Americana

1. JB Pritzker on the invisible trail
2. A lurid GOP fight in Virginia
3. Democratic feuding
4. Impeachment angst
5. A new American history

Also: Must-reads about Elise Stefanik and John Fetterman

The best show in Washington this week, free to watch, was the White House’s briefing for “new media.” On three separate days, Karoline Leavitt chased her ordinary press conference with one for conservative influencers and streamers. Some of the questions were about Ukraine negotiations, and family-friendly policies the president might support. Some other questions focused on vengeance.

“A lot of people in America are questioning if there’s any possibility that we could see further investigations for anyone that could have violated our election integrity rights,” asked X influencer Dom Lucre. “Is there any possibility for names such as Barack Hussein Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to ever just possibly get investigated?”

Eric Bolling, a former Fox News host, asked if Trump’s lawsuit against CBS will “go to fruition,” and possibly roll up more of the press. “Will the New York Times be enjoined into that lawsuit?” he asked. “Will Trump sue Fox for their methodology in polling?”

Revenge has been the great deliverable of the president’s first 100 days in office. No modern president had worked so quickly to knock out the foundations from left-wing institutions, which the influencers appreciated. A year after he said he’d be “too busy for retribution,” at a time when his campaign worried that voters didn’t want him to focus on retribution, he had done plenty. The State Department was even combing its records for information on some Trump foes.

This has terrified big and small “L” liberals. It’s also been fairly easy, exercising powers that don’t need congressional approval and other presidents were reluctant to use. Trump can credibly tell supporters, like he did in Michigan this week, that he kept his promises.

How many more of them? House Republicans punted again on this year’s funding bill, and no negotiator has ruled out including every benefit that Trump ran on. They were worth billions. He ran on free IVF coverage, which his executive order couldn’t provide; eliminating taxes on tips; eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits.

In office, he’s talked about eliminating taxes on income under $200,000. He hasn’t endorsed a $5000 “DOGE dividend” check, but Elon Musk has, and the Trump joint fundraising committee sent donors an email this week warning that Democrats wanted to “STOP YOUR $5000 DOGE DIVIDEND CHECKS.”

Any reporter who’s been outside Washington has met voters who expect some of this. We won’t know, until House Republicans tell us, how much is real. One appeal of Trump, for his old and new voters, is that he makes lots of promises and either executes them or tries to. Barack Obama suggested in 2008 that he might support a “truth and reconciliation” commission to scour the Bush years, then said in 2009 that he wouldn’t. Activists, influencers, and donors have never had this much ability to get their issues in front of a president; ask Laura Loomer. “I can outpromise him,” Huey Long said of Franklin Roosevelt, but Trump actually got to do that to his opponents twice.

Until Trump says no, the expectation is that all of the harder, costlier promises will be fulfilled, too. Nobody has said “we can’t,” yet.

JB Pritzker enters the invisible primary

MANCHESTER, NH — On Sunday, Democrats here held one of the first stops on the invisible primary: A fundraising dinner with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, which he used to pick a fight with the Trump administration.

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption,” said Pritzker, after praising the people who’d been resisting Trump in the streets. “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They must understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.”

Pritzker had sharper lines for Republicans in the 30-minute speech — the first one any potential 2028 presidential candidate had given in an early-voting state, a fact that delighted party chair Ray Buckley. He warned that MAGA Republicans would be remembered as “tyrants and traitors,” and got huge applause for denouncing funding threats to universities: “Do not claim that your authoritarian power-grabs are about combatting antisemitism.” He turned a blowtorch on his party, too, against “do-nothing Democrats” whose “timidity” had brought Trump back to power.

But it was the “no peace” line that Republicans latched onto. In Illinois, the state GOP chair demanded an “open investigation for criminal incitement.” In Washington, Stephen Miller said the quote could “clearly could be construed as inciting violence.” Back in Chicago, Pritzker met with University of Illinois students and mocked the administration for not “listening to my speech at all.”

“Stephen Miller is part of a gang of people who apparently support the idea of attacking the federal capitols on January 6th,” he said. “I have called on people to express themselves… something that is obviously not understood by the gang that controls the White House today.”

Nude photo scandal rocks VA GOP

Virginia Republicans brawled all week about their nominee for lieutenant governor, after John Reid refused to resign and said an account that shared nude photos did not belong to him.

Reid, a former journalist and Senate staffer, was the only Republican who qualified for the ticket, letting his party forgo a primary as Democrats battled for their LG and attorney general nominations. The trouble started at the end of last week, when Gov. Glenn Youngkin urged Reid to drop out, after becoming aware of what a Youngkin spokesman called “disturbing online content.”

The candidate refused, saying in a short video that he had nothing to do with nude photos on a Tumblr account that shared its handle with one he uses on Instagram. “This is extortion, and it is illegal in Virginia,” he claimed. On Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, the GOP nominee for governor, quoted from the Book of Matthew and called for the story to end: “It is his race, and his decision alone to move forward.”

One day later, Reid rallied in Richmond, an event that had been planned as an event for the ticket, which he used to condemn the “swamp” and defend his integrity. By Thursday, Reid’s resistance had blown back on Youngkin; strategist Matt Moran put out a letter from an attorney, denying that he had defamed Reid as the Tumblr story broke, and stepped away from Youngkin’s Spirit of Virginia PAC. Democrats watched it all happily; they have contested primaries for LG and AG next month, which they don’t think can get as messy as this.

DNC gears up for Hogg fight

The Democratic National Committee will consider a challenge to Vice Chair David Hogg’s election on May 12. The protest, from a Native American party activist who lost that Feb. 1 election, began before Hogg said that his Leaders We Deserve PAC would keep intervening in Democratic primaries.

But that decision, and a busy media tour defending it, frustrated some voting DNC members. The DNC itself has defended the rules that elected Hogg and the rest of its leadership, but the complainant, Kalyn Free, argues that the crucial vote “undermin[ed] both fairness and gender diversity.” The party’s credentials committee will hear this complaint; this summer, the full DNC will vote on banning members from intervening in primaries.

Crowded primaries keep breaking out anyway. Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig entered the race to replace Sen. Tina Smith on Wednesday, after a weak fundraising quarter for Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan — who pointedly hasn’t been endorsed by her governing partner, Tim Walz. (Hogg got Walz’s support for his DNC bid.)

In Illinois, Gov. Pritzker endorsed his running mate, Juliana Stratton, for US Senate. So did Sen. Tammy Duckworth. That is not expected to dissuade most of the House members who had been eyeing the seat, including Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Rep. Lauren Underwood; Pritzker pushed back against an NBC News story claiming that Underwood was “damaged goods.”

Jen Psaki has gone from being a behind-the-scenes political staffer, to running the White House briefing room under Biden, to now hosting a primetime show on MSNBC. This week, Ben and Max bring on the former Press Secretary to talk about what it means to be a cable news host in 2025, how podcasts are changing how TV works, and why she went from being a spokesperson to a primetime anchor. They also ask her what she thinks of the current administration’s press tactics, how she reflects on the 2024 race, and what she makes of the idea that there was a cover-up of Joe Biden’s condition.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Democrats don’t want a third Trump impeachment

On Monday morning, Michigan state Rep. Donavan McKinney launched a progressive challenge to Shri Thanedar, a two-term congressman from Detroit. McKinney was the first Democrat of the cycle to be endorsed by Justice Democrats, the group that recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the “squad” — a reboot after it spent the last cycle on defense against AIPAC.

Hours after McKinney’s announcement, Thanedar made his own news. He was introducing articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. Plenty of Democratic activists had been calling for it; Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff had just told a constituent that Trump committed impeachable offenses. But McKinney brushed it aside.

“We’ve done this. We’ve been through this circus already,” McKinney told Semafor. “How many times has Trump been impeached? He got re-elected. He’s not going anywhere. We need to figure out another strategy to fight back.” He had bigger disagreements with Thanedar, who he called the “Elon Musk” of Michigan; Thanedar had gotten support from AIPAC, while McKinney believed that Israel was carrying out a genocide.

There are growing grassroots demands for a vote to remove Trump from office, from new organizations like the Mayday Movement (which began an impeachment sit-in on May 1) and Citizens’ Impeachment. Its leaders, like Democratic leaders, call Trump a threat to democracy and a would-be king, and say that there’s only one constitutional provision to stop that. But Democrats have balked at their demands, while not disputing their premise.

The lesson of the last two Trump impeachments, they say, is that the process no longer works.

Greg Grandin’s history of America(s)

“Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots,” Stephen Miller said on Thursday. “We’re gonna make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology.”

He said that right after I’d talked to Greg Grandin, the Pulitzer-winning historian and author of America, América, a massive new book that covers the creation of the United States and its neighbors as one big story. Alternative histories of our country have had a rough ride, recently, epitomized by that Miller quote. The 1619 Project, which situated the true founding of the nation with the arrival of slaves in North America, was adopted by some blue state classrooms, then drummed out of red state classrooms.

Grandin doesn’t expect the same fate for his book, which is full of revelations, even for people with a solid understanding of the United States. The Trump administration’s talk about annexing Canada, which helped Prime Minister Mark Carney win this week’s election, gets covered as a wild departure from norms. So does the new right’s affinity for El Salvador and the deportation of illegal immigrants here to a mega-prison there.

Polls

When the president condemned “fake polls” this week, he was mostly talking about CNN’s. It pinned him with the worst overall approving ratings on some key issues for a president after 100 days in office — far worse than Joe Biden, who at this point in his term was benefiting from the wind-down of COVID and the economic stimulus packages he’d inherited from Trump and built on. The toplines put Trump at 41% approval, about as low as it was when he lost the 2020 election. Bad perceptions of the economy drive everything, and his advantage on immigration and “gender” issues, which Democrats have wrung their hands responding to, just isn’t driving the news. That could have implications for down-ballot Republicans. In Virginia, the GOP has continued to attack Democrats over “migrant crime” and the definition of a “woman” in sports, but worries about inflation have overwhelmed those topics.

The AJC’s polling got Georgia right last year, capturing Trump’s improvement with non-white voters and coming very close to capturing the horse race. It now finds Trump underwater, opposed by most voters on nearly everything he’s done, with his lowest approval ratings in nine years. But Democrats, too, record nine-year lows in this poll, driven by frustration from their own voters that they’re “soft” and resisting Trump too weakly. That makes sense in a swing state where they’ve been winless, except for one US Senate race, since 2020. Trump’s decline has been driven by unpopular results for sometimes-popular actions he took. Democrats haven’t benefitted from a backlash; independents have just soured on all of them.

Democrats haven’t won an election in Ohio since 2018. They’re hopeful that the conditions next year — a second Trump midterm, possible economic uncertainty, a Trump-endorsed Ramaswamy candidacy for governor — will open up a path for them. By a 12-point margin, registered Ohio voters say that the first 100 days were “worse” than they expected, and support for global tariffs is 50-50, in a state where trade protectionism has traditionally been very popular. But the Democratic brand is still in the sewer. Acton, who’s running for governor, runs only slightly stronger than Kamala Harris did last year. Brown and Ryan, who Democrats see as strong potential candidates for either the Senate seat or for governor, run about as strong as Brown did when he lost re-election. Democrats have no real path to a majority in Ohio without their old base in the Mahoning Valley, and not even candidates from the region (like Ryan) are bringing it back yet.

Ads

• Josh Gottheimer for Governor, “Born Fighter.” Gottheimer got a torrent of earned media for his self-disclosed use of AI in this spot — the most-watched one of his campaign, by miles. Admaker Bill Knapp used AI prompts to portray a young Gottenheimer in a boxing ring, then a middle-aged Gottheimer boxing Donald Trump. (The words on their gloves and the signs around the ring are gibberish.) Real photos of Gottheimer working with Bill Clinton, which have appeared in other spots, appear next to AI-generated images of them with Barack Obama. “AI Generated. Tax Cuts Are Real.”
• Karrin for Arizona, “Trump Endorsed.” Karrin Taylor Robson’s gubernatorial campaign has put money behind one short message: Donald Trump endorsed her. That was the theme of her campaign launch, and it’s the theme of her first primary spot, telling voters that she’s “answering Trump’s call” to run. The policy promises are still vague: A “stronger economy” and “stronger borders.” The endorsement fills in any gaps, with nothing a Republican primary voter could object to.
• Zellnor for NYC, “Mrs. Randolph.” New York State Sen. Zellnor Myrie is the third mayoral candidate to go on the air, after Zohran Mamdani, and after Andrew Cuomo’s super PAC. Mamdani’s first spot contrasted him with Cuomo, but Myrie doesn’t mention him at all. Instead, it lets one of his former teachers narrate the story of a relatable, next-generation politician who wants universal after-school programs and affordable housing. Myrie’s a favorite of young YIMBY liberals, but has struggled to gain traction or name ID. Hence the straightforward introduction in this ad.

Scooped!

On Monday, when House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries was asked about Democrats going to El Salvador to investigate Kilmar Ábrego García’s imprisonment, he gave a non-answer: “Our reaction is that Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president in modern American history.” Adrian Carrasquillo’s follow-up story in The Bulwark clarified things: Democrats were getting the message, from leadership, that the story had run its course and it was time for members to stop saying they would head there. (This happened after Republicans ruled out official status, and payment, for the trips.)

Next

• 39 days until primaries in New Jersey
• 46 days until primaries in Virginia
• 53 days until primaries in New York City
• 186 days until off-year elections
• 549 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

Two superb stories this week tackled topics that generate a lot of takes, but usually without much insight. Ben Terris’s look at how John Fetterman became alienated from former staff, and Annie Karni’s profile of Elise Stefanik’s failed UN ambassador nomination, overflow with first-hand details and emotions that politicians try, typically, to contain. You can hear the teeth grinding in this Stefanik quote: “This has been more freeing in opening multiple paths for me to serve New Yorkers stronger than ever.” You will wonder what happened in the four minutes Fetterman went off the record.

Quarterly earnings reports from oil and gas companies suggest the industry is already feeling the impact of US President Donald Trump’s trade wars, pointing to headaches ahead for shareholders, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell reported.

At $60 a barrel, most oil companies’ dividends are probably safe, one energy analyst told McDonnell. Closer to $50, they’re at much greater risk — we’re not there yet, McDonnell wrote, but “red flags are going up.”