Inauguration Day Blues
And How To Lose Them
Donald Trump says it’s the dawn of a “golden age,” but is it really the end of the world as we know it?
And do you ask yourself: "Well, how did I get here?"
Donald Trump’s tight-fitting Inaugural (how many kooks, lunatics and fanatics can you cram into a Rotunda still in Recovery?) and loony-but-scary campaign speech Inaugural Address has left a chill in the air that’s unrelated to the unusual DC weather.
But we can lose those Inauguration Day Blues, or at least, understand them better.
That Talking Heads song reference above was also made in this post by
, who writes about the “Plutocratic Doom Loop” driven by the Roberts Supreme Court where:
Billionaires swamped elections with unlimited spending, and corporations, which could not spend on elections before, had spent more in each of the toss-up House and Senate elections than the candidates in those elections;
The Voting Rights Act was all but repealed, and politicians were drawing their own districts with almost no constraints;
Women lost the constitutional right to an abortion;
Anti-corruption laws were gutted while the rights of white-collar criminals were expanded; and
New laws were enacted making it almost impossible for consumers and workers to bring corporations to court or to file class actions.
Mike Podhorzer goes from quoting Talking Heads to citing The Rule of Ipse Dixit, while elsewhere on Substack,
shares
-and one of the important points he emphasizes is this:
The most impactful way to stop Trump is to take back the House in 2026.
If we do that, Trump will never pass another law without Democratic support again. Speaker Jefferies will control what comes to the floor. We will have enormous leverage in budget negotiations and, as importantly, Democrats will have subpoena power to investigate the rampant corruption and criminality that will almost certainly be pulsating throughout the Trump Administration.
Retaking the House is very much within our reach. The GOP currently has one of thee narrowest margins in history. If a mere 7000 votes across three districts had gone the other way, Hakeem Jeffries would be Speaker of the House right now.
This is all very true. We’ll see how far Donald Trump is able to get with executive orders—but when he needs Congress, and Congress falls apart, Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries and Jamie Raskin will look like leaders.
advises us not to follow Trump down every crazy rabbit hole he sniffs around. As I pointed out in the post below, besides having the attention span of a goldfish and zero interest in anything resembling policy or governance, Donald Trump is demonstrably stupid. I understand why the press feels it can’t add that label to every piece of reporting, but we need to know it’s there.
Pfeiffer also recommends supporting “pro-democracy media” and not to give up hope, and I second that emotion. I’ve previously recommended a media diet that’s light on the empty calories of MSNBC and includes more healthy portions of The New York Times and the Guardian (with maybe, just maybe still also The Washington Post).
But for all the insight I get from people like
, and, sometimes I feel like I’m looking at that barn door after the horse has bolted. All of what we’re reading about the corruptive influences of money, power, grievance, disinformation and Supreme Court decisions on politics is true—but the bigger truth is that too many people will shrug at that and say, “so what?”For those of us who still think voting matters, that politics can strengthen our most deeply held values and beliefs (see Robert Kennedy), it’s hard to accept that Donald Trump won with the votes of people who thought he was funny. This is how devalued voting has become, and this is the obstacle we have to overcome.1
I like to quote what former Virginia Congressman Tom Davis said way back in 2008—if the Republican Party were a brand of dog food, “they'd take us off the shelf and put us in a landfill." Now it’s both parties, all of Washington, and the whole political system in the junkyard.
That answers the question, “well, how did we get here?”
As for that one about the end of the world, after an Inaugural Address that Peter Baker called “a grim portrait of a country on its knees that only he can revive,” I’m not sure.
But I do know that Dan Pfeiffer is right—we can win back the House in 2026 and push back against the scary list of promises Donald Trump made today.
But first we have to solve the Tom Davis dog food problem.
Forgive the alliteration, I’m a speechwriter.