Dems Beg Dems to Act Like Dems

It's not just crazy progressives losing their minds about Dem leaders, it's other Dem leaders, too...

Jan. 30: Schumer chewed out by top Dems … House Dem recruiting for far-right ministry … Trump cuts off HIV drugs globally … Jan. 6 pardon recipient charged with sex assault on girl under 12 …

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Don’t get me wrong. As soon as word came that a military helicopter slammed into a commercial passenger jet last night — the first U.S. civilian passenger jet crash in 15 years and in the first ten days of the second Trump administration — as a good, knee-jerk leftie, my left knee jerked immediately to the possibility that Pres. Donald Trump’s leadership might somehow be implicated. Employees fired. Regulations deregulated. Who knows. But it’s too early to know. And there’s a good chance it’s so early in Trump’s term that nothing he did contributed to this.

On the other hand, it’s also possible that the chopper was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s designated driver and he ordered it to come pick him up at Fuddruckers and not stop for anything. We just don’t know. So TFN will wait, as unfun as that might be.

(On the other hand, we do know that Hegseth never in his life prayed as hard as he did last night, falling to his knees weeping and begging Jesus, Lord — for the love of God — please make the chopper pilot transgender.)

Dem Governors DEMand More from Senate Dems

Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at a news conference yesterday not making news. (Screengrab / AP video.)

People love the Trump-bashing. I get it. TFN loves it, too. It’s nutritious and fun for the whole family. We’ll keep doing it when the substance merits bashing. But America’s in its tenth year of Trump-bashing not making him go away. Something needs to change. Since that won’t be our Republican leaders, it needs to be our Democratic leaders.

Your tough-skinned TFN gets beat up once in a while for beating up on Democrats, so before we do so today, a few meta-points. TFN does not hate Dems or want Trump to win or any of that. TFN definitely doesn’t think Dems are all corrupt, 11-year prison sentence notwithstanding.

But when we see the people who work for us making mistakes, we speak up. For one thing, the party is not monolithic. Every day, competing factions fight over the Democratic Party’s identity. True Newsfuckers know that the bros — Wall Street, tech, and billionaire — relentlessly advocate their vision for the party. Which means Democratic leaders who disagree need to be able to provide evidence, when they make their case, that there are people out there who also disagree. Complaining about Democrats is helping the Democratic leaders who want change.

And I get that this can look like fractiousness and disunity and therefore freak the shit out of anxious people who will then tell me to shut up before I ruin it for everyone. But here’s the thing. Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t lose in November because of some big, significant Democratic rift. There was so much unity we got vibes off it. Progressives helped. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) played nice and everything. And what happened? Voters simply … stayed home.

So, I’m sorry that this messy process can be scary. But if people believe in democracy, they should act like it, and champion the mess. Fear of the mess is what makes tyranny seem appealing. So if people believe in democracy enough to fight Trump, they should fight for democracy at every level. Including within the party. And if they won’t take my word for it, how about Democratic governors?

Half a dozen Democratic governors told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a private call last night that Senate Democrats suuuuuuck need to do better. The New York Times got details of the call and, according to their report, the governors “all but begg[ed] the minority leader to persuade Senate Democrats to block whatever they could.”

Some Democrats, including 12 senators¹, voted for the bill Pres. Donald Trump signed yesterday, a law that handcuffs immigration law-enforcement by preventing them from exercising discretion over which people to handcuff. Some Democrats have helped confirm Trump nominees, including Sens. John Fetterman (D-PA), Ruben Gallegy (D-AZ), and Mark Kelly (D-AZ), voting to send former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) to run the Environmental Protection Agency into the poisoned ground.

Trump’s nominees would’ve gone through without Democratic votes. But Democrats could’ve drawn more attention to them. Raised the political price of confirmation. Denied them the fig-leaf of bipartisan confirmation. Democrats could’ve filibustered the immigration bill, protecting people more than their jobs.

And now it’s not just leftie hippie Marxist maniacs (present) saying so, it’s other Democratic leaders.

Because last night, Democratic governors let Schumer have it. They want Senate Democrats to stop voting for Trump nominees. They want Republican legislation slowed and Democrats to make stinkier stinks so the public notices what’s being voted on.

And Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) — remember him?!? — according to the Times,

“said Democrats needed to be more visible on television presenting an alternate vision of governing — not just complaining about what Mr. Trump is doing. Mr. Walz argued that Democrats must occupy just as much media space as Mr. Trump and Republicans have been doing.”

Which, if TFN may say, is what TFN has been saying: Democrats need to stand for something. Something other than protecting what’s in place. Something better than Band-Aid™s to heal our chronic capitalist ouchies.

And Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) articulated a longstanding Democratic moral dilemma. Does fighting all-out to block something Trumpian merely extend how long it will take for Americans to recognize the shittiness and do something about it? As the Times put it:

"Mr. Beshear said that the hardest part of dealing with the new administration was that the American people would have to feel the pain of Mr. Trump’s actions so that they would learn not to make the mistake of electing someone like him again.”

For his part, Schumer claimed for Democrats some victories that I suspect belong more to the Great Mother Universe. He said Senate Democrats damaged the standing of Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

I seem to recall journalists surfacing the most standing-damaging shit about those two. And if anything Senate Democrats have ignored the most dangerous aspect of Hegseth and other nominees: Theocratic Christian nationalism.

On the Senate Democratic website yesterday, they took credit for Trump withdrawing the Office of Management and Budget funding-freeze memo. Which, again, no.

Sadly, much of the suggested remedies on last night’s call consisted of small-bore administrative shit. Assigning staffers to coordinate Trump-based rapid-response. That kind of thing.

Schumer said Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is doing a great job heading their social media. Last week Booker gave Senate Dems a PowerPoint on how to post online:

• Instagram: 1-2 times a day.

• Facebook: Once a day.

• LinkedIn: 3-5 times a week.

• Twitter: 2-5 a day.

• TikTok: 1-4 times a day.

Anyone know offhand how often Trump posts on social media? Oh, right. Whenever the fuck he wants times a day.

And now, if you’re not already too depressed (I promise, there’s Schadenfreude and gloating to come), TFN brings you a Democrat who isn’t just soft on Trump, she’s helping the theocratic Christian nationalists…

EXCLUSIVE: Gluesenkamp Perez Recruiting for Far-Right Ministry

Ralph Drollinger is about as famous as you can get in evangelical circles without boinking the cabana boy. He ran a Bible study in the Trump White House.²

In fact, Drollinger runs similar groups around the country — 43 state capitols — and in countries around the world. The goal is to move politicians toward Jesus. Drollinger’s Jesus.

So, y’know those stories I’m allegedly always working on for my original-reporting Substack? Well, I posted one last night revealing the one (1) Democrat who signed a letter urging members of Congress to join Drollinger’s ministry.

And I don’t know why I’m acting like it’s a mystery who it was since her name’s right there in the headline. It was Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA). If you want all the depressing details — you can take it! — you can read my reporting — and the letter she signed, which I obtained from a Hill source — over at the Jonathan Larsen Substack. (And big thanks to the two folks who upgraded their JL subscriptions to paid yesterday!)

Okay, Newsfuckers, we made it through all that depressing Democratic Party inadequacy!

We now resume our regularly scheduled Trump-bashing with one of the most vile and lethal bits of depravity we’ve seen from this deranged motherfucking sociopathic meathead…

Trump Blocks Distribution of Life-Saving Drugs

Donald Trump, the president elected by the self-styled pro-life movement — whose first mention in the New York Times ever was for discriminating against Black people in the 1970s — has taken his axe to the HIV/AIDS program created by Pres. George W. Bush and credited with saving 25 million lives.

There are, right now, HIV drugs sitting on shelves in clinics and hospitals in other countries. They were bought with money provided by the U.S., via Bush’s global program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

Trump last week ordered that the drugs not be distributed.

Treatment for people with HIV has already been interrupted.

What that means, the Times says, is that the immune systems of patients will start to degrade — making them vulnerable to the other diseases Trump is ending funding to fight — and also making them more likely to spread HIV. That’s right, Trump loved the ‘80s so much he’s bringing AIDS back.

American officials have stopped communicating with the top health officials in other countries. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is no longer allowed to share information about viruses or anything else via email with the World Health Organization. Not even viral memes.

Officials around the world were notified Monday that the PEPFAR data systems would shut down in three hours, ending access to medical data and analytical tools.

Some Republicans, notably Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), freaked out earlier this month about reports that an agency receiving PEPFAR aid also performed abortions. Not that they used the money for abortions…just also did abortion things. But even that is against the funding rules.

Without PEPFAR, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NJ) said earlier this month, “hundreds of thousands of children will die.”

But they’re not dying in the womb, they’re dying out in the oxygen, at the hand of the Invisible Hand the way Jesus intended, so that’s okay.

Republicans had been winning the war on PEPFAR even before Trump won re-election. Last year, they reauthorized it for only one year, thanks to Smith, meaning programs around the world couldn’t do any long-term planning in response to local health conditions. Which, it turns out, wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

There are some Republicans who are genuinely supportive of overseas aid on hunger and disease. So far they’re not saying shit about their colleagues the way they go after Dems for defending abortion rights.

More Trump Criminals

Here’s our updated running tally of Pres. Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 pardon recipients and how they commit more crimes than undocumented immigrants do. We had two already logged.

• The guy who’s now a fugitive on charges of soliciting sex from a minor, which he wasn’t arrested for because police couldn’t find him after Trump sprung him from federal custody.

• The guy who got shot dead resisting arrest after getting pulled over by a cop.

And now we’ve got David Daniel. Newly reported federal documents show that he was arrested in the fall — before Trump pardoned him, so the Justice Department maybe coulda/shoulda flagged this! — and charged with sexual assault of a child under the age of 12, and possession and trafficking of child pornography.

With all these cases piling up, maybe Trump was right and the Jan. 6 attackers really do love democracy and weren’t attacking Congress; they just misunderstood and were trying to get a girl named January. Who was six.

Wait, No, One More

Six days before Emily Hernandez of Missouri was sentenced in 2022 for entering and remaining in the Capitol, she committed an oopsy-doodle. With her car. And a lot of booze.

While rocking a 0.2% blood-alcohol content, Hernandez drove her car into an SUV fast enough that — even though they were in a fucking SUV — 32-year-old Victoria Wilson was killed and 36-year-old Ryan Wilson was injured badly enough that he still uses a cane.

Hernandez served 30 days for going the wrong way in the Capitol and yesterday got 17 years for driving the wrong way on I-44. This is her smiling with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) nameplate:

As they might have said on my lost, beloved Police Squad, now Hernandez is going from the House to the Big House.

Two Quickies

• This is the kind of trivial, doesn’t-matter “news” that TFN tries to resist and save you from. But Satan’s call was strong with this one, and resist I could not. There are vaccination needles full of reasons that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ought not be the nation’s Health and Human Services secretary. And this is not one of them. But in his confirmation hearing yesterday, he was asked about his presidential campaign’s ongoing fundraising. “I don’t think my campaign exists anymore,” Kennedy said. His campaign sent another fundraising email while he was talking.

• Okay, one thing about last night’s plane crash. Author Thomas Schaller, who I’ve put on the air back when I was a TV person, posted hours before the crash: “An FAA employee I know confirms agency already lacks sufficient air traffic controllers. The so-called ‘buyouts’ and other attacks on federal employees won’t help. Remember that fact when the flight delays (crashes?) commence and Trumpers start falsely blaming DEI or Biden.” Stay tuned.

TCB

I KNOW, I KNOW There’s a lot of big stuff your usually big-stuff-hitting TFN didn’t hit today — even beyond the plane crash. Some days I try to help important stories — PEPFAR, Schumer, Gluesenkamp Perez — break through all the hand-waving and screaming about stuff that may or may not matter. I haven’t missed all that stuff, I’m harvesting it for a bigger piece about how we should be seeing Trump’s second term. I’ll get there! But also…

MORE NEWS COMING I confess that TFN has been sidelined a wee bit by my work for the Jonathan Larsen Substack. And, man, that guy is really riding me. In fact, I’ve got another story, in addition to yesterday’s, about yet another Democrat lending a hand to Christian theocrats. Which, sorry if some Democrats don’t like me reporting that, but the fundamental driving precept at both Substacks is that People Should Know Things. So know things ye shall.

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Go get ‘em, kids.

1. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), co-sponsor John Fetterman (PA), co-sponsor Ruben Gallego (AZ), Maggie Hassan (NH), Mark Kelly (AZ), Jon Ossoff (GA), Gary Peters (MI), Jacky Rosen (NV), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Elissa Slotkin (MI), Mark Warner (VA), Raphael Warnock (GA).

2. Of course Trump didn’t actually go. But he did get Drollinger’s Bible study notes and returned them with notes like, “Keep it up.”