Americana

1. Trump dismantles DEI
2. Grappling with deportations
3. Dems look for strategy
4. Election results head to courts
5. David Hogg on saving the DNC

Also: The first campaign ad war of 2025.

You might be cheering on the new administration’s swift start. You might be despondent over its sweeping action. You can’t be surprised. As Donald Trump took office this week, promising a new “golden age” of American success and expansion, everything he did was previewed on the long campaign trail.

We knew so much about what a second Trump term might look like because reporters covered it early. Jonathan Swan, then at Axios and now at the New York Times, was writing about the ambitions of the Heritage Foundation (“a database of personnel for the next Republican administration”) and the important role of Russ Vought (“somebody who would rebuff career officials”) nearly three years ago. “The game plan is being written,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told me for this newsletter in 2023.

Like a lot of reporters, I got a paper copy of that game plan, Project 2025, and thumbed through it to get story ideas. No one living had ever seen a former president, after a defeat, run again with full knowledge of what he should have done the first time. Trump didn’t debate his primary opponents or do cattle calls with interest groups, but he didn’t need to; the record was there, and the plans were everywhere.

This got complicated when Democrats, underdogs for most of the campaign, built their messaging around Project 2025. The Trump campaign denounced it, saying that this was not the real agenda, with some brazeness and some credibility; some conservatives worried that their connections to Heritage would disqualify them from administration jobs. And had Trump lost, his insistence that he had nothing at all to do with these ideas would have been seen as a Streisand Effect blunder, giving Democrats and the media a late-campaign hook for more Project 2025 explainers.

But he didn’t lose — and the conservative movement’s willingness to clam up about this stuff was a campaign asset. Reporters could get Vought or Stephen Miller or an anti-abortion attorney on record about their plans once, but if their story got too many eyeballs, the next call went to voicemail. Heritage published hundreds of pages of ideas for Trump, but it did not publish the executive order concepts Vought was working on, refusing to give liberals a preview of what they’d be suing over.

Still: Anyone paying attention last year knew what was coming, and that has colored Trump’s breakneck first week and the Democrats’ hand-wringing resistance. They no longer see Trump as a fluke winner who needed third party spoilers and James Comey’s agents to get over 270 electoral votes. They are watching him roll back diversity programs, pardon Jan. 6 rioters, use emergency powers to expand deportations, and send troops to the border, after swing state voters heard him promise to do all of that. If there’s a backlash, it’ll be over the implementation and the consequences. Democrats know that, because it happened to Joe Biden.

Trump’s hard move against diversity programs

Twenty-four hours into his second presidency, Donald Trump’s pen knocked down a cornerstone of affirmative action.

Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, which required racially diverse hiring from federal contractors, had survived five Republican presidents. It couldn’t survive Trump, who erased it with a command to end “illegal preferences and discrimination” across the government.

Democrats had expected Trump to unmake Joe Biden’s diversity agenda. He did so on Monday, scrapping every Biden order on “advancing racial equity,” erasing the policy legacy of the 2020 “racial reckoning.” What would they do to salvage it?

“I’m going to take this issue, working with the civil rights groups, head on,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told Semafor at his Thursday press conference, standing between placards that went after Trump for his Jan. 6 pardons and for the Medicaid and ACA cuts in GOP legislation. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion are American values. It’s about economic opportunity for everyone.”

Trump’s first deportations get underway

Governors, mayors, and law enforcement on both sides of the border grappled with the Trump administration’s new deportation plans this week, with Mexico setting up tents across from El Paso to handle the expected human traffic.

As the new president promised, during the 2024 campaign, the new administration was pursuing deportations from every angle. On Monday, asylum-seekers using the border patrol’s app found that it had been frozen; on Friday, agencies got the go- ahead to deport the one1 million migrants who had been paroled into the country, and earned temporary legal status, under the Biden administration.

Republicans celebrated Trump’s moves, including an emergency declaration that allows border wall construction to resume and military assets to be deployed at the border. Democrats saw early signs of overreach, with New Jersey Democrats saying that a raid designed to find illegal day laborers in Newark swept up some American citizens. Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, is a candidate for governor this year, and said in a statement that the city would “not stand by idly while people are being unlawfully terrorized.”

Democrats grasp for a Trump-era strategy

“Give us a little time,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told Semafor this week. He was puzzling over how Democrats, once again in the minority and once again battling Donald Trump, would resist or mitigate his policies. In the first days of the new presidency, that resistance had no clear strategy.

That was evident in the first votes on Trump’s cabinet nominees, some of which Democrats had delayed —– none, so far, that they could stop. No Democrat voted to advance Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth, but just two Republicans opposed him, after a campaign of pressure and revelations about his past misbehavior. Every Democrat on the floor voted to support their colleague Marco Rubio for Secretary of State; many Democrats who had opposed John Ratcliffe’s 2020 nomination for Director of National Intelligence voted to support him for CIA Director.

“Personally, I don’t want to give Republicans an inch on their claims they care about national security after their pardons,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “My hope is that we’re going to be down on the floor and on TV and back in our states talking about the danger of these pardons.” But Ratcliffe was still confirmed Thursday, 74-25, with significant Democratic support.

Court fights play out in contested NC and MN races

Political power in two swing states was still up for grabs this week, as courts intervened in North Carolina’s supreme court race and a decisive contest for Minnesota’s state House.

In North Carolina, where GOP candidate Jefferson Griffin is suing to throw out more than 60,000 ballots after his 734-vote loss to Justice Allison Riggs, the high court remanded the case to Wake County superior court, giving the case another look and delaying a final decision. But the GOP majority on the court expressed some sympathy with Griffin.

“On the night of the election, petitioner led his opponent by almost 10,000 votes. Over the course of the next several days, his lead slowly dwindled, and he now trails his opponent by 734 votes,” the chief justice wrote in his concurrence. “That is a highly unusual course of events. It is understandable that petitioner and many North Carolina voters are questioning how this could happen.” (Griffin sought, and lost, two recounts.)

In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz had scheduled a Jan. 28 special election to replace ex-Rep. Curtis Hanson, who won a safe Democratic seat but was disqualified when he failed to meet its residency requirement. Republicans successfully argued that Walz had called the election too early; it was canceled, and a new race to replace Hanson hasn’t been scheduled yet. Both parties met in court on Thursday, where Democrats argued that the GOP’s 67-66 majority — it would be tied, if Hanson were seated — could not legally govern.

David Hogg on the DNC’s young voter problem

The race to lead the Democratic National Committee is heading into its final week, with one more party-sponsored forum before the new chair and vice chairs get elected on Feb. 1.

For the first time, Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler released a whip count, claiming support from 131 of the DNC’s 448 voting members, including seven governors. “Another candidate,” Wikler wrote, put out an “inflated” whip count that put him just two dozen votes away from victory; he was referring to Minnesota DFL chair Ken Martin, seen since the start of the race to be its favorite.

There’s more competition for the party’s three vice chair roles: 14 candidates, including state party leaders, state legislators, and failed congressional candidates. David Hogg, the 24-year old activist who charged into politics after surviving a mass shooting at his Florida high school, got the most attention and skepticism when he entered the race. (Making fun of Hogg is practically a sport for conservatives on X.) But Hogg had been involved in high-level party politics for years, growing less and less confident that Democrats knew what was happening with young voters — and having his suspicions confirmed after the under-30 vote shifted right last year.

He talked with Semafor at last week’s party meeting in Detroit, and in a phone call this week where he assessed how Democrats were handling their short-term problems (opposing the Trump administration) and long-term crises (how to get young men to stop rolling their eyes at them).

Polls

No party thrives right after losing a national election. They are rarely as hard-up as the Democrats are now — even if, in terms of power in the states and in Congress, they have more influence than they did after their last big defeat. In CNN’s polling, the party is less popular than it’s been in decades, with 51% of self-identiified Democrats expecting it to be ineffective in opposition, and 18% now viewing it unfavorably. Some of the drop-off comes from voters who’ve stopped paying attention to politics, which is affecting Republicans, too. Democrats suffered an identical six-point hit after losing the 2016 election, while support for the GOP jumped by 5 points. But Democrats are especially miserable about their team, and Republicans are largely optimistic about what will happen under Donald Trump.

On Monday, Donald Trump became the first president since James K. Polk to devote part of his inaugural address to the idea of territorial expansion. “We’re taking it back,” he said of the Panama Canal. It was one of the least popular ideas in the speech — supported here by most Republicans, but no other group of voters, many of whom weren’t alive when the United States last controlled the Canal zone (1979). Trump’s other riffs on expansionism have little support, even though plenty of Republicans have endorsed them, with varying levels of seriousness. They’ve been more interested in his commitment to renaming the Gulf of Mexico, which doesn’t require any money or changes to the map.

For more than two decades, Gallup’s pollsters didn’t bother asking how Americans felt about their democracy. Their optimism cratered in 1992; it bounced back after Bill Clinton’s election, and stayed stable. Starting in 2021, Gallup started asking the question again, and found a complete collapse in confidence, with nearly two-thirds of all adults saying they were dissatisfied with American democracy. The bounce here comes mostly from Republicans, whose faith in the system nearly doubled after the 2024 election — from 17% to 33%. That put them in sync with independents and Democrats. No group of voters is mostly optimistic about the system right now, which explains why the Democrats’ effort to cast Trump as a threat didn’t move the needle last year.

Ads

• Susan Crawford for Wisconsin, “Never.” The ad for Democratic Party-backed candidate for Wisconsin’s open court seat went on air shortly after the Republican-backed candidate’s, with the election’s first negative spot. Brad Schimel’s intro ad highlighted his work closing rape cases; Crawford says he “left 6,000 rape kits untested,” an issue Attorney Gen. Josh Kaul seized on during his successful 2018 campaign against Schimel. That and an accusation that he went soft on a donor make him “too extreme” for the job.
• Schimel for Justice, “Lies.” The Republican’s campaign was ready for Crawford, with a southeast Wisconsin sheriff on tape defending Schimel’s record. “I don’t call it a sexual assault kit initiative — I call it a Brad Schimel initiative,” says Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt, a Republican who gained attention last year for campaigning with Donald Trump and urging local clerks not to allow voting drop boxes. Such cases wouldn’t come before the supreme court, but these races increasingly focus on crime, with Republicans pressing their post-Ferguson advantage with law enforcement figures.
• The Heritage Foundation, “Tulsi Gabbard: Warrior. Patriot. Fighter.” The shotgun wedding between Donald Trump’s ex-Democrat nominees and the right’s powerhouse think tank continues with this multi-million dollar buy on behalf of perhaps the least secure Cabinet nominee. Like Gabbard’s 2020 campaign advertising, it emphasizes her military experience over any of her political views; the footage of her saying “I love our country,” and “I have dedicated my entire adult life to protecting the safety, security and freedom of all Americans,” actually comes from that campaign, when she was firing back at Hillary Clinton for saying she’d been “groomed” by Russia.

Scooped!

What the heck is Jubilee? I’d seen the new media company’s viral “Surrounded” videos, where guests face down ordinary people who want to dismantle their ideas and arguments. But I’d never really asked about the origins of this stuff. Spencer Kornhaber did so for The Atlantic, and his profile is really insightful: “Jubilee’s success suggests why deplatforming—the strategy of blocking bigots and liars from public stages—has proved ineffective.”

Next

• Eight days until the DNC leadership elections
• 67 days until Wisconsin’s state supreme court election
• 284 days until off-year elections
• 648 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

James Pogue is always worth reading, and I’d been waiting for his piece on the Democratic Party’s internal crises since I ran into him at the 2024 convention. The weekly newsletter is the highest form of writing, but the longform magazine article is up there; Pogue quotes Democrats like Jamie Raskin and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez over enough space to really interrogate their ideas, and paints vivid pictures of the campaigning that preceded their widespread defeats.

It may be more difficult than usual for the US Congress to pass legislation to streamline the process for building new energy infrastructure, a senior Democrat who has helped lead recent negotiations over the issue told Semafor’s Tim McDonnell.

President Donald Trump’s aim to speed up energy projects could collide with Democrats’ aversion to slashing environmental oversight, pushing a legislative deal “much further out,” a consultant and lobbyist said.