America's Undoing

Oops! I sent the wrong draft of Star Trek or Mad Max: we get to choose

America's Undoing — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:17:23 GMT

My bad on the earlier send of this email. I sent an older unfinished draft of the piece. Kinda like the Green New Deal SNAFU from way back in 2019 when I sent an internal doc to Steve Inskeep. You live, learn. Or do you?

The author, Zack Exley, is a good friend and long-time collaborator. Zack is the reason I was able to get involved in politics. He took a chance on me way back in 2015, giving me my first job on the Sanders presidential campaign.

Zack is one of the most brilliant strategists I know, and he’s been the quiet inspiration behind many of the progressive movements and victories you’ve heard of. I came away from this piece with more hope and determination than I’ve had in a while, and I hope it does the same for you. Please comment and reply we want to hear from you.

This is the most terrifying and exciting time to be alive in human history. In the next decade or two, we could build the utopia that humanity has dreamed of for millennia, or we could have World War III and the AI apocalypse. I’ve been talking like this for decades, and this is the first time people aren’t automatically calling me crazy. The sci-fi future is becoming our present reality. It’s time to choose: Star Trek or Mad Max. I’m optimistic, but this is going to be a tough fight.

I run the think tank New Consensus. Years ago, we put out the Green New Deal. Most people don’t remember this, but the original ask was for a congressional committee to make a plan for a 10 year national mobilization to build a clean economy productive enough for all Americans to make a great living. The plan was intended for the president who would be elected in 2020, so they could hit the ground running and succeed. Wouldn’t that have been handy? But Speaker Pelosi said no.

We didn’t give up. We went to work on our own plan. We call it the Mission for America. It’s the plan for the president who will take office in 2029. Our “Project 2025.” The Republican Project 2025 was just a long list of programs to cut. It’s easy to destroy. But we need to build. Planning for that is much more difficult, exactly why we need to do it now and not wait for the president to take office.

With mass AI layoffs coming soon, a plan to get Americans working with a purpose becomes both more necessary and more realistic. We’re systematically going through each sector of the economy and working out the detailed and comprehensive steps that a presidential administration will need to take, and the laws that congress will need to pass, to really turn things around for working Americans.

We’re not talking about slowing the collapse of working class wages or slowing the closing of American industry. We’re talking about literally building a whole new economy, one in which all workers, for the first time in U.S. history, can live a truly prosperous life. In a time when we’re building the most productive technology the world has ever seen, that shouldn’t sound like an impossible task.

If you’re curious about how it actually works, check out this high level summary of the Mission for America. We’re hiring a director for this project, and researchers. If you know anyone with expertise who’d be interested in joining our team, please forward this email to them.

But I have a much more urgent ask. Part of what has made Trump’s second term so destructive is that the MAGA movement recruited and vetted tens of thousands of true believers. Mostly young and inexperienced, these recruits have been succeeding in their mission (to destroy the government, terrorize immigrants, and erode all of our rights) thanks to their single minded devotion to their goals.

Again, it’s much more difficult for us. We want to build, improve, and strengthen our economy, institutions, and government. We’ll need plenty of young people just starting out, but we’ll also need people with serious experience across every area of our economy and society. But like MAGA, we need people who will be united in their determination to achieve a goal.

To that end, we’re running a Personnel Project to recruit and start preparing builders to serve in 2029. You can sign up here. Or please forward this to someone you know who would be interested and able to serve.

Like I said, some new developments are making me more and more optimistic that this plan, or at least something inspired by it, will be used in 2029. First, are all the great new leaders who are going to Congress in 2026 to challenge the old, do-nothing, Democratic Party leadership. Our friend Saikat Chakrabarti is one, but several others with him will form a new bloc of fighters. Following their example, more will run in 2028. The new president we get in 2028 will be supported by a congress with new leadership ready to go big.

The other thing that’s making me optimistic is AI. Not because of the good it will do, but because of the changes that it will force. I know AI is being hyped like crazy. But beyond the hype, something huge is happening that we ignore at our peril: After decades of science fiction imagining that someday machines would become truly intelligent, they finally are. This changes everything.

I know there’s a lot of skepticism about whether AI will ever be able to take over whole jobs. If that’s where you’re at, please bear with me for a minute, because this is important.

AI is already replacing humans in certain fields such as software and customer service. And it’s accelerating. There were more AI layoffs in Q1 of 2026 than in all of 2025. Soon, it will be wiping out hundreds of millions of jobs around the world: a huge share of jobs that are done on computers plus many others.

But this isn’t like past waves of automation that got people off the farm and into factories, or out of factories and into offices. This is like when the engine replaced the horse. This time, we’re the horse. This is because while AI will create new kinds of work, that work will be done by AI, not humans.

Soon, AI coworkers and managers will appear at your company on Zoom and in Slack. They will present as fully capable humans — just 10,000 times faster, and able to work with thousands of people and tasks simultaneously.

For software developers and a few other kinds of workers, this is already a reality. I used to work in software, managing big teams of developers. Now I’m building systems with one AI agent in days that would have taken a whole team of humans months and millions of dollars.

Once AI is better than us at knowledge and management tasks in general, then, just like horses in the last century, there will be no new roles for us. We will be valuable as humans still, but not as workers. Many writers and thinkers have been anticipating the “end of work” for centuries. It’s here.

The irony is that, for decades to come, there will still be physical labor for humans to do. Yes, we can already theoretically make robots to replace people in every job once capable AI is controlling them. But unlike inviting AI to your Slack and Zoom, building physical robots, and rearranging factories and farms to suit them, is not free or instant. Automation will make physical labor gradually more and more scarce for people too, but it will take some time, and we can choose to save whatever kind of physical work we want for people.

Why does all this make me optimistic? This is a huge and complex topic, but let me try to spell it out clearly and concisely. (If you want the full treatment, please check out the series I recently published on the New Consensus blog.)

Building a new, clean economy that can provide prosperity for everyone is a gargantuan task. The biggest knock on the Green New Deal was that there aren’t workers available. Everyone is too busy making or marketing things that no one asked for, or driving the top 20% around in Ubers and delivering their DoorDash orders. Economists said there wasn’t the slack in our labor market to allow us to upgrade our homes and buildings or build new clean power generation, let alone build an entirely new economy from the ground up.

The bottom line is that as long as the stock market is on the rise and the incomes of the top 20% are skyrocketing (which they are), things aren’t going to change.

I’m not one of those people who wishes for collapse so that we can have the revolution. But the collapse is coming. The question is, what will we do when it happens? We know what the current Democratic leadership would do: Nothing. Paralysis. They’ll be frantically looking for corporations to bail out, but it’s not going to be that kind of crisis. It’s going to be so much deeper than a few banks and AI companies going bankrupt. Most of our population will be sitting at home permanently without income. Without customers, virtually every industry will face insolvency, not just banks. Everything will grind to a halt.

That’s where the Mission for America comes in. It’s a plan for getting America to work. Not repaving roads, but building all the industries and infrastructure and institutions that we have been needing to build (or build back) for decades.

All the technology we’ve been developing for the past decades, centuries and millennia has now evolved to the point where, if we choose to, we can build a world economy that truly provides prosperity, security and freedom for everyone on earth. The Mission for America is the plan for America to do its part toward that end. We need to build an economy that can provide prosperity for our own people, but we also have a responsibility and an interest in sharing the technology and capital that all nations will need in order to build prosperity for themselves too.

The reason I’m excited to be writing to Corbin’s readers about all this is that I know you’ve been engaged in working to support a new generation of candidates for Congress. In another year, we’re going to be looking at a busload of presidential candidates vying to succeed Trump. These upcoming elections will be the most important in American history up till now, and the most important for the rest of our lifetimes.

But even if we send the absolute best people in America for these jobs, they won’t be able to succeed unless we also send them with the playbook to guide them. There won’t be time once they’re serving. We learned that with Biden. And with Obama. Trump learned that in his first term, and he came back the next time with a plan. It was a plan for destruction, and they’ve been destroying everything in sight.

So please forward this to someone you think might like to serve in a Mission for America administration or sign up yourself. Please check out Mission for America at New Consensus. And please let Corbin know if you’d like to learn more about it in future emails, and if you’d like to hear more about what to expect from the AI crisis that we believe is coming.

Zack Exley
New Consensus

Star Trek or Mad Max: we get to choose

America's Undoing — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:49:49 GMT

I know there’s a lot of skepticism about whether AI will ever be able to take over whole jobs. If that’s where you’re at, please bear with me for a minute, because this is important.

The bottom line is that as long as the stock market is on the rise and the incomes of the top 20% are skyrocketing (which they are), things aren’t going to change.

Zack Exley
New Consensus

To War or Not to War?

Corbin Trent — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:20:59 GMT

I’m generally disgusted that here in the US we almost always frame war in terms of its economic impact. But in this case the price of oil illustrates how America is deceiving itself about the true cost of its decision to choose, yet again, to go to war.

There are two prices of oil right now, and between them is an unprecedented gap. One is the paper price, the Brent futures you hear about on TV, sitting around 100 dollars as I’m writing this. The other is the physical price, what a refinery actually pays for a real barrel on a real tanker. Dated Brent has hit 144 dollars. The spread is the widest it has ever been. Forty dollars. Before the war it was less than a dollar.

The paper price is the market telling us a calming story. The physical is describing reality. When those two come back together, and they always do, it’s paper that moves to meet physical reality. America is experiencing a similar gap. We are telling ourselves a story about our position in the world that is about forty dollars above what’s actually arriving at the dock.

The war is the clearest picture of what we’ve chosen. It’s not about Iran’s nuclear program. It’s a resource war aimed at China, routed through Iran, and the administration’s own advisors have said so on the record. Look at the pattern. Venezuela first. We seized their oil, kidnapped their leaders, routed half a billion dollars through a Qatari bank account. Then Iran. Airstrikes, a blockade, the Strait of Hormuz closed. Then Netanyahu’s pitch to pipeline Gulf oil overland to Europe and away from Asian buyers. Then pressure on Denmark over Greenland. Then Lebanon, where Israel is now openly planning to occupy eight to fifteen percent of the country with our weapons and our political cover, on top of everything we are still arming in Gaza. Then secondary sanctions threats against any bank anywhere that dares touch an Iranian barrel.

The theory is this. Break the world’s energy flows before China’s navy can project force. Keep oil priced in dollars. Strangle Chinese growth before they catch all the way up. It is coherent. That is the problem. The coherence is the indictment. We think we are going to get back to our status as a respected world power through bullying and through being wannabe gangsters, and the strategy is so openly cynical that even the foreign policy establishment is now celebrating it in public as Trump’s best hand against China.

This is not just a Trump problem.

The House has forced four war powers votes and they have all failed, partly because Democrats themselves keep defecting on their own resolutions. Four Democrats voted against the first one in March. And when Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic leadership actually had a shot to force another vote in late March during a pro forma session, they kept it off the floor. They waited until mid-April, after the troops had been rallied, by which point the war was well underway and the vote was mostly symbolic.

That is a failure of leadership on something as basic as stripping war powers from a madman. Jeffries has not called any of the defecting Democrats out. Not publicly. Not privately as far as we can tell. No pressure, no cost, no consequence.

Remember when Democrats did a sit-in on the House floor over gun violence? Cameras on, refusing to leave, forcing the country to look. That is what resistance would look like. This ain’t that. Both parties see our path to prosperity and relevance through war. That is why the response has been letters and press conferences and votes they knew would fail. Neither party wants to actually close the barn door on executive war-making because both parties want to use it when their turn comes.

And this pattern is older than Iran. In 2011 we went into a sovereign country with drones and jets, killed the leader’s protective guards, and set up his murder by local opposition forces. Call it whatever you want. That’s what happened. What was Gaddafi working on at the time? A pan-African gold-backed currency meant to price African oil in something other than dollars. The project died with him. When the dollar gets challenged, we break the challenger. Both parties have done it. The rules-based order we like to lecture other countries about has a pretty big asterisk on it, and the asterisk reads “except when it touches the dollar.”

The strategy is already backfiring, and everyone who can count can see it. China’s clean tech exports hit 21.9 billion dollars in March of 2026 alone, up 70 percent year over year in a single month. The oil shock we engineered to hurt them solved their solar overproduction problem for them. Iranian oil has been priced in yuan since April of last year. Tankers paying tolls to cross Hormuz are reportedly paying in yuan too. Deutsche Bank is now openly naming this war as a potential catalyst for the erosion of the petrodollar.

Gallup’s global leadership approval poll from April 3 has China at 36 percent and the United States at 31. Widest gap in China’s favor in twenty years. U.S. net approval at negative 15, the worst in the history of the poll. That data was collected in 2025, before the January withdrawal from 66 international organizations, before the Iran war. The real number right now is almost certainly worse. Pew and the European Council on Foreign Relations say the same thing in different words. In most of Europe and Latin America more people now name the United States than China as the greatest threat to their country. ECFR put it cleanest. If there is a race for global popularity, America is currently losing to its Indo-Pacific rival. We are forcing the world to make choices, and we are not going to like the outcome.

We should be forcing ourselves to make choices instead. When we look at China, we are not looking at an enemy. We are looking at a reflection of our former selves, and we do not want to see it.

Sam Walton had a rule. Until you’re number one, you copy number one. He used to get arrested for crawling around competitors’ stores with a tape recorder, because the point of walking into a Kmart wasn’t to find what they were doing wrong. It was to walk out with an idea you didn’t have when you went in.

That’s what China is doing to us. And what they are copying is our playbook, the one that created the largest middle class in the history of the world. Hamiltonian industrial policy. State banks. State-directed investment in strategic industries. Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures from 1791. The American System. Lincoln’s land grant universities, the transcontinental railroad, the Homestead Act. The Arsenal of Democracy, where FDR forced competing firms to share their intellectual property because winning the war mattered more than winning the quarter. Apollo. DARPA. The NIH. The internet itself. Every single one was public capital, public purpose, public coordination, with private firms executing. We invented it. We ran it for 150 years. China picked it up off the floor where we dropped it in the 1980s, and is running it now.

Their space program is decades younger than ours and they have a space station, they are landing reusable rockets, they are scaling rapidly, and they are sharing their information. They are not competing for every single thing. They are working in unison to do better. The systems they are using are our own. We are being beaten by ourselves.

And we didn’t just invent the playbook. We invented the tempo. The Arsenal of Democracy built a wartime industrial economy from scratch in about four years. Ford was rolling a B-24 off the line at Willow Run every hour by 1944. Apollo went from Kennedy’s speech to a boot on the Moon in eight years. Rural electrification, the interstate system, the Manhattan Project. None of it took generations. China gets the tempo part too. They built the largest high-speed rail network in the world in about fifteen years from zero. EVs from nobody to global dominance in a decade. Solar in under a decade. Shipbuilding, drones, batteries, the whole deck, faster than we ever went, using our methods, while we tell ourselves a twenty or thirty year timeline is realistic.

When I was a kid we couldn’t compete with China because their labor was too cheap and they didn’t care about pollution. Then we were overregulated and our workers wanted too much. Then it was currency manipulation. Now it’s that they are too far ahead on robotics and we will never catch up. The excuse changes every decade. The underlying move never does. We explain why we can’t, instead of doing the thing.

This is the part that matters most, because it is bigger than this administration. The entire American establishment, both parties, both sets of think tanks, the Pentagon, the corporate class, the press, has quietly agreed that American renewal is a generational project. Twenty years to reshore semiconductors. Ten years for permitting reform. Slow and steady. Patient. Serious. That timeline is a lie. Nothing we have ever actually built in this country got built on it. Generational change isn’t about being pragmatic, it’s about putting off the work. It lets everyone currently in power keep their arrangement running while the country erodes underneath them. It assumes our place on earth is god-given or immutable. It’s neither. And it’s crumbling quickly unless we do something about it.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say. This is a choice between destruction and construction. Between valuing death and valuing life. Between taking responsibility for our future and hoping it all works out.

Destruction is what we are doing right now. Destruction is the blockade. Destruction is hobbling the Chinese by working through proxies, cutting off oil, kidnapping Venezuelan leadership, pressuring Denmark over Greenland. Destruction is arming a genocide. Break other people’s things because we have forgotten how to build our own.

Construction is the other path. Construction is Hamilton’s playbook, at speed. Reindustrialize. Repatriate the supply chains we offshored. Pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, steel, rare earths, shipbuilding. Repatriate health care from extractive finance back to something that serves the people paying for it. Rebuild public research. Rebuild the grid. Build rail. Build housing. Do it fast, because fast is the only tempo that has ever actually worked for this country.

Construction is also how you become useful to the world again. China is going to electrify the global south whether we like it or not. We can help build the world into a future like the Jetsons or we can try and bomb it into a future like the Flintstones. If we choose the Flintstones the world may turn their collective backs on us. A rules-based order means following rules, including the ones against wars of aggression and the ones against arming genocides. A democracy means practicing it. You get your respect back by being the thing you claim to be, not by bullying the people who have noticed you aren’t.

And this is where the responsibility piece lands, because I mean the word we. The American people allowed this. Voted for some of it. Looked away from the rest. Trusted that the serious people would handle it while the serious people were handling themselves. There is no version of this that gets fixed by waiting. Not for the other party, not for the next election, not for someone else to show up. We is the job description. It has to be, because hoping it all works out is how we got here.

The world is already choosing. Gallup, Pew, ECFR, they are telling us in every language they have that they have seen enough. The question is whether we will choose too. To war or not to war was our question, and we answered it wrong. The next question is what we build instead. And that one is still open.

Corbin Trent
A Fight Worth Having

53 Candidates. 20 States. One Idea.

Corbin Trent — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 10:31:05 GMT

I told you last week a list was coming.

Every candidate on this list is working hard, raising money, and doing it without selling themselves out to the people who broke this country. None of them is backed by AIPAC or taking corporate PAC money. That was a filter. A lot of them have earned endorsements from Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, Working Families Party, and Bernie Sanders. Some are challenging incumbents. Some are running in open seats. Some are trying to flip Republican districts. All of them are running on a similar agenda.

What is the point of this list?

Individually, I want every one of them to win. But individually there is much less chance that they will transform our system into one that we’re proud to be a part of. If 10 or 15 or even 30 of these folks win but haven’t developed relationships with one another they will go in significantly less powerful than if they were already a bloc. One truism of Nancy Pelosi’s that I believe in my heart are “power isn’t given it’s taken.” and “when you have power you must use it.” Political power grows rather than depletes when it is used for good.

So I am going to be asking candidates to do the hard thing. Work together. Don’t resign yourself in victory to the small offices, committee assignments, and the drumbeat of “big change is impossible”. United they can more easily resist the institutions designed to water down their mandate for change. absorb them.

So I’m trying to figure out how we get there.

What if five of these candidates decided right now, before the end of the month, to do something odd and cross-endorse each other. To commit to a few things together. Demand new leadership for the Democratic Party. Force votes on stripping war powers from this president and Medicare for All. That would be enough to get some attention.

Five people saying that out loud together is news. Ten is a movement. Twenty is a bloc. Thirty or forty candidates going into November having already built relationships, already endorsing each other, already knowing who they’re walking in alongside. That’s something leadership would have to reckon with. You can’t absorb thirty people who show up knowing each other and knowing what they came to do.

I know what you’re thinking. That sounds like the Progressive Caucus.

It isn’t. The Progressive Caucus defends incumbents. It defends leadership. What I’m describing would be different from day one. People who believe they can change and must help build a better Democratic Party. One that more than 30% of Americans want to be part of. If that many people stood together and lifted the voices of so many of us so many Democrats and would-be-Ddemocrats, they’d have some power.

Why those three demands?

New leadership because 74% of Americans, including 55% of Democrats, think congressional Democrats have the wrong priorities.

Stripping war powers because Congress gave that authority away decades ago and no president should have it alone. Least of all this one.

A floor vote on Medicare for All because 65% of likely voters support it as do , 78% of Democrats. Iit would be great to see who stands with Democratic voters once they make it to Congress. Make everyone go on record. Either healthcare is a right or it isn’t.

This is a hard thing to ask these candidates to do. They’re running their own races, working long days, trying to win. Their staff and consultants will tell them it’s a bad idea and a distraction. Asking them to coordinate, to cross-endorse, to take a stand against their own party’s leadership while they’re still trying to get elected, that’s a real ask.

But if people can’t do something different - a bit edgy - now when our very system is threatened, later will be too late, others are hungry for exactly this. They know that the traditional ways aren’t working. That sending even the most talented communicators and hopeful people into a system designed to maintain the status quo won’t work.

A candidate who stands up with four others and says “we’re going in together and we’re going to fight for this together” is going to generate more excitement, more coverage, and more small dollar donations than they would alone. I think it’s an asset, not a liability.

But I can’t just tell them that. I have to show them. I want to run polling in these districts to see if voters there respond to this idea. I want to see if big ideas resonate in these states and districts. That polling, and your support getting it done can help us to build this bloc.

That polling costs money and I’m asking you to help fund it.

This is the first time I’ve made a direct ask. I’m making it because I think this can work and I think we can move fast. Give five dollars. Give fifty. If you’ve got a $100,000 to spare and you believe in this, we’re a super PAC, so we can put it to work. We move independently, without the candidate having to ask, which means we can hit hard and fast.

So please, head to AFightWorthHaving.com. check it out. Sign up. Donate what you can. And share this piece with someone who’s been asking what we do.

Here’s the list. Sorted by primary date. I didn’t link the websites, if I had this email would go straight to spam.

Frederick Haynes, TX-30. Already won his primary. He’s the nominee.

May 2026 Primary

Zachary Shrewsbury, WV-Senate, challenging Republican Shelley Moore Capito.

Denise Powell, NE-02, Open seat.

John Cavanaugh, NE-02, Open seat.

Chris Rabb, PA-03, Open seat. Endorsed by Justice Democrats, Working Families Party, Our Revolution.

Everton Blair, GA-13, primary against 13-term incumbent David Scott

Bob Brooks, PA-07, running to flip an R+1 district.

Carol Obando-Derstine, PA-07, also running to flip PA-07.

Erin Petrey, KY-06, Open seat in R+7 territory.

June 2026 Primary

Saikat Chakrabarti, CA-11, Open seat. Co-founder of Justice Democrats, architect of the Green New Deal. Endorsed by Justice Democrats.

Analilia Mejia, NJ-11, Open seat. Endorsed by Our Revolution and Working Families Party.

Heidi Hall, CA-03, primary against Ami Bera.

Audrey Denney, CA-01, Open seat in R+12 territory.

Angela Gonzales-Torres, CA-34, primary against Jimmy Gomez. Endorsed by Justice Democrats.

Jake Levine, CA-32, primary against Brad Sherman.

Russell Tyler Cleveland, MT-01, Open seat in R+5 territory.

Jay Vaingankar, NJ-12, Open seat.

Randy Villegas, CA-22, running to flip an R+1 district. Endorsed by Our Revolution and Working Families Party.

Rebecca Bennett, NJ-07, running to flip an EVEN district against Thomas Kean Jr.

Sarah Trone Garriott, IA-03, running to flip an R+2 district.

Graham Platner, ME-Senate, challenging Susan Collins. Endorsed by Bernie Sanders.

Ata-Ul-Salaam Bhatti, VA-01, running to flip an R+3 district.

James Lally, NV-03, primary against Susie Lee.

Mo Seifeldein, VA-08, primary against Don Beyer.

Mike Sacks, NY-17, running to flip a D+1 district against Michael Lawler.

Antonio Reynoso, NY-07, Open seat.

Alexander Bores, NY-12, Open seat.

Charles Park, NY-06, primary against Grace Meng.

Dylan Hewitt, NY-21, Open seat in R+10 territory.

Effie Phillips-Staley, NY-17, also running to flip NY-17. Endorsed by Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman.

James Felton Keith, NY-13, primary against Adriano Espaillat.

Michael Blake, NY-15, Open seat.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, NY-13, also running in NY-13. Endorsed by Justice Democrats and Democratic Socialists of America.

Manny Rutinel, CO-08, running to flip an EVEN district. Up eight points in polling.

Melat Kiros, CO-01, primary against Diana DeGette. Beat DeGette 63 to 35 at the Denver county assembly in March. Endorsed by Justice Democrats.

Joseph Reagan, CO-05, running to flip an R+5 district.

Julie Gonzales, CO-Senate, primary against John Hickenlooper.

Mai Vang, CA-07, primary against Mark DeSaulnier. Endorsed by Justice Democrats.

August 2026 Primary

Kshama Sawant, WA-09, primary against Adam Smith.

Cori Bush, MO-01, primary against Wesley Bell. AIPAC spent nine million dollars to beat her in 2024. She’s back.

Donavan McKinney, MI-13, primary against Shri Thanedar. Endorsed by Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, and Working Families Party.

William Lawrence, MI-07, running to flip an EVEN district.

Abdul El-Sayed, MI-Senate, Open seat. Endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Polling at 25% in a three-way race within striking distance.

Justin Pearson, TN-09, primary against Steve Cohen. One point behind in the most recent poll.

Emily Berge, WI-03, running to flip an R+3 district.

Luke Bronin, CT-01, primary against John Larson.

Elijah Manley, FL-20, primary against Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick. Up three points in polling, with 70% of district voters saying his opponent should resign.

Oliver Adams Larkin, FL-23, primary against Jared Moskowitz.

Christian Urrutia, NH-01, Open seat.

September 2026 Primary

Patrick Roath, MA-08, primary against Stephen Lynch.

Jeromie Whalen, MA-01, primary against Richard Neal.

Beth Andres-Beck, MA-06, Open seat.

That’s 53 people across 20 states. None of them taking AIPAC money. None of them taking corporate PAC money.

I’m not asking you to pick a favorite. I’m asking whether you think they could be more powerful together than any of them are alone. Help me prove it.

This could be a beginning.

Corbin Trent

A Solution Menu With Prices

Corbin Trent — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:03:21 GMT

Americas Undoing is published by A Fight Worth Having. The Not AIPAC SuperPAC.

Happy Sunday,

Let’s talk about what real solutions actually cost. Not in dollars. In seats and votes.

Most Americans agree on the basics. The economy. Jobs. Healthcare. The influence of money on politics. Education. Immigration. People want these things fixed. They just don’t hear anybody being honest about what fixing them requires.

Just like you can’t take half a round of antibiotics and wonder why you’re still sick, half measures on a broken system make things worse. So here’s the full prescription.

We’ve confused health insurance with healthcare. Having coverage doesn’t mean there’s a hospital, a clinic, or a doctor. We sold off public healthcare delivery over decades, and the nonprofits that replaced it act like for-profits. You can fix who pays the bill and still have towns of two thousand people with nowhere to go at two in the morning. Same with the economy. People don’t want talking points about GDP. They want to afford a house, a doctor, childcare, school. Those things keep getting further out of reach. And we can’t seem to build anything anymore either. Not rail. Not energy infrastructure. Not housing. We have a hard time doing it, period.

So what does changing that actually cost?

Medicare for All has 65% support among likely voters, including nearly half of Republicans. To pass it you need 60 Senate votes to break a filibuster and 218 in the House. And even then you haven’t built a single new hospital or trained a single new doctor. So if you’re going to 60 anyway, go all the way. Restore public ownership of healthcare delivery. A hospital in a town of a thousand people is never going to exist for profit. It never did.

Break up monopolies in healthcare, food, housing. 60 votes. A House majority willing to take on the industries writing their campaign checks.

Tuition-free state owned universities and trade schools. Universal locally owned childcare. A minimum wage a person can live on. 60 votes.

Getting big money out of politics is a different category. The Supreme Court decided corporations have free speech and money is speech. You can’t limit what they spend. To undo that you either remove the justices who made those calls, which takes two-thirds of the Senate to convict, 67 votes, or you pass a constitutional amendment. Two-thirds of the House. Two-thirds of the Senate. Ratification by 38 state legislatures.

That’s the most expensive thing on the menu. And it’s been done before.

In the late twenties Republicans had a trifecta. Then everything collapsed. In 1930 Democrats started picking up seats. By 1932 they broke through. By 1934 they had 69 Senate seats. A supermajority. By 1936 they had 77. The largest in modern American history, built in six years from a minority, by offering something worth voting for while the other side presided over a disaster.

That’s the model. Build the majority. Then use it.

Which is why we have to be straight about where we are right now.

A recent CNN poll found 74% of Americans think congressional Democrats have the wrong priorities. That includes 55% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. CNN’s own data analyst called those numbers atrociously awful and said they scream primary challenges across the map. Democratic voters hold a net negative 4% view of their own congressional leaders. In 2006 that was positive 28. In 2018 it was positive 19. Both of those were midterm years with a Republican in the White House, just like now. Chuck Schumer’s hold on his leadership role is a coin toss according to the prediction markets.

The base isn’t confused. They’re not apathetic. They’re telling you something true, and the people currently in charge aren’t listening.

So we’re going to try something. I’ve put together a list of candidates who support the right policies and are willing to fight for them. They’re either primarying incumbent Democrats or running in open seats, and they’ve all raised at least a hundred thousand dollars, meaning they’re real. Over the next few weeks we’re going to try to talk to as many of them as we can, and get them on board with something simple: work together now, while you’re still campaigning. Build your power as a bloc before you get to Congress. Then actually use that power when you get there.

That’s the whole idea. We know how to do this. We’ve done it before.

But we can’t do it without you. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and help us get these candidates working together.

Corbin Trent

I have been writing about this for over a year. The thing I hear most, from people who read every word, is some version of yeah, I get it, but what do we do about it.

A Fight Worth Having is being built to answer that question. We are working to find candidates who understand what this moment actually requires. Not just candidates who can win, but candidates who know what winning is for. We put them through a real process before we back them because the filter matters as much as the fuel.

Are they ready to challenge Democratic leadership, not just Republican villains? Are they willing to stand alongside candidates in other states and districts around a shared mission? Do they understand that their victory matters more if the person running three states over wins too?

When we find those candidates we go to work for them through independent expenditure campaigns. That is a legal term for us doing the work ourselves, separate from the candidate, without them having to ask. It means we can move fast, hit hard, and build the kind of infrastructure that the other side has been running for decades.

Next week we’re releasing a list of 46 candidates we think could actually change the math if they’d run together, fight together, and refuse to let leadership off the hook. People we’ve found across the country who are primarying incumbents or running in open seats and have already shown they’re serious. We think this list matters. We’ll show you why next week.

If you’ve been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and get in.

Fairy Dust and Rainbows Are Our Only Hope

Corbin Trent — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:19:43 GMT

I’ve been hearing from a lot of candidates and campaigns lately. This one is for them.

In 2015 I sold my food trucks to volunteer for Bernie Sanders. That turned into co-founding Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, then helping elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I worked as her strategist and communications director for a few years after that. I’ve spent the better part of a decade pretty close to the center of the progressive movement. The following is what I learned.

Support the work

Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton said Bernie Sanders’ policies were “fairy dust and rainbows.” The point wasn’t just that big things were hard. The point was that big things weren’t needed. The system was basically working. America was great. If you thought otherwise you weren’t serious, or you weren’t paying attention, or you were the kind of person who gets dismissed at Brookings as insufficiently realistic.

That was the consensus. Serious people. Credentialed people. Times columnists and think tank fellows and television regulars, all reading from the same hymnal. Don’t rock the boat. Take what the system offers. Be grateful.

That consensus didn’t protect us from Donald Trump. It elected him. Twice.

Because when someone came along and said the system is rigged and I’ll burn it down, 80 million people said finally. They were wrong about the messenger. They were completely right about the problem. The “things are actually pretty good” position was the most destabilizing thing anyone could have said. That realism was actually radicalism. And we’re living in the results.

The market doesn’t work for the things people actually need to live. Not anymore. Maybe it once did. It doesn’t now and the evidence is everywhere.

We spend $6 trillion a year on healthcare. More than any country on earth, by a lot, and we rank last among wealthy nations in outcomes. Last. Tens of millions of people are one diagnosis away from financial ruin. Rural hospitals are closing. The market has had decades to fix this. It hasn’t fixed it. It has extracted wealth from it while delivering less.

Or consider the mRNA vaccines. The federal government funded the foundational research for 35 years. When COVID hit, the government paid Moderna and Pfizer billions more to finish the job and purchase the doses. Moderna and Pfizer then walked away with over $100 billion in combined revenue. The public got the bill twice, once as taxpayers funding the research, once as patients paying the prices, and the companies kept the patents.

The same pattern shows up in housing. We have been short on housing for decades. The market hasn’t built our way out of it. Cities that people actually want to live in are unaffordable. But so are the rural areas. I live in Lenoir City, Tennessee. Population about 11,000. Here a studio apartment runs you a thousand dollars a month.

And what did our nominee offer? Kamala Harris proposed a $25,000 grant for first-time home buyers. I understand the instinct. But the issue is supply. You pump $25,000 into a market that isn’t building enough homes then prices go up. The money flows straight through the buyer and into the seller or the landlord and the developer, and nothing new gets built. It’s the same story as healthcare. We keep pouring money into broken systems I assume because it seems like a logical solution. But it only makes the problem worse. .

Too many people think of American problems as spending problems. But if I walked into my local grocery store and wanted 15,000 pounds of beef, it wouldn’t matter how much money I had. You can’t buy what doesn’t exist. We don’t have enough housing. We don’t have enough doctors. We don’t have enough childcare slots. Pumping money into markets that aren’t producing those things doesn’t produce them. It inflates the price of whatever scraps are left. You fix a capacity problem by building and training, not injecting more cash.

We built our way out of the Depression not just by writing checks but by doing it ourselves. The government built water and irrigation infrastructure that turned the Central Valley into the food supply for half the country. It strung electrical wire to farms and small towns across the rural South and Midwest that private utilities had written off as unprofitable. We built the industrial capacity that became the Arsenal of Democracy. That was public investment. That was us deciding some things are too important to leave to the market.

We don’t believe that anymore. Or rather, our leaders don’t. Those few that do get stopped before they can do anything about it.

AOC won. She scared people badly enough that they spent millions trying to destroy her. She had the right diagnosis. She had the right policies. She had the courage. The things she ran on didn’t happen. Not because she wasn’t good enough. Because she walked in alone. A seat won in isolation gets absorbed. The machinery of this system is designed to absorb individual attacks.

Progressive politics has the same capacity problem that the rest of the country does. We don’t have enough aligned people in power, and we can’t fix that one seat at a time any more than we can fix the housing crisis one subsidy at a time.

Which brings me to where we are. An American president is suggesting on a Tuesday night that Iran should cease to exist. Not metaphorically. And the people who are supposed to be the opposition are writing letters. That is where we end up when the people in charge have no affirmative vision, no plan to build anything, and no team capable of fighting for it even if they did.

So when people ask me about candidates, I’m not asking whether they have the right positions. Most of the good ones do. I’m asking whether they understand what those positions are actually up against. Whether they’re ready to fight it.

I’m looking for bold, specific, public policy positions. Not values. Policies. Medicare for All. Public ownership of AI infrastructure. A housing program that builds and owns, not just subsidizes. Drug pricing reform that takes back the patents on publicly-funded research so the public owns what the public paid for. You would be amazed how many candidates won’t put this out publicly.

A willingness to say out loud that the Democratic Party as currently led is the problem. The people running it have failed. They have names. Saying so isn’t radical. It’s honest.

An understanding that our institutions have been captured. The FEC. The FDA. The SEC. The DOJ. The Supreme Court. Not neutral referees. A coordinated fifty-year project to make progressive governance legally impossible. A candidate who won’t say that isn’t ready for what’s coming.

A willingness to take risks inside the party. Not fighting Republicans on television, which costs nothing. Backing primary challengers against Democratic incumbents who are blocking the agenda. Making it more dangerous to oppose you than to support you. Almost nobody will do this.

All of those are necessary. None of them are enough.

A commitment to building a team before they win. Not after. Campaigning alongside candidates in other states and districts. Endorsing across geographies. Treating their race as part of something bigger than their district. This has never been done at scale on our side. It’s the thing that would change everything.

People resist this one the most, so let me explain why it matters.

A candidate’s victory, whether it’s a House seat or a Senate seat, can only accomplish things within the framework of how big and powerful their team is, how aligned that team is, and whether they built it before they walked into the building. It has to happen before, not after, for two reasons. First, because building it before is what proves you’re willing to put skin in the game and take real risks. Anyone can talk about solidarity after they’ve won. Doing it before, when it costs you something, is what makes it mean anything. Second, because you cannot change who’s sitting at the table from inside the table. You have to build the power to change it from outside. That means committing to each other before any of you have a seat, when the only thing binding you together is the mission itself.

And it matters to voters. Candidates running on these ideas as individuals are just putting policies on a page. They’re giving speeches. When they show up with a team, when they’ve committed to each other before they’ve won anything, they’re showing voters they understand what’s standing in their way and they have a plan for taking it head on.

Underneath all of it, public ownership as the mechanism. Not regulation. Not subsidy. Ownership. We did it before. We can do it again. When a technology has the power to transform society, it’s unwise to leave it in the hands of a tiny group of self-absorbed billionaires whose only goal is to maximize profit, who consistently show contempt for the rights and interests of their fellow Americans, and who aren’t accountable to anyone, especially with a federal government this weak. We don’t let private companies build nuclear weapons. We don’t let them decide when or how to use them. We don’t let them raise armies. We understand some things are too powerful to leave in private hands. AI is one of those things. It’s built off of thousands of years of human data and thought. It’s built off of major public investment. It’s built by us. It should be working for us. The only thing that’s got a single chance of ensuring that is if we own it. Just like Alaska gets dividends from its oil reserves, the American people should be getting dividends from their data and their investments.

Nobody is coming to do this for us. It takes a team. People who said all of this out loud before they won. Who committed to each other before they walked into Washington. Who understand that their victory only matters if the person running three states over wins too.

That team is what I’m building with A Fight Worth Having. Not candidates with good vibes. Candidates who’ve passed this filter. Who know what they’re up against. Who are ready to fight the right people, including the ones in their own party.

If you’ve been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do.

Go to AFightWorthHaving.com

Corbin Trent

Are We the Good Guys? Were We Ever?

Corbin Trent — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:18:46 GMT

I’ve been watching this war for 38 days. Iranian hospitals hit. Water systems destroyed. More than 30 universities gone. 110 children killed at an all-girls school in Minab.

American bombs, American military, no real goal, no real purpose. Just destruction. Just power. And the dumbest kind of power.

The pundits at the NYT and on CNN are losing their minds. Not about the killing or carnage. About the tone.

The New York Times is beside itself because Donald Trump went on social media and promised to blow up Iran’s water supply. He celebrated the destruction of a bridge near Tehran like he’d won a fantasy football matchup. The White House is running propaganda reels, real footage of airstrikes cut with video game clips and movie scenes, set to guitar riffs. Michelle Goldberg is writing about the lost veneer of American morality. Other columnists are lamenting that we’ve lost our standing, our credibility, our ability to lead.

I think the veneer was harmful. It prevented us from being confronted with our actions. The veneer didn’t protect the 7,000 American soldiers who came home in flag-draped coffins or the 60,000 who came home missing pieces of themselves. It didn’t protect the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died after we invaded a country that had nothing to do with September 11th. It didn’t protect the Libyans after we helped turn their country into a failed state. It didn’t protect the Yemenis. It didn’t protect the Iranians whose scientists we’ve been assassinating for years. The veneer didn’t protect anyone other than American elites, our own arrogance, our own sense of moral superiority.

I’m 45 years old. In my lifetime this country has gone to war in Afghanistan after 20 hijackers, most of them Saudi, attacked us. We invaded Iraq. We bombed Libya. We ran illegal drone programs that killed civilians in countries we weren’t even at war with. We’ve overthrown legitimately elected governments. We’ve blockaded Cuba for decades because apparently a small island nation 90 miles off our coast is an existential threat to the most powerful military in human history. We have now bombed Iran for 38 straight days.

None of that is new. What’s new is that Donald Trump won’t dress it up. He says he wants the oil. He says he wants to blow up the infrastructure. He says his own morality is the only thing that can stop him. And the people who spent their careers providing the intellectual justification for all of it are horrified. Not because of the killing. Because he won’t pretend.

The argument from the establishment isn’t that the wars were wrong. The argument is that the wrong wars should have been conducted with more tact. We should have issued a polite press release about spreading democracy before we took the oil. We should have couched the civilian casualties in the language of precision targeting and collateral damage and the difficult choices made by serious people in positions of grave responsibility. We should have maintained the fiction.

Because that’s what it was. A fiction. One that protected the conscience and prestige of the empire, not the people living under it.

When the International Criminal Court moved to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes in Gaza, in a Senate hearing Lindsey Graham said “if they do this to Israel, we are next.” He didn’t say they were innocent. He said we’re next. Chuck Schumer called the warrants reprehensible, profoundly unfair, and outrageous. Not the genocide in Gaza. Not the killing of tens of thousands of civilians. The warrants charging the people doing it.

The veneer wasn't protecting America's reputation. It was protecting theirs. Biden and Gaza, Obama's drone program, Bush and Cheney and Iraq, Clinton and Serbia. The list is long and every one of them knows exactly how long it is. That's why the ICC never gets real power over Americans. Not because they believe in sovereignty or international norms. Because they'd be on the list.

My street in Loudon County, Tennessee. Last week. Drug bust.

Last week, I was walking to the coffee shop when a convoy rolled past me. A massive police van, multiple cop cars, and one of those military vehicles, 15 feet long, 10 feet tall, the kind you’d expect to see rolling through Fallujah. I followed them. Drug bust.

A house full of meth heads in my town, hit with a dozen guys in full desert tactical gear, silenced weapons, flash bang grenades. I know it was an overreach because those people were back home later that same day. If you need to blow through a door with that kind of force to arrest someone, that person probably shouldn’t be sitting on their porch six hours later.

We don’t know how to reach for anything except the gun anymore. Not here, not abroad. It’s the only tool we’ve kept sharp.

I don’t fear Iran. The people who have more direct control over the daily conditions of my life and my kids’ lives than the Iranian government ever has or ever will are not in Tehran. They’re here.

Trump is a clarifying force.

He didn’t create our system. He just makes lying about it harder. His selfishness, corruption, cruelty, and vulgarity strip away the rituals of denial. He is not a departure from American history. He is a caricature of it. America without the niceties. America without the pretense. America without the patience for the stories that help us feel righteous.

We have always known how to speak the language of liberty while practicing domination. The founders talked about freedom while enslaving human beings. We talk now about justice and righteousness while arming genocide and threatening to bomb whole societies into ruin.

We cannot become something different by pretending Trump is something other than America. He is America. Just the version that has lost respect for the system of denial.

We can be different and we can do it quickly. In 1932 Republicans had a trifecta. The economy collapsed. The country nearly fell apart. In two cycles Democrats built a supermajority that lasted a generation. Not because they had better consultants. Because they had a vision big enough that people believed in it and showed up for it.

Can we look honestly at what we are and decide to be something different? Not redeemed. Different.

The people who need the veneer are counting on our cynicism. They’re counting on us to look at that chart and find a reason it can’t happen again.

It can.

Corbin Trent

If you’re wondering what we can do about it, A Fight Worth Having is being built to answer that question. We are working to find candidates who understand what this moment requires. Not just candidates who can win, but candidates who know winning is the beginning.

We put them through a real process before we back them because the filter determines the fuel.

Are they ready to challenge Democratic leadership, not just Republican villains?
Are they willing to stand alongside candidates in other states and districts around a shared mission?
Do they understand that their victory matters more if the person running three states over wins too?

I’ve was on calls all last week. Here’s who’s passed so far.

Oliver Larkin in FL-23
Melat Kiros in CO-1
Graham Platner, US Senate Maine
Saikat Chakrabarti, CA-11

With many more to come.

If you’ve been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and help us help them.

We Are About to Miss the Opportunity of a Lifetime

Corbin Trent — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:11:22 GMT

Morning y’all,

2026 and 2028 can and should be the beginnings of something transformational.

We’ve got tailwinds like you wouldn’t believe. A president whose approval rating has dropped below 35%, rivaling Nixon during Watergate. The man said, on camera, at an Easter lunch at the White House, that we can’t afford daycare because “we’re fighting wars.” That same week he asked Congress for a $1.5 trillion military budget. A 44% increase. The largest in American history.

The same guy who wants $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a prison while we’re spending roughly $2 billion a day bombing Iran in a war nobody asked for, a war that’s woefully unpopular even with the MAGA base.

But daycare? Too expensive, folks. Can’t swing it. Trump really doesn’t give a f…

Thirsty fo more?

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Fox host turned Secretary of War, is out there at the podium in the Pentagon asking Americans to pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, for “overwhelming violence” against Iran. The Pope rightly sees it differently, calling the war immoral.

Oh, and let’s not forget that these people aren’t just inept, they’re largely insane, like the dude running FEMA who’s been on podcasts claiming he was teleported to a Waffle House.

So, we’ve got a historic opportunity staring us in the face. But here’s the sad part. The really upsetting part.

Even in the face of all this, our party is still less popular. Even amongst ourselves. 55% of us say the party has the wrong priorities. 71% of Democratic-aligned voters say the party’s been ineffective at opposing Republican policies. Why? Because it has been. This isn’t a messaging problem. This isn’t voters failing to appreciate how good the Democratic Party is. This is us finally starting to understand how bad it is. How far our party has drifted from the people it claims to represent. How captured it’s become by Wall Street, big pharma, big tech, big oil, the military industrial complex, and every other industry that’s learned to write checks to both sides and win no matter who’s in power. Our leadership has failed us. We see it. We know it.

Last Saturday, 8 million of us were in the streets. All 50 states. More than 3,300 events. The largest single-day demonstration in American history. Nearly half of those events were in red states and rural communities. People who never march for anything marched.

But we marched against stuff, not for stuff. Against Trump. Against kings. Against war. There’s this energy out there and it’s real and it’s righteous, but right now it’s anger without a goal, and anger without a goal can’t build power. A goal, a vision, hope, that’s what you build a supermajority around. Our party is really good at channeling anger into “Trump bad” but that won’t do it. These millions of us, not just the 8 million in the streets but the tens of millions more who weren’t, could be a burning light hot enough to set this country’s rot ablaze if a party would just hold the magnifying glass.

But you’ve got to understand how we got here.

Trump’s first election was a warning sign so loud that half the country covered its ears. Then Covid hit and nearly buckled a healthcare system already on life support. We lost jobs, lost coverage, lost family members, and discovered that basically every system we’d been told to trust, healthcare, housing, childcare, the supply chain, was one crisis away from collapse. Then we elected Biden, who passed trillions in spending bills. For a moment it felt like something was changing.

It wasn’t. The systems that caused this mess stayed intact.

We need to accept that America doesn’t just have a spending problem. We have a system problem. Every time Democrats get into power they pump money into broken systems without rebuilding them. Obama did it. Biden did it. The money goes in and disappears, absorbed by corporate middlemen, diluted by bureaucracy, leaving barely a trace in the lives of the people who needed it most.

And then we get Trump again. Twice elected.

If that doesn’t convince you that Americans are screaming for transformation I don’t know what will. People aren’t electing Donald Trump because they love Donald Trump. They’re electing him because they’re done with the status quo. They’re done being told our system is functional when they can see with their own eyes that it isn’t. They want it burned down. That’s a rational response to decades of betrayal. It’s also a catastrophic one. But it’s what happens when nobody offers an alternative vision. In the absence of hope and vision anger will do.

That is what so many elected Democrats lack, a vision. A mission. The folks running this party have failed and they have names. Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Gregory Meeks, Pete Aguilar, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Lieu. Those are the names of the leaders that 55% of Democrats think are failing.

We’ve been so afraid of words like socialism that we’ve allowed these folks to contort our values into shapes that are almost unrecognizable.

Here’s the dark irony. MAGA isn’t calling out corruption. They are the corruption. But they’re willing to tear down institutions that too many treat as sacred. The DOJ, the SEC, the FDA, the courts, it doesn’t matter. They’ll dismantle anything. They’re doing it for greed and power and not a damn thing for the American people, but the lesson is still there. No institution should be untouchable. The revolving door between corporate boardrooms and government shouldn’t just be stopped, the people who came in through it need to be removed. We should’ve been saying that for years. Some of us were. Nobody in leadership heeded the call.

But some of us are done waiting for leadership to listen.

Saikat Chakrabarti built Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited and elected AOC by unseating a ten-term incumbent the Democratic establishment said was untouchable. He was her chief of staff. He wrote the Green New Deal. He took on the most powerful people in the party and won. He’s running for Congress again. Graham Platner is publicly calling for Chuck Schumer to step aside. He’s not just running his own race. He’s campaigning alongside Chakrabarti, alongside Abdul El-Sayed, alongside a growing list of candidates who are building a coalition before they even get to Washington. They’re rallying together, organizing together, building something real together. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already underway.

These candidates are calling out corporate PAC money, calling out AIPAC, calling out the Iran war, calling out our own party’s leadership on the things that actually matter. They’re proving you can run without selling out before you even start.

But they’re not just running against the establishment. They’re running to stop the next great extraction. AI is going to do to the top 20% what offshoring and NAFTA did to factory workers. The project manager. The paralegal. The coder. The analyst. Same story, faster timeline. It doesn’t have to go that way. But the only path that doesn’t end there runs straight through public ownership. A share of the economy for every American. Because the more automated production becomes, whether it’s software or automobiles or medicine, the more important it is that it gets built here and that we own a piece of what it produces. The alternative is the Rust Belt, but for everyone.

We’re roughly 30% of the electorate. Independents who support healthcare, housing, a government that actually builds things, those people are with us in enormous numbers. What they don’t agree with is our leadership. What they don’t trust is our track record. What they’re waiting for is someone to actually mean what they say.

So the question is whether we’re going to back these people or keep doing what we’ve always done. Listening to party leaders and pundits and establishment political hacks tell us who to pick. Letting them convince us with their metrics and their models that we’re better off than we think we are. Letting them talk us out of believing our own eyes. They’ve been doing it for decades and we’ve been letting them and the results are sitting right in front of us.

This party belongs to us. Not to its donors. Not to its consultants. Not to its leadership. It’s time to squeeze it back toward our values and away from the people who’ve been writing the checks. We’ve got to be brave enough to back the people willing to break the cycle. With money. With hours. With our voices and our votes in primaries that most people ignore.

Moments like this don’t come around often. The candidates are there. The coalition is forming. Don’t let this one pass.

Let’s back the fighters.

Corbin Trent

I have been writing about this for over a year. The thing I hear most, from people who read every word, is some version of yeah, I get it, but what do we do about it.

Are they ready to challenge Democratic leadership, not just Republican villains
Are they willing to stand alongside candidates in other states and districts around a shared mission?
Do they understand that their victory matters more if the person running three states over wins too?

If you have been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and get in.

Two Weeks in for A Fight Worth Having

Corbin Trent — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:13:23 GMT

Two weeks ago I told you what I was trying to build. What I want to tell you today is that it’s moving.

I’ve spent the last two weeks on calls with campaigns. A lot of them. Candidates running for Senate seats, House seats, in states you’d expect and some you wouldn’t. Most of them have good platforms. Some of them have great platforms. That was never the hard part to find.

Here’s what I’m actually looking for and what makes the bar so high.

Help keep it going?

A candidate can be right about everything. Medicare for All, taxing the billionaire class, Gaza, the housing crisis, all of it. And still be useless once they win. Not because they’re dishonest. Because they walk in alone. And alone you don’t pass anything. Alone you wait your turn. Alone the machine absorbs you the same way it absorbs everyone else, and two years later you’re taking the small wins and calling it progress just to have something to say at the next fundraiser.

The theory of A Fight Worth Having is simple. It’s almost embarrassingly simple. Candidates who share a platform and a diagnosis need to commit to each other before they win. Campaign together now. Coordinate once they’re elected. Name the Democratic leadership that has failed us and fight to replace it. Back primary challengers against the incumbents inside their own party who are blocking the agenda they ran on. Say all of that out loud, on camera, in public, where it can’t be walked back quietly in a back room conversation.

That last part is the filter. Not the platform. The willingness to say it where it counts.

Most candidates won’t. Not because they disagree. Because they’re calculating. Because they think they need the very people they should be fighting. Because they believe they can negotiate their way to change from inside a structure that was specifically designed to make sure nothing changes.

Two weeks in and I’ve already had conversations with campaigns that give me real reason to believe this can work. Some of those conversations are about to become public. I’m not ready to name names yet. But I will be soon, and when I do I want you to already be part of this.

Here’s what we need right now. People.

We are building a list of folks willing to show up at town halls, candidate forums, and campaign events in their districts and ask simple questions on the record. Will you oppose the failed leadership of Schumer and Jeffries? Will you commit to coordinating with other candidates running on this agenda, before you win and after? Will you back challengers against the incumbents in your party blocking the results?

One person in one room with one camera changes the conversation.

Sign up at AFightWorthHaving.com. Tell us your district. Tell us if you can show up. If you have a platform, even a modest one, tell us that too. We will connect you with everything you need.

The candidates worth backing are out there. Some of them are already talking to us. What we’re building is the thing that makes them believe they won’t be walking in alone.

Get in before this gets loud.

Corbin Trent

I’ve spent a long time writing about what’s broken. People ask me what to do about it. A Fight Worth Having is my answer. It’s a super PAC that runs independent expenditure campaigns behind candidates willing to take on their own party, take on corporate money, and take on the lobbying operations that have turned Congress into a permission slip for the donor class. We don’t wait for the party to anoint someone. We find the fighters and we back them.

Contribute

We Showed up. Our Leaders Schemed.

Corbin Trent — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:30:23 GMT

Welp, millions of us were in the streets today. All 50 states. More than 3,300 events. Lebanon, Pennsylvania and Midland, Texas and Boise, Idaho. Almost half the protests took place in GOP strongholds. Texas, Florida, and Ohio each had over a hundred events. Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah had events in the double digits. The third No Kings protest, and by every account the biggest in American history.

For every one of us that showed up today there were dozens that felt the same but stayed home convinced showing up wouldn’t matter. We have to make sure it does matter. That means action. That means change.

While we organized, they schemed. Drop Site News reported that Senate Democrats privately wanted Trump to prosecute this war. Let him weaken Iran. Let him take the political hit. Win-win. Except 76 percent of their own voters oppose this war. Nine percent support it. Nine percent. They left the war powers of the United States in the hands of a man they call a threat to democracy because it was politically convenient to do so. That is not opposition. That is complicity.

House Democrats had the votes. Three Republicans were ready to cross the aisle. They declined to bring the resolution to the floor. When Trump deployed military and federal authorities to DC, Hakeem Jeffries pointed to a letter from the DC Attorney General. “I thought that was a strongly worded letter,” he said. More than 1,900 people are dead. The war is a month old. Strongly worded letters.

Democratic leaders made a decision. Let Trump keep his war powers unchecked. Let the threat to our democracy run the table on Iran while they calculate the political upside. It is sickening. And there are better leaders available to us.

They stay comfortable doing this because nothing in their political lives forces them not to. That insulation is not an accident. It is a structure. Hakeem Jeffries won his last primary with 23,145 votes. His challenger got 3,402. Fewer than 27,000 total votes is what made him the unbeatable House Democratic leader. He is not invincible. He is a guy who won a low-turnout primary in a safe district and parlayed it into leading the opposition to the most aggressive consolidation of executive power in modern American history. With ongoing conversations.

Primary turnout in congressional races runs between two and five percent of eligible voters. The people making these decisions are not a majority. They are a small organized group. It does not have to stay that way.

On the Senate side, Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who has been in office since 2009, was asked this week whether he supports Chuck Schumer as minority leader. His answer: “Do I look stupid?” His best defense of Schumer was that nobody fundraises harder. Not that he’s winning fights. Not that he’s stopping anything. That he raises money. That’s not a defense. That’s a eulogy.

More than 80 Democratic House candidates across the country are either non-committal on backing Jeffries or outright opposed to him. Warner won’t defend his own leader. The press is asking the question. The candidates are hedging. The base is done.

The energy in the streets today, the frustration that has been building for two years, the growing list of candidates who won’t say Jeffries’ name with a straight face — that is an ember. It needs to become an inferno of demands. Every candidate running in a competitive district should have to answer one question before they get one dollar of grassroots money, one hour of volunteer time, one endorsement from anyone who was in the streets today. Will you fight to replace this leadership. Yes or no.

This is the path to defeating MAGA in 2026 and 2028. Trump is at 36 percent. The war is unpopular. The conditions for a wave election are forming right now. But waves require contrast. Voters do not turn out to replace one party that manages the decline with another party that manages the decline. They turn out when they believe something will actually change. That requires leaders who understand what is at stake. Jeffries and Schumer do not. Their answer to an illegal war, a cratered approval rating, and the biggest protests in American history is ongoing conversations and strongly worded letters.

That changes when the leadership changes. Not after 2026. Before it.

NotKeem.com and ChuckSchumerIsBadAtHisJob.com launches today.

Both go to the same place. The goal is simple: find out, on the record, where every Democratic incumbent and candidate in key districts stand on leadership. Will they support new House and Senate leadership or will they defend what we have. Yes or no. No process concerns. No timing objections. Just the answer.

Show up. Town halls. Campaign events. Candidate forums. Anywhere a Democratic candidate is taking questions in a district that matters. You ask the question. You film the answer. You film the dodge. We will help you find the events. We will give you the questions. We will help you get the footage out. What we cannot supply is a constituent in the room who lives in that district and has every right to demand an answer. That is you.

Share everything. One video of a candidate saying yes becomes a template. One video of a candidate dodging becomes the story. The press is circling this. Warner proved it this week. What reporters need to write the bigger story is evidence that voters are asking it too. You showing up in that room and putting it online is that evidence. If you have a following, even a modest one, push the clips. This spreads through people, not algorithms.

Sign up at NotKeem.com. Tell us your district. Tell us if you have a platform. Tell us if you can show up. We will connect you with everything you need.

Donate at AFightWorthHaving.com. I’ve spent a long time writing about what’s broken. People ask me what to do about it. A Fight Worth Having is my answer. It’s a super PAC that runs independent expenditure campaigns behind candidates willing to take on their own party, take on corporate money, and take on the lobbying operations that have turned Congress into a permission slip for the donor class. We don’t wait for the party to anoint someone. We find the fighters and we back them.

The millions of people in the streets today were not asking for a strongly worded letter. They were asking to be heard. The leaders we have now cannot hear them. They are too insulated, too funded, too comfortable.

We do not fix that by waiting. We fix it by replacing them.

Go to NotKeem.com. Sign up. Show up. The ember is lit. Let’s make it an inferno.

Corbin

I've spent a long time writing about what's broken. People ask me what to do about it. A Fight Worth Having is my answer. It's a super PAC that runs independent expenditure campaigns behind candidates willing to take on their own party, take on corporate money, and take on the lobbying operations that have turned Congress into a permission slip for the donor class. We don't wait for the party to anoint someone. We find the fighters and we back them. AFightWorthHaving.com

The Obama Problem

Corbin Trent — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:31:49 GMT

The Democratic Party has an Obama problem. Whatever do I mean? I’m glad you asked.

Zohran Mamdani was on the brink of winning the New York City mayor’s race last November when he stepped off the campaign trail to handle something. He had gotten word that Chi Ossé, a Brooklyn councilman inspired by Mamdani’s own insurgent campaign, was building toward a primary challenge against Hakeem Jeffries. Ossé might have expected support from the man whose movement he had been part of.

Instead Mamdani called him the night before Election Day and told him he could not win, that a high-profile fight would undermine the left, and that if he persisted, Mamdani would ice him out completely. He also told Ossé he could be a key figure in the new administration, but only if he dropped the bid. When the call ended, an email was waiting in Ossé’s inbox. His invitation to Mamdani’s victory party the next day had been rescinded.

That was November. In February, Mamdani spent hours on the phone leaning on Working Families Party members to stay neutral in the governor’s race and protect Kathy Hochul from a primary challenge. When he got what he wanted, he called Hochul to make sure she knew his role. In January, Jabari Brisport, his former roommate and a senator who had spent years fighting for child care expansion, got moved out of camera range at the child care rollout because Hochul’s team asked and Mamdani’s office complied. He burned Nydia Velazquez, the first major elected official to endorse his mayoral campaign, by backing a different candidate for her congressional seat after she asked him to stay neutral. He showed up personally to the DSA meeting to kill the Ossé challenge. Ossé dropped out in December.

Last August I wrote that the worst thing Mamdani could do after winning was stand his movement down and try to negotiate his way to change. I said you cannot get small enough to become acceptable to people whose entire operation depends on things staying as they are. I said the only leverage that works is making them afraid of what happens if they don’t change. He had 50,000 volunteers and a million doors knocked and a city that had just told him it was ready. I am not going to pretend I called this wrong.

Visit A Fight Worth Having

The New York Times framed what he did as the portrait of a cunning operator. Jay Jacobs, the state party chairman who opposed Mamdani’s campaign, offered the lesson the Times seemed to endorse. Every successful political person has to be a little ruthless from time to time, Jacobs said. Otherwise you don’t survive.

That is not the wrong lesson because ruthlessness is bad. It is the wrong lesson because Mamdani is being ruthless in exactly the right direction for the wrong goal. He has power. He is using it. He is just using it to protect the people who stand between us and the change he ran on. Protecting Hochul and Jeffries is a choice. That million-door machine could have been aimed somewhere else.

The trap is not charm and it is not strategy. Both are tools and you need them. The trap is believing they are enough on their own, that if you are careful enough about managing your relationships with the people who currently have power, you can eventually get them to share it. That is not how power works. Power does not get shared. It gets built or it gets taken. A real supermajority, the kind that actually passes something, has never been built through accommodation. It gets built through aggressive political infighting, through primarying the members of your own party who are blocking your agenda, through making it more dangerous for someone to oppose you than to support you.

Democratic Senator Max Baucus had taken $3.2 million from the health care industry by the time he was handed the pen to write the Affordable Care Act. Obama let him write it. He wanted a seat at the table with the people who had spent decades building the table to keep people like him out. What he got was a health care bill that left the insurance industry intact, a stimulus too small to do the job, and a financial reform that left Wall Street standing after Wall Street burned the economy to the ground. Each of those got called a win. Each left the machinery in place. Last year I watched Democrats travel the country warning that the ACA subsidies expiring would be a healthcare catastrophe. What they were describing was Obamacare. The law they spent fifteen years calling a triumph. They passed something they knew was not good enough, called it a win, and watched it become the floor that everything else fell through.

FDR understood something about change that Obama and Mamdani have not. In the summer of 1938, after conservative Democrats in his own party started blocking New Deal legislation, Roosevelt campaigned across the country against his own incumbents. Reporters called it a purge. He mostly lost. But he understood that the fight for his agenda ran straight through his own party, and he was willing to say so out loud and pay the price. Trump understood the same thing from the other direction. In 2022 he backed challengers against Republican incumbents who crossed him, knocked out four of the ten who voted to impeach him, and remade the party in his image. Their vision is a list of enemies to hate. But both men proved the same thing. A party is not a sacred institution. It is a vehicle. And the people inside it blocking your agenda are the first fight, not the last. The progressive movement today operates as if it believes the opposite, and it keeps producing leaders who win elections and then protect the people standing in the way of everything they ran on.

What I have come to believe, from watching this up close for years, is that the most important thing about a candidate is not their policy positions. Policies can change. You can pressure someone into supporting a good idea. What you cannot inject into someone is a willingness to fight. Not willingness to fight Republicans on television, which costs nothing. Willingness to walk into a room where someone you thought was on your side is selling you out, say it out loud, and make them pay for it. Willingness to primary the colleague blocking the agenda you ran on. Willingness to point the movement at the people inside your own party who are protecting the system, because those are always the harder fights. You used to think those people were on your side.

You feel the same? Throw in to help.

Either they have that core or they do not. And almost none of them do.

Once they have the office they decide they know better. They have a seat at the table. They think their job is to keep things running smoothly, not just for their constituents but for the movement. They worry that if they fail it will reflect badly on all of us. And that worry becomes the thing that makes them fail.

The people who knocked a million doors for Zohran Mamdani deserved to have that energy pointed at something after he won. They deserved to be the reason Jeffries had to think twice, not the force Mamdani used to make sure Jeffries never had to think at all. Chi Ossé deserved a mayor who understood that one more democratic socialist in Congress is worth more than a comfortable relationship with the House Democratic leader.

We have been living off the work of previous generations for a long time. The New Deal built the public infrastructure that made markets possible. The GI Bill built a middle class. NYCHA at its peak housed 600,000 people in dignity. Those generations understood that government had to build things, own things, make long bets. They sewed. We reaped. And somewhere along the way the Democratic Party forgot that you cannot keep harvesting from a field you stopped planting.

The leadership we have now does not have a vision for planting. When Trump froze two billion dollars in Harvard’s federal funding, Chuck Schumer announced that Democrats had sent a very strong letter asking eight very strong questions. When Trump deployed the military to Washington, Hakeem Jeffries praised a strongly worded letter from the DC Attorney General. Those are not opposition tactics. Those are the gestures of people who have made their peace with not having power.

Power is not winning. Winning is the beginning of the fight for power. The work does not stop on election night. It starts there.

I am not interested in being hard on Mamdani or Obama or any of the others. These are not bad people. They are people who believed that being in the room was the same thing as having power. It is not. Power is what determines what happens when you leave the room. And you build it before you sit down at the table, not by making yourself agreeable once you get there.

Corbin Trent

I have been writing about this for over a year. The thing I hear most, from people who read every word, is some version of yeah, I get it, but what do we do about it.

Are they ready to challenge Democratic leadership, not just Republican villains
Are they willing to stand alongside candidates in other states and districts around a shared mission?
Do they understand that their victory matters more if the person running three states over wins too?

If you have been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and get in.

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An American Buyback

Corbin Trent — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:19:37 GMT

Last Thursday I told you about a new organization I’m launching called A Fight Worth Having. Going forward it will be the publisher of America’s Undoing (New website coming), so keep an eye on your inboxes. If you see anything from Corbin Trent at America’s Undoing or A Fight Worth Having, open it. And reply, even one word to this one right now will keep us landing in your inbox and not your spam folder. It matters more than you think.

Now, I want to go deeper into what we’re building and why.

The problems stacking up on working people in this country are not mysteries. Housing costs are out of control. Groceries cost more than they did. Healthcare costs more than it did and covers less. We are dropping bombs sometimes on children. We are kidnapping foreign leaders. We are running up debt and have next to nothing to show for it. We continue to export carnage to maintain an American system that delivers less and less to the actual people who live here. The American dream is now something only the top twenty percent can afford. And AI is coming for them like the white-collar jobs in much the same way offshoring came for the factory worker, fast and with no serious plan from anyone in power to do a anything about it. We all saw how that went.

None of this happened by accident. And the Democratic Party, as it exists right now, is not ready to fix it. The voters are ready. The ideas are there. The leadership isn’t.

The only way to change that is to change who’s leading the Democratic Party and our nation. Changing who leads this party is harder than it sounds. It is not just money, though the money is real and the numbers from last week's piece make that plain. It is also social.

Most people drawn to politics are genuinely likable people who enjoy being liked. They want to connect, to build relationships, to find common ground. Those are not bad qualities. But what we need right now is something rarer. We need people who can sit across from colleagues they genuinely like, people they think are basically on their side, and tell them that what they are doing is not good enough and that they intend to do something about it. Most people will not do that. The ones who will are the people we are looking for.

I think about Zohran Mamdani a lot when I think about this. He won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City decisively. He has the right agenda and real mandate and 50,000 volunteers who knocked a million doors. He is also spending his political capital trying to get along with Kathy Hochul and protect Hakeem Jeffries from a primary challenge. I understand the instinct. I have watched it up close with AOC. You cannot make yourself small enough or reasonable enough to become acceptable to people whose entire operation depends on things staying basically as they are. The only leverage that works is making them afraid of what happens if they don’t change. Zohran had the people to do that. He took a different route. I wrote about this last August.

The questions we will be asking every candidate we consider supporting aim to answer one question, “Are you ready to take on power?”

A Fight Worth Having is a super PAC. We are going to raise money and spend it in congressional races on behalf of candidates who are ready to do the hard things. We are building what I think of as a filtration process to figure out who those people are.

Here is what we are looking for.

A willingness to challenge Democratic leadership. Not just Republican villains, which costs nothing, but the people inside their own party who are protecting the system. Enemies of change come in two varieties, foreign and domestic, and the domestic ones are harder to fight because you used to think they were on your side.

A willingness to unify. To treat their race as part of something bigger than their district. To stand alongside candidates from other states and other districts around a shared mission and mean it. We have never done this at scale on our side. We are going to try.

A willingness to endorse each other in primaries even when it costs them something personally. To put the agenda above their own political comfort. Most people will not do this either.

A commitment to taking back what has been sold off or stolen. Our hospitals. Our clinics. Our patents. The generational investments built with public money and handed to private interests by paid-off politicians. We want it back.

A serious reckoning with AI. The disruption is coming whether we are ready or not. The question is who owns the productivity on the other side of it. If it is a handful of tech oligarchs, you get a permanent underclass. If it belongs to the public, you get something closer to a country worth living in. We built roads and bridges and power grids as public infrastructure because some things are too important to leave in private hands. AI is that. Instead of stock buybacks for shareholders, we need nation buybacks. We need to buy back the productive capacity of this country and put the ownership where it belongs, with the people.

Those are the filters. We are not going to find many candidates who will clear all of them. That is the point.

The first push two efforts are launching very soon. First we will try to build candidate unity around a big idea. Second, we are getting into a congressional race where there is one clear visionary.

We are building out something bigger around the question of what Democratic leadership should actually look like and whether the people currently providing it are willing to do what is required. When it launches you will know exactly what we are asking and exactly how you can help.

Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and sign up. There are going to be a lot of ways to help, from replying to an email or sharing a post, to showing up at an event, making a donation, or making some noise. We will tell you what we need when we need it and why it matters. Reply to this one and tell me what you think.

Corbin

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A Fight Worth Having

Corbin Trent — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:19:20 GMT

I am launching a PAC called A Fight Worth Having. In this piece I tell you why.

Almost exactly one year ago I wrote one of my first pieces for this Substack. I called it The Right Builds Power and The Left Holds Rallies. I laid out what I saw coming. No coherent vision. No real plan. No financial infrastructure capable of backing candidates at the level they actually need. No super PACs. No capacity for the kind of independent expenditure campaigns that AIPAC runs, that the crypto lobby runs, that corporate PACs run in congressional districts all over this country. I said it was going to bear fruit in losses.

North Carolina. Illinois. Here we are.

Progressive, Nida Allam ran in North Carolina’s 4th Congressional District. She had Bernie Sanders. She had Justice Democrats. She had the Working Families Party. She had a ground game and a message and a story that connected with people in that district in a real way. Outside groups spent more than $4.4 million in that primary. The single biggest spender was Jobs and Democracy PAC, which dropped $1.6 million in ads for the incumbent Valerie Foushee in the final weeks of the race. Jobs and Democracy is the super PAC funded by Anthropic, the AI company. They backed Foushee because she co-chairs the House Democratic Commission on AI. They were buying a friendly regulator. An AIPAC-donor-tied group called Article One PAC threw in another $600,000 for Foushee. The biggest counter-AIPAC group in the country, American Priorities, spent more than $1 million for Allam. One million against two and a half. The two candidates combined raised and spent about $811,000 from actual people who believed in them. The outside groups outspent them by more than five to one. Allam lost by 1,200 votes. She said exactly what it was. “The AI lobby just bought its first seat in Congress.”

Now go to Illinois, where the numbers get worse.

AIPAC and its donors spent $13.7 million across the Illinois primaries, funneled through shadow PACs with names like Elect Chicago Women, Affordable Chicago Now, and Chicago Progressive Partnership, so voters wouldn’t know where the money came from until after it was over. They put $3.9 million behind Melissa Bean in the 8th District, a former Blue Dog who hadn’t held office since 2011, pulled back out of retirement specifically to stop Junaid Ahmed, who was running on Medicare for All and working-class economics and refusing corporate PAC money. It worked. Robert Peters had Bernie Sanders. He had Elizabeth Warren. He’d been a DSA member, a community organizer, a state senator who spent years doing real work on criminal justice and labor rights. The progressive PACs backing him scraped together about $200,000. Affordable Chicago Now dropped nearly $4.4 million for Donna Miller. Peters didn’t crack the top two. You can’t fight $4.4 million with a fundraising email and a Sanders endorsement.

I helped build Justice Democrats. I was in that room. I recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress. I watched what happened after she won and I watched what didn’t get built around it. Individual candidates. No machine. The energy got absorbed into a system designed specifically to absorb it. Nine years later we’re watching the same thing happen to a new set of people who deserved better.

The organizations on our side are trying. The money they put into these races is real and it matters and the people running them are genuine. But the entire progressive funding ecosystem combined could not match what one lobby spent in one state on one day. That’s not a criticism of the people doing the work. That’s a structural problem. And the structure doesn’t get fixed by writing bigger checks alone.

Nobody on our side is running a unified slate. Nobody is putting a group of candidates on a stage together around a mission bigger than any one of them. We campaign on Medicare for All and the Green New Deal and a living wage and those are good things worth fighting for. But they’re policies. They’re not a vision. And a vision is what builds a movement big enough to actually scare the people writing those checks.

The groups spending that money against us are single issue. AIPAC needs compliant foreign policy votes. The crypto lobby needs light regulation. The AI companies need friendly committee chairs. That’s it. Their asks are narrow and their money is deep and they have decades of institutional momentum behind them. They’re not fighting against anything. They’re protecting something they already have.

Brand New Congress tried to build a united front. Justice Democrats tried. AOC and the Squad moved the conversation in ways that genuinely scared people with power, and the amount of money spent to destroy individual members of that group tells you everything about how seriously they were taken. So many people have tried, and tried hard, with real sacrifice.

But we have never been able to get candidates to fully understand that their race is only as important as the races around it. That a seat you win in isolation doesn’t shift power. That the person running in Memphis and the person running in Sacramento and the person running in a Chicago suburb are either winning together around a common purpose or they’re each losing alone. Mostly they’re losing. Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois was on everyone’s radar because the race got nationalized. People knew her name, knew what she stood for, knew the money being spent to stop her. Nida Allam almost nobody knew about. I was on Jake Tapper’s show the day of the North Carolina primary talking about Texas races and mentioned her by name and he had never heard of it. No polling was showing how close she was. No one was sounding an alarm. She nearly beat an incumbent with $4.4 million in outside money working against her and it barely registered as news until she’d already lost by 1,200 votes. A united slate of candidates talking about each other, lifting each other up, pointing to the same map and the same mission — Allam’s race gets nationalized. It gets resourced. It gets watched. Those 1,200 votes don’t disappear without a fight.

And when someone does eke through and win, they walk in alone anyway. No unified mission behind them. No machine capable of making the mission real. So they take the small wins and learn to call that progress. They compromise on the things they ran on because the things they ran on require a power they don’t have by themselves. The system doesn’t have to beat you in the primary. It can wait.

People keep telling us progressive policies can’t win. That the vision for a better country is fairy dust. And I keep coming back to one question. If it’s all fairy dust, why are they spending $13.7 million in a single state on a single primary day to stop it?

Either the people writing those checks are the dumbest political operatives in the history of American democracy, or they are terrified of what happens when candidates who actually give a damn about this country get their hands on power. I don’t think they’re dumb.

We don’t need to aim at a bigger version of the same small ideas. A national insurance program and a living wage are the floor, not the ceiling. We should be setting our sights on being the best country in the world at the things that actually matter to people who live here. Not the most expensive healthcare system. The healthiest people. The cleanest food. The cleanest air and water. The best schools. The most innovative and cleanest manufacturing. An economy that builds things the world needs and doesn’t poison the people who live next door to the plant in the process.

We have been choosing wrong for seventy years because we handed all of that to the private sector and told ourselves the market would work it out. What the market worked out is how to move all the money to the top and hire better consultants every decade to explain why that’s good for you. What they built is the most expensive healthcare system in the world that leaves tens of millions of people one diagnosis away from losing everything. Infrastructure that embarrasses us in front of every other wealthy country on earth. Schools falling apart. A manufacturing base that got shipped overseas the minute it was more profitable somewhere else.

It doesn’t bother them. They don’t care how hard it is to make rent. They don’t care how many people can’t afford to get sick. They don’t care who makes the products that keep this world running or what those people breathe while they’re making them. And the same apparatus that buys a committee chair buys a foreign policy. They don’t care about Gaza. They don’t care about Iran. We are at war with Iran right now and they are fine with it. They want control. Their appetite for what belongs to the rest of us is not going to shrink because we asked nicely or compromised in good faith or wrote a good op-ed about shared values.

All the money we keep pouring into bombs could be building schools. Here and in the countries we keep blowing up. We don’t have to spend the next five years watching the headlines and wondering when the shooting starts with China. We could be competing with them to see who builds a better life for their people. That’s a competition worth having. Dropping bombs and blowing up children is not a foreign policy. It’s a moral failure we keep funding and calling strategy.

Taking back what belongs to all of us is the only path forward. Not a progressive wing of a party still organized around the interests of the people writing those checks. A real fight. The kind where you know who you’re fighting, you say it out loud, and you build something big enough to win.

What I want to build is an organization funded well enough and loud enough and bold enough that candidates come to it. Running for Congress is not a job. It’s three jobs. The candidate and everyone around them are already running at full speed just trying to win. If we’re chasing them down to sell them on a bigger mission, we’ve already lost them. They don’t have time to be convinced. The only way this works is if we build something so compelling, so well funded, so full of possibility that they find us. We have to send up a bonfire big enough that they walk toward the light on their own.

And I think we can. Not because of messaging or branding or any of that consultant nonsense. Because the ideas are real and the need is urgent and people know it. Claiming our healthcare system back from the insurance companies and the hospital conglomerates. Shared ownership in our manufacturing base so that when this country builds things, the people of this country benefit from it. A serious reckoning with what artificial intelligence is about to do to every working person in this country and every democracy on this planet. AI has the potential to be as disruptive and as dangerous as nuclear weapons or the Industrial Revolution. It cannot be left in the hands of a handful of oligarchs racing to become the world’s first trillionaires. It has to be owned and governed by the people it is going to affect. That’s all of us.

A mission that big needs real support. It needs money and it needs people and it needs candidates who understand that their race in their district only matters if the person running three states over wins too. That we are building something together or we are losing alone. That has always been true. We just haven’t built the thing yet that makes candidates believe it enough to run that way.

That’s what I’m trying to build with A Fight Worth Having. The numbers in this piece are designed to make you feel small. They’re supposed to end the conversation before it starts. But they only do that if we stay separate.

Sign up. Share this piece. Forward it to someone who needs to see it. There will be candidates coming, people worth fighting for, running on the things you’ve been waiting to see someone run on. When they show up here you’ll know it, and there’ll be ways to help that go beyond reading and sharing. I will not use your email like an ATM. Every message will have something worth reading in it first. That’s a promise I intend to keep.

We will need money too. A lot of it. I’m not going to pretend otherwise after a piece that lays out exactly what we’re up against. But the machine gets built one person at a time, and it starts with you deciding this fight is worth having.

If you’re reading this and you feel what I feel when I look at these numbers and these results and this country, then you’re already part of it. Let’s build the machine.

Corbin Trent

The Moderation Trap

Corbin Trent — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:27:48 GMT

Matthew Yglesias has a theory about why Democrats keep losing, and the New York Times editorial board is happy to amplify it. The party is too progressive, too ideologically rigid, and if candidates would just moderate on a handful of cultural issues, the working-class voters they’ve lost would come back. It sounds reasonable. It has charts. It cites academic survey experiments.

It is also dangerously wrong. And the people most harmed by that misdiagnosis are exactly the ones Yglesias and the Times claim to be trying to help.

Both pieces treat Donald Trump’s victories as evidence that moderation works, pointing to positions he walked back on Medicare cuts, the Iraq War, opposition to gay and lesbian soldiers serving openly. That reading fundamentally misunderstands what Trump did. He didn’t win by meeting working-class voters halfway on policy details. He won by going to war with the institutions those voters blamed for their decline. Both parties, the media, the donor class, the trade deals that gutted manufacturing, the consensus that had governed Washington for thirty years. None of that is moderation. That is a frontal assault on the status quo. What he quietly dropped were the positions that most obviously signaled he was working for the same donor class as everyone else.

The moderation crowd calls this “angry centrism.” I’d call it a con that worked, because it addressed a real grievance.

The deeper problem is the narrowness of their imagination. They talk constantly about supermajorities and winning back the center, but never look at what actually produced supermajorities. Yglesias has written that if AI advances on the current timeline, “America is cooked.” That fatalism is revealing. It means the moderation argument isn’t really about how to win. It’s about how to lose more slowly while keeping the existing economic architecture intact. And it explains why none of the positions they’re recommending are remotely big enough to address what’s actually wrong. Moderating on affirmative action while accepting permanently unaffordable healthcare and housing as facts of nature is not a governing vision. It is a smaller version of the same failure that created this crisis in the first place.

The New Deal built the Hoover Dam and the water projects that made California farmable. It strung electrical wire across the rural Midwest, bringing power to millions of farms private utilities had deemed unprofitable. The WPA hired 8.5 million Americans directly. The minimum wage and the 40-hour work week were established. These weren’t poll-tested adjustments to existing private systems. They were structural transformations that changed people’s lives, and the coalitions they built lasted for decades because people could feel the difference. That is what a supermajority looks like. The moderation crowd invokes those majorities without ever asking what built them.

The Times holds up Obama as a model of winning moderation. I can speak to that from personal experience. Al Gore was my first election. I was twenty years old. I didn’t vote again for eight years, until Obama ran. He didn’t just inspire me to vote. I drove to Asheville to see him speak. I raised money for him from family members. I had a watch party on election night. I was genuinely all in, because I believed he was ready to take down a system that had been crushing my region for decades, to rebuild a Democratic Party more like FDR’s or LBJ’s than Bill Clinton’s.

I didn’t vote again for seven years, until Bernie Sanders came along in 2015. And Bernie didn’t just inspire me to vote either. I sold my business and started volunteering for the campaign until I got enough attention that I was hired onto it.

In my life I have voted four times: Al Gore, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders twice. Every single one of those votes required someone to genuinely inspire me, to make me believe they were ready to actually fight the system rather than manage it. I told that to Michele Goldberg, a columnist at the New York Times, when I was in New York recently and she was mortified. Just mortified that I’d only voted four times. That reaction tells you everything about the gap this piece is trying to describe. The question she didn’t ask was why. The question she didn’t ask was what it would take. The question she didn’t ask was what kind of candidate or party could turn someone like me into the person who sold his business and gave everything he had to a political campaign.

That’s the voter the moderation crowd doesn’t have a theory of. They have a theory of the persuadable suburban moderate who needs to feel comfortable crossing over. They have no theory of the tens of millions of people who have checked out entirely, who will move mountains for the right candidate and stay home for everyone else. Those people aren’t waiting for a Democrat who’s tougher on the border. They’re waiting for someone who’s ready to actually fight.

Despite all the noise about Obama being a radical socialist, he barely underperformed Clinton in Tennessee. Democrats held five state legislative seats there right through his election. What caused the collapse, the wipeout of 2010 and everything after, wasn’t his presence on the ticket. It was his moderation once in office. A month before the 2008 election was even decided, a Citigroup executive had already emailed John Podesta a near-complete list of Obama’s future cabinet, and it came true almost entirely. Obama nominated people suggested by Citibank and listened to them.That a Citigroup executive could pre-select a cabinet before a single vote was cast tells you everything about how the system filters candidates before they ever reach voters. He passed Romneycare instead of a public option. He managed the existing system rather than challenging it. Working-class communities across Tennessee, West Virginia, and the Rust Belt noticed. Not because he was insufficiently tough on transgender issues. Because the help that was supposed to come never came.

The Working Class Project, 39 focus groups, 400 voters, 21 states, found that voters perceive Democrats as “too focused on social issues and not nearly focused enough on the economic issues that impact everyone, every day.” Yglesias reads that and concludes: less woke. Stop talking about trans people. Find a candidate who sounds more like a regular guy.

That is exactly the wrong lesson.

What those voters are describing is not an excess of cultural liberalism. They’re describing a party that spent thirty years presiding over the destruction of their economic lives and filled the void with culture war positioning because it had nothing real to offer on the things that actually determined whether their lives got better or worse. The frustration isn’t that Democrats cared too much about gay marriage. It’s that caring about gay marriage seemed to be all they had energy for, because actually challenging the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance industry, the trade deals, the financial sector, the whole architecture of extraction would have cost them something. Culture is cheap. Structural economic change is not.

As a white working-class man from Appalachia, it was not wokeness that drove me away from the Democratic Party. It was not gay marriage. It was not the idea that trans people have a right to exist. What drove me away was watching a party that claimed to represent working people become indistinguishable, on the things that actually mattered to my region, from the Republicans they were supposed to be fighting. The uniparty of war and free markets and neoliberal consensus that shipped our jobs, let our towns rot, looked the other way while the Sacklers poisoned our communities, and then showed up every four years to tell us the market would eventually sort things out.

My neighbors who vote Trump talk about wokeness because that’s what they see on Fox News. But what drove them there is a feeling of being completely disposable. Of being abandoned by a party that viewed their economic suffering as a lifestyle choice rather than a structural condition. That’s what the Working Class Project is actually measuring. Not a cultural preference. A betrayal.

The multiracial numbers confirm it. Latino working-class men went from 22% Trump support in 2020 to 55% in 2024. Black working-class men went from 17% to 22%. If this were a story about wokeness driving people away, you would not see those numbers. You would not see a multiracial working-class coalition moving in the same direction at the same time. What you see is a class-based revolt against a party that stopped fighting for the people who needed it most.

Yglesias has written that the affordability crisis is “basically just anger at inflation” and that there “isn’t really that much” to it beyond technocratic management of interest rates. He has argued that wanting prices to actually come down is promising something impossible, that the old price level is simply gone. In other words, affordability cannot be reclaimed and there is no structural solution. That is not political analysis. That is a surrender document dressed up as realism. And it is precisely why the moderate positions being recommended will make things worse, not better. Every election cycle that passes without a real answer to what healthcare costs, what housing costs, what it costs to raise a family, is another cycle where people conclude that no one in the existing political system is actually on their side. Moderation doesn’t cure that resentment. It confirms it.

The United States spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024, $15,474 per person, roughly double the OECD average, and ranks last among wealthy nations in outcomes. 79 million Americans carry medical debt, 80% of them insured. 146 rural hospitals have closed since 2005. Public healthcare ownership in this country peaked in 1983. Cities, towns, and the federal government once owned a substantial share of healthcare delivery, not just insurance coverage. That is nowhere in the Yglesias prescription. The answer is always more subsidy, more guardrails, more money poured into the same broken private system. If that approach could fix American healthcare, $5.3 trillion a year would have already done it.

The claim that bold structural policy is unpopular doesn’t survive contact with reality. Most Americans say government has a responsibility to ensure health care, 90% of Dems and 41% of Republicans. A wealth tax polls at 74%. There is no gap between voters and bold policy. There is a gap between voters and a political class unwilling to champion it.

The real risk here isn’t ideological. It’s strategic. If the Democratic Party absorbs the Yglesias prescription and shifts right on culture while leaving the economic architecture of extraction untouched, it will have done nothing to address the conditions that made Trump possible. It will have produced a cleaner-looking version of the same failure. And eventually that produces something worse than Trump: a better fascist. A more capable leader who can articulate a genuine structural vision without the chaos and the corruption. Someone who names the same enemies Trump named but actually means it, and has the discipline to follow through.

The Working Class Project asked voters in 21 states what they wanted. The answer was direct: “Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge we need big, bold, aggressive changes, across the board.” That is not a progressive slogan. That is the median working-class voter, speaking for themselves.

The question is whether anyone in the party is willing to listen, or whether they’ll keep taking their cues from people who have never once had to.

Corbin Trent

The War We’re Not Fighting

Corbin Trent — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:28:47 GMT

This president and too many in the Democratic Party just decided to go to war with Iran. They decided it was worth the risk of a regional war and American deaths because they cannot imagine any other way to remain relevant on the global stage. They can’t picture an America that competes through what it builds. They can only picture one that competes through what it destroys.

We didn’t go to war because we had to. We went to war because it’s the only thing we know how to do anymore.

And it’s not just me saying that. The Washington Times reported that China experts are calling the Iran strikes “an operational component of a grand strategy to contain China.” The Atlantic Council said any analysis of this war that ignores the great-power competition underlying it “is either incomplete or a deliberate red herring.” First Venezuela, now Iran. Both countries that sell oil to China. Both countries whose leaders we removed in the span of two months. The pattern is not subtle.

The Carnegie Endowment pointed out that China’s entire strategy for competing with the United States has been to lean into economics, technology, construction, and training. Not military alliances. Not bombs. They build roads, ports, rail networks, energy systems. They invest in other countries’ infrastructure. They compete by making things. We compete by breaking things. And we’ve spent decades proving it.

We can’t build a subway line in under twenty years. We can’t make insulin affordable. We can’t keep a hospital open in a rural county. We can’t build housing fast enough to keep families off the street. But we can flatten a city on the other side of the world in a weekend. We’re really good at that part. We’ve had a lot of practice.

The United States of America in 2026 is a country that has completely lost the ability to build, to produce, to create, to maintain the systems that keep a society alive. And because we can’t do any of that, because we’ve emptied ourselves out so completely that the only functional institution left is the military, war is the only card we have to play. We can’t compete economically so we compete with bombs. We can’t build our way to relevance so we bomb our competition or their allies. We can’t imagine a future where American power comes from what we make and what we offer the world so instead we make sure the world is afraid of us.

That’s what the Iran war is. It’s not about nuclear weapons. It’s not about defending Israel. It’s not about democracy or human rights or any of the words they use to dress it up. It’s about a country that has nothing left to offer except force. A country that has strip-mined its own middle class, gutted its own infrastructure, sold off its own public goods, and has only war left as a way to continued relevance. There are alternatives but thry require doing the hard work of actually rebuilding. And nobody in charge, in either party, can imagine doing that work.

I wrote Tuesday about why Democrats can’t oppose this war. The short version is they agree with it. But the deeper version is this. They can’t oppose the war because they can’t articulate what we’d do instead. They have no vision for an America that doesn’t need to project military force everywhere all the time to remain a global power. They have no plan for rebuilding the domestic economy in a way that would make the war machine unnecessary. They’re stuck in the same trap as the Republicans. The only difference is they feel bad about it.

For fifty years, both parties have agreed on the big things. Hand economic power to Wall Street. Let corporations run the show. Shrink the government until it can’t do anything except write checks to defense contractors and bail out banks. They told us markets would solve everything. That prosperity would trickle down. That if we just got out of the way, corporations would build the future for us.

That experiment failed. And we’re living in the wreckage.

Since 1970, median income has gone up about 911 percent. Sounds great until you look at what happened to everything you need to buy with it. Housing prices jumped nearly 1,700 percent. Rent went up more than 1,200 percent. A public college degree that used to cost around $1,500 now runs nearly $40,000. That’s a 2,400 percent increase. And healthcare exploded by more than 4,000 percent.

People aren’t mad about eggs. They’re mad because the entire economy has been reengineered to make them work harder and get less. A society that once promised stability and upward mobility now demands more and gives back less. And when people look around for someone to blame, the only answer they’re offered is immigrants, or China, or Iran. Never the people who actually did this to them. Never the system itself.

This is why Trump won twice. Not because he had better ideas. Not because of trans people or immigrants. Because he was willing to say the system is broken. Democrats still won’t say that. They still think the system is basically fine, it just needs better management. A few more guardrails. A tax credit here, a job training program there. They cannot bring themselves to admit that the thing they’ve been building for half a century doesn’t work. That it was never going to work. That handing the entire economy to the private sector was always going to end with a country that can’t do anything except make war.

Because that’s where we are. We can’t build. We’ve forgotten how.

We built the Hoover Dam in five years. The Interstate Highway System, 41,000 miles, in thirty five years. The TVA electrified an entire region of the country that the private sector had written off. We created public universities that cost a few weeks of wages. We built Medicare in eleven months. We sent people to the moon in less than a decade.

Now it takes fourteen years to rebuild a single rail tunnel under the Hudson River, at a cost of $16 billion. California’s been working on high speed rail for over fifteen years, it’s billions over budget, and it’s still not done. China built 22,000 miles of high speed rail in fifteen years. We can’t build a system because we no longer believe we should have one. And while we pour resources into flattening Iran, Chatham House reports that Beijing sees our overextension in the Gulf as serving their interests. Every dollar we spend managing a war in the Middle East is a dollar we don’t spend competing with China where it actually matters. They know this. They’re counting on it.

And that’s not an accident. That’s the result of decades of deliberate sabotage. We replaced civil servants with contractors. We cut training. We inserted layers of consultants who bill by the hour and have no incentive to ever finish anything. We deliberately broke the machine and then pointed at the wreckage and said: see, government doesn’t work. It was a setup. And both parties were in on it.

The fear of being called a communist for simply wanting government to compete with corporations has paralyzed the Democratic Party since McCarthy. They’d rather be ineffective than risk sounding like they’re challenging capitalism. But this fear cost them the very ideology that made them dominant for decades under FDR. The belief that government should be a builder. Not a regulator. Not a banker. A builder.

Corporations exist to maximize profit. That’s what they do. That’s all they do. They are not designed to address national challenges or secure a prosperous future for citizens. That’s what government is for. When we delegated those responsibilities to the private sector in the seventies and eighties, we guaranteed the decline we’re living through right now. And we guaranteed that when the decline got bad enough, the only response we’d have left is the one we’re watching play out in Iran.

Bombs instead of bridges. Missiles instead of medicine. A nearly $1 trillion defense budget and a country that can’t keep its own people alive.

The right is selling nostalgia. Make America Great Again. But they don’t want to build anything either. They want to strip what’s left and hand it to their friends. The left, or what passes for it, is selling fear. Save democracy. But if the democracy you’re saving doesn’t build housing, doesn’t provide healthcare, doesn’t educate kids without bankrupting their parents, doesn’t keep the lights on, then what are you actually saving?

I grew up in Appalachia. My grandfather went from sharecropping to owning a forty acre farm in a single generation. That wasn’t grit. That was an America that built things. That created systems that let working people rise. That believed the government had a role in making sure the economy worked for everyone, not just the people at the top. That America is gone. And it didn’t die of natural causes. It was killed. Exposed to a very slow acting poison administered by both parties over fifty years until the patient was too weak to do anything except reach for a gun.

That’s the war we’re not fighting. Not the one in Iran. The one here. The fight to rebuild the capacity of this country to actually do things. To build housing. To make medicine. To educate people. To maintain roads and bridges and rail and broadband. To compete on the global stage through what we create instead of what we destroy.

Every dollar we spend bombing Iran is a dollar we don’t spend rebuilding Ohio or West Virginia or the Bronx. Every young person we send to the Middle East is someone who could be building high speed rail or manufacturing solar panels or staffing a public hospital. Every year we spend managing a war is a year we don’t spend fixing the thing that made the war inevitable in the first place.

But we won’t get it from the people currently in charge. Not from Trump, who wants to own the wreckage. Not from Democratic leadership, who want to manage it.

There is no law of man or God that says we have to bomb our way to a better world. That death and destruction are the best paths to comfort and security. We can marshal our resources just as easily for peace as we can for war. We can build comfort and safety without missiles. And in fact I think the two paths are not compatible. Our search for security through destruction is misguided and it ends poorly, not just for us but for the billions of other humans with whom we share this planet. Every bomb we drop is a confession that we’ve run out of ideas.

But some people haven’t run out of ideas. Saikat Chakrabarti, who co-founded Justice Democrats and helped launch the Green New Deal, is running for Congress right now on exactly this vision. His organization New Consensus built something called the Mission for America, a detailed plan to put this country back into building mode. Not a slogan. Not a talking point. An actual blueprint for how government rebuilds industries, creates jobs, and competes on the global stage through what we make instead of what we destroy. It’s modeled on what FDR did, not just during the New Deal but during the war mobilization that built the most productive economy the world had ever seen. Chakrabarti’s argument is simple. FDR didn’t defeat authoritarianism with slogans. He built a society that worked so well it made authoritarianism unnecessary. That’s the kind of leadership the Democratic Party needs. Yesterday. The sooner people like him are in power, the sooner we stop reaching for bombs when we should be reaching for blueprints.

That’s a fight worth having.

Corbin Trent

Why is the resistance failing to resist?

Corbin Trent — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:11:22 GMT

For years, Democrats have had one message. Trump is bad. He’s a criminal. He’s a fascist. He’s a threat to democracy. He’s breaking everything.

And yet he keeps winning. He keeps consolidating power. He keeps getting stronger. We are less than a year and a half into this administration and he has already started an illegal war with Iran, backed a genocide in Gaza that has killed over 70,000 Palestinians, kidnapped the president of Venezuela, and called for regime change in a sovereign nation on live television. Death and destruction is our primary export right now and it’s a bipartisan product.

Every time Democrats lose another fight, they act confused about it. I’m not confused. I’m paying attention.

This is where the American people need resistance. War. Regime change. Bombing a country we were actively negotiating with. Killing a head of state and over a hundred school children in the same weekend. And Democratic leadership isn’t just failing to resist. They’re actively working to make sure nobody else does either.

When Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna put forward a war powers resolution to stop Trump’s war with Iran, Democratic leadership didn’t whip votes for it. Hakeem Jeffries didn’t rally the caucus. Instead, Democrats like Josh Gottheimer and Jared Moskowitz came out against it. Moskowitz called it the “Ayatollah Protection Act.” Gottheimer said it would “restrict the flexibility needed” to respond to threats. These are Democrats. Arguing that the president should have a free hand to bomb whoever he wants whenever he wants.

As I told Salon before the bombs even started falling, the Democratic Party that exists now in Congress is very much a party that’s aligned with the war machine, and has been for decades. The core, the corporate Democratic Party, which is the one that’s in charge right now, has been fully in lockstep with the Republican Party on this. That’s one of the places where these two parties have been merged for quite some time.

And it’s not just me saying it. A senior Democratic staffer told reporter Aída Chávez that “leadership rarely comes out and says they oppose these votes outright, because they know the underlying issue is popular with the base. Instead, you see process concerns, timing objections, and caucus-unity arguments used to slow things down or keep members off the record.” That’s the game. They support the war. They just don’t want their fingerprints on it. Saikat Chakrabarti, who co-founded the Justice Democrats, pointed out that members learned from Iraq that it was better for their political futures to cede their constitutional power to the president than to take a vote on a war they support. The support for Iraq cost Hillary Clinton an election. It cost Jeb Bush an election. So now they’d rather make no choice at all.

Ro Khanna, one of the few Democrats actually trying to stop this, said the quiet part out loud. He said the Democrats trying to kill the bill are beholden to “powerful interests that are itching to have regime change in Iran.” He named AIPAC specifically. Chakrabarti pointed to the 149 Democrats who voted for the current defense budget as a proxy for the members of the party who likely support a war with Iran. One hundred and forty nine.

Capitol Hill sources went even further. They told Drop Site News that a substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But they also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump. Win-win for Democrats.

Dem insiders were rooting for a war that 76% of Democratic voters oppose because they like the policy and thought it would be good politics. Only 9% of Democrats support military force against Iran. Nine percent. And our leaders are sabotaging the effort to stop it.

And it’s not just a few rogues. As Adam Johnson reported, House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats were working behind the scenes to prevent a vote on the Khanna-Massie resolution even before the bombs started falling. And the New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards, which have weighed in on every major military action in the past fifty years, stayed silent in the weeks leading up to the strikes. They mostly agree that attacking Iran is a good thing and they want Trump to do it, but they know saying that out loud would be toxic. So what we got was a consensus of silence.

Meanwhile John Fetterman goes on Fox News and calls the war powers resolution “an empty gesture” and says the strikes were “right and necessary” and asks God to bless the United States, our military, and Israel. And nobody in leadership kicks him out of the caucus because he’s not actually breaking with them. He’s just saying what a lot of them think.

Look at Jeffries’ actual words after the strikes. He said Iran “must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies.” His only problem is that Trump didn’t fill out the right paperwork first. That’s not opposition. That’s proofreading.

They aren’t interested in stopping the killing. They aren’t interested in the hard work of rebuilding our self sufficiency or our ability to make a living. They aren’t interested in the deep systemic change that propelled Trump to power in the first place. But they love his foreign policy. Some of them love it more than Netanyahu does, and Netanyahu went on television and said this is what he has yearned to do for forty years.

And now Axios reports that Senate Democrats already expect to lose the war powers vote this week. They know it’s symbolic. They’re already pivoting to the “real” fight over war funding. Which means they’ve already accepted the war. They’ve moved on to managing it.

And it’s not just the war. That’s the thing. The war and the economics are the same disease.

Trump broke from the old playbook on economics in ways Democrats can’t. Not because he’s smarter. Because he doesn’t believe in the system the way they do. He looked at forty years of neoliberal economics, at globalization, at free trade, at the idea that the market knows best, and he said out loud what half the country was already thinking. This doesn’t work. It’s broken. The whole thing is rigged.

He was lying. He doesn’t want to fix it. He wants to own it. He wants to be the one doing the rigging. But he named the problem, and that’s more than Democrats have ever been willing to do.

Because Democrats still believe in this system. I laid this out a year ago and nothing has changed. They believe in free markets, globalization, and privatization the way you believe in a religion. Both parties pushed NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, and every other trade deal that gutted American industry. Since Carter and Clinton, Democrats have been handing off the New Deal state to the private sector. They treat billionaires the way a parish priest treats the guy who donated the new wing of the church. You can’t really go after him. He paid for the building.

This is why they can’t resist Trump in any meaningful way. They don’t want to. They want to resist the chaos, the tweets, the ugliness. But the underlying project of handing this country over to the private sector? That’s not a Trump project. That’s a forty year bipartisan project. Democrats helped build every mile of that road. Their objection is never to the destination. It’s to the driving.

And why would they oppose any of it? This is the same party that built the case for Iraq, gave Bush carte blanche to spy on every American through the Patriot Act, expanded drone warfare under Obama, prosecuted more whistleblowers than every previous administration combined, and treats the Pentagon budget like sacred text. Democrats believe in the security state the same way they believe in the economic system. With the faith of true believers.

They believe in might makes right. They just want the might deployed with better PR.

And that’s the connection people miss. The economics and the war machine aren’t separate things. They’re the same thing. You believe the market should run everything, and when some country doesn’t want to play by your market rules, you bomb them. You believe corporations should control the global economy, and when someone threatens that control, you call it a threat to national security. You say the word evil as a precursor to doing evil. You’ve been doing it for a century. In Iran. In Iraq. In Libya. In Vietnam. In Guatemala. In Chile. Anywhere the local population decides they’d rather own their own resources than let American corporations extract them.

Democrats aren’t against this. They’re for it. They just want it done through institutions. Through the IMF, the World Bank, through trade agreements that look voluntary but aren’t. Through the kind of coercion that wears a suit and carries a briefcase instead of a rifle. When the suit doesn’t work, they reach for the rifle too. Ask Libya about that.

A few voices in the party actually get it. AOC called the Iran strikes unlawful, unnecessary, and catastrophic. Rashida Tlaib said warmongering politicians from both parties support this war. Zohran Mamdani connected it to what people actually care about. The cost of living, the demand for peace, the basic expectation that government should work for them instead of for Lockheed Martin. Ro Khanna is putting his neck on the line trying to force a vote that his own party’s leadership is working to undermine. Anti-war candidates are challenging incumbents in primaries this week, running ads about dead school children while AIPAC funnels money through PACs linked to Jeffries to protect the incumbents who won’t oppose the war.

But leadership? Leadership is talking about briefings and process and War Powers resolutions they know won’t survive a veto, when they’re not actively sabotaging the resolutions themselves. It’s 2003 all over again. Democrats who privately think this war is insane but won’t say it because they’re afraid of the attack ad. Afraid of looking weak. Afraid of AIPAC funding their primary opponent. Afraid of being called the “Ayatollah Protection Act” by members of their own caucus.

So they’ll do what they always do. Quibble about procedure. Demand oversight. Fund the war anyway.

And this is why “save democracy” never lands as a message. People already know democracy is broken. They live in a country where their government doesn’t reflect their will. When Democrats scream “Trump is destroying democracy” the honest response from most Americans is what democracy? The one where my town lost its hospital and its factory in the same decade and nobody in Washington noticed? You can’t save something people don’t believe they have.

American soldiers are dead in Kuwait right now. Iranian children are dead in their classrooms. Oil prices are spiking. Airports are closing. The entire global economy is teetering. All because a foreign leader who spent forty years lobbying for this moment finally found a president willing to give it to him. And the loyal opposition, the party that’s supposed to represent an alternative? Only 7% of their own voters support this war and they can’t even bring themselves to oppose it.

The consensus held through Bush. It held through Obama. It held through Trump’s first term. It held through Biden.

And it’s holding right now.

Corbin Trent

The Uses of Evil: The Choice of War.

Corbin Trent — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:21:44 GMT

I hear the word evil thrown about a lot. It gets used like it settles an argument. It’s not new. We’ve been calling people and countries and ideas evil for quite some time. The Soviet Union was evil. Communism was evil. Saddam was evil. Gaddafi was evil. Castro was evil. The Ayatollahs are evil. And, of course, Iran is evil. That’s supposed to be the end of the conversation.

It seems to me that the word evil is really just a precursor, an excuse we use as justification for evil actions of our own. We name the evil out there so we don’t see it in ourselves. That’s exactly what is happening with this immoral and illegal war against Iran and the assassination of their leadership, which is also illegal. All this is justified because after all, they were evil.

Already hundreds of Iranians and 3 US servicemembers are dead. We killed the Supreme Leader. We killed his family. We killed his top military officials. We killed over 200 people, including 118 students at a girls’ school. Because Trump and Netanyahu chose to go to war with Iran. A sovereign nation. The pretense was nuclear weapons, but negotiations were actively happening. Iranian diplomats were in Switzerland agreeing to never stockpile enriched uranium. We did this without a vote in Congress. Without a declaration of war. Without an imminent threat.

I don’t want to go on a deep rant about the history of the Middle East and the West and the British Empire in that region. But we need to look at Iran because it tells you everything about the pattern.

Iran has been trying to become a democracy for over a hundred years. They had a Constitutional Revolution in 1906. They fought for self-governance through two World Wars. And in 1951 they elected a prime minister named Mohammad Mossadegh. Wildly popular. He moved that country forward. Created things like social security and other social safety nets. Expanded workers’ rights. And to fund it he nationalized their greatest resource, their oil. Oil that had been controlled by the British through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. We know them today as BP.

Same story you can hear in Venezuela. Same story in Saudi Arabia. Same story in Iraq, in Kuwait, across the Middle East really. Anywhere oil was found, that oil meant your people didn’t matter.

So MI6 and the CIA worked diligently to overturn this prime minister and install the Shah of Iran. Who was, you couldn’t have guessed it, a brutal dictator. He tortured. He maimed. He created a secret police force called SAVAK that went around silencing political dissidents. He suppressed religious identity and religious practices. He suppressed so many freedoms. And he did all of this with American weapons, American money, and American approval for 26 years.

When the revolution came in 1979 we acted shocked. We called them evil. But we made them. Not their theology. That’s theirs. But the rage and the resentment and the turn toward fundamentalism as an identity against Western domination? We helped build every brick of that.

If that sounds familiar it’s because it is. It’s the reality of America that Trump was describing in his campaigns. The reality that resonated so broadly and so deeply. The shithole America. The elites screwing you over. That’s what happened in Iran. It’s just a different country with a different religion. But it’s the same tool the ruling elite have been using for centuries. Same thing that happens in West Virginia. In the Coal Belt. In steel mill towns of yore. They install leadership. They extract your resources. They take your money. They take your things. They take your opportunity. And it leads to a real breakdown.

Think about drug addiction in Appalachia. The crime. The generational illness of opportunity. Then put that on the Middle East. Much like Appalachia, these folks turn to their religion for solace. For comfort. And often, like in the US with the right wing, they’re radicalized. The source of that rage comes from injustice. From a casual disregard for humanity. The mechanics are the same whether you’re in eastern Kentucky or Tehran. Install your people. Extract the resources. Discard the population. When they react, call them the problem.

So America. We recently decided the system isn’t working. That the cost of living had gotten too much. That the elites decided they could take too much. That they could be relatively open with their desire to take our resources, take our money, and even be relatively open pedophiles. Groceries are up 26% since the pandemic. Ground beef is up 17% in just the last year. Coffee up almost 19%. Daycare costs up nearly 40%. Seven out of ten Americans say raising a child is unaffordable. Credit card debt has hit $1.2 trillion. People are drowning. We decided this was too much.

That was the mandate. Fix this. Make life affordable. That’s what people voted for. And instead of fixing any of it, instead of lowering a single grocery bill or building a single thing, we went right back to murdering and killing and assassinating and warring. A war with Iran. A military seizure of Venezuela’s president. ICE agents shooting American citizens in Minneapolis. 73,000 people in immigration detention, the highest ever. A $170 billion enforcement machine being built across the country. None of which puts food on anyone’s table or lowers anyone’s rent. People voted to fix a broken system and got another war instead.

Donald Trump won twice telling Americans their country was broken. That was the whole pitch. America is on the wrong path. The system is rigged. The elites have taken everything. Your towns are hollowed out. Your jobs are gone. Your kids can’t afford to live. It worked because it was largely true.

But once the bombs drop, once wars start, you’re either on our side or the other. That honesty about your country isn’t allowed anymore. If you say the same things that got Trump elected, you’re not a patriot anymore. You’re a traitor. You have to support the mission now.

It’s very hard for people to understand that being on the side of America means being against these wars. Being against this way of behaving. Being for a new way of being America, both at home and abroad. I can say that this illegal war where we’re killing schoolchildren is something I absolutely oppose as an American and I think it’s patriotic as hell to say so. But if I say that, I’m the bad guy. Same people who ran on “America is a disaster” now need you to stand and cheer for the disaster they’re creating.

Either Americans have the right to demand better from their government or they don’t. That right doesn’t go away because somebody decided to start bombing another country.

I racked my brain to understand why we’d be doing this now. A lot of times you hear “it’s complicated.” I think that’s used to put a veil over things that aren’t particularly complicated. It’s only complicated because there are so many different groups that want to invade and destabilize Iran for their own reasons. But the big picture isn’t hard to see.

Follow the oil.

China gets half its crude imports through the Strait of Hormuz. China buys over 80% of Iran’s oil exports. Venezuela, whose president we helicoptered out and kidnapped in January, holds the largest proven oil reserves on earth and was another major supplier to China. We’ve put a boot on the throat of China’s energy supply right at the moment they’re trying to become the world’s dominant industrial power.

China isn’t just making cheap stuff anymore. They’re building fully automated factories that run with no workers and no lights. They call them dark factories. They installed more industrial robots in a single year than the rest of the world combined. Producing a smartphone every second in plants run by AI. Building the machine tools of the future. The robotics. The renewable energy. The advanced manufacturing. They’re embarking on a generational transformation.

They’re working to get off foreign oil entirely. Working to turn coal into liquid to make carbon fiber and other materials. Going all in on solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal. Not just because they want to save the planet, though it may have something to do with it. Because they know their future depends on energy independence. Their ability to grow crops and feed their people depends on it. They understand that to be strong, to be themselves, they must be independent.

That’s something America never seems to learn. That interdependency on the entire world, an interdependency on one chemical, say petroleum, creates a monster. It removes your ability to say “we won’t do that because it’s immoral.” Because the choices seem stark. Do the immoral thing and continue life as a nation as you know it. Or don’t, and make some adjustments. For whatever reason our leaders have never decided, nor have we, to do the hard work of transitioning from a dependent nation to one with more independence. More energy and manufacturing capacity. One that can stand on its own two feet and make moral decisions based on who we want to be as a nation. Not based on what we need to do to make sure the malls get open and have good prices.

I say all this because I think it’s important to understand where we are, how we got here, and why we keep falling down the same pits over and over and over. Why we keep making the same horrendous decisions, the same immoral decisions, again and again.

That’s why A Fight Worth Having exists. Why I did Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress. Why I worked for Bernie. Why I worked with AOC. I’ve been trying, like so many others in this country, to help us go down a different path. One built on community and creation instead of destruction and violence and war.

This country is in great disrepair. Structurally and emotionally. Our infrastructure. Our economy. Things need to be fixed. Things need to be built. Things need to be done. I know we want to go fishing on the weekends and hang out in the evenings and just go about life as normal. The problem is we’re in a moment where the generations before us didn’t do the work needed to sustain a good quality of life. They didn’t do the work necessary to keep this nation afloat. We’re the generation that has to do it now.

But we’ve got a great opportunity ahead of us. We can see the immorality of where we’re headed. We know there’s a need to improve our lot in life. And we have robotics and AI and advanced manufacturing. Scientific innovations and discoveries. What we need to do is harness those and deploy them for ourselves and the world. We need to think about how we can export opportunity and joy and comfort instead of bombs and trauma and death. We need to learn to do that here at home as well. Learn to lift ourselves and each other up instead of tearing down and stepping on people to do better. It’s a big challenge, but it’s a huge opportunity. I hope.

And that hope is what this is about. Making sure that we, the people, own some of what our society builds in the future. That’s the Mission for America. That’s American Equity. And that’s what we’re here to do.

Corbin Trent

An Open Letter to the Top 20%

Corbin Trent — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:41:22 GMT

An Open Letter to the Top 20%

I want to tell you a story about where AI is taking us. It might seem outlandish. But I’ve lived it, and that’s why you need to hear it from me.

If you’re in the top 20%, that means your household is bringing in somewhere around $130,000 a year or more. Maybe you’re a project manager making $95,000 married to a marketing coordinator making $45,000. Y’all are a $140,000 household. You’re taking vacations. You can afford healthcare. You can afford housing. Your kids are wearing whatever name brand kids are wearing these days. You feel fairly secure, but not totally secure. And both of your jobs are done on a screen.

Here’s what you may not realize. You’re living the life that factory workers lived in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. You’re living the life that auto workers in Detroit lived. That steel workers in Pittsburgh lived. That chemical workers across the Northeast and Appalachia lived. Back then a single income could buy a house, raise kids, take a vacation, and retire with a pension. A GM line worker in the early ‘90s was pulling the equivalent of about $43 an hour in today’s money. That life, the one you’re living right now, used to be the baseline for millions of Americans.

I can tell your future, because for me, it’s a rerun.

I grew up in Appalachia, living in the shadows of what had been. The old-timers talked about a time when the life you're living now wasn't reserved for the top 20%. It was just life. But over decades, fewer and fewer people could reach it. A normal life for most working Americans disappeared in a generation, then kept declining for decades after that, and nobody did a damn thing about it.

The top 10% of earners now account for nearly half of all consumer spending in this country, the highest share ever recorded. For you few who still have a quality life, the future I lived is coming for you.

Don’t look out your window. Look at where my people are from.

Detroit went from 1.8 million people to roughly 630,000. The city lost more than a million people. Entire neighborhoods abandoned. The crack epidemic turned whole sections into a war zone. 80,000 buildings left empty. In St. Louis, where the factories closed and the mills went quiet, whole neighborhoods now resemble what the Alliance for American Manufacturing called “a bombed-out war zone, with few vestiges of their former glory.” In 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. The birthplace of the American middle class went bankrupt.

There were no other jobs. What was left was Walmart. CVS. McDonald’s. Harder work for less money, and our towns decayed. Despair set in. People turned to drugs to numb the pain, Big Pharma got rich, and 800,000 of our neighbors died. Not in a war. Not in a natural disaster. From opioid overdoses, in the very places where the factories closed and the jobs disappeared. Overdose deaths shot up over 500% in a single generation. Violence spiked. Communities fell apart. We were lost.

Over and over, Americans looked for answers. They turned to the government, because after all it was the government that had pulled us out of the Depression, won World War II, took us to the moon. It was us working together through our federal, state, and local governments that built this nation. We looked for answers in Ronald Reagan. In Bill Clinton. In Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. And then, finally, Trump, hoping we could turn this shit around.

But instead of looking at the greed that caused this, instead of looking at the Wall Street barons, the bankers, and the handful of decision makers who sold us down the river, we turned our eyes toward immigrants. We split up our communities based on race and religion and sexual orientation and whether or not women have bodily autonomy. We did exactly what the people who profited from our decline needed us to do. We fought amongst ourselves while they cashed the checks.

Now the information and administration economy is next.

The economic devastation that happened over 40 years in labor is coming after white-collar workers in four. And it’s coming for the same reason. It makes no more sense to have humans doing work that can be done by machines or programs or robots. They are much, much less expensive. They don’t get sick. They don’t have drama. They don’t have needs.

I know how fast this is moving because I’m living it. I’m starting a PAC called A Fight Worth Having. I was quoted $65,000 a year by a company called Snapstream to record and monitor four TV stations at once. I decided to see if I could do it with AI and four cable accounts. Turns out I could. The same thing happened when I needed an email system, a research hub, a social media monitoring operation. AI is building things for hundreds of dollars that would have cost hundreds of thousands. That’s not a prediction. That was Tuesday.

Add to that, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said at an AI summit in India: “AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me.” He said they may be only a couple of years away. This is the man running the most prominent AI company on Earth, built on technologies we developed as a society and invested in as a people. And he’s telling you his technology will do his job better than he can. Your job is not safer than his.

AI and robotics end in the Garden of Eden or Mad Max. Sadly there is little in-between.

We see where this path leads. An unimaginable life for a handful of people and scraps for the rest of us. If we leave this to the market, the 'owners' will keep the Star Trek economy for themselves simply because they were in the right seat at the right time. I can tell you by looking out my window that the rich don't reckon the poor deserve very much.

We have another path. I’m calling it American Equity.

What it requires is public ownership of the things that are going to replace our jobs. If we don’t own a share, if we don’t own a controlling interest in the entities and technologies that replace American workers, we’re screwed. Taxes and UBI will not solve this. Fighting trillionaires and centi-billionaires that control our means of production is not a fight we need to have.

You, the top 20%, needn’t join me and my fellows in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. We can join you. We can join you in access to a life of plenty through American Equity. That is us, we the people, owning what we produce, owning what our knowledge and generations of labor is leading to.

And to the crowd already warming up the “seizing the means of production” line, let me remind you of something. Over the past 50 years, Wall Street sold our means of production to China and to anybody else who would do it cheaper. They didn’t give a damn about keeping it. They gave it away. So this isn’t about seizing anything. This is about rebuilding what they sold out from under us and owning it this time. AI and robotics can do that. But we have to own it, because these same people have already proven they are too greedy to be trusted with it.

We cannot be conned by words like socialism or communism, because the only alternative to American Equity is American Feudalism.

I’ve seen your future. I grew up in it.

Corbin Trent

Why Democrats Must Be Genuine to Win ✊

America's Undoing — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:30:51 GMT

I join @MeidasTouch to break down the "Self-Censorship" trap that keeps Democrats from connecting with American’s today.

Watch The Full Video Here:

I Went on Meidas Touch. Here’s What I Said.

Corbin Trent — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:11:55 GMT

I was on the Meidas Touch Network this week and we covered a lot of ground. If you’d rather watch than read, the video’s is just blelow. But for those of you who prefer the written version, here’s what I had to say.

The host started by playing clips of the propaganda coming out of Fox and the administration, the usual stuff, the immigration fear machine, the four pieces of paper they managed to scrounge together to justify terrorizing immigrant communities. And look, we all know the data. Immigrants are far less likely than native born citizens to commit crimes. The people we actually need to protect ourselves from are the rich, the powerful, the oligarchs, the Epsteins and the Trumps of the world. That’s who’s actually doing the harm. But the courts are tied up and the administration is ignoring court orders anyway. So the only things standing between an out of control regime and where we’re headed are Congress and the American people. And Congress, the opposition party at least, is not exactly rising to the moment.

One of the things that makes this so hard to respond to is that life goes on. The cars are still going down the street. People still go to work. The bills still have to be paid. Kids still go to school. Our electoral infrastructure and our social infrastructure are collapsing and it feels normal because for the overwhelming majority of Americans daily life still feels normal. That’s not the case for a lot of our immigrant brothers and sisters. But for most people it’s hard to get yourself steeled for something that doesn’t look like a crisis from your kitchen window. And that’s by design.

We talked about the polling showing Trump underwater with non-college educated voters, which is significant because those are the people he’s supposed to own. And I brought up something I think about a lot, which is what happened in my home region.

In the 1930s, Europe went one direction and America went another. We were in a very similar spot then. Republicans had a slim majority in both chambers and the presidency. Sound familiar? And then in just a few cycles, Democrats had a supermajority in the House and the Senate and held the presidency for four terms. How? They delivered. They had a grand vision for the country called the New Deal and it transformed people’s lives in a deep and significant way. That coalition held together for 40 or 50 years.

In East Tennessee, my region, the New Deal built TVA dams, dozens of them. The Manhattan Project built Oak Ridge. The Interstate Highway System. Rural electrification put electricity in places that didn’t have it. This area was transformed by bold public investment and public ownership. And it could be again.

But here’s what I keep coming back to. When I look at Tennessee’s voting history, Bill Clinton won this state twice. Obama only underperformed Clinton by about three points. Tennessee voters didn’t really turn their back on the Democratic Party until Obama’s second term, and then they moved hard toward Trump. And the thing about Trump originally was that he gave people a vision. It was a dark vision, immigrants taking your jobs, corporations and politicians stealing your livelihood. But embedded in there was the hope that something better could be rebuilt. People fell for it and they got duped. But the level of understanding Trump had about where Americans’ minds were is something the Democratic Party mostly doesn’t have.

Gavin Newsom is a good example. He’s positioning himself as the anti-RFK. Fine, RFK deserves plenty of that. But he’s not saying hey, actually, big pharma does have too much control over our healthcare system. Hey, actually, our healthcare system is screwed up. We’re eating stuff that’s illegal in other countries. The Democratic Party is too reactive. They want to be anti-Trump, anti-RFK, anti-this, anti-that, instead of having a strong vision of their own that can win hearts and minds.

We talked about how you cut through the propaganda, and I said two things. One, Democrats self-censor constantly. They try to analyze what voters are going to think and then calibrate what they say based on polls instead of just saying what they believe. I’ve had so many politicians ask me how do I sound more genuine. The answer is be genuine. If you believe we need a public option not just in insurance but in the actual delivery of care, say it. If you believe we need a better system for generating energy, say it. You can change what people believe. Donald Trump bought 10 to 15 percent stakes in a dozen companies and that would be called socialism in any normal circumstances, but he just did it. Stop overthinking and start saying what you actually think.

And two, take the message everywhere. Go on Fox, go on the new independent media, go where the audiences are. But don’t water down your message for the audience. Take your message to the audience. It gets through more easily that way.

The last thing I talked about, and the thing I think matters most, is the piece that’s missing from progressive politics right now. The Democratic Party and progressives think what we need to do is tax billionaires and corporations and then use that revenue to invest in the existing healthcare system or the existing education system. And what that misses is that if you put money into an already broken healthcare system that’s not creating more doctors, more nurses, more hospitals, that’s not creating the supply we need, then all you get is more of the same. Consolidation. Very rich corporations. The money goes in and it doesn’t come back out as care. It comes back out as profit.

We used to own about 50% of our healthcare delivery in this country. The hospitals, the clinics, all of it owned by counties, municipalities, states, and the federal government. Same thing with TVA here in Tennessee. We own the electrical production capacity. And I think that’s the only way you actually compete with the oligarchs and the monopolies. You create your own massive, vertically integrated, publicly owned systems that are competitive. That restores competition. That restores access. That’s the vision.

Saikat Chakrabarti and New Consensus are building the framework for this through something called Mission for America. It’s the most important work happening in progressive politics right now and almost nobody is talking about it. Go look at it.

More Sunday.

Coribn