Democrats can learn from what happened in Massachusetts this week.

Seth Moulton lost to U.S. Senator Ed Markey in Tuesday's Democratic primary in Massachusetts.

The 46-year-old moderate lost to the 79-year- old progressive.

I identify three lessons.

Lesson one: An incumbent senator, who has been in political office for 50 years, has a lot of good goodwill and is hard to unseat, even if his age worries people.

That lesson won't be lost on people who consider opposing my own 77-year-old senator, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, who I expect will stand for re-election in 2028.

Lesson two: On paper, Moulton was the right person at the right time. He is a combat Marine veteran, an incumbent U.S. Representative, a graduate of Harvard and the Harvard JFK School of Government, and a political moderate at a time when Democrats are getting uncomfortable with candidates who are too progressive. Many Democrats are backing away from the positions of the recent past. Yet there are contrary currents, with progressive candidates defeating moderate, establishment candidates in high profile races. Democrats want electability, but they also want a progressive fighter. There is the crosscurrent of Democrats wanting to replace old Boomers with a new generation. Markey survived this primary challenge because he represents something people wanted more than a new generation: true, blue, liberal policy. He did not leave credible room on his left. People voted for the more progressive candidate. 

Lesson three: Moulton blew the trans issue and it defined him as too conservative.  News stories and commentaries about Moulton's campaign quickly get to a comment like this one in The New York Times:

If Massachusetts were a general election battleground state, perhaps Mr. Moulton’s skepticism about trans athletes’ participation in youth sports might have played better among primary voters.

But from the moment Mr. Moulton entered the race last October, Mr. Markey used his remarks questioning transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports as a battering ram against him. Not only did it galvanize the L.G.B.T.Q. vote for Mr. Markey, it also helped frame him as the progressive candidate

Moulton expressed an opinion that is a majority opinion in this country, that allowing trans women to play in competitive sports creates problems of fairness and safety. But in Massachusetts, in a Democratic primary, it played badly.

I don't think Moulton was on the wrong side of that issue, even in a Democratic primary in blue Massachusetts. His problem was how he framed what likely is the majority opinion in the state. By saying he worried about his daughters' safety when competing against potentially larger, stronger trans athletes he framed trans women as threats. 

That was an error.

He needed to have begun by expressing compassion and support for trans women. He needed to have said he wants the very best for them, free of discrimination. Live and let live, let freedom ring. Having established that, a Democratic politician needs to say that his opposition to trans women playing in competitive female leagues is intended to benefit and protect trans women. Putting them into competition with women in women's leagues raises the question of unfair advantage. It pits the value of fairness against the value to women of having leagues where women are athletes, not cheerleaders, like in the bad old days of my youth. Women's athletics is a good thing. Say so. Say it needs to be protected, too. Trans women in competition creates enemies for trans people because it pits their interests against the group of people born biologically female. A fight between those interests focuses on distinctions and differences, which is terrible for trans women seeking live-and-let-live inclusion. Trans women athletes get judged as advantage-seekers, and in serious competitions is is read as cheating. That hurts the broad goal of inclusion. Limiting trans women in athletics is done to protect them.

Moulton's apology walk-back made his situation worse, because it defined his original statement as anti-trans. A better message strategy would have been to have affirmed his original statement, saying he was damned if he was going to advocate a position on trans competition that would end up hurting his trans friends. Then the competition with Markey would have been on who is really the better friend of trans women being allowed to live their lives in peace. Moulton could have won that argument.

This lesson is too late for Moulton, but not too late for other Democrats.

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Rope to hang himself, and fellow-Republicans

President Trump has a method, and it works. He games the legal system.

The problem with his having a free hand is that Trump has bad taste and judgment.

The Supreme Court just voted 5-4 that a board member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacked standing to object to the destruction of the East Wing of the White House and replacing it with a giant ballroom. 

Trump won another round. He called it a victory. It is a curse.

The legal issue was one of standing. Chief Justice John Roberts noted that the destruction of the East Wing was "likely unlawful." But since the executive department cannot enforce the law against its own executive, the law doesn't stop the president from doing as he wishes. Can a board member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation sue in federal court to stop a president? No. The Justice Department lawyer argued that even if a president removed the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument, no one would have standing to object.

This decision shines a spotlight on the Trump device for being lawless: President Trump does whatever he darned well wants to do, legal or not, then waits for the achingly-slow justice system to react, and by then it's a done deal. 

Trump's method of acting quickly and outrunning the legal system worked with imposing tariffs on a pretext, and it worked with invading Venezuela on a pretext. He flouts the War Powers Act on pretexts, and ,this week, his lawyers got the Supreme Court OK to let the Postal Service stop mail voting until states were in  fact hurt, not just prospectively hurt. 

America is going to get Trump's ballroom in all its splendor. Trump will have "won." It will reflect Trump's will and taste. It will project extravagance and self-serving Trump-style luxury. A golden ballroom is a classic "Nero fiddles" or "Let them eat cake" symbol. That was the point Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia made in the speech that drew attention for having named "Natalie" as Trump's close companion. Trump is not attending to his job while the public suffers. 

Had this gone through the normal legislative process, the East Wing/ballroom project would have been shown to be well- justified, or more likely, would have been scaled down to something politically manageable. There might have been a spirit of national pride in the improvements. Now Democrats deride the ballroom's extravagance, and Republicans in Congress are forced to defend it, or explain why they didn't stop it. 

Trump's willful, swashbuckling, narcissistic judgment creates a peril for Republicans candidates and officeholders. His tariffs are unpopular. His Iran war is unpopular. His inflation is unpopular, as is his minimizing it. His proposed Trump Arch is unpopular. His Qatar gift jet is unpopular. His Argentina beef deal is unpopular, at least with ranchers. His crypto meme coin grift and $1,776 billion settlement with himself are unpopular. His attaching his name onto the Kennedy Center is unpopular. His disruption of voting by mail is unpopular and will become more so if county clerks in both red and blue states say that Trump created election chaos.

Trump does what he wants, unmoderated by democratic checks, balances, laws, or norms. Republicans consent to what Trump does, so they will share the blame. Republican majorities in Congress have the power to constrain the president. They don't. They will get blamed. Democrats will see to that.



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Roses ,in Trump's District of Columbia

     "Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses!"

          Poem by James Oppenheim, "Bread and Roses," 1912;  based on a speech by labor organizer Helen Todd, 1911

Notwithstanding Trump's assertions, Washington, D.C., was not a hell-hole of crime in 2024, when Joe Biden was president. 

It isn't a hell-hole now, either, even with a few National Guard troops.

Jennifer Angelo had a career as an attorney for the U.S. Postal Service. She and her husband Jack Mullen live in Washington, and are eyewitnesses to conditions there. She sent me a field report on an event that didn't have Trump's stamp: the National Book Festival.

Amid the conflicts that roil the politics of our country, people still live their lives. Kids play, lovers love, people read books, and book readers congregate at book fairs.

Guest Post by Jennifer Angelo 

My husband, Jack Mullen, recently posted here about Trump’s America 250 festivities and architectural vanity projects. They started with a wrestling match at the White House and today culminated in a Grand Prix car race around our beautiful city. How these spectacles honor the country I do not know, but they have made 2026 a trying time for most Washingtonians. Thus, I was delighted yesterday to attend the National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress. It came with the tag line “America 250: It’s Your Story.”

The news about Americans’ reading habits is grim. A recent Atlantic piece by Rose Horowitch ran through the numbers: Fewer than half of us read a book in 2022; only 2 percent read to a child daily; only 16 percent read for pleasure on a given day. The culprit is screens, and even our attention span there has fallen to 47 seconds. There may come a time when no one under 70 understands references to a white whale, Catch-22 or Big Brother. (Let’s hear it for the Bible, which will never go out of print and gives us many of our best literary references.)

Given the sad reading statistics, it soothed my mind and my soul to walk into the two-million square foot Washington Convention Center yesterday and find it mobbed with book lovers. I read novels, history, memoirs, mysteries, essays, and short stories. I take at least one class every year on a classic novel by Austen, Dickens, Woolf, or the like. I keep track of my books on Goodreads and routinely exceed 75 books in a year (I cracked 100 in the Year of Covid). Those in the enormous convention center crowd were my people, and just being part of it was rejuvenating.

The presenting authors included Martin Scorcs(film preservation), Kate McKinnon (debut Young Adult novel), Baseball Orioles owner David Rubenstein (upcoming book about the business of baseball), our Poet Laureate Arthur Sze (poetry in translation), and Ann Patchett (best-selling and award-winning novelist and essayist). There were more than 60 others, each of whom has a devoted audience. My enthusiasm for the crowd size did not extend to standing in line for an hour or more to hear these icons, but I was starstruck nonetheless.

The attendees’ T-shirts were on point: “Born to read, forced to socialize,” “You can never have too many books,” “Book Nerd,” and a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Public Library. The pop-up bookstore on the huge lower level had a snake line six rows deep for the cash register. There were book-themed puzzles, mugs, shirts, and posters. A row of tables featured books for every U.S. state – Oregon featured Stubborn Twig by Lauren Kessler and a children’s book, Bing’s Cherries by Julia Kuo.

 I arrived early to grab a seat for a presentation on how audiobooks are made. My seat neighbor and I bonded right away over a favorite book reader (George Guidall). The featured narrator, Arthur Dent, was a buff Navy veteran with a deep, clear voice that was made for telling stories. An audiobook producer and an executive from the Audiobook Publishers Association completed the panel and answered questions about the technology, logistics and quality control involved in audiobooks. And because there is some debate about whether listening to an audiobook is “reading,” they reminded us that the Odyssey was passed on orally for generations. Take that, audiobook snobs!

I spoke to a woman who works in the Manuscript Room at the Library of Congress and scored a copy of Rosa Park’s hand-written recipe for pancakes. I picked up free bookmarks. I asked for directions many times. I saw a lot of young readers, and my heart soared. I would say I was one of the older people there and very much in the minority. Is there hope for reading after all?

Today, cars are racing around the Mall at 185 mph. The event’s promoter is a President who quite possibly has never read a book, even his own. He fired the Librarian of Congress and appointed Todd Blanche as its temporary head. When it comes to the city and well-educated residents of Washington, he cannot read the room. But at least he didn’t kill the National Book Festival.

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In praise of drinking alcohol. Yeah, really.

Alcohol isn't all bad.

In fact, alcohol is pretty good -- in the right amounts, in the right times and places, in the right people.

Alcohol with friends

I have not drunk alcohol for 35 years. I am happier for having stopped drinking. It was easier to not drink than drink a healthy amount.

And there are lots of problem drinkers.They hurt themselves and others. They drink and drive. They drink and get into fights. They drink and get sloshy drunk and ruin family gatherings. Alcohol is very prone to abuse. I have no illusions about that.

For several decades red wine had positive word of mouth based on apparently-flawed science that indicated that red wine was good for heart health. Red wine has compounds called polyphenols and resveratrol, which supposedly raise "good cholesterol." There was observed anecdotal evidence that the French drank more wine than did Americans, but they lived longer and had better cardiovascular health. "To your health" was a good reason to have a glass of wine.

Newer medical information is that alcohol in any amount is net-unhealthy. People are drinking less and it coincides with people having decided that wine is not a health-food

People are still drinking wine, and in the same percentages, but doing so in an atmosphere of people generally drinking less, and Trump's tariff wars have destroyed the U.S. export market for alcohol, especially wines.

So what is good about alcohol? Why would I praise something that I know to be dangerous and addictive? Alcohol lifts spirits. Alcohol increases sociability. There is a social isolation problem in America. Covid sent people indoors and into their screens. Young people are less likely to get together in bars or living rooms and talk. Alcohol is addictive, but so are phone screens. Alcohol is an antidote to screens.

I do just fine at a dinner with friends without alcohol, but alcohol with dinner makes a three-hour dinner of talk more likely, and I am happy if other people around me are drinking. Notice that no wine glasses are on the table. The family members are looking at each other, not grandmother's turkey, but everyone seems happy.

But these images in advertisements are not wrong. Alcohol is the social lubricant that makes this image of interracial mixed-gender groups plausible.

Such a group does not need alcohol. Perhaps they all got together to talk politics, and they are all laughing at Trump having renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America. How petty!  I can imagine this group, talking together, barely, but it mostly makes sense if alcohol is involved. 

Alcohol creates a party spirit. People laugh more and talk more when they are drinking alcohol. The French do live longer than Americans. Maybe it is because they take more vacations; maybe it is because they have better national health care; maybe it is because they drink wine at dinner slowly, and it is the pace of their dinner that makes wine-drinking healthy. 

I don't think this is an image of a heart-healthy dinner:

The problem is the huge piece of red meat, not the wine.

I recognize the dangers of looser, less-inhibited social interactions. There is a reason why "bar fights" are a thing. Alcohol is a flawed social lubricant, but lubricant it is. People seem happier holding a wine glass than holding a phone. This image worries me more than the images of people getting loose while drinking wine.

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Easy Sunday: Presidential character.

     "I can tell you without hesitation: Being president of this country is entirely about character."
          Dialogue by Aaron Sorkin, written for President Andrew Shepherd character, "The American President," 1995

President Trump is the way he is because Americans are the way we are. 

We elected him, knowing what he was.

A majority of GOP officeholders in the House and Senate accept and enable Trump's corruption, flagrant dishonesty, presidential wars, crypto grift, cronyism, sale of pardons, shredding of alliances, midnight tweeting, Epstein coverup, and the whole Trump Era experience. GOP voters are along for the ride. A commenter wrote yesterday that he would vote for Trump "in a heartbeat -- as would millions of others. Ignorance or malevolence have nothing to do with it. . . . All Democrats have to offer is higher taxes and bigger, more intrusive and ineffectual government." 

It is a democracy and we have made our choice.

Today's guest post is by John Coster. He reflects on the damage done to America and Americans as Trump shapes our political and moral expectations. Coster studied theology at Regent College while continuing his career managing multimillion-dollar development projects for high-volume users of electricity. He tried to retire but has been pulled back into work because his expertise is so valuable during this build-out of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

I call my shorter, Sunday posts "Easy Sunday," but today's message isn't easy. It is sad and ominous. 

Guest Post by John Coster

Healthy free market capitalism and democracy, or just living in a free society relies on social contracts of trust. My high school teacher once said that “locks are designed to keep honest people honest.” I think that’s true of laws and systems to make and enforce them too. Trust is implicit to some degree. 

Trump’s biggest damage to the soul of our country isn’t just that he has normalized and even glorified cruelty, greed, lies, and contempt for the weak -- as horrible as that is. It’s that his still-high approval ratings among the GOP faithful show that he has lured a big part of our population (even supposedly people of faith) into celebrating his untrustworthiness as smart. Enforcing agreements is based on power and leverage, not mutual trust. Trickery, deceit, and gaslighting are his tools.

But he has feet of clay, and his reign will end one way or another, like that of every other lying and thieving megalomaniac in history, leaving a hollowed-out world of needless suffering that will have a long tail for generations. Or setting us up for someone as bad or worse.

I don’t know whether to blame him for leading our collective moral decay, or to regard him as a mirror of who we really are. I suspect our former allies are starting to think it’s the latter.

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Keeping your word.

"So you see I'm not naive
I just would like to believe
Ah what you tell me. . .
Just be for real"
     Frederick Knight, 1976, "Be for Real," covered by Leonard Cohen, 1992

Donald Trump would have been a bad client in my brokerage business. 

He would have been a bad merchant to have sold melons to in my youth.

He is a bad president.

I am disgusted by Trump. It isn't "derangement." It is rational and based on my experience in business. Some people are bad clients.

My disgust isn't partisan. I mostly vote for Democrats but I get along well with Republicans, and probably 60 percent of my brokerage clients were Republicans. What triggers me about Trump is his unreliability and gleeful dishonesty. He ruins relationships that took decades or centuries to build. As Mark Carney, prime minister of Canada put it, Trump's deals are signed in pencil.

I watch Trump with the mindset of my career as a financial advisor. Orders are given and received orally in that business. When a client heard my recommendation and said "yes," it became an obligation of mine to do as instructed. It is also an acknowledgement that we had settled on a course of action. It is pretty simple: We each do what we agreed to do. Business can take place quickly because of trust. A client who decided after the fact that they didn't want the deal, or lied about the deal, or made some pretext that the trade or course of action wasn't agreed to is an immediate career-ending problem for the advisor. 

In my 30-year career there were about five such client incidents. The incidents were difficult or impossible to unwind; they brought investigations, reports, and weeks of hassles. They ended relationships.

Trump ended the Obama deal with Iran, wrote then abruptly ended the North American Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico and keeps changing it based on whim, changed the tariff deal on imports from every nation, and changed the terms of alliances. And, like a bad brokerage client reneging on a trade, Trump does this with a dishonest pretext, then blames the other party. Trump claims foreign nations deserve tariffs because they all hire slave labor. He claimed Venezuela was carrying out an armed invasion. 

The USA is now understood to be profoundly dishonest and unreliable in its relations with others.  

I remember how important trust was in my youthful melon business. I would deliver melons to Mr. Blunt, the owner-operator of Blunt's Ranch Market. I would tell him that I could bring him an amount of ripe melons from the next day's picking. He would say how many he could use, and to bring them. That set in motion mutual obligations. It meant he would not reject my load when I showed up the next day, having just bought some other melons from some deal that came available. It meant that I would not sell my day's picking of melons to someone else, leaving him short of melons. We had a relationship of trust. Trust was lubrication. Trust was a shock absorber.

Americans elected Trump with their eyes open. Even siloed consumers of conservative news had heard that Trump stiffed vendors. They heard him brag that he didn't pay taxes because he was smart. They had heard about his bankruptcies. My Republican friends who voted for Trump said: He's a scoundrel, but he is our scoundrel. Trump represented change, the end of rules, courtesies, and norms of trade and diplomacy, replacing them with an equilibrium set with the ongoing push and pull of power. Each individual, each business, each country grabs what it can. Trump was what America just enough Americans thought it needed: a sharp businessman.

Mr. Blunt treated me honorably. When he told me to bring melons, I brought the melons and he bought them. Ninety-nine point nine percent of my brokerage clients treated our verbal agreements honestly.

Trump is the very, very bad apple client.  He is the client who novices are warned about. Bad apples get a reputation. In the long run, they get the very worst deals possible because people realize they are snakes. 

Bad apples lose relationships of mutual benefit, but are not friendless. They find fellow-snakes. 

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Can a White, Jewish politician connect with Black voters? Yes.

U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff at Elizabeth Baptist Church:

"I address the political and moral crisis that we face this moment."

The clip is seven minutes long. Take a moment to see the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE1_bJNH_Gs  

I think America is at a turning point. We have passed the moment of "peak Trump." Americans, Republicans included, recognize that Trump's open corruption is dangerous and morally wrong. We are better than that. I don't expect voters to seek a pious Jimmy Carter, but I think Americans are ready for some hand-washing, some sign that the venality and crudeness of Trump and his crowd of billionaires and flatterers should not become the new normal. 

Trump is a flamboyant anti-hero. He is the professional wrestling "heel." He is Tony Soprano. He is Walter White. He is fascinating, but he is not good at governing and he doesn't inspire confidence. Americans think the country is on the wrong track. 

Maybe it is as simple as his time being up. Public tastes oscillate. He has had 10 years on center stage, and we are tiring of his schtick, and his corruption is indefensible, even for people who like that he closed the borders. I see signs of it, even among Republicans. A percentage of them are willing to be not-Trump, without daring to opposeTrump. They want distance, even if they dare not say it directly. 

Ossoff is probing that ground where the swing voters are, the people who swung to Trump in 2024 and now don't like what they see. Some of the critique is economic: It's the economy, stupid. But it is also a matter of character. 

A Democratic politician needs to be able to inspire Black voters without estranging White ones. A Jewish politician needs to be able to carry his identity comfortably without estranging Christians. I think Ossoff pulls this off.

A candidate for the U.S. Senate talks about state issues and what he has done for his state. A presidential candidate talks about the character of a nation, its purpose and destiny. Ossoff looks like a serious man in a serious role. 

Meanwhile, Trump looks petty and vindictive, lashing out at Canada, renaming Lake Ontario, tweeting insults, starting trade wars, trying to manipulate beef prices, messing with elections.  Republican voters might ignore his character if he were doing a great job with the economy and keeping us out of war, thinking that it takes a corrupt man to lead in a corrupt world, but he cannot hide inflation and the mess he has made of our war with Iran.  Americans have given an anti-hero president a chance, and they are ready for something new.

Jon Ossoff is the real thing, and the timing looks about right for him. 

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