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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: It's not you that's nuts. It's the White House. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-05-28

Alan Elrod/Liberal Currents:

You're Not Crazy. America Has Gone Mad American politics has become so insane that being reasonable feels like a malady, and MAGA agrees. We are throwing the most advanced health science research system into the sea and have turned over our public health infrastructure to quacks and crooks. We are destroying our prosperity to sate the president’s desire to play at 19th century political economy. We are blithely ignoring the potential for war with former allies as Trump crows about annexing Canada and Greenland.

Be assured. It’s not you.

x A judge struck down President Trump’s executive order against the law firm WilmerHale, adding to decisions that have ruled the White House campaign against the legal industry as unconstitutional https://t.co/9llC5EsLKp — WSJ Politics (@WSJPolitics) May 27, 2025

James Fallows/Breaking the News:

Kristi Noem vs. Harvard: What Their Language Reveals. 'In the life of the human spirit, words are action,' a US president said long ago. Let's look at words from a cabinet secretary who doesn't know what 'habeas corpus' means, vs. a university that does. To preview their rhetorical meaning: The first message, from Noem, is the language of thuggery, extortion, ignorance, and bullying—language to which we’re more and more inured. We’re so battle-scarred we barely even notice. But, as Arthur Miller once put it, Attention must be paid.

The second is the language of people who know the laws, the limits, the norms, and the aspirations of the United States before the MAGA era, and are fighting to see that America again.

The third is the terse language of the judiciary, on which all too much of the country’s fate now depends. Now let’s look at these one by one.

SV Date/HuffPost:

Yes, There Was A Media Scandal In 2024. No, It Wasn’t About Joe Biden. The political press corps started ‘normalizing’ Trump just weeks after Jan. 6, 2021, to get access. That’s a big reason Trump later won, not some ‘cover-up’ of Biden’s age. Early on in Donald Trump’s first term, a favorite riposte from right-wing accounts on social media to real and perceived cultural excesses from “The Left” was simply: “This is how we got Trump.” Eight years later, we’re getting another round of this same clever retort, only this time the culprits are not progressive activists, but reporters who covered the Joe Biden White House. Apparently, we collectively conspired with Biden family members and aides to hide his worsening physical and mental condition from America. It’s an amazing assertion, given that polls in early 2024 found that some 80% of Americans thought that Biden was too old to be president. Focus group participants said they were shocked he was even running again. It turns out that people drew their own conclusions from watching his halting public speeches and videos of his increasingly noticeable old-man’s shuffle.

Tough to cover up something everyone already knows. On the other hand, that includes Trump’s corruption.

x Normalizing the abnormal is sadly normal for so much of the mainstream press. The NYT has done some terrific reporting and had some great opeds on Trump. But this framing, all too typical, is deeply dangerous. Imagine if Biden had given this kind of speech how they would’ve… https://t.co/255hUgR0N2 — Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) May 25, 2025

New York Times:

Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward The party’s standing is startlingly low after a defeat that felt like a cultural rejection. What comes next? One longtime Democratic researcher has a technique she leans on when nudging voters to share their deepest, darkest feelings about politics. She asks them to compare America’s two major parties to animals. After around 250 focus groups of swing voters, a few patterns have emerged, said the researcher, Anat Shenker-Osorio. Republicans are seen as “apex predators,” like lions, tigers and sharks — beasts that take what they want when they want it. Democrats are typically tagged as tortoises, slugs or sloths: slow, plodding, passive. So Ms. Shenker-Osorio perked up earlier this year when a Democratic man in Georgia suggested that a very different kind of animal symbolized her party. “A deer,” he said, “in headlights.” The man had more to say. “You stand there and you see the car coming, but you’re going to stand there and get hit with it anyway.”

x A slate of bills are moving through the Delaware legislature to expand voting access, including via early voting and mail voting: https://t.co/GRIHQX2ecy — Bolts (@boltsmag) May 28, 2025

Will Sommer/The Bulwark:

MAHA in Disarray: Leading Anti-Vaxxer Parts Ways with RFK Plus: The sad spectacle of James O’Keefe’s exposé on his own former organization. The former group thinks the influencers’ food advocacy is both unlikely to succeed and trivial compared to the “real” problem: injections of poison administered forcibly by the government. At their most charitable, the anti-vaxxers see the food-obsessed faction as a distraction that will divert Kennedy’s focus from their priorities. Kennedy hasn’t even been health and human services secretary for four months, and already this clash has become a recurring problem. It’s energizing the backlash on the right toward Trump’s new surgeon general pick, Casey Means, who is seen by some anti-vaccine activists as insufficiently opposed to vaccinations. And it’s given rise to a conspiracy theory that Kennedy himself is somehow being blackmailed by unnamed but definitely pro-vaccine forces, a wild notion that even his own former presidential running mate has promoted. But now divisions in Kennedy’s camp may be getting even worse, as arguably the biggest anti-vaccine activist in the country is quitting the MAHA organization.

x While I find the NYT’s three-election analysis interesting, can I raise one point? There is no doubt that Trump has changed the GOP. Whether Trump’s vote is transferable to anyone is FAR less certain. Mark me as skeptical. — Dante Chinni (@Dchinni) May 25, 2025

Jonathan V Last/The Bulwark:

JD Vance and the Honky Tonk Man Why MAGA’s thirstiest try-hard (probably) won’t get the brass ring. There’s a dark irony in Vance using Ross NeverTrump(?) Douthat1 and the woke New York Times as a vehicle for shoring up his position as the heir to MAGA. But also, it’s a revealing choice. Where Trump used Breitbart and Alex Jones to take over the Republican party by winning over the great unwashed, Vance has decided that his base is the conservative nomenklatura and that he can cement his claim to the throne with the support of Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher, and Peter Thiel. This isn’t as crazy as it might seem. In politics, there is an inside game and an outside game. The outside game is popular support—it’s when a figure harnesses public sentiment to capture political power. The inside game is more about attaining power by mastering the elites. The two ur-examples here in politics are Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. In professional wresting there is also an ur-example. Let me tell you a story about Hulk Hogan and the Honky Tonk Man.

G Elliott Morris: Strength in Numbers:

How much should politicians (and pundits) follow the polls? This is the wrong question. A debate is raging among Democratic strategists and left-leaning commentators about how the Democratic Party should position itself ideologically to maximize its probability of winning the next election. This debate centers on conflicting diagnoses of Democrats' electoral problems. One side argues that a failure to win the presidency, and especially the Senate, can be traced to the party moving too far from the median voter and alienating moderates. This side argues Democrats should immediately move back to the middle on key issues, such as immigration, in order to win back the pivotal center. They suggest moderating especially on issues that get a lot of attention from the press and voters, and being wary of raising aggregate attention on issues where Republicans have an advantage. This group is sometimes referred to as “popularists.” The other side argues that Democrats should focus more attention on shaping public opinion, rather than merely following it. They say what the party lacks is leadership, especially on issues of corruption, democratic institutions, and civil rights. An illustrative case is the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, about which the popularists said Democrats were focusing too much on immigration, while the latter group argued public opinion could easily be changed with sympathetic figures and the right message. The “anti-popularists” charge the pro-moderation camp with affecting excessively "poll-tested" politics and lacking the courage and conviction to create a mobilized base of mass support on ideologically cross-cutting issues… Let’s look at the empirical evidence and see if we can find a way to resolve this debate — or if not, at least offer some much-needed data-driven advice.

David Shuster on Trump’s fading abilities:

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