Dear Elected Democrats: Are You Collaborator Or Are You Opposition? Make Your Choice.
You can't be both.
New Democratic Senator Adam Schiff tweeted this yesterday, after he and all his new colleagues voted 99-zip to confirm their colleague Republican Marco Rubio as Donald Trump’s secretary of State:
We think we speak for most informed Democrats and leftists and left-leaning voters and progressives and liberals — yep, the whole spectrum! — when we say “OK boys and girls, get the collegiality circle jerk out of your system now, because the time for fucking around ended yesterday.”
And yes, working together in any way with the Trump administration — AKA collaborating with Nazis and fascists and terrorist-sympathizers and traitors and perverts and sex pests and sometimes all of the above — is fucking around.
You’re either a collaborator, or you’re part of the opposition.
We regret we can’t be more genteel about this, very serious gentlemen and gentlewomen of the Senate who fancy yourselves above all of it, who love to tell us all what a good working relationship you have with the chairman of the committee on which you are now the ranking member. (That means you’re powerless.) That Republican chairman and his colleagues (yes of course they’re all his) are about to confirm a Nazi or fascist or terrorist-sympathizer or traitor or pervert or a sex pest in charge of a very big and important agency of the United States government!
You see collegiality. We see Dianne Feinstein, God rest her soul, telling Chuck Grassley what a nice time she had during Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing, right before Barrett marched to the Supreme Court and overturned Roe v. Wade.
This is not the #Resistance anymore, dearly beloveds. That was the first Trump term, when we could pretend this was an aberration, and that if we just clung to and supported institutions harder than anybody else, we could save the world. And we did bring it back from the brink, at least seemingly, at least for a few years.
But now it’s 2025. We are the opposition. We will either be a meaningful opposition or we will not. One way to not be a meaningful opposition is to collaborate with the fascists, especially on bills that were written and named by fascist think tanks and right-wing media, so as to give “bipartisan” cover to those assholes’ bigotry, xenophobia, and general Nazism.
New Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego is demonstrating what not to do. You see, Gallego co-sponsored the Republicans’ “We Named This Bill After A Dead White Woman For Birth Of A Nation Reasons” immigration bill in the Senate, and he’s damn proud of it. (So did John Fetterman.) In fact, Gallego is lecturing Democrats that their refusal to do things like this is why they lost, and that we should be more like Republicans on immigration.
Of course, there’s a difference between trying to retool the party’s message on immigration and signing on to fucking obviously bad faith Nazi Republican immigration bills — bills that came, you’ll remember, a year after Donald Trump killed a bipartisan immigration bill in Congress because he couldn’t bear to let President Biden have that win before the election.
Now, Gallego has some thoughts on Trump’s executive orders. He seems mildly displeased with some of these!
Oh no, is ending birthright citizenship contrary to Make America Great, and also unconstitutional? (He mentioned that somewhere else, Twitter we think.) Thank goodness Gallego is committed to “working across the aisle” with people whose president just pardoned 1,500 domestic terrorists and set them free into the homeland! Thank goodness he went ahead and co-sponsored their party’s “A Mexican Looked At My White Debutante Daughter Funny” Act Of 2025! Sure, it absolutely does away with due process, and anyone can claim their enemy shoplifted and thus get them locked up and deported without a conviction or even charges, but didn’t you see the title of the bill? A Mexican looked at someone’s daughter funny!
For sure they’ll take his Susan Collins Concerns to heart next time they’re thinking of doing something bad!
By the way, 12 Senate Democrats voted for that bill. Besides Gallego, there was Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), John Fetterman (PA), Maggie Hassan (NH), Mark Kelly (AZ), Jon Ossoff (GA), Gary Peters (MI), Jacky Rosen (NV), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Elissa Slotkin (MI), Mark Warner (VA), and Raphael Warnock (GA).
You’ll note that all are from swing states. Four — Ossoff, Peters, Shaheen, and Warner — are up for re-election in 2026. Hate to break it to them, but voting for the bad faith Republican tough-on-crime-against-undocumented-immigrants bill is not actually the golden ticket to re-election they think it is. You know, unless they think Fox News and the rest of Trump’s state media are going to go easy on them because they are willing to say the magic words “Laken Riley” a whole bunch.
As for the other eight who aren’t up in 2026, what are you even fucking doing?
See, here is the thing: If you don’t go along with the full Trump Nazi crusade against immigrants, they’re going to paint you as an immigrant-loving border-hater anyway. And reminder: There is a full Trump Nazi crusade against immigrants! Again, Trump is trying to wish away birthright citizenship, even though that’s clearly in the Constitution. He is trying to SHOCK AND AWE deport millions of peaceful people who add more to the fabric of this country than any white Republican ever has or ever will. And whatever else Stephen Miller thinks about when he masturbates at night!
You don’t get to pick and choose which parts of the Trump Nazi crusade are OK, and be absolved of your collaboration with the rest of the mess.
You’re either helping Trump or you’re helping America. You’re either a collaborator, or you’re in the opposition.
Compare that sort of bullshit appeasement behavior with this from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, responding to annoying Beltway journalists badgering her about whether or not she was going to the inauguration. “I don’t celebrate rapists,” she said, simply.
Compare it also with these posts from Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker yesterday, responding to Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order and Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes:
You can either be a collaborator, or you can be part of the opposition. There is no in the middle.
And lest any Beltway Democrats think this is coming from just the far Left or the #Squad, please note that JD Pritzker is not a “squad” member, and that Jen Rubin’s new Contrarian and The Bulwark are doing a better job grasping the idea of “opposition” than many congressional Democrats are. (Also note which particular Wonkette editor is writing this at you right now, AHEM.)
This is everyone who actually gives a shit about this country and doesn’t want it to fall permanently into the abyss of Donald Trump’s Stupid Hitler MAGA authoritarianism.
Right now, the New York Times’s front page looks like North Korean media’s daily tribute to Dear Leader; Politico’s founding editor is exhorting us all to “admit” that Trump is a “great” president (get fucked); and the Washington Post recently changed its slogan to “Democracy Died Because My Dad Helped Kill It.” (Just fooling! The real new slogan is far stupider than that.)
Meanwhile, we all saw every tech billionaire nerd on the planet taking turns kissing Trump’s royal grundle at the inauguration, like democracy is one big financial transaction.
This must be what it felt like to watch media and institutions line up to suck Hitler’s cock in the 1930s.
Elected Democrats: You. Can’t. Be. Both.
You can’t “work with Trump, blah blah blah, common sense solutions to the real problems Americans face,” oh fuck off. You just can’t. It’s not one of the options on the table.
What can you do?
Read Timothy Snyder on how opposition parties in parliamentary systems develop literal shadow cabinets. Read this excellent essay from Jason Linkins in The New Republic about how the best course of action for those opposing Trump 2.0 is to literally “Shove The Presidency Down Trump’s Throat.” Read Brian Beutler this morning on how Democrats should go ahead and start dramatically and publicly going through the motions of impeaching Trump for pardoning the J6-ers, and aggressively tracking what those pardon recipients do with their newfound free time. You better believe they’re going to reoffend. That needs to be pinned on Trump.
Read this essay from University of Alabama professor AJ Bauer about how Democrats must learn to define the terms of the debate on policy issues and look for and exploit ways to divide Republicans. This slice of that essay is pertinent to the Laken Riley bill:
When Democratic policymakers accept Republican policy proposals as though they are good faith assessments of empirical reality, they unwittingly cede the struggle over framing the problems we face to the right. If both Democratic and Republican officials are calling something a “crisis,” journalists have little choice but to report it as such and voters little reason to think otherwise.
You. Can’t. Be. Both.
Nobody gives a flying fuck about “bipartisanship.”
You can only help one side.
Look for the helpers, like Mr. Rogers said. Then identify who they’re actually helping.
And in this case, quite frankly, primary them if they’re helping the fucking Nazis.
Republicans are scared of Elon Musk money? Democrats need to be scared of Democratic voters.
1,460 days left in Trump’s last presidency. Lots of work to do.
OPEN THREAD.
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Harry wants to know why toy not moving, sorry little dude but you broke the stick. No worries new ones on the way. The next one comes with two poles, one metal. Hopefully lasting longer than a couple months. https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-87719236?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
AOC and Pritzker are leading the way. Dems need to take their cues from them.