Dems who don't believe Trump will try to destroy us need to quit wasting our time

D. Earl Stephens
02 May
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as he signs executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 23, 2025.

Let’s start here today: Any Democrat who had a part in the Biden/Harris/Harris/Walz 2024 presidential campaign, is never allowed to work in politics again.

That might not be the brave decree it reads like, because that election might have been the last of its kind in American history, which makes the failings of the three-headed campaign so stark.

And if that made you snicker it wasn’t meant as a joke, because if you still somehow don’t think that the American-attacking Trump won’t do everything inhumanely possible to hold onto power in 2028, you need go stand in some corner for not paying attention.

He means to end us, folks.

What you have seen out of this stone-cold racist and his Christo-fascist cult of me-firsts during their first 100 days of this torture test has been but a small sampler of what is yet to be served. It has been the bothersome drizzle before the steady deluge.

By the time this corrupt sicko is done with our federal government it will be completely unrecognizable, and geared around one mission and one mission only: keeping him in power until he has the decency to finally die on his two-ton throne.

Money, as always, is the biggest motivator for this psychopath and his fawning billionaires to kick us into the gutter, but sheer vindictiveness and a never-ending craving to completely wreck this county and turn it into a gas-powered dumpster fire is running a close second.

He is a sick and demented old man, the result of being the most inadequate, miserable person in every room he has ever stepped in the last 78 years.

He has the most powerful court, justice department and military in the history of the world at his greasy finger tips, and if you don’t think he won’t use them against us, I’d like to know what isolated island you have parked yourself on, so I can join you.

So back to the all these Democrats, who are still barraging us with fundraising messages, and think keeping lightweights like Chuck Schumer in the vicinity of power is helpful.

The Democratic Party has never been more unpopular, and it has never deserved it more. The more I have gotten to know about who is inside the 24/7 money-raising machine and making it tick, the more I have come to understand why it is now stalled on the side of the road after going bang.

On Monday, I unfortunately stumbled into a never-ending guest column in The New York Times penned by a guy named Rob Flaherty. Underneath the column, Flaherty is identified as “a deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign and served as assistant to the president and director of digital strategy in the Biden White House.”

Wow. Either that’s a guy with a lot of responsibility, or is one of these Washington insiders, who wears those cheap suits and bargained harder for his title than his salary.

In his piece, I worked for Harris and Biden. Here’s the missing link for Democrats,Flaherty spent a lot of time talking about “opt-in” voters, allegedly us. And “opt-out” voters, allegedly them. Democrats are winning “opt-in” voters big-time, you see, but just can’t seem to reach those pesky “opt-out” types, who he described this way:

“At their core, opt-out voters generally don’t trust politicians or the mainstream media. Many assume the system is rigged, the media is biased and neither party is actually fighting for them.”

That’s funny, because that at least vaguely sounds like me, and I thought I was an “opt-inner.” It hurts to admit that, especially as a guy who gave his life to journalism. But let’s face it, we are all being suckered and rolled by billionaires who own our current-day corporate media and their clever messages of surrender disguised as news.

Before diving face first into his “opt-in” “opt-out” spiel, Flaherty, who’s 33, wanted us to know this important nugget:

“I’ve come up through a party that clings to TV ads and news releases, holding on to a media environment that stopped existing a decade ago.”

I played along and read the piece, but not before asking several times why if this guy was so damn smart and knew about some “missing link” and the fact he was part of an ancient media environment that “stopped existing,” he didn’t do something about it as the deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign when it would have mattered — LIKELAST F–––––G YEAR.

Except the truth is he wasn’t that smart last year, either, because here is what he said about the campaign just 75 days from the election:

“Young voters are very excited about this ticket, and voters across the country are excited about this ticket, and that’s because of the vice president, and that’s because of Gov. (Tim) Walz.”

Ummm …

No.

Actually if young voters had showed up for Democrats as they had in the past, Harris would have won going away, because here are the facts:

75-year-old white men supported Kamala Harris by a whopping 14 points over 20-year-old white men in this election. Worse? Among all 18-year-olds, women of color are the ONLY group Harris won. Trump even won nonwhite men in this age group by a narrow margin.

That’s called a massive failure, and if we are to believe Flaherty and all his tens of years of expertise he’s dragging along, it’s a failure he most certainly should have seen coming, and acted on when he had the chance, instead of Monday morning quarterbacking in the NYT while this country burns.

Look, Flaherty seems like an earnest lad, who’s got a serious political addiction, but the nonsense he’s dealing to his “opt-inners” in the NYT right now isn’t helping. He is becoming highly skilled at making himself believe almost anything about anybody depending on who is paying him to do it.

Trust me on this: D.C. is just crammed full of these people, who are elbowing each other out of the way to get a rising politician’s attention.

Flaherty’s piece is just the latest from the gang of gung-ho, inadequate staffers in the Biden/Harris/Harris/Walz campaign who spent 2024 hiding how bad things were on the inside to the millions of donors on the outside.

They are falling all over themselves to explain how it all went wrong, despite all they were allegedly doing right.

Rather than reckon with their issues, they apparently just decided to roundly ignore them, and sent out 73 fund-raising messages an hour, so they could use that money to ensure that Harris reached as many critical “opt-in” voters as possible, and join the coveted billon-dollar campaign fundraising club.

For having reached that milestone, and then spent that money in all the wrong places, people like Flaherty still figure they will have jobs inside the party forever, and that is the damn problem right there.

Everything anybody thinks they knew about politics died on November 5, 2024. Right now the survival of our country — forget the Democratic Party — is on the line.

We are officially at the “fight or die” stage of American democracy.

We need to be on wartime footing. We need new leaders with new ideas who understand this. I’m talking about RIGHT NOW.

They need to be leading from the front and everywhere.

We need to plan what it will look like when people take to the streets by the millions because this is most certainly coming. I’m not talking about these isolated marches that have been popping off in the last few months, I am talking about massive demonstrations of people power.

I am talking about the kinds of things that America has never seen before, because I am telling you that if you still do not believe Trump will do everything in his power to destroy us, before admitting he was wrong about anything, then you need to get out of our way, and quit wasting our time.

This is not some damn political game.

It terrifies me that too many Democrats on the inside still don’t seem to understand what the hell is going on on the outside.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

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