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Of the various teams that I follow most closely, one of them — that would be the Democratic Party — saw its brief winning streak upended, while another one of them simply does not know how to lose. A tenacious defense, especially in the red zone, and the talent to overcome their leader’s occasional blunders...the Democrats could learn a lot by emulating the Philadelphia Eagles. If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here. Americans out fighting for democracy while their Senate works to destroy it This weekend, a computer safety researcher in Chicago named Kyle Kingsbury wrote an essay that quickly went viral describing what everyday life has become in parts of America’s third-largest city, in the face of a federal “blitz” seeking to grab and deport thousands of immigrants there. The piece is just as grim as Edward R. Murrow reporting from bombed-out London in 1940, except the air raid sirens have been replaced by a beehive of warning whistles. There are beeping texts about four neighbors abducted from a nearby drugstore, and mounting anger over masked federal agents waving guns as they storm a preschool and drag out a popular teacher. But there also is a section that brings me hope. Kingsbury writes: “I want you to understand what it is to love Chicago. To see your neighbors make the heartbreaking choice between showing up for work or staying safe. To march two miles long, calling out: “This is what Chicago sounds like!” To see your representatives put their bodies on the line and their voices in the fight. To form patrols to walk kids safely to school. To join rapid-response networks to document and alert your neighbors to immigration attacks. For mutual aid networks to deliver groceries and buy out street vendors so they can go home safe. To see your local journalists take the federal government to court. To talk to neighbor after neighbor, friend after friend, and hear yes, yes, it’s all hands on deck. “I want you to understand Chicago.” This is how I’d always planned to begin this week’s newsletter, sharing the gospel of how everyday Americans confronted with growing fascism — spreading across a nation long thought to be fearful, soft, and compliant — are instead fighting back with a tenacity that just darn well might save our fragile democracy. With Chicago as Ground Zero, but not alone. And so I decided to keep this beginning even after Sunday night’s demoralizing, shattering news that seven Democratic senators and one Independent who caucuses with them, aided and abetted behind closed doors by others unknown, had cowardly betrayed the American freedom that folks on the streets of Little Village or Evanston in tear gas-soaked Chicagoland are racing into the foggy abyss to defend. Like so many who stand in opposition to Donald Trump’s tyrannical regime, I was appalled to learn of the centrist Democrats’ plan to reopen the shuttered federal government after a more-than 40 day shutdown while getting next to nothing in return — just a handshake for a future Senate vote on blocking astronomical healthcare price increases that is all but guaranteed to lead nowhere. I’m going to talk about both hope and despair in this newsletter so let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. The craven Democrats who caved in this weekend made an unforgivably horrible mistake, both morally and politically. I get their argument, which is basically this: Real people were getting badly hurt by the shutdown — federal workers not getting paid, food-aid recipients stiffed by Trump’s heartless ploys, and more — yet the GOP would never agree to the proposed healthcare fix because Republicans never compromise. Said Maine Sen. Angus King, a major proponent: “Standing up to Donald Trump doesn’t work.” Except on many levels it was working. Public opinion was strongly in support of Democrats fighting for affordable health care and standing their ground against Trump and Senate Republicans, and it was that sense of solidarity — apparently all an illusion — that powered the Democrats to coast-to-coast election wins last week. The era of good feeling that was supposed to last through the 2026 midterms is already over. From Day One, Trump treated the government shutdown in the style of a terrorist, hijacking whatever he thought Democrats would miss most — from government paychecks (but excluding the troops) to food aid, or SNAP, to airplane flights in and out of blue cities — and holding them hostage. The reason we, as a society, won’t pay any price to get back hostages, no matter how beloved, is because capitulation only brings more terrorism. Now, Trump has new proof that Democrats can be bullied. It was no coincidence that seemingly minutes after the preliminary cloture vote paved the way for the “deal” to end the shutdown, Trump World revealed that more than 70 people tied to the election interference of 2020, including the president’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, have been given presidential pardons. Trump should be feeling low after last week’s election shellacking and his low approval ratings, but eight quislings in the Democratic Party have given a dictator new life. I know some people are saying that the calls for revenge against the Democrats are only coming from folks on Bluesky who hate Trump with the fire of 1,000 suns and who don’t get Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program benefits. But actually some of the fiercest voices screaming at the Democrats are those who were being personally hurt by the shutdown, but saw something bigger than themselves in this aborted fight. “We’ve been put through hell for weeks, constantly having our ability to simply feed ourselves dangled in front of our faces, our survival used as a bargaining chip, told it was for a reason,” a SNAP recipient emailed independent journalist Marisa Kabas after the Democrats caved. “Our suffering would prevent even more suffering and it would be temporary and worth it to save healthcare for millions. And now it’s all for nothing. They stood for nothing.” Once again, the Democrats fail to understand that perception is what matters in politics, much more than anything else. You can argue the policy specifics until you’re blue in the face, but millions of angry and discontented Americans want mainly to believe that someone is fighting for them, somewhere. and for an all too brief moment they nearly did. Now, many of us don’t know who to trust when the choice we’re given are a deranged dictator or his feckless appeasers. Which carries me back to Chicago, where computer engineers and plumbers and home health aides and other regular folks — not able to retreat into their money or vast carelessness or whatever keeps the elites of the Democratic Party together — are putting it all on the line to show we don’t want fascist-thug stuff happening on U.S. soil. Those everyday citizens who get up in the face of Trump’s secret police goons instead of running away from them, who are out in the streets blowing whistles and warning their neighbors, who are dodging and occasionally taking pepper-ball shots or choking on tear gas to let ICE know they are not welcome, have restored so much of the faith in this country that I lost around dawn on Nov. 6 of last year. Most Americans are good. Most Americans want a free society. They will fight for their community. Chicago, and the rest of this tortured land, deserves a government as good and as brave as the people defending it, and we don’t have it. The Angus Kings, John Fettermans, Jeanne Shaheens, and Chuck Schumers will be remembered by the history books as craven appeasers, and nothing more. They do not deserve one moment of peace until good people can force them off a platform they do not deserve. Primary every one of them until we have a Congress comprised of the people blowing the whistles, not the people hosting swank fundraisers. As the Democrats become the irrelevant Whigs of a new century, I’d love to see the best people forming a new political party from the ashes. Call it the Courage Party. We already know who is ineligible. Yo, do this! Ask me anything Question: Which party will toss more lawmakers in the 2026 election given the backlash over the Dem shutdown fold? Which senior legislators may go leaving open key committee chairs? — Old Dog (@the-old-dog.bsky.social) via Bluesky Answer: Great question, Old Dog! It’s gotten little attention, but the next Congress that arrives in January 2027 is all but certain to be the most radically different (and maybe radical) legislature since the post-Watergate revolution of 1974. And this was before Sunday’s Senate capitulation deal that stirred up fresh talk of many Democratic primaries. One reason is that the gerontocracy is winding down; Nancy Pelosi, Chicago’s Jan Schakowsky, and Philly’s own Dwight Evans will be gone, and probably replaced by folks to their political left. But also, both parties will likely lose key veterans because of the frenzy over mid-decade partisan gerrymandering, especially Texas Democrats (the great Rep. Al Green, for example) and California Republicans. The political world at the end of this decade will look very different, so fasten your seat belt. What you’re saying about... Like most experiments, my attempt at asking a question about the 2025 elections and hoping people could wait a day, until the results, to respond was a complete bust. The handful who did write back to me during Election Day were right, however, in their cautious optimism about an exercise of democracy. Wrote Roger Morgan: “I’m hopeful this election could be the turning point where some, maybe even just a necessary few Republicans in Congress will grow a pair and do the right thing because of the message sent by the voters.” Added Eileen O’Rourke: “The number of people driving past who honked their horns (including truckers and SEPTA bus drivers), gave fist bumps, thumbs up, etc. made me realize how the ‘silent majority’ is finding their collective voices.” 📮 This week’s question: A no-brainer. Do you think moderate Senate Democrats had no other choice but to vote to reopen the federal government with zero guarantees of affordable health care, or are you angry that these Capitol Hill Dems caved in to a bully? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Senate Dem deal” in the subject line. History lesson on how Dick Cheney created Trump Your mother probably told you that if you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, don’t say anything — especially when that person just perished. But I’m going to ignore that advice and write a few words about the former vice president Dick Cheney, who died last week at age 84. Cheney’s unfailing belief in his own rightness, and his willingness to lie to the public to impose the world he thought we needed, killed hundreds of thousands of people. Some of them were poor young Americans from West Virginia to Watts who’d hoped for a better life in the U.S. military, but the vast majority were everyday Iraqis, many of them women and children. No wonder Cheney’s approval rating dipped to little more than 20% — roughly that of Richard Nixon when he was forced to resign — by the end of a George W. Bush presidency in which many viewed the veep as the true commander-in-chief. Thanks to a heart transplant, Cheney stayed around long enough after his 2009 departure from the White House to take a shot at redemption, In 2024, in tandem with his heterodox daughter Liz, the former congresswoman, Cheney recorded several ads blasting the idea of a second term for Donald Trump. “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” he said in a spot unsuccessfully supporting his daughter’s reelection, calling his fellow Republican “a coward.” Many of the news accounts of Cheney’s death last week played up his late life turn against the GOP’s embrace of authoritarianism, but even here there was a strong whiff of hypocrisy. The Wyoming native worked most of his career pushing for the kind of government that would give oxygen to a potential demagogue like Trump who wanted to abuse the powers of the White House. Cheney, who rose to prominence as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in the wreckage of Watergate, long advocated for what became known as the unitary executive theory. Cheney long took umbrage at the 1973 War Powers Act in which Congress sought to reassert some of its authority around fighting overseas. “A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the 70s served to erode the authority, I think, the president needs to be effective especially in a national security area,” he said in a 2005 interview. Under his idea, the unitary executive had presidential powers that couldn’t be constrained by Congress or independent commissions. In his worldview, such an all-powerful commander-in-chief was needed to keep America safe from terrorist attacks like the one on Sept. 11, 2001. But Cheney really believed in a much broader realpolitik in which this imperial president didn’t have any obligation to the truth, which he abused in the campaign of blatant lies and media manipulation that fueled the 2003 Iraq War. In doing so, Cheney didn’t just foster a humanitarian nightmare 11,000 miles away, but he established the template for a president who would lie, neuter Congress, and fire independent watchdogs — not to prevent another 9/11, but to enrich himself and his family. Every time that the Trump regime blows up a boat in the Caribbean and claims the War Powers Act doesn’t apply, or when its leader takes control over the Justice Department to punish his political enemies, they are channeling the authoritarian spirit of Dick Cheney that will haunt America for generations to come. What I wrote on this date in 2021 Four years before Donald Trump returned to make a war on higher education in America a major focus of his second term, the University of Austin arrived as a John the Baptist-like harbinger of the upheavals that lay ahead. On Nov. 11, 2021, I wrote about the invention of the high-profile new university that co-founder Bari Weiss — on her glide path to become head of CBS News — and others dedicated to undoing what they saw as the major problem on campus, too much “wokeness.” I wrote: “The students who list pronouns as their biggest concerns aren’t the same as the ones who crowd campus food pantries to get enough calories to study without hunger pangs, or who worry constantly about whether any diploma will be worth debts that sometimes pass $100,000.” Read the rest: “‘Anti-woke’ University of Austin is right that college is ‘broken,’ but its founders are wrong about everything else.” Recommended Inquirer reading
