Trump Isn't Winning. Democrats Are Losing.

Dean. Obama. Bernie. Trump. Then Trump again. And again. The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, MAGA, the George Floyd uprisings—all screaming for something radically different.

The numbers don't lie. Trump's approval rating: 48%. Democratic Party approval: 27%. A twice-impeached, convicted felon is more trusted than the party claiming to defend democracy. That's not because Americans love criminals—it's because they've lost faith in the alternative.

Ten years ago, I left Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign to start Brand New Congress with Zack Exley and Saikat Chakrabarti. Our goal was audacious: to recruit hundreds of candidates to run for all 535 congressional seats simultaneously, united behind a single vision to rebuild America's infrastructure, economy, healthcare system, and industrial base.

Spoiler alert: we failed.

We did recruit and elect AOC, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman, but they became individual success stories rather than a unified movement. The Green New Deal morphed from an infrastructure and manufacturing revolution into a culture war talking point. The outsiders we helped elect got absorbed by the inside or beaten by AIPAC. There simply weren't enough of them at once, nor was there a clear plan of action.

But I learned a lot traveling the country during Bernie's campaigns and during my time in the political trenches. Serving as AOC's communications director and as executive director for Justice Democrats was a decade-long education. At first, I thought I was an outlier. A political and economic extremist. Turns out I'm not. I'm more the norm than I would have imagined. What I learned is that we've been in a revolutionary moment for a very long time—I just hadn't recognized it. My East Tennessee community—Appalachian born and raised—was fired up for either Bernie Sanders OR Donald Trump. That should have told us everything.

Americans have been desperately seeking radical transformation for decades. They thought they found it with Reagan. Then Howard Dean. Then Obama. Then Bernie. Then Trump. Then Trump again. And again. The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, MAGA, the George Floyd uprisings—all screaming for something radically different.

Yet our elected leadership, Democrat and Republican, works frantically to preserve the status quo. For them and their donors, things are working fine. They need to manage the debt, squash the populist uprisings, but otherwise everything is going according to plan—the plan developed by Chicago School economists who believed we could reap rather than sow indefinitely. That somehow we'd be the managers rather than the makers, and the world would go along doing the dirty work.

Even Bernie and AOC's "rally against oligarchy" tour misses the point. They're talking about redistribution—tax the billionaires, spread the wealth around. But you can't redistribute your way out of a supply crisis. Healthcare and housing are great examples.

Money doesn't fix bones. Money doesn't cure cancer. Money doesn't build houses or train doctors or manufacture insulin. The supply itself—hospital beds, medical equipment, skilled nurses, affordable housing units—that's what actually solves problems.

Look at the math across every sector:

Healthcare: We're projected to spend $7.7 trillion per year by 2032—more than today's entire federal budget—just to produce mediocre health outcomes while other countries spend half as much and get better results.

Housing: We spend more per unit on construction than almost any developed nation, yet we're building fewer homes than we need. The problem isn't money—it's that we've made building expensive and slow through a system designed to extract, not deliver.

Infrastructure: We're spending three times what other countries pay per mile of rail or highway, and taking five times longer to complete projects. China has built entire new energy grids, hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, and transformed their manufacturing capacity while we debate permits for a single rail line.

Education: We outspend most developed nations per student but get worse results. We're importing engineers and doctors while our own graduates struggle to find work that matches their debt load.

Manufacturing: We've outsourced production of everything from medicines to steel to computer chips, then act surprised when supply chains break or prices spike.

The pattern is everywhere: massive spending, massive debt, declining results, and monopolistic extraction replacing actual production.

Even the radical proposals or the once-in-a-generation investments fall woefully short. Medicare for All? That only changes who writes checks for our broken healthcare system. The Inflation Reduction Act just threw money at the same extractive energy companies and consultants. Infrastructure bills just funnel cash to the same contractors who've been failing for decades.

We need to examine who is producing what we need across every sector and why they're failing so spectacularly at it. We then need to step in and fix them by building, by making shit. If the invisible hand is screwing us, we take over the controls.

This neoliberal blindness leaves Democrats unable to imagine real change like this and creates openings for Josh Hawley, JD Vance, and worse. Trump has proven that he won't truly challenge economic power—his tariffs are merely theater, not a transformative measure. His trade wars are WWE matches designed to create drama while the same extraction continues.

But the anxiety and desperation keep growing. And rightfully so.

Every issue voters care about is connected. What is national security if we can't manufacture what we need? What is an economy that produces only financial bubbles and healthcare bloat? What is $10 trillion in government spending if contractors and consultants bill us for most of it before anything gets built?

We're not exporting amazing products and breakthrough ideas anymore. We're exporting bombs, pain, and financial instruments designed to extract wealth from other countries. We've become the global economy's loan shark instead of its most productive member.

We've become a society that's too lazy to fix itself. Our C-suite executives have gotten lazy—why innovate when you can just extract? Our elected officials have gotten old and lazy—why build when you can just manage decline?

Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Jeffries, Buttigieg, Newsom—they're all trapped in this way of thinking that keeps them from being revolutionary. They can't imagine transformation because they built this system. Even Bernie and AOC, for all their rallies against oligarchy, can't break free from redistribution politics when we need production revolution.

We look at healthcare consuming 20% of our GDP and say "too complicated to fix." We look at housing costs requiring 15 years of median income and shrug "market forces." We see infrastructure projects taking three times longer and costing five times more than other countries and call it "the way things work."

But that's how things fail, not how they work.

The difference isn't authoritarianism versus democracy—it's willingness to build versus acceptance of failure.

The government is also to blame. They forgot—we forgot—that the government was supposed to be an extension of us. An extension of the people. They call it the people's house for a reason.

What happened was we let the government decide it was just going to be a fucking lapdog, rolling over anytime a Wall Street tycoon or business leader walked in to rub their belly. The bond market shows up and the little doggy pisses all over the floor.

(Democrats are spending $20 million to figure out how to talk to men, so forgive me if I skip the focus groups and just speak like a normal Appalachian dude.)

We forgot who has the power in this country. It's us. It's we the people. And where we have that power is through our government. We give these corporations their charters. We give these businesses their licenses. We let them operate on our airwaves, our waterwaves, on our streets, using the infrastructure built by generations of blood, sweat, and tears. Literal slaves, indentured servants, sharecroppers, coal miners, factory workers gave their lives and liberty to build this nation and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk think it's theirs. It's not.

The government became a pussified yes-man to business interests that extract from us instead of providing for us. Businesses and industry don't build countries—that's not their job, it's not their goal. They make profit. Quarterly profit. We're supposed to keep that shit in check and make sure it's working for us.

Sure, the government's a villain in this story, but they're a villain because they cowered or stuck out their hands in the face of corporate greed. They gave up, gave in, and took a little treat here and there like the good puppy dogs they'd become.

But there is an alternative. The American alternative. The one Hamilton designed, Lincoln executed, and FDR perfected. When markets fail, we don't just regulate or subsidize—we build public competition that makes extraction obsolete.

FDR didn't just regulate electricity companies—he built the Tennessee Valley Authority that brought power to millions while forcing private utilities to compete or improve. Similarly, New York City didn't just regulate its private transit operators; the city built its own publicly-owned subway system—the IND—to directly compete with private subway companies. This forced existing private operators either to lower prices and improve service or be acquired by the public system, which is exactly what eventually happened. These weren't socialism—they were capitalism with real competition.

What we have now isn't capitalism. It’s monopolistic extraction masquerading as free markets. So let's bring back real competition. This requires more than electing outsiders. It requires dozens of candidates united behind one revolutionary agenda:

Build public alternatives across every broken sector. Public hospitals so good that private insurance becomes irrelevant. Public housing construction that brings rents back within reach. Public manufacturing that makes offshoring pointless. Public universities that graduate students without debt. Public broadband that makes telecom monopolies obsolete. Public transit that makes car dependency a choice, not a necessity.

And yes, it means using government power to clean house: impeach corrupt Supreme Court justices who protect the police state over the Constitution. Fire Federal Reserve boards that enable asset bubbles while claiming inflation is low. Remove members of Congress who insider trade while writing the laws.

You can't have a functional society if criminals in government and industry face no consequences. You can't have a nation if lawlessness continues under the guise of economic stability.

The political path is simpler than you think. Hakeem Jeffries won his primary with 19,000 votes. These aren't beloved leaders—they're placeholders getting by on name recognition and donor money.

A few dozen candidates running together could transform what seems possible. But they must run together, not as individuals. The moment must be about the mission, not the candidate. Brand New Congress failed because we created stars instead of building power.

We can't wait for some mythical figure to arrive and save us. We can't wait for Bernie to get younger or for AOC to get more radical or for some perfect candidate to emerge from the ether.

But there is someone doing something about this right now. Saikat Chakrabarti is running against Nancy Pelosi, calling for other candidates to join him in a Mission for America—a radical rethinking of how we do things. If you know candidates, if you communicate with any candidates, if you're thinking of running, you should be pushing people to look at what this concept entails.

Right now we're on track not to choose transformation. We're on track to just wait and see what happens while complaining about how complicated everything is or how much it sucks.

This will be a moment of either continued collapse and decline, or rebirth and rejuvenation. We're either going to make America great again, or we're going to continue to sink deeper into this hole. We do not want MAGA, Trump, Josh Hawley, or JD Vance at the steering wheel. I can assure you of that, because they have neither the ideas nor the ideals that will drive us to a desirable destination.

But Americans are ready. They've been ready. They keep searching for leaders willing to say the system isn't broken—it's designed this way on purpose, and we're going to replace it.

We never left the revolutionary moment. We just kept electing people who couldn't see it.

Time to elect people who can't unsee it.

The extraction could end. The building could begin. But only if we stop being too lazy to do the work.