Fascist Incompetence Requires An Impeachment Strategy for the 2026 Midterms
March 26, 2025
From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of fuck up imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, quoted by The Hill, on U.S. officials sharing war plans with a journalist in a group chat.
My high-level takeaway is “what you see is what you get. These guys might look like idiots, and talk like idiots, but don’t let that fool you: they really are idiots. I suppose there is a small possibility that this was some kind of “op” — an intentional leak to Goldberg and the Atlantic — but to what end? It makes them look amateurish and bad at their jobs. To a president obsessed with image, this is even more important than the actual nation.
Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was bizarrely included on a Signal chat thread with the highest defense and intelligence officials – including the vice president – concerning operational matters about military attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen. Goldberg was made privy to information the rebels would have loved to have hours before the attacks on them occurred. The specific operational information was provided on the chat by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Something tells me that if this were a Democratic Administration we would have impeachment hearings scheduled already. Gross incompetence, like cruelty and criminality, appears to be okay when Republicans commit it - even when it is an imminent threat to national security. And in this case it’s not just incompetence, it’s criminal. Several of the persons on this chat testified yesterday to Congress that there was no classified information released - something that seems refuted today as The Atlantic published the full chat thread. It is clear today that, perhaps among others, National Security Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe committed perjury yesterday.
This is a good political moment for Democrats, and some are taking advantage of it. This episode demonstrates how dangerous it is to put incompetent partisans loyal only to the president personally into positions of high sensitivity, such as Secretary of Defense and National Security Advisor. Democrats should take advantage of the opportunity to point out the nation this level of incompetence and how that connects to a president who is more interested in revenge, unquestioned personal loyalty, and to breaking things rather than fixing them.
This comes on the heels of a very bad week for Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who - after nearly all other Democrats had stood firmly against it - capitulated to the Republican budget plan that includes $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid. Plenty of rank and file Democratic voters were already fed up with the inaction and ridiculous performative antics of Democratic officials in opposing the increasingly fascist shift of the Trump Administration. The budget plan (which was technically a temporary continuing resolution to fund the government until September) was one of the few real leverage points Democrats had to counter an administration that was refusing to spend federal funds as Congress intended and was firing federal employees in key agencies in a way designed to undermine their missions.
If there is a better poster child for voting out the incumbent Democratic leadership than Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), I wouldn’t know who that is.
Axios reported last week how angry Democratic voters are with their elected officials. To be fair, they are angry at Republicans as well. This should not be interpreted as Democrats shifting right. Democrats are mad at their officials because they are not opposing Republicans strongly enough. There has been some increasing buzz about a “Tea Party” year for the Democrats in 2026. One Republican strategist writing in the New York Times suggested that would not be a good thing for Democrats, but his reasoning, if not actually founded on a motive of preventing Democrats from doing something productive, appears to be based on an old conventional wisdom that this party of coalitions cannot operate from a position of anger. Well, I am not sure of that. Democratic voters are sick of party candidates and officials hemming and hawing and always calculating to play it safe. They don’t seem to want to play it safe anymore.
I have an idea of how to harness Democratic energy right now for the 2026 campaign. It also has the advantage of directly taking on the fascist demolition of the Republic that is taking place under Trump. And that is to run a real referendum on Trump; one with consequences. Ask voters to give Democrats the votes and mandate to impeach and remove Trump and Vance from office. And use Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as the leader of this campaign – with House candidates pledging to elect Sanders Speaker of the House so he can be Acting President until we can have regular democratic order in 2028.
Why Sanders? Well, unlike Schumer and other Democratic leaders, he has been barnstorming the nation – particularly in Republican districts – making the case against Trump initiatives and to protect the federal safety net programs. He and AOC attracted a crowd of 34,000 people in Denver this week. Schumer is afraid of 34 people showing up at a book signing demanding he explain why he voted for the Trump budget. Sanders is popular – perhaps the most popular politician in the US. And with his age, I think he can safely reassure the country that he will hold office only until the next presidential election. By then, after removing the fascist leadership of the country and ensuring at least Trump and Vance never hold federal office again (however, other federal officials – such as Cabinet officials, agency heads, and even Supreme Court justices – can and should get the same impeach, remove, and disbarment from holding future office treatment), we can think about resuming our prior democratic norms.
Source: CBS News
The 2026 midterms has a good chance of being favorable to Democrats even in the absence of such a campaign, but there are reason to be wary if the party plays it safe rather than goes bold.1 Voters are so tired of Democrats playing it safe that more and more seem to be considering not voting. One reason so many Democratic voters are angry at the party after last year’s general election loss is how often they are told to hold their nose because the “safe” candidate or strategy is the only way to win. Yet, then they lose anyway. I think Democrats are starting to see that their base would rather lose boldly than lose safely. If you can’t win with a safe strategy, how safe is it? Maybe a bold strategy is the safer one.
You can bet your bottom dollar that if the party labels were reversed today, Republicans would be demanding immediate impeachments of the Democratic President and Vice President. They would be insisting that voters were deceived just four months ago and that continued Democratic leadership over foreign affairs and the military was a clear and present danger to the Republic. We won’t see Democrats do that right now, but they are calling for resignations. The problem comes from the top – the hypothetical Republicans in my example above would certainly have a point if the hypothetical Democratic administration behaved as Trump’s has.
Voters can get pretty skittish when it comes to security screw-ups, but this scandal is only one example of what happens when a dishonest, self-serving authoritarian is elected president. Republicans are getting hammered in local town halls about the mass firings in federal agencies, the impact that has on people’s lives and local economies, and how that impacts the ability to receive federal services. We read daily of yet another person who claims they did not vote for this. And then there is the illegal deportations of legal residents and immigrants who have committed no crimes. Even people who might be inclined to not care about deporting them are concerned that the Trump Administration is refusing to abide by court orders and is sending people to dangerous prisons in foreign countries without any due process.
None of this is normal, except in a fascist takeover. We cannot continue to kick the can down the road hoping next time we can elect a Democratic president and then everything will go back to normal. The damage done already in just three months is breathtaking, and a lot more is to come soon. If Democrats want there to be a Republic left in 2028 for a free and fair presidential election to occur, they need to take bold steps now. Right now they do not have the votes to impeach, let alone convict, any federal officer. They need to appeal to voters to give them those majorities. And they need a face and voice to rally behind while doing it, and be a trusted acting leader to bridge the gap until 2028. That person is Bernie Sanders.
Source: Denver Post
Although this is a subject for a full post, Democratic candidates have been outperforming Republicans in special elections thus far in 2025. The rate of overperformance is essentially the same as it was at this time in 2017. Yesterday, Democrats flipped a state senate seat in Pennsylvania that has been Republican forever and voted for Trump by 15 points four months ago. Next week in Florida, there is a chance at an upset in a deeply Republican Congressional special election. It’s more likely to be a Democratic loss, but with a significant overperformance as well.