Americana

1. Beshear’s normal-talk strategy
2. Democrats pile on Epstein
3. Mamdani’s endorsement hunt
4. GOP wins the money chase
5. Ex-DNC chair’s “family” podcast

Also: The first, muddled polling on the GOP’s tax-and-spending bill

Democrats love to describe the “chaos” President Donald Trump is causing in Washington. Hakeem Jeffries, who likes to speak in alliterative triplets, calls this a time of “chaos, cruelty, and corruption.” Midterm candidates say they were inspired to run to fight the “chaos.” When I followed potential presidential candidates to South Carolina this month — Gavin Newsom and Andy Beshear were just there, Ro Khanna en route — heads nodded at any mention of chaos or exhausting DC news.

Imagine that you’re not watching that news. (This is a thought experiment. Don’t stop subscribing.) The administration wanted a suite of tax cuts by July 4, and it got them. It wanted DOGE to hollow out “woke” federal agencies; after some embarrassing court reversals, it got that. It wanted to defund public media and end foreign aid, and it pulled that off with something any prior Republican administration could have done: Impounding the money, then getting a GOP majority to claw it back.

The anti-Trump “resistance” has done what it promised in December, and made all of this harder. But month by month the administration is dismantling government programs that would be hard for anyone to reconstruct, and setting new priorities that will be hard to reverse.

Specifically: Republicans have learned, three times this century, that if they cut income taxes, Democrats will keep most of the cuts in place. When Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Republicans promised to repeal it. When they passed the Inflation Reduction Act, Republicans promised to repeal it. They largely failed at the first task and largely succeeded in the second. But even in friendly rooms, Democrats are not promising to repeal the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in toto.

Will Democrats fully restore the Department of Education? Recreate USAID? They haven’t said so. Tim Walz, arguably the most progressive of the Democrats showing up in primary states, told me that the next Democratic president had “an opportunity to create the agencies the way we saw them in the first place.”

Would Democrats fully refund NPR and PBS? It will be three and a half years, at least, before they get a chance to, and they don’t know what of those institutions will be left. Would they repeal the new ICE money that has turned it into one of the best-funded law enforcement agencies on earth? Jeffries has promised “aggressive oversight,” not defunding.

Would they repeal all of the new tariffs? They didn’t when Biden was president. Restart DEI offices? Please. Democrats see the new stories of migrants self-deporting as an anti-American horror. Republicans see homes and jobs that will be freed up for citizens, and migrants who’ll never come back.

The real Democratic conversation about a post-Trump agenda won’t get underway until 2027, when their presidential candidates stop being so coy about what brought them to Charleston and Nashua. But Republicans have stopped fearing “the ratchet effect,” the theory that government programs never contract once expanded.

Think of what survived in the Biden interregnum: The border wall (which activists wanted him to dismantle), the US embassy in Jerusalem (with its commemorative Trump plaque), the Space Force, the 2017 tax cuts. There was plenty of “chaos” coverage when Trump notched those wins, but it didn’t really matter. Democrats are confident that they can run against the OBBBA and its Medicaid cuts, and some Republicans have already grown wobbly about them. But the rest of the Trump agenda? The ratchet effect is going the other way.

Finally, a programming note: This newsletter will be off next week as I move between houses, but our reporting will be available in Principals, and Americana will return on August 1.

Kentucky’s governor: Let’s talk normal

CHARLESTON, S.C. — At each stop on his two-day tour of South Carolina, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear asked the same question, one designed to confuse his audience.

“The phrase is ‘justice-involved population,’” Beshear said. “Anybody know what that is?”

The question was met with raised eyebrows and embarrassed murmurs at a house party in Greenville, an alumni center at the University of South Carolina, and a law firm in Charleston.

“Those are inmates,” Beshear answered. “You know what our inmates call themselves? Inmates! We’ve got to get back to talking to people like we talk to our friends, like we talk each and every day in our life.”

At one stop, in Columbia, former Gov. Jim Hodges was particularly enthusiastic about Beshear’s advice on speaking to voters in “normal” language, advice he’d been giving “for a long time,” unheeded.

“We need a grocery store, but we Dems have to call it a ‘food desert.’ What’s that term for moms we use — ‘birthing persons?’ It’s hard to connect with voters when you use language in a way that creates barriers,” Hodges said.

Democrats jump on Epstein bandwagon

The battle for the “Epstein files” moved into a more partisan mode this week, even before a Wall Street Journal investigation turned up a “bawdy” birthday book for the late sex offender with a contribution from Trump.

Democrats used multiple House votes to try and force the release of whatever information on Jeffrey Epstein and his clients remained in government vaults, undisclosed. Most Republicans voted to stop that — and, by Friday, were coalescing around the president’s strategy of releasing a small set of “pertinent” grand jury testimony, “based on the ridiculous amount of publicity” for the story.

“We won’t stop until the files are released,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told reporters after a failure to attach his Epstein language to the House’s cryptocurrency legislation. His own Epstein bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., had enough Republican support to pass if it hit the floor.

But Thursday’s Wall Street Journal story steadied Republicans, giving them a familiar mission: Defending the president from a media story he claimed was fake. (One of the reporters on the story, Joe Palazzolo, won his first Pulitzer for reporting on the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels.) Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., led House Republicans in saying he’d cancel the free WSJ subscription used by his office, and predicting that the paper would pay out “millions” once the president sued them, as he threatened to do on Thursday.

Democrats, who had been wary of discussing the Epstein story before, kept on the pressure. But many preferred to zoom out and portray it as a story about the president’s dishonesty, not the specifics. “It’s another promise that hasn’t been kept,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear told Semafor. “[What] people are really angry about is, the president promised to do something that he’s not.”

Democrats react to Mamdani’s charm offensive

Powerful Democrats continued to circle around Zohran Mamdani this week, hesitating to endorse his campaign for New York mayor as Andrew Cuomo officially launched his mulligan bid as an independent.

Mamdani traveled to DC on Wednesday for meetings with Democrats, though not with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — both New York City voters. “I have a sit-down conversation, and then I take it from there,” Jeffries told reporters on Thursday, explaining that he would talk with Mamdani in the city on Friday.

Bernie Sanders, who endorsed Mamdani toward the end of the June primary, urged him to be more insistent in getting Democrats to endorse their nominee. According to CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, Sanders also advised Mamdani to clean up his position on the term “globalize the intifada,” which he did not condemn in a pre-primary interview.

Mamdani had begun to do so, telling a closed-door meeting of business leaders that he discouraged use of that term. Cuomo’s relaunched campaign was less focused on it, this week, than on interviews recovered by conservative X channels from early in Mamdani’s career, where he mused about whether prisons were still necessary and about seizing the means of production.

Republicans win the fundraising quarter

House Republicans thrived in the year’s second fundraising quarter, as their allies in Texas began planning for a special legislative session to draw more safe seats and keep their majority.

Ten Republicans targeted by Democrats raised more than $1 million for the quarter, led by Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif. Just one Democrat seeking reelection hit that bar: Virginia’s Eugene Vindman. (New Hampshire Rep. Chris Pappas, who raised $1.8 million, is running for Senate.) Republican leaders massively helped their conference, putting $8.4 million into their frontline “patriots,” as the GOP’s congressional campaign committee raised $32.2 million; its flagship Congressional Leadership Fund raised $60 million together with the American Action Network in the first six months of the year.

Five Democratic challengers did outraise Republican incumbents, though most of that happened in safely red seats where the GOP members of Congress raised little money. And Republicans are committed to expanding the map along the lines Trump drew last year, when he did better than ever with Latino voters. Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., was outraised for the first time in his Inland Empire district, which Joe Biden won by 15 points and Kamala Harris won by just three.

But Democrats outmatched Republicans in Senate races. Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, the only Trump-state Democrat seeking reelection, ending June with $15.5 million on hand; Maine Sen. Susan Collins, the only Harris-state Republican running next year, raised $2.4 million. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger had doubled the take of GOP gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears, $10.7 million to $5.9 million, raising Democrats’ confidence that they’ll win back the state.

Jaime Harrison, the liberal Joe Rogan?

COLUMBIA, S.C. – The search for a liberal Joe Rogan has led Democrats to an unlikely candidate: Jaime Harrison, their former party chair. On Thursday, Harrison will launch At Our Table, an interview show he’s been recording from his home in South Carolina and from the road, where he frequently spends time with the party’s once and future stars.

“Civic education in America is at an all-time low,” Harrison told Semafor this week — shortly before meeting up with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, the latest ambitious Democrat to visit Harrison’s home state ahead of its 2028 presidential primary. “I think it’s really important to start educating people about these processes that are so important in terms of determining who our leaders will be.”

The first episodes of At Our Table put Harrison next to 2024 vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, South Carolina kingmaker (and Harrison mentor) James Clyburn, and Hunter Biden, the prodigal son who has not spoken out since his father ended his last presidential bid.

“A lot of people don’t know how smart he is, don’t know his background, don’t know the stuff that he’s worked on,” Harrison said of the Biden interview. “They only know what either his allies or his enemies have put out there, and he’s been defined by that.”

Ari Aster returns to theaters with Eddington — a film so online, it might’ve been written by Twitter itself. The director of Hereditary and Midsommar explores a modern Western set in the 2020 lockdown, where digital media becomes the true antagonist. This week on Mixed Signals, Ben and Max sit down with Aster to unpack why he ran toward a COVID-era story while Hollywood ran away, how his complicated relationship with social media shaped the film, and what he learned from exploring the world of conspiracy theories.