The Democratic party is leaderless, unpopular, and up for grabs, and in last night’s New York elections, the Democratic socialists showed they’re the faction with momentum in it. “Fresh off sweeping victories across New York City that showcased the growing power of the anti-establishment progressive left inside the Democratic Party,” Politico reports this morning, “Democratic Socialists of America leaders, eager to capitalize on their momentum, are already plotting their next act: making sure one of their own is on the presidential primary debate stage, whether the party wants them or not.”

Isn’t it exciting, living in one interesting time after another? Happy Wednesday.

Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker for Command Post live on Substack and YouTube at 10 a.m. EDT today.

Old Man Yells at Crowd

by Andrew Egger

It’s interesting, the things that jump out at you watching your eight millionth¹ Trump rally. For instance: Did you know the president is perhaps the sole person on earth who uses the words “won” and “love” as synonyms? “Hello, Pennsylvania,” he said as he arrived on stage Tuesday afternoon to the usual soaring strains of “God Bless the USA.” “I won this place so much.”

Trump hasn’t been doing so much winning lately. Islamist regimes abroad and single-celled organisms at home keep disobeying his extremely clear instructions, no matter how many bombs or gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide he sends their way. Rogue judges keep ordering his name off of buildings, no matter how much he deserves to put it up and how nice it looks once it’s up there. Even his most reliable whipping boys, the Republicans of the United States Congress, have begun to flash a sudden and alarming new modicum of self-respect, with a small but significant number of them voting against his wars and scuttling his slush funds.

Yeah, D.C. sort of sucks lately; what Trump needed was a rally. So yesterday he schlepped out to a Mack Trucks factory in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley to get one. These rallies have always been a tonic for Trump; this one felt more like a lifeline. Every stupid threadbare brag line, every completely invented cockamamie anecdote and scripted attack on the “Dumocrats”—the crowd, as usual, ate it up with a spoon. “There’s so much love in the room,” Trump said. “There’s so much unbelievable love.”

We could spend far more time and space than this newsletter permits ticking through the president’s usual parade of whoppers. It seems, for instance, that he intends to try to sell a return to the status quo² in the Strait of Hormuz as one of those Wonderful, Magnificent Deals Only Trump Could Ever Get You: “Yesterday, 19 million barrels of oil flowed out of the Strait of Hormuz, a very beautiful place,” he said. “That’s the most oil in the history of the strait.” (In reality, it’s still a bit subpar—last year an average of 20 million barrels passed through the waterway daily.)

It also appears that Trump, having failed once again to deliver the manufacturing boom he has spent a decade promising, is now using America’s data center buildout as a way to fudge the numbers and pretend he’s delivered on that front too. “Right now, we have more factories being built—and I mean car factories, AI factories, factories of every type—than we’ve ever had in the history of our country, by three times,” he bragged. “That’s because they didn’t want to pay the tariff. How don’t you pay a tariff? You build the factory here and you hire American workers.”

Building a data center in America rather than in Bangladesh, of course, has zero to do with tariffs and lots to do with latency, infrastructure, grid stability, and so on—companies want to keep their data centers as close to their actual users as possible. And a data center, unlike a factory, doesn’t bring with it a whole bundle of blue-collar manufacturing jobs of the sort Trump keeps promising to bring back.

But at a Trump rally, none of that matters. It is a space apart from space and a time apart from time, where the possibilities remain endless and the achievements remain unsurpassed. These people really do think, after all this time, that Trump is giving them the straight, honest truth when he brings out that old canard: “A short time ago, we were a dead country,” but now “we’re the hottest country in the world by a lot.”

The problem is that it’s growing clearer—even to increasingly panicky Republican strategists outside the building—that all this is an illusion. Trump might find these rallies both soothing and invigorating, but the people who show up in that room have never been further from a durable political majority: Trump is still nineteen points underwater in Silver Bulletin’s polling average, and the strong approvers—the rallygoing types—are utterly swamped out by the strong disapprovers: 22.6 percent of Americans say “hell yes,” 48 percent say “hell no.”

Trump might think that the vast majority of Real Americans approve of him. He might think, when he heads out for one of those rallies, that that’s who’s showing up. He might think the polls really are cooked, that the vote totals really are rigged, that he’s sitting on the people-pleasing side of a whole bundle of—as he likes to say—“99–1” issues.

But if he does, he