Trump-fluffing Beltway ad peddler Axios has a piece up with the title “‘Such bulls**t’: Not every Democrat wants to talk about Epstein.” It is deceptively illustrated by a photo of Hakeem Jeffries, who definitely DOES want to talk about Epstein.
House Democrats are at odds over whether to use Republicans’ blowup over the Jeffrey Epstein files as a talking point while they are in their districts for the five-week summer recess.
Why it matters: Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ (D-N.Y.) leadership team has encouraged caucus members to maintain the drumbeat on Epstein, but some Democrats say they are sick of talking about it.
House Democrats’ messaging arm sent members an alert Wednesday urging them to “amplify” a Wall Street Journal report that President Trump is in the Epstein files and demand that “House Republicans stop covering up for Trump.”
Several House Democrats said they would rather spend August discussing more substantive policy matters; however, with one who spoke on condition of anonymity telling Axios: “Candidly, this whole thing is just such bulls**t.”
It doesn’t sound like the caucus is “at odds” at all, except for the alleged anonymous source. Even the reps I would classify as chronic tools aren’t stirring any shit within the caucus. If they were criticizing Dems who are talking about Epstein, you can bet your ass Axios would be trumpeting that that from the rooftops:
Driving the news: Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), the co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told Axios he is “not really focused” on Epstein.
“I think the big focus is going to be on health care, because that’s what people care about, and I don’t think this issue is big outside the Beltway,” he said.
Similarly, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) told Axios in a text message: “We will focus on [the ‘big, beautiful bill’], Medicaid, and tariffs raising costs.”
Axios insists there’s a chasm where there’s none.
The other side: Other Democrats argued that going after Republicans on policy and slamming them on Epstein aren’t mutually exclusive. “I think all these issues are linked together,” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) told Axios.
“Trump is willing to lie and betray his own people, and he’s willing to take away your health care to give it to his rich friends. … I think it’s all part of one story,” said Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a former CPC chair, said similarly: “I’m talking about Medicaid, I’m talking about tax breaks to billionaires — and I’m talking about Epstein, because he fits right in there.”
State of play: Jeffries has surprised some of his members by bear-hugging rank-and-file efforts to force the release of the Epstein files despite his usual reluctance to engage on salacious issues.
I think the reps who are linking the Epstein matter to this administration’s consistent catering to billionaires have it right, and that very much includes Jeffries, despite Axios’ insistence that he is reluctant to “engage on salacious issues.”
The throughline is elite impunity, which ranges from their shirking the responsibility to pay taxes at one end to their epic public corruption and tolerance for the most heinous criminal behavior from one of their own at the other.
Trump’s open musing about pardoning Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell is another example of this.
Trump didn’t seem to rule out the possibility of pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence in prison after being convicted of sex trafficking charges for recruiting and grooming teenage girls to be sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein.
“I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about,” Trump told reporters outside the White House this morning before leaving for a trip to Scotland.
If Trump and his media enablers at right-wing outlets like Newsmax think people are going to accept the new positioning of Maxwell as a “victim,” they have another think coming. (I think.)
Also, I hope the Scots skewer the mottled orange haggis with barbed witticisms applied to signs every time he shows his ugly face in public. They have a knack for it there.
***
Switching gears, my work schedule is light today, so I visited the library to return some books and choose new ones. On the way out, I narrowly avoided being run over by a confused motorist who was driving the wrong way up a one-way lane surrounded by median strips that bisects the parking lot. His wife was yelling at him, so I just waved and shrugged instead of piling on.
A woman with a cart was collecting books from the parking lot book drop, and she said, “Close call!” I agreed and then thanked her for all the work they do at the library and told her I consider it an important community resource. The poor thing almost wept with gratitude — the library gets a lot of shit in this backward-ass town.
Everyone should be nice to librarians, for fuck’s sake! They provide FREE access to lots of good stuff!
***
Afterward, I went to lunch at a pub in town that has lobster bisque because I frequently crave lobster or crab bisque, and I don’t make it at home because Bill has to watch his shellfish intake due to a hereditary tendency toward gout.
The pub has a few tables and a very long bar, and it was early and mostly empty when I arrived. No one was seated at the bar when I sat down several chairs from the left end.
Shortly after my salad and bowl of bisque arrived, a man walked in and sat about three chairs to my left. He was loudly berating someone on a cellphone. The barkeep brought him a cocktail without speaking to him, so I figured he’s a regular.
I also figured he’d hang up or the person he was berating would say FUCK OFF and hang up, but neither did. He kept right on huffily upbraiding the person about some bullshit business issue involving paint and tile in a cafeteria and the delayed installation thereof.
Fed up at last, I gathered my tea, bisque and salad and moved to the opposite end of the bar. A group of 10 or so women had pushed tables together in that part of the room and were chatting and having lunch, but all 10 of their voices at once were quieter than the asshole on the phone.
The end.
Baud
I linked to the Axios thing downstairs. Pure propaganda, but some people eat it up the way MAGA eat up Fox.
Baud
zhena gogolia
I agree about it all being one story
Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride
Was there ever a time during Bill Clinton’s real and alleged sex scandals when any Republican said for publication (even anonymously) that this “just such bullshit” or that they they wanted to focus on the real issues?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Considering how many people here say “Epstein is too much for MAGA as opposed to the crap he is doing as president, what bullshit” I suspect that statement wasn’t reported correctly.
MattF
It’s not surprising that Dems have mixed feelings about the Epstein stuff. Considering, e.g., that conversations in these comment spaces tend to go back and forth between some posters saying ‘I don’t get it’ and other posters giving convoluted explanations of the facts in the case and why MAGA is so worked up about it. And no, Axios isn’t going to clarify things by repeating ‘Why aren’t you and him fighting each other harder?’
Hoodie
@zhena gogolia: Casar seems to be on the right track. The Epstein story is about rich fucks closing ranks and keeping quiet about one of their own. A lot of these assholes – especially Trump – had to know he was engaging in this stuff. The story puts Trump squarely in that group and deconstructs his image as MAGA hero.
AM in NC
@zhena gogolia: I also agree, and it is a smart way to frame the issues. Dems “lost” the white working class because Trump played into their grievance – the elites have harmed you, and I can save you!
Hammer home EVERY SINGLE TIME, that the GOP IS the elite and they ARE out to get you – they’re the car dealership owner scamming you to buy the needless undercoating; they’re your boss messing with your overtime and your work schedule; they’re the billionaires who shipped your jobs overseas and just got themselves ANOTHER fat tax cut thanks to the Republican Party; they’re Republican Congressmen who took away your parents’ and your grandparents’ nursing home care; and they’re Jeffrey Epstein and his friends and enablers and protectors. And here’s what Democrats are doing and have been doing to fight against ALL of that predation . . . . . . Help us stop them and build a better America for ALL of us, not just the predatory elites.
Baud
@Baud:
Follow up
Surly Duff
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Exactly. Sloppy reporting.
The “however” following the semicolon seems to indicate that whoever was calling out “bulls**t” was not revealing a preference to avoid Epstein talk, but was rather complaining about the false dichotomy which underlies this entire BS article.
I may or may not be overreading this.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Shit Dems like Suozzi and Cueller are too easy to beat on when it comes to the optics of this so of course Axios singles them out, it’s an inside-the-Beltway equivalent of a Cletus Safari.
What’s nice is the slew of Dems that do “get it” and are unabashedly so. Perhaps it’s them who are dragging Jeffries in a certain direction, again assuming he needs dragging.
p.a.
A Congresscritter may not want to focus on tRumpstein, but if any of them actually called it “bullshit” (and I don’t for a moment think Axios wouldn’t make up the quote) I’ll donate to a primary opponent if the name becomes public. They are too stupid to hold any office of responsibility at any level.
Shalimar
Tesla’s Optimus Robots Have Reportedly Run Into Severe Trouble
I am beginning to think Musk is impulsive and makes bad decisions. Producing the robots before you know how to make hands is like making a sex robot without knowing how to make fleshlights. What is the point?
chemiclord
@AM in NC: The problem is none of that actually matters. All that is the cover story to what really resonated with them.
“All this woke bullshit, illegals, gays, blacks, trans people, women… all those ‘others’ have changed the country you knew and made it something else. I can make it yours again.”
Betty Cracker
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: To his credit, Jeffries was among the first Dems (at least that I heard) who made the connection between the Epstein scandal and the more generalized GOP plutocrat protection racket.
Layer8Problem
@Shalimar: “So a couple of limbs or sex organs get wrenched off. Every so-called ‘failed’ test brings us new data to improve the product!”
Spanky
Local DC radio station WTOP has an AP headline that seems … deceptive:
Seems “girlfriend” obscures an awful lot, no?
MattF
@Shalimar: Musk thought he knew how to deal with the problem, but, in fact, he did not. This behavior pattern is persistent and repetitive, it happens over and over again.
Geminid
My friend Stephanie visited a couple days ago and I asked her if she’d been hearing much about the WmEostein affair. Oh yes, she replied, on TV and radio.
Stephanie votes Democratic in every election but she typically is not engaged very deeply in politics and will usually watch the most mediocre sportsball show instead the best politics program. She’s the sole “Normie” among my Democrat friends.
So I took her interest to be significant, and there was an edge to her comments that indicated she took this matter very seriously.
Stephanie’s life experiences make her very sensitive to male/female power disparities, and the young biracial granddaughter she is helping raise is the apple of her eye. Now Trump has made the political world personal for Stephanie, and I think she sees the Epstein matter in that light.
Fair Economist
I’m definitely in the “we can walk and chew gum at the same time school”.
Trump destroying healthcare is a bad thing. Let’s talk about that.
Trump covering up and probably participating in the largest pedophilia ring we know of is a bad thing. Let’s talk about that.
Discussing multiple bad things doesn’t distract, it amplifies. Casual followers just pick up “wow, everything about this guy is bad.”.
Shalimar
Elon Musk floats $20 trillion valuation days after Tesla misses earnings
For comparison, the current GDP for the entire world combined is roughly $105 trillion. Why does anyone buy his bullshit? He just pulls numbers out of his ass.
trollhattan
@Shalimar: Like self-driving cars, nobody has an actual explanation for the “need” for robots outside the factory floor. Feel like I’m soon to be living in Sleeper.
trollhattan
@Shalimar: TBF that ass is always busy. It’s the drugs.
chemiclord
@Betty Cracker:
Jeffries is an excellent target for all those lefties who are uncomfortable with black people having any sort of authority.
Throwing his picture on an article for engagement might as well be throwing chum to sharks.
Mr. Longform
This is a perfect encapsulation of reason vs. propaganda, nice folks vs. Fox grandpas, AOC vs. MTG. It’s like the moral at the end of a fable.
Geminid
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: We might not have Henry Cuellar to kick around much longer. Cuellar’s trial on bribery charges is scheduled for this Fall, and his defense team just lost a motion to move it from Houston to his hometown of Laredo.
A Cuellar conviction would set off a battle royale for TX28. Republicans have been gunning for that seat the last few cycles and will go all in on flipping it in the special election. Trump carried TX28 by around 4 points last year while Cuellar won by ~3%.
Suzanne
Yes this, thank you! Walk! Chew gum!
Baud
@Suzanne:
Chewing gum is a distraction from the walking.
Baud
On topic
Layer8Problem
@Suzanne: There will be those who say we’re diluting the message, that your average voter can only manage one thing in their brains. Which speechwriter came up with the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations” again? To steal LGM’s Robert Farley’s shtick, I say if you have nine 16-inch guns on your battleship and the other side has already given you the ammunition, fire those guns broadside.
mrmoshpotato
@Shalimar: I thought the problem would be the robots endlessly giving fascist salutes.
lowtechcyclist
I keep saying, Axios exists to make Politico look good by comparison.
Harrison Wesley
@Shalimar: I’ve brought this up before, but I strongly urge one and all to read or reread Fondly Fahrenheit.
Soprano2
This is a good point, it’s what the R’s did to the Clintons.
I was arguing with a MAGA on FB this morning about what a coup actually is. He seems to believe it’s a “coup attempt” that Obama might have talked to people in the intelligence community before they published their report about Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election, and that saying Russia tried to interfere in that election to help FFOTUS is proof of an ongoing “coup conspiracy”. This guy didn’t seem stupid before, but I’m rethinking that opinion now. I posted that it might be a coup when you try to stop the certification of an election in order to install the loser as president. LOL
WTFGhost
Hee. Back in college, I frequented libraries, to get books, and I frequented dorm rooms giving perfectly gentlemanly backrubs to beautiful women (some of whom didn’t believe they were beautiful because they didn’t meet conventional beauty standards). I’m too tired to read, and to touch the bodies of beautiful women, so I’m envious of normal-people’s energy levels today.
Still: I learned that touch is an amazing way to show real, honest-to-goodness affection. It’s also a great way to have sexytimes fun, don’t get me wrong, but real, honest-to-goodness, “nope, just wanted to make you happy, I’ll only fantasize in non-creepy ways about it, okay?” affection has a lot to say for it, too.
Man, you’re really trying to make me wish I knew you in college, aren’t you?
Redshift
@mrmoshpotato: I’m sure the hands are already capable of that. It’s probably why Elon thought they were production-ready.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I sure hope Media Matters doesn’t fold. That’s just wrong.
Geminid
@chemiclord: I noticed how an anti-Jeffries blogger headed a recent post with a picture of Jeffries and Pelosi together. Pelosi’s got the knives out for her now, so why not feature them together?
Back in fall of 2022 it was pictures of Jeffries and Governor Hochul standing together. Hochul caught a lot of the blame for New York Democrats’ poor prformance that year and people wanted to tie the new Minority Leader to a failure New York Democrats squabbled about for months.
But I have followed the anti-Jeffries folks ever since he beat Barbara Lee for Caucus Chair in November of 2018. They are very predictable and their animus is transparent.
ljdramone
As someone who’s married to a librarian (who works in a kind of Trumpy part of Maryland and has had issues with the local chapter of Moms for Liberty) I’d just like to say hell yeah. Preach it, Betty!
Scout211
. . .
Creeps gotta creep.
gene108
Dems need to figure out a way to broaden the cracks the Epstein files, and lack of their release, has had on Republican voters trust in Trump and Republicans in general.
I don’t know what will resonate, but once the trust is gone these people will either stay home at election time or vote for any party that’s not Republican.
@Soprano2:
R’s were helped by an MSM that refused to question the validity of almost every right wing rumor floated about Bill and Hillary.
Redshift
@Fair Economist:
Yes and no. We’ve also had the ongoing problem that bad stuff from Trump administration figures doesn’t become a scandal because there’s just too many separate bad things happening, and (since we don’t have our own propaganda network) catching fire as a scandal requires a drip drip drip of new stories. So it’s not completely unreasonable to worry that different things could dilute rather than amplify each other.
That doesn’t mean Suozzi and his ilk aren’t idiots — not jumping on the bandwagon of the thing that’s doing the most damage would be political malpractice. Just that multiple simultaneous attacks aren’t always more effective.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Betty Cracker:
That’s good to know. It’s always problematic about “how much gets done” when it’s hard to keep up.
I also suspect that part of this is our usual grousing about how to get the messaging thru, ie., if Jeffries says something in the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
AM in NC
@chemiclord: Yes, I know. But we have to come back with SOMETHING, and I won’t throw the “gays, blacks, illegals, women, trans people, etc.” under the bus, so unless we just give up on 1/2 the public, what else can we do to try to peel at least some of these people away?
They also hear, constantly, from the right side of the political/media machine the drumbeat that “it’s those people” screwing you over. Our people need to be saying, yes, you are being screwed over – but it’s THEM doing it. Jujutsu the motherfuckers over and over and over again and it will get through to some of them.
Craig
As for people in bars. I was at my local afterwork the other day with a friend. She’d gone outside for a smoke and there was a group of tech bros at the table behind us. One of the dudes all of sudden LOUDLY talks over the others I SAW THIS MOVIE IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE BY THIS GUY WONG KAR….WAY..WHY? SOMETHING. WONG KAR SOMETHING. ITS ON THIS NY TIMES LIST, IT CAME IN AT #4. ITS SO BEAUTIFUL. I can’t hear the other guys. ITS ABOUT LONGING, ITS SO BEAUTIFUL. I GUESS HE MADE SOME OTHER STUFF… . One of the other bros says something about ‘I think Tarantino dug that dude.’ Now know that In The Mood For Love is one of my favorite movies and Wong one of my favorite directors, but no way was I going to engage with these dudes about anything, sometimes you just need to marvel at the world as it spins by you. Half a drink before they had been talking about Ozzy and my friend stopped me in mid sentence talking about the Giants game to call my attention to one of the five bros explaining to the others just who Randy Rhoades was. We decided that we were old
JoyceH
@gene108: the thing about “the Epstein files” is that all files are is information, and it’s information gathered from, y’know, people. Most of those people are still alive. So far several victims have come forward for interviews and I suspect more will surface if the right wing continues its trend toward “Maxwell is a victim too”. There are lots of places to shake loose info that doesn’t rely on DOJ practicing the transparency they claim to revere.
Paul in KY
@AM in NC: Go on!
Paul in KY
@Spanky: She was a bunch of other things besides ‘girlfriend’. Is the fix in?
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: Hope we get the sex box….
Shalimar
I have no clue how you easily disprove you paid for something. If you didn’t pay, then there is no record. If you did pay, it was probably with cash. So not easy for her to prove, but impossible for you to disprove.
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: Also, TACO wasn’t the fucking President in ‘2016’. He was a candidate and Pres. Obama was supplying oppo.
trollhattan
@Paul in KY: That, and the Orb.
Spanky
@Paul in KY: She ain’t in jail for being a girlfriend. But priorities, I guess.
Shalimar
@Craig: All respect to Ozzy as a great musician, but Randy Rhoades was on another level up from him.
Spanky
@Paul in KY:
This one is being invented by a techbro with a reputation for high profile failures, and his own johnson is (reportedly) mangled. I’ll take a hard pass on anything elmo creates.
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: I had forgotten the orb!! Ooh yeah, I hope we get that one too!
Paul in KY
@Spanky: I didn’t mean fucking Tesla making one! I certainly wouldn’t get in it. Now a Yamaha sex box would be quality…
Shalimar
@Paul in KY: He can’t even get the robot configured properly for a handjob. You’re never getting sex from a Musk bot.
Martin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Jeffries and Schumer are part of the stewardship of the big donors for the party. They are the rope in the tug of war between the donors and the voters and the members of their respective caucuses. It is hard to gauge any longer where either of them would naturally fall on any issue because their job is to be that rope – they don’t really have a ton of agency here, except to gauge how to shift the moment of force is on that rope by shifting where they stand.
@chemiclord: I don’t think the left broadly has an issue with Jeffries regarding his race, but they definitely have a problem with the perceived favoritism of party leaders including Jeffries toward the donors. They would prefer the Democratic Party rely on small dollars and shift their loyalties entirely to voters. That’s pretty obvious – there is no universe where socialists aren’t going to take that position in the most maximal way. This is elevated in this moment because of the NYC mayoral race where Cuomo was funded pretty much by one guy, a big Dem donor in the past that everyone is suspicious leadership is trying to win back. Jeffries is in a challenging spot here because he agreed to wear that hat, but also he’s in a district where his constituents are understandably skeptical of a guy like Mamdani. The ‘team gentrification’ by his staffer was an unhelpful cheap shot at a time when Democrats need all the help they can get, but that is by no means an unfounded fear by the black community and people are awaiting how that will play out as a lot of the left are wondering if Democrats can recognize the reasons why voters like Mamdani so much (as they did with AOC and Pelosi before him).
Do not underestimate the degree to which the NYC mayoral race is now a proxy for how to assess the entire Democratic Party, because of the intersection between Mamdani and AOC and Jeffries and Schumer. They can’t pretend they don’t have an iron in that fire – the race covers all of their constituents. And the race has to no small degree been a proxy for the role of those donors. Some of Mamdani’s votes came from people who fucking hate that guys like Bill Ackman (and like Donald Trump tried to be) have always been sort of economic warlords in the city, and those are the people that Jeffries and Schumer (and other party leaders) are the stewards of (this should not be controversial, these are the people the Biden defenders accuse of pushing Biden out of the race, and I don’t think that assessment is entirely wrong – the donors hold enormous power over the party).
And I’m not accusing you of this here, but more than a few folks around here have charged that the left is both racist and anti-semitic because they have issues with Jeffries and Schumer. And like, no – you can’t draw that conclusion. You can’t say both say ‘hey, look at us, we put a proud Jew and a black person into the highest elected positions in our party and the only possible reason someone could raise criticism of them is because they are Jewish and black.’ Like, you want to know why there is criticism of wokeism from the left and the center? That’s why. That shit right there. You don’t get to have it both ways. If you have some evidence that it is racial then offer it up. I don’t deny that there is some racist/antisemitic criticism from the left, but there’s also a hell of lot of people on the left saying ‘why don’t we have someone more like Jasmine Crockett or AOC in that spot?’.
I think the most fair racial criticism of the left is that to the extent that a fair bit of the left is made up of well-to-do white people (the Bernie coalition), they are ignorant of, and sometimes willfully so, of the realities of the politics for marginalized communities and the calculus within those communities. They tend to want to hit a home run off every pitch and the marginalized communities are like ‘yo, just get on fucking base man, don’t risk striking out just so you can have your glory jog around the stadium’. And I think that’s pretty fair criticism overall – the left needs to fix that shit. But that is a very far cry from having a problem with a person of color in leadership.
Lobo
@Betty Cracker: Added a bit to your line:
GOP predatory plutocrat pedophile protection racket
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: It is possible to put too much emphasis on Mamdani. New York may be the biggest city in the country but there a whole lot of population outside the city that doesn’t really care that much about NYC specific issues. Getting too hung up on it is like being a living, breathing representation of the NYC-centric New Yorker cover.
Betty Cracker
@Martin: Great points.
@Omnes Omnibus: True, but it’s not surprising Dems who follow politics closely would fixate on that race since it is a proxy for party fault lines that extend from coast to coast.
tam1MI
We should have gotten rid of that asshole years ago. He’s been a festering boil on the ass of this party for over two decades now.
ruckus
@Shalimar:
As someone who used to design and build tools (and not the kind in your toolbox) for industry to make things, often to extremely tight tolerances, I can easily tell you that complicated machines require a lot of thought, expertise and effort to build and a lot of the same to operate them and manufacture the products they were designed to make. Replacing humans with machines is actually a big step past that effort. Look how long it’s taken for humanity to get to the point it’s at today and think about how well that all works.
None of this is easy, especially if it is involved in replacing humans and making it work even close to reasonable. Because in this one example of a self driven car, look what has to exist. Awareness. Safety. Expectations. A lot of humans can’t actually drive well, and unless one knows all the reasons why and can overcome them, the concept of a self driving vehicle will work only part of the time. When everything else is basically in agreement with how it works. And we ain’t there. And I doubt seriously that we ever will be. Look at a train. Is on tracks but speeds have to controlled – which should be not that difficult – except. What happens when something doesn’t work as it should, say a car stalls on the tracks. Or goes around the gates, or through the lights. It’s a big, busy world, with a lot of people thinking/doing something that works normally but can be a disaster in the making.
Geminid
@Martin: I szw a marked increase in what I considered racist messaging on the parts of some leftwing Democrats after the 2020 primaries. A lot of people carried grudges over Joe Biden’s South Carolina win in particular. Black Democrats there and elsewhere were portrayed as a conservative force in the party that thwarted the Sanders movement.
Michael Moore’s crack on South Carolina Democrats as being low-information voters was no outlier. Black Democrats, who I believe tend to be the most pragmatic of Democrats, got tagged as “Centrist” or “Conservative” instead. This prejudice naturally falls on Jeffries now as well.
So I think the negative attitudes regarding Hakeem Jeffries are a mixed phenomenon. Criticisms of him are generally made with no conscious references to race, but there is an unmistakeble racist component to some of them. I’m thinking here of the ones portraying Jeffries as a child, or as Nancy Pelosi’s errand boy.
I’ve seen plenty of shots along these lines, including a few here. I think some of the people making these types of criticisms are only repeating stuff they hear uncritically, but some of the originators recognize the racist dogwhistles and just don’t care.
Tearing Jeffries down is easier to do because most Democrats knew little about Hakeem Jeffries before he became Minority Leader in late 2022. I could tell plenty of people here had paid little attention to Jeffries until he served as a House Manager in the first Trump impeachment. Jeffries is still a partially blank slate for many, and some people try hard to paint it in so as to fit their chosen anti-establishment narrative.
But I think Hakeem Jeffries’ leadership will be one of the issues that gets hashed out in next year’s House primaries. A lot of the issues Democrats are fighting over now will be, and I am looking forward to that.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@tam1MI:
Exactly. He’s not unlike Cuomo in terms of “why is this asshole getting our support”. Sure, it’s a “tough” district but how far do we need to bend our standards in order to keep a House seat?
He barely qualifies as a “more” Democrat much less a “better” one.
Martin
@AM in NC: The problem is the Dems don’t exactly have the high ground on the issue and we look like hypocrites when we make the argument. The GOP does as well, but it prevents us from making that a winning issue because it falls so naturally into the ‘both parties suck’ argument. FFS, Joe Biden used to be called ‘the Senator from MBNA’ because of how aggressively he protected the Delaware based financial services companies. Democrats still pull big money out of the financial sector and the other half of Silicon Valley as well as the media industry. And another way the Biden dropping out situation was unhelpful to that narrative was that the story wasn’t about voters, but about donors and party insiders making those moves (if anyone was wondering why people like AOC stuck with Biden, I think it’s because she was sticking with voters). One of Trumps better narratives with voters was that the party didn’t want him there, but the voters did. And that’s true in the sense that the party insiders didn’t want to be strapped to that lunatic, but it was and continues to be a strong narrative for him. You think Kash Patel is who Mitch McConnell wants running the FBI? No, that’s who the dipshits who jump their ATV over their single wide want running the FBI.
You know who Democratic Party insiders don’t want being mayor of NYC? Zohran Mamdani. That is part of his appeal completely independent of his policy ideas. If Democrats want to sell themselves as the party of the people, they gotta fucking act like the party of the people, like for real. And I think that’s why on economic issues there’s not a lot of room between Democratic and Republican voters right now. There is a shocking amount of agreement there, which suggests the parties haven’t differentiated themselves on those issues, I think personally, because both parties have been equally good at serving the needs of the wealthy, just different coalitions of the wealthy. I think in this moment, Dems seem to have lost significant ground with that group but their actions are to still cater to them in the hopes of winning them back, where I think strategically because enough of them have defected from the Democratic Party it’d be better to cut them loose entirely and go to war with them (and I’ll concede doing so might be a disaster). But it’s very apparent party leadership is not ready to go there.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: As always, fuck Michael Moore, but I don’t think it’s racist or wrong to say South Carolina Dems are more conservative than the median Dem. IMO, Southern Dems, especially in rural areas, are more small “c” conservative, white or black.
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: I am not sure that is the case though. Mamdani could probably win in Madison but not statewide in Wisconsin. That’s not really due to “fault lines” as I see them but rather regional differences. AOC getting elected in Brooklyn but not being viable in Nebraska is the same thing. We nationalize local races too much at our peril. What we need are not Mamdani and AOC clones nationally, but rather people who sound natural and comfortable talking to their constituents. Walz in Minnesota does it, but he is very different stylistically from the New Yorkers.
Suzanne
@Martin:
There’s also racist and Islamophobic bullshit coming from the center, but for some reason we don’t make that a collective-guilt-by-association thing.
It’s been gross to see some Dems turn a blind eye to (and in some cases, spread) anti-Muslim/Arab sentiment because they’re angry that they we lost a chunk of those voters in the last election. We either stand against bigotry in all its forms, or we don’t.
Ramona
I’m going to make explicit the sense that Trump/Epstein is the billionaires against the rest of us by observing that income inequality was crucial to Epstein’s ability to entrap underage teenage girls in his sex-trafficking network and get away with it even after many Palm Beach detectives worked tirelessly to shut him down. But for the lucky circumstance that the sweetheart plea deal granting US Attorney Alex Acosta’s becoming Trump’s Labor Secretary in 2017 piqued Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown interest in Epstein, the latter might have still gotten away with his abuse to this day.
danielx
Well, Axios, what would you? I will note that MAGAt congresscritters seem to have no problem with jumping all over less-than-substantive issues when it gives Dems heartburn, so why not return the favor?
When will these guys like Suozzi get it through their fucking heads that a lot of voters don’t pay attention to policy at all times, but do pay attention to salacious scandals, no matter how superficial? Sweat policies and details when you’re holding the majority, dickhead, you can’t do anything about policy until then anyway! Until then lose no opportunity to make your opponents miserable! And yes, do say Republicans are fucking you with tariffs, taking away your health care etc., but when you have a FSM-given chance to pile on don’t waste it.
Not that allegations of child trafficking and subsequent cover ups are in any way superficial.
:::::wiping froth from mouth::::
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: The emphasis is there because what other Democratic victories do we have to pattern off of since the election? Plus, that election ran completely counter to the prevailing narrative that Dems needed to run right with good upstanding white male candidates – which I think would have been a disaster. Cuomo looks very much what a surface level examination of the 2024 election told us who voters wanted – a well funded well known cringy white male creep with a strange speaking affect. And I think it’s important to destroy that idea as early as possible and dig a lot deeper into what voters were really responding to.
I agree that there’s a lot there which doesn’t translate outside of NYC. But I’m also not trying to make a point that the key to winning is to run leftists or Muslims or that $30/hr should be the party’s policy, etc. The point is that Mamdani was a good fit for the local politics and we need to be tolerant of politicians that are good fits for their local races – whether that is breaking on gun policy in Texas and so on. But I think there are lessons in how an underfunded candidate beat a heavily financed candidate, and the Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to take those kinds of fights, which I think they are afraid to do. I will point to Marie Glusencamp Perez who is on the right of the party but who I think won for many of the same reasons that Mamdani did, and I’m glad she won because we need the seat. But as to who she is speaking on economic issues, she looks a lot like Mamdani. They likely disagree in places on *how* to solve those issues, but it’s clear where the focus for each of them is. If you’ve never lived in NYC you might not understand who a campaign to make buses free but not the subway is directed to, but everyone in NYC knows exactly that that’s targeted to. MGP was doing the same thing in rural Washington using a different set of parochial issues and a different language. But it was the same audience, and not only is it an audience that Democrats have been losing, it’s THE audience that Democrats claim to care most about. Low income voters voted GOP in 2024 for the first time since I think the ’84 blowout.
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: I don’t disagree with any of that, but I do think the race represents an establishment vs left populist ideological split that extends well beyond NYC, even to backwaters like rural FL. YMMV.
Martin
Yeah, I agree those are totally unacceptable. And I don’t deny that there are racist attacks from the left, but that doesn’t mean every criticism of Jeffries from the left has that basis, and if people sweep valid criticism away, I think we risk setting traps for ourselves. That’s what I’m trying to get at – Democrats are really defensive right now and time is drawing short before the midterms, we are picking candidates and strategies soon, and we gotta pull our head out of our asses and figure out how to win this and defensiveness prevents that from happening.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: That may be so. But I think that in 2020, the largely Black South Carolina Dems didn’t go for Biden because they were conservative, they went for him because they were pragmatic and understood the urgency of the situation. They knew Trump had to be defeated, and they understood this country well enough to see that none of the other candidates could get the job done.
I feel like Black Democrats are ahead of many White Democrats in this respect. They have an outsider perspective and see things others might not. I have some Lesbian friends who are that way. They see things I miss, and it’s because they have an outsider point of view.
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: I personally think the split right now is on the fighter v. non-fighter types rather rather than left/right ot populist/establishment division.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I view the split as me vs. everyone else
Ramona
@Lobo: Love This!
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Baud:
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Martin:
x.com/owasow/status/1930315361976557815
Data to support that at least from the donor side. Dems pulled the majority of people (or maybe households) earning more than $100K but under that, we were in the minority. And many of those under $100K types used to vote Dem.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: As you should.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: The ideological split you speak of seems to vary from place to place. I like to joke that idealogically, Virginia Democrats run the gamut from Mark Warner to Tim Kaine and everywhere in between. But when I look at the candidates we choose, the reality isn’t that far from the joke.
I’m not sure Virginia is an outlier in this respect. My general observation is that most Democrats and Democrat-leaning Independents tend to cluster in the middle of the party, between the 35 yard lines so to to speak. I also think the 50 yard line is not as left as some liberals believe or at least wish. But we will get some real data on this question from next year’s House primaries, especially the ones for open seats.
Martin
@Betty Cracker: Yes. There is a huge appetite for populism in this country that the Democratic Party is fucking terrified of. I do not think people realize just how badly out of balance this country is economically and Democrats keep missing that. Biden spoke to it, but didn’t do much about it. Harris/Waltz started to speak to it and then pivoted off when the Uber guys showed up. Jeffries and Schumer speak to it in very guarded ways. Like, maybe it’s there, but they don’t want to piss off the billionaires on the upper east side. And the voters are saying ‘you gotta pick – you can’t split the baby any longer, it’s us or them’. <insert spinning beach ball and modem connection sounds over a photo of Democratic leadership>
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: I tend to agree with you that the ideological split in the Democratic Party is nowhere near as big as people tend to think. The splits have always been more in terms of style and approach.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Should always be acknowledged that black voters aren’t a monolith. Not talking about you, but a lot of white people claim they’re lifting up black voices when what they really amplify is black folks who happen to agree with them.
Martin
Exactly. That’s what I was trying to get at before. White democrats had to pull black democrats behind Obama because black democrats needed a win more than they needed a black president and white democrats had to show that we had his back. White dems could afford to lose, black dems co
Yes, however, it’s also a trap. Black democrats are also more supportive of left-leaning and populist economic ideas than white democrats are. And if the black community wants to see those things happen, you’re never going to get there voting for the centrists. At some point you need to call your shot and take the risk on the candidate that will fight for those policies.
And here’s where I think the democratic party has kind of fucked itself in that we agreed to fight in the GOPs culture war and gave up the economic one and I think we just need to swap those priorities. We we drew hard progressive lines in the sand on culture war issues and allowed the economic stuff to drift to the center, and we should have done the opposite. And if you think about what black and latino communities tend to prioritize, it’s the other way around – hard progressive economic lines and yield ground on culture war when needed because public opinion on that stuff tends to be movable. CA voters (the 2nd bluest in the country at the time) banned gay marriage in 2008 and it was nationally legal 7 years later. That’s less time than the Trump tax cuts for the rich were in effect. One of these things is much more durable than the other.
Geminid
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I see how Mr. Wasow’s analysis showed that Democratic donors grew more affluent relative to Republican Trump donors. This suggests two questions.
One is, did Democratic donors in general become more affluent in absolute terms, 2024 over 2020 and 2016? Is there a trend?
That to me is the more important issue, because of the second question raised: is the increase in Republican donors a real trend long-term, or is it an artifact of Trump’s singular appeal? That question might not be answered until 2028.
Duke1337
I went to the library today too. I got a book about the Nuremberg trials.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: I just go by our House caucus, which l think is as good a representation of the party as a whole as any. I think that if I were to place them on a left-right continuum, Democratic House members would resemble a fat Bell curve, with plenty of overlap among Progressive Caucus and New Democrat caucus members.
Various people–media pundits, activists etc.–seem invested for different reasons in portraying House Democrats as polarized into two bunches, more like a dumbell. This analysis breaks down quickly though, once I start learning about them as individuals and not as parts of different caucuses. But plenty of people still buy into the paradigm of polarization.
Bobby Thomson
Rule of thumb: the unnamed source is usually on the record elsewhere in the same article
Geminid
@Martin: I was just thinking about the 2020 primaries. As to the future, I’ll be looking at next year’s House primaries for clues. We’ll get an idea then of where Democrats, Black, White and Hispanic, come down on the questions debated here.
Other Democrats will also have a say, like Asian Americans including Indian Americans. I’m not sure how numerous the latter group is, but they have won representation among party electeds. I can count four Democratic Representatives who are of Indian origin: Pramila Jayapal (WA), Raj Krishnamoorthi (IL), Shri Thanetar(sp?) (MI) and now Suhas Subramanyam (VA). I may have missed others.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: Right, but fighter for who, or fighter on what?
And I think there are two orthogonal issues here. Mamdani very deliberately steered away from national issues. His ‘fighting’ was very locally focused on practical issues. What did voters like about Biden when he was fighting? What was he most vocal about? Kitchen table economics, the dignity of work, that kind of stuff. I think his rhetoric there was fantastic. But in any fight there is also ‘who is being fought’. And right now I think there is an appetite to fight people of wealth and power more than the Republican rank and file here. There is a risk when fighting of not naming who you are fighting against and allowing some other party to define that on your behalf. And it think Democrats have been VERY cagey about trying to fight for everyone against nobody. Contrast with Trump who is not only very clear who he is fighting against, he fighting against everyone – China, Democrats, DEI corporations, the media, immigrants – you name it. If I had to name Democrat’s opponent it’s ‘MAGA extremists’. Well, they aren’t why my employer is paying me $7.50/hr.
Nationally there’s a completely different dynamic related to fighting the administration. I don’t think these should be confused. What one looks like, and who it targets, and on what issues is very different from the other which is a very existential ‘is this adequate to stopping a Reichtag fire’ kind of thing. Party leaders have the unenviable job of having to juggle both. And I’ve before advocated for leadership to delegate the ‘what and who the party stands for and who they stand against’ stuff to other members of the caucus who are particularly gifted at that so they can focus on stopping the authoritarian shit.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I am with you FWIW.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Being a fighter is all well and good. But picking battles you can’t win is stupid. As is applying lessons from a closed primary in a heavily D city to the entire country.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: You are very sure of yourself.
Martin
@Geminid: I think it’s bimodal on the right. The GOP has picked up more very wealthy and more working class (which has pulled the average down because the lower class is a much larger population) while Dems have concentrated more in the middle/upper middle class and lost the working class (pulling the average up).
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: I have already noted several times that the NYC primary does not tell us very much.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s because you are not building castles in the air. I have seen commentary here and in other places that suggests following Mamdani’s tactics and message will win us 2026.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: Aren’t you an attorney? Argue your case. Tear my reasoning apart.
But my observation is that Mamdani went really hard out of his way to keep his campaign inside city limits. He barely mentioned Trump at all. The debate question of which country would you visit first – “I’m going to stay in the city”. That in itself is a signal that his focus is entirely on the city and not on bigger things.
That’s not what the Democrats who are dissatisfied with the party are looking for out of Jeffries or Schumer or whoever. Like, they don’t overlap at all. Am I wrong?
Isn’t that the very moment that Zelenskyy is facing in Ukraine – he has one kind of fight against Russia and a completely different kind of fight against corruption in governance and signed a bill that pissed off the public, creating protests. How you do the domestic fight is almost completely divorced from the existential fight. Zelenskyy tried to tie them together, and the public was pretty ‘fuck off with that shit’.
It’s not simply fight/don’t fight.
Martin
@schrodingers_cat: Which tactics and messages were they referring to? Because there were dozens of both.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: Pay me and I might.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: LOL. Well played.
Another Scott
@Omnes Omnibus: +1
Plus, some of us remember Cuomo stomping on things that DeBlasio wanted to do as mayor. As in many / most states, the Governor can quash many things that cities and localities want to do.
It’s not like Mandami will get to do whatever he wants as Mayor – there are pretty big checks on his power.
FWIW.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Geminid
@Martin: But is there data to back up this assertion, that Democratic donors skewed more affluent in 2024 than in 2020 and 2026? That’s what I am asking. The study the commenter cited showed a relative inter-party shift, but was there also an intra-party shift? I’m talking about donations accross the board, and not just the presidential campaigns.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Good answer.
Martin
@Geminid: It’s really hard to tell from the piece because there’s no indication of what the study is really measuring. Anecdotally, we did see a shift with Trump from a broad set of rich donors to a concentration on just a few giving more money, notably Musk who alone gave $288M. There seem to have been more rich donors (just from me cursory looking through the FEC data), but apart from those handful who have a ton the rest individually gave less than in the past. The piece seems to suggest they aren’t looking at the size of the donation but the income/wealth of the donor. And if we are assuming they’re looking at median income/wealth and not average (which someone like Musk would completely annihilate) then you would expect a handful of whales to not really make any contribution to that median because there are so few of them. So this really turns into a measure of middle vs lower class donors. Simply by virtue of the fact that Democrats have been consolidating professional class voters (college educated middle/upper middle class) and losing lower class voters, and assuming any kind of uniform rate of contributions by those classes (of any amount, since amount doesn’t matter here) then it would be hard to see Democrats getting their lower class voters to donate more frequently to make up for their declining numbers, and similarly the same dynamic for the GOP but in reverse.
One way it might not happen is if the GOP didn’t create opportunities for small dollar donors, but they were all over that because Trump turned it all into a county fair prize fest. Give $5 and win a NFT with Trump dressed up like Aquaman. So assuming there were adequate opportunities to give, you’d sort of expect that trend just based on the underlying trends in the voter bases. It’s hard to explain but there are certain things that are extremely reliable within populations and I suspect the number of people who donate within a given income class to be very stable, but the amounts to be less so. (I have a lot of experience in admissions modeling, and there you need to make a shit-ton of predictions around income and other demographic measures and you come to learn that a lot of things are extraordinarily stable across these classes of people across multiple years – like you can predict within 1%.)
What the article is really trying to note is that in a shift to authoritarianism you often have this small inner circle of extremely powerful people (Russias oligarchs, for instance) who while small in number are the ones propping up the campaign because they have so much to gain, and this populist message needed in order to generate enough votes to win – so you get this odd alliance of the very rich and the poor that you shouldn’t expect to see unless that inner circle of the very rich were about to promise the world and then fuck them over once they got in office. And on the opposition you’d see what we see – this consolidation between those two groups with the rising affluence being a sign that you’ve lost the poor voter base.
There are a lot of things out there in the social sciences that work this way – ‘this is a marker for this phenomenon’ – and an alliance of the very rich and the poor is a marker for an authoritarian movement, and they just measured that. I don’t think it’s intended to be used in a predictive way into the future or to be useful in any other capacity.
Paul in KY
@Omnes Omnibus: An attorney for sure :-)