More Notes On Trump's Unprecedented Ugliness and Becoming The Ferocious Opposition

Some Friday thoughts on how Hopium is likely to evolve next year

Good morning all. Each Substack has a short description of what to expect if you subscribe. Here’s what we have for Hopium:

Expert commentary from a 30-year veteran of US politics. Here at Hopium we work on strategies to defeat MAGA, tell our story more effectively, and ensure freedom and democracy prevail. Expect sharp analysis, live events, and all sorts of Hopium!

Tell our story more effectively. As you’ve heard me say “we need to be talking more about us and less about them.” So my bias here, day to day, has been to talk about us, the greatness and goodness of our party, our leaders, America and not dwell on them. They are loud. Their stories and memes break through. Ours struggle to. So here I’ve focused far more on telling our stories. As I wrote in the very first Hopium post:

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.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to maintain this optimistic orientation of early Hopium - something I see as a strategic necessity, not wishful thinking - once Trump and the Republicans take over next year and we become the opposition and no longer the governing party. A newsletter that just recounts their ugliness each day is not something I want to write, or read. While we cannot look away, spending all our time talking about them and their darkness would put us in service of their mission, not ours.

Let’s go through some of today’s news as a way of exploring this dilemma.

Trump crypto venture partners with platform linked to Middle East militants, Reuters:

A crypto venture recently unveiled by President-elext Donald Trump and his new Middle East envoy, billionaire Steve Witkoff, has partnered with a crypto platform that authorities and financial experts say has been used by criminals and Iran-backed militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

This story is one of the craziest things I have ever read.

Trump’s Middle East Adviser Pick Is A Small-Time Truck Salesman. NYT:

The lore around Massad Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, is that he is a billionaire dealmaker. Records show otherwise…….

President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming Middle East adviser, Massad Boulos, has enjoyed a reputation as a billionaire mogul at the helm of a business that bears his family name.

Mr. Boulos has been profiled as a tycoon by the world’s media, telling a reporter in October that his company is worth billions. Mr. Trump called him a “highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the international scene.”

The president-elect even lavished what may be his highest praise: a “dealmaker.”

In fact, records show that Mr. Boulos has spent the past two decades selling trucks and heavy machinery in Nigeria for a company his father-in-law controls. He is chief executive of the company, SCOA Nigeria PLC, which made a profit of less than $66,000 last year, corporate filings show.

There is no indication in corporate documents that Mr. Boulos, a Lebanese-American whose son is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Tiffany, is a man of significant wealth as a result of his businesses. The truck dealership is valued at about $865,000 at its current share price. Mr. Boulos’s stake, according to securities filings, is worth $1.53.

As for Boulos Enterprises, the company that has been called his family business in The Financial Times and elsewhere, a company officer there said it is owned by an unrelated Boulos family (bold added for emphasis).

Mr. Boulos will advise on one of the world’s most complicated and conflict-wracked regions — a region that Mr. Boulos said this week that he has not visited in years. The advisory position does not require Senate approval.

This story is also one the craziest things I’ve ever read.

Trump and his fellow co-conspirators in Georgia election theft case

Here is how Paul Krugman ends his very smart (and a bit wonky) new Substack post, From Exorbitant Privilege to Invaluable Ignorance:

So, does it matter that Trump is invincibly ignorant about trade, his signature issue? I think so. He imagines that other countries are taking advantage of America and will meekly comply with his demands that they stop; that’s not how they see it, and he’s going to face ugly retaliation — those “subsidized” Canadians are already talking about export taxes on oil and uranium. You’d like to think that when everything goes wrong — when his demands that foreigners both invest in America and stop running trade surpluses aren’t met, because that’s arithmetically impossible — he’ll back off and take advice from the adults in the room. But there won’t be any adults in the room. And I have no idea what comes next.

A new Washington Post story details the four dozen - yes four dozen - ways you can put money directly into Trump’s pocket:

The advent of President Trump 2.0 has a distinct “one last big score” feel to it. Trump repeatedly hawked Trump-branded items on the campaign trail, certainly more energetically than he personally promoted the idea that people should contribute to his campaign. He has long understood that politics finally gave him the brand dominance he had long sought, but he has seemingly worried that leaning into that dominance to sell stuff to his fans might hurt him politically. It didn’t, and he has no more campaigns to run, so he is much more obviously interested in wringing cash out of his fame.

Or the false blather, bullshit and invention that will soon return to our lives, daily. He may have won the election but Trump is still that same man we saw during the campaign - a rapist, fraudster, traitor and felon, diminished, delusional and disgusting. Listen to this ridiculous clip from yesterday that ends with him suggesting apples in grocery stores are refrigerated (maybe in Moscow!!!!):

The ugliness of all this can be overwhelming, and depressing. What I am struggling with is that I just don’t think a newsletter that looks like this everyday, while perhaps necessary, will be successful. Nor is it in the spirit of early Hopium.

Which is why this new poll from AP-NORC suggests a path forward. It found shockingly low approvals for some of Trump’s cabinet nominees, and many, many Americans without an opinion yet.

This data reminds us why, as we go forward, we cannot look away no matter how ugly it gets, or “obey in advance;” and why in this daily battle for our future we need to keep fighting, being loud, info warring. For while they have a huge advantage in the information space every day, Trump has already overplayed his weak hand with his ridiculous nominees, and he is still the lumbering, diminished, reckless buffoon we’ve seen on the trail this past year. Trump is a weak man, not a strong man, and what this AP data tells us is that our family has an enormous opportunity in the coming days to define the unacceptable 4. and his early Presidency. Doing so will require us to start playing the game very differently, and start operating as a true, networked 24/7/365 communications ecosystem. In this recent essay I laid out some thoughts about how we do this, and emphasize one big piece of what has to be our new approach - elected officials themselves must come to understand their role as one that is not just about governing or legislating but also about communicating, every day:

Finally, our elected officials, every single one of them, at all levels of government, need to get louder in every way possible every day. There has to be a revolution in how we see the role of an elected official, both on the official side and on the campaign side. Electeds need to not only govern and legislate, but also should see themselves as influencers and info warriors with enormous platforms to help shape the information environment every day, 24/7/365. Simply, they have to work it as hard as they can, every day, using all the tools at their disposal.

What does all this mean for Hopium next year as we move from governing to opposition party? Strategically, we will still be Hopium - optimists, patriots, believers that tomorrow can be better than yesterday. But tactically, as we move into opposition, we may be spending more time understanding - and defining - them than telling our story. It is my core belief that the central reason we lost to Trump after having had good elections in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023 is that there was a collective failure to define him with far too many voters. It’s why we need to see ourselves not as the loyal opposition but as the ferocious opposition, and fight like hell every day, not just in the few months before an election. Trump remains the ugliest and most dangerous political thing we all have ever seen, and job one in Hopium’s mission - defeating MAGA - is still far from done.

Fighting Trump’s Unacceptable 4 - As I wrote Wednesday the fall of Assad and the humiliation of Putin should make it harder for Trump to get his unacceptable 4 - Hegseth, Gabbard, Patel and Kennedy - confirmed. The world has just grown far more complicated, making these unqualified and unfit nominees even more of an an unacceptable risk. Putin has stumbled, badly - again - and alliance with him may be far less appealing for Republicans going forward. The pro-Russian, anti-NATO stances and statements of many MAGAs, including these 4, will be far harder to defend in the confirmation process. We just have to keep working it peeps:

• Call your Senators and Representative to let them know your dissatisfaction with the rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth and Robert Kennedy; and to inform them of your expectation that they will leave it all out there on the playing field to block these profoundly dangerous nominations whether they have a vote on them or not.

• Contact the White House and ask President Biden to order the FBI to begin background checks into Trump’s nominees immediately and before Trump installs Patel to disable the process. Last week the Trump team signed an agreement allowing these background checks to go forward. President Biden should do Mr. Trump a favor and expedite the clearance process for the most sensitive jobs of State, Defense, DNI, CIA, Homeland Security and HHS (pandemic preparedness) so the new team can hit the ground running in January.

What Happened, What Comes Next - To help make sense of what happened in the 2024 election and where we go from here I’ve launched a new video discussion series to bring outside voices and experts into our conversation here, one that starts with many more question than answers. Here are the first seven of our discussions:

• Senator-elect Ruben Gallego - On winning Arizona in a tough year, getting Latinos back and what he’ll be working on in 2025

• Anderson Clayton - On our impressive electoral wins in North Carolina

• Ken Martin - MN Dem Chair, a leading candidate for DNC Chair on the future of the DNC and the Democratic Party

• John Della Volpe - On Trump’s gains with young people, particularly young men

• Joe Trippi - On the power of networks and the need to build our own

• Elaine Kamarck - On the perils of DOGE and lessons from Clinton’s reinventing government

• Rep. Abigail Spanberger - On winning Virginia in 2025!

  Learn more about Abigail | Volunteer | Donate To Her Campaign | We have already raised more than $10,000 towards our $100,000 goal!

You may also find these two segments from our fall Closing Strong collaboration with COURIER Newsroom and Tara McGowan useful:

• On The Need For Pro-Democracy Media - With Tara McGowan and Dan Pfeiffer

• Beyond MAGA Creators - Russia’s influence on the Republican Party runs deep with Stewart Stevens and Jiore Craig

And here are my two most recent post-election videos and analyses:

• For Dems It’s A Time For Re-imagination, Re-invention and Innovation

• More Notes On What Happened And What Comes Next

I’ve set up a thread for paid subscribers to offer their thoughts on what this wonderful and plucky community should do next. I’m grateful for the many comments we’ve received so far. Weigh in if you can in the coming days, and note that an annual Hopium paid subscription is now 10% off through the end of the year for those who may want to sign up or give a bit of Hopium as a holiday gift!

Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon