On the menu today: Good morning! National Review’s political reporter Audrey Fahlberg here, filling in for Jim Geraghty again before he returns to your inboxes next week.
On June 27, 2024, the world saw what Republicans and Democratic voter surveys had warned about for years: an octogenarian President Joe Biden who could no longer hide his cognitive and physical decline behind a curtain.
Democrats Still Lost in the Wilderness
“Even I was shocked” by Biden’s onstage performance that day, Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) told National Review on Thursday.
One year later, Biden has not receded from the spotlight as much as congressional Democrats had hoped. A new book released last month, Original Sin, revealed new details about the lengths to which Biden’s inner circle went to conceal his decline from the public (without adequately addressing the role the media played in the cover-up). And the administration’s recent release of special counsel Robert Hur’s hours-long interviews with Biden over his mishandling of classified documents has lent credence to Republicans’ years-long claims that Biden was cognitively unfit for office, let alone a second term. What’s more, House Oversight Chairman James Comer has pledged to continue investigating the 46th president’s use of the autopen while in office.
Meantime, Democrats are struggling to turn the page. Like every other Republican in Washington, Burchett now relishes Democrats’ inability to get their act together, politically, now five months into Donald Trump’s second term.
“They are a rudderless ship,” he says. “They can’t get out of their own way.”
Out of power, leaderless, and searching for a message, Democrats are trying to figure out how to effectively push back against the Trump agenda when Republicans enjoy a rare trifecta in government. For the first few weeks of the administration, that meant leaning into the anti-oligarchy message and protesting former DOGE czar Elon Musk’s joint efforts to shrink and reshape the federal bureaucracy. After Musk receded from the spotlight (and fell out of favor with Trump in the process,) they shifted their focus to Republicans’ ‘Big, beautiful’ tax-and-spend reconciliation bill, which they insist will cut Medicaid for the needy to offset big tax cuts for Republicans’ billionaire friends. Or as Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) put it to me recently: “Little children will go hungry so that Jeff Bezos can buy a third yacht.”
In recent days, Democrats have begun shifting their energy on Trump’s immigration agenda. Earlier this month, there were organized “No Kings” rallies across the country to protest the administration’s deportation strategy as inhumane and out of touch. The party’s decision to lean in on immigration — an issue that helped Trump win in 2024 — is another signal that Democrats are gambling that voter sentiment will swing in their favor ahead of 2026 in response to the Trump White House’s overreach on the issue.
Can Dems Get Their Act Together Ahead of 2026?
The national Democratic Party’s fundraising struggles and public infighting have not helped matters. Nor has self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary this week. Mamdani’s win has privately infuriated the normies in the party who are wary of being even minimally associated with a socialist in their party’s ranks. They’ll point to “centrist” former Representatives Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, Democrats’ 2025 gubernatorial nominees in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, as more tangible evidence of where the party is moving in the post-Biden era.
Earlier this month, a few hundred moderate pundits, strategists, and political junkies made that case at a conference in Washington, D.C. Here’s a fun readout of the confab from the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher and Reid Epstein:
The centrist wing of the Democratic Party gathered on Wednesday in a hotel basement in downtown Washington with a grand plan.
The party should start winning, and stop losing.
Surveying the wreckage of the 2024 election, the proud moderates here pleaded that their faction should seize control of the party’s messaging, stiff-arm liberal interest groups and experience the spoils of real-life victory, all while ignoring angry online activists.
The Democrats in the room aimed to put a new sheen on — and perhaps some more spine in — what has long been tagged as the mushy middle, arguing that they are the majority-makers the party needs in 2026 and beyond to take control of Congress.
But taking the mic and momentum away from the activist wing of the party isn’t easy when labor unions, climate lobbyists, anti-Israel groups run the show. Even at this so-called “CPAC of the Center,” progressives found a way to make their mark:
At one point, when Representative Ritchie Torres of New York was speaking, left-wing protesters stormed the stage chanting “Free Palestine” and unfurling banners about genocide.
The event organizers blasted the Carly Simon anthem “You’re So Vain” from the sound system during the interruption.
Even one year after Biden’s fateful debate, Democrats brush off questions about how the party can find its footing without any real leader at the helm.
“When has there ever been a leader in our off year like this?” says Representative Maxwell Frost (D., Fla.) a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We’re not a cult like them, so we don’t have a Trump-like figure looming over our party. This is normal.”
House Democrats are hosting listening sessions and caucus conversations to craft an affirmative message ahead of 2026, he says, when they hope to flip Republicans’ narrow majority. “We have progressive people. We have moderate people. We want to come together around something,” he told NR. Like other progressives, Frost thinks Democrats need to be bold. “I think we have to go big. So, if they’re taking away health care from 15 million people, I think part of our platform should be universal health care and going big on these ideas, and actually I’m passing it in the majority. . . . But we’ll see where we get as we have the conversations.”
ADDENDUM: The Wall Street Journal has a deeply reported piece today about how General Dan Caine, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has quickly risen in the ranks in Trump’s inner circle. Give it a read:
In his short stint in the new job, Caine has emerged as one of Trump’s closest advisers. In the week before and immediately following the strike, the general was in the White House nearly every day. During Saturday night’s operation in the Situation Room, Trump repeatedly turned to Caine for answers to his questions. Caine narrated the attack as it played out, displaying maps and explaining what was going on in real time. He told White House officials that he believed the Iranians never saw them coming, and answered the most questions of any official in the room. Trump looks to Caine for the straight facts about what is going on, said one senior U.S. official.
Jim will be back in your inboxes next week. Happy Friday and enjoy your weekend!