Americana

1. CPAC goes global
2. GOP wrestling with Hill agenda
3. Bernie Sanders goes on tour
4. Trump admin erases ‘trans’
5. Pelosi challenger speaks

Also: Elon Musk’s money arrives in Wisconsin

James Fishback, a 30-year-old investor and founder of a free speech-focused college debate league, woke up on Friday with a vision of a rebate to taxpayers funded by the savings of DOGE. Working with his firm’s head of research, he pounded out a four-page memo and sent it to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles —– a “heads up, out of respect for the president.”

On Tuesday, on X, Fishback got the idea directly to Elon Musk. “Will check with the president,” Musk wrote in a public reply. One day later, speaking in Miami Beach to a nonprofit funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, Trump said that one idea “under consideration” was a partial DOGE refund: “20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% goes to paying down debt.”

Musk has frequently taken ideas from X, taking pitches from (usually verified) posters and promising to try them out as his DOGE probes each branch of the federal government for potential cuts. No idea was bigger or more expensive than Fishback’s —– a $400 billion fund for rebates, if DOGE identified $2 trillion in cuts. (As of Thursday morning, it had identified $8.5 billion.)

Adjusting for inflation, that would be half as much as the government disbursed in COVID relief checks. It would not undermine the goal of balancing the budget, said Fishback, because the potential for a check next year would incentivize more people to enter the workforce, and people who now lacked a reason to report government waste would have one.

Whether or not it happens, the “DOGE dividend” is a study in MAGA’s unofficial motto: You can just do things. The old way for an idea like this to get on the president’s desk might be a think tank study, followed by a press blitz, followed by lobbying of the people with Donald Trump’s ear. Fishback just posted it.

Suddenly, Democrats were being asked if they were really stingy enough to deny free money (which hasn’t been found or appropriated) to taxpayers. At CPAC, where this week’s newsletter spends a lot of time, the “dividend” question was a crowd-pleaser. House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that the party’s “brand” of fiscal conservatism, and desire to balance the budget, made it unlikely. Hours later, Musk appeared onstage and said it would likely happen.

“I told the president. He’s supportive of that,” Musk told Newsmax host Rob Schmitt. “So it sounds like something we’re going to do.” Two hundred years ago, Percy Bryce Shelley called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Just change a couple of letters: The new legislators are the posters.

Conservatives want to take the “Trump revolution” everywhere

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — On Thursday morning, Steve Bannon hosted his War Room podcast live from the Conservative Political Action Conference, with a special prop. A screen behind him showed live footage from the Senate floor, where Trump loyalist and frequent CPAC star Kash Patel was about to be confirmed to lead the FBI. Much less interesting, for the crowd gathered around Bannon in CPAC’s exhibit hall: Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell taking the floor to announce his retirement.

“McConnell and his cartel of consultants had a complete monopoly on the funding of Senate races, and they’ve lost more swing races than they’ve won,” said Caroline Wren, a GOP strategist who worked with 2024 Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake. “What’s his legacy? I don’t think anyone gives a shit.”

CPAC’s transformation into a pro-Trump convention happened many years ago, changing what had been a messy meeting between Republican factions — libertarians and conservatives, war hawks and isolationists — into a celebration of America First nationalism. McConnell stopped coming to the conference after winning a Senate majority in 2014. His major triumphs, of blocking a 2016 Obama appointment to the Supreme Court and speed-running a 2020 Trump appointment, were very old news.

What was new, and exciting for this year’s attendees, was the Trump administration’s rapid deconstruction of the administrative state, a goal older than the 51-year conference. Even more thrilling was the idea of exporting this around the world. Elon Musk, handed a chainsaw by Argentina President Javier Milei, was praised by Republican leaders and foreign politicians for both slashing the government and turning Twitter into a “free speech” hub where liberal media outlets barely mattered.

Congressional Republicans argue over what to do next

Senate Republicans advanced a border and security spending package on Friday morning, after a night of voting on politically charged amendments from Democrats. Their votes did not clarify the muddle over the GOP trifecta’s agenda.

In public and private, House and Senate Republicans have bickered over the reconciliation package that will fund the government for the next year and extend their 2017 tax cuts. There is disagreement over which chamber will move first, and whether there will be one package — a “big beautiful bill,” in the parlance coined by Trump and aped by House Speaker Mike Johnson.

“I have no clarity,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told Semafor about the path forward. “Let’s stop playing the game of chicken. Let’s get on one page here. It’s clear we need to sit down and have really substantive negotiations.”

Thursday’s opening speeches at CPAC showcased the disagreement, even in friendly onstage interviews about how successful Trump and the GOP had been already.

“The President has been very clear that his preference is to put everything in one bill,” Vice President JD Vance said in one morning session. “I actually talked to the President about this yesterday, and he said to me, Look, it’s very rare that you can get two reconciliation bills done in one Congress.” But Democrats had used their trifecta to pass two reconciliation bills as recently as 2021 and 2022.

Bernie heads back to Iowa

Bernie Sanders will be in Iowa this weekend, and he is not running for president. At two rallies — first in Omaha, then across the state line in Iowa City — he will begin a tour to rally voters against “oligarchy,” as epitomized by Elon Musk and DOGE.

“If we are serious about defeating Trump’s agenda, and in particular this disastrous reconciliation bill, which will give over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top 1%,” said Sanders, “the best way to do it is to rally the grassroots of America. And the best way to do that is to go into districts Republican won districts where the Republican candidate for Congress won by a small amount of votes.”

Sanders, who for years has been the “outreach” chair for Senate Democrats, has done versions of this before. He held his own set of rallies for Joe Biden, and then Kamala Harris, in the 2024 campaign, attempting to change the election’s conversation from age and gaffes to economic and labor policy. Before that, he rallied for progressives candidates under pressure from AIPAC or other large political groups, asking voters not to reward massive political spending.

This tour, he said, was another attempt to shift the conversation, which wasn’t happening in DC or major media channels. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. faced Sanders in his nomination hearings, the new HHS Secretary accused the senator of being bought by “pharma” — he had never taken donations from industry PACs — because many of his small donors happened to work for the industry. “You can distort that, and that is what they do,” said Sanders. “That is a very tough issue to take on, the massive amounts of lies and disinformation.”

In the Midwest, he would take on another powerful conservative idea: That a greedy administrative state needed money, and the wealthiest man in the world could be trusted because he didn’t.

“That’s the idea that the billionaires always use when they run for office — hey, I don’t need this job!” said Sanders. “I think Musk can probably get by on $400 billion. But there is, within many of their hearts, an insatiable level of greed. These guys want more and more and more. When they talk about deregulation, when Musk and [Jeff] Bezos talk about their anti-union efforts and their desire to end the National Labor Relations Board, what are they talking about? They are talking about wanting to make it harder for workers to earn a decent living so they can make even more money.”

How ‘transgender’ vanished from the federal government’s language

It was a regular commitment from Joe Biden’s White House: A meeting between LGBTQ “stakeholders” and the Office of Public Engagement. Groups like GLAAD got direct access to the administration, helping craft policy and language for a president who called transgender rights “the civil rights issue of our time.”

Times change.

One month into Donald Trump’s presidency, pro-LGBTQ language, including nearly every reference to “transgender” people, has been pulled off of federal government websites. The impact on sports and on people changing their government documents was obvious. But the scale of the pullback, announced on Trump’s first day in office, goes far further than his first term, with pages and terms that were kept online then getting taken down now.

“If the government itself doesn’t see you, doesn’t recognize you, the resources won’t be there to help,” said Barbara Simon, the senior director of news at GLAAD. The Biden approach, she said, “wasn’t always perfect; but at least included the people directly involved, who know what they’re talking about.”

AOC’s former chief of staff runs against the Speaker Emerita

Saikat Chakrabarti arrived in Washington six years ago, the chief of staff to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, eager to work on the “most ambitious, the boldest, the biggest things we can.”

He left eight months into that job, moving to San Francisco to advocate for the Green New Deal. Chakrabarti launched his own campaign for Congress last week, against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – but he didn’t talk to Ocasio-Cortez until after. He had come up with his own, current argument for generational change inside the Democratic Party, new for 2025.

“I don’t know what Nancy Pelosi is doing,” Chakrabarti told Semafor. “I haven’t really seen her out there, advocating for much. When one party is doing an illegal seizure of the entire government and throwing checks and balances out the window, you have to start playing hardball.”

Chakrabarti talked with Americana recently about his decision to run, about elderly Democrats being reluctant to give up their seats — “I just don’t know if she still has it in her to do this fight” — and why he thinks it’s better to save the Democratic Party than to replace it.

Polls

Why did voters elect Donald Trump last year? The Democratic answer is “to lower prices.” That’s politically convenient for them to say: Prices aren’t down, and fighting over that issue is possible without any reform of their own party. The Republican answer is broad, accepting the MAGA premise that voters wanted the entire government turned upside down and an end to foreign military entanglements. So far, Republicans support everything Trump is doing; Democrats oppose it (4% support shutting down USAID and the CFPB), and independents largely oppose it. Only 30% of independents support ending DEI in the federal government, one of the early wins that Republicans were most confident about.

Since Nov. 5, Democrats have been in an open-air trauma session about their failure to message effectively to voters. With a few small exceptions — two House Democrats fretting about “boys in girls’ sports” , a large minority of House and Senate Democrats voting to pass the Laken Riley Act — they have delayed any larger debate about their policies. Their voters sound ready for that discussion, with more of them saying the party should move right, even though Harris ’24 ran to the right of Biden ’20 on significant issues, like the role of government in creating equitable racial outcomes. Republicans are more satisfied with their victorious party; four years ago, the surge in GOP voters believing that the party wasn’t conservative enough was a reaction to Trump losing the presidency. Sure enough, he ran a more conservative campaign last year than he did in 2024.

Every newly elected president gets a honeymoon; every newly dis-empowered opposition party gets the opposite. But there’s not much precedent for the weakness of congressional Democrats right now — not in Quinnipiac’s polling. A majority of self-identified Democrats disapprove of the job their party is doing in Congress. That’s weaker partisan support than Republicans had after their landslide loss to Barack Obama in 2008, and significantly weaker support than Democrats had eight years ago, the first time they lost the White House to Donald Trump and the Congress to Republicans.

Ads

• Building America’s Future, “Susan Crawford’s Dangerous Decisions.” It’s an iron rule of politics: Every race for a law enforcement or judicial job becomes an argument about sentencing guidelines. This is the first ad from Elon Musk’s PAC in Wisconsin’s Apr. 1 Supreme Court race, and it’s entirely focused on the sentencing of a pedophile who sexually assaulted a child but was “let off” by Judge Susan Crawford with four years in prison; the maximum allowed sentence would have been 100 years.
• Susan Crawford for Wisconsin, “Buy Off.” Crawford’s using the playbook that’s worked for Democratic-endorsed state court candidates recently — pounding the Republican nominee as anti-abortion and soft on crime. When the BAF ad buy was announced last week, Crawford’s campaign accused Musk of “trying to buy off (GOP-backed nominee) Brad Schimel and take over control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.” There’s no Musk mention in her first ad after that news, but the theme is that Schimel will make decisions based on who gives him money.
• Club for Growth Action, “Feed.” The Club for Growth has earned a reputation for early, hard-hitting ads, often getting the airwaves to itself before anyone’s actually started a campaign. In Kentucky, it is already trying to soften support for Rep. Andy Barr, the seven-term congressman from Lexington, who is positioning to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell if he retires next year, telling interviewers that Donald Trump deserves a Republican senator who’ll work with him. (McConnell, who turned 84 yesterday, announced his retirement the same day.) This is a kitchen-sink spot that hits Barr for his birth name (Garland Hale Barr IV), his votes to increase the debt limit, and his support from banks, relabeled “woke Wall Street banks” here, a hint of what strategies think will play in GOP primaries now.

Scooped!

What’s up with big liberal donors? This is a big question, smothered in secrecy; years ago, I knew one reporter who booked a room at a liberal donor conference to increase his chance of grabbing documents before custodians cleared their meeting rooms. (He was successful.) This triple-byline New York Times study of liberal donor panic is the best I’ve seen about the world these elites have been living in since November, fretting about audits and vengeance and wondering what the point even is of donating to Democrats right now.

Next

• 39 days until Wisconsin’s state supreme court election
• 256 days until off-year elections
• 619 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

Not to get ahead of Semafor’s weekend media newsletter, but NPR’s David Folkenflik and Tom Dreisbach have a story I’d wanted to read: The changing of the media guard at Donald Trump’s White House. Eight years ago, the first Trump administration took some steps toward elevating “alternative” media, while working with the more established press corps (nonpartisan, liberal, and conservative) that usually filled the Brady Room. This administration has moved more deliberately to elevate pro-Trump journalists and outlets, while continuing to work with the “traditional” press corps. That explains one mystery hanging over the beat: Why no outlet has walked out of the gaggles or briefings, to protest the exclusion of the Associated Press for refusing to use White House language in its stylebook. “If mainstream media were to leave, they said, the outlets that are outright supportive of Trump are poised to fill the gap.”

Investors must adjust to US climate skepticism under the Trump administration in order to ensure renewable energy continues dominating infrastructure finance in Africa, a private capital industry figure told Semafor’s Alexis Akwagyiram.

“African businesses, investors, and governments must adapt by seeking alternative partnerships,” said Nadia Kouassi Coulibaly, head of research analytics at the African Private Capital Association (AVCA) industry body, pointing to European and Asian investors.

Despite the political shift, “sustainable investing will remain a viable and strategic approach,” she added.