Americana

1. Democrats stand up to DOGE
2. Republicans trust Trump on Gaza
3. Pete Buttigieg eyes Senate
4. #MeToo’s power fades
5. Bud Light’s woke backlash

Also: Cuomo 2028?

Six years ago, when Elon Musk was still “not sure about [the] good of Twitter,” a Florida man had an idea. When government entities needed to publish public notices, they had to pay to put them in local newspapers. State Rep. Randy Fine saw a lot of taxpayer money sloshing around in dying newsrooms. “We’re gonna deregulate the market, which will bring costs down,” he told reporters, introducing legislation to let local governments post their announcements on websites they already owned.

Fine’s law worried the news industry. It did not get much attention outside of it. But in the new Washington, Fine looks like a pioneer. On Wednesday, the Trump administration canceled all executive branch subscriptions to Politico Pro, after Musk’s followers on X highlighted the millions of dollars they had cost over the years; on Thursday, it asked the General Services Administration to “cancel every single media contract” it was paying for.

It was a given that a new Trump administration was always going to find ways to throttle the funding streams for institutions it deemed hostile, and the media was high on the hit list. There are still many potential plans of attack. Conservative outlets more friendly to the administration could get the exclusives that used to go to “legacy media,” another tactic from Ron DeSantis’ Florida. Ending taxpayer funds for public broadcasting, a longtime conservative goal, was part of Project 2025’s manual for the new president.

Still, the surprise attack on government media subscriptions wasn’t in the war plan. This was one of many ideas that bubbled up from Musk fans on X, got his attention, and became a Republican cause.

“Our government is paying for this propaganda, and we didn’t even know,” Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry told one conservative influencer. In fact, Republicans did know what Politico Pro was — some of the new critics had paid for it — but the online activists searching USASpending.gov and posting about fed-expensed subscriptions found another way to starve media of revenue.

Watching this unfold, and guessing how it would end, I was struck by how fast the Musk/DOGE operation moved and how slowly its target responded. Twenty-four hours passed between Karoline Leavitt saying that “DOGE is working on cancelling” federal subscriptions to news services and Politico putting out a full response. “This is not funding,” wrote Politico’s editor and CEO. “It is a transaction.”

Expect more of the same; parts of Washington are now staffed by techno-optimists who believe that all sorts of information-gathering can now be done via X or typing questions into LLMs. They don’t see a role for the old media here. And Randy Fine will get to Washington soon; he easily won last week’s GOP primary for an open House seat, and is heavily favored to win the special election, on April Fool’s Day.

The new resistance

The Democratic Party’s base demanded that its leaders “do something” about DOGE. And this week, they tried.

In the Senate, they used the 30 hours allotted to them to debate the nomination of Russell Vought for OMB director, warning that his plan to break and traumatize the “deep state” was already in motion. In the House, they tried and narrowly failed to subpoena Elon Musk to testify before the Oversight Committee.

And on the streets outside, they shuttled from protest to protest, promising to “fight” for suspended federal workers and grind DOGE down in court, walking into federal buildings until they were forced to leave.

The refrain that sometimes came back at them: “Do something!” They were losing, and it was hard to rev people up about that.

“Obviously, the speed is surprising,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told Semafor. “The blatant disregard for the norms that they’re trampling on, things that could potentially be illegal — it’s sort of like, ask for forgiveness instead of permission.”

Republicans back Trump on Gaza takeover

President Trump said on Tuesday that America would “take over the Gaza Strip,” developing it for new habitation and investment after the “temporary removal” of the Palestinians who live there. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, standing next to Trump, praised his “out of the box” thinking. Republicans wrestled with the idea of a new foreign adventure from a president who had run on ending them.

“I think, if you’re looking toward MAGA and populism, if you’re trying to find a consistent ideology, it won’t be there,” Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie told Semafor’s Kadia Goba. “They’re not ideologues.”

Processing the idea, on Wednesday and Thursday, most Republicans settled on a framing that Trump was using a negotiating tactic that typically worked for him. Palestinian leaders had recoiled at the idea of removing nearly two million people to some undetermined zone; neighboring Arab states had no interest in taking them. But in his party, the proposal sounded like a way to force those states out of their rigid position.

“It really is his way of playing chess when other people are playing checkers,” said Ohio Rep. Max Miller. Arab-American and Muslim groups that had supported Trump in 2024 were far more skeptical, verging on horrified. In a statement, Arab Americans for Trump founder Bishara Bahbah said the group had been renamed “Arab Americans for Peace,” and that “the president has yet to meet with Arab leaders” to explain what he was doing or why it wouldn’t end the campaign for a Palestinian state.

Michigan Democrats want a Hoosier in the Senate

Michigan Democrats are taking former Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg very seriously as a US Senate candidate, as early polling puts him well ahead of the potential field.

Buttigieg, who relocated his family to Michigan from Indiana during the Biden administration, had never ruled out running for office in his adopted state. After Sen. Gary Peters announced his retirement last week, Buttigieg’s camp put out word that he would not run for governor, but would consider the Senate race. And a survey conducted by Blueprint, and shared with Semafor, found that 77% of likely Democratic voters viewed him favorably — slightly ahead of Attorney Gen. Dana Nessel, who is considering a run, and far ahead of any other option.

“Never before have we invested so much into America’s aging infrastructure, and that was all led by him,” said Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar, who encouraged Buttigieg to run.

Republicans, who were planning to target Peters, see the open seat as one of their best opportunities in 2026 — the only Democratic vacancy in a state won by Trump. In Georgia, where Sen. Jon Ossoff is now the only Democrat in cycle representing an electorate that voted for Trump, the GOP’s Senate committee is leaning on Gov. Brian Kemp to run.

A Democratic rethink about allegations that end campaigns

Eight months after their sexual misconduct allegations doomed his congressional campaign, Virginia state legislator Dan Helmer is suing a group of Democratic Party activists for defamation, conspiracy, and $15 million in damages. The lawsuit, filed in Fairfax County court last week, resurrected a controversy that briefly panicked Democrats last year. But the party is much quieter about the issue now, shying away from commenting about the lawsuit.

Helmer brought his case at a moment when allegations of sexual misconduct have lost some of their power to disrupt. Trump won his new term after losing a defamation case against E. Jean Carroll, who had accused him of sexual assault. Old allegations of impropriety against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and new allegations against Pete Hegseth, did not pry off many Republican votes for either man’s cabinet nomination.

Democrats are also showing signs of #MeToo fatigue. In New York City, Democratic candidates for mayor are girding for the potential candidacy of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned his last office over sexual harassment allegations but now leads in public polls. One of Cuomo’s potential rivals is former City Comptroller Scott Stringer, whose 2021 mayoral bid imploded after a former campaign aide accused him of sexual misconduct.

How the Bud Light boycott helped sink DEI

Anson Frericks says he tried to warn them. For a little over a decade, Frericks worked at Anheuser-Busch InBev, finishing his time at the company as president of sales and distribution. He left in 2022 to co-found Strive, the anti-woke investment company that rebelled against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) guidelines for companies, arguing that political and ideological goals were crowding out policies that made sense for shareholders.

His Strive co-founder, Vivek Ramaswamy, ran for president. Frericks watched InBev tumble into controversy, after a Bud Light sponsorship video with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney backfired, turning the brand into a conservative punchline, and sparking a boycott that had major implications for how companies approached race and gender. In “Last Call for Bud Light,” Frericks writes about what he saw inside the company, at what might have been the apogee of DEI — published at a moment when a new president is trying to root those policies out of the public and private sectors.

Polls

Republicans have been very comfortable defending the new president, the quasi-CEO role he’s given Elon Musk, and the constitutionality of everything they’re doing. Just a third of voters in this poll believe that Trump is violating the Constitution, but nearly half say that Musk has too much influence on the administration. Fifty-six percent say they oppose disbanding the Department of Education, and only 34% support Musk’s muddled buyout offer for federal workers. Democrats are still debating amongst themselves how much to talk about the legality of Musk’s role, versus the decisions he’s made. “I’m much less focused, personally, on who’s appointed or who’s elected,” Texas Rep. Greg Casar told Semafor this week. “I’m much more focused on: Why does the richest guy on Earth get to shut off kids’ pre-K and school lunch programs to enrich himself?”

Mayor Eric Adams has become overwhelmingly unpopular with New York Democrats, and a nonfactor in this year’s campaign, skipping every candidate forum. The candidates who have showed up are waiting for a final decision from Andrew Cuomo, the instant frontrunner if he gets in before the March deadline. His weakness: The highest unfavorable ratings of any non-Adams candidate, at 49%. In a ranked-choice ballot test, Cuomo leads, but doesn’t win a majority until the 6th round of counting, after Adams is eliminated. But he holds significant leads over the field on every issue (crime, the “migrant crisis,” the MTA) except one: Which candidate would be best to clean up corruption. On that question, he leads former Comptroller Scott Stringer by just 2 points, even though both were taken down four years ago by allegations of sexual misconduct, which both of them denied.

Gallup’s omnibus state-of-the-nation polling has found a grim mood for a very long time. On most topics, Americans are more pessimistic now than they were at the start of Donald Trump’s first term. Attitudes about race relations have improved slightly. Nothing else has, even when conditions have objectively gotten better. (The 2017 tax cuts haven’t changed the overall feeling that people are paying too much to the IRS.) DOGE’s work highlights some of that ambiguities. When people are asked about individual program cuts, they’re often opposed to them. But when they’re asked if there’s too much government and red tape, they agree, even more than they did eight years ago.

Ads

• Schimel for Justice, “Careless.” The content of this spot, from the Republican-backed supreme court candidate in Wisconsin, concerns a botched 2001 prosecution of a rapist from Democrat Susan Crawford’s time in the attorney general’s office. The Crawford campaign disputes the accusation — she didn’t work on the case directly — but is trying to take down the ad for a different reason. Its image of Crawford frowning is altered from a photograph of her smiling. Democrats say that violates the state’s new ban on AI misinformation in advertising, and Schimel’s campaign says they’re protesting too much about a simple alteration.
• Susan Crawford for Wisconsin, “1849.” This year’s Wisconsin supreme court race is just the second since the Dobbs decision, and the second with Democrats warning that Republicans could ban abortion across the state. Here, the Crawford campaign uses remarks that Brad Schimel made to Republicans late last year, defending the state’s 1849 abortion ban, which the court’s liberal majority is expected to strike down unless he wins and flips the balance. “Too extreme,” warns a female narrator, dramatizing how outdated the law with grainy video from decades later.

Scooped!

In the first days after the new president took office, Americana readers got a thorough look at how his first executive orders were ripping out not just DEI programs, but the 60-year-old roots of all affirmative action policies. My old colleagues Jeremy Stahl and Mark Joseph Stern broke the news of the administration’s next major project in that vein — a memo from Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, asking DOJ attorneys to scour businesses and non-government institutions and find the “most egregious and discriminatory DEI and DEIA practitioners in each sector of concern.”

Next

• 53 days until Wisconsin’s state supreme court election
• 270 days until off-year elections
• 634 days until the 2026 midterm elections

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