Reasons Not To Obsess (Part One)
Ballrooms, Third Terms And Poop
The Always Interesting
writes:Why Tearing Down Trump’s Ballroom Would Be a Mistake
Trump views it as his house — to do whatever he wants, with no regard for what came before or what will come next.
That’s exactly how he thinks about our country and our democracy: something he can tear down and rebuild in his image without regard for anyone else.
True, that. And as I wrote here recently (pass it on), it’s not just the White House that Donald Trump wants to own, it’s all of us. Donald Trump’s medieval view of power is scarier than you think. Of course he wants a ballroom.
In
, Pfeiffer lists four reasons why making tearing down the ballroom a presidential campaign issue is a mistake, including this one:3. What would replace it?
Let’s say we take Swalwell or Last’s advice and tear down the ballroom. Something would have to replace it — and there are three ways to pay for the rebuild.
Taxpayer dollars. That would be a political non-starter and look ridiculous given the need to restore agencies like USAID and the Department of Education, and to repair damage in American communities.
Corporate donations. That’s exactly what Trump did. Taking corporate money to pay to demolish his monument would look hypocritical — and could easily reproduce the very pay-to-play dynamic we’re trying to punish.
Grassroots fundraising. Last suggests the millions who protested could each donate $25 to demolish the ballroom. Sure, many would give — but those dollars aren’t renewable. Raising hundreds of millions that way would siphon resources from midterm and presidential campaigns when they’re desperately needed.
True that, too.
Pfeiffer recommends
A better approach is to target the things that actually matter: institutional capture, corrupt agencies, dangerous policies, and the people who engineered them. Take apart the structures that enabled Trump’s abuses, enforce accountability, and rebuild institutions consistent with democratic norms.
Sure, that would be good. But I’ll repeat the view I keep returning to here. None of those hifalutin arguments amount to the proverbial hill of beans if people don’t vote.
We used to be able to count on the foundational truth that people voted for a reason—to act on their most deeply held values and beliefs, endorse policies, programs or parties, or defeat someone standing in their way.
Now, many people use their vote not as a tool of democracy but as a card to play, a score to settle or even a joke. All of the outrage, head-shaking and eye-rolling about Donald Trump from pundits, columnists, consultants and candidates aren’t landing with people who don’t recognize the tool they have to do something about him.
Donald Trump won in part because he brought more first-time voters to the polls. (Joe Rogan, angry memes, etc.). And as I wrote here, (quoting not only Dan Pfeiffer but also
) an analysis of the 2024 elections from Catalist, shows, as Silver writes:No single demographic characteristic explains all the dynamics of the election; rather we find that the election is best explained as a combination of related factors. Importantly,an overarching connection among these groups is that they are less likely to have cast ballots in previous elections and are generally less engaged in the political process . (Emphasis added—and worth repeating)
An overarching connection among these groups is that they are less likely to have cast ballots in previous elections and are generally less engaged in the political process.
How do we reach them? Not through the ballroom.
More about Trump’s ballroom, his repulsive social media posts or clickbait engineered by Steve Bannon about running in 2028 won’t move the needle in the only measure that matters—winning the House and making gains in the Senate.
The subject line on my morning email from Politico Playbook read, “Trump: ‘I’d love to’ run in 2028. If you follow the blatherer-in-chief at this website I’ve previously warned you about1you’ll soon see him continue to elevate something that is not going to happen with words like this:
“I would love to do it — I have the best numbers ever! … Am I not ruling it out? You’ll have to tell me. All I can tell you is that we have a great group of people, which they [the Democrats] don’t.”
Please, let’s all make an effort to steer conversations away from conspiracy theories and outrages and towards solving what I keep referring to here as the “dog food problem,” quoting the former Virginia Congressman who said 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, along with any belief that voting or politics can make a difference in people’s lives, or should be taken any more seriously than professional wrestling.
Let’s not obsess about the hundreds of reasons why—as the news breaking this moment tantalizes, Trump needed an MRI.
Let’s not even take up my suggestion to google “Trump threatens” to measure where we are as a country. (I got 62,900,000 results when I started writing that column, and it went up to 79,200,000 by the time I finished. Now it’s at 80,700,000).
Let’s figure out how to make the issues we all read about in our favorite Substacks important to people who don’t read them and turn them back into citizens who believe voting matters.
Only because a window into every word Donald Trump says in public could be dangerous to your health