He promised to lower prices — they’ve gone up.  He promised no new wars — and started a huge one.  He promised terrific health care “at a tiny fraction of the cost” — and has yet to reveal, after 10 years, even his “concept of a plan.”  He promised to pay down the debt — and has added massively to it.  He promised to appoint only “the best people” — and has appointed lackeys and incompetents.  He promised to deport “the worst of the worst” — and sends harmless, helpless asylum seekers . . . in shackles, no less . . . to the Central African Republic.  He promised to release the Epstein files without unnecessary redactions — and has not.  He promised to drain the swamp — and runs the most corrupt administration in American history.  He swore an oath to the Constitution — and regularly flouts it.

Everything he touches dies.

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Having doubts?
[ask the billboards now in 27 states that some of you have helped to finance]
You’re not alone. 
www.leavingMAGA.ORG

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From The Guardian: Life after Maga: the group offering an ‘exit ramp’ for right-wingers questioning Trumpism.

KANSAS!

Also from The Guardian:

Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the US Senate since 1932. Will that change in November?

From The New Yorker:

Adam Hamilton and Taking Back Religion from the Right

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Democratic socialists are getting more of the attention, but Democratic Christians may prove more influential this November.

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(Note that there are about 100,000 members of the Democratic Socialists of America — none of whom to my knowledge has been elected to public office or endorsed by the likes of Bernie Sanders or AOC*  — and more than 200 million Americans who identify as Christians.)

Want to meet this wonderful man?  Founder and pastor of the largest United Methodist church in the country, with 24,000 Kansan congregants?  Me-Mail me.

SO FUN, SO IMPORTANT

So I’m plugging it again:

This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy by Ben Wikler.

The best thing you could do, after reading it yourself, is to get it in front of a child or grandchild eager to do something meaningful.

BONUS

The Kennedy Center: It’s Even Worse Than You Think!

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I spent 10 months working at the institution because I thought I could help protect it. What I observed there is far worse than the public knows.

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*Though with hundreds of thousands of elected officials in the country I could be missing a couple.

Trump’s Broken Promises, in 11 Charts

Share widely.

One minute not to be missed.

This week’s Indivisible “What’s The Plan” — How to Fix This MAGA Supreme Court featuring Elie Mystal — was really, really interesting.  If you can find time, I think you’ll learn a lot.  I did.

Listen!

And now . . .

Perhaps even more consequential (and that’s saying something):

AI is making everything worse.

The least of it (but I can’t resist):

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Here’s a fun fact for you: More cops have been arrested for stalking women using Flock cameras than there are trans athletes in sports.

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The one thing Garrett Graff doesn’t address — a very big thing — is what to do about A.I.’s downsides.

Hard as it is to imagine our getting one, the world clearly needs a really smart international treaty to try to give humans a chance to control how A.I. develops before it decides that for itself.

Adam Hamilton and Taking Back Religion from the Right

Snippets:

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. . . While many observers are focused on the emergence of the Democratic Socialists of America (who boast a total membership of just over a hundred thousand), a more important trend in the Democratic Party may be the resurgence of the once dominant and long-dormant mainline Protestant tradition [which may be more like 45 million].

. . . The first public moment of resistance in Trump’s second term came immediately, during the Inaugural prayer service, when the Episcopal bishop of the District of Columbia, Mariann Budde, asked him to “have mercy” on gay, immigrant, and other marginalized Americans. The President, naturally, responded by saying that the bishop was a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” who owed him an apology, and whose service had been “very boring and uninspiring.”

. . . At sixty-two, [Adam Hamilton] has been a minister for thirty-six years. He’s running for Senate, he says, to “build bridges” across political divides, and he seems more likely than most to have a shot at succeeding. He’s not just a Methodist pastor, he’s the founding pastor of the largest United Methodist church in the country.

. . . [Hamilton’s] kind of progressive theological clarity is showing up in many places. Another prominent American Christian, Pope Leo XIV, has been straightforward in condemning both the Trump Administration’s treatment of immigrants and its prosecution of the war: the Gospel says to welcome strangers; Catholic teaching back to Augustine says a just war must be defensive. “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” the Pope said in April, not long after Trump had posted and then deleted an artificially generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure.

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Worth reading in full.

(In case you’d like to meet Reverend Hamilton at a small gathering in New York next month — with David Letterman — me-mail me.)

OH, CANADA

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When [Prime Minister Mark] Carney stood at that podium Saturday and said the Americans “asked too much and offered too little,” everyone assumed he was talking about dairy quotas and hockey stick tariffs.

He wasn’t.

This was an annexation attempt with a cover page . . .

. . . I want to be precise here because there’s a document floating around on social media claiming to summarize the US demands, and about half of it is fabricated. Ignore it. You don’t need the fake version. The real version, confirmed by Carney’s own mouth and sourced reporting, is damning enough on its own. . . .

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Again, worth reading in full. 

If this writer is correct, Trump’s trade war on Canada will prove to have been one of his bigger mistakes.

And that’s saying something.

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The Solo cups never lie:

Here’s which party is better on the economy, jobs, and the debt.

MUST SHARE II

The President of Kazakhstan calls Trump, don of the Mar-A-Lago mafia (2 minutes).

R.I.P.

Though I never met her, I felt I knew Dolly Parton; and, like everyone, I really liked her.

Here she is with my then-partner Scot Haller, whom we lost to AIDS 36 years ago:

And here’s a remembrance that has to make you smile.

Especially the part about her entering — and losing — a Dolly Parton look-alike contest.

CLEAR THINKING ON IRAN

From Foreign Affairs: Maximum Pressure on Iran Will Fail.

I hope they’re wrong; but then I had hoped he’d make good on the bonds he once issued, too.   I figured: with his own name on the bonds, he’d never let them default.  Plus — how can lose money running a casino?

Everything Trump Touches Dies.  Bad news for almost everyone — though not China, Russia, North Korea, or the measles.

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And now the Republican line is that Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders (who is not a member of a group called the Democratic Socialists of America, which has platform planks like getting rid of police and prisons that no one actually running for office supports) are all full-on socialists or communists.

So I wonder:

IS AOC A COMMIE?

Watch her answer here.

(Sorry to shout, but I really hope you watch — 90 seconds).

IT’S THE DATA CENTERS, STUPID

Or so argues Ryan Busse here.  What Democrats should do, he says (in effect) is demagog this issue.

That might certainly work in specific districts where voters — quite reasonably — oppose data centers.  But as a nation we are surely going to need them, because artificial intelligence is the future, scary though that is in many ways — I’m an apocaloptimist, as you may recall — and ceding the future to China is probably not the best idea.

So, no: it’s not the data centers, at least as a national policy plank.

(Vaguely related good news: China will not be invading Taiwan any time soon.  For more, ask your A.I.  Which is why we need data centers.)

(More vaguely related good news: the harder it is to find sites for data centers, the more valuable, I like to think, RNGE‘s business model of reclaiming abandoned Appalachian mine sites for use as data centers becomes.  I think the stock, though up five-fold from where we bought it, could climb another ten-fold over the next few years — though a bet to be made ONLY with money you can truly afford to lose.)

AI APOCALYPSE . . . NOW?

A discussion on Pod Save America that might be of interest:

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Is AI set to destroy the world, or could it all just be a bubble?  Why does Sam Altman want ChatGPT to monitor everything you do on your computer? Who is set to win the AI Game of Thrones?  Casey Newton, editor of the tech newsletter Platformer and co-host of Hard Fork, joins Tommy to talk about the hype and doom surrounding the world-changing technology and to unpack what could happen to us now that AI models are learning to outsmart their creators.  The two discuss the eccentric billionaires recklessly promoting the industry, how far behind the United States is when it comes to AI guardrails, and why Silicon Valley doesn’t seem to understand what Americans actually want from the technology.

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Have a great week.

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Moderates See Socialists as a Threat to the Democratic Party. Socialists Agree

. . . is that the DSA — the Democratic Socialists of America — is a small membership organization, not a political party, and that Bernie Sanders does not belong to it. 

Many of its aims are wonderful — who doesn’t want a crime-free society that requires no police or prisons? — but no Democrats I know of advocate crazy stuff like that.

It would be so much easier if Bernie, AOC, Zohran, et al, simply said, “because we don’t embrace all the platform planks of the Democratic Socialists of America, we will henceforth call ourselves Social Democrats to avoid confusion . . . while working hard to advance the many DSA aims, like universal health care and taxing billionaires, with which we do agree.”

But now let’s talk about socialism for a minute — this dread word Republicans love to scare people with.  Most Republicans are socialists!  They support public roads and public schools and public police forces (though billionaires have private security) and public fire departments.  They support Social Security!  They support Medicare!  (17 Years Later, ‘Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare’ Guy Still Wants Government Hands Off His Medicare.)

All these things are socialist.

Not to say that, as a practical matter, Democrats should embrace the label.  It’s just too toxic.

But c’mon: think about it.

Political ideology is a continuum that runs all the way from pure communism on the left, which always leads to economic failure and tyranny (e.g., North Korea today, and China before it went largely capitalist and started minting billionaires) — no one wants that — to pure cruel unregulated untaxed Darwinian libertarian capitalism on the right (no one wants that, either; well, maybe Elon Musk when he’s on acid).

Most Democrats want to nudge us a little further left — more like Canada and Europe and Australia and Japan, say; plus a pluralistic society that celebrates diversity, agrees with Ronald Reagan on immigration, values civility, competence , and compassion . . . while Trump and the Epstein class who currently control all three branches of our government want to nudge us more toward what I guess might be called the Putin model of oligarchy, nationalism, and intolerance.

Note that economic growth under the socialist-style 90% percent top tax rate of Eisenhower — and under the only moderately less socialist-style 70% top tax rate of JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Ford — was significantly stronger than it has been since Reagan started cutting taxes on the rich.

Those cuts, amplified by Bush 43 and Trump, have accompanied slower growth, weaker wage gains, and massively higher National Debt.  Not to mention social-fabric-destroying inequality.

So if you’re a MAGA Republican who wants to see our economy — and your personal economy — thrive, and our national finances gradually brought back from the brink, you just might want to vote Democrat. 

Which brings me to:

SPAM PACS

Yesterday’s I offered this piece about what underlies the swarm of texts and emails we all get — like a swarm of mosquitos — asking urgently for $15 by midnight.

It may not be worth your time to read in full, but the highlights, I think, are important:

“I’m a political scientist who studies money in politics,” writes Adam Bonica, “but I’m also a lifelong Democrat. I believe my party is doing itself a disservice by following Republicans down this dark path.”

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Spam PACs rarely operate in isolation. My analysis of FEC data shows that they cluster into networks linked by a small number of treasurers who oversee multiple committees at once. . . .

[From 2011] through 2025, Harry Pascal’s network of eight PACs raised more than $390 million from individual donors. According to my analysis of FEC filings, roughly $20 million of that went directly to Democratic candidates, or funded independent expenditures supporting them. Another $100 million or so covered field and get-out-the-vote programs and the payroll to staff them, and roughly $20 million went to administrative costs. The rest — an estimated $249 million, or 64 cents of every dollar raised — went to fundraising itself.

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“Among the fundraising ads run by the largest spam PACs,” Bonica found, “between 70 and 85 percent of impressions are delivered to users 65 and older.”

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Whether or not those who operate this fundraising model recognize or intend it, fundraising spam runs on similar psychological levers to those that the FBI and AARP identify as hallmarks of elder financial exploitation: manufactured urgency, emotional appeals engineered to trigger guilt or fear, false exclusivity, fabricated account or profile statuses that look like official notices, and relentless pressure to give before there’s time to think.

Why stamp “FINAL ATTEMPT” on a message and warn that “the deadline is just hours away” if not to manufacture urgency?

Why claim that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries have emailed you, then demand an answer to their “desperate pleas” if not to trigger guilt?

Why warn that Social Security checks will be “SLASHED by $500/month?!” — up from the $460 in the email sent two days earlier — if not to stoke fear?

Why tell someone they are “the only Democrat in your city who hasn’t responded” if not to single them out?

Why announce a recipient’s “appointment to the Social Security Advisory Board” above a picture of a Social Security card if not to dress a solicitation as official business?

Why the midnight deadlines, the countdown timers, the “400% MATCH” that applies only if you give right now, if not to force a decision before reflection can intervene?

Even someone with no moral objection to these tactics should mind their cost. They poison the entire Democratic ecosystem, warping incentives for organizations and candidates alike. For campaigns, the draw is fundraising without the traditional work of fundraising — no grueling hours dialing for dollars, no donor dinners, no need to build genuine grassroots enthusiasm. Simply hire a digital firm and let the consultants tap into the pipeline.

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It’s some comfort that . . .

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Only about 20 percent of Democratic congressional candidates hire the high-volume digital fundraising firms used by spam PACs. But those candidates raised a combined $570 million from captive spam donors. The remaining 80 percent of Democratic candidates who stayed outside the spam ecosystem raised just $37 million from these donors.

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And yet . . .

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This fundraising model is a parasite on the party, enriching outside consultants while steadily starving the host. Republicans succumbed to it first, watching their own grassroots donor base hollow out in real time. If Democrats don’t change course, they are headed into the exact same donor death spiral.

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Not great to read that . . .

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The party’s platform champions protecting the vulnerable. Its fundraising apparatus exploits them. The party’s official campaign committees, which should set the standard, are instead some of the worst offenders. Emails and texts from the DCCC and the DSCC feature similarly aggressive fundraising pleas and draw heavily from captive spam donors.

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(A lawyer for the DSCC and DCCC whom I admire pushed back that the committees do not target the elderly — which I believe.  But Bonica responds: “This piece makes no claim that either committee targets donor solicitations by age; the finding concerns who responds, not whom they are aimed at.”)

Note that Bonica did not include the DNC with its sister committees.

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The good news is that change is possible. After I published a series of articles on Substack last summer about deceptive fundraising practices, ActBlue leadership reached out to me to discuss the platform’s response. Soon after, ActBlue announced its most significant crackdown on deceptive fundraising to date. . . .

There has been other movement in the right direction. The Democratic National Committee, led by Ken Martin, launched an effort to stop PACs from trading on the Democratic name without actually supporting Democratic candidates.

But these reforms have not been enough. . . .

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More is needed.

Beware spam PACs.

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AVOID HOLY WARS! 

We didn’t vote for this war, and we sure didn’t vote for a Holy War.  Watch! (90 seconds)

Also . . .

AVOID SPAM PACS!

Hook and Squeeze: How Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.

Be sure you know whom you’re giving to.

Which leads me too . . .

OOPS

Bill Clinton’s wonderful speech I posted yesterday turns out to have been fake.

Fortunately, whoever wrote it, human or otherwise, did a great job — and in a just cause! — so it’s still well worth watching.

But it’s scary to think how people like me, who’ve known the guy for 40+ years, could watch for 21 minutes and not have a clue.

(In hindsight, there were some tells — why was he plugging The Bluebill . . . I guess that’s likely who wrote the speech — but my guard was down and I lapped it up.)

Scarier still to think AI will be twice as powerful in 6 months, and twice again more in a year.

Boy, do we ever need honest, thoughtful, brilliant people to lead us into the future.

A couple of you sent helpful suggestions:

→ “When you click on a YouTube video, select ‘description.’  They disclose when it’s made with AI.”

→ Steve Brill’s latest venture: NewsGuard AI.

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