Since it is Thanksgiving week, I am going to write a positive article today about Donald Trump (well, semi-positive, at any rate...).

Of course, there is indeed a whole universe of negative aspects of having Trump as president again, but even I have to admit that Trump has had a few positive effects on the Republican Party -- mostly by his insistence that they blindly follow him in all things. This has meant the party as a whole has had to largely accept some of Trump's very non-traditional stances on issues (non-traditional for conservatives or Republicans, that is). Trump, unlike many of the ideologues who used to set the party's direction and policy objectives, has the ability to occasionally spot an issue where the GOP's traditional position is so unpopular that it winds up hurting them at the ballot box. Two of these issues in particular stand out. Trump can't truly be said to be "on the right side" of either of these issues, and his objection to the more-extreme positions the Republicans traditionally have taken is rather thin and transactional. But it's better than where the party was headed without Trump, so he at least deserves partial credit for how he's changed the party's orthodoxy. And then finally, Trump has now made one cabinet pick that even plenty of Democrats will likely get behind in the Senate, when it comes time for their confirmation vote.

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Since it's going to be a short holiday week anyway, I though today was a good day to wallow in grammatical pedantry. Because I have a nit to pick with America's media editors. So fair warning to all -- today's column is about nothing more than me being linguistically annoying.

Elon Musk, Donald Trump's "first buddy" (as he calls himself), is going to team up with Vivek Ramaswamy to set up a group to slash government spending. The moniker Musk picked for this group is a misnomer, since it won't actually be a federal "department" of anything, but Musk reverse-engineered the name to boost his favored cryptocurrency anyway, coming up with the "Department Of Government Efficiency," or "DOGE."

That's the way I have been capitalizing it, at any rate. Because I apparently have different standards than everyone else in the editorial world.

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Well, that was quick. As many have amusingly pointed out, the nomination of Matt Gaetz to be Donald Trump's attorney general didn't even last a full Scaramucci. Eight days, from beginning to end, was all it took. It's more than he deserved, really.

There was a whole bunch of tea-leaf-reading after Gaetz announced he was giving up his bid. Was Gaetz really just preparing to run for Florida governor and concocted the whole thing as a convenient way to bury that damning House Ethics Committee report? We have to admit, we do find this one convincing (especially since today Gaetz announced he will not attempt returning to the House). Or was Gaetz a "stalking horse" put out there to be so odiously bad that he distracted from all the other odiously bad cabinet appointees Trump has been announcing? Would senators (of both parties) spend all their energies on Gaetz and then be so exhausted that they let through all the others without much protest? If that were accurate, Gaetz would have stayed in the fracas until the bitter end, though, which he didn't.

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Matt Gaetz announced today that he has withdrawn his name from consideration to be the next attorney general of the United States. It seemed his nomination had a minor problem.

Sorry, but it's almost impossible not to treat the whole sordid story as a joke. Gaetz was a completely laughable candidate from the start, so it's hard not to have a few final laughs as he exits. After all, the nomination of Gaetz didn't even last a full Scaramucci!

Kidding aside, I do have to wonder whether this was the plan all along. From the start, there was speculation that this was all very conveniently timed to allow Gaetz to escape what is reportedly a very damning report from the House Ethics Committee being made public. If Gaetz hadn't been nominated, this report likely would have been released last Friday. Gaetz reportedly has plans to run for Florida governor in 2026, and it would be easier for him to do so if the report stays buried.

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Do Democrats still have a "big tent" party, or have they now morphed to being a "small tent" party by insisting on too many must-pass litmus tests? That is a question Democrats should really be asking themselves now, after suffering a humiliating election defeat. That's the traditional way to put it, but at the risk of using an offensive term, what they really need to decide is whether they're going to allow what might be called "Cafeteria Democrats" to exist peacefully within their party or not.

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The 2024 election is not yet over. Well, the ballots have all been cast -- the act of voting in the election is over -- but we're still waiting for the final results in a handful of districts in the House of Representatives. And right now, it is looking like the election didn't change the makeup of the House one bit. This could slightly change, but only by a small number. That's fairly remarkable in an election where the Republicans gained seats in the Senate and took back the White House.

As of this writing, there are five districts still outstanding -- two in California, one each in Iowa and Ohio, and the at-large Alaska seat. As things stand, Republicans are ahead in three of these races while Democrats lead in the other two. If that winds up being the final result, then the makeup of the House will not have changed by a single seat.

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Although Donald Trump is known for tossing aside any political conventions or traditions he doesn't like, there's one aspect of his transition that seems rather jaw-dropping, although few have commented on it (other than by making jokes). Ultra-cynical observers of American politics have long denounced the wealthy (not to mention corporations) for "buying" politicians. If you've got enough money, then you can easily fund a re-election campaign... or fund a primary challenge if this carrot doesn't work as intended. From that point on, they have certain politicians "in their pocket," and can count on them to vote to support their interests.

This has been rampant in American politics for a very long time, of course. Campaign-finance reforms are occasionally enacted, but there's a saying in Washington: "Money in politics is like rain on a paved road... there will always be cracks that allow it to seep in." And ever since the Supreme Court ruled that money equals free speech in politics, campaign finance laws are notable only for their weakness (or their non-existence). The business of buying politicians has been made easy, which has led to not just a rainfall of people using political donations to buy influence, but an absolute flood.

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The circus has come to town, and performing in the center ring this week was the teeny-tiny clown car which disgorged a continuing parade of clowns, each more outlandish than the last.

Or, to put things another way: get ready for lots more circus/clown metaphors in the very near future. It's really the only possible way to describe Donald Trump selecting his cabinet. But we'll get to the individual clowns in a moment, because first we've got to take a broader view of what Trump's up to here.

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I have to say, the temptation to join the chorus of both laughter and horror over Donald Trump's cabinet picks is pretty tempting today, but I think I'll save my comments on that clown parade for tomorrow. Instead, I'm going to continue looking forward today, to extend my thoughts on the Democratic Party and what it should do moving forward. The last two days I devoted to possible presidential candidates in 2028, but today I'm going to concentrate on what Democrats should be emphasizing during both the 2026 (midterm) and 2028 campaigns.

Looking that far into the future in politics is impossible, I do realize that. A lot of any Democratic campaign is going to be commentary on what Trump has done as president, that much seems pretty certain. What I'm going to lay out is a very pro-family economic platform for Democrats to embrace next time around, which would compliment whatever Democrats are saying about Trump and the Republicans running Washington.

This isn't meant to be an autopsy of what went wrong in the 2028 campaign, but one common theme has emerged from such attempts I've read elsewhere. Democrats continue to lose working-class blue-collar workers -- of all identity groups. Blacks, Latinos, Whites -- it doesn't matter which, they all deeply care about the economy. If there is one easy way to explain the way the electorate was feeling this cycle, it is the anger that eggs got expensive (I've even heard the neologism "egg-flation" used to describe it), and Democrats didn't seem to care much or have an answer for it.

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[We continue today with Part 2 of the article posted yesterday, where we are taking a look at the Democratic "bench," to see who might be considering a run for president in 2028. Yesterday we began with governors; today we move on to senators and other Democrats who might decide to become candidates.]

Senators

I will begin by saying that this section is probably going to be somewhat incomplete. Almost all senators entertain thoughts of becoming president at one point or another, so I'm sure there will be some surprises when 2028 rolls around. Most of these, however, fail to gain much traction on a national stage and wind up pulling out of the race pretty early, though. To give but one example, does anyone today remember Michael Bennet's 2020 presidential campaign? I certainly hadn't, and I follow politics pretty closely. So there will likely be at least a couple Democratic candidates next time around that few outside of their home state even recognize.

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