Americana

1. Republicans back freezes and tariffs
2. Final stretch in DNC race
3. “Condoms for Hamas”?
4. Democrat Iowa winner speaks
5. Chris Hayes on attention

Also: Why crypto dropped $500,000 into a completely non-competitive race.

For 24 hours, before it was partially withdrawn, nearly every Republican in Washington defended an order from the Office of Management and Budget to freeze billions of dollars in federal spending. The idea of a pause on countless grants didn’t sound that scary to the GOP. “Every modern corporation that I’m aware of knows how to downsize and save money,” Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s America’s turn. I mean — it’s the federal government’s turn.”

Making government “run like a business” is a very old cliché. Making it run like a modern corporation, with a CEO who can move fast and slash the workforce at a whim? This is fairly new — and something Democrats are seizing on to attack the administration,

They’re flipping that same framing around (“oligarchy,” “billionaire boys club”) to remind people what they don’t like about big business, and pointedly taking offense when pro-Trump intellectuals compare what he’s doing to what a CEO does; even more if they invoke the “bold, persistent experimentation” of FDR.

And as the stories spun forward this week, I heard Democrats use another word to describe what was happening: “Chaos.” And it was confusing to sort through the actions and walkbacks of an OMB that doesn’t have a Senate-confirmed director yet (Democrats boycotted Russell Vought’s committee vote), and a DOGE that’s making big decisions with little transparency.

The comparisons between Elon Musk’s remake of Twitter and his remake of the federal government were obvious. Memos and embarrassing emails were leaked right away to reporters; “buyouts” were offered to federal employees (again, after being leaked), using tactics from the private sector that did not sync up with the unionized government workforce.

“The president has tried to terrorize you for about a week and then gives you a little sweetheart offer,” Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine said on Wednesday, urging federal employees to ignore a mass-emailed offer of “deferred resignation,” inspired by Musk. “Don’t be fooled. He’s tricked hundreds of people with that offer.”

This is a compelling message in Virginia, where government workers and contractors typically vote Democratic — and where the party hopes to win back the governor’s office this year. But Democrats acknowledged this week that even the most outrageous headlines about what Musk is doing don’t click unless voters believe it will affect them.

And at a forum for Democratic National Committee chair candidates last night, most agreed that the party was losing the message wars. Several said that they needed to quickly, compellingly elevate “real people” affected by any hostile takeover of federal programs. Without that, “chaos” just sounded like something the DC media was hyperventilating about. Easy for them to ignore. Easy for Republicans to celebrate.

Republicans back Trump on spending and trade war

Republicans brushed off concerns about the president’s spending freezes and tariffs this week, sticking with him before and after an order to freeze federal spending was halted.

“Wyoming people want to see some eggs broken back here,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., in an interview with Semafor. They “just kind of trust [Trump] about matters of trade, of tariffs and policies that are trying to get a handle on the size of government.”

The party may face another test this weekend, if the president goes through with a threat to place 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico. After the deadly Washington-area airplane crash on Wednesday night, a White House official told Semafor that tariffs remain “a top priority” for Trump, then added that he’s “not held to any date.”

Still, even as they defended Trump, Republicans acknowledged that the OMB memo that ordered the spending freeze sparked confusion back home. At the House GOP’s retreat in south Florida, which unfolded during high-profile hearings of Trump’s most endangered cabinet nominees, Republican leaders generally blamed the media for stoking fear about government spending cuts. Senators, while not breaking with the president, were more critical of the administration, and hopeful that it had learned something.

“It was just obviously too confusing. We had a lot of people calling into our state and here [in DC] worried about it. So they took it down, but I’m not sure all the confusion’s gone,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. “We were getting it from health care, from domestic violence shelters, from colleges, universities, nonprofits. You name it.”

Democrats wrap up raucous DNC race

The eight candidates running to chair the Democratic National Committee faced protests and skeptical questions on Thursday, at their last public forum before the party elects new leadership this weekend. Ahead of Saturday’s final vote, candidates for every key DNC role agreed that they were losing “messaging” wars and losing working class votes. They needed a more aggressive response to Donald Trump. The only Democrat who got Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker was mentioned as a Democrat who seemed to be doing

“It’s chaos, and it deserves a party that’s gonna fight,” said Minnesota DFL chair Ken Martin, on the campus of Georgetown University. Martin still leads the field in public endorsements from DNC members. Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, who trails but has been endorsed by party leaders like Nancy Pelosi, said that Democrats could “overwhelm the algorithm” of conservative-leaning social media with a focus on popular Democratic ideas, and attacks on GOP weaknesses, like proposed cuts to Medicaid. (Martin told Semafor that Pelosi’s endorsement was not moving many votes.)

Martin, Wikler, and the rest of the field largely ignored activists who interrupted the forum several times to demand party limits on “corporate” money. They were frequently asked to defend diversity after a week of Trump administration rollbacks of DEI policies; each candidate raised his or her hand when Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart asked whether race and misogyny played a role in Kamala Harris’ defeat in November.

“You all passed,” said Capehart.

Faiz Shakir, the manager of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign and a last-minute candidate for the DNC role, broke with the pack over other diversity questions. When one party member asked about creating a new role for a transgender person, and another asked about expanding a Muslim caucus, Shakir said that he wouldn’t do either. “I am frustrated with the way we use identity to break ourselves apart,” he explained. Two-time presidential candidate Marianne Williamson said that she would create the transgender role, because that community was being “attacked” by Trump.

The Condom Question

President Trump claimed this week to have canceled $50 million in “condoms” for residents of Gaza. It could have been a memorable example of how the new administration was scouring the government for wasteful spending — if it was true. But the group that lost that funding said that it had spent none of it on family planning.

Asked by Semafor about the canceled grants, and what exactly had been canceled, a spokesperson for the State Department said that the reference was to “two $50 million buckets of ‘aid’ for Gaza via the International Medical Corp,” which offered “family planning programming.” A spokesperson for the IMC said that it had received $68,078,508 from USAID for work in Gaza, but “no US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms,” and that its work would cease soon thanks to the cutoff.

Democrats hit back after Trump repeated the dubious $50 million number: “It’s a lie, made up,” wrote Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy on X. But the claim circulated widely in pro-Trump media, revealing an advantage — positive conservative coverage, for readers who now ignore “legacy” outlets — that has grown since the president’s first term.

Winning in deep Trump territory

On Tuesday night, Republicans lost a state senate seat in eastern Iowa — where voters had just backed Donald Trump by 21 points. Mike Zimmer, a 64-year-old teacher and public school administrator who spent “less than $50,000” on his campaign, beat a Republican activist by 4 points, surprising some state and national Democrats who assumed they couldn’t win where now-Lt. Gov. Chris Cournoyer used to win easily. It was the first gain for the party since November, and the first hint at the sort of turnout advantage Democrats enjoyed in special elections during Trump’s first presidency.

“Our goal was to just get Democrats out to vote,” Zimmer told Semafor. “We felt that if we could do that by door-knocking, phone-calling, postcards, that kind of business, that we could get between 4,500 to 5,000 votes. And by God, that’s exactly what we got.”

Zimmer ran on what he called “Iowa values,” and against a Republican supermajority in Des Moines that has pursued a conservative agenda since it took over 11 years ago. “Iowa values means not demonizing any segment of the population and just singling them out because they don’t look like, talk like or act like you,” he said. “My campaign was talking about raising the minimum wage, which hasn’t happened since the Democrats had both the House and the Senate — so it’s been 17 years.”

Republicans will still hold a 34-16 supermajority when Zimmer takes his seat, and Zimmer said that he learned something, during the short and wintry election, about why his party had lost ground. “‘The impact of Fox News is just jaw-dropping,” he said. “All of a sudden, when I’m having a conversation about Iowa, they’ll say ‘well, in California, they’ve got a real problem.’ Where did that come from? I don’t think I fully grasped just how strong that propaganda machine is, day in and day out. It’s just incredible.”

Chris Hayes on the Democrats’ attention crisis

Every weeknight, for one hour, Chris Hayes asks Americans to stop what they’re doing and watch him break down the news. Competition has never been so fierce.

“All of us in politics are having a hard time just figuring out what to focus on,” he said in an interview this week. “Some of this is about energy: People feel depressed and defeated.”

In “The Sirens’ Call,” his new book about the all-out war for Americans’ attention, Hayes works inside and outside of his anchor’s chair to understand what the “slot machine in our pocket” has done to our ability to focus — and to politics. Candidates who’ve cautiously avoided interviews where they might make mistakes lose to candidates who’ll say anything, even if it generates bad headlines. Fake, free news gets more traction than paywalled news that went through lawyers and fact-checkers.

“Right now, there’s a period of reflection and brainstorming, because people have a sense that they need new tactics,” Hayes said.

Polls

Donald Trump started his first term, eight years ago, with a flurry of activity and an approval rating under 50%. He’s starting his second term the same way, with just one big marked difference — fewer Democrats are ready to give him a chance. In January 2017, 14% of them approved of Trump after one week in office, by far the lowest level of partisan support for a president of the other party in Gallup Poll history. Joe Biden broke that record in 2021 — 11% of Republicans approved — and Trump broke it this month, coming in at 6% with Democrats.

The biggest hurdle for the Democrats’ resistance strategy is simple: Donald Trump and his party are more popular than them. This is the biggest Democratic disadvantage in Quinnipiac’s polling since it started asking voters their basic opinion of the major parties, driven by a tremendous gender gap. Men view the GOP favorably by a 9-point margin; they view Democrats negatively by a 45-point margin. Eight years ago, the last time they were boxed out of power by Trump, Republicans had a much smaller lead on the question, largely because men still held a negative view of the party. The only Trump initiative less popular than the Democrats is the effort to end birthright citizenship. Every other immigration policy is more popular, and by a decent margin; Joe Biden’s preemptive pardons of his family members are less popular than Trump’s pardon of Jan. 6 defendants.

The first debates in New Jersey’s 2025 race for governor start on Sunday, and not a second too soon: Voters have no idea who their options are. Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican who outran the polls and nearly beat Gov. Phil Murphy in 2021, has a clear advantage in the GOP primary; it’s his third run for the nomination, and he won the last one easily. But half of Republicans are undecided, and 29% of them are considering an alternative to Ciattarelli, among them candidates who have run to his right. (Ciattarelli’s distance from Trump, an asset in 2021, is a small problem now.) The Democratic field includes two North Jersey members of Congress, the mayors of Newark and Jersey City, and a former state senate president, and none has support north of 10%.

Ads

• Defend American Jobs, “Vote Randy Fine.” Florida state Sen. Randy Fine easily won Tuesday’s primary for the House seat vacated by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. He rolled past two little-known and underfunded conservative activists, setting him up to win the Apr. 1 election. This pro-crypto PAC moved in for an easy win, too, spending more than $500,000 — more than Fine spent on his own campaign — on this by-the-basics spot. Like most crypto-linked ads, it makes no mention of the industry, telling voters that Donald Trump supports Fine and that the two of them will “drive prices down” and “end the border crisis.”
• House Majority Forward, “Real Steal.” The House Democrats’ super PAC has been on the air in swing seats all month, and it’s horning into the cable news conversation with this buy about “the Trump freeze.” As Republicans defend the concept of spending freezes on non-discretionary spending, Democrats say that the “chaos” of the decision could risk the benefits they ran on saving last year — “health care” and “payments to police departments.”

Scooped!

On Wednesday, 26 minutes after The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta would pay $25 million to settle with Donald Trump, Michael Scherer’s story on the larger trend went live. “A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court — in some cases for years — have now lined up to negotiate,” he wrote, drawing the line from X’s decision to give up a strong defense against a Trump lawsuit to the looming settlements from media companies no longer interested in battling the president. This newsletter’s mostly about the back-and-forth of electoral politics, but these stories reminded me of how much else is happening at a higher level, where voters won’t matter for another four years.

Next

• One day until the DNC leadership elections
• 60 days until Wisconsin’s state supreme court election
• 277 days until off-year elections
• 641 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

There’s a rich vein of news in the new administration’s staffing choices, most of it done without a blaring press release. Vittoria Elliott’s WIRED story about the Elon Musk influence at OMB is worth paying a subscription for: Pivotal choices are being made by very young veterans of Musk’s companies.

The breakout success of Chinese AI platform DeepSeek doesn’t mean a dimmer future for the US electric grid, despite what Wall Street seems to think, the billionaire CEO of a company racing to produce low-carbon power from natural gas told Semafor’s Tim McDonnell.