(original hanging in the Hay-Adam’s Off the Record bar)
My colleague KAL has also a post about the coasters he, Matt Wuerker, and I created for the bar.
(Note from A: Click through on KAL’s-you’ll love it!)
Irritating Screechy Blowhole by Clay Jones
Look, Europe! Our president (sic) is a raving lunatic Read on Substack
It’s one thing for Donald Trump to display his deteriorating mental state here at home, like ranting about lightbulbs or batteries so heavy that they sink boats to waiting sharks, but it’s another thing for TACO to go overseas and reassure our friends and allies that the United States of America has an insane racist at the helm (he howled about immigration into Europe).
While sitting next to European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, Trump went on a rant about windmills…again.
Trump said in a long-winded rant, “And the other thing I say to Europe, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States, they’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. And I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains, beautiful areas of the United States, and you look up and you see windmills all over the place, it’s a horrible thing. It’s the most expensive form of energy; it’s no good. They’re made in China, almost all of them. When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn them off, you can’t bury them, they won’t let you. But the propellers, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land, that’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land; in other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil. The whole thing is a con job.”
Keep in mind, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is fighting its own power to fight Climate Change. Talk about a con job. (snip-yadayada [Trump] I mean MORE)
Trump puts another loyalist goon on a federal bench for life Read on Substack
Oops! I forgot to put satire in this cartoon.
I do that sometimes. I’ll draw a cartoon that illustrates exactly what happened. What happened here is that Republicans confirmed Emil Bove as a federal appeals court judge, which is a lifetime appointment.
They confirmed Bove despite him serving as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in the hush money case that found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts. The appeals court is one level below the Supreme Court. A Trump loyalist will be on the court for life. He has more loyalty to Trump than to the Constitution.
He will serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Bove will be as crooked as the judge in Florida who dismissed his stolen document case.
After Trump reentered the White House in January, he quickly made Bove a top official in the Justice Department where he worked on the dismissal of the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and the investigation of everyone who investigated department officials who were involved in the prosecutions of hundreds of Trump supporters who were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Bove has accused FBI officials of “insubordination” for refusing to hand over the names of agents who investigated the attack and ordered the firing of a group of prosecutors involved in those Jan. 6 criminal cases.
It was bad enough to put a supporter of Trump’s white nationalist terrorists in the DOJ, but now he’s going to be a federal judge.
The whistleblowers provided evidence to the Senate that Bove lied during his testimony, and that he suggested the department should ignore court orders when it came to Trump’s illegal deportations. There’s an audio recording of Bove making statements about the Adams case that contradict his testimony, saying that whoever signed onto the dismissal would be rewarded.
Chuck Schumer said, “It’s unfathomable that just over four years after the insurrection at the Capitol, when rioters smashed windows, ransacked offices, desecrated this chamber, Senate Republicans are willingly putting someone on the bench who shielded these rioters from facing justice, who said their prosecution was a grave national injustice.”
Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski were the only two Republicans to vote against Bove’s confirmation, with Collins saying, “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”
Collins isn’t always right, like the time she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, believing him when he said he wouldn’t overturn Roe. (snip-MORE, and it’s good)
(Note from A: I’m adding this photo, because Emil Bove reminds me of the photo)
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced legislation Monday to provide tariff rebate checks of at least $600 per adult and child to American families, similar tothe stimulus checks the government distributed during the Covid pandemic.
“Like President Trump proposed, my legislation would allow hard-working Americans to benefit from the wealth that Trump’s tariffs are returning to this country,” Hawley said in a statement.
Hawley, who championed stimulus check legislation with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during the Covid pandemic in 2020, put forward his new bill to echo that past effort. The program would be set up as a refundable tax credit, with the government sending checks this year should the bill advance through Congress and get Trump’s signature. The bill would ensure that each adult and dependent child would get at least $600. It would also allow a larger rebate per person should tariff revenue exceed projections.
The bill would reduce the rebate by 5% for joint filers who have adjusted gross income in excess of $150,000, a head of household whose income exceeds $112,500 and an individual taxpayer whose income exceeds $75,000.
The Treasury Department reported this month that customs duties totaled about $27 billion for June, an increase of about $4 billion from May. But June also saw inflation tick up slightly as Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs started to work through the U.S. economy. The independent Tax Foundation projected that Trump’s tariffs would raise $2.5 trillion in revenue over the next decade, but that, through price increases, they would effectively increase taxes on the average U.S. household by nearly $1,300 this year and nearly $1,700 in 2026, should they remain in full effect.
Hawley’s bill has a long road ahead of it before it could become law. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., poured cold water this year on different proposal to send direct checks to Americans. Johnson’s comments were in response to the idea of a “DOGE dividend” check, in which the government would send part of the savings created by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency directly to U.S. taxpayers. But DOGE fell far short of then-leader Elon Musk’s projection of as much as $2 trillion in savings, and Musk has broken with Trump after he left the administration in May.
If Texas Wants To Play Dirty, Kathy Hochul, Gavin Newsom, And JB Pritzker Are Ready To Get In The Mud by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Texas using its ‘hey let’s do something about flood warnings’ special session to cheat like the dickens. Read on Substack
The Texas Lege is in special session and putting together a redistricting plan aimed at adding five new Republican-leaning congressional districts, in hopes that might improve the GOP’s chances of keeping control of the House in next year’s midterms. No, there hasn’t been another Census that you forgot about, they just want to rig the electoral map for Daddy Trump.
During a committee hearing on the gerrymandering plan Thursday evening, a Democratic candidate for Congress, Isaiah Martin, was tackled and arrested because he wouldn’t yield the floor after his time expired. Martin was testifying to a state House committee against the plan, which is likely to chop up the 18th Congressional District where he’s running to replace the late Rep. Sylvester Turner, who died in office in March.
“You need to have shame. History will not remember you for what you have done. It is a shame,” Martin yelled out as he was shoved to the ground. “It’s horrific for what you have done. You should all be ashamed. America will rise up against you!”
Martin was booked into Travis County Jail on charges of “criminal trespass, disrupting a meeting or procession and resisting arrest,” but eventually all the charges were dropped. But not quickly: Instead of simply being booked and released Thursday, Martin was held in the jail for about 26 hours, only getting out at 9:30 p.m. Friday — and then he told reporters he plans to be at a second redistricting hearing being held today in Houston.
The special session of the Lege was called to pass disaster relief following the deadly flash floods in the Texas hill country a few weeks ago, but Republicans decided — after Donald Trump told them to do it — that it was also a dandy opportunity to try to prop up the slim and increasingly unpopular GOP majority in Congress.
Before his time ran out and his mic was cut off, Martin condemned Republicans for turning a deadly disaster into a power grab:
“And you choose, after we literally got out of one the worst mass casualty events in our state’s history, to go and gerrymander people out of their seats. That’s what you have chosen to do with your time,” Martin said. “Because you are scared of Donald Trump. You are scared and terrified because you are seeking an endorsement.”
Dems Name ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ Tune In Three Notes
Also on Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she’s not ruling out the possibility of redistricting in her state if Texas and Ohio insist on artificially juicing Republicans’ chances. Speaking at an unrelated event in Buffalo, Hochul answered a reporter’s question by saying, in effect, hell yeah, if they’re gonna play dirty, we’re not going to take it sitting down: (vid on the page)
“All’s fair in love and war. We are following the rules. We do redistricting every 10 years. But if there’s other states violating the rules and are trying to give themselves an advantage, all I’ll say is, I’m going to look at it closely with Hakeem Jeffries.”
In answer to a follow-up question, Hochul added, “I’m not surprised that they’re trying to break the rules to get an advantage. But that’s undemocratic, and not only are we calling them out, we’re also going to see what our options are.”
That could be easier said than done, because unlike Texas, New York actually has a bunch of dumb clean-government laws aimed at preserving electoral fairness, including a constitutional provision specifying that redistricting can only be done once every 10 years, following the US Census. Lousy stinking good government!
In 2022, the state’s highest court threw out a Legislature-drawn electoral map that gave an advantage to Democrats (22 D-advantage seats and four R-leaning seats, compared to the prior map’s 19-8 split), so the maps were redrawn by a state court. That gave Republicans a chance to win more seats in Congress, but the good news here is that thanks to Trump’s fuckery and to their support of the Big Ballocky Buggery Bill that everyone hates (and that not even Republican voters are all that fond of), many of those narrowly elected Republicans are likely to be in trouble next year anyway.
“This is not a bluff,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said on Friday afternoon, minutes after meeting with Democrats from the Texas House. “This is real, and trust me, it’s more real after listening to these leaders today, how existential this is.”
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois issued a similar pledge. “Everything is on the table,” he said on Friday.
Pritzker added that he considered redistricting in between Censuses to be “cheating,” but if Texas Republicans go ahead and “take this drastic action, then we also might take drastic action to respond.”
As in New York, redistricting in either state could be a heavy lift, since Illinois’s electoral maps were already redrawn in 2021 to add one Democratic district and eliminate two Republican-advantaged ones — a move that also led to more extreme Republicans winning their primaries for the remaining R-leaning seats.
In California, district lines are drawn by an independent commission, but Newsom said Friday that he’s considering several different options that could change that process in time for the 2026 election. That could include maybe a voter referendum, or getting a two-thirds vote in the state Lege to allow changes. He said after meeting with the Texans, “We have got to fight fire with fire,” emphasizing that it’s really up to whether Texas goes ahead with its gerrymander.
And back in Texas, Democrats in the Lege are considering all their (very limited) options. Friday’s trips to meet with Pritzker and Newsom took place while the special session was in recess, but the idea of blocking a quorum in the state House by skedaddling from the state — a time-honored tradition in Texas politics — is just one thing Dems are looking at if it becomes necessary. If they do that, each member could be fined $500 a day for being absent, under a 2021 rule change Republicans passed after the last time Democrats went on Rumspringa, that time to delay passage of Republicans’ voter-suppression bill, which eventually passed anydamnway, because electoral fuckery is a time-honored tradition for Texas Republicans, the end. (snip)
It’s all a lot of money. But one party doesn’t get the amounts of dark money that the other party receives; one party has access to the US Treasury through POTUS that the other party does not have, as well.
House and Senate candidates recently filed their fundraising reports covering the first six months of 2025. OpenSecrets analyzed the data to determine which candidates have raised the most money and which ones are sitting on the biggest piles of cash.
Let’s start with a look at Senate races. Jon Ossoff (D) is seeking reelection in Georgia, where he won his first term in the most expensive Senate race in history. (That record has since been broken). During the first half of this year, he raised more money than any other candidate running in 2026.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who was fifth in fundraising, has the most cash on hand, with Ossoff running third after this big first-half haul.
As of today, the well-respected Cook Political Report has identified three tossup races that could determine control of the Senate in 2027: Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina. The Tar Heel State race just moved into that category because Sen. Thom Tillis (R) announced his retirement June 29, so the candidate field has not yet solidified.
The three most senior members of the House of Representatives rank among the top fundraisers this year, but they were dwarfed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who raised $6.7 million more than Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), the speaker of the House.
Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) raised the most among Democrats and also have two of the biggest stockpiles of campaign cash heading into the second half of the year. It remains to be seen whether Rep. Elise Stefanik (R) will stand for re-election to Congress or make a run for governor of New York in 2026. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) is running for an open Senate seat.
This article was originally published by OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that tracks money in politics. View the original article. (The original includes pertinent charts that make the article make better sense. I recomment clicking through; I’m not sure why their republish code doesn’t include the charts. I tried to copy them separately to insert them, but copying was not allowed. -A.)
The United States has more money held by private citizens than any other country in the world. According to the Federal Reserve, U.S. households hold a total of $160.35 trillion, which is the value of each person’s assets minus their liabilities. However, many Americans are perplexed by the fact that, in a country with such wealth, so many people still struggle to make ends meet.
Although Americans hold the largest amount of privately held wealth in the world, many of us still struggle with financial stress. A recent report found that 68% don’t have enough money to retire, 56% are struggling to keep up with the cost of living, and 45% are worried about their debt levels. A significant reason is that a small number of people hold a large portion of the privately held wealth in the U.S..
Nearly two-thirds of America’s private wealth is held by the top 10% of people, leaving the remaining one-third to be divided among 90% of the population. (snip)
With so many people struggling in America, while a few at the top are unbelievably wealthy, what would happen if the money were magically divided evenly among the 340 million people who live in the United States? If everyone received a truly equal share of the American pie, every person would receive approximately $471,465. That’s $942,930 per couple and $1.89 million for those with two kids. (snip)
However, such a drastic redistribution of wealth would be cataclysmic for the economy, as people would have to liquidate their investments to give their assets to others. The sudden increase in wealth for many, without a corresponding increase in goods and services, would lead to incredibly high inflation. The dramatic reconfiguring of the economy would also disincentivize some from working and others from innovating. Some posit that if everyone were equal, in just a few months, those with wealth-generating skills would immediately begin rising to the top again, while others would fall behind. (snip)
Although it seems that a massive redistribution of wealth isn’t in the cards for many reasons, we do have some evidence from recent history on how programs that give people money can help lift them out of poverty. Government stimulus programs during the COVID-19 pandemic brought the U.S. poverty level to a record low of 7.8% in 2021. Child poverty was also helped by the American Rescue Plan’s Child Tax credit expansion, which drove child poverty to an all-time low of 5.2%. It’s also worth noting that the trillions in government stimulus had a downside, as it was partially responsible for a historic rise in inflation. (Note from A.: The hyperlink takes you to CNBC, which hastens to report this: “But the widespread rise in prices was mostly “a supply-side phenomenon” caused by the Covid-19 pandemic itself, Yellen told CNBC in an exit interview.”) (snip-a little MORE)
While asshole billionaires are enjoying the continuation of huge tax cuts, Donald Trump and Republicans realized, maybe, that this will actually increase our national debt. Why didn’t somebody say something? So in order to slow down the bleeding, the goons looked for where they could make some cuts and save. No, they did not cut the budgets for ICE, defense, bombs for Israel to drop on the kids in Gaza, Trump golf trips, or Trump birthday parades. Maybe they could sell the plane Qatar bribed Trump with, if anyone else actually wanted it.
Trump and Republicans passed a bill that will cut $1.1 billion in federal funding for PBS and NPR. Trump is all giddy about this and posted to ShitSocial…
Of course, this impacts Sesame Street. What kind of asshole hates Sesame Street? Donald Trump is that kind of asshole. Donald Trump was an asshole millionaire by the time he was 8 years old. His allowance at 3 years old was around $200,000 a year. That explains why he doesn’t have any appreciation for Sesame Street. If nothing else, Sesame Street could have taught him how to count his money and maybe realize that if you spend more than you bring in, you will increase debt. Cookie Monster knows this. You can’t eat more cookies than you have. Maybe if Trump watched Sesame Street, he wouldn’t speak like a drugged-out crackhead and could talk the king’s English as well as the president of Liberia.
Sesame Street might have saved Trump from being the kind of asshole who sexually assaults and rapes women. It could have saved him from being a grifter and a thief. It could have saved him from growing up into a racist liar. Sesame Street could have saved Trump from turning into Trump.
As Matt Hooper said in Jaws while describing a Great White Shark as a machine, “All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that’s all.” Trump is also a machine, and all that asshole machine does is grift, sexually assault women, and make little assholes.
By the way, have you seen a photo of Barron Trump lately? He’s cultivating the asshole look. He may be taking grooming tips from older brother, Don Jr. Fortunately, Barron hasn’t developed the coke-up dazed expression yet, so for now, he only has the Christian Bale serial killer look from American Psycho.
Anyhoosies, we’re supposed to be talking about Big Bird and not Big Turd, the serial killer of democracy. I wanted to avoid drawing Big Bird for a cartoon on this subject, as so many other cartoonists did this week. But after I got the bucket idea, how could I not?
That’s the blog for today, Peezeheads. One of my clients asked for a local cartoon this morning, and he asked about an hour ago if he could have it by 11 a.m. tomorrow. I haven’t even read the article yet, so I should do that. You’re also going to get a blog about Ozzy. Stay tooned. And no talking about Ozzy in the comments until the Ozzy blog. Pretend you’re a Republican and Ozzy is the Epstein Client List. (snip-MORE)
Allison Gill reported on the newest money runaround the laws on campaign financing. Seems the island of Guam Republican Party got in prior years one donation of $10. This year they got 193 individual donations of $10,000 each. $10,000 is the maximum one person can give to the party. It turns out the donors were all very wealthy republicans many serving in the tRump administration. The island did not suddenly go hard right. No it turns out that the law doesn’t limit party transfers of money between party committees. After the money hit the Guam party coffers, it was transferred to the RNC. Turns out the 193 donors had already maxed out their allowed donations to the RNC. So this was a way to give the RNC an extra 1.93 million for the midterms. Put that with the other ways they plan to rig the election and it seems that the only way they figure they can stay in power is to cheat. Often and repeatedly. Hugs
Last Friday, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence (sic), released a report she claims showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Donald Trump.
This is bizarre because over the past eight years, the entire Intelligence network agreed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to undermine our elections and to help Donald Trump win the presidency.
Also, it could be treasonous for an American president to manipulate an election, but it’s not treasonous to oppose Donald Trump, which is how the administration is framing this. When Trump lied that Obama “wiretapped” Trump Tower, he called it “treasonous.” It could be illegal without a warrant, but it wouldn’t be treasonous. However, it was a huge lie. Maybe lying to the American people repeatedly should be considered treasonous.
President Barack Obama never broke the law. Trump has broken the law repeatedly. He’s breaking the law now.
Trump likes to call what happened in 2016 the “Russia hoax.” Robert Mueller was never able to assert that Trump colluded with Russia, but only because the investigation ended early after then-Attorney General William Barr basically pulled the rug out from under Mueller. But Trump did collude with Russia. The Trump Campaign shared polling data with Russia. Isn’t that colluding? They invited Russians into their campaign HQ to provide “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Trump even asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “missing emails.” Does anyone remember, “Russia, if you’re listening”? Does anyone remember that Russia started hacking the Democratic National Committee on that very same day? Asking for Russia’s help, and receiving it on the same day, sure sounds like colluding.
Intelligence agencies and Senate investigators spent years reviewing the investigations and concluded that during the 2016 election, Russia conducted probing operations of election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes. While Russia extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona, and probed in other states, there was no evidence that they attempted to actually change votes.
The Obama administration never claimed that Russian hackers manipulated votes, just that they meddled, as in conducting influence operations to change public opinion, using fake social media posts from the Russian Troll Farm to sow division among voters, and leaking documents stolen from the DNC to hurt Clinton. These are not opinions, they’re facts. Even a Republican-led Senate report said this was true. One of those Republicans today is Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
Obama ordered intelligence officials to review the material they had collected and report what they had learned before he left office. Obama was worried that the incoming Trump regime would bury all reports and facts about Russia’s meddling, and Obama was right to be concerned.
Later in Helsinki, Donald Trump stood next to Vladimir Putin and took his side over that of America, and defended Putin from accusations of meddling in our election.
Garbage, I mean Gabbard is upset by an email from an assistant to then-Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, that said Obama was seeking a new assessment of the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.” Gabbard believes that’s treasonous, but then again, she’s always been a useful idiot for Putin.
How exactly is it treasonous or even A-ha, to ask, “How did Russia do it?”
Now, the CIA is referring James Brennan, the former CIA Director, to the FBI, run by conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, for a criminal investigation. How is conducting an investigation, not on Trump but on Russia, criminal?
Gabbard’s report highlighted that there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count,” then contrasted that with the spy agencies’ ultimate conclusion in December 2016 that Putin “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”
The report is saying that our election system (pay attention, MAGAts) wasn’t manipulated, just that Putin tried to manipulate the results of the election.
The report focused on a decision intelligence officials made at the time against producing an article for the president’s daily intelligence briefing that would have said that the Russians “did not impact recent U.S. election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” That report was not added to President Obama’s daily briefing because they didn’t know if it was true. It wasn’t.
While Russia did not impact the vote count, it did affect the results. How is Obama having these investigations done, which were to protect our nation, treasonous? A better question might be: Is it treasonous for a president to engage in real estate deals and accept free jets from monarchies?
If an American president (sic) acted treasonously, it’s Donald Trump for trying to steal the 2020 election he lost.
One of my senators, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said Gabbard’s report compared two different things: Russian attempts to hack into voting systems and Russian influence operations meant to sway public opinion. If Gabbard can’t understand that difference, and we know Trump can’t, then she’s not qualified to be the Director of National Intelligence.
Good luck explaining the difference between hacking into a voting system and swaying public opinion, as Gabbard’s comprehension skills are on the same level as your attic-dwelling MAGA uncle.
The Director of National Intelligence should have some intelligence. She’s as qualified for her position as Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi are for theirs.
Warner said, “This is one more example of the director of national intelligence trying to cook the books. We’re talking about apples and oranges. The Russians were not successful at manipulating our election infrastructure, nor did we say they were.”
Warner pointed out that as recently as March, the intelligence community reported that Russia is still using influence campaigns to sow dissent in the West. Duh. They never stopped. And why would they when it works? They’ve hacked into other Western nations, but they had their greatest success with our elections, probably because American voters are more gullible. And not just conservatives. Raise your hand if you believed Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert are going to do a show together because you saw it on Facebook.
The report found that “Moscow probably believes information operations efforts to influence U.S. elections are advantageous,” and that undermining the integrity of American elections was a key goal.
Warner said, “They acknowledged that Russia’s effort to meddle goes on. That was an assessment under her watch,” he said, referring to Gabbard. See? She’s stupid.
Warner said his committee found no attempt by Obama or senior officials to manipulate the findings.
William Barr appointed a special counsel shortly before Trump left office in 2021 to investigate the investigators, and none of this came up.
You know what Harry would say? This is some bullshit.
Trump and his goons, like Tulsi Gabbard, have weaponized National Intelligence, which we used to trust, against democracy.
I hope this MAGA conspiracy theory works out even better for them than the Epstein Client List theory.
Creative note: I wanted to hit this subject after seeing that nearly every MAGA cartoonist went after it with Trump’s talking points and without any context. All their cartoons said is that President Obama committed treason. They don’t even understand the issue. These MAGAt cartoonists have a better chance of explaining quantum physics in Greek than they do of understanding this issue.
Here’s onecartoon on this, and here’s another one, and here’s one more(it wasn’t a DOJ investigation, dum-dum), and hey…I found another one, and another one(by our favorite racist duo), and here’s one by another of our favorite racists, and an idiot to boot. Nice label, dumbass. There’s not one bit of context in any of these six cartoons.
Context is hard for MAGAts, but talking points are easy.
Trailblazing Illinois Democrat reflects on political career and says party is ‘in a daze’ about how to combat Trump
Carol Moseley Braun speaks after Rahm Emanuel wins Chicago’s mayoral race in February 2011. Photograph: Nam Y Huh/AP
“Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton … ”
Carol Moseley Braun was riding a lift in the US Capitol building when she heard Dixie, the unofficial anthem of the slave-owning Confederacy during the civil war. “The sound was not very loud, yet it pierced my ears with the intensity of a dog whistle,” Moseley Braun writes in her new memoir, Trailblazer. “Indeed, that is what it was in a sense.”
The first African American woman in the Senate soon realised that “Dixie” was being sung by Jesse Helms, a Republican senator from North Carolina. He looked over his spectacles at Moseley Braun and grinned. Then he told a fellow senator in the lift: “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.”
But clearly, Moseley Braun notes, the senator had never tangled with a Black woman raised on the south side of Chicago. She told him calmly: “Senator Helms, your singing would make me cry even if you sang Rock of Ages.”
Moseley Braun was the sole African American in the Senate during her tenure between 1993 and 1999, taking on legislative initiatives that included advocating for farmers, civil rights and domestic violence survivors, and went on to run for president and serve as US ambassador to New Zealand.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian from her home in Chicago, she recalls her history-making spell in office, argues that sexism is tougher to crack than racism and warns that the Democratic party is “walking around in a daze” as it struggles to combat Donald Trump.
As for that incident with Helms, she looks back now and says: “I had been accustomed to what we now call microaggressions, so I just thought he was being a jerk.”
Moseley Braun was born in the late 1940s in the post-war baby boom. Her birth certificate listed her as “white” due to her mother’s light complexion and the hospital’s racial segregation, a detail she later officially corrected. She survived domestic abuse from her father, who could be “a loving advocate one minute, and an absolute monster the next”, and has been guided by her religious faith.
In 1966, at the age of 19, she joined a civil rights protest led by Martin Luther King. She recalls by phone: “He was a powerful personality. You felt drawn into him because of who he was. I had no idea he was being made into a modern saint but I was happy to be there and be supportive.
“When it got violent, they put the women and children close to Dr King in concentric circles and so I was close enough to touch him. I had no idea at the time it was going to be an extraordinary point in my life but it really was.”
Moseley Braun was the first in her family to graduate from college and one of few women and Black students in her law school class, where she met her future husband. In the 1970s she won a longshot election to the Illinois general assembly and became the first African American woman to serve as its assistant majority leader.
But when she planned a historic run for the Senate, Moseley Braun met widespread scepticism. “Have you lost all your mind? Why are you doing this? But it made sense to me at the time and I followed my guiding light. You do things that seem like the right thing to do and, if it make sense to you, you go for it.”
Moseley Braun’s campaign team included a young political consultant called David Axelrod, who would go on to be a chief strategist and senior adviser to Obama. She came from behind to win the Democratic primary, rattling the party establishment, then beat Republican Richard Williamson in the general election.
She was the first Black woman elected to the Senate and only the fourth Black senator in history. When Moseley Braun arrived for her first day at work in January 1993, there was a brutal reminder of how far the US still had to travel: a uniformed guard outside the US Capitol told her, “Ma’am, you can’t go any further,” and gestured towards a side-entrance for visitors.
At the time she did not feel that her trailblazing status conferred a special responsibility, however. “I wish I had. I didn’t. I was going to work. I was going to do what I do and then show up to vote on things and be part of the legislative process. I had been a legislator for a decade before in the state legislature so I didn’t at the time see it as being all that different from what I’d been doing before. I was looking forward to it and it turned out to be all that I expected and more.”
Carol Moseley-Braun watches the delayed launch of the space shuttle Discovery in Chicago in October 1998. Photograph: Michael S Green/AP
But it was not to last. Moseley Braun served only one term before being defeated by Peter Fitzgerald, a young Republican who was heir to a family banking fortune and an arch conservative on issues such as abortion rights. But that did not deter her from running in the Democratic primary election for president in 2004.
“It was terrible,” she recalls. “I couldn’t raise the money to begin with and so I was staying on people’s couches and in airports. It was a hard campaign and the fact it was so physically demanding was a function of the fact that I didn’t have the campaign organisation or the money to do a proper campaign for president.
“I was being derided by any commentator who was like, ‘Look, this girl has lost her mind,’ and so they kind of rolled me off and that made it hard to raise money, hard to get the acceptance in the political class. But I got past that. My ego was not so fragile that that it hurt my feelings to make me stop. I kept plugging away.”
Eventually Moseley Braun dropped out and endorsed Howard Dean four days before the opening contest, the Iowa caucuses. Again, she had been the only Black woman in the field, challenging long-held assumptions of what a commander-in-chief might look like.
“That had been part and parcel of my entire political career. People saying: ‘What are you doing here? Why are you here? Don’t run, you can’t possibly win because you’re not part of the show and the ways won’t open for you because you’re Black and because you’re a woman.’ I ran into that every step of the way in my political career.”
Since then, four Black women have followed in her footsteps to the Senate: Kamala Harris and Laphonza Butler of California, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware.
Moseley Braun says: “I was happy of that because I was determined not to be the last of the Black women in the Senate. The first but not the last. That was a good thing, and so far the progress has been moving forward. But then we got Donald Trump and that trumped everything.”
Harris left the Senate to become the first woman of colour to serve as vice-president, then stepped in as Democrats’ presidential nominee after Joe Biden abandoned his bid for re-election.
Moseley Braun comments: “I thought she did as good a job as she could have. I supported her as much as I knew how to do and I’m sorry she got treated so badly and she lost like she did. You had a lot of sub rosa discussions of race and gender that she should have been prepared for but she wasn’t.”
Trump exploited the “manosphere” of podcasters and influencers and won 55% of men in 2024, up from 50% of men in 2020, according to Pew Research. Moseley Braun believes that, while the country has made strides on race, including the election of Obama as its first Black president in 2008, it still lags on gender.
“I got into trouble for saying this but it’s true: sexism is a harder thing to change than racism. I had travelled fairly extensively and most of the world is accustomed to brown people being in positions of power. But not here in the United States. We haven’t gotten there yet and so that’s something we’ve got to keep working on.”
Does she expect to see a female president in her lifetime? “I certainly hope so. I told my little grandniece that she could be president if she wanted to. She looked at me like I lost my mind. ‘But Auntie Carol, all the presidents are boys.’”
Still, Trump has not been slow to weaponise race over the past decade, launching his foray into politics with a mix of false conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace and promises to build a border wall and drive out criminal illegal immigrants.
Moseley Braun recalls: “It was racial, cultural, ethnic, et cetera, backlash. He made a big deal out of the immigration issue, which was racism itself and people are still being mistreated on that score.
“They’ve been arresting people for no good reason, just because they look Hispanic. The sad thing about it is that they get to pick and choose who they want to mess with and then they do. It’s too destructive of people’s lives in very negative ways.”
Yet her fellow Democrats have still not found an effective way to counter Trump, she argues. “The Democratic party doesn’t know what to do. It’s walking around in a daze. The sad thing about it is that we do need a more focused and more specific response to lawlessness.”
Five years after the police murder of George Floyd and death of Congressman John Lewis, there are fears that many of the gains of the civil rights movement are being reversed.
Over the past six months Trump has issued executive orders that aim to restrict or eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. He baselessly blamed DEI for undermining air safety after an army helicopter pilot was involved in a deadly midair collision with a commercial airliner. Meanwhile, Washington DC dismantled Black Lives Matter Plaza in response to pressure from Republicans in Congress.
None of it surprises Moseley Braun. “It should have been expected. He basically ran on a platform of: ‘I’m going to be take it back to the 1800s. Enough of this pandering and coddling of Black people.’”
But she has seen enough to take the long view of history. “This is normal. The pendulum swings both ways. We have to put up with that fact and recognise that this is the normal reaction to the progress we’ve made. There’s bound to be some backsliding.
More than 30 years have passed since Moseley Braun, wearing a peach business suit and clutching her Bible, was sworn into the Senate by the vice-president, Dan Quayle. Despite what can seem like baby steps forward and giant leaps back, she has faith that Americans will resist authoritarianism.
“I’m very optimistic, because people value democracy,” he says. “If they get back to the values undergirding our democracy, we’ll be fine. I hope that people don’t lose heart and don’t get so discouraged with what this guy’s doing.
“If they haven’t gotten there already, the people in the heartland will soon recognise this is a blatant power grab that’s all about him and making a fortune for himself and his family and has nothing to do with the common good. That’s what public life is supposed to be about. It’s public service.”
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