Updated on February 1 at 10:06 ET

The Democrats are angry. Well, at least some of them.

For months, party activists have felt bitter about Kamala Harris’s election loss, and incensed at the leaders who first went along with Joe Biden’s decision to run again. They feel fresh outrage each time a new detail is revealed about the then-81-year-old’s enfeeblement and its concealment by the advisers in charge. But right now, what’s making these Democrats angriest is that many of their elected leaders don’t seem angry at all.

“I assumed that we would be prepared to meet the moment, and I was wrong,” Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun-control group Moms Demand Action, told me. “It’s like they’ve shown up to a knife fight with a cheese stick.”

For all the people in Watts’s camp, the party’s response to Donald Trump’s first 12 days in office has been maddening at best and demoralizing at worst. After Trump issued pardons or commutations for the January 6 rioters last week, including the ones who attacked police officers, no immediate chorus of anger came from what is supposed to be the next generation of Democratic talent, including Maryland Governor Wes Moore, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another 2028 hopeful, who is on tour selling a young-adult version of her autobiography, has told interviewers, “I am not out looking for fights. I am always looking to collaborate.”

After Trump threatened Colombia with tariffs, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attempted to reassure the confused and fearful rank and file with the reminder that “God is still on the throne,” which seemed a little like saying, “Jesus, take the wheel.” And people were baffled after the Democratic National Committee responded on X to Trump’s first week in office by channeling a quainter time in American politics and dusting off an Obama-era slogan to accuse him of being “focused on Wall Street—not Main Street.” “Get new material!” one person suggested in the replies, a succinct summary of the other 1,700 comments.

[Will Freeman: Strong-arming Latin America will work until it doesn’t]

The limp messaging continued this week, after Trump’s administration on Monday issued a federal-funding freeze, including for cancer research and programs such as Meals on Wheels. The next day, Jeffries called for an emergency caucus meeting to hammer out a forceful “three-pronged counter-offensive.” But that emergency meeting would not actually take place until the following afternoon. (By the time lawmakers were dialing in, the White House had already rescinded the order.) Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, scowling over his glasses, offered his own sleepy—and slightly unsettling—assessment of the moment: “I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time.”

Some Democrats say they are hopeful that a new chair of the DNC, who will be elected today, will give the now-rudderless party a bit of direction—a way to harness all that arousal. The committee leads the party’s fundraising apparatus and coordinates with its sister organizations on Senate and House campaigns. But a chair can’t do much if the party’s own lawmakers aren’t willing to swap out the mozzarella for something a little sharper.

Part of the hurdle for Democrats is that they are afraid of sounding shrill. Few are eager for a return of the frantic and indiscriminate alarm-sounding that characterized the response to Trump 1.0, when Democrats clamored for the release of the supposed pee tapes and wore pink pussy hats in protest. There’s something cringey, these days, about reviving the capital-R Resistance—especially because Trump’s second win can’t be chalked up to some fluke; he won the popular vote, fair and square. Most Democrats acknowledge that, this time around, they should choose their targets carefully. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” Jeffries told reporters yesterday morning.

But Democrats can’t just stand idly by the plate, several frustrated progressive activists and movement leaders told me. They should be communicating to voters that Trump “is shutting down the government, and stripping it for parts to sell to billionaires,” April Glick Pulito, a progressive communications strategist, said. But Democrats aren’t getting it across, a reality that is disheartening, she told me, but also symbolic. “It’s part of why we fuckin’ lost,” she said. “It’s why people stayed home.” She and others I spoke with are demanding that Democrats be louder and more forceful—using resolutions and press conferences, sure, but also creative social-media campaigns and stunts for the cameras. “Speak like normal people, on platforms that normal people access,” Watts said. “I am not reading your press release. Get on every platform I’m on—talk to me on an Instagram reel, or a Substack live. Tweet things that explain what’s happening and how I can help or what you’re going to do to fix it.”

Some Democratic lawmakers have been doing this. People I talked with pointed to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has regularly gone live on Instagram to spell out the consequences of Trump’s actions. They also pointed to Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker’s vow to thwart unlawful deportation efforts and his new directive blocking any pardoned January 6 rioters from serving in the state government.

But Democrats across the ideological spectrum say they want more from their leaders. Dullness in political messaging is death, they say, and bland consultant-speak is plaguing the party, which right now seems totally incapable of grabbing any voter’s attention. A clear example of this was when Democratic leaders chose 74-year-old Gerry Connolly, who is not exactly a fiery communicator, to head up the House Oversight Committee over Ocasio-Cortez, Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the grassroots group Indivisible, told me. That choice indicates “a failure to recognize the political and media moment that we’re in.”

A party that is in the minority in both chambers of Congress usually doesn’t have a prayer of blocking legislation, but it can gum up the works. Dozens of Democratic senators have so far voted in support of Trump’s Cabinet nominees when they should be opposing them at every turn, these frustrated activists argue, along with rejecting unanimous consent agreements, voting against cloture, and requesting quorum calls. “They should be slowing everything to a halt,” Amanda Litman, a co-founder of the organization Run for Something, told me.

Glick Pulito compared the Democrats’ situation to a sketch from the Netflix comedy show I Think You Should Leave, in which a man wearing a hot-dog suit crashes a hot-dog-shaped car into a store and proceeds to look around wildly for the culprit. “I don’t want to see Chuck Schumer saying Congress should act,” Glick Pulito said. “Bro, you are Congress!”

Some signs have emerged that Democrats are developing a wartime footing. A group of 23 attorneys general from across the country sued the Trump administration this week over its funding freeze. The former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz came out of election-loss-induced retirement to go on a cable-news rampage about it. (“They defrosted him!” Glick Pulito said.) And when the White House rescinded its funding block, Democrats claimed a grassroots victory. “FAFO,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “I am more optimistic now than I was 48 hours ago,” Levin told me. “I am seeing some green shoots. I would like those to bloom into full-fledged flowers.”

[Elaine Godfrey: The resistance almost missed impeachment]

A new DNC chair, activists and progressives leaders hope, could at least be the Miracle-Gro for that process. Since Harris lost and Biden left, Democrats have been leaderless and agenda-free. Any conversations about the party’s brand troubles or its plan for handling the next four years have been haphazard and localized. Ken Martin and Ben Wikler, the two top candidates for the DNC chair job, both have the confidence of the activists I spoke with, not least because both have led political operations from outside the D.C. Beltway. Both men say they understand that people are frustrated. “If we don’t stand up now,” Martin, head of the Minnesota Democrats, told me, “then how in the hell are people going to believe that we’re going to fight for them and their families when we’re back in power?” This is a period of transition, Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin state party, told me: “Very soon, the battle will be well and truly joined.”

But the cavalry’s arrival may not mean much. The DNC has always occupied an amorphous role in the Democratic Party; it holds little sway with congressional leadership, and won't exactly shape the party's ideological future. That reality was on display this week during a chaotic DNC candidate forum characterized by a fixation on diversity issues, constant interruptions from climate-change activists, and frustrated outbursts from the audience.

The scene was indicative of a party not only struggling to fill a leadership vacuum but also stumbling beneath the weight of a tarnished brand, an unhappy base, and a growing reputation for fecklessness.

This article originally misstated the DNC's role in the Democratic Party.

The most surprising thing about Donald Trump is that there are still people here, in the year 2025, who retain the capacity to be surprised by Donald Trump. The man has no depths to plumb, contains no multitudes; to scratch his surface is to know the man entirely. We know that what he wants most in life is for the voices on his television to be praising him. We know that the biggest reason he ran for a second term is to avoid jail and that, now that he’s back, his main goal is to make off with as much money as he can. We know what kind of president he will be (bad) and how he’ll leave the country (worse). Trump is often described as a “pugilist” in the press. I’m not sure people know what that word means, because he’d be awful at pugilism. All of Trump’s punches are telegraphed.

Nevertheless, D.C. Democrats seem to be some of the last people to learn that there is nothing left to learn about Trump. Trump’s first week back seems to have caught them off guard, so much so that they’ve largely spent the last few days tiptoeing around as multiple crises unfolded. They’ve been careful, circumspect, cautious—and they’ve gotten absolutely banjaxed as a result. It wasn’t until Trump tried to turn off the entire federal government that they recovered a bit of fighting spirit, vowing to escalate the conflict with the GOP into a “street fight.”  

It’s great that they got there in the end; I look forward to this street fight, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Still, one of the Democrats’ big problems is the sheer number of times you can use the word “belatedly” to describe their reactions. It might have been better if Democrats had actually used the time between Trump getting reelected and Trump getting inaugurated to prepare to confront the things that Trump spent over a year saying he was going to do.

On Tuesday morning, The Bulwark’s Sam Stein reported on BlueSky that Democrats were planning to do a press conference on Trump’s decision to pardon the January 6ers—which occurred a full week prior—even as the effects of the Trump administration’s funding freeze were making headlines. The Democrats’ approach raises serious questions about their pathological inability to participate in the modern news cycle. Moreover, the pardoning of the January 6ers became a fait accompli the moment Trump won the election. The time to start raising a hue and cry over those pardons was thus November. 

Stein noted this lag: “Two parties running at different speeds.… Unclear if there is a presser today to go after the OMB’s power play to take over all federal grant money.” Democrats actually did manage to work the breaking news story into their brief in a rare display of nimbleness. But despite the hasty agenda change, Democrats seemed as if they’d not been following the political news for a staggeringly long amount of time. “Last night,” Chuck Schumer said of Trump’s attacks on the civil service, “President Trump plunged the country into chaos without a shred of warning.”

Trump’s actions were of course preceded by copious warnings, most notably in the form of Trump repeatedly saying that he planned to tear down the civil service and replace it with loyalists willing to use the federal government as his own instrument of plunder and revenge. In addition to these warnings, many stories generated well ahead of time elucidated Trump’s purge plans—a tightly reported piece from Jonathan Swan in Axios and two well-trafficked features from The New York Times and Vanity Fair among the biggest stories detailing Trump’s shock-and-awe schemes for the civil service. 

Readers of this very newsletter know that I wrote about Trump’s plot back in September 2022, using my patented journalism technique of listening to what Republicans say they are going to do and then writing it down and publishing it to the internet. All of these stories, based on nothing more than the public statements and documented plans of Donald Trump and his cronies, are what we in the biz would call a “warning.” 

There’s a long list of bad habits that Democrats need to break at this point, but we’ll add this to the list: Be ready to respond to the things that Republicans plan to do when they’ve given you several months of head start. If there is a takeaway for Democrats after Trump’s first 10 days in office, it’s that procrastination and lollygagging really kills. Fortunately, there’s still an easy way for them to get two steps ahead of the curve.

For instance, it’s never been a mystery that Project 2025 has essentially been the punch list for Trump’s second term—the White House is already very dutifully ticking items off. Any uncertainty about this ended this week when it was discovered that metadata in the Trump administration’s OPM memos indicated that they shared authors with the Project 2025 manifesto. Once that was publicly disclosed, the administration rather clumsily attempted to scrub that metadata from those memos. 

Based upon all of this, it seems pretty clear that this administration is just going to keep making its way through Project 2025’s pages. Democrats could probably finagle a copy of that document, given that it is publicly available, and maybe even start messaging against it.

Another thing I recommend Democrats get ahead of is the Trump administration’s plans to enact a national abortion ban. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Republicans can be pretty cagey and evasive when confronted on this matter. Here’s a fun fact: Several Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices even told Democrats during their confirmation hearing that Roe was “settled law” before they actually went and unsettled it. Chances are good, folks, that Republicans are actually doing this thing colloquially known as “lying.”

Yes, I know that Trump has repeatedly said that he would not sign a national abortion ban that comes across his desk into law. In the first place, yes, he absolutely would (see above: “lying”), but more importantly, he does not need a bill to arrive on his desk to enact a ban. As we have rather relentlessly reported here at The New Republic, Trump’s Department of Justice will enforce a law that’s already on the books known as the Comstock Act to ban abortion, something that Vice President JD Vance asked Merrick Garland’s DOJ to do when he was still an Ohio senator. 

There is no reason Democrats can’t simply count the contents of Project 2025 and a national abortion ban as done deals, things the GOP is going to roll out sooner or later, and start publicly sparring about them, along with the GOP’s other antisocial and unpopular plans. Republicans will complain, and there’s definitely a strain of pundits who will disapprove, but remember: Those people suck, and being on their bad side is evidence of good politics. Besides, with no legislative majority and thus no prospect of enacting legislation, Democrats may as well spend their time fighting the GOP, complaining about their ideas, and working the refs. 

Democrats have some reason to feel a little gun-shy about ramping up these kinds of attacks. The media, too often, reported on Trump’s denials of Project 2025 and his assertions about signing a national abortion ban way too credulously. But that’s a reason to start naming and shaming the media personages who got it so badly wrong. More to the point, Democrats need to spur, if not entirely resuscitate, a popular opposition to Trump and start planning an electoral referendum of what will be another round of failure and misrule. That begins with something that resembles energy and action, no matter how constrained you may be in parliamentary terms.

You look stupid when you’re a week late to a news story, and pathetic when saying you weren’t warned about the stuff that Trump publicly and repeatedly said he’s going to do. This administration wants to burn it all down, and measured responses won’t work as a counter; you can’t wait for your lawyers to go over the text of Trump’s executive orders and for your pollsters to focus-group the optimal response. Besides, you shouldn’t need to when you can just say, “Trump is fucking up the country and plundering the federal government.” Hopefully this week will prove to be a teachable moment heralding a quick course correction, because there’s one thing that Democrats can never say about Trump’s plans: that they weren’t told.

A company spokesperson said Amazon will outsource deliveries to smaller contractors. The spokesperson insisted that the decision was tied to cost savings — not the recent unionization of about 200 employees at the Laval, Que. warehouse. 

Let’s not bicker and argue about who murdered who.

From my perspective on a university campus where I’ve had occasion to see it in action lately, the ADL has turned into a straight-up reactionary organization, that is is eager to treat a completely unambiguous Nazi salute by the president of the United States’s current BFF as an “awkward gesture.”

The post People, this is supposed to be a HAPPY occasion appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Last week, the Border Patrol conducted raids on farm workers in Bakersfield, California.

Acres of orange fields sat unpicked in Kern County this week as word of Border Patrol raids circulated through Messenger chats and images of federal agents detaining laborers spread on local Facebook groups. 

The Border Patrol conducted unannounced raids throughout Bakersfield on Tuesday, descending on businesses where day laborers and field workers gather. Agents in unmarked SUVs rounded up people in vans outside a Home Depot and gas station that serves a breakfast popular with field workers. 

This appears to be the first large-scale Border Patrol raid in California since the election of Donald Trump, coming just a day after Congress certified the election on January 6, in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency. The panic and confusion, for both immigrants and local businesses that rely on their labor, foreshadow what awaits communities across California if Trump follows through on his promise to conduct mass deportations.

“It was profiling, it was purely field workers,” said Sara Fuentes, store manager of the local gas station. Fuentes said that at 9 a.m., when the store typically gets a rush of workers on their way to pick oranges, two men in civilian clothes and unmarked Suburbans started detaining people outside the store. “They didn’t stop people with FedEx uniforms, they were stopping people who looked like they worked in the fields.” Fuentes says one customer pulled in just to pump gas and agents approached him and detained him.

Fuentes has lived in Bakersfield all her life and says she’s never seen anything like it. In one instance, she said a man and woman drove up to the store together, and the man went inside. Border Patrol detained the man as he walked out, Fuentes said, and then demanded the woman get out of the vehicle. When she refused, another agency parked his vehicle behind the woman, blocking her car. Fuentes said it wasn’t until the local Univision station showed up that Border Patrol agents backed up their car and allowed the woman to leave. 

Fuentes says none of the regular farm workers showed up to buy breakfast on Wednesday morning. “No field workers at all,” she said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment. On social media, Gregory K. Bovino, the Border Patrol chief in El Centro, called the sweeps “Operation Return to Sender.” 

“We are taking it to the bad people and bad things in Bakersfield,” the El Centro Border Patrol said in response to a comment on its Facebook page. “We are planning operations for other locals (sic) such as Fresno and especially Sacramento.”

“We’re in the middle of our citrus harvesting. This sent shockwaves through the entire community,” said Casey Creamer, president of the industry group California Citrus Mutual, on Thursday. “People aren’t going to work and kids aren’t going to school. Yesterday about 25% of the workforce, today 75% didn’t show up.”

He pushed back on the Border Patrol’s claims they’re targeting bad people. He said they appeared to be general sweeps of workers. 

“If this is the new normal, this is absolute economic devastation,” said Richard S. Gearhart, an associate professor of economics at Cal State-Bakersfield. 

Video at the link.

The United Farmworkers Union published advice in Spanish and English on Bluesky. I saw these graphics again last night, so another raid may be in progress or expected.

There have been demonstrations against the raids in Fresno, Salinas, and Bakersfield.

More to come.

The post It Begins appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to believe Meta is "returning to its roots" with today's announcement about "free expression." What he's actually doing is showing us his true colors.

This morning, Meta announced it's killing its fact-checking program, loosening content moderation, and moving its trust and safety teams from California to Texas (because, apparently, neutral content moderation has a zip code now). The timing couldn't be more transparent: Trump wins the election, and suddenly Meta discovers a burning passion for "free speech."

Let's look at how they rolled this out: Joel Kaplan, a former George W. Bush adviser freshly promoted to Chief Global Affairs Officer, went straight to Fox & Friends to make the announcement. Not CNN, not MSNBC, not even a tech publication. Fox News. The message wasn't subtle: Meta is ready to be a team player in Trump's America.

"We've got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference," Kaplan told Fox News, apparently hoping we'd all forgotten that Trump has repeatedly threatened to sue news organizations and nominated an FBI director who wants to target critical media outlets.

But Meta's hypocrisy runs deeper than just convenient timing. While they're publicly championing "free expression," they're actively suppressing it within their own walls. As 404 Media reported this morning, Meta is deleting internal employee criticism of their new board member Dana White—you know, the UFC president who was caught on video slapping his wife in a nightclub. Apparently, "free expression" doesn't extend to pointing out inconvenient facts about company leadership.

And let's talk about that "commitment to free expression." Just yesterday, at revealed that Meta had been blocking teenagers from searching LGBTQ-related content for months, hiding it under "sensitive content" restrictions while letting creepy right-wing "tradwife" content flourish. Only after getting caught did they claim it was an "error." Funny how these "errors" keep happening to the same communities, isn't it?

This isn't about Meta being scared of Trump. It's about Zuckerberg recognizing an opportunity. He's not capitulating to pressure; he's aligning himself with power. There's a difference. The company that claimed it needed to protect teens from LGBTQ content is now suddenly concerned about having too many content restrictions. What changed? The political winds.

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Make no mistake: this is a calculated business decision. Meta is fighting antitrust cases, hoping for government help against TikTok, seeking regulatory approval for various AI initiatives, and looking to curry favor with an administration that rewards loyalty.

The cynicism here is staggering. Meta isn't "returning to its roots"—it's revealing them. They're not championing free expression; they're showing us exactly what kind of company they've always been: one that will embrace whatever ideology serves its bottom line.

But hey, at least we can all rest easy knowing that Meta's trust and safety teams will be working from Texas now. Because nothing says "we believe in free expression" quite like moving your content moderators to a different state to prove you're not too "woke."

And there you have it. A tech company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, led by a man who once promised to "bring the world closer together," is now openly choosing to align itself with authoritarianism. Not because they have to, but because they want to. The most disturbing part isn't that Zuckerberg is making this choice—it's that he clearly thinks we're all too stupid to see exactly what he's doing.

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And while you’re here…

I want to use this space to promote my friend Ana Marie Cox’s writing workshop.

I've known Ana for years and she's a wonderful, talented person and writer. For a few years now, she's been teaching a workshop for people who want to write about their recovery. Her next session starts on January 21st, and if you're at all interested in diving into your own recovery story, I know she gears the class to be as friendly as possible to all kinds of people—you don't need any experience writing or be in some kind of formal recovery. Here's what she sent me about it:

• It's the "Third Story Workshop," focused on helping people to own their recovery journey

• I taught writing workshops at treatment centers for years before bringing this out to the world, since everyone is recovering from something

• In addition to recovery from addiction, people have taken it to deal with grief, job loss, relationships ending and medical trauma.

• 11 weeks at 6:30pm ET/5:30pm CT, starts 1/21 and ends 4/8

• $1200 if you sign up in the next two weeks, $1500 after that... but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. I have several scholarship slots. People can contact me via the website anamariecox.com/contact

I also interviewed her about the newsletter last year, if you want to check that out: