Growing a Spine on El Salvador Is Good PoliticsGrant Democrats the courage to change the things they can change and the PR advisers to help them talk about the rest.
Hey y’all, it’s Tim in for JVL today. My colleague Joe Perticone did a beautiful job writing about the death of Pope Francis in Morning Shots earlier. I had a chance to discuss it with him on camera too if you want to check that out, here. Despite my being a lapsed Catholic, Pope Francis held a special place for me as the first Jesuit pope, someone who washed the feet of AIDS patients in Argentina and demonstrated a love and recognition for gay Catholics in a way that his predecessors had not. He will be missed dearly. Oh, and if you make the pilgrimage to Rome to pay your respects . . . no pictures in the Sistine Chapel, please. On to the newsletter. PS: The Gmail gods are telling me this note may be too long. If you use Gmail and it seems to get cut off midstream, just click the title to open the live page or the link at the very end to get to the full edition.
1. Down With Consultant BrainHow will the U.S. government disappearing refugees in a foreign concentration camp affect Democrats’ chances in the 2026 midterms? If you are an average Jane who does not consume toxic amounts of political punditry you would assume this is a question that only people suffering from brainworms would ask.¹ But because our political press is deeply broken and the media-consultant-industrial complex has subsumed most of our elected officials, this was a popular query for reporters to lob at Democrats over the past week. Their answers ranged from terrible to overly accommodating to almost human. (Congrats, Jason Crow!) Given that the political media is committed to treating the Democrats as the protagonists² with agency even though they currently have essentially zero political power, this question does not seem likely to go away. As such, I thought there would be some value in answering it as if the entire premise were not a sign of society-wide mental illness. Here goes. Let’s begin at the 30,000-foot level, leaving aside the specifics of the El Salvador issue. The midterms are still eighteen months away. At this point, we have no idea what the dominant issues will be. Yes, the economic conditions will certainly matter (more on that in a bit). But beyond that—who the hell knows? Not sure if you have noticed but we have an erratic, elderly, convict-president currently overseeing the most chaotic and incompetent administration in the modern era. By the 2026 midterms, Trump will be 80. Between now and then, his administration could invade Greenland, bomb Iran, replace fiat currency with Bitcoin, replace Jerome Powell with Vince Vaughn, defund the highway system, raise taxes on billionaires, cut taxes on billionaires, put a moat on the northern border, put out an executive order banning Taco Tuesdays, or come up with a policy that I can’t even fathom because it has heretofore only been proposed in the fever-dream replies to Catturd tweets. Anything could happen. Literally. (Actually literally, not Joe Biden literally.) But we don’t need to just point to Trump’s volatility to demonstrate the limits of our powers of prognostication. Even in more stable times, the elite strategist class doesn’t have a great track record of predicting even the political near term. In April 2021, did anyone predict that the Democrats would outperform in the midterms thanks to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Republicans nominating a series of pro-January 6th lunatics to statewide office? Don’t believe so. Around that same time were there any Republican graybeards suggesting that what the party really needed to take back the White House was a third Donald Trump campaign that closed strong with a message about pet-eating migrants? Pretty sure only John Barron thought that would be a good idea. After the 2012 election, I was part of the Republican “autopsy” that canvassed all the leading GOP consultants to identify what elected leaders should do to win back the White House in 2016. But the GOP electorate, rather than nominate a candidate who would heed that sage advice, turned to an inexperienced game-show host who ran a winning campaign for president doing exactly the opposite of what the smart set suggested. SHRUGGIE EMOJI. The future being unknowable does not mean that all political punditry and strategery should be dismissed. There are certainly actions that will raise a party’s probability for success and others that will lower them. Politicians could surely harm their chances by championing extremely unpopular policies.³ My point is simply this: Everyone should have a bit more humility when it comes to sweeping conclusions about how the concerns of today’s news cycle will affect elections months away—especially when people’s lives and our constitutional order are hanging in the balance today. The main arguments for why Democrats should not focus their energies on the people who have been indefinitely disappeared to a foreign concentration camp go like this: (1) The disappearances are just a “distraction” from the most important issue Democrats should be focusing on, Trump’s economic mismanagement; or (2) raising the “salience” of an issue where Trump is on stronger turf than on the economy is unhelpful. The former is just a stupider version of the latter so let’s handle both together. Let me stipulate that I concur that the Democrats’ best bet for doing well in the midterms is the American people being pissed about their economic circumstances. It would be a bonus if The People also believed that Democratic politicians cared about fixing those circumstances . . . but in our negatively polarized times just thinking Trump screwed it up could prove sufficient for Democrats to at least take back the House.⁴ What I struggle to understand is how the “earned media” efforts of Democratic elected officials a year and half before anyone goes to vote are supposed to meaningfully impact those perceptions. Nobody likes to be told that the effort they put into their work is rather pointless, but let’s be serious about this: Most of what passes for “strategic communications” in D.C. is make-work for political insiders. Take this quote about House Democrats’ messaging plans from yesterday’s Politico Playbook:
Totally unobjectionable political pablum. Costs are too high. No argument here! What is the “week of action” going to entail exactly? What voter that was not already highly likely to vote for Democrats is going to be “activated” by the efforts? We can look backwards at what House Democrats have done to date to get a sense for what to expect. This past Thursday was the House Democrats’ Medicaid “Day of Action.” (Exciting!) I’m sure all of you who are reading this newsletter for politics junkies heard about that, right? Well just in case you hadn’t, apparently Jeffries went to a community health center in Bed-Stuy, did a CNN interview, and other members did similar outreach. How many people do you think these efforts reached? How many swing voters? How many people disengaged from politics? And of those who were reached, how many will say eighteen months from now that the Medicaid Day of Action had an impact on how they voted? I think anyone being honest with themselves would agree that the answer is zero people. These types of earned-media gimmicks are not actually intended to help the Democrats win over voters in the midterms. It’s just a big show for political obsessives, D.C. insiders, activists, donors, and other “stakeholders”⁵ all of whom agree that it is “smart” to focus on costs because that is what voters care about. Do you know what is going to have an actual impact on the midterms among the marginal voters who have concerns about costs? VOTERS’ ACTUAL LIFE EXPERIENCE WHEN IT COMES TO COSTS. Something Democrats have little control over.⁶ There is this fantasy notion out there that some really coordinated messaging on kitchen-table issues from mid-bench House members that nobody has heard of is going to make people realize that their tomatoes cost more. When in reality tomatoes costing more is what makes people realize their tomatoes cost more. The only people who think (or pretend to think) that politicians can Jedi mind trick people about their financial circumstances are the staffers who are paid to coordinate the messaging, cable TV pundits who need something to talk about (Hi, guys!), and the handful of people who follow politics like it’s a sport. Unfortunately those are the very people who inform the actions of a lot of politicians. And that’s why you get inoffensive empty-calorie action items like a Cost of Living Day of Action. To be clear—I’m not arguing that Democrats should not talk about how much things cost. And I’m not arguing that they should not hold days of action. There are plenty of reasons for politicians to do things besides reaching the median voter. Community engagement is part of the job. Pressuring your GOP colleagues to act on issues is probably not going to do much good but it’s not without merit. Injecting talking points into the “discourse” that your superfans can share with their normie friends is useful. Demonstrating to the elite cadre of constituents who do pay attention to what their elected officials are up to that you care about things they care about is a meaningful part of the job. In a best-case scenario, an elected official can—over a period of time—repeat that they care about costs so often that at least some people will believe it. If you are a front-line Democrat in the swingiest of swing seats, creating that brand for yourself makes a lot of sense. But for everyone else in Washington, it doesn’t serve your interests or the best interests of the country if you are lying to yourself about this type of insidery PR twaddle being important. Because when elected officials tell themselves those lies it gives them a rationale to NOT do impact policy where they actually could make a difference. 2. Action and the appearance of actionWhich brings us back to the issue of the kidnapped Venezuelans and Kilmar Abrego Garcia. As far as we know, Abrego Garcia is the first person ever to come out of CECOT, the prison camp where El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, is holding a couple hundred people sent from the United States without any due process. We now know that Abrego Garcia is alive—for days, speculation had mounted that he was not—and although he has not been released, reports indicate he has been moved to a different prison. And it seems to me that the only reason for those changes—the only reason we got to see that Abrego Garcia is alive and that he has been moved—is because Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland forced the issue.
Why was Van Hollen able to make a little progress? Because political PR twaddle does matter to people at the highest level of politics and government. Even the “world’s coolest dictator” felt compelled to react to the pressure campaign. Right now we are at a hinge point in history. The president has tried to use a 227-year-old law—a law that the author of the Declaration of Independence said was a tyranny—to disappear people based solely on their nation of origin and their self-expression. If he succeeds at defying the courts and keeping these men in a foreign gulag, who knows who will be targeted next. Everyone who has any influence or ability to stop or stall this affront to our constitutional order, the rule of law, and basic rights has an obligation to do so. If you are going to shirk that obligation because of politics—maybe because you believe that doing so will serve some greater good—then you had better be damn sure that you are on the right side of the politics. And now we can end where we began—with that brainwormed opening question. And based on the information we have today—I just don’t see any compelling evidence that letting these men rot in El Salvador is winning politics. But I do know that the lives of those who may be wrongfully imprisoned are at stake and they deserve our best efforts. And I also know that the new research showed that among those who didn’t vote in 2024 Democrats are seen as “weak” and that their leaders “need to grow a backbone.” So the opportunity that I see before them is this. They can do everything in their power to protect the fundamental right to due process for everyone. They can do what they can to stall or stop the Trump administration’s ongoing desire to exile more people to El Salvador. They can try to facilitate a return for those who have been sent to hell with no recourse. And then maybe just maybe . . . if the Democrats show that they have passion, and if they fight for those who were wrongfully sent to El Salvador, then some voters will start to see that it’s a party that would fight for them too. And if not, at least they’ll be able to go to sleep at night knowing they did their best for those who have been subjected to an unimaginable trauma, not by a foreign dictator, not by fate or chance, not by a rogue actor, but by us. It’s worth a shot. 3. The crypto scamOn Friday I talked to Molly White, one of the best reporters covering the crypto industry. And her analysis of the scope of the Trump crypto conspiracy will shock you. Watch and share: 1 I hope that you are an average Jane and therefore blissfully unaware of the fact that our secretary of health and human services did in fact have a literal brainworm. 2 Stealing this from Lovett. 3 We’ve seen this in the recent past with Defund the Police and other issues. But the El Salvador deportations is not one of those issues. A YouGov survey from earlier this month showed that 61 percent of Americans opposed “deporting immigrants without criminal convictions to El Salvador to be imprisoned without letting them challenge the deportation in court.” Just 26 percent supported it. 4 Assuming we still have free and fair elections. I believe we will but unfortunately this is a required caveat nowadays. 5 My favorite catchall political term for justifying the time spent on something. Gotta keep the stakeholders engaged! 6 Among the things Democrats do control: (1) Recruiting candidates in red districts who can speak to these concerns with credibility and expand the map of potential seats if the economy really does go into a tailspin. (2) Figuring out how to use their platforms and the hundreds of gajillions of dollars they will raise to reach working-class people and young people who don’t follow the news and will never see a single talking-point–laden press release or selfie video that Democratic leaders put out. This is a valuable use of the high-paid consultants, PR wizards, and twentysomething digital staffers who populate these offices, because cracking that nut would actually make a meaningful difference for Democrats. And my strong assumption is that reaching these people is going to require creative strategies and engagement on issues with high emotional salience rather than safe, generic talking points. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber. We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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Growing a Spine on El Salvador Is Good Politics
April 21, 2025
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