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money in politics
Blaming Donald Trump—a Dangerous Distraction?
In focusing on Trump’s shocking amorality we risk sliding over a painful truth we must embrace to create the democracy we need and want: His rise is a symptom.
Jul 08, 2025
Americans are waking up to President Donald Trump’s assaults on our democracy. In just four years, his documented lies have topped 30,000. He has also broken laws, including his attempts to dismantle government agencies, his blatant conflicts of interest with Elon Musk, and his disregarding courts on a number of fronts. We honor those courageously stepping up to hold Trump accountable—from Indivisible to Common Cause to Democracy Forward, and many more citizen-organizing efforts.
But our appropriate outrage might hide a danger—that in focusing on Trump’s shocking amorality we could slide over a painful truth we must embrace to create the democracy we need and want: His rise is a symptom. Donald Trump was able to triumph because of deep dysfunction long built into our governing structures. While we must resist his actions and work to limit the immediate damage, we must also commit to fighting for an even more democratic future, free of our current limitations.
Simply put, some features of our democracy are baked-in barriers to one-person-one-vote. The Senate, to name one. Wyoming, with a population of just over half a million has the same number of Senate seats as California, home to nearly 40 million. In other words, a voter in Wyoming has almost 68 times greater representation than a voter in much more densely populated California.
Our fight can’t merely be against Trump but in pursuit of a positive vision of an America where each of us counts, and we work together building the world we want.
And the challenges don’t stop there. Gerrymandering of electoral districts—the redrawing of district lines to favor the party in power—creates unrepresentative legislatures. As a result, one report found Republicans had an advantage of about 16 House seats in 2024’s congressional election. And then, there’s voter suppression as well as the hugely corrupting role of money in politics and the limits of our two-party system.
Despite being unfit, Trump rose to power in large measure because our antidemocratic rules have led to deep dissatisfaction with government that he was able to tap. Indeed, it’s been nearly four decades since 60% of us expressed satisfaction with “the way democracy was working.”
Since then, approval has tumbled steeply. By early 2023, just 28% of U.S. adults expressed satisfaction with how our democracy is working. And by early 2025 well more than half of Americans—61 percent—remained dissatisfied.
And Americans’ view of our standing in the world?
Despite deep doubts about our democracy, interestingly, over half of us still see our country as one of the world’s greatest. One in five even place the us at the top, and only 27% acknowledge there are better democracies.
Hmm. Self-perception can be self-deception: In global comparisons we rate shockingly low. Each year, Freedom House, founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, ranks nations by the quality of their political rights and civil liberties—a reasonable measure of democracy.
Sadly, the U.S. ranks 57th worldwide, and not even in the ballpark of nations we imagine to be our peers. Almost all European Union nations rank in the top 25.
Really? That bad?
Yes. So, how do we explain the disconnect? And how might we use this bad news for good?
Domestically, we know that there are deep roots to dissatisfaction with our democracy. But it’s not just the structural features named above: At the same time, our extreme economic inequality—deeper than more than 100 nations—means economic stress for most Americans, even as we hold onto the myth that we’re a middle-class country.
Still, the myth of American exceptionalism blinds us.
Instead, let us heed this truth: Be it a rocky marriage or a sprained ankle, healing starts when we get honest with ourselves—when we stop averting our eyes, making excuses, or just hoping one day it will all go away.
Today, as our democracy is diminishing before our eyes; let’s drop these dangerous escapes and choose constructive action. The good news in our sad scores is proof of possibility—hard evidence that we can do better as we learn lessons from the leading democracies.
So, let our dissatisfaction fuel determination and bold action. Our fight can’t merely be against Trump but in pursuit of a positive vision of an America where each of us counts, and we work together building the world we want.
Democracy is not a dull duty but a thrilling vision and empowering action.
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WelcomeFest’s Billionaire Backers Reveal Its True Mission
Like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council before it, Welcome is yet another donor- and elite-driven operation seeking to drag the Democratic Party rightward on economic policy.
Jun 04, 2025
If the Abundance universe is to be believed, the hottest ticket this summer is WelcomeFest.
Wednesday’s confab is the second such annual gathering organized by the centrist group Welcome Party and its political action committee WelcomePAC, with this year’s event touting a distinct abundance flair. The conference boasts a rogues’ gallery of corporate-friendly cosponsors, including Third Way, the New Democratic Coalition, Inclusive Abundance, and the Blue Dog Caucus. A sizzle reel from last year’s event paints WelcomeFest as an Internet Hippo tweet come to life, complete with cameos from A-listers like ex-CNN anchor John Avlon and Democratic influencer Olivia Julianna.
Taken together, WelcomePAC’s leadership and funding are at odds with their claimed opposition to the “buttoned-up [politics] of Washington elites.”
This year’s “Responsibility to Win” session (misspelled on the event’s official poster) has drawn viral attention online—both for its bizarre AI Ghibli promos and stacked lineup of neoliberal pundits, conservative Democratic lawmakers, and wunderkind pollsters serving up Dick Morris’ reheated leftovers.
Speakers include:
- Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance.
- Matt Yglesias, confidently-wrong pundit and, per Thompson, the “OG grandfather of Abundance.”
- Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who doesn’t think Democrats should use the term “oligarchy.”
- Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), Abundance champion and darling of AIPAC and crypto lobbyists.
- Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), Adam Gray (D-Calif.), and Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Mich.), founding members of the Abundance-themed Build America Caucus.
- Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash). and Jared Golden (D-Maine), current and former co-chairs of the conservative Blue Dog Caucus.
- Adam Jentleson, anti-”Groups” crusader currently distancing himself from his 14-month stint as Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) chief of staff.
- David Shor, pollster and prolific party animal.
WelcomePAC’s Donors
Campaign finance records reveal that WelcomePAC, the primary organizers of WelcomeFest, has raked in sizable contributions from billionaires and corporate oligarchs:
- Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has given over $1.8 million to WelcomePAC since 2021. A major donor to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign and the pro-Harris SuperPAC Future Forward, Hoffman strongly opposed the Biden administration’s anti-monopoly policies and publicly demanded that Harris fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan if she won the election. Hoffman has also bankrolled the Mainstream Democrats super PAC, which spent heavily in Democratic primaries in 2022 and 2024 to defend conservative Democrats like Kurt Schrader and Henry Cuellar and defeat progressives like Cori Bush and Nina Turner.
- Walton family: WelcomePAC has received over $1.1 million from relatives and heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton—the richest family in America.
- S. Robson (Rob) Walton: Rob Walton, the eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since 2024.
- Samuel R. Walton: Samuel R. Walton, grandson of Sam Walton and owner of a natural resources holding company, has given $625,000 to WelcomePAC since 2024.
- Christy Walton: Christy Walton, widow of one of Sam Walton’s sons, has given $125,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022.
- Alice Walton: Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, has given $25,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022.
- Carrie Walton Penner: Walton Penner, daughter of Rob Walton, has given $150,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022. She is also a prolific donor to the anti-public education charter school movement.
- Greg Penner: Penner, the husband of Carrie Walton and son-in-law of Rob, has given $150,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022. Penner is also Chairman of Walmart’s Board of Directors and a managing partner for the Walton family’s private equity firm.
- Bekenstein family: Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein and his wife Anita have given a combined $375,000 to WelcomePAC since October 2024.
- Michael Bloomberg: Billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since August 2024. Bloomberg is best known for his controversial mayoralty (which saw the expansion of racist “stop-and-frisk” policing tactics and anti-Muslim surveillance) and his expensive, widely-mocked 2020 presidential campaign.
- James & Kathryn Murdoch: James Murdoch—the estranged younger son of News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch—and his wife Kathryn have given a combined $2.5 million to WelcomePAC since April 2024.
- Rob Granieri: Granieri, the co-founder of Wall Street quantitative trading firm Jane Street, has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since June 2024.
- Edward Fishman: Fishman, a managing director at hedge fund D.E. Shaw, has given $200,000 to WelcomePAC since February 2022.
- Mark Heising: Heising, the founder of private equity firm Medley Partners, has given $250,000 to WelcomePAC since June 2024.
- David Nierenberg: Nierenberg, an investment manager and former national finance co-chair for Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and his wife Patricia have given a combined $726,600 to WelcomePAC since March 2024.
- Americans Together Inc: Americans Together Inc, a centrist group founded by former Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) daughter Heather Manchin Bresch, has given over $1 million to WelcomePAC since February 2024. A core plank of Americans Together’s policy platform is opposing any repeal or reform of the Senate filibuster (the goal, ironically, of a 2021 book by WelcomeFest speaker Adam Jentleson).
- Bresch, the former CEO of pharma company Mylan, attracted national attention in 2016 for defending Mylan’s EpiPen price-gouging.
Who’s Actually Welcome to the Party?
While WelcomePAC’s donor roster makes clear who the group wants to welcome into the Democratic tent, its website is quite explicit about who they wish to exclude. WelcomePAC blames the Democratic Party’s woes on an “extreme right and socialist left […] conspiring with conflict-driven media to trash the Democratic brand.” In a poorly-aged 2021 Substack post calling for a “Jim Clyburn Day,” Welcome co-founder Lauren Harper celebrated Clyburn’s 2020 endorsement of Biden for “steering the party away from further polarization that would have led to a second Trump term.”
WelcomeFest organizers have explicitly juxtaposed their event with the purportedly left-wing Democratic National Committee, offering a refuge to those put off by the Democratic Party’s current leadership. They firmly reject unspecified “progressive purity tests” (read: having values), but lack a compelling explanation for why swing and red state voters are flocking to the progressive-populist fight against oligarchy.
Bafflingly, for a group that promises to offer “a vision for a depolarized United States,” WelcomeFest only features Democrats speaking about the need to moderate. The group, which proudly touts the label of “centrist insurgency,” has seemingly little to offer a polarized Republican Party—which is perhaps why their previous campaign to convince five House Republicans to caucus with Democrats failed so spectacularly. This has hardly hampered their push for moderation at all costs. In pursuit of this end, the group has even invented a metric that claims safe blue congressional seats are undemocratic, encouraging Republican challengers to pursue previously uncontested blue seats.
Some of WelcomePAC’s top staff have also spent their careers working to move the Democratic Party to the right. Co-founder Liam Kerr previously spent 10 years working for Democrats for Education Reform, a charter school advocacy organization founded and funded by hedge fund managers. Welcome Party board member Catharine Bellinger has also spent her career working for the same pro-charter school groups as Kerr. WelcomePAC’s political director, Daniel Conway, spent nearly six years working for No Labels, the centrist dark money group co-founded by the late Joe Lieberman that repeatedly attempted to recruit a third party candidate to run for president in 2024.
Taken together, WelcomePAC’s leadership and funding are at odds with their claimed opposition to the “buttoned-up [politics] of Washington elites.” Like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council before it, Welcome is yet another donor- and elite-driven operation seeking to drag the Democratic Party rightward on economic policy. That “rebranded neoliberalism” approach risks further alienating the very constituencies that Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024, and ceding further ground to right-wing faux-populists like Vice President JD Vance.
Given the WelcomeFest lineup, it’s clear that the donor class views Abundance as key to carrying out this self-serving crusade against populism.
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The Gaza Genocide Is Biden’s True ‘Original Sin’
Genocide is the worst crime human beings can commit. In the case, it’s also the one nobody’s talking about—even though it cost Democrats the 2024 election.
Jun 04, 2025
“Original Sin” was an odd title choice for the recent book, co-authored by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and subtitled “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and his Disastrous Decision to Run Again.” The book confirms long-standing suspicions about former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, its handling by Biden’s inner circle, and the Democratic Party leadership’s attempts to conceal it.
These may be sins, but they’re hardly “original.” The earliest confirmed cover-up of presidential incapacity goes back over a century, to President Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 stroke. Ronald Reagan’s aides were so concerned about his inattentiveness, competence, and mood that they proposed invoking the 25th Amendment.[1] Questions about Biden’s cognition were already circulating in Washington by the mid-2010s and were openly discussed during the 2020 election.
In the long arc of history, political cover-ups and lies are relatively venal sins. But genocide is a mortal sin—the worst imaginable.
Meanwhile, the conversation around this book is distracting us from the worst sin of all: genocide.
Out of Sync
American complicity in Palestinian slaughter isn’t “original,” of course; it has a long history. The Biden team’s originality lay in its open disregard for international law and global institutions. They defied the world court system well before Trump did.
Genocide is the worst crime human beings can commit. In the case, it’s also the one nobody’s talking about—even though it cost Democrats the 2024 election.
Other factors affected the outcome, too, of course, but many people predicted that the Gaza genocide would hurt the Democrats[2], perhaps fatally—and all indicators are that it did.
It will continue to hurt them for the foreseeable future. Pew Research reports that, as of March 2025, 53% of Americans held “a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Israel.” That includes more than two-thirds of all Democrats—at a time when the party’s approval rating has plummeted[3] and it desperately needs renewed enthusiasm among its base voters.
Silent Running
Except for a brief cease-fire, President Donald Trump has continued his predecessor’s assault on Palestine. That’s something we’re all morally obligated to resist. But Democrats, and the equally complicit media, must be held responsible for their actions—actions that made the Trump presidency possible.
When’s the last time anyone believed that the Democratic Party could be persuaded to change just because it was the right thing to do?
No wonder they want to keep talking about Joe Biden. But Biden is gone. If they were serious about changing, Democrats would ask themselves why they let the charade to go on for so long. A few initial answers: big-donor money, disregard for popular opinion[4], a pronounced detachment from the experience of working people, and a party culture of self-advancement and sucking up to power.
What they wouldn’t do is fixate on superficial questions of messaging or image. The problem isn’t their choice of language; it’s not even their “gerontocracy,” as pronounced as that is. The problem is the forces behind their use of language, their perpetuation of incumbent power, and their ossification of thought. These forces stem from the party’s dependence on big money in its various corrupting forms.
A Heaven of Hell
I thought I past being shocked by the behavior of liberal politicians after they’ve been embraced and seduced by the tentacular flow of big money—that never-ending flow of cash which remolds their perceptions as they sit through think-tank conferences, fawning interviews, desserts and conversation at fundraising dinners, or drinks with lobbyists in cigar-scented wood-paneled rooms.
Horrors like the Gaza genocide are transcendental evils, but they’re born in mundane places like these.
And yet, Democrats seem reluctant to sacrifice these pleasures for anything as banal as winning elections. I’m sure that Tapper’s book makes lively conversations at their gatherings. And those conversations mean they don’t have to talk about genocide.
In the long arc of history, political cover-ups and lies are relatively venal sins. But genocide is a mortal sin—the worst imaginable. This one cost the Democrats the presidency in 2024. Unless they change, it will continue to cost them for years and decades to come.
Postscript
A lot of left-leaning columns, including this one, make a habit of citing poll numbers. I think we do it because we hope (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) that we may yet persuade Democrats to govern more humanely—if only out of self-interest.
But since we’re talking about sin, here’s a question: When’s the last time anyone believed that the Democratic Party could be persuaded to change just because it was the right thing to do?
[1] There’s no conclusive proof that Reagan was mentally impaired while in office, although it’s still widely suspected. A clinical analysis of Reagan’s press conferences later concluded that he used a progressively smaller vocabulary as time passed, a pattern that is “associated with the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease.” Reagan announced that he had dementia in 1994, six years after leaving office.
[2] I called Gaza “Biden’s Vietnam” in November 2023 and warned it could hurt his presidency in much the say way as Vietnam hurt Lyndon Johnson’s in 1968. The Arab American Institute’s September 2024 poll showed a catastrophic drop in Arab-American voter support. I used AAI’s data on swing states, cross-referenced it with other voter groups in those states who felt strongly about Israel-Palestine (non-Arab Muslims, Black people, and college students), and concluded in October that the election could be lost on the Gaza issue alone. Many others reached the same conclusion.
[3] As of late May 2025, only 36% of those surveyed in an Economist/YouGov poll viewed the Democratic Party favorably while 57% viewed it unfavorably. Republicans fared better, with 41% favorable versus 52% unfavorable. (Still, these results suggest that Americans aren’t very happy with their choices.)
[4] By the end of his first year in office, a Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that voter confidence in Biden’s fitness had plunged, with only 40% agreeing that Biden was “in good health” and 50% disagreeing. Only 46% agreed he was mentally fit for office. At roughly the same time, nearly 60% of voters surveyed told Harvard-Harris pollsters that Biden was too old to be president. By July 2022, two-thirds of Democrats polled said they wanted someone else to lead their party’s ticket in 2024. Roots Action began a “Don’t Run Joe” campaign in 2022.
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