Dems Win Important Specials In Virginia, Not Letting Trump's Madness Become Our Own

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Jan 08, 2025

Good morning everyone. We had a good night in Virginia last night, winning special elections for the State Assembly and Senate that keep our narrow margins in both chambers in tact:

After Srinivasan and Cifers take office, Democrats will hold a 21-19 majority in the state Senate. If Democrats had lost the special election for the Loudoun County seat, control of the chamber would have gone to the Republicans, because GOP Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears holds tiebreaking authority.
After Singh is sworn in, Democrats will maintain their 51-49 majority in the House of Delegates. A win by the Republican candidate would have resulted in a 50-50 tie.

Our two candidates matched Harris’ margin in their districts, while the Republican State Senate victor failed to match Trump’s. So a good night.

As we gear up for the 2025-2026 cycle, Virginia will be a central focus for us this year. Partnering with our friends at Network NOVA and the DNC, this community played a major role in getting us those narrow margins in the VA legislature in 2023, raising more than $300,000 for six targeted races, 4 in the House and 2 in the Senate. We won 5 of our 6 races which were the difference between us being in the majority or minority in both chambers.

Our six 2023 VA candidates (left to right) - Schuyler VanValkenburg, Michael Feggans, Russet Perry and Josh Thomas, Joshua Cole, Kimberly Pope Adams

Our work in flipping the VA Assembly, keeping the Senate and defeating Youngkin’s 15 week abortion ban and electing the first black Speaker in Virginia’s history was the first major electoral project this community undertook, and it was very successful. It set the stage for our highly impactful 2024 work across the US. Together we logged an incredible number of volunteer hours; led organizations that did remarkable work in states across the country; and raised more than $6.5m from mid-October of 2023 to November of 2024 for our candidates and state parties.

So, yes, Virginia will be very much on our mind in 2025. We’ve made one endorsement so far - Abigail Spanberger for Governor of Virginia. You can watch my recent interview with her here, learn more and donate too. She is a great candidate and this is one of 2025’s true must win races. Congrats to all of you who worked on our wins last night, and am excited to be gearing up to go win many more races with all of you this year.

Not Letting His Madness Become Our Own - As we’ve discussed over the past few months not letting his games, madness, ugliness and extremism overwhelm and get the better of us. This site and the many other pro-democracy media orgs will fail if all we do is post the latest Trumpian outrage and persistently follow him down his many rabbit holes. We cannot let his madness become our own.

So as I did yesterday I plan on diving into his madness when it matters in the real world, not as theater, but as outcomes that effect our lives. Yesterday Trump did not rule out using force to seize Greenland, part of Denmark, a European and NATO ally; Canada, one of our largest trading partners and historically close ally (also a NATO member); and Panama. Elon Musk is openly working to dislodge and defeat pro-Western, pro-US governments in Europe, North America and the UK. So, yes, madness - but with very real world consequences.

In a important new Atlantic article, The New Rasputins: Anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe (gift link), the great Anne Applebaum writes about how “madness” has become a driving force of global and US politics:

The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.
When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.
This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law…

She concludes:

For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma. The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of America’s Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inoculation. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders—Lincoln, Roosevelt, King—quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.
By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

In a new Substack post, Is There An Insanity Premium On Interest Rates?, Paul Krugman writes about how even though the Fed has cut short-term interest rates, longer term interest rates have risen:

the interest rates that matter for peoples’ lives are longer-term: rates on 5-year car loans, 10-year corporate bonds, 15- or 30-year mortgages. And a funny thing has happened to those longer rates: they’ve gone up. Since the Fed began cutting, the benchmark 10-year Federal bond rate has risen by roughly the same amount the Fed funds rate has gone down.
This divergence is unprecedented.

He then writes:

Which brings us to #3: increases in long-term rates, like the 10-year Treasury rate, might reflect the horrible, creeping suspicion that Donald Trump actually believes the crazy things he says about economic policy and will act on those beliefs.
Look at the dynamic over the past few days. Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported that people around Trump were planning a fairly limited, strategic set of tariffs rather than the destructive trade war against everyone Trump has been promising; Trump quickly responded with a Truth Social post calling the report “Fake News” and declaring that he does too intend to impose high tariffs on everyone and everything.
In short, Sources: “Trump isn’t as crazy as he looks.” Trump: “Yes I am!”
Then, as if to dispel any lingering suspicions that he might be saner than he appears, Trump held a press conference in which he appeared to call for annexing Canada, possibly invading Greenland, seizing the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. This morning CNN reported that Trump is considering declaring a national economic emergency — in a nation with low unemployment and inflation! — to justify a huge rise in tariffs.
What does this have to do with interest rates? There’s near-unanimity among economists that Trump’s announced agenda of high tariffs, tax cuts and mass deportations would be highly inflationary, although probably not right away; whatever Trump does, inflation will probably remain low for much of this year. Still, if he were to go through with any substantial part of that agenda, the Fed would definitely have to put further interest rate cuts on hold. In fact, it might well feel the need to raise rates again.

One of our main goals here at Hopium in the coming era of Trump 2.0 is to work through the madness, the New Obscurantism and keep focused on how all of this impacts the real world, our world. We have to, as I talk about so often, distinguish between what people believe and what is true. And in the last few days there are a few things that are clearly true that we should be forcefully driving into the daily discourse as we seek to get louder and go 24/7/365 against them:

Trump’s claims on lands in Europe, North America and Central America are helping Putin and other global autocrats. It isn’t funny, or goofy. It is dangerous, a threat to the national security of the United States, to the American-led global order we imagined and built. The President and other leading Democrats should be denouncing what he is doing far forcefully.
Trump’s economic plans including tariffs, mass deportation/worker shortages and yawning deficits are *already* making things cost more in America, are already unraveling the strong economy he has inherited. The President and other leading Democrats should pointing this out far more forcefully.
Trump’s Unacceptable 4 - Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy, Patel - are all unqualified and dangerous, part of this new emerging world of charlatans and extremism Applebaum so brilliantly describes. The President and other leading Democrats should be making our case against them, far more forcefully, and should be waiting for the hearings to begin.
Trump is a serial criminal and traitor to the nation. We have to keep making the case, forcefully, for the release of the Smith Report, and for his Friday sentencing for his 34 felony convictions to take place without another rancid intervention by a corrupt Supreme Court.

As I wrote in the very first Hopium post in March of 2023:

I am calling it Hopium Chronicles because I want this to be a journey guided by hope and optimism, of belief in ourselves, in love of country and a clear understanding of the nature of the conflict we are in. I have become convinced that part of Greater MAGA’s strategy is to intentionally poison our discourse with negative sentiment every day. They want us to feel bad about America, our democracy, our leaders, our institutions, our success, each other, ourselves. We cannot let them do that any more. While they talk American down every day, we need to talk it up. While they spread lies, we respond with truth and data. Hopium is a rejection of the darkness they are trying to spread. It is a way of standing up for our great country and its remarkable people. It is the key to how we win.

Not sure we all thought we would be defending the Enlightenment in 2025, but here we are. And defeat, my friends, is not an option.

Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg

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