Americana

1. Elon scales back DOGE work
2. Elderly Democrats find the exit door
3. DNC bans primary endorsements
4. The left goes after Trump, not ICE
5. Sebastian Gorka on the Trump doctrine

Also: Why Republicans took Nayib Bukele’s word over a senator’s.

As a propaganda stunt, “Margaritagate” could have gone much better.

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the first of several Democrats to visit El Salvador in a search for information about illegal immigrants, negotiated for a meeting with Kilmar Ábrego García. He got one, albeit outside of the CECOT prison where Ábrego was detained. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele shared the first photos: Van Hollen and Ábrego at a table, with two glasses of water and two of a clear liquid that Bukele called “margaritas.” Van Hollen shared his own picture, before Bukele aides placed the mysterious non-waters, which neither man had asked for.

“Nobody drank any margaritas or sugar water or whatever it is,” Van Hollen said when he returned. “This is a lesson into the lengths that President Bukele will go to deceive people.”

Neither man was photographed drinking the “margaritas.” Bukele claimed, with no evidence, that they were “sipping” them. Yet it was Bukele’s story, not Van Hollen’s, that carried into this week.

In the Oval Office, a Newsmax reporter told President Donald Trump that “photos have emerged” of the senator “sipping what appear to be margaritas.” In a Fox News op-ed, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee claimed that Van Hollen had “potentially spent thousands of taxpayer dollars to enjoy a round of margaritas.” In an official letter that rebuked two Democrats who wanted a Congress-funded visit to El Salvador, House Oversight Chairman James Comer falsely claimed that Van Hollen was photographed “enjoying margaritas garnished with cherry slices.” New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat-turned-independent, got in on it, too; at a press conference, he twice said that he wouldn’t drink “a tequila drink” with a gang member.

Republicans are very comfortable defending the Ábrego imprisonment, and any other errors made by the president’s deportation regime, because they support its basic goal. Why glom on to this? It was the only detail of the story faked by Bukele’s government, and badly faked. There may be people who garnish margaritas with cherries. I’ve never met one, and I don’t know how I’d react, but the possibility exists. No one drinks these things without disturbing the salt on the rim. A memorable detail can make a story, but if the detail gets debunked, the whole story can get discredited.

But it might not be discredited for everyone. All sorts of fake factoids travel through the rotting news/entertainment pipeline, believed by people who want to believe them. The brake on this used to be shame, and that it’s embarrassing to confidently share something fake. Ask Dan Rather, ask Ben Shapiro, ask your uncle who shared a bogus quote from his Facebook feed.

If you’re not worried about shame, there’s no brake. Elon Musk, who may or may not be leaving his powerful DOGE role soon (see below), is among the people who share fake politician net-worth figures from AI-generated websites. If your prior is that your political enemies are corrupt, you can find some fake stuff that “proves” it. If your prior is that Nayib Bukele is trying to save not just his country but the West, then you don’t need to hear him debunked. You trust him, and you don’t trust his critics. Even if they’re right.

Musk says he’ll scale back Trump role

PFLUGERVILLE, Tex. — Elon Musk told Tesla investors this week that he would scale back his involvement in DOGE, the agency he named and led to cancel billions of dollars in federal spending.

For the Democrats who want Musk and DOGE to be gone, it was both welcome news and not enough. Texas Rep. Greg Casar, the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has led Democrats on a letter demanding that Musk be removed, or must divest his business interests, by May 30, the day when his “special government employee” status will run out. Over the two-week congressional recess, he held town halls in his district and across the country, often facing questions about how Democrats were fighting Trump — and responding with the Musk plan.

“If he does not leave by May 30, there are even more legal and legislative options that will happen,” Casar told Semafor after a town hall in one of the safe Republican House seats drawn by the Texas GOP around Austin. “At that point, he has to either sell off his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX and more, or leave.” And it wasn’t just Musk: “Every special government employee needs to leave after 130 days.”

Congressional Democrats are limited in the sort of investigations they can run or ask for, often issuing reports or letters to demand information from DOGE. But they overwhelmingly believe that Musk’s role has polarized the cost-cutting project and made it less popular, pointing to their party’s 10-point win in this month’s Wisconsin supreme court race. “The jiu jitsu of Musk’s money, or Republican mega donors’ money, will be very important for our strategy,” Casar said.

Elderly Democrats retire instead of facing young challengers

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin announced on Wednesday that he won’t seek another term, becoming the fourth Senate Democrat to retire this year in favor of younger candidates. “I’m physically and mentally strong,” Durbin told the Chicago Sun-Times in an exit interview. “But I don’t want to wait too long and test fate.”

Pressure on elderly Democrats has kept up all year — though Durbin’s retirement, before a term that would have ended in his late 80s, was widely expected. Shortly after Durbin’s announcement, Politico broke the news that Rep. Jan Schakowsky would retire next year. Schakowsky, who like the senator was born before the end of World War II, had been out-fundraised by Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old progressive influencer who had not yet relocated into the district.

“I’m glad that Rep. Schakowsky understands that this moment calls for new leadership,” she said in a statement.

Other Democratic challengers have been even blunter about the need to elect younger people. Everton Blair, a former Gwinnett County, Ga. school board chair, told Semafor that he began planning a campaign against Rep. David Scott when the 79-year-old congressman held a January town hall. According to a recording shared with Semafor, Blair attempted to ask Scott about the “congressional and legislative strategy” Democrats were pursuing against the Trump administration. Scott, who had brought staffers to take and handle questions, cut him off — “I don’t know who sent y’all” — and deferred to one of his employees.

Democrats brawl over whether to intervene in primaries

The Democratic National Committee’s chairman promised that members would not intervene in primaries this week, after DNC vice chair David Hogg angered some strategists by saying he’d continue to raise money for insurgent candidates.

“No DNC officer should ever attempt to influence the outcome of a primary,” DNC chair Ken Martin told reporters on Thursday morning, as he announced a new monthly investment in state party organizing. In an op-ed, he promised a “slate of structural reforms that codify these principles of neutrality and fairness into our official party rules.” The party will vote on Martin’s proposal this summer.

Martin framed those changes as part of the party’s long post-2016 reform, after a cycle when anger at DNC members and delegates endorsing Hillary Clinton led to years of bitterness about the party. Hogg, who had co-led the PAC Leaders We Deserve before seeking his DNC role, told Semafor that he would not quit the party or the PAC — which was not just funding primary challenges to incumbents, but finding young Democrats who could change the party, sometimes in open seats.

“If they decide to remove me, I don’t take it personally,” he said. “This is a strategic disagreement here.”

Other DNC members clarified that the change was not a response to Hogg, who talked about his PAC work when he won the vice chair gig in February. The job was largely “ceremonial,” he said, refuting DNC members who worried that he might use inside information to help primary challengers.

“I’ve been calling people throughout the week, talking to them, having conversations, informing DNC members of what we’re actually doing here,” he said. “When I explain that, no, this money is not just going to challenging Democrats in primaries, it’s also going to support candidates who are younger in frontline seats, [and] our challenging of incumbents is only limited to the House in safe seats; they say, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’”

Democrats try to avoid a 2018-style immigration trap

PFLUGERVILLE, Texas — An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent smashed a car window in a small Massachusetts city to apprehend the wrong man.

Another agent briefly faced contempt charges in Boston for arresting a non-citizen in the midst of a trial. ICE detained a US citizen for 10 days in Tucson before family members showed up with his birth certificate. Reports of overreach by ICE have made national news during the new Trump administration’s first 100 days, drawing harsh criticism from Democrats and immigration attorneys.

But Democrats aren’t calling to “abolish ICE” as they did back in 2018, even if the slogan has sporadically been heard at rallies and seen on signs and protest art. The party is wary of challenging Trump’s second-term White House with tools that didn’t work eight years ago. Democrats have confidently condemned Trump for deportations to El Salvador’s CECOT prison and for making legal immigration much harder — but even progressives who once called for ICE to be broken up or abolished are wary of saying so now.

Sebastian Gorka on Trump’s new war on terror

“We will be focusing on real threats, not made-up threats,” said Dr. Sebastian Gorka during Semafor’s World Economy Summit. The White House’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism, who briefly served in Trump’s first administration and has been a conservative commentator for many years, had said many things about who was and wasn’t a terrorist.

Last week, he suggested on Newsmax that Democrats rallying for immigrants who had been shipped to El Salvador after being accused, with scant evidence, of being MS-13 gang members, were giving support to terrorism. He clarified that after a blow-up, which he blamed on the “gutter press” in Washington. And he came to Semafor’s World Economy Summit to explain that and more, talking with White House Correspondent Shelby Talcott about how the administration viewed Yemen, Ukraine, and next steps against pro-Gaza protests in America.

Ezra Klein is on a book tour — you may have heard his voice on some of your other favorite podcasts talking about Abundance. Today, Ben and Max also talk to The New York Times columnist and host… but you won’t hear anything about the book (you’ll just have to buy it). Instead, they ask Ezra what he’s learned about the media and podcasting through this latest tour, how the “abundance” framework might apply to media, and if Trump will go after the press next. They also discuss how he’s become a rare media celebrity for liberals, why his fans feel saner listening to him — and how that may not be a good thing.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Polls

According to G. Elliott Morris’s Trump approval rating tracker, the president’s numbers went underwater at the start of March. The evidence is that concerns about the economy, not any other issue or news cycle, drove that decline. Americans started the year assuming that stock values would go up, along with the overall economy, and that inflation was on the verge of decline. (It has not moved substantially in the last year, but voters still worry about it.) Confidence in a growing stock market has fallen with all voters, and confidence in every other economic possibility has declined, albeit less sharply. Republicans believe that the economy is growing (which it is) and overwhelmingly believe it will be growing next year, which follows the White House’s own messaging: That short-term tariff pain will pay off. But independents and Democrats don’t believe that it ever will.

The president has used his power to weaken liberal institutions like no one since the New Deal, executing plans that conservatives couldn’t get his predecessors to take seriously. They either didn’t want to try, or calculated that the backlash wouldn’t be worth it. And there is a backlash, despite some rosy punditry speculating that Trump would benefit if he took on elite universities. When that is framed as a political strike against the universities (Trump has cited their politics in his Truth Social posts, not just how colleges handled Gaza protesters), it’s unpopular with everyone but Republicans. A majority of them (57%) favor what Trump is doing. But just one in four Republicans support greater executive branch control over “museums and theaters,” one of the least popular moves Trump has made so far.

Ads

• Club for Growth Action, “Back Stabber.” The Club for Growth contains multitudes. In 2023, it spent millions of dollars on ads designed to hurt Trump in the GOP presidential primary, before determining that it hadn’t worked. In down-ballot GOP primaries, the Club often accuses its targets of anti-Trump heresy. The indictment of Kentucky Rep. Andy Barr in this spot, opposing his US Senate bid: He voted too often with Nancy Pelosi, defended fellow Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after Jan. 6, and cosponsored a bill that Trump opposed (during his tightest reelection race, in 2018).
• Zohran for NYC, “Affordable.” The first mayoral campaign TV ad that New Yorkers saw this year was from a super PAC supporting Andrew Cuomo’s comeback bid. The second is from Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist legislator who’s in second place behind Cuomo, to the dismay of more center-left candidates who believe Mamdani can’t win the ranked-choice runoff vote. “Corrupt politicians like Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo have sold us out to billionaires and corporations,” says Mamdani, as headlines from Cuomo’s gubernatorial years (“Cuomo vows offensive against labor unions”) pop on-screen.
• Jean Stothert for Omaha Committee, “Forward.” Omaha’s mayor is running for a fourth term next month, as a Republican in a city that keeps getting more Democratic. In this month’s first round, Democrat and Douglas County Treasurer John Ewing Jr. ran a close second. Stothert’s reelection ads don’t go after Ewing, focusing on growth in the city and how crime’s fallen as she’s hired more cops. (Another ad contrasts Omaha with cities that “cowered to rioters” and “defunded police.“)

Scooped!

One of the most significant policy changes from Trump’s first term to his second is the dismantling of affirmative action, including a legal campaign against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in the public and private sectors. Trump talked about dismantling the Minority Business Development Agency, but didn’t do it, and he endorsed Sen. Tim Scott’s “opportunity zones” in cities. Politico’s Katherine Hapgood reports on what’s changed: Defunding the MBDA, on the grounds that race-conscious policies don’t comply with Trump’s orders. How is the chairman of the 2026 GOP Senate campaigns responding? He’s trying not to.

Next

• 46 days until primaries in New Jersey
• 53 days until primaries in Virginia
• 60 days until primaries in New York City
• 193 days until off-year elections
• 556 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

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