How Embarrassing
The Trump cabinet is off to a roaring start.
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Imagine working your whole life to become a United States Senator. You do well enough in school, you go to college and play football and run for student government. You join the military, you start a business, you make a lot of money. You run for office, putting your family in the public eye. You go to law school where you pay someone to give you homework. You decide to forgo the outright wealth of the private sector for the prestige and influence of the Senate. You’ve cemented the power and privilege of your position, imbued by the Constitution with a solemn duty to what you believe is the greatest country in the world.
And now you’re going to let a bankrupt, wannabe dictator turn you into a puppet? A lame duck reality TV show president with a marketing firm masquerading as a real estate operation, doing all his corruption right there in the open where anyone can see, reminding the plebes that they could demand some sort of law or campaign promise to prevent elected officials from getting rich off of said power and influence. You’re going to let that guy turn you into a puppet so he can put a drunk, bigoted, lecherous weekend anchor in charge of your beloved U.S. military, with its millions of employees and absolutely 100% necessary don’t ask any questions $800 billion budget? A guy with brain worms in charge of Health and Human Services? When almost half of you were born into a country with yearly polio epidemics and now don’t have to worry about it because of the vaccines your new HHS secretary doesn’t believe in? You are obsessed with terrorism, you see terrorists around every corner, in every school, at every immigration checkpoint and you want who running the FBI?
Jesus christ, Republican Senators are so embarrassing.
I know we have a lot of work to do as a Democratic party. For one, it should not be as easy as it was for these banal, cruel blowhards to beat us in any election, let alone one for the highest office in the country, when one of the candidates had once tried to violently overthrow the government. Democratic policies are broadly popular, and they often win as ballot measures even when our candidates don’t. When the country has lost faith in the status quo of our government, we can’t charge into battle defending it. If the contest comes down to two parties that the American electorate believe are both corrupt, both largely out for themselves, blatant corruption might feel more honest than the imprimatur of a functioning democratic system where you never seem to get ahead. And we cannot discount the insidious tendrils of racism, misogyny, bigotry that shore up that system, that thread themselves through our daily lives, and that become a siren call of someone to blame and an easy solution when times are hard.
There are plenty of reasons we’ve found ourselves in this predicament. Republican elected officials and candidates lie - a lot. They also have the most watched news and media apparatus at their disposal, while we can barely get anyone to watch or read fact based media that turns on us as often as not. They have a substantial Electoral College advantage and have spent decades eroding any and all progress on voting rights. Acknowledging that all of this is true doesn’t fix the problem though. It doesn't change the fact that we can’t control the media or Republican speech writers. If we could have fact checked our way out of this mess we would have done it already. And it doesn’t change the fact that fixing this problem is going to be complicated and impermanent. No matter how often we beat them, Republicans unfortunately will keep coming back.
But here’s the most important thing to remember - we can beat them. I swear we can. We’ve done it before. And in fact, in a lot of really important places, we did it this time too. Today’s Republican party is a bigoted, controlling mess, steered by the whims of a decaying fraud with little to no interest in government except as a mechanism by which to stay out of jail and punish his enemies. They stand for nothing beyond getting rich, and reifying the power structures and privileges that help them stay rich. They have absolutely no interest in the lives and needs of their constituents, in improving the economy or making our air easier to breathe or our water healthier to drink. They don’t want to keep us safe, they want to use the specter of safety to keep us in control. Their plans won’t make any of our lives better - and in fact they are quite likely to make our lives worse.
It’s always harder to be the responsible party, the one that abides by the rules, that strives for goodness, that embraces complexity, and that believes in possibility - we necessarily will let people down. It’s impossible for anyone to live up to their ideals all the time, let alone a party full of thousands of elected officials and candidates and millions of voters. Sometimes Democrats and progressives will meet expectations, and sometimes we’ll exceed them. But sometimes we won’t be able to do either. And honestly, more often than not, we’ll disappoint some by the same move that excites others.
The current Republican party also has this advantage: it’s not news when they fail. It’s not news when they are too extreme or too corrupt or when they crash the economy or get us into decades long wars that cost incomprehensible amounts of money and countless human lives. You cannot disappoint someone who had no expectations of you in the first place.
But still I’d rather be us than them.
I’d rather strive for goodness and fail sometimes, than fall back into selfishness, deceit, and greed. I’d rather take great big steps into the future that somehow take us too far and not far enough. I want to believe in possibility, to make space for the future, to learn from people who aren’t like me, to take joy in diversity and community. I want to try, always to try, knowing that I might fail, that I might be failed, that it won’t always work, and we won’t always get the credit. We can make each other’s lives better, and in doing so we can make our own lives better.
And on top of all of that, what a gift not to have sold my soul to a two-bit conman like Donald Trump. Let’s all just take a moment, and revel in that.
Actions to Take this Week
Call your Senators and tell them that you expect them to confirm only the nominees that have the experience and temperament befitting the position of a cabinet secretary whose actions will impact hundreds of millions of people. Call even if your Senators are Democrats! I made a guide to calling that you can find here.
Things Giving Me Hope/Strength This Week
The Red Wave Didn’t Hit Statehouses in This Election: This time around, Democrats are in a much stronger position. Thanks to a decade of making investments and gains—including our 2024 wins—Democrats will hold nearly 40 majorities in our statehouses and are ready to combat the worst of the Trump presidency. We’ve also nearly tripled our number of governing trifectas to 15 states, including big blue powerhouses like New York, California, and Illinois with large populations and booming economies. Case in point: California alone is the fifth-largest economy in the world.
AOC officially launches bid for top job on Oversight Committee: “In the 119th Congress, Oversight Committee Democrats will face an important task: we must balance our focus on the incoming president’s corrosive actions and corruption with a tangible fight to make life easier for America’s working class," Ocasio-Cortez told her Democratic colleagues, who will soon vote on who should lead committees for the party while the House is under Republican control in the new 119th Congress.
Washington voters uphold the state’s pioneering climate law: The 2021 Climate Commitment Act, which launched a carbon market in the state, was designed to help Washington nearly halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and virtually eliminate them by 2050. A ballot measure financed by hedge-fund manager Brian Heywood, Initiative 2117, would have repealed the law and banned the state from pursuing any kind of carbon-pricing system in the future.