What The Hell America!

Expect a bizarre scene at the White House today, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is showing up to sign an agreement pledging some Ukrainian rare-mineral rights to the United States—theoretically in exchange for further U.S. opposition to Vladimir Putin engulfing his country. Trump has been whipsawing all over in his rhetoric on the conflict: Last week, he accused Ukraine of starting the war and called Zelensky a dictator. Yesterday, he was all jokes on the matter: “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that.” Happy Friday.

by Lauren Egan

Democratic voters are pissed off with their party’s leaders. And increasingly, top officials fear they may topple them.

The data are becoming hard to ignore. This February, a Quinnipiac University poll found that only 21 percent of voters approve of how Democrats in Congress are handling their job while 68 percent of voters disapprove. More recently, a CNN survey showed 73 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents thought congressional Dems were doing too little to oppose Trump.

For many, it foreshadows the possibility that the party could be consumed by primary challenges in the 2026 cycle—fueled by anger that leadership isn’t up to the challenge of taking on Trump.

“It’s vitally important, again, that people who are elected—and particularly those in leadership positions—stand up and say: ‘Red alert, everybody. Your rights are being taken away,’” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said in an interview with The Bulwark. “It’s the Tea Party movement that we saw in 2010 beginning to gather in 2025 on the Democratic side.”

The situation facing Democrats is different from the first Trump administration, in which the grassroots was mostly in harmony with elected leadership in trying to oppose the president’s sweeping actions.

Democratic leadership insists it can meet the current demands. In recent weeks, they have made a show of protesting Trump’s nominees, ratcheted up attacks on Elon Musk, drawn sharp lines in the budget debate, and gone after Republicans for threatening to cut Medicaid. But it’s not clear, as of now, that their voters are convinced.

Last week, protesters showed up at Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s Brooklyn office calling on him to be more aggressive with Trump. They’ve been bird dogging Jeffries for some time, as he holds events around the country promoting his children’s book. (Yes, Jeffries has been on a post-election promo tour for an illustrated children’s book, The ABCs of Democracy). Having spent the better part of the last two years warning that Trump posed an existential threat to American democracy, they seem unsatisfied with the occasional press conference skewering Trump or milquetoast critiques of Musk delivered during evening MSNBC.

“There’s a sense of a leadership vacuum—that the Democrats in leadership adopted a strategic silence or a ‘bipartisanship first’ frame when it came to the new administration after spending two years saying that this guy was Mussolini,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of the grassroots group Indivisible, whose members have had a big presence at some of the recent protests of Jeffries.

Some members of Congress are already feeling the heat back home. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) was interrupted during a speech in his district last week by attendees calling on him to do more to reign in Trump and protect American democracy. He didn’t appear to have much patience. “I got elected,” he said, according to a video published by MassLive. “You want to decide that? You need to run for Congress.”

Lynch might want to be careful what he asks for.

Run For Something, the group that recruits and trains first-time Democratic candidates to run for office, said that about 500 to 600 people are reaching out to them each day expressing interest in running for office. More people have signed up with the group since the 2024 election than did in the entire 2017 calendar year.

“It’s frustration with, obviously, Republican leadership. It’s frustration with Democrats’ style,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of the group. “It’s not going to fall cleanly on progressive versus moderate or centrist [lines]—that’s not the division we’re gonna see. It’s going to be willing to fight and have the skills to fight in this media environment versus neither stomach nor skills.”

Lakshya Jain, co-founder and CEO of the election data analysis firm Split Ticket, who recently wrote about why Democrats might be at risk of their own Tea Party movement, said that the level of party dissatisfaction among base voters this early on in a new administration is particularly unusual. Even in 2009—when the original Tea Party started brewing—he noted that Republicans were popular with their own voters. Their support didn’t start to crack until closer to the midterms.

“One way or another, this is going to end up coming to head very quickly because it’s not a sustainable equilibrium,” said Jain. “If you just look at the polls, any time you have this deep level of discontent, it indicates that the public is not afraid to make some change.”

There’s a long way to go until midterm primary season—and a lot can happen before we’re even close to candidacy filing deadlines. Until then, Democrats can bone up on The ABCs of Democracy.

THE EPSTEIN FILES: The internet, as we all know, is real life now, and nowhere more so than in the current White House, which spends remarkable heaps of time fine-tuning its political messaging for a particularly insane splinter of the turbo-online right. We got the most bizarre example yet of that phenomenon yesterday, when a group of MAGA influencers (after having met, according to one attendee, President Donald Trump, Vide President JD Vance, National Security Advisor Mike Walz, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr., and Secretary of State Marco Rubio) came prancing out of the White House brandishing binders labeled “The Epstein Files.”

The financier Jeffrey Epstein’s shocking sex-trafficking charges, wide-ranging elite connections, and suspicious apparent suicide have long fueled online theories. In the most extreme, QAnon-adjacent version of these theories, the government is sitting on a trove of files linking hordes of elite political and media figures the world over to Epstein’s predations. Trump, never one to let anti-elite theorizing go to waste, had promised on the campaign trail to get to the bottom of it.

Yesterday’s stunt, however, failed rather badly. If these files were so important, some MAGA types wondered, why had they been dispensed to a gaggle of goofy posters? When it became apparent that nothing in the important-looking binders was actually new—the contents had all been published online before—a circular firing squad sprung up at once. Why had Attorney General Pam Bondi not released the good stuff, the juicy stuff?

Well, said Bondi: It’s because the FBI is still covering it up. In a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel that she immediately leaked to conservative media, Bondi said that a New York FBI office was still sitting on Epstein information, and demanded it be handed over at once. (Why Bondi didn’t get this out there before the White House’s influencer-binder photo op, she didn’t explain.)

Do more files related to Esptein—perhaps containing actual new revelations—actually exist? Could be!

But it seems unlikely that they will live up to the wildest imaginings of the online cadre expecting to see some society-wide reckoning result from these revelations—which means there must always be some truer, realer, deeper Epstein files just out of reach, on the tantalizing precipice of discovery.

Anyway, we did a YouTube video on all this, if you’re interested.

THE SHELL GAME IN ACTION: Elon Musk’s companies have billions upon billions of dollars in federal contracts. And now that he’s become the emperor of which federal contracts stay and which ones vanish, DOGE keeps hacking away at oversight offices that had been investigating his companies.

But lately, Musk has been taking the brazen conflict-of-interest game even further. The world’s richest man has been rabble-rousing online against his competitors with their own government contracts in an apparent attempt to build GOP support for giving that business to Elon instead. The strategy appears to be bearing fruit, per the Washington Post:

The Federal Aviation Administration is close to canceling a $2.4 billion contract to overhaul a communications system that serves as the backbone of the nation’s air traffic control system and awarding the work to Elon Musk’s Starlink, according to two people briefed on the plans.

The Post notes drily that tearing up the contract currently held by Verizon “would represent a significant test of protections against conflicts of interest in government projects.” Musk insists he is just updating a rapidly, dangerously decaying system (amazing how that happened in the span of a month) and will be offering Starlink’s services for free.

But here’s what’s even more remarkable: He isn’t the only one slagging on Verizon this week. Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr sent a letter to the telecom giant yesterday accusing it of failing to halt its DEI initiatives quickly enough. “I am concerned by Verizon’s continued focus on promoting DEI,” Carr warned. “I expect all regulated businesses to end invidious forms of discrimination.”

Coincidence? Perhaps. But with Musk wielding remarkably unchecked power across the federal government and Trump continuing to back him to the hilt, there’s undeniable pressure on other agency heads to remain in his good books.

A GRIM ANNIVERSARY: Cathy Young writes in to commemorate the death of a former Russian opposition leader:

Ten years ago yesterday, a murder in Moscow became a grim signpost on Russia’s road to hell. Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down a short distance from the Kremlin on his way from a late-night dinner. Five Chechen hit men were later convicted, with no official mention of the person(s) behind the hit. But given that the shooting happened in an area tightly controlled by state security and that Nemtsov himself was likely under FSB surveillance, the “who” in this whodunit is pretty clear.

A liberal political star in the 1990s, the charismatic Nemtsov was often touted as a possible successor to Boris Yeltsin, under whom he was deputy prime minister. Instead, he found himself targeted by Vladimir Putin’s rising authoritarianism. He was harassed, arrested, jailed; he still persisted.

Nemtsov’s legacy is especially relevant today because he was a staunch supporter of Ukraine and its pro-Western revolutions in 2005 and 2014. The protest he was to lead on March 1, 2015 was against Russia’s covert war in eastern Ukraine disguised as a separatist insurgency. Notably, at the time of his murder, he was apparently finalizing a report documenting Russia’s role. “The war will go on. It’s horrible, of course,” he was quoted as saying, sounding eerily prophetic.

For many Russian dissidents, Nemtsov’s death felt like the death of hope. And yet today, a glimmer of hope can be seen in the footage of people braving arrest to lay flowers at the spot where he was killed.

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