-point gap as a reservoir of persuadable Trump-disapprovers. Morris split it by Republican markers — a 2024 Trump vote, a Republican lean, a conservative self-ID — and found two-thirds isn’t persuadable. That’s Pool 3: Republican-aligned Trump disapprovers, 6.8 percent of registered voters, 89 percent Republican or Republican-leaning, 66 percent who voted Trump in 2024. They dislike him. They’ll vote for his party anyway. This is the electorate Charen is writing to protect. They were never coming.

Do the actual math. Trump won 88 percent of self-identified Republicans in 2016, 94 percent in 2020, 94 percent in 2024 — a twelve-point defection, then six, then six again. A Republican who never once voted for him across three elections is the overlap of those three slivers — even assuming, generously, that it’s the same defectors each time, not three different groups taking turns. Republicans are about a third of the electorate. Multiply it through and the true, three-elections Trump refusenik is worth a few tenths of a percentage point of the country. Not a swing demographic. A rounding error with a really big Substack.

Morris’s Pool 1 — the 3.4 percent of non-aligned, persuadable voters — is the group Democrats can actually move, and it looks nothing like a Bulwark subscriber. No Republican markers, and undecided rather than opposed: 83 percent don’t know how they’d vote. They’re 42.8 percent with no education beyond high school, 37.3 percent under $50,000 household income, nearly a quarter Hispanic, close to a fifth Black, more than a quarter under 30. Almost 40 percent sat out 2024 entirely, and their top concern is prices, at 38 percent, then jobs, at 21 percent. Crime is 3 percent. Immigration and border security together don’t reach double digits.

These are the voters Democrats need. They have never heard of the DSA and wouldn’t give two shits if they had. They just need to make rent.

This is where the popular front stops being a slogan and starts being a trade. Charen isn’t wrong that Trump has alienated a piece of his own coalition — Morris’s data confirms real erosion. She’s wrong about what it’s for. It isn’t a persuasion target. It’s a set of witnesses: Republicans and ex-Republicans who can explain, in language conservatives already trust, how their own coalition built the machinery now gutting the courts and the civil service. They’re credible in rooms where Democrats will never be heard.

Here’s the interesting part. (Took me a while to get there, huh?) You have almost no constituency among actual voters, and an outsized (call it inordinate) amount of power over dorks like us, the people who read thousand-word posts about politics. Charen’s column, and anything The Bulwark runs, will be read by more people than this one ever will. A lot of it is excellent, especially the pieces carrying the byline of , Dean of Health Care Reporters.

Never Trumpers’ sway over the press, over influencers, and over what I call the earlyworms — the fifth or so of the country that follows the news early and tells everyone else what it means — is real, and it’s wildly out of proportion to your electoral representation.

What you can do, for the right-leaning voters still waffling in the room only you can enter, is say the thing only you can say with credibility. A party’s tolerance for a wide range of voices who believe in democracy is the actual measure of its belief in freedom. Uniting against the regime is the best chance anyone has of beating it. Refuse to be divided by people offering nothing but more bigotry and more corruption of the values that are supposed to matter more than any one personality or the cult formed around him.

Because verily I tell you, it’s going to get messier.

And I get it. It’s tough to represent almost no one. And it aches to see your former party with a clarity many of your old colleagues, and still friends, have talked themselves out of. But beating Trump means sitting with something less comfortable than an alliance of the reasonable: it will look like an activated progressive base, which isn’t built to impress lifelong Republican voters.

Think of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, some of the largest in American history. Republicans used Fox to spread Trump’s lies that every city in the US was burning and to make it feel like the worst fever dreams of the racists behind all of Stephen Miller’s favorite neo-Nazi manifestos. The centrist assumption is this movement and the slogans around it hurt Democrats when it actually helped them win their first trifecta since 2008.

And political science tells us why.

Bouke Klein Teeselink and Georgios Melios, writing in Political Behavior, found a real jump in Democratic vote share in the counties where protests happened, driven less by turnout than by persuadable voters changing their minds about racial inequality.

If that’s what winning looked like once, this fight may require something louder, ruder, and considerably less interested in checking with you first.

This is why the anti-DSA column is dangerous rather than just wrong. Votes aren’t the leverage here. Narrative is, and the White House needs yours right now.

Marco Rubio’s State Department just published a hundred-page report, Cuba, the Capital of 21st Century Communism. It names Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s, and radio host Amy Goodman as nodes in a Cuban influence operation supposedly running from the George Floyd protests through the campus Gaza encampments.

Katrina vanden Heuvel likened Rubio to Joseph McCarthy, running a modern loyalty list instead of a hearing room. A handful of DSA primary wins in safe seats is not a national security threat. It’s the pretext the administration is building for the next round of the machinery it already has in place to investigate and prosecute its opposition.

Charen’s column, unintentionally, hands that pretext the sort of hyperlink it desperately wants.

Embracing that myth now, when the fight demands solidarity, is bad strategy before it’s anything else. The same collective-action failure among Republicans that let one man take their party is now repeating itself. It is also, plainly, a lack of patriotism. You don’t have to like every Democratic candidate. You don’t have to vouch for any of them personally.

That’s the whole trade, and it runs one direction. Never Trump Republicans get a coalition big enough to beat the thing they’re more frightened of than they’ve admitted. Democrats get messengers. America gets a chance to keep her Republic.

Get in, hosers. Just don’t try to drive.

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WATCH

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Our episode this week looks at how the current administration has violated both laws and customs on every front to try to profit from government positions and maximize Trump's power across the board. Andrea Pitzer shows how, from business corruption to ICE detention and the war in Iran, it's nearly impossible to keep track of the ways in which the president is destroying the rule of law and any willingness to respect precedent, in and out of courts. Exploring the use of the rule of law as a weapon against vulnerable and targeted groups since the country's founding, Andrea outlines why the law itself has often been a force for wrong. She nevertheless argues that the history of authoritarianism shows that when existing law is ignored or dismantled through dictatorial power grabs, it consistently exacerbates the crisis faced by vulnerable groups, and others as well.

Andrea then goes through recent broad reviews of everything from ICE detention practices to court cases brought by the DOJ. While precedent is being ground down, and the legal system remains under tremendous strain, Andrea points out how the law is still being used successfully to deny Trump and his allies the unlimited power they want. She looks at how communities are establishing and upholding norms as well. From a refusal of a New Jersey town council to do business with a bank partnering with major ICE contractors to a Baltimore rugby team that is standing by its trans players, there are examples everywhere of everyday people finding effective ways to push back against hatred and corruption.

00:00 — Executive Corruption & The Kazakhstan Mineral Deal

02:30 — Alien Terrorist Removal Court & Iran War Casualties

06:15 — Human Rights Violations in ICE Youth Detention

09:40 — ACLU Report: Law Enforcement Liability & Abuse

12:20 — Supreme Court Forces E. Jean Carroll $5.6M Payout

14:50 — Federal Judges Block DOJ Voter Roll Seizure

17:15 — Failed DOJ Prosecutions: Marimar Martinez & David Hern

20:00 — Holding ICE & Stephen Miller Accountable in Court

22:10 — Grassroots Victories: Montclair $91M Bank Divestment

24:30 — Local Resistance: Communities Protecting Trans Athletes

Why does everybody love Abdul?

That question keeps nagging me, almost mocking me. There are more of his lawn signs on my drive to and from summer camp all the time, and every day more of my Michigeese and gander neighbors are making his case unprompted. So I went to the People v. Powerful rally in Detroit to hear him, along with Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other local progressive champions like Rashida Tlaib, and find out for myself.

Just minutes into the rally, UAW president Shawn Fain nailed the “Everybody loves Abdul” phenom, describing what happened when Abdul El-Sayed addressed the union’s constitutional convention.

 ”UAW members from all over the country and from every part of Michigan, from Detroit to Flint to Three Rivers to Northern Michigan, and they were on their feet,” Fain said. “We have members that are Republicans, we have members that are Democrats, we have members that are independent, we have members that don’t give a damn about any of these parties. But the thing that was cool that day is they were all saying the same thing after Abdul spoke.  They were saying, ‘This guy understands me. This guy gets me. We love this guy.’”

That sense that we have a fighter on our side is why Abdul is within single digits of a Schumer-backed frontrunner with two weeks left before Michigan’s August 4 Senate primary.

He’s got a real shot to be Michigan’s chance to join the ranks of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who just endorsed him (and hopefully Sherrod Brown), as a member of the small but mighty “People First” caucus of the US Senate. This is true despite $50 million in dark money raining down on behalf of the establishment candidate Haley Stevens, $30 million of that from AIPAC and the forces still championing the war crimes that the Netanyahu regime committed, and is still committing, against women, children, and the elderly in Gaza.

So my heart was sold. But on the drive back out to Washtenaw County, my head did the math. And the practical case is even stronger than the emotional one.

Let’s do them both.

Your heart

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opened up her speech by making the case that undergirds Abdul’s candidacy and blots out the arguments that our state can’t have the good things he’s fighting for. She said that good leadership “swings for the fences.”

Then she went after the corruption underneath it all. “Good leadership gets big money out of our system. It takes on the corruption that blocks common sense solutions that lift working people.”

She knew what critics would call it. “Pundits want to dismiss this idea as naive,” she said, then pointed to 2018. Democrats won their largest House majority since Watergate with 185 candidates who took zero corporate money. “It’s not naive. It’s how we win, Detroit.”

Her closing went straight into my ventricles. “Abdul El-Sayed is America. We all are America.” The politics of the future, she said, “looks like a doctor who answers to people and not big donors.”

Bernie Sanders asked the question everyone in the room already knew the answer to: “What is it about Abdul that frightens them so much?” His answer: Abdul believes healthcare is a human right, “and maybe in the richest country in the history of the world, we should do what every other bloody country on Earth is doing.” Sanders noted that Abdul doesn’t just support Medicare for All. “He wrote the book on it.” He noted that Abdul has “the crazy idea” that America should have the best public education system in the world, and wants super PACs out and public funding in. “They got the money, that’s clear... but we have something that they don’t have. We have a vision as to what this country can become. And we have the people.”

Then Abdul took the mic, and told the room exactly who he answers to and who he doesn’t. “If you’re somebody who wants government to work for you, I aim to be the best friend you ever had…” he said. “If you’re the CEO of DTE, you damn well better believe I’m dangerous. If you’re Blue Cross Blue Shield shareholders, yep, I’m dangerous.”

He told us where his drive and vision come from.

Every summer growing up, he visited family in Egypt. Every summer, his grandmother reminded him what separated him from the cousins he left behind: “You get to go back to America at the end of the summer.”

That’s the line that traveled with me on the drive home. It’s not just the wonk case for Medicare for All, which he wrote the book on, as Bernie Sanders noted. It’s about what it means to be handed a country you didn’t do anything to deserve, and what you owe it back.

“America has one incredible gift, and that is the indelible capacity to correct. In this country, we don’t make peace with our demons, we exorcise them. We don’t rest on our laurels. We fight for better.”

And he told Michigan what beats $50 million dollars. “If all they got is money, we’ve got the many. We’ve got a movement of people coming together beyond our differences to build together what we cannot have alone.”

And Fain was right; by the end of the speech, their hearts had lifted the crowd to their feet.

Your head

And here’s the math that hit me on that drive.

We need Abdul on the ticket to win. Not the US Senate seat, but the governorship, and a trifecta that can return to the work of making Michigan a state that works for the working class.

The inevitable Democratic nominee for governor, Jocelyn Benson, is exactly who we want leading this state when the vote is under attack; no one understands or implements secure elections better. But Haley Stevens won’t bring her one new vote, and Benson won’t bring Stevens one either.

Both represent the “normie” Democratic vote that used to be reliable in our state but has now been upended by the rise of MAGA. To win in an election that will be as activated and contested as Michigan will be this time around, we need to turn out those irregular and/or anti-system voters who decide any close race in this state. They decide it when they turn out for Trump, or when they stay home to reject the stale, compromised state of the Democratic Party. They did both in 2016 and 2024.

This isn’t just a Michigan dynamic—it’s true in virtually every close race across America. The polling right now looks bizarre because millions of Americans genuinely hate Trump, yet they’re almost equally furious with establishment Democrats for failing to stop him. When faced with these voters, the party has two choices: you can be mad at them and try to lecture them with a flowchart of proper blame, or you can actually give people a cause and a candidate to believe in. We have both in Abdul.

Polls, if you trust them, back up the math.

A Data for Progress and Working Families Party survey found El-Sayed narrowly leading Republican Mike Rogers in a general election matchup, 47 to 46, while Stevens trails him, 46 to 45. El-Sayed posted stronger favorability, more intense support, and more resilience after negative attacks than Stevens did. Zenith Research found the same pattern in June, with El-Sayed beating Rogers by 3 points while Stevens and McMorrow led by smaller margins.

Even inside the primary, where Abdul and Stevens are trading leads, El-Sayed’s favorability numbers are better. A Detroit News/WDIV poll taken after the candidates’ first debate found El-Sayed viewed favorably by 51.5 percent of Democratic voters and unfavorably by only 15.4 percent. Stevens’s numbers were 49.5 percent favorable and 21 percent unfavorable. Voters like Stevens less than they like El-Sayed even while more of them plan to vote for her.

Tough numbers to survive a general election.

Then there’s the youth vote, the group every Democratic strategist claims to want, and few campaigns actually organize. Youth turnout jumped in every 2025 race that featured a Mamdani-style campaign. It hit 28 percent in New York City’s mayoral race, 29 percent in New Jersey’s governor’s race, up nine points from 2021, and 34 percent in Virginia’s, up seven points. That’s the demographic El-Sayed’s campaign is built to activate, and it’s the demographic that decides midterms engineered to be close.

The heart case says vote for El-Sayed because a UAW hall full of Republicans, Democrats, and people who hate both parties agreed on one thing. The head case says vote for him because the data backs up what the feet in that hall already knew. You don’t have to choose.

On August 4, your heart and your head can vote the same way. Most elections don’t give you that. This one does.