Anytime (Certain!) Democrats Want To Stop Being Weenies, We're Here For It

But not until then.

Pictured: Certain Democrats

Pardon our French, but what the fuck is it with Hakeem Jeffries? The Democratic House minority leader was interviewed on CNN by Dana Bash on Sunday, and she might as well have been interviewing an AI program that had been trained using nothing but memos from the same political consultants who told Kamala Harris to stop calling Trump and his (some say!) couch-fucking homunculus of a running mate “weird.” Which, in a way, Jeffries and a lot of other Democrats sort of are.

And we say this as someone who has some sympathy for Jeffries's position! He’s got to juggle a caucus of 200+ people with 200+ different priorities. It’s not just herding cats, it’s getting the cats to all agree on the exact same brand of cat food to eat at every meal. And if you have ever lived with one or more cats, you know how that can go.

But dear god, if there was ever a time to go head-on at a president — even just rhetorically, which is about the most Jeffries can do so long as Democrats are in the minority and Republicans are ignoring them — it is now, when armed National Guard troops are appearing on the streets of American cities to intimidate localities that had the temerity to not vote for Donald Trump.

Let’s focus for just a moment on the bit of the interview that was flying around BlueSky on Sunday and causing some of the app’s more passionate users to fill their timelines with variations of WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU:

[W]e should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he's deeply unpopular. The one big ugly bill is deeply unpopular. Ripping health care away from millions of Americans is unpopular. Enacting tax breaks for their billionaire donors is deeply unpopular.

When we first saw this, we wondered if there was any context missing. So we watched the whole interview, and there really isn’t. Bash had asked Jeffries what the Democratic plan is to fight any deployment of the National Guard to Chicago for no reason, and after some yadda yadda about the state of Illinois and its governor JB Pritzker saying “No thank you,” Jeffries pivoted to Trump is doing this because his agenda is unpopular.

No. No no no no no. Sending the National Guard to take over Democratic cities is not a distraction from the agenda; it is a major part of the agenda! It always has been! Trump and his sycophants have been talking up using the military to crack down on a nonexistent crime wave for years. Now that they are doing it, polling shows it to be grotesquely unpopular. Somewhere around 80 percent of residents of the District of Columbia are opposed to what is going on in their city. Residents of Los Angeles were ripshit furious when Trump deployed troops there earlier this summer.

Plus, as best we can tell, local police in DC are helping federal authorities with the crackdown, so the whole “I support local police” line might not be applicable here.

The American people might sometimes — okay, often — have trouble grasping political ideas and concepts and policies they hear about in soundbites on cable because those ideas can sound like abstractions. The National Guard occupying cities is not an abstraction. People can turn on the news or see videos online and be viscerally horrified. Democrats could harness that, if they would just ignore the consultants telling them to keep saying, AKSHUALLY, Donald Trump is really unpopular. Because from where we are sitting with the rest of the public, it doesn’t look as if it matters.

Besides, if you’re congressional Democrats, what else do you have to do right now?

The interview is here if you feel like grinding your teeth in a fine powder:

You know one Democrat who is grasping the moment? Gavin Newsom, governor of California, who has been very frank in discussing the dangers of letting Trump run unchecked. He has flat-out said that Trump’s efforts to get Texas to redraw its congressional maps so Republicans can have more seats is an unconstitutional power grab, because it is. And Americans get why that is unfair. Which makes Newsom’s attempt to redraw maps in his own state resonate.

We cannot believe we have to say this, but Gavin Newsom, of all people, is showing way more of a spine than most other high-profile members of the Democratic party. Now, part of why he can do that is because as a governor — like JB Pritzker and other Democratic governors — he has some power to back up his words that Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and other Democrats in Congress do not have.

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But another reason he can do that is because he’s correct! He’s telling a very simple story of right versus wrong, of Trump brute-forcing his way into a power grab, and everything else is downstream of that.

Please do not fill the comments or our inboxes with angry denunciations of Newsom’s problematic positions in other areas. We’re aware of his hosting insane right-wingers on his podcast. We’re aware of his positions on trans folks. We’re not suggesting anyone vote for him in a presidential primary in which the first votes will not be cast for another two and a half years.

What we are saying is that he and a handful of others seem to grasp that Trump’s use of the military to take over cities is holistically part of the entire agenda, not a way of distracting from it. Unfortunately, Hakeem Jeffries and whatever consultants he and much of the rest of the party are listening to do not seem to grasp that.

OPEN THREAD.

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