Americana

1. Democrats wonder who’s listening
2. Gaetz gives up
3. Capitol Hill fights over Israel
4. A bathroom ban in Congress
5. The DNC battle begins

Also: Just in time, a 2028 presidential poll

This was a week of predictions coming true. When Matt Gaetz was picked to become attorney general, people who’d covered him for a while knew that investigations into his private life could sink him. He sunk. When Sarah McBride ran for Congress — not to be its first transgender member, but that was part of the deal — she assumed that some Republicans would refuse to recognize her gender identity. She was right about that.

It’s made for a different kind of presidential transition, so far. Unlike 2016, there is no flowering of anti-Trump resistance; quite the opposite, as ratings for liberal TV shows fall and the prosecutions of the former president fade out. Unlike 2020, there’s no looming congressional runoff that might quickly shift the balance of power.

And there won’t be clear substantive tests of the new administration until it’s gotten a few months to enact an agenda. The next questions aren’t electoral at all. They’re about which Trump campaign promises are already ringing hollow (support for IVF, a blacklist on Project 2025 contributors) and which were serious (putting vaccine skeptics in charge of public health).

Americana will be taking Thanksgiving off next week, returning in December. It would be very un-Americana to work during “a moratorium on all the grievances and resentments” — that’s Philip Roth’s advice, and I agree with it.

Democrats talk. Who is listening?

Center-left Democrats spent much of Thursday morning on their latest post-election airing of grievances, bemoaning how little voters had heard their messages or appreciated their record.

NewDEAL, created to build a Democratic farm team after the party’s 2010 losses, gathered elected officials and strategists at a progressive D.C. hotel. They saw polling from Third Way, another center-left idea shop, which found that voters trusted Donald Trump more than Kamala Harris on all but two issues: abortion and climate change. They marveled at how good Republicans were at activating unlikely voters and yanking the news cycle where they wanted it.

There was no agreement, yet, on what had worked for their own candidates. But separation from the Biden administration helped, accompanied by high-profile criticism of its least popular positions.

“I don’t think there’s a generalizable answer, but I really worked hard to show my independence,” said Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., who won re-election in his competitive Hudson Valley district by nearly 14 points. “I was one of the first to call on Biden to step aside. I consistently called him out on failing to secure the border. I stood up to our own state leaders on what would have been a very harmful congestion pricing policy that would have taxed a lot of working people in my district.”

Trump picks Bondi for attorney general after Gaetz nomination implodes

Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz ended his bid to become attorney general on Thursday, and Donald Trump nominated ex-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to replace him. It was the first setback for Trump’s transition, and one of the briefest prospective nominations in American history — eight days, the shortest span between an announcement and withdrawal since scandals tanked the 2004 Homeland Security nomination of Bernie Kerik.

“He’s our first casualty,” Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast on Friday. “There’s blood in the water, and they’ve scored a big win.”

No other Trump pick has met the same resistance from Republican senators, intense enough to convince the president-elect that there was no path to confirmation. But several senators have raised concerns about the sexual assault allegation levied against defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth and questioned the praise that director of national intelligence pick Tulsi Gabbard gets on Russian state TV. Hours before Gaetz pulled his nomination, Trump allies were talking confidently about punishing any “no” votes in primaries, a plan that might still be implemented if other nominees falter.

Anti-war Democrats test their strength with Israel votes

A Democratic attempt to cut off military aid to Israel failed in the Senate this week, and two pro-Israel bills passed with Democratic support in the House. But activists demanding an end to the war, and an arms embargo on the Jewish state, still believed they had made some progress.

Nineteen senators, all Democrats, voted for at least one of the resolutions introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, which would have restricted the sale of weapons that have been used in Israeli strikes that killed civilians. Two of those Democrats hailed from states won by Donald Trump this year; one of them, Sen. Jon Ossoff, faces re-election in 2026. On the Senate floor, Ossoff cited Republican presidents who have pressured Israel, saying that doing so wasn’t a betrayal of the country.

“Israel, faced by President Reagan’s ultimatum, adjusted its policy to accommodate America’s demand,” said Ossoff. “The United States remained Israel’s closest ally, and the world kept turning.”

In the House, 15 Democrats joined Republicans to pass the Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act. That was a decline from one week earlier, when 52 Democrats supported a bill that would allow a treasury secretary to more easily declare a nonprofit a “terrorist supporting organization.” The Democrats flipped after pressure from progressive groups, who warned that the second Trump administration could use the proposal to destroy organizations that weighed in against the war in any way.

Republicans restrict

House Republicans announced this week that Capitol bathrooms would be “reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” weeks before the first transgender member of Congress would take office. Rep.-elect Sarah McBride, D-Del., told Semafor before the election that she expected to face ugliness from Republican colleagues; this week she said that she would abide by the rule, while calling it “a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing.”

McBride helped shape her party’s response to the proposed rule, which was first brought forward by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who has taken shifting positions on LGBTQ+ rights. “I’m absolutely 100% gonna stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom,” she told reporters after introducing a bill to do that. After talking with their new colleague, Democrats echoed her response — that Republicans were creating a non-issue to hurt vulnerable people.

“It is disgusting,” New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez told reporters outside the Capitol on Wednesday. “And frankly, all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn’t wearing a skirt because they think she might not look woman enough.”

A DNC chair candidate talks

The battle to lead the Democratic National Committee began the day after the election – slowly, and politely. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley declared his candidacy first, followed by Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chairman Ken Martin. Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler is considering it; Latino strategist Chuck Rocha is talking about it; other Democrats are trying to talk Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel into it.

They would need to play catch-up. “I’ve probably made about 275 calls so far,” Martin told Americana on Thursday, estimating that “a little over 100” of the party’s 450-odd voting members now support him. As president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, Martin had been working for years with fellow state chairs on what he called the “57 state party strategy” (the states, DC and territories), funding them year round. His basic pitch: “We need to get the DNC out of DC.”

POLLS

Republicans earned some goodwill in the election, and most voters haven’t reacted to Donald Trump’s cabinet picks with the hair-on-fire horror of Democrats and liberal pundits. One in eight Harris voters have, right now, a favorable view of Kennedy and Gabbard, Democrats who left the party and are persona non grata now. Gaetz, who has since withdrawn, was the least-liked Trump nominee among independents, but more voters were unfamiliar with him than viewed him negatively. A plurality of voters simply don’t know who Hegseth is; 56% of Republicans view him favorably, keeping his rating above water. Republican senators and aides might worry about how these nominees will play when more vetting is done and Democrats can challenge them in hearings, but they are starting from a solid baseline.

ADS

• Mikie Sherrill for Governor, “Build Something.” The 2025 race for governor of New Jersey was underway before anyone voted for president this year; Jersey City’s mayor started running in April. But Sherrill, one of the highest-profile members of the Democrats’ 2018 House class, raised more than $600,000 as soon as she jumped in. The only references to her job in Congress are images from Fourth of July parades in her old campaign gear; the messaging is all about her military service, ways to “make life more affordable,” and the role a new Democratic governor would play in resisting Donald Trump.
• Josh Gottheimer for Governor, “Jersey’s Problem Solver.” Gottheimer, whose House district borders Sherrill’s, is a much more controversial figure inside the party. He leans into that in his launch videos, citing his creation of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus that clashed with progressives by cleaving the 2021 infrastructure bill from the Biden Build Back Better agenda – and his other big clash with progressives, battling New York’s congestion pricing in Manhattan. “Every candidate shares the same goals” on abortion and opposing Trump, he says; the difference is that he’s a price-fighting moderate.
• Miyares for Virginia, “My Announcement.” Virginia Republicans solved a potential problem this week when Attorney General Jason Miyares announced that he was running for re-election, giving Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears a clear path to the gubernatorial nomination. While Miyares ran behind the ticket in 2021, he’s used the office to go after the reform prosecutor movement, in Virginia and elsewhere, and frames his re-election as the way to keep fighting it. If he loses, Virginia could return to a place “where our law enforcement heroes were reviled, where criminals came first while victims came last.”

SCOOPED

Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s walk around New York City, to figure out why some neighborhoods surged right, has the most enlightening set of post-election interviews. It takes discipline to listen to so many contradictory voices, understand them, and quickly capture what they’re saying in a way that illuminates the whole election. One example, from a first-generation American whose take turned out to be very popular: “On the one hand, he had heard Biden would give amnesty to 15 million undocumented immigrants already in the country and was disappointed he didn’t. On the other hand, he supported Trump because he hoped to block further arrivals.”

NEXT

• 59 days until Inauguration Day
• 347 days until off-year elections
• 711 days until the 2022 midterm elections

DAVID RECOMMENDS

The old rule for presidential nominees was that the best candidates had short paper trails. That is not how Donald Trump approaches this process.

His picks for major roles have recorded untold hours of podcasts, live-streamed their speeches, and guest-hosted prime-time Fox News shows. Jonathan Chait’s read of Pete Hegseth’s four books is full of revelations: “Hegseth’s notion of unfair tactics used by the left includes not only enacting administrative policies that he disagrees with, but the basic act of voting for Democrats.”

It’s also one cube chopped out of a vast iceberg. We have rarely seen nominees who explained themselves so thoroughly before they got picked.

Trump is back, and so is the stock-market chaos that accompanied his first win, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman reported.

It could be an even wilder ride this time. The president-elect is angrier and more sure-footed, but there are also more like him around: “Elon Musk xeets more than Trump truths, has 24 times as many followers, and owns the algorithm that fills our feeds,” she wrote.