Perhaps no quote more perfectly encapsulates the current political moment than this gem from the 17-year-old daughter of Rep. Josh Gottheimer, on the subject of her father’s yearslong friendship with former Sen. Markwayne Mullin, now the homeland security secretary presiding over 1,500 ICE abductions per day, and for much of the past decade the New Jersey Democrat’s favorite gym buddy:
“It is like they are like the same person, just in very different fonts.”
The quote is from a New York Times story about a children’s book young Ellie Gottheimer wrote with Mullin’s 17-year-old daughter Larra, about a bipartisan duo of dogs who reach across the aisle to save their dog park from closure by an unspecified peril, presumably the construction of a data center or ICE detention facility.
Proceeds from the book’s sales will benefit a charity called Project Night Night, which provides “security blankets” and stuffed animals to homeless children. The article does not delve into the topic of whether Project Night Night is permitted to distribute security blankets to children detained in the notoriously frigid ICE facilities where child detainees have repeatedly reported that paper-thin aluminized Mylar “space blankets” are their only source of warmth, or the terrified offspring of the 65,000 undocumented immigrants who have been rounded up since Secretary Mullin resumed this summer the blitzkrieg of abductions, car rammings, and shootings that culminated in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and oustings of Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski months ago. The girls simply wanted to tell a feel-good parable about the virtues of bipartisanship, Ellie told the Times: “We want to be able to show kids before they get on social media, before they experience extremism and polarization and false information, that you can work together with those that are different from you.”
I’ll confess the story struck a bit of a nerve, in part because it’s near-impossible to visualize, for example, the gratuitous bulletproof vest–donning Gottheimer even allowing his kid to hang out with his Democratic colleague Ilhan Omar’s teenage son Adnan, who was pulled over by ICE during the Minneapolis crackdown. What exactly are we meant to believe is so “different” about Gottheimer and Mullin, again? OK: The Oklahoman is quite a bit richer, with a net worth following the sale of his family business to a private equity firm estimated around $70 million to Gottheimer’s $40 million.
Once upon a time, the base and the donor class of the Democratic Party did not seem wholly irreconcilable.
But outside the gym, there’s still much they share in common, like campaign contributions from AIPAC, Palantir, and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The latter of whom, alongside MAGA/Gottheimer mega-donor Marc Rowan of Apollo, also financed a private equity–fueled dark-money group, Pine Tree Results PAC, that was formed to blanket the airwaves with attack ads about former Senate candidate Graham Platner, a man Gottheimer and other centrist Democrats spent much of the past year plotting to destroy. A statistical analysis of donations of $50,000 or more to AIPAC’s attack ad slush fund the United Democracy Project, the single most prolific source of dark money in the Democratic primary campaigns, suggested that only a third were made by oligarchs who give exclusively or even primarily to Democrats: 22 percent of the donors were partisan Republicans like Rowan and Paul Singer, and the rest either give heavily to both parties or not enough to establish a partisan preference.
Billionaires have always tainted our elections, but back when Barack Obama made the arguably Faustian choice to turn down public financing for the 2008 election, they accounted for just 30 cents of every $100 spent on campaigns. By 2024, that figure had rocketed to nearly $20, roughly three-quarters of which it shoveled to Trump and the GOP, leaving just 22 percent for Kamala and the Democrats.
The regime that emerged from this orgy of oligarch astroturf has turned even former MAGA supporters like comedian Tim Dillon and (inexplicably popular) ex-Navy SEAL podcaster Shawn Ryan into vocal campaign finance reform advocates. Trump’s billionaire donors and friends now run the Pentagon and the Department of Education, the Commerce Department and NASA; an almost-billionaire runs the Treasury Department; billionaires have been incompetently spearheading peace negotiations with Iran and Russia and hold three of the nine seats on the Gaza Board of Peace; and lest we forget, the nation’s first trillionaire (now merely centibillionaire, so sad about SpaceX) spearheaded the violent and extralegal liquidation of virtually every regulatory agency or government bureaucracy designed to steward the public good. These days, it is frequently said on the right-wing podcast circuit that if you want to know who really runs the country, look at the donors to the president’s ballroom.
Both parties have a populist wing of varying sizes and a donor base that is uniformly opposed to something so antithetical to their worldview. But with Trumpism and billionaire ideology having fully merged, most prominent right-wing populists long ago abandoned the MAGA ship. The establishment would like to do the same to the left wing, but the voters aren’t complying, as they keep exhibiting the nasty habit of voting for candidates promising to at least try to free the country from its corporate-controlled government.
ONCE UPON A TIME, the base and the donor class of the Democratic Party did not seem wholly irreconcilable. In 2006, for instance, the centrist mafiosos running the House and Senate campaign committees, Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, were constantly plotting to undermine Howard Dean, the populist visionary helming the DNC. Yet Schumer not only allowed a lifelong socialist, Bernie Sanders, to run for the Democratic Senate nomination in his state unopposed, he did not go to great lengths to stop a populist businessman from mounting a successful primary challenge against the inveterate warmonger and Vichy Democrat Joe Lieberman, even dispatching Bill Clinton to plead with Lieberman not to run as an independent when he lost the primary. (He did, and won.) The Democratic civil war did not, for example, distract the media from covering revelations that GOP Rep. Mark Foley had sent sexually suggestive messages to a number of underage congressional pages, or capitalizing on Foley’s resignation to flip his House seat; whereas the media and the party have this cycle been almost suspiciously mum on the horrifying child abuse allegations the daughter of sitting U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) has leveled against GOP Rep. Max Miller (R-OH).
Today, the friction between the donors and the grassroots has indisputably devolved into open warfare. Big donors have abandoned the DNC while selectively plowing cash into centrist slush funds. Gottheimer, a man so devoid of charisma that his disastrous fourth-place gubernatorial campaign last year failed to nab even AIPAC’s endorsement, nevertheless remains so popular with donors that he is sitting on a cash hoard of nearly $13 million heading into an election against an opponent who has raised in total all of $118,000. Billionaire tech oligarch Reid Hoffman has donated nary a cent to the committee following the 2025 defeat of Ben Wikler, the former MoveOn director whose candidacy he funded to the tune of $250,000, at the hands of the now-embattled Ken Martin, the charmless compromise candidate currently getting dragged for the committee’s fiscal woes.
For all his frustrating deficits as a leader, the media attack on Martin is just the latest act in the Centrist Mafia Revenge Tour of 2026 that commenced with the obscene victory lap every Dem took in the aftermath of Platner’s withdrawal, when Neera Tanden told CNN that the “voters of Maine … owe an apology” to the rest of the state for nominating Platner while pundit after pundit opined that the scandal underscored the failure of the entire premise that working-class Americans would be swayed by economic policies that served their material well-being.
James Carville, sitting in a white leather chair that looked incongruously like it had been swiped from a Quentin Tarantino set, spent the month essentially promoting the expulsion of all socialists and anti-Zionists from the party. Rep. Hillary Scholten embarked on a cable news tour smearing Abdul El-Sayed as “deeply sexist” and accusing him of collaborating in misogyny with Platner and Hasan Piker, while Rep. Jim Clyburn ripped the populist Bernie-backed former Detroit health commissioner for attracting too many white faces to his campaign rallies. Tom Suozzi appeared on Fox & Friends to tout a new group behind something called the “Promise to America” pledge, which he and Gottheimer had co-founded to champion capitalism and patriotism within the Democratic Party. The Atlantic published a typically viral hate read accusing the Democratic Socialists of America of using Trotskyist tactics to “infiltrate” and “subvert” the Democratic Party.
On Fox News, Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer gloated over the “far-left feeding frenzy” that by the network’s count had launched 27 “progressive far-left” candidates to the general election across the country as of mid-July, as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) depicted the coming election as a face-off between “common sense and communism.” Indeed, no sooner did universal health care supporter and emergency room physician Amish Shah, who narrowly lost the general election in a Phoenix-area swing seat in 2024, defeat the $4.5 million campaign of “Promise to America” signer and former Republican Marlene Galán-Woods than the National Republican Congressional Committee emerged with a trolling press release wondering if “socialist Amish Shah” would vote for Hakeem Jeffries.
But a Fox News poll released the week of the primary highlighted the national mood: More than 80 percent of respondents told pollsters in July that they were seeking, at a minimum, “substantial change” from the Congress for which they vote this election cycle, with more than half of the change voters describing the variety of change they preferred as “dramatic” or “revolutionary.” And next week’s primary in Michigan might finally seal the fact that the centrist putsch just doesn’t have any juice.
AARON GIES, A THEOLOGY PROFESSOR in Olean, New York, who is among the 27 “radicals” highlighted in the Fox graphic, laughed off the GOP boomerang theory. “I don’t know much about the centrist establishment, but the active part of the party is so furious at them I haven’t paid them much mind at all,” he said.
Gies’s district voted for Trump by 21 points in 2024, so his primary attracted little notice from centrist mafia types. But he says the shift away from Republicans is so profound among “teachers, health care workers, small-business owners, anyone who has some skin in the game” that he might just have a chance to flip the seat on his own. One of his volunteers is a farmer and onetime Bernie voter who finally took down his Trump lawn sign after the president hiked Argentine beef imports. Their single biggest concern is health care, both skyrocketing prices and the surge in hospital and nursing home shutdowns that accompanied last year’s reconciliation bill, concerns about which he says his opponent Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY) doesn’t hear as loudly because of his deep financial ties to nursing home owners in the district.
“Voters understand that all these things are connected, that gas is more expensive because of the war no one wanted and other things cost more because of the data centers no one asked for,” Gies says. “My neighbors don’t necessarily bring up ‘Israel’ when you talk to them about politics, but they recognize it as shorthand for the corrupting influence of money in politics.” But where Trump at least hits the road to sell his graft, Gies points out, Langworthy hides from constituents. “He’s never held a town hall, and he lives in his affluent suburban sliver way at the edge of the district where he’d never run into anyone he represents,” Gies says. “The political class has gotten used to this idea that the purpose of government is to subsidize the ultra-wealthy in hopes they’ll make life better for the rest of us, but that attitude has absolutely killed places like this.”
The populist flank is singing a similar tune 1,400 miles south in Broward County, where centrist stalwarts Jared Moskowitz and Debbie Wasserman Schultz both bowed out at the last minute from encounters with left-wing challengers over the past few days, with the latter skipping an NAACP-sponsored town hall last Thursday despite continuing consternation over her baffling decision to run in a majority-minority, 49 percent Black district. Moskowitz canceled an advertised—but apparently never confirmed—appearance at a Florida Baptist church just hours before he was scheduled to debate his DSA-endorsed challenger Oliver Larkin. “The extent to which Debbie really does not give a fuck really, really shocks me,” a campaign staffer of one of Wasserman Schultz’s six Black opponents told the Prospect, noting wryly that both South Florida centrists had found time that week to sign on to an audacious letter to Marco Rubio giving him 15 days to consider suspending some perfunctory aid program to Malaysia in retaliation for the prime minister’s announcement that he would be deporting residents of the country determined to be citizens of Israel, with which the country of 34 million has no diplomatic relations.
Larkin, whose affluent coastal district is a slightly better fit for Moskowitz’s self-described “DeSantis Democrat” ideology, was less surprised. “[Moskowitz] believes he will win if he simply never acknowledges me, and maybe he is right.”
But constituents are not the only thing centrists avoided in July, as a funny dustup last week between centrist Seth Moulton and Ed Markey, the left-wing octogenarian he is challenging in the Massachusetts Senate primary, illustrated. The tiff began when Moulton posted a video of himself pacing a converted warehouse where Markey had filmed a spot with Elizabeth Warren and Ayanna Pressley a couple of weeks earlier.
“Sen. Markey has been in Washington for 50 years,” Moulton narrates. “And he wants to stay for another six years so badly that he couldn’t even go to Massachusetts to film his ad!”
“This,” the six-term congressman continues unconvincingly, “is the problem with the old Washington establishment playbook.”
More than 80 percent of respondents told pollsters they were seeking, at a minimum, “substantial change” from Congress.
The Markey campaign quickly shot back an explanation, and a burn: He’d filmed the spot in D.C. because Congress was in session and the legislators’ votes were needed on a transportation bill that day—which Moulton had not bothered to show up to vote for. Alas, had Markey been a bit more spry, he’d surely have mentioned his opponent’s absence at an exponentially more consequential vote the day before Moulton posted his lame diss track, on a GOP resolution to fast-track the National Defense Authorization Act bill without debating or voting on an amendment sponsored by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) to strike Section 219, the controversial provision creating an official American-Israeli military technology fusion center reporting directly to the defense secretary that had been scandalizing podcasts and social media left and right all month. Moulton, who swore off AIPAC money this campaign cycle but is benefiting from a super PAC that raised $250,000 from AIPAC donor David Randolph Peeler and thousands more from Times of Israel co-founder Seth Klarman, was one of four Democrats who didn’t vote down the fast-tracking; he was listed as a no vote, along with retiring South Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson.
Section 219 itself is a study in the centrist reality denial method of coping with 2026. Originally introduced as a stand-alone bill in February sponsored by centrist mafiosos Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Ted Budd (R-NC) along with Reps. Don Davis (D-NC)—a Promise to America signatory!—and Ronny Jackson (R-TX), its real mastermind, according to a letter to another congressman dated in June, is Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who conceived the plan as a means of “democracy-proofing” the Israel-American “special relationship” from the overwhelming calls to cut off the tens of billions of dollars in direct military aid the United States has sent the apartheid state since October 7, 2023, by “shift[ing] the framework … from aid to partnership.” In a concise post that got three million views on X, AOC called Section 219 an “existential threat to American sovereignty.” Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene described it the “ultimate betrayal that will never be undone” and “literally treason”; on the cult geopolitics podcast of the Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen, retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell’s chief of staff until early 2005, summarized the provision as “taking the treachery of Jonathan Pollard, the treason of Jonathan Pollard [and] legalizing that treason.”
And yet neither CNN nor MS NOW—nor The New York Times nor The Washington Post—appears to have devoted any coverage whatsoever to the provision save for a tiny news brief, so the most tantalizing television coverage of it was left to TMZ, to whom Rep. Lauren Boebert, jokingly apologizing that Botox had paralyzed the left side of her face, reported that the White House and Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth had personally promised her they would have the section struck from the bill, but before it could be deleted “a whole bunch of men” she identified as “staffers” mysteriously began “trying to muscle me into voting for the NDAA” much earlier than expected, with the offending section still included. As former D.C. police officer and January 6th resistance hero Mike Fanone weighed in astutely on his Substack: “When the horseshoe closes that tight, and when the socialist from the Bronx and the constitutionalist from Kentucky are all pulling the same fire alarm, the fight isn’t ideological. It’s insiders versus everybody else.”
Indeed, that very day CNN aired a remarkable segment on Israel’s plunging favorability among voters in which data analyst Harry Enten marveled over the “absolutely huge, mammoth changes” pollsters had documented in public attitudes toward Israel, whose approval rating among American voters—while still higher than Trump’s—has plunged by 67 points since 2018. “A lot of Republicans think, ‘Oh, we’ll be able to run against these anti-Israel Democrats because the general electorate feels very differently from the Democratic base,’ but the general electorate … look at these numbers on Israel,” Enten said. “They’re all negative! Fox, minus 11 points. Pew Research Center, minus 23 points! This is not just a left issue, this is an American issue.”
