I see that Donald Trump is once again making elaborate promises that he will end the war any day now and get Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The mainstream media, especially Axios, is reporting this with a straight face, helping out Trump in his goal of manipulating the stock market. 

We should not be fooled. We’ve been down this road countless times in the past few months and, inevitably, things fall apart and the bombing begins again. Despite all his self-fluffery as a “dealmaker,” Trump is a very dumb man who couldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag. This war is likely not over until his presidency is, and anybody who claims otherwise is just playing into his hands. 

I wasn’t too surprised that the Michigan Democratic primary for U.S. Senate ended up closer than polling suggested it would be. A recent Emerson poll showed that Abdul El-Sayed’s lead over Rep. Haley Stevens came from voters under 50 and, unfortunately, older people vote in much larger numbers than younger people, especially in primary elections. Still, El-Sayed was able to turn out enough younger voters to push him over the top, which is a hopeful sign for the November election against Republican Mike Rogers. 

What is especially interesting to me is that Stevens had a massive fundraising advantage, with estimates suggesting she may have had 12 times as much money available, counting both direct spending and money poured in by outside groups. That may have closed the gap at the end, especially with all the scare tactics claiming El-Sayed wasn’t electable. Utimately, she still lost.

There’s a lesson in this, if Democrats are willing to hear it: Money is not everything. On the contrary, money is often the problem. The Democratic Party’s favorability rating is low, even as it keeps winning elections, because its own voters feel that Democratic leadership is too beholden to the rich and corporations to stand up for working people. So when they see politicians who benefit from heavy spending and who, like Stevens, have the wooden affect that suggests a fear of offending big donors, voters clock it. 

El-Sayed was able to turn the fundraising issue against Stevens, portraying all this outlandish spending as a sign that she was beholden to special interests and not the people. There’s an enduring fetish for money among mainstream Democrats, rooted in an addiction to consultants and a belief that expensive TV advertising is the heart of a campaign. These days, that approach tends to backfire, and the sooner that lesson is learned, the better. 

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As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye points out, Jeanine Pirro likely got her job as U.S. attorney in D.C. because, to quote her former employer Fox News, she’s a “reckless maniac” who will lie shamelessly to flatter the delusions of her new boss, Trump. She lied about the election in 2020, resulting in a nearly $800 million defamation judgment against Fox in 2023. And she has been all too willing to file charges against innocent people, all to support Trump’s childish inability to admit that his incompetent “repairs” damaged the Reflecting Pool, not “vandals.”  

But even though Pirro is evil enough to arrest and imprison people who did nothing wrong, she couldn’t get past a baseline reality: There was no possible way to convict those people in our judicial system. Even if she had been willing to risk disbarment, or maybe even criminal charges, by lying to a federal judge, it was vanishingly unlikely that she’d be able to put enough falsified evidence before a jury to get a guilty verdict. So she gave up, even though Trump may fire her for it. 

Even smart people would be unable to dismantle the judicial system entirely and rebuild it as the kangaroo court of Trump’s dreams, especially on the time scale he wants. Trump is even more hamstrung because he surrounds himself with incompetent boobs, those being the only people willing to do his dirty work. When it comes to legally vulnerable people, such as immigrants, that doesn’t matter as much, since it’s not that difficult to consign them to the gulag. But tthankfully, there are still real-world limits. 

This also serves as a reminder that fighting back works. These defendants no doubt wondered whether a guilty plea might make all this go away, but instead, they stuck it out and won. We should all keep that in mind.

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