While Trump parades tanks and deploys the troops, where are they?

This Saturday, Trump parades tanks through Washington for his birthday while 4,700 troops occupy Los Angeles. And where are the Democrats who want to lead in 2028? Writing books and growing beards.

This Saturday, Donald Trump will parade tanks through Washington D.C. for his birthday while 4,700 troops occupy Los Angeles and protests spread to dozens of cities across the country. He's spending $45 million on this authoritarian spectacle while threatening protesters with "very heavy force."

And where are the Democrats who want to lead this country in 2028? Writing books. Growing beards. Giving strategic interviews. Positioning.

Senator Murphy, you're getting close. That Guardian interview where you talked about men losing their identity as breadwinners and the need for Democrats to become "an aggressively populist party"—that's real. But you're still dancing around the edges of something much bigger.

Same goes for Pete, Gavin, and everyone else quietly positioning for 2028. While Trump rolls tanks through the capital and deploys Marines against American cities, you're doing all the traditional pre-campaign theater. Here's my advice: Stop positioning. Start running.

Trump understands that power is about building a vision and fighting for it. He's willing to use military force for political theater, spend tens of millions on parades, and deploy troops against governors who oppose him. Whether you agree with his vision or not, he has one. And he's acting on it.

What's your vision? Where's your fight?

I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean, literally announce your candidacy right now. There's nothing wrong with running early. Running gives you permission to test ideas, build teams, and most importantly—start the hard work of rebuilding the Democratic Party from the ground up.

While Trump parades his power, we need leaders building a different vision for American strength. Not tanks in the streets, but infrastructure that works. Not military occupation of American cities, but public competition with the monopolies that are failing us. Not $45 million birthday parties, but investments in manufacturing, housing, and healthcare that actually serve people.

Here's what Chris Murphy seems to get but doesn't say: if you want to govern successfully in 2028, you need to win big in 2026 first. And we're nowhere close to being ready for that. If the next presidential candidate has any hope of being transformational rather than just a blip on the path to Republican domination, they need a completely new Democratic Party. Your loyalty has to be to America and its people, not to the party establishment that got us into this mess.

Murphy talks about men feeling powerless because they're no longer breadwinners, and that's part of it. But the real crisis goes way deeper than gender identity or cultural wars. It's about households drowning in debt while living in supposedly the richest nation in history.

"The problem isn't that poor people aren't voting for Democrats. The problem is that our economy is so broken that being poor now includes people making $75,000 a year."

Hundreds of millions of Americans are feeling massively burdened by debt and financial insecurity at the exact same time we're supposed to believe prosperity has never been higher. You think people are stupid? They can see the disconnect. They know the game is rigged. And when Democrats keep defending this broken system with "real wages" or stock market numbers, people tune out or vote for the guy promising to blow it all up.

Right now, a normal middle-class life—decent job, house, kids, some vacation time, ability to retire—seems so impossible that people just dream of being ultra-wealthy instead. Why dream small when small dreams are just as unlikely as big ones? The American Dream isn't dead because people lack ambition. It's dead because we've created a system where the basics of a decent life are priced out of reach for most people, even those with good jobs.

Here's what we're really deciding: who are the villains? Is it the immigrants coming here to work and build? Is it unchecked borders? Is that why we're seeing economic pain and crime in America?

Or is it the clear and obvious answer that one of the biggest causes of crime is poverty, and one of the best ways to fight poverty is through economic opportunity and well-being?

"We're fundamentally in a battle for the future of this country. Trump has his answer: blame the vulnerable, intimidate the opposition, and let billionaires run everything while putting on military spectacles. What's yours?"

The problem isn't just that Democrats are responding with letters while Trump deploys tanks. Gavin Newsom and other Democratic governors sent Trump a letter saying they thought the troop deployment was awful. Chuck Schumer sent a letter with eight questions. They're literally writing letters to the manager while tanks roll through the capital.

The deeper problem is that when we only attack Trump without accepting responsibility for how we got here, we seem insincere. You can't critique Trump's authoritarianism while defending the economic arrangements that made his rise possible.

"We didn't just magically wake up in this broken system one day. This happened over time, and Democrats were part of it."

For forty years, Democrats have gone along with the neoliberal experiment. They've defended "free trade" deals that shipped our manufacturing overseas. They've celebrated financialization while working families got crushed by debt. They've handed over public functions to private monopolies and then acted surprised when those monopolies price-gouge people.

We've got monopolies in every sector from healthcare to housing to infrastructure. We've got an economy that runs on debt instead of wages. Our manufacturing base has been strip-mined and sold off. Democrats have been managing this decline for decades, not fighting it.

At some point, we're gonna have to come to terms with the fact that we cannot spend $77 trillion per decade on healthcare. We're gonna have to rethink the system altogether. Same is true for manufacturing. If it's all automated and robots, we definitely need that manufacturing here because whoever owns that owns a whole bunch of power.

We've handed our space program over to billionaires like Musk and Bezos, and now when Musk threatens to shut down Falcon rockets, Democrats like John Tester worry about which billionaire to trust next. Nobody says the obvious thing: we need to take NASA back. WE need to make our rockets.

But Democrats are terrified to say any of this out loud because it means admitting that the system they've been managing for decades is fundamentally broken. They'd rather triangulate with hate—throw immigrants under the bus, soften on women's issues—than turn on the people they really need to be turning on: the Democratic establishment that's aligned itself with Wall Street.

This is why Democratic leaders just sit there unsure of how to go forward except to attack Trump. They're tied to a donor base and a mindset that won't allow them to think outside of the failed system they helped create.

If you truly want to re-establish the Democratic Party as a force for good, if you want the party to be taken seriously again, then you're gonna have to run over and reject the people that got us here. Now, ironically, to some extent, that's many of you. But you're gonna have to throw other people under the bus - Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries - all of them.

"We don't need to abandon capitalism. We need to rebuild it so it actually works."

That means creating public competition for private monopolies that are failing us in every sector. When Chattanooga got tired of slow internet and high prices, they built their own fiber network. Prices dropped, service improved dramatically. That's what government competition looks like when it works.

You want to become a populist party? That means going to war with your own donor class. It means recruiting candidates who aren't afraid to call out the whole neoliberal experiment for what it is—a failure. It means building public alternatives to the private monopolies that are strangling this country. It means PRIMARIES and lots of them.

It also means acknowledging that institutions like the FDA, the SEC, the BLS, the Fed, the Treasury—these captured, corrupted institutions overrun with lobbyists and revolving-door goons—need to be reformed or torn down and rebuilt from scratch.

"2028 doesn't matter if Democrats get slaughtered in 2026. You can't govern with a hostile Congress."

That means you need to start building a farm team of candidates who aren't afraid to primary these incumbents. Whether they're corrupted, captured, or simply disconnected from reality doesn't matter. They are not the people for this moment, and they need to be replaced.

You need candidates who don't owe anything to the existing power structure and who understand that the system needs rebuilding, not fine-tuning. You need candidates who've actually built things, run businesses, fought foreclosures, organized strikes, started co-ops—people who understand how things actually work and why they're failing.

Any serious Democratic leader who wants to change this party into one that can resonate with 70, 80% of Americans—like we were able to do during FDR's administrations—is gonna turn more toward the American people than their own party.

You can keep playing the traditional game—courting donors, managing expectations, triangulating between corporate interests and public needs. Keep talking about "democracy" while defending an economic system that's rigged against the vast majority of Americans.

Or you can do what FDR did: build a movement that takes on concentrated wealth and power directly. Create public alternatives to private monopolies. Use government power to rebuild the real economy instead of just managing the financial one.

But understand this: the establishment will fight you every step of the way. They'll call you radical, divisive, unelectable. Corporate donors will flee. Op-ed writers will sneer. Your own party leadership will try to kneecap you.

The question is: are you willing to lose those people to win back the country?

Trump is showing us exactly what power looks like when it's used for spectacle instead of service, for intimidation instead of building. But his tanks and parades also reveal an opening. People can see the difference between real strength and authoritarian theater.

This creates a moment for something completely different. A government that works. Institutions that build. An economy that serves people instead of just shareholders. Leaders who understand that we need to reignite the engines of capitalism with competitive fuel, not seize them for profit extraction.

But that window won't stay open forever. It requires leadership that's willing to name the problem honestly and fight for solutions that match the scale of the crisis.

The natural cadence of what's usually a presidential campaign can start now. We can start with the vision setting. We need to build, not burn. We need leaders who emerge with a new mission for America.

So stop positioning. Stop testing messages. Stop waiting for permission.

Run. Right now. Start building the movement we need. Start recruiting the candidates we need. Start having the fights we need to have.

The country is ready for something real. Your loyalty has to be to America and its people, not to a party that's lost its way. We will rally behind that kind of leadership, but you can't do it with the same people who got us into this mess.

The question is: are you ready to choose transformation over party loyalty?

—Corbin Trent

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