Another Strong Jobs Report, DNC Candidate Forum Tomorrow at 11am ET, And Yes Our Next President Is A Serial Criminal
Sending love to Los Angeles today.......
Good morning all. We got the last jobs report of the Biden Presidency this morning, and it was another good one - 256,000 jobs, far more than what was expected. Unemployment rate at 4.1%, widely considered to be “full employment.” Wages have risen 3.9% over the past 12 months, outpacing the inflation rate 2.8% during this period. Here are my core economic graphs, updated:
Note that the 256,000 jobs created this month is over 2 years of job creation under the last 3 Republican Presidents.
Three additional points:
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris inherited an extraordinary mess and made things far better for Americans and America. Trump and Vance are inheriting one of the best first days of any Presidency in the modern era.
The inability of Democrats to tell a simple story - that things get better under us and worse under them - has been an extraordinary and deeply consequential collective failure of our Party over many years now.
Trump’s reckless and dangerous agenda is already causing interest rates to go up and prices to rise. The strong Biden economy Trump has inherited is already unraveling.
My long-time collaborator Rob Shapiro has a smart new essay up at the Washington Monthly on Trump’s team attempting to walk away from core campaign promises on mass deportation, lowering prices and tariffs:
Economic reality catches up with every president, and Donald Trump is no exception. His Mar-a-Lago entourage and perhaps the president-elect are already learning that what’s promised either cannot be fulfilled or would be terrible if it was. So now they’re backpedaling on his three central campaign commitments.
Yesterday Elon Musk backed off their commitment to cut $2 trillion from the budget (unrealistic, also economically and politically dangerous) while the Washington Post reports this morning that his DOGE project is somehow already sending people to talk to folks in the federal government (yikes!). In a new Substack column this morning Paul Krugman warns of that Trump may try to falsify government economic data to hide the inflation and price hikes his agenda is already causing.
Politico reports this morning that the Trump transition is struggling to get their nominees ready for their confirmation hearings. Underneath the bluster and blather there is also a shitshow:
The Trump transition’s weeks-long dawdling on signing agreements with the White House and Justice Department — along with its rejection of federal email servers, office space and other resources — may be coming back to bite them.
Republicans’ ambitions of confirming a swath of key Cabinet members by Inauguration Day are fading fast as senators in both parties complain that they haven’t yet seen the FBI background checks and financial disclosures they typically receive at least a week before holding a hearing on a nomination. The delays have already prompted the Senate Agriculture Committee to postpone its hearing for DONALD TRUMP’s pick to lead the USDA and may also push back hearings with nominees to lead the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and the CIA….
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The Office of Government Ethics, which is responsible for ensuring federal officials sever financial ties with the industries they oversee, confirmed to West Wing Playbook that it has not yet finished processing and sending to the Senate the disclosures of any Trump nominees.
In a reminder we need to keep fighting Trump’s unacceptable 4 - Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy, Patel - 15,000 doctors sent a letter to Congress yesterday opposing Robert Kennedy’s nomination to be head of Health and Human Services. From NBC News:
More than 15,000 doctors have signed a letter urging senators to vote against confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services.
“The health and well-being of 336 million Americans depend on leadership at HHS that prioritizes science, evidence-based medicine, and strengthening the integrity of our public health system,” the letter reads. “RFK Jr. is not only unqualified to lead this essential agency — he is actively dangerous.”
The letter was posted online by the Committee to Protect Health Care, a physicians advocacy group. Beyond his well-documented anti-vaccine views and advocacy, the letter cites other conspiracy theories Kennedy has actively spread, including baseless claims about a link between school shootings and antidepressants and his promotion of disproven treatments for Covid-19.
“This appointment is a slap in the face to every health care professional who has spent their lives working to protect patients from preventable illness and death,” the letter says.
And yes, Trump is now officially a convicted felon.
Love To Los Angeles - There are many members of the Hopium community in Los Angeles, and I send my love to all of you.
My wife, Caitlin Durkovich, Deputy Homeland Security Advisor to President Biden, is one of the leads rallying federal support for the people of Los Angeles. She and the entire Biden team are working incredibly hard to do everything possible to support state and local efforts to fight the fire and lay the groundwork for a successful recovery. Here she is behind President Biden yesterday (light colored jacket on the left)
I am very very proud of the work she has done to help communities across the country prepare for and recover from disasters over these past four years. Perhaps I can get her to join us for a discussion about lessons learned from being on the front lines of mitigating and recovering from worsening climate disasters. She is going to have a lot more time on her hands in ten days……
Our friend Ben Meiselas from MeidasTouch was evacuated from his Los Angeles home this week and shared this video from a temporary location last night.
And yes, while all this is happening, Trump allies have begun their assault on blue state economies:
Love to all Angelenos!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There Is A DNC Candidates Forum Tomorrow, Saturday, at 11am ET - You can watch it live on the DNC’s YouTube channel. I make recommendations for improving the DNC and our political efforts more broadly in a new post and video, Raising Our Game, Building The Next Thing, Going 24/7/365. You can also catch my interviews on the 2024 election and the future of the Democratic Party with leading DNC Chair candidates Ben Wikler and Ken Martin, and NE Dem Chair Jane Kleeb and NC Dem Chair Anderson Clayton here.
This morning the DNC joined the fight to block the Republican Party from stealing a Supreme Court seat in North Carolina:
The Democratic National Committee on Friday attempted to stop North Carolina Republicans’ effort to invalidate tens of thousands of ballots from the November election and upend a state supreme court race that Democrats won.
The DNC filed a legal action on Friday to intervene in a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee in Wake county, North Carolina, in late December, seeking to throw out votes because of alleged missing information on registration forms.
This week, the North Carolina supreme court stalled the state elections board from confirming the results of a November supreme court race that their Democratic colleague, Allison Riggs, won by a margin of just more than 700 votes. The Republican candidate, Jefferson Griffin, has made claims of missing voter registration information in multiple legal filings before and after the election.
The actions in North Carolina have Democrats and democracy advocates concerned and fighting back over fears voters could be disenfranchised and elections overturned.
“For months, North Carolina Republicans have attempted to steal an election in plain sight at taxpayers’ expense, seeking to throw away some 60,000 lawful votes cast in the race for North Carolina supreme court justice,” the DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, said in a statement. “On November 5, North Carolina voters elected Justice Allison Riggs. Their voices will be heard.”
Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon
As we wrap up another crazy week two thoughts: 1) thank you. Love this community. Proud to be in this fight with all of you. 2) we need to be tolerant of fellow Democrats as we all seek to find our way in this new day. Folks are going to do stupid things, make bad decisions and we cannot freak out. This is a hard time. People are angry, scared, worried. Not everyone is going to be smart and good every day. We have to anticipate this and not cast people out from the tribe but work to help them find a better path. If we turn on each other it's over and they win today and for a long time. Onward - Simon
I rarely add my $0.02 cents here, but I have to dump it all here today, because most of yesterday's comments were ABSOLUTELY INSANE. I love my fellow Hopium mates but IMO some of us need a seriously frank reality check right now...
"It was because she was a woman. All those macho Latinos and young men who listen to podcasts didn't want her. I'm not sure we can afford to run a woman next time." I am begging you guys, absolutely BEGGING you to cut this out. This is the same shit people said after 2016 that made them feel compelled en masse to pick a boring centrist elderly white man in 2020 over all the other options. Years later, look where that got us. PLEASE do not do that again. Look, Harris lost because she was stuck being the VP to either the most or 2nd-most unpopular President in modern history, and was given 107 days to cancel out 3 years worth of negative sentiment from the public, which - while the attempt was exhilarating - proved to be impossible. (Biden was as unpopular for most of his whole term as Carter was at his nadir or Bush Jr. was right after Katrina!) Young men are more progressive in both economic and social attitudes than older men, and while some misogyny still obviously exists, insisting that bigotry is the engine powering the thinking of large numbers of young men who are potential Dem voters is so untrue, insulting, and alienating. I would like to remind y'all that the demographic shifts away from Dems in '24 were the same as in '22, when there was no biracial woman running for President. I would like to remind y'all that Hillary Clinton - a woman! - won Latino men by large margins. (Also, the President of Mexico is a Jewish woman.) I would like to remind y'all that Biden was losing in hypothetical polling to woman-of-color Nikki Haley by a landslide. Harris improved on Biden's polling among all groups, and won more raw votes than he did in '20 in WI, NV, NC & GA. The excitement of having her possibly make history powered voters TOWARD her in a way no Midwestern white dude could ever have managed. It just wasn't enough, because a billion dollars can't buy you more TIME, which is what she needed.
"I wrote a zillion postcards but we didn't win. What ways can we contact people other than mail, calls, and door-knocking?" Uh, none? Unless you believe in chemtraiIs and mass hypnosis, talking and writing are kind of the main modes of human communication. Even though postcarding makes for a more jolly activity, it is not as helpful as phone or text banking or frankly anything else, but folks here got reeeeeal touchy when that was pointed out.
"Ok, but why did I put effort into volunteering when clearly the ground game didn't make a difference?" It did make a difference, it just couldn't save the White House or our majorities. The admiration for Biden on here is *still* blinding people to how much grave damage he did. The Harris team have publicly described the internal polling when she took over as "gruesome" and "catastrophic," and the whole campaign as a "rescue mission" to pull off "a miracle." Biden was going to Iose every swing state by something like 8 or 9 points and likely take blue states down with him as well. The ground game makes something like a 2% difference, which is everything in a tied game, but won't save you if it's not. If we had not switched candidates AND had the best ever ground game, we would have lost at least 4 more Senate seats and dozens of House seats, guaranteeing Republican power for a generation.
"Why was the NYT not talking about the good Biden did BEFORE the election? It would have made a BIG difference!" It would have had the same impact as an editorial from Cronkite or Murrow, which is to say none. Old folks are having a *really* hard time grasping that. The data is clear that Harris/Dems whole loss came from low-information voters who avoid traditional media. My 24yo brother is a college-educated honors student and was a 4H **state ambassador,** and I genuinely don't think has ever held a real newspaper in his life, let alone read one. If the NYT shut down tomorrow he wouldn't even know. He wasn't going to vote until Harris took over, then voted for her on the basis that she was "more liberal and a nicer person and would rather see her face for a few years." He wanted to get "coconut-pilled" (look it up), and took note when Charli XCX proclaimed "Kamala IS brat" (look it up). He doesn't know what 60 Minutes is, but would have loved it if Harris had found her way onto Hot Ones (look it up). This is the world now, Grandma.
"I'm disowning Fetterman. Who could primary him?" LOL WTF GTFO This man could be a top contender for President in '28 if he wants to be, and we need to spend the years in between cloning him. He is a true progressive who campaigned hard for Bernie and Biden and Harris and won his swing state by FIVE points. Lemme get this straight: FDR got chummy with Stalin, but Fetterman merely agrees to meet with the President-elect who carried his state and you're MAD about that? He damned Trump with some backhanded compliments on a talk show and said he'd keep an open mind on the Cabinet and you're MAD before he even votes on anyone? Newsflash: every swing district person is gonna do that. Politics 101. Their job is to survive. Loud opposition is the job of folks in safe seats.
"If we need to get louder, why aren't we getting loud already? Where are our leaders?!?!" They are taking a damn minute to figure out what went wrong and what the new line of attack needs to be. We just lost to the worst people on Earth, remember? Maybe re-evaluating is needed before we start running our mouths again. Nothing has happened yet, and when it does we need to pick our battles.
"Why are all those Dems appeasing the enemy by voting for that Laken Riley Act? They should be opposing such a horrible bill!" You may like it or not, but the idea that we should detain someone who is a thief and not a citizen is a reasonable-sounding idea to most Americans. Hate to break it to you guys, but if a bill gets dozens of the opposing party members to vote yes, by definition that means it is incredibly popular and non-controversial. Our government is supposed to represent popular ideas, right? Don't complain when they do their job for once. Besides, Schumer & co. will almost certainly get amendments on it.
"Why was Obama being nice to Trump in that photo?" Because being polite to someone who you hate is what you do at a freaking FUNERAL (with assigned seating). What was Obama supposed to do, bend over and fart in Cheeto's face while the cameras are rolling? This wasn't a game of cooties, it was a FUNERAL.
"What can we do about these endless negative emails begging me for money?" Click the "unsubscribe" button at the bottom of the email. If it's a text, click the "block spam" button. You are asking why you have weeds in your garden, when you never pull up the weeds. Pull up the weeds and after a while they will stop growing. Just. Click. Unsubscribe.
"I think she lost because she focused too much on battleground states!" Holy crap. I'm out.