DNC Chair Ken Martin's incompetence is matched only by his fear of accountability.
The Ebola outbreak, Israeli strikes in Gaza, Putin in Beijing and Arsenal win the Premier League – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists Continue reading...
DNC’s Ken Martin condemned for suppressing report for months and then admitting it ‘won’t meet your standards’Democrats belatedly publish 2024 election autopsyKen Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, is facing mounting calls to resign over his shambolic handling of an autopsy report on Kamala Harris’s defeat by Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.Martin suppressed the document for months before finally bowing to internal pressure and releasing it on Thursday. The slapdash nature of the autopsy, omitting Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term and failing to mention the words “Gaza” or “Israel”, has only deepened a crisis of confidence in his leadership. Continue reading...
Gabe Amo, Democratic Representative of Rhode Island, joins Joe Mathieu on Bloomberg's Balance of Power to discuss the DNC's autopsy of the 2024 election as well as the likelihood of Congress passing a war powers resolution, saying the 'long-term solution' is to end the war in Iran. (Source: Bloomberg)
It has been a year and a half since the second female Democratic nominee for president lost to what her party views as an existential threat. Since then, President Donald Trump’s defeat of former Vice President Kamala Harris has been dissected at length. After much criticism and mounting public pressure, the Democratic National Committee finally […]
Donald Trump last year amassed one big beautiful rap sheet of scandal and criminality, with multiple instances of corruption that made Teapot Dome look quaint. But the president’s bogus new “settlement” with his own administration’s IRS, which he had sued in January for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns in 2020, hits scorching new heights of depravity. The deal’s contours were bad enough when it looked like Trump was simply going to take a small fortune of taxpayer money and line his own pockets. But that was last week: The new plan is for $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to be set aside as a slush fund, which Trump will effectively control, to pay out to January 6 insurrectionists and political cronies that he believes were wronged back when the Department of Justice wasn’t his mobbed-up plaything. Some of the worst people in America are already lining up for payouts.There are plenty of ways to describe this arrangement. Call it cartoon villainy. Call it criminal. For certain, call this an utterly impeachable offense. Also call this very worrisome: There is a non-zero chance that Trump will simply get away with it, now that corrupt elites dominate American life with absolute impunity. For those with any vested interest in restoring democracy and clearing out the Augean stables of Trumpism, how we respond to this is very important.The Trump White House is a kleptocratic organ, pure and simple—one that increasingly resembles authoritarian regimes around the world. “This new slush fund is no different than what we see in other kleptocracies,” Casey Michel, frequent TNR contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, told me. “It’s a ruling figure creating a new pot of wealth that they can use for whatever they want—in this case, paying off a bunch of insurrectionists who Trump can now transform into his own personal paramilitary, without any oversight or checks whatsoever. It’s something we’ve never seen in U.S. history—but is perfectly familiar to those who study autocracy around the world.”There is, however, a key distinction between Trump and the scores of foreign kleptocrats that Michel has spent years studying: “The only difference here is that most foreign kleptocrats at least try to hide their tracks—instead of broadcasting them to the world, like we’re seeing with Trump.” While most criminals endeavor to keep the newspapers from finding out about their intention to commit crimes, Trump does it in plain sight—either because he’s incredibly stupid or because the Supreme Court has told him he’s wholly immune from prosecution. (It’s probably both.)But the newspapers’ early coverage of the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is troubling. If sanewashing was last year’s problem in the political press, sinwashing might be the au courant media malady. The initial coverage from The New York Times suggested that the scheme merely “could funnel money to Trump allies,” even though this was its expressed purpose. The news department also couldn’t bring itself to call it a slush fund, instead drafting “critics” to say what is plainly and objectively true (the paper’s editorial board at least named it appropriately). Elsewhere, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal found a useful euphemism, referring to the settlement’s arrangement as merely “unusual” instead of nakedly criminal. (TNR’s headline, if you’re keeping score, nailed it: “Trump Just Launched a Taxpayer-Funded $1.8 Billion MAGA Slush Fund.”) So I’m concerned that when Democrats return to power, the media will either be an impediment or an enemy to any effort to put things right. But at least that effort is kicking off right away. Representative Jamie Raskin told TNR’s Greg Sargent he is planning to “introduce a bill that would block the fund and other future efforts like it.” He’ll be doing so with the full support of party leadership, who will seek to bring the vote to the House floor over the Republican majority’s objections via a discharge petition. While such a maneuver will require some GOP support, Republicans in the House have in recent weeks broken ranks on the disclosure of the Epstein files—and a few have defected from the party line on funding Trump’s grifty ballroom, as well, likely killing the $1 billion that Republicans had planned to allocate to it in their ICE-funding reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, HuffPost’s Jen Bendery reports that Senator Chris Van Hollen will be launching a similar effort in the Senate, amending the reconciliation bill to prevent January 6ers—some of whom assaulted the Capitol Police officers who protect these politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike—from obtaining money through this slush fund. Taken as a whole, these efforts tick a lot of boxes for those, like me, who bemoan Democrats’...
If you’ve read anything about the Democrats’ “autopsy” of its 2024 election loss, which was released Thursday after being suppressed for months, it probably highlighted what the report doesn’t include: any mention of Gaza, the Biden administration’s refusal to curb Israel’s genocidal war, or Kamala Harris’s mealymouthed efforts to triangulate a position after becoming the nominee in July. “There are 50,000 Words in the DNC Autopsy. ‘Gaza’ Isn’t One,” Mother Jones announced. The Intercept struck a similar note: “DNC Autopsy Doesn’t Mention Gaza or Israel At All.” On the other side of the aisle, National Review crowed about the omission: “DNC Autopsy Exposes the Left’s ‘Gaza’ Excuse as Nonsense.”“When it arrived in my inbox, I immediately clicked on it, used the search function, and searched for Gaza. Came up as zero,” Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Politico. “Israel came up as zero, Jews came up as zero. I was surprised. It looks like there’s a huge omission.”Well, yes. The omission of Gaza, which played an important role in Harris’s disappointing showing with young voters, is appalling and suggests a party leadership still unwilling to reckon with the cost of the Biden administration’s support for Israel—or even to acknowledge just how far Democratic attitudes toward Israel have shifted in recent years. But the overriding focus on this one omission misses a more important point. The problem with the DNC autopsy isn’t just that it doesn’t mention Gaza. It’s that it ignores policy and, for that matter, politics—how policies are messaged, and what role they play in coalition building—altogether. It is a profoundly weird document that’s almost entirely concerned with fundraising and spending while devoting almost no space to issues, including the two most consequential ones: inflation and President Biden’s age and fitness. Those issues, though less morally stark than Gaza, were clearly decisive. And the autopsy ignores them. “The report’s so stupid, it’s hard to make sense why something’s in there and why it’s not,” one senior Democratic operative told Politico. It’s obvious why the DNC shelved the autopsy. It’s long yet incomplete, and utterly useless for its intended purpose: to show Democrats what they did wrong, so they don’t make the same mistakes in 2028. In a way, it’s actually worse than useless because the DNC’s clumsy attempt to suppress it became an unnecessary intraparty scandal in itself, making it seem to journalists and Democratic voters alike that some forbidden truth was being suppressed. In reality, the scandal is that this is the best the DNC could do to explain the party’s catastrophic loss in 2024, which set the country on a path of unimaginable corruption and authoritarian thuggery. There is a disclaimer early in the autopsy noting that “this document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC.” The first question should be obvious: If this isn’t the DNC’s view of what went wrong in 2024, then just what are we doing here? The second question is just as straightforward: Just who is the author? It’s Paul Rivera, a longtime Democratic strategist and friend of DNC Chair Ken Martin. He is also, as many people have noted, a fixture of New York’s notoriously corrupt and incompetent Democratic Party and worked as an aide for state Senator John Sampson, who was convicted on charges of obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents in 2015. (Rivera resigned shortly before Sampson’s arrest.) It’s not clear why Rivera was tapped for this important job, aside from the fact that he was available and seemingly willing to work for free. He hadn’t worked on a presidential campaign since John Kerry’s in 2004. Rivera clearly wasn’t up for the task, but the autopsy contains some critiques—mostly vague or incoherent—over voter targeting. It suggests that Trump’s anti-trans ad, “Kamala is for they/them, I am for you,” was especially effective, and observed that the Harris campaign didn’t do enough to try to capture rural voters. Mostly, though, it consists of platitudes, such as: “At times, it seems Democrats are trying to win arguments while Republicans are focused on winning elections. Democrats operate in an ecosystem defined by reason even in cycles when the electorate is defined by rage.”The right, the report claims, is “always on,” but Democrats are not. What does that mean? Here’s the report’s explanation: “The difference is right-wing interests take a longer-term approach and amplify polarizing messaging and candidates within the Democratic family with the intention of ‘othering’ all Democrats. Without aggressive pushback and tactics, it works.” You can look at aspects of the right-wing machine—Fox News certainly, and parts of the Koch machine—and nod along. This analysis isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s outdated—the kind of thing every Democrat was wailing about during the George W. Bush presidency and early Obama years.
THE DNC AUTOPSY: DID DEMOCRATS REALLY WANT TO KNOW? Do you know who Paul Rivera is? Don’t feel bad if you don’t; he’s not a household name, even among political junkies. A little-known former Clinton White House aide and senior adviser to the losing 2004 John Kerry presidential campaign, Rivera became famous this week as the […]
The autopsy never once mentions the terms “Gaza” or “Palestinian,” a top issue for many voters in 2024.