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'Why Are People Cynical About Politics'? Ex-Obama Adviser Joins Pro-Trump Crypto Giant Coinbase
"Democratic campaigns need to start treating corporate shills like Plouffe as persona non grata," argued one progressive.
Jun 12, 2025
A long-time Democratic strategist who managed Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and advised Kamala Harris' 2024 White House bid announced Thursday that he is joining the global advisory council of the crypto exchange giant Coinbase, which donated $1 million to President Donald Trump's inaugural fund and recently benefited from his administration's decision to drop a major lawsuit against the company.
David Plouffe "has worked extensively in tech," including at Uber and the crypto exchange Binance, Politicoreported Thursday, noting that he arrives at Coinbase "a few months after the advisory council added former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona—a Democrat turned independent—and Chris LaCivita, who served as Trump's co-campaign manager in 2024."
"Among Plouffe's charges will be outreach to tech-savvy voters who flocked to Democrats during the Obama era, but have shifted to the right in recent years," Politico reported. "It's another move meant to reinforce the bipartisan credentials of the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange as it pushes for broader buy-in after Republicans and President Donald Trump opened their arms to the industry and many of its policy goals."
"There is a crypto-skeptical anti-corruption wing of the Democratic Party and a crypto-embracing, corruption is business as usual wing."
Progressives argued that Plouffe's decision to take on a role at Coinbase underscores the toxicity of the revolving door between the political consultant class and corporate America, particularly the tech sector.
"Democratic campaigns need to start treating corporate shills like Plouffe as persona non grata," argued Jonathan Cohn, political director of Progressive Mass. "They weaken campaign messaging, erode public trust, and only view campaigns as grift exercises."
Jeff Hauser, founder and executive director of the Revolving Door Project, asked, "Doesn't this put a fine point on which wing of the Democratic Party lost to Trump?"
"There is a crypto-skeptical anti-corruption wing of the Democratic Party and a crypto-embracing, corruption is business as usual wing," Hauser wrote on social media.
Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), responded rhetorically to the news of Plouffe joining Coinbase, writing, "Why are people cynical about politics."
Coinbase gushed in a statement that the addition of Plouffe to its advisory council "comes at a moment of historic momentum for the crypto industry," which spent big on the 2024 election and continues to lobby the federal government aggressively for favorable regulatory policy.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has voiced support for the so-called GENIUS Act, crypto legislation that critics say is riddled with industry-friendly loopholes. With bipartisan support, the Senate voted Wednesday to advance a revised version of the bill.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), an outspoken opponent of the legislation, said in floor remarks on Wednesday that "industry is the driving force behind the GENIUS Act," legislation that could deliver a personal financial windfall for Trump and his family.
"Through his crypto businesses, President Trump has created an efficient means to trade presidential favors like tariff exemptions, pardons, and government appointments for hundreds of millions—perhaps billions—of dollars from foreign governments, from billionaires, and from large corporations," said Warren. "This is the single greatest corruption scandal in American history and, by passing the GENIUS Act, the Senate is about to not only bless this corruption, but to actively facilitate its expansion."
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As Trump Dismantles the Republic, Where Are Its Former Leaders?
Tens of millions of Americans voted for our past presidents. They are waiting for them to speak up, stand up, and mightily help lead the fight to stop Trump’s mayhem against the American people in red and blue states.
Apr 13, 2025
If there was ever a strong contemporary case for declaring that silence is complicity, consider the hush of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and even George W. Bush as they grind their teeth over the Donald Trump-Elon Musk wrecking of America. Trump is destroying freedom of speech and due process, abolishing democratic restraints, and establishing a criminal fascistic dictatorship.
Trump pounds Biden for the Trump administration’s blunders and failures an average of six times a day. These assaults go unrebutted by the Delaware recluse, nursing his political wounds.
The Clintons? Bill sticks to his private telephone wailings. While Hillary, who gave us Trump in 2016 with her smug, stupid campaign, penned a self-anthem op-ed in The New York Times on March 28, 2025. She writes: “Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries.” Trump is not belligerent enough for the war hawk Hillary Clinton who has been the pro-Iraq sociocider butcher of Libya and the ardent supporter behind provocative “force projection” of the Empire around the world.
What would all the GIs, who they caused to lose their lives in their presidential wars, think of their timidity?
Before turning to the excuses for essentially shutting themselves up during our country’s greatest political upheaval—unconstitutional and criminal to the core—here is what prominent former Democratic presidents and presidential candidates COULD do:
- Tens of millions of Americans voted for our past presidents. They are waiting for their leaders to speak up, stand up, and mightily help lead the fight to stop Trump’s mayhem against the American people in red and blue states. The people want former Democratic leaders to galvanize the Democratic Party, still largely in disarray about confronting Trump.
Don’t they know they have a trusteeship obligation to citizens, many of whom are voicing their demands for a comprehensive plan of offense against the GOP in town meetings and other forums?
The media, threatened daily by Trump, is eager to give former Democratic Party leaders coverage.
- They are all mega-millionaires, very capable of raising many more millions of dollars quickly with their fame and lists of followers. They know very rich people as friends. They could set up strike forces in Washington and around the country to provide needed, fighting attorneys, organizers, and other specialists to ride head-on against the proven damage to health, safety, and economic well-being of people here and abroad and counter Trump’s daily cruel and vicious assaults. They could end Trump’s unrebutted soliloquy of lies and false scenarios over mainstream and social media.
- They could push the Democrats in Congress to hold constant “unofficial” public hearings and file resolutions and legislation that provide the daily evidence of this dictator and his recidivistic criminality and push for impeachment and Trump’s removal from office. Impossible, you might say with the GOP in narrow control on Capitol Hill. Look back at Richard Nixon who for far fewer violations was told by Republican senators that his time was up. Politicians save their political skin in approaching elections before rescuing an unstable, egomaniacal, vengeful politician like the one now camped at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Trump will be soon plunging in polls and stock market drops, inflation, recession, and more Gestapo-like kidnappings and disappearances to foreign prisons of targeted individuals. These conditions are not popular with the American people.
- The former Democratic leaders could do what Bernie Sanders is doing and traverse the country supporting the fighting civic spirit of the American people who oppose the painful afflictions wrought by Tyrant Trump.
- Gore is well-credentialed to show how the actions of Hurricane Donald, Tornado Trump, Drought Donald, and Wildfire Musk’s fossil-fuel-driven greenhouse gases are leading to a climate catastrophe. The facts and trends Trump omnicidally ignores need to be front and center.
Even George W. Bush, known for causing the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis and the destruction of their country by his criminal war of aggression has a beef. His sole claim to being a “compassionate conservative”—the funding of life-saving AIDS medicines overseas—has gone down in flames with Trump’s illegal demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Bush may be mumbling about this, but he’s staying in his corner painting landscapes.
All this abhorrent quietude in the face of what they all believe is a mortal attack on the Republic has the following excuses:
First, they don’t want to get into a pissing match with a slanderous ugly viper, who unleashes his hordes of haters on the internet. That’s quite a surrender of patriotic duty at a time of unprecedented peril. What would all the GIs, who they caused to lose their lives in their presidential wars, think of their timidity?
Second, it wouldn’t have much impact. America doesn’t listen to “has-beens.” Then why is Obama still the most popular retired politician in America with over 130 million followers on Twitter? That attitude is just convenient escapism.
Third, plunging into the raucous political arena with the Trumpsters and Musketeers is just too disruptive of a comfortable daily routine life by politicians who believe they have been there, done that, and deserve a respite. Self-diminishment gets you nowhere with tens of millions of people in distress who seek powerful amplifiers from well-known leaders behind the demand that Trump understands: YOU’RE FIRED, ringing throughout the nation from liberals and betrayed Trump voters hurting in the same ways. That mass demand is what pushes impeachment of the most visibly impeachable president in American history.
In the final analysis, it comes down to their absence of civic self-respect and cowardliness in confronting Der Fuhrer. Aristotle was right: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
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Trump’s Rule by Fiat Is a Grotesque Continuation, Not an Aberration
The playbook he uses was written by both parties over decades of eroding democratic norms, consolidating executive power, and circumventing meaningful checks on authority.
Mar 25, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest defiance of the courts—this time refusing to follow an appellate judge’s order to halt migrant deportations—has triggered another round of liberal outrage. Critics are calling it an authoritarian move, a blatant assault on the rule of law, and a warning sign that American democracy is on its last legs.
But if this is the end of democracy, it’s been ending for a long time. And not just at Trump’s hands.
The central truth we keep missing—especially on the left—is that Trump is not an aberration. He’s a grotesque continuation. The playbook he uses was written by both parties over decades of eroding democratic norms, consolidating executive power, and circumventing meaningful checks on authority. Trump didn’t invent the impulse to rule by fiat; he just brings it out into the open.
If we want to stop the next Trump, or the next expansion of executive lawlessness, we can’t keep pretending he came out of nowhere.
Consider the legal justification Trump has floated for ignoring the courts: The United States is “at war.” Therefore, he claims, wartime powers apply—even domestically, even over immigration courts. To many, this sounds like a dystopian twist. But it’s eerily familiar. Because the same logic has been used, repeatedly, by both Republican and Democratic administrations since 9/11.
After the attacks on the Twin Towers, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which gave the executive branch sweeping powers to pursue terrorism around the world. That one document has served as the legal scaffolding for 20-plus years of undeclared wars and covert operations in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and elsewhere.
No further congressional approval was needed. The public never had a say. The war powers clause of the Constitution became symbolic—if not obsolete.
Former President Barack Obama inherited that framework and expanded it. His administration developed the now-infamous drone kill list, justified targeted assassinations (including of U.S. citizens), and defended the government’s right to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects without trial. Obama didn’t officially suspend habeas corpus, but in practice, he upheld a system that made the writ meaningless for hundreds of detainees held at Bagram and Guantánamo. The position of his Department of Justice was clear: The executive has the authority to detain and kill, beyond judicial oversight, because we are at war.
This is the true bipartisan legacy that paved the way for Trump. The removal of checks and balances didn’t happen overnight. It was built incrementally, piece by piece, under the banner of national security—with the cooperation and silence of the same liberal establishment that now acts scandalized by Trump’s every defiance.
It’s worth asking: Why wasn’t there more pearl clutching when the executive branch was unilaterally deciding who lived or died abroad, without congressional debate or judicial process? Why didn’t more alarm bells ring when Democrats joined Republicans in handing over war-making powers and then refused to take them back? Why was it acceptable to rule by emergency decree when the emergency was foreign—but suddenly unacceptable when the same logic is turned inward?
Trump is now openly talking about “eradicating” the Houthis in Yemen—an aggressive military escalation that directly contradicts the MAGA-era promise of no new foreign wars. So much for populist anti-interventionism. In lockstep with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, Trump appears eager to resume the forever war posture. And once again, no one’s talking about congressional approval.
This is the cycle we’re caught in. Trump exposes the tools others helped create. He strips them of their moral veneer, revealing the ugly core. And rather than confront the system itself, liberals point at Trump as a singular villain—as if everything was working just fine before he came along.
The truth is harder to face: If we want to stop the next Trump, or the next expansion of executive lawlessness, we can’t keep pretending he came out of nowhere. We need to reckon with the fact that our democracy has been undermined from within—by both parties, for years. We need to challenge not just the man, but the machine.
And that’s something the Democratic Party, in its current corporate and security-state-aligned form, seems unwilling—or unable—to do. It would require renouncing its own legacy, from the Clinton-era crime bill to Obama-era surveillance and drone wars. It would require fundamentally rethinking how power is distributed in this country, and how easily it can be abused.
Until that happens, we shouldn’t be surprised when the next Trump defies the next court order. We shouldn’t act shocked when the language of war is used to suspend due process. We shouldn’t cling to the fantasy that our institutions will save us, when those institutions have been hollowed out by decades of bipartisan compromise.
Trump didn’t break democracy. He just took the mask off.
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