Weekly Wrap | How to Outlast MAGA and Stop Being Civil with Them

Evan Fields is a veteran who writes the Fourth and Democracy and Weekly Wrap newsletters for Lincoln Square. Subscribe to his News from Underground Substack.

Welcome to the Weekly Wrap – Lincoln Square’s newsletter meant to catch you up on conversations and details from live interviews and shows you might’ve missed during the week.

Trump & MAGA Get Thumped in Texas | The Weekly Assignment with Lavora Barnes

The Weekly Assignment with Susan J. Demas and Sam Osterhout welcomed Lavora Barnes to kick off the week and discuss the Texas state Senate election that saw the 9th district flip. As we prepare for more elections in November, there are concerns about the safety of polling places and elections.

Sam Osterhout: How do we trust anything that happens in this administration?

Lavora Barnes: We can’t. We can’t trust anything. We can’t trust them. It’s one of the questions that my daughter asks me, “how do we break through when they are in charge?” When they have all the seats in power.

And I said, “Well, that’s why electoral politics continue to be the important part because we have to take back control of something.” And then we have to, as Democrats take control, exercise every level of power we have to get into the details of what’s going on and clean out the corruption.

And that means that, frankly, Democrats are going to have to grow a set of balls – excuse me. But we can’t be afraid to step up and step out. We can’t be afraid to push for investigations. We can’t just win and then sit back and go “okay, we got it safe now.”

When we take control, and I feel very strongly that we will, then we’re going to have to use all the levers we can, including subpoenaing folks. We are really going to have to work hard at digging deep on what all of this mess is and getting it all cleaned out. They’ve done such an incredibly good job, quickly, of creating a mess and then tucking it nice and neatly under a rug so we can’t see the details of it. But we need to see all those details.

See more of the discussion here.

The Case to Stop Being Nice and Civil to MAGA | Wajahat Ali & Stuart Stevens LIVE

Is forgiveness the answer? Can the people who did this to our democracy be treated with grace and redemption as America has done in the past? Wajahat Ali & Stuart Stevens went live to discuss if we need to stop being civil with MAGA.

Waj Ali: [Bro podcaster] Andrew Schulz is now saying, “Wow, man … ICE agents terrorizing American cities? That’s really bad.” And I rarely swear, Stuart. But I saw that clip and I did a quote retweet that somehow went viral. And I said, “Andrew Schulz, you useless, utter piece of shit.”

“You sat there and ingratiated yourself with MAGA. You behaved like a circus monkey for Donald Trump and people brought all the receipts and you deliberately rode him and his base to make millions. Fuck you. Kick rocks.”

Now the reason I bring this up, some Democratic strategists, centrists, all white guys… now that he’s come around – you know what it reminded me of? Reconciliation, no truth. Redemption, no contrition. Grace for who? White Republicans, but nobody else. Slap on the wrist goes back to Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, the failure of reconstruction, the war on terror, the bailout, and Donald Trump in the first administration.

And what happens instead, and why I resonate with your piece, Stuart – is what America does and the American establishment does, especially to those who are part of the club. Usually white, not always, and wealthy. You kind of feel bad, grace, forgiveness, come back – and the cycle repeats.

Stuart Stevens: [...] It comes from very insecure men. One of the things that drew me to the Republican Party, believe it or not, is this concept of personal responsibility. That you as an individual were responsible for your actions. We accused Democrats, unfairly, but we did it, of being a victim shopping party – that we would never blame the person who perpetrated a crime, we blame the victim.

So, when I wrote this book, It Was All a Lie, one of the things I really wanted to be very aware of not doing is blaming others. Because I was a part of this. And literally, the opening sentence of the book is “Blame me.”

See more of the discussion here.

Trump Is a Failed Leader | Stuart Stevens & Simon Rosenberg LIVE

Stuart Stevens and Simon Rosenberg are back for their monthly chat and this time they broke down how Democrats are meeting the moment, and what work they still have in front of them.

Stuart Stevens: One of the things that really strikes me that would be so helpful here, and it may just be impossible – if someone from the Democratic Party could give a national address and frame it as “these are the stakes. This is why this is important.”

I just wonder, everybody in their daily busy lives they see this man was murdered, this woman was murdered, but the process stuff – particularly in a world in which there’s no longer three networks, there’s no gatekeepers – I don’t know how you focus the attention on it.

[...]

I think that in part because of the way our democracy was set up, the way our government was set up, if we were in a parliamentary system there would be a shadow prime minister and a shadow foreign minister and a shadow homeland secretary – who would be part of the government, right? They would be the official party out of power and will have gone through a process to have selected those people who then had not an honorific role, but a legitimate serious role in the government itself.

Parliamentary systems have built into them these unified oppositions that can fight against a party within the majority power we have learned that we don’t have. And what we have is a lot of disparate voices in the senate, in the house, the governors, the attorneys general who are all doing their part but the sum isn’t greater than the parts. We don’t have this unified opposition.

See more of the discussion here.

How to Outlast Trump | The Strategy Session with James Fallows, Stuart Stevens, & Joe Trippi

How do we outlast Trump? James Fallows joined Stuart Stevens and Joe Trippi on this episode of The Strategy Session to discuss how we can be effective in measures like Trump tearing down the Kennedy Center, by learning from the people of Minneapolis.

James Fallows: The East Wing of the White House is gone forever. There were some centuries old trees around there, which they just cut down. And once they’re gone, there’s nothing you can do about it. It is all too easy to imagine the same construction and demolition companies that were servile to Trump with the East Wing just showing up at 6 a.m. sometime with the Kennedy Center and it’s just not there anymore.

So, it is so important, just as people are bearing witness in Minneapolis and they did in Los Angeles and are doing all over the place – It may be time for people in D.C. to start being on duty around the Kennedy Center to make sure that if those demolition crews show up early, then people like in Tiananmen Square, the guy standing in front of the tank, that it’s time to stand in front of those wrecking balls because you can’t rule anything out from this team.

See more of the discussion here.

Kat Abughazaleh Won’t Let ICE Intimidate Her

Kat Abughazaleh is a congressional candidate for the 9th District in Illinois. She has been a target of the Trump administration for her ICE protests. And as a journalist, she has worked to expose right-wing talking heads like Tucker Carlson. This week, she joined Lincoln Square’s Susan J. Demas to discuss this and more.

Susan J. Demas: If you were elected to Congress, what would you be doing in terms of ICE and DHS funding and just those institutions as a whole?

Kat Abughazaleh: I’m going to go into my end game and then what I can actually do under a Trump presidency and with the Supreme Court being the far set it is.

We need to not just abolish ICE. Abolishing ICE isn’t enough. We need to prosecute ICE. We need trials. We need to dismantle DHS. There were immigration services before ICE. We had INS. There was a world before ICE. There will be a world after ICE. And any agency, and that includes DHS and ICE, that can function as a secret police force should not exist. There is no reforming to be done.

There are plenty of different strategies for immigration, this is not one of them. This is a terror squad. But of course, this administration doesn’t care about the law. They will bully any representatives they can, especially republicans. So under this administration, I think my priority will be limiting CBP’s jurisdiction from 100 miles from any international border (that includes the Great Lakes, that includes coasts) to 5 or 10 miles.

I think that is a common sense solution that we can, especially as ICE terrorizes even red places, we could get some Republicans on board with it under the guise of small government they say they’re so committed to.

See more of the discussion here.

Trump’s Retreating From Minnesota, But ICE Is Still Out of Control | Dean Obeidallah Joins Susan J. Demas

The Democratic base wants people who are going to fight back against what Trump and ICE are doing to American citizens. Dean Obeidallah joined Susan J. Demas to discuss what he hears daily from people who call into his show and how the party is letting them down.

Susan J. Demas: You can make the argument that Stephen Miller’s absolutely abhorrent immigration policy is catering to the basest of the base. Why do you think Democrats have so much trouble not just catering to their base (and) why does it take so long for Democrats in Washington to wake up and just listen to what the people are telling them to do?

Dean Obeidallah: That’s such a great point, Susan. I’ve talked about it so much, the idea the Republican leaders fear their base. For Democratic leaders, they at best tolerate us, if not ignore us. And there are some exceptions, but you can’t define a movement by the exceptions, you have to define it by the norm.

The norm of Democrats are they live in a different world. They may have town halls here or there. I wish they all hosted talk shows, daily talk shows and listen to people call in. They would have a much better sense of what the pulse is, what were the bases, where the energy is, what’s motivating people – because that’s what you need in midterm elections.

Where is the energy? Where is the passion? Look, it takes them a long time as you’re seeing. And you have the corporate media which doesn’t help. The corporate media labels us who are progressive as radicals when we want things that poll at 75 or 80% of all Americans.

Another issue we saw was on Gaza and the ceasefire. We had 80% of Democrats say ceasefire and Democrats didn’t want to talk about it except for that small number of progressives and it should have been a no-brainer.

See more of the discussion here.

What I Saw in Minneapolis: HuffPost’s Jen Bendry on her ICE Reporting

Lincoln Square’s executive editor Susan J. Demas was joined by Jen Bendry of the Huffington Post to discuss her reporting on the ground in Minneapolis after ICE agents invaded the city.

Susan J. Demas: Thousands of people are being subjected to horrible conditions right here in the richest country of America – it’s just hard to process that. What are your thoughts about how we’re dealing with this going on every day in our own country?

Jen Bendry: There’s only so much the brain can process, right? I think part of the reason the three names you mentioned (Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Liam Ramos) and the fact that we refer to them is because there was video footage or photographs of what was happening to them. So we can see it for ourselves and it’s not just a faceless number.

It’s real people who we can see with our own eyes doing nothing wrong and then being killed or being taken. That’s why I think the photo of Liam Ramos went viral and international. I’ve had international news, radio shows in England, reach out about wanting to talk about Liam Ramos. I’m like, okay, this has penetrated other countries’ news cycles, who knows what the hell they think is going on in America anyway.

Those names give us something tangible to tie to this massive dystopian movement.

See more of the discussion here.

Women Hate ICE & Trump’s Poll Numbers Are Plummeting | Behind the Numbers with Rick & Andrew Wilson

There is a noticeable difference in the way that men and women are treated by ICE agents and the polling numbers show it. That, along with Trump’s disastrous popularity are what Rick & Andrew Wilson covered in this episode of Behind the Numbers.

Andrew Wilson: The Trump administration doesn’t care what the people think about ICE. ICE is a tool to execute their plan. This is multiple actions to restrain ICE and focusing on people with only violent felonies, 43 percent of voters say that they strongly support that.

Rick Wilson: Which has only been 7% of the arrests they’ve made so far.

Andrew Wilson: Blocking ICE from polling locations – 40% of voters say they support that. Now, remember, it’s illegal for ICE to be at polling sites. It’s already illegal under the federal CFR. They will try. They’re promising to try. Every time they make one of these grand or outlandish (statements), they’re floating it because they’re going to try it, they’re going to do it.

Rick Wilson: They tell you every time what they’re going to do. They’re not keeping this a secret.

Andrew Wilson: Call your local election official and ask them what their plan is if the federal government sends ICE agents to your polling places.

See more of the discussion here.