Donald Trump has, in fact, damaged the economy. He’s juiced inflation and weakened the labor market and created deep uncertainty. But the public seems to think things are worse now than at any time since the Great Depression. And that is empirically not true.

So in this episode, Matt and Brian try to unravel the mystery of why perception and reality have departed from one another so dramatically.

* Does Trump in some sense deserve this economic discontent, for fanning it on the campaign trail and selling lies about lower prices, only to govern corruptly and incompetently?

* Is Trump just as much a victim as Democrats of a new media era in which negativity drives attention?

* And if smartphones and social media really are the main drivers of discontent, how much is due to viral misinformation, and how much is due to a more generalized malaise that arises from hours wasted scrolling?

Then, if weak economic sentiment is only loosely tied to real economic conditions, what can Democrats do about it? This episode contains real, actionable ideas: how to message through economic challenges; how to instill confidence in voters across lengthy campaigns, without overpromising; how to exploit right-wing governing failures for maximum partisan benefit.

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

Further reading:

* Matt on the Tyranny of Democratic Plansmaxxing.

* Brian on how MAGA is devouring itself before our eyes.

* Arin Dube’s new book on persistent labor market weakness and how to fix it.

Matt’s away this week. Or since he’s in London, maybe we should say he’s “on holiday” with a funny accent. In any case, Brian’s piloting solo this week, and since he’s always going on about “fighting,” we wanted to give the concept clearer shape.

In this conversation, Brian and the veteran political scholar Norm Ornstein discuss:

* When did needed political reform in America stop pertaining to modernization and become a more existential campaign to fascism-proof democracy?

* How have Democrats done so far, given that they’re the minority party in both the House and Senate?

* What could change between now and the midterms to better discharge their obligations?

Then, a look ahead. First: If Democrats win the midterms, what would resistance worthy of the Hungarian opposition look like in practice? What under-utilized tools should Democrats exploit? Where does impeachment fit in all this? Then: If Democrats have a chance to rebuild in 2029, what would it take to convince ourselves and the world that we’re really not going back this time? And—perhaps most important of all—is there any indication that the party, as currently staffed and led, has gamed this all out and begun preparing to act?

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

Further reading:

* Brian on what Democrats should—and shouldn’t—learn from Hungary.

* Brian on Trump’s plan to conceal, destroy, or sell the evidence of his corruption, perhaps before the midterms.

* Norm and Madeleine Dean on reining in the pardon power.

As we were all waiting on tenterhooks after Donald Trump threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization, Matt and Brian took a step back to examine why Democratic opposition to the Iran war hasn’t pierced public consciousness.

* Is Democratic infighting over the status of Hasan Piker a proxy for internal divisions over the war and the U.S. relationship with Israel?

* Is Matt right that Dems have opposed the war as aggressively as they oppose (e.g.) cuts to health care? Or is Brian right that they haven’t received much credit for their war opposition, because they aren’t really acting like you’d expect an opposition party to act in the midst of an existential crisis?

* Would a more procedurally aggressive form of opposition—impeachment resolutions, calls for an arms embargo—allow Democrats to appeal to marginal voters without necessarily “legitimizing” specific influencers, who tend to have bad ideas about all kinds of issues?

Then, are Dems stuck in an issue trap, or are they mainly uncertain of themselves because they’re leaderless? Do they need to make demonstrable moves to the right on issues like immigration, or do they need to echo charismatic figures like James Talarico and John Ossoff who have staked out mainline views on immigration and Israel with an unusually deft touch? Do they need a hard reset, the way Republicans did after George W. Bush’s presidency ended in failure, or is the Biden legacy mostly tarnished by his age, his allegiance to Benjamin Netanyahu, and the fact that he failed to vanquish fascism?

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

Further reading:

* Matt has progressive views about some things.

* Brian thinks Hakeem Jeffries should use his power to force impeachment votes to stage a referendum on the Iran war.

* On the attempted cancelation of Hasan Piker.

Donald Trump hasn’t been this unpopular since he incited an insurrection. But he’s still at least a bit more popular than an entity called The Democratic Party.

In this episode Matt and Brian discuss:

* Do Democrats deserve any credit for Donald Trump’s political woes?

* How should we square Democrats’ impressive performance in special and off-year elections with their underwhelming performance in the generic ballot?

* If Democrats change nothing between now and November, would they win big by default, or disappoint, leaving everyone wishing they’d undertaken a more serious rebranding?

Then, since nobody disagrees that Democrats have become toxically unpopular, we get at why? To what extent is it contemporaneous frustration with the weakness of the Democratic opposition, and to what extent is a longer-run disaffection with a party that’s moved left over the past couple decades. Have Democrats really changed stripes? Or are they right where they “should” be, given long-run liberal commitments to a robust welfare state and civil equality?

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

Further reading:

* Brian argues Dems don’t necessarily need to sweat their generic ballot woes, but can only fix them by picking more fights with Donald Trump.

* Matt thinks Democrats’ uniform moves to the left since 2008-2012 are the culprit.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the counterproductive aspects of intersectional political rhetoric: “If you can extend the the temporality out just a little bit of the struggle I think it makes the mistakes not better, but understandable. It’s very, very hard to get any movement of humans to always act right, speak right, talk right. I really, really wish people read more about the civil rights movement deeply because they were fucking up all the time.”

Donald Trump seems to want out of the Iran war AND out of the Department of Homeland Security shutdown. But only if he can get out by being an even bigger asshole.

In this Matt and Brian discuss:

* Trump’s latest, inscrutable, and quite likely corrupt machinations to end his war of choice (or at least prosecute the war without throttling global oil supply);

* Signs that Republicans are catching more heat than Democrats for the DHS shutdown (and the ensuing long lines at airports);

* Whether it was wise or unnecessarily risk averse for Democrats to offer to fund TSA and other non-immigration components of DHS (to avoid blowback from weary travelers).

Then, does the fact that Democrats have maintained unity in this fight for the past 40 days redeem Chuck Schumer at all? (No.) If not, does it suggest that the Senate Democrats who lost confidence in him aren’t really that interested in fighting after all? Will this kind of fighting help Democrats improve their abysmal approval numbers and lagging generic-ballot numbers? Or are they simply unpopular because they’re out of step, policy-wise, with the electorate?

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

Further reading:

* Brian argues that the real problem with Democrats’ policy agenda isn’t that it’s too far left, per se, but that it will, once again, crowd out the more pressing matters of democracy protection and accountability for fascism.

* Matt on the most perverse reason Trump hasn’t quite chickened out of the war.

* Perception of partisan ideology, by party ID.

Democrats are caught in a new and somewhat troubling fad, in which they promise working-class people extremely broad tax cuts, which, in practice, would make expanding the safety net all but impossible.

In this Matt and Brian discuss:

* The Oscars!

* What are these policies, where do they come from, and what would they mean, in practice, for other elements of the Democratic agenda?

* Is there tension between Revenuemaxxing™️ and Billionairemogging™️, and can it be resolved?

* Given all that will need to be rebuilt post-Trump, should Democrats embrace fiscal responsibility, or might there be some advantage to playing chicken with Republicans over the future of the American welfare state?

Then, Donald Trump seems pretty panicked about the consequences of his misbegotten Iran war. But not enough to chicken out. At least not yet. Why is that? What are the peculiarities of the global energy market that might explain it. If he’s waiting for global oil futures to hit crisis levels, what kinds of developments in the war might send it there? And can we count on Democrats to oppose war funding?

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

Further reading:

* Matt on quagmires.

* Brian on how the Iran war exposes the shallowness of the U.S. elite.

* The Yale Budget Lab on the Van Hollen tax plan.

* Matt Zeitlen on the oil shock. (Spoiler: it’s bad.)

Depending on whether you believe Donald Trump, or Donald Trump, or Donald Trump, his war in Iran is “very complete” or “just beginning” or “both.”

In this Matt and Brian discuss:

* Has Trump finally set in motion a disaster he can’t contain?

* What does TACO mean when others have a say over the disposition of events?

* Are we doomed to reprisal attacks and a long-lasting energy crisis?

Then, what the hell is Jared Polis thinking?! The governor of Colorado is apparently planning to commute the sentence of Tina Peters, a former election official who tried to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election. Should Polis’s partisan and ideological allies try to stop him? How? Is he acting purely in response to Trump’s threat of reprisals? And to the extent he really thinks it’s a good idea, what are his obligations as a retiring elected official serving at a time when liberal democracy is under severe threat?

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

Further reading:

* Brian asks why elites seem just as easily duped as MAGA nobodies.

* Matt’s prescient piece on the moral failure of liberal leaders to not act selfishly.

* Should Colorado Democrats impeach Jared Polis?

We’re at war with Iran all of a sudden, and nobody can say why, even the people who started the war. After closing the loop on the Texas Senate primary, Matt and Brian discuss:

* What was Donald Trump thinking?

* What consequences (regional, domestic, and global) should we be prepared for?

* What do we make of the Democratic response so far?

Then, because the war has no support and was not justified, the public is overwhelmingly opposed to it. This should tend to fracture Republicans and unite Democrats. But it raises some questions: Will the progressives who couldn’t bring themselves to admit that Kamala Harris was the more anti-war of the two candidates in 2024 link arms with Democrats? Will the Trump supporters (GOP propagandists, marginal voters) who claimed to support Trump on anti-war grounds change their thinking? How much intra-GOP strife is driven by antisemitism? And what’s the best way to make sense of the mixed messages and buck passing already leaking out of the administration?

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

Further reading:

* Matt on the failure of the anti-antisemitism movement.

* Brian argues Trump uses war abroad as an instrument of domestic politics, which he in turn views as civil war by other means.

* Our initial views on the state of the Talarico v. Crockett Senate primary.

You can’t say Donald Trump used his State of the Union address to distract from the Epstein files!

In this episode, Matt and Brian discuss:

* How boring the speech was;

* Whether boring is better for Trump, given his political predicament, than stuntiness;

* Should the Democrats who chose to attend be ashamed of themselves?

* All of the lies.

Then, are we finally going to have it out over whether Trump sexually assaulted any of the girls or women he met through Jeffrey Epstein? Will the Supreme Court decision vacating his tariffs be viewed as a turning point in his administration?

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

They’re calling it the liddlest, tiniest government shutdown of all time. Democrats are demanding changes to policy that helps Trump’s immigration police get away with abuses. So they’ve shut down the Department of Homeland Security and only the Department of Homeland Security.

In this episode, Matt and Brian discuss:

* How we ended up with such a narrow shutdown, instead of one that spanned multiple cabinet departments;

* Whether this was a mistake or a savvy move;

* What success (or “success”) might look like.

Then, the Epstein Files story is stuck behind our collective unwillingness in the political class to state plainly what we’re after: Whether Donald Trump abused children, and what the consequences should be if he did? Why is the administration so allergic to accountability for non-Trump associates of Jeffrey Epstein? And, was Pam Bondi’s infamous performance before the House Judiciary Committee last week secretly brilliant?

All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.

Further reading:

* Brian reconceives of the Trump-2024 campaign as a conspiracy to conceal the Epstein Files.

* Halina Bennet on the ICE accountability gap.

* Roger Sollenberger on a credible allegation of child sexual abuse against Donald Trump.