Steve Schmidt on his The Warning blog focuses on a story by Peter Nicholas, Carol E Lee and Megan Shannon concerning the reappearance of former president Joe Biden, offering to people close to him to raise funds, campaign and do anything else necessary for Democrats to recover lost ground from the rollbacks of Democratic Party-designed programs by President Trump. In a meeting with new Democratic National Committee chairman, Ken Martin, Biden offered his help to raise the popularity of the party from the 27% favorability of voters to which it has fallen of late, a ranking that is likely to keep falling in its struggle to regain its viability. A report says Donald Trump responded to a possible Biden re-entry into politics by declaring, “I hope so.” Schmidt says Trump is happy. DNC Vice Chair Jan Kleeb responded with, “The Kool Aid tastes delicious. If you were to call any state party chair and ask if they wanted Joe to be a keynote speaker for their annual dinner, the answer would be ‘Yes.’ He is beloved by the party and beloved by voters.” It is said the Bidens are sequestered with their team of gaslighters, all plotting how to make money on the books that are coming as they consult with former administration officials, and a snarky question arises: Biden is signed with CAA in Hollywood, so it is fair to ask who will play him in the dramatic pardon scene at the end of his tenure? Schmidt says Biden’s selfishness is his legacy, and wife Jill’s lust for power, combined with the insatiability of his advisers for more of it, has led America into an abyss — which leads into another tragic legacy: Trump. This is a legacy of catastrophe, and the reality is that Joe Biden will serve the sentence that he imposed on all of us in solitary. Schmidt concludes that the lies and delusions should be put down at last, with a realization that more Biden and Schumer is not the right path — the party is already in the ditch.

Schmidt slams Senator Schumer by mocking his ‘strategy‘: By not going after every single issue, picking only the most important fights, then lying down on the train tracks. He describes Schumer as “the career politician from Brooklyn, a cloistered man from a cloistered club, presiding over our national suicide — sublime, indifferent and capitulant. The view is good from the tracks for Chuck Schumer and his team of fools, who can watch the Trump locomotive run over them again and again and again.” Illinois governor JB Pritzker rejected Schumer’s appeasement, saying, “Trump is not somebody that you can appease. We’ve got to stand up and fight. And by the way, at the state level, I think many of us are. But I think that we’ve got to make sure that in the Senate and the House, that the people who have a platform are standing up.” Schmidt charges the Democratic Senate members with failing the country in an urgent moment, being ill-led, and corrupted by the touches of a thousand lobbyists, who know the lure of self-interest as a primary enticement which is more important than fighting for constituents. “The Senate Democrats are a team that can’t fight because at their head they have a man who can’t stand up. Chuck Schumer is a lay-flat type of man. This moment calls for stand up people with guts, integrity and a plan. JB Pritzker should appreciate two things: Chuck Schumer isn’t changing, and neither is Donald Trump. Let me close by saying something as clearly and directly as I can. Is there anything more grotesque than what Donald Trump is doing? Is there anything more grotesque than Elon Musk stomping about the US government like it is SpaceX? What about the purges, the lawlessness? The answer is yes, there is. It is the surrender to it all. It is the laying down on the tracks when the train is coming. Why can’t Chuck see it? Why can’t Chuck hear it? He is a most preposterous figure. He is a hollow man from a fallen age — the archetype of the 21st century politician so perfectly suited for our fallen moment. The age of silliness has ended, and along with it, any pretenses that menace isn’t real and malice hasn’t seized power in America. It has. The question now is, can we get it back?”

The bugaboo for ‘Real Time’ host Bill Maher is ‘deregulation,’ a repudiation of which he believes is dragging the Democratic Party downwards, suggesting the party is facing the same fate as the Whig Party which collapsed in the 1850s, and a notion they should embrace. He cited the American Redistricting Project’s outlook that Democrats will lose congressional seats in California, New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Oregon by 2030, with Republicans gaining seats in Texas, Florida, Idaho and Utah. “I mean, it looks like ‘game over.’ And the reason why people are voting with their feet is a lot what your book is about: taxes and regulation,” he told New York Times columnist and ‘Abundance‘ co-author Ezra Klein. “I’ve been screaming about it forever. We’re taxed (in California) more than any other state. People are leaving these kind of states for places where they don’t feel the heavy breath of government on them. It’s not that hard for Democrats to understand this, but they don’t. They seem to be incapable of doing anything about it,” he continued. Klein’s response cited polls revealing the reason people are ditching Blue States is ‘cost of living,’ stressing that if 2030 projections hold, the Red States will ultimately allow Republicans to win presidential elections without the Blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. “They are driving people out, working-class families, out of the states they govern because the cost of living is too high,” Klein says, linking it to regulations and taxes, adding, “But the big problem is they just don’t have enough energy, not a government capable of delivering, and they’ve been treating that as not a real problem.” He went on to praise Texas and cities like Houston and Austin which are booming because of their friendly environment for home and energy development, while noting the irony of the Texas GOP’s opposition to clean energy, yet able to thrive because of deregulation. “We need an Elon Musk who would do to California what he’s doing to the government — in a sane way. I mean, if you have 400,000 regulations and you cannot build a high-speed rail that started in 2008, you need somebody to come in here. Who is this person on the left?” Responding to his question, panelist and Substack writer, Andrew Sullivan said, “The left doesn’t want to deregulate. They just don’t have that instinct to deregulate. They’re gonna have to get over it, or they’re gonna be the Whigs.”

With the Democrats approval rating at 27%, Donald Trump’s star rose to a 44% rating, his highest-ever, prompting him to crow about it on Truth Social — still underwater, however, with 51% of those polled in disapproval. Americans who believe the country is on the right track also hit the 44% mark, with 54% saying we’re on the wrong track, but the Trump border security and immigration issues got a 55% approval. The economy polling has another topsy-turvy result with 54% disapproving of Trump policies, and a 44% approval rating in the NBC poll. Intra-party rifts and frustration consumed the Democrats in Congress as lawmakers approached a possible government shutdown a couple of weeks ago, as Senate Democrats had to decide between a House approved, GOP plan to keep the government afloat — a choice between backing Trump legislation giving him more power, or a shutdown forcing hundreds of thousands of workers to be idled. In the end, ten Senate Democrats sided with the MAGA side of the aisle avoiding a shutdown. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is asking for less animosity, calling for Dems to end the “intramural quarreling” in this “fight for democracy,” as “we fight in the dugout, being absent on the field and the other team scoring runs.” Senator Chris Murphy, a ‘no’ voter, said he gets it why some of his colleagues voted to avoid a shutdown, but this risk aversion led to the party sinking to a historic low in polling. “I understand that had we gone into a shutdown, even for a handful of days, it would have been difficult, but it would have sent a message that the Democratic Party is not going to be bullied by Donald Trump.” In a CNN poll, 57% of Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents feel that party leaders should focus on stopping the GOP agenda, with 42% wanting cooperation with Republicans.

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” though completely shuttering the 45 year-old agency will require an act of Congress. The workforce had already been cut in half, and dozens of grants and contracts canceled, all of which have drawn legal challenges. Former wrestling executive McMahon’s actions will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year department created by President Carter, as surely as Trump’s gutting of funding for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and effective closure of USAID. Not to be overlooked are his and RFK Jr’s attacks on vaccine science, Trump’s attacks on freedom of speech of university students and professors, and state attacks on teaching truth in our schools about America’s history of slavery and Native American genocide. Then we have attacks on libraries with an executive order mandating cuts in funding, which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, reliable internet for those without it at home, and homework help and other resources for students and educators. The same executive order cut funding for museums, and on the arts, as Trump appointed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center in DC. Robert Reich sees all this as an attack on the American mind, as “tyrants throughout history have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited slaves from learning to read. Nazi’s burned books. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.” Reich sees Trump as “the frontman in this attack which is really coming from the anti-democracy movement: From JD Vance; and from Vance’s major financial backer, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who staked Vance’s senatorial campaign and helped convince Trump to select Vance as VP; and from Thiel’s early business partner, Elon Musk.”

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Reich responded with, “Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power. Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone to being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the US is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment equality and justice is eroding America’s social order. In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major ‘shareholders’ select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime. Be warned,” advises Reich. Former Obama adviser, Steven Rattner, wrote on X, “The Department of Education provides crucial funding for low-income public schools — eliminating it would result in the loss of 6% of teachers’ jobs nationwide.” He presented a chart based on data from the Center of American Progress on states’ K-12 education funding under Title I, the Ed Department’s main federal program to help low-income students, showing Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Nevada, and Arizona — Trump states — as most reliant on that funding, and the most likely to lose hundreds of teachers, with many other Red States close behind. Rattner says this will likely lead to a devastating domino effect of educational instability in states that need it most.

Conservatives argue that other education department functions, such as administering loans, should be handled instead by the US Department of Treasury, and that civil rights infractions are the Department of Justice’s domain. Trump’s allies also want to expand school choice, which would allow students and families to use public money to select private or religious alternatives to public schools. But who can forget Trump’s primary victory speech in Nevada, when he said, “We won with the young. We won with the old. We won with the highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” This post on Quora captures that moment: “A person who misspells three-letter words, talks in code, cannot finish a single thought in a sentence, acts like a toddler, and only thinks of himself with a strong desire to be worshipped and loved by his followers, will almost literally roll over and have his belly scratched for money by actual billionaires and corporate goons. Although graduating from Penn State, claiming he went to Wharton School of Business, his professors said he was the dumbest person they ever taught — and who could prove otherwise since he forbids his school records to be divulged. Military school instructors called him the dumbest person on the planet. I peg his IQ at about a 75, slightly above my dog’s IQ, which is borderline Special Needs. The scary part is how many MAGA supporters think he is a very smart man — revealing volumes about their own IQs.”

“Trump, his chief of ghouls Stephen Miller, and his czar of white ethnonationalism, Tom Homan, have been making the rounds of calling out ‘rogue’ federal judges who dare to try to apply the law to Trump and his administration,” wrote Elie Mystal in The Nation. The chief executive has called out for the impeachment of US District Judge James E Boasberg, who ordered Trump to halt the deportations of Venezuelans to El Salvador — which Trump ignored. “That SEEMED to trigger Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, prompting him to pull out the weapon most preferred by institutionalists to fight the fascist takeover of the government: the sternly worded letter,” reports Mystal. Roberts issued a statement which read, in full: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” Mystal says people who don’t know any better are calling this a rare “rebuke” of the sitting president from the Chief Justice. “I urge people to not fall for the ‘Okiedoke,’ and to understand Robert’s statement for what it is: meaningless drivel from a man trying to protect his own stature instead of trying to protect the country from a tyrant.” Robert’s letter telling Trump that impeachment is not an ‘appropriate response’ to a judicial disagreement is like me telling Trump that he can’t jump off his roof and fly. It’s not a ‘rebuke’ to tell somebody they shouldn’t do what they physically can’t do anyway. Impeachment of federal judges follows the same rules as the impeachment of a president, a process familiar to Trump, where the House brings impeachment charges, and the Senate presides over a trial which requires a two-thirds vote for conviction. Mystal gets a dig in, when he says, “Trump controls the House, but he doesn’t control two-thirds of the Senate. Judge Boasberg is not Palestinian, so I don’t think Chuck Schumer will give Trump the extra votes he needs.”

“Justice Roberts knows all that. His statement is meaningless because it tells Trump not to do something he already can’t do. Roberts is sprinting to the head of the parade already in motion, just to look like he’s leading it,” says Mystal. Looking at what Roberts didn’t say, Mystal points out that Trump is in direct violation of Boasberg’s order, but Roberts avoided that, and instead of an admonishment, Roberts only invoked the ‘normal appellate review process,’ NOT saying Trump should litigate disagreements with the judge, but saying Trump should feel free to ignore lower-court orders until the Supreme Court has a chance to weigh in — essentially telling Trump what he wants to hear. Roberts is trying to maintain the appearance of power in the face of a president who has shown no inclination to respect it, with the Chief Justice desperately trying sound as if he’s in control, to avoid a judicial confrontation with Trump. Mystal calls it a delicate game, looking back in history to Chief Justice John Marshall’s attempt to maintain an appearance of judicial supremacy against President Thomas Jefferson — the Marbury v. Madison case in 1803. The case dealt with the seating of commissioners appointed by President Adams, seats Jefferson didn’t wish to fill, so a lawsuit was initiated by William Marbury. Marshall knew Jefferson was never going to fill those positions, and all the court orders in the world wouldn’t have mattered a whit to Jefferson, so Marshall deferred to the president, saying it was wrong not to seat the commissioners, but it didn’t matter anyway because the entire congressional law itself was unconstitutional. Mystal concludes, “He was bending the knee.” Turn down the echo machine!

A phone call between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss ending the war in Ukraine has comedian Jimmy Fallon casting a jaundiced eye, saying, “Both sides said the call went well, which makes sense because they’re both on the same side. Russia actually described the call as historic and epic, and nothing makes me feel safe like a happy Russia.” Despite the hype, the New York Times reported that the call accomplished nearly nothing, with Fallon joking, “The White House said Putin agreed to a partial ceasefire — at least they think he did. It was tough to hear on the phone with Elon’s kids playing tag in the background.”

Speaking of happy — the US has dropped to its lowest-ever ranking on the World Happiness Report conducted by Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Falling down one spot from last year, to 24th, and from the nation’s highest ranking of 11th place in 2012, rankings are determined from answers people give when asked to rate their own lives. Finland has held the top spot for eight years, followed by Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands in the top five; Costa Rica and Mexico entered the top ten for the first time, ranking sixth and tenth place, respectively. Brent Hartinger and Michael Jensen-Brent in the Washington Post say that people don’t want to go to parties anymore — along with other signs the world is coming to an end. They say Americans‘ current obsession with social media and “therapy culture” isn’t going to end well, as people who do show up at social gatherings are sitting to one side staring at their phones assuring that things rarely take off. The Wall Street Journal adds that it’s now socially acceptable — even something brag about — to cancel your plans with other people at the last second. Both publications blame these new social mores on America’s political polarization — who wants to socialize with people on ‘the other side’ anyway? They say it’s the lingering after-effects of COVID — but please, that’s not it at all; why are both newspapers pretending not to see what’s really going on? Smartphones and social media! Why bother interacting with actual human beings when you can have all your social needs met by living online? Teachers will tell us that kids are literally addicted to their phones, accustomed to the dopamine hits from social media that bring on actual symptoms of withdrawal when separated from their phones. The greater problem is that social media isn’t really real; it’s the illusion of intimacy. It gives people what we want, to keep us forever engaged and looking at ads — but not what we need. It’s also important to sometimes be bored. And remember, as great as cat videos are, actual cats are always better.