Election Discussions & How To Watch Trump's Media Coverage:
Some More Autopsy and Election Commentary. Plus, Calling Out a Disturbing Trend in the Increasingly Trumpian Corporate Media.
Feel free to check the past archives and follow the editions to come in the Trump Era (First Come, First Serve!).
First off, let me encourage people at such a divisive moment in our country to give your time to local causes and charities of your interest, whether through volunteering, donating, or otherwise. Let me briefly mention the good work of some of the groups on my campus at Providence College as an example of what others can do elsewhere:
BELIEVE: BELIEVE is a campus group that strives to make Providence College a more accommodating and welcoming place for students with disabilities (like myself).
Best Buddies: Best Buddies similarly allows students with intellectual and developmental disabilities to form new friendships, develop leadership skills, and live up to their highest potential.
Make A Wish: Make A Wish RI, which a classmate from my freshman year is in, seeks to raise money for children with leukemia and other forms of cancer, including through providing desserts and other goods on campus.
Operation Smile Club: Operation Smile seeks to raise money for children in need of various oral surgeries, including cleft palate repairs.
Active Minds: Active Minds works to end mental health stigma on the Providence College campus through open discussions.
If you are a Providence College student, or simply someone wishing to give back to the Providence College community, please reach out to Providence College if you want to support any of these terrific extracurricular programs and the good people who run them.
Additionally, I will take some time to thank the Attorneys General and Secretaries of State I haven’t mentioned before who are serving our democracy well and working every day to protect our vote, make elections and government more transparent, protect consumers and workers, and fight for a cleaner environment and affordable healthcare. These are offices that cannot be overlooked in 2026, including with leaders and rising stars like:
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha
Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore
New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold
Colorado Attorney General (and 2026 gubernatorial candidate) Phil Weiser
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar
New York Attorney General Letitia James
New Jersey Secretary of State (and Lt. Gov) Tahesha Way
Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel
Michigan Secretary of State (and 2026 gubernatorial candidate) Jocelyn Benson
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul
Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon
North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson
California Attorney General Rob Bonta
Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield
Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows
Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark
Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell
Speaking of this, let me feature another good leader in Michigan Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist (see the MoveOn and Change.org petitions).
On the other hand, we can’t praise the good without calling out the bad. And one of the low points this week was definitely Congressman Rich McCormick suggesting that young kids should get off their couches and just work at McDonald’s, or be a paper carrier (which no longer exists in his 1980s experience), as an argument for cutting free school lunch programs.
Speaking of the bad, check out Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s take on the crypto-ligarchy. The reviews—and warning signs—of bitcoin are not great either. Or how Trump could reverse the healthcare progress the Biden Administration has made. For example, Biden’s healthcare package has fortunately erased the coverage gap for Medicare recipients with a $2,000 costs cap.
We will have more on these types of stories in later posts. However, I also have a couple more interesting numbers from Siddarth Khurana and others worth keeping in mind on 2024:
Enterprise, NV (mainly Latino & Filipino suburb of Las Vegas): Obama +14, Clinton +11, Biden +9, Trump +0.1
Utqiagvik, AK (Alaskan Native community formerly known as Barrow) Clinton +12, Biden +2, Trump +6
Robeson County, NC (Lumbee tribe center/home): Obama +17, Trump 2016 +4, Trump 2020 +19, Trump 2024 +28
Manchester, NH (former textile mill town city) Obama +11, Clinton +7, Biden +14, Harris +8
Wapello County, IA (home of Ottumwa) Obama +12, Trump 2016 +19, Trump 2020 +24, Trump 2024 +31
Black Hawk County, IA (home of meatpacking city of Waterloo): Obama +20, Clinton +8, Biden +9, Harris +1
And the Minnesota Iron Range, which has seen a dramatic shift towards Republicans in the Trump era, including a county that voted Republican for the first time since 1928.
If you want to see how Trump has garnered so much support amongst Democrats who supported Obama or Gore, think of looking into past congressional district results in regions like Southwestern PA (PA-17, PA-16, & PA-14), Northeastern PA (PA-07 & PA-08), Northeastern OH (OH-13, OH-09, OH-14, OH-06), Southwestern OH (OH-10 & OH-15), Northwestern IN (IN-01 & IN-02), Southern IN (IN-08 & IN-09), Southern IL (IL-12), Northern & Eastern MO (MO-08 & MO-06) Central MI (MI-07 & MI-08), Southern MI (MI-10), Eastern IA (IA-01 & IA-02), Central IA (IA-03), Southwestern WI (WI-07, WI-03, WI-01), Southern MN (MN-07 & MN-01), and Northeastern MN (MN-08).
Definitely listen to these types of voters.
While we are doing our quick survey of the country, let me bring up Pacific Palisades and Altadena, California. I have a sad prediction that these places will just never be the same again. The costs of rebuilding from the destructive wildfires are immense, but more so, the long term exposure to multiple toxins and the cancer risks are just too great, especially for those who believe another wildfire could be triggered around there again.
Now, let me discuss some election proposals that I feel while well-intentioned and in good faith, are ineffective and distracting from the crisis-level issues of dark money in politics, partisan & racial gerrymandering, and voter suppression that elected officials really need to focus on and address:
Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV): If you like Eric Adams and those types of politicians, RCV might be for you. Otherwise, and honestly, RCV does not make much of a difference in addressing party polarization. The system’s “sophistication” of ranking candidates has been shown to turn off voters, lower turnout, and overwhelm the system, while making little-to-no impact at all in changing voting behaviors or weakening partisan polarization. Rather, they reinforce such patterns, whether it is in Alaska, Maine, or California’s, Washington and Louisiana’s notorious jungle primaries. We should consider electoral reforms, but this is not the changemaker most people are looking for, or need relative to other issues.
Term Limits: The term limits concept is a common, convenient one in theory. It is much harder in practice. With the talk of the gerontocracy, maybe we should consider whether it is in the best interests of the country to have 90-year olds in the Senate or not, or some 80-year olds in the House depending on their health conditions. Gerontocracy is a real issue in American politics. However, term limits in itself can have unintended consequences in churning out legislators every 6 or 12 years at a given time. In fact, it likely would offer an even bigger deluge for dark money to influence the political process, would further reinforce unfair redistricting practices, and erode needed legislative experience. This is shown in states with term limits such as Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Ohio.
Our politics can only be addressed when we look at the true main culprits of political polarization today: special interest dark money, legislature-driven gerrymandering beyond moral sanity, and degraded ethics standards across all levels of government in our ever-worsening plutocratic oligarchy.
Finally, we turn to the media yet again. Because as much as David “Screw the Country So Long As I Get My Mergers & Acquisitions” Zaslav’s CNN is the most notorious example of Trump’s media capitulation, it is not the only one (the latest exit from CNN yesterday being outstanding journalist Jim Acosta, with his sign off a must see).
And no one is saying that the media should be the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, or that it should do whatever pleases us. We can do our own work ourselves, thank you very much. We wouldn’t want that kind of help anyways for the implications of the institution. The media’s existence is to purposefully be tough on everyone in seeking out the facts and the truth.
But as John King and Christiane Amanpour have expressed, it should showcase views of both sides while also reporting on and telling the truth. There is no side to 2020 for instance. Trump lost fair and square—like Hillary Clinton in 2016 and like Kamala Harris did in 2024.
The “mainstream media” is not holding itself accountable to that standard, certainly not the media executives running the shows, and I don’t mean just Zaslav, Mark Thompson, or formerly sexual predator Les Moonves at CBS.
Sinclair, Nexstar, and Gannett have all elevated syndicated Trumpian columnists and analysts while slashing and carving up local newsrooms and studios. Now, they regularly feature the likes of Boris Epshteyn, Scott Jennings, Lindy Li, and Bill O’Reilly (a.k.a., the washed-up blowhard sexual harasser). It is those commentators that receive more airtime and coverage than Democratic analysts, and the reporters themselves, often attacking and even defaming their political opponents and lying about basic realities on elections, climate, or any other issue for that matter.
There is no question the media coverage generally is tamer, and more timid, to Trump across the board this time around.
Has the media hounded Trump daily on the scale of his January 6th pardons, and done the same thing to Congressional Republicans?
Has the media asked whether Trump still believes the 2020 election was rigged even though down ballot Republicans won? And even though Trump himself won in 2024 and 2016?
Have they asked the same questions to Trump on age and cognition that they repeatedly focused on Joe Biden routinely, wall-to-wall, every day, for 4 years?
Have they ever asked Trump what tariffs are and how they impact consumers and businesses?
Have they asked yet about why more exorbitantly expensive military planes are being used instead of civilian planes for mass deportations?
Have they recently asked how Trump will pay for all the mass deportation operations?
Have they asked him about the contradictions in his campaign pledges vs. his actions on issues like government efficiency, the social safety net, and “Make America Healthy Again!”?
Have they followed up on why Trump no longer believes he can lower prices on Day One in his administration and now says will actually take several months instead, if that?
In many cases so far, the answer is no. The media outlets themselves are actually content with Trump’s return for their own ratings and subscription numbers.
Instead, the media executives have requested their reporters to not go hard on Trump, while also announcing that media coverage would be diversified to focus more on life, pop culture, and entertainment. So, in other words, they are fine with flooding the airwaves with politics during the election cycle, but when the watchdogs really matter, they cower and bend the knee to a corrupt, oligarchic, nepotistic, despot, and narcissistic wannabe dictator?
Are they going to be soft on the Trump-aligned oligarchs like Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Rupert Murdoch because of their immense wealth and political connections?
The Washington Post has a motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It sure as hell dies in darkness when the press is MIA playing a game of who can kiss the ring first.
Democrats, you will have to be the guardrails against Trump, because the Cabinet, the Congressional GOP, the judicial system, and the corporate press executives like Zaslav have abdicated their responsibilities as a check-and-balance on Donald J. Trump.
Remember, this is not about what Donald Trump pledges or says. It’s about what he does. Cut through the noise created by the “flooding of the airwaves.” Break the Trump information and attention bubble. Sooner rather than later.
Absolutely right.