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Hey folks,
I want to spend a minute talking about what a petulant child the president of the United States is. This is a man who simply has no self-control and throws wild tantrums whenever he doesn’t get his way.
That’s not news, of course. But I was struck yesterday by the sheer absurdity of Trump’s legal team telling a federal court that if they don’t get their way on renaming the Kennedy Center after Donald Trump, they intend to tear it down and replace it with an outdoor amphitheater.
Read that again. Trump’s plan is to hold the Kennedy Center hostage unless he gets to rename it and remake it after himself.
And I think that’s a great preview of what happens to basically every public institution in America that Trump can’t put his name on or twist into whatever bizarre shape he and his people want. It’s how he took over the Republican Party, too. He promised he’d burn the whole thing to the ground unless they remade themselves in his image, and now they’re virtually gone as a party. The once-great Republican Party of states’ rights and personal freedom has become a big-government party shoving a scammy, radical Christian nationalist agenda down our throats while letting Big Tech and corrupt billionaires do whatever the hell they want with this country.
The other piece of news that struck me yesterday, is that Trump’s administration is trying to make it actively harder for you to know when and where they’re planning to build AI data centers. The EPA wants to strip the public’s right to give feedback. No notice. No comment period. Nothing. You don’t get a say in what’s best for your community and your kids. That might sound like a completely different story from the Kennedy Center. It's not. It's the same instinct: if something stands between them and what they want, it either bends or it breaks.
That’s what’s amazing to me. If they don’t pass that rule, if this community won’t take an AI data center, if they don’t get to rename this thing after Trump, if the MAGA movement doesn’t get exactly what it wants, they promise to just burn it all down. At this point you’re basically negotiating with terrorists. These are not people governed by a core set of fundamental values and beliefs beyond self-enrichment, accumulating power, owning their political enemies, and most of all, winning. And once winning becomes the only value, there is basically nothing you can't justify.
It’s not too dissimilar from what I told you yesterday about Pennsylvania Republicans suddenly having a positive opinion of John Fetterman. The only reason they like Fetterman is that people like me hate him. It’s not because his politics have changed that much. He still votes with Democrats 85 percent of the time. They like him more than they like Dave McCormick, their own Republican senator who votes with Trump 100 percent of the time. It just flows on down.
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Trump is very much a symptom of broader diseases in American society today: the lack of accountability for a very wealthy class of people, our broken campaign finance laws, an institutional rot and malaise that has allowed people to get lazy and refuse to modernize and recognize that we are living in a very different time, where the way people operate is very different. He didn’t create all of this. But he figured out how to exploit it, and he accelerates it. And he’s also somebody who corrupts everything and everyone around him just by the way he acts. People get enamored by his glow and corrupted by the access to power and opportunity it brings.
I mean, those lawyers arguing in court right now that they’ll tear the Kennedy Center down if they can’t rename it after him? Those people probably didn’t go to law school intending to argue for shit like that. I simply can’t believe anybody begins a career that way. So how does somebody become so worn down and characterless over time that they end up trapped in a movement like this? Are they so thirsty for power and money and access that they’ll argue and say whatever? I think that’s probably the answer. Occam’s razor. The simplest answer is usually the correct one. You compromise one thing, then another, then another, until eventually you’re standing in federal court, arguing that the president should be allowed tear down a national cultural institution that has belonged to the American people for generations, all because he can’t put his name on it. It’s disgusting.
I’ll end this rant with this: We have to fight like hell to make sure the Democratic Party does not become a mirror-image reverse of what the Republican Party has become. There are a lot of people in the party right now propagating slop and trying to convince you that we should give up and abandon our values, the people we fight for, and the country we want to build together, all in order to beat these guys. But winning cannot be the only value. That’s exactly how people end up where Trump’s Republican Party is today. It needs to be deeper than that. If we beat the MAGA movement in November, if we beat Donald Trump and his handpicked successor in 2028, but we do it in a way that abandons our core Democratic Party values, we’re not going to build a government that can actually solve the fundamental crises we have in this country. We won’t get real accountability. We won’t fix a broken economy. We won’t clean up our broken campaign finance laws. We won’t remake this country in the way I believe we really can.
And we have such an opportunity. Every crisis is an opportunity. I’d rather we weren’t in this crisis right now. I’d rather Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election. I was proud to support her. But let’s take this for the opportunity it is. Trump has shined a light on everything that’s broken in American politics today. The brazenness of the Epstein class, these corrupt billionaires, these failed politicians on both sides, frankly, have given us an opening to turn this country around and remake it the same way both Roosevelts did, the way Lincoln did. Not just to defeat something. To build something better in its place. To win in service of something greater than ones self or party. That’s a generational opportunity. It comes along maybe once, maybe twice in a lifetime. And it’s right in front of us.
So my advice to everybody: find the thing you’re good at. Find the way you can be useful, to your community, to your family, to your friends. Let’s take this moment and turn it around. Because I think we can take the darkness of this moment and the petulant nature of our president and build something pretty goddamn special, something we can all look back on and be proud of, the way past generations turned around rampant corruption and economic calamity and stupid foreign wars. We can do that again.
The pendulum swings, my friends.
Let’s fucking go.
With urgency,
—Mike
Well said, Mike. I am proud to subscribe to this. I am 94 and served for 24 years as an elected official of local government. It was a great experience and the best possible education in politics and government.
Trump is absolutely the worst president in the history of this country. He's throwing a fit when everyone hates him.
He thinks that slapping his name on everything makes him seem popular.
Natalie Harp should show him the real news about his low approval ratings. They are delusional