My vision, goals, and plan for the Second Trump Era

If there’s one thing this country needs right now, it’s another white guy with some thoughts and vibes they feel like shouting from the rooftop. Luckily for me, if you’re reading this, you’re here by choice so I don’t feel that bad about talking about what I think needs to be done the next four years.

This is going to be a longer one. So before I dive in, I want to establish some time horizons for these ideas I’m laying out. There is a big difference between what can and should be done from now to November 2026 and what will be done between now and November 2028. There are up variables in both time horizons, but there are more unknowns about four years from now. Who controls the House and Senate, how is Trump doing with his old age, how have his policies helped or hurt the American people (and how much), and other factors are impossible to predict. By the time 2028 rolls around Trump could have completely bulldozed the constitution and the presidential election could look like us going through the motions of a democracy rather than a legitimate contest. NATO could be dissolved, Russia could be in Germany, there could be war with Mexico, maybe we own Greenland and Canada now. Or perhaps none of that happens, it’s all too difficult to predict.

What I do feel confident predicting is that Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress will enact an agenda that hurts workers, makes us less safe, and is the greatest gold mine of all time for the ultra-wealthy. And it is with those fundamentals in mind, that I will approach the next two years with a singular goal: win back the House and Senate. Everything we do in the next two years should advance that goal, but I recognize that may not be a viable path everyone can stomach. But for me, at least, that is the only goal I am concerned with. I’ll leave harm reduction to activist groups, NGOs, and nonprofits. I’m operating strictly within the realm of domestic power politics. Who wins and who loses is all that matters to me right now.

I see my party adrift, leaderless—both desperate to find our footing and afraid to say the wrong thing. Did Trump smoke us or was this election much closer than people thought on election night? The answer is both, but it also is irrelevant. What matters is that this election was always going to be very close for a few reasons.

1. Democrats have hemorrhaged “traditional groups” like Latinos, union “blue collar” workers, and Black men for multiple elections in a row.

2. Democrats lost the war on immigration, culture, and toughness due to self-inflicted wounds, circular firing squads, a legacy media environment that holds Democrats to a higher standard than Republicans, and a new media environment that is dominated by right-leaning voices.

3. 3. Democratic Party leadership failed spectacularly in handling Joe Biden and installing Kamala Harris as our nominee with 100 days to go was both the only choice we had and also a disastrous choice.

Allow me to flesh this out a bit more below.

Losing with traditional groups

Barack Obama won 71% of the Latino vote in 2012. Kamala Harris won just 52% of the Latino vote in 2024. Obama won 36% of white voters without a college degree in 2012 to Harris’ 25% in 2024. Obama won over 90% of Black males, while Harris won approximately 70%. There are plenty of smarter people to read on why those trends are occurring, but I’m here to say this trend is real, it’s happening, and we cannot win national elections if those trends continue.

We have lost the Message War

Voters see Democrats as more extreme than Republicans. That is inaccurate and unfair, but life isn’t fair. And we need to acknowledge this so we can actually do something about it, rather than complain and point out (rightfully) that only one of our two parties tried to overthrow the government and hang the vice president. I’ll just give my anecdote that I worked for Kamala Harris during her brief run in the Democratic Presidential Primary in 2019 and I am haunted by the nonsense we argued about during those few months and throughout the rest of the primary. It was a race to the bottom for Democrats to see who could publicly come out in favor of the more nationally unpopular position.

Whether it was eliminating private health care, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, defunding the police, or providing taxpayer-funded gender-affirming care to illegal immigrant felons while they were in prison—we were genuinely out of our minds thinking these positions would not alienate low-info swing voters. I certainly didn’t realize how out of touch it sounded at the time, but typing this out now is making my head throb.

The right seized on these positions, and Democrats were left in a lose-lose situation. Candidates who tried to rebuke these far-left ideas were branded as insensitive, racist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, or corporate sell-outs. So we expended time, energy, and resources fighting amongst ourselves. The circular firing squad negatively impacts our ability to obtain power in two ways. First, it necessarily drains finite resources either in political capital or in actual campaign dollars. Second, it has led to candidates taking positions that are far too easily seized upon by the right to paint us as crazy and out-of-touch.

Example: In the real world, AOC has limited actual power, as she is a young House member without a large governing coalition within that legislative body. But go ask your dad, uncle, or grandpa, who watches Fox News all day, about AOC. They believe she is both the anti-Christ and also the main face of the Democratic Party.

Conservative control of both traditional and new media makes it very difficult to combat if we’re A) doing half their job for them with the positions we champion and B) not entering the spaces their listeners are in.

Democrats are held to a far higher standard than Republicans, even by the “liberal media”. Let’s do a thought experiment: imagine President Biden blaming a plane crash that killed over 60 Americans on DEI and Republicans. How would the media respond to that? Think about that for a moment and you can conclude we are not on a level playing field. Then there’s Fox News (and I suppose OANN and NewsMax), which is as close to state-run TV as you can get without it actually crossing into that realm. Fox owns its audience’s eyeballs and ears every night and it feeds them conspiracies about liberals while swooning over Trump as much as humanly possible.

The podcast and YouTube world are challenging for Democrats as well. The most popular podcasters like Joe Rogan and YouTubers like Lex Fridman make a point to avoid labeling themselves as Republicans, but the views of the guests they invite onto their shows are friendly to the right, and these hosts never push back on anything their guests say—even when they are patently wrong. Even more difficult to combat are guys like Theo Von. He is not a political influencer, nor is he even that tuned in to politics. But he does invite right-wing politicians and influencers onto his shows, and he is very friendly to them.

I can’t expect a guy like Theo Von to deliver hard-hitting questions a real journalist would ask, but he also allows guests to spew conspiracies and lies without an ounce of pushback. More often than not, he agrees with them by the end. This is a very difficult dynamic for Democrats to navigate, and I have a lot of sympathy for people whose comms team doesn’t want them going on those shows—but we must begin to infiltrate that world. Otherwise, their viewers will hear only the right-wing version of events, and we will be locked out from winning those voters.

Joe Biden & Democratic Leaders Failed

Even with the disadvantages we faced due to problems one and two, we still could have won this election! It was close! Donald Trump was not a popular person and he absolutely could have been beaten… but we never gave ourselves a chance.

First, Joe Biden should not have run for re-election. That’s not a hot take. He was too old. He was incapable of communicating effectively. And frankly, he looked weak. Elections are a popularity contest at the end of the day, and if all else is equal, would you choose someone who looked too weak to do the job over someone who appeared energetic and excited?

I blame Joe Biden for being too selfish to hand the reigns over to the next generation (as he said he would do in 2020). I blame his family for pressuring him to stay in. I blame his closest advisors for not telling him the truth about his chances to win, even hiding polling data from him to keep him in the race. That decision by his close advisors was despicable, cowardly, and selfish, and should be noted in the annals of history as such. But Biden is a grown man, and he deserves the brunt of the blame. I don’t care how old he is. His decision to remain in the race until July 2024 set off a chain of events that I believe cost us a much better chance of winning the election.

In the timeline we were given, Democrats had no choice but to run Kamala Harris. It was unquestionably the right choice in my mind and there is significant data to suggest that her campaign saved Democrats from a Carter-esque wipeout across the board.

But imagine a different timeline, one where Biden announces after a strong Democratic showing in the 2022 midterms that he will not stand for re-election. In that scenario, Democrats could have quite reasonably held a real primary to determine who should lead the ticket. Kamala Harris was the Vice President and there is a very good chance she would have become the nominee in this scenario as well, but at least this way, you can have a process. You could have debates where candidates could distance themselves from Biden’s plummeting popularity. They could offer a different approach to the highly divisive war in Gaza and they could articulate their plan to bring inflation down. They could more effectively articulate the dangers Trump presented their vision for a better America.

Instead, Kamala Harris was forced into a rushed campaign of 100 days. She had to rush to pick a VP, rush for a DNC convention, rush to prepare for a debate (which she crushed), and rush to find the right message to land against Donald Trump, all while he and his Super PACs backed by $250 million from Elon Musk ran ads of her saying taxpayers should fund surgery for transgender illegal immigrant felons in 2019. Not great! But even then, she ran a strong campaign that way over-performed in the swing states where the campaign had a ground game and ran ads.

Joe Biden’s decision to run in 2024 and his subsequent decision to stay in the race until July put Democrats and Kamala Harris in an impossible position. And even then, the election ended up being pretty close!

So that’s how we got here. Now what does this white guy with an opinion think we should do about it?

Phase I — Hard Power

The first step in affecting change is winning elections. Lobbying, advocacy, and activism are all critical parts of this process, but ultimately, you need your people in charge to make it happen.

I’m not anyone important in the Democratic world, but I have a professional skill set that can help Democrats obtain and exert hard power. Me and a few other concerned Dems have joined together to form a new organization called No Surrender.

Our motto is Pro-America, Anti-Trump because that is how we view this fight ahead of us. We are not interested in purity tests for Democrats—if you oppose Trump AND Trumpism and you are willing to do what it takes to beat him and his supporters in Congress, we want you on our team. Our only goal is to identify House and Senate races we can engage in to either protect Democrats in vulnerable seats (Jon Ossoff in Georgia) or to take out Republicans who are beatable and who have shown their cowardice and lack of backbone by bending the knee to Trump (Thom Tills in North Carolina).

Democratic donors are so swamped by hundreds of campaigns asking for donations that it becomes far too difficult and time-consuming to decide who does and doesn’t need their money. We want to streamline that process for them by clearly establishing who we will support and how we will spread the money. That’s where the transparency part comes in. There’s no reason not to be transparent if you’re doing what you’re supposed to with the money people send us. We will have our FEC filings front and center on our website (when we have any to publish) so people can see how their money is being spent.

You may think, “Don’t other groups already do this?”. Yes, plenty of Democratic organizations work to elect other Democrats. The difference is our only goal is 2026 and affecting the specific races we choose, which will be based on two conditions: is the person defending their seat or challenging the Republican a strong defender of the rule of law and opponent of autocracy, and can they win? Too much money gets wasted on races that either don’t need the money to win OR have no chance of winning but are being run against big-name Republican baddies like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

This organization has one goal for 2025: to grow and become as much of a juggernaut as possible so that in 2026, we can fire on all cylinders, running our ad campaigns, funding phone banks, setting up volunteer canvasses, and giving directly to candidates we want to win. If you want to be part of that, add your name to our mailing list.

Phase II: Infiltration & Soft Power

If you’re familiar with the American model of becoming and remaining the most powerful country on Earth, you know hard power has to come with soft power.

This means influencing information both in presentation and substance. For several reasons, the right will continue to control media spaces for the next four years.

1. The podcast and YouTube space is only growing stronger

2. Traditional media holds the right to a lower standard

3. Traditional media already has been and will become more prone to attack from Trump’s FCC, DOJ, FBI, etc, which will stifle criticism

4. Billionaires who own both legacy and social media have bowed down to Trump and manipulated their platforms to be more friendly to him

I have no idea how to solve those last three challenges, but I think we can chip away at the first one by having more people join the podcast/YouTube space, either by creating our own or by appearing on shows that we normally wouldn’t. This way, we can force our point of view into these shows that often do nothing but naval gaze. Growing your own space and having the clout to get an invitation to those other shows seem to go hand in hand, so I would like to try to break into that space eventually.

The first step is what I’m doing right here on Substack—just trying to put my thoughts into the world to see what people are interested in reading more about and what they’re not. If we have an information ecosystem problem, then we need to infiltrate every corner of the ecosystem we’re struggling in. That means digital print, podcasts, YouTube, and social media more broadly. I would love to be able to lay out, in detail, what this part looks like. The truth is, I’m not entirely sure yet. There are Substack writers, podcasters, and YouTube channels who do some of this to varying degrees. But what I want is to become someone who can infiltrate the information environment by being a normal person who will also espouse liberal beliefs.

I love sports, movies, books, TV, video games, working out, eating, going out, etc. I don’t need to become Politics Guy Who Hates Trump every hour of every day. I think we can benefit from something more. Being able to go on a Barstool show where guys come to hear about sports but are also influenced by more right-wing guests is a good example of the kind of place I could fit in socially but would probably differ a lot politically. We need more people who are willing to do that, not just Democratic Party leaders who people already know and associate with the “radical left.”

We need soft power. We need reach, access, and messengers to deliver the information and message young men who tune in to these sources won’t otherwise receive. Information AND people’s attention are more powerful and valuable than money, oil, or guns. We’re in an information and attention war that we are currently losing. That cannot continue. As I said at the top, I’m just another white guy with opinions—but perhaps a white guy who likes to talk about sports can break through in this information environment rather than coming off as a “lib cuck” as the kids on the right say these days.

This part is much more difficult than building the hard power because I have professional skills in the ladder. So, I’ll be sure to keep you all updated on how this side of things is going.

Conclusion

Phase I can be effectively implemented with a target set directly on the midterms and nothing else because Donald Trump will not be at the top of the Republican ticket in 22 months. He drives the turnout of his base, which helps him and other Republicans win elections. We have multiple midterm elections without him at the top of the ticket, and voters have not historically rewarded the rest of his party without his presence. Between that, the voting demographics Democrats are over-performing with these days, and the rank unpopularity of the policies Trump 2.0 will force onto the American people, we should be in a position to deal a massive blow to the GOP House and Senate.

The information and attention war is more of a four-year project. As I said, I’m not important enough to have that kind of impact on people’s minds right now, and I cannot see a world where that changes drastically in the next two years. I will continue writing to you, and if you enjoy my content, I hope you will share it with your friends, family, or followers.

I look forward to continue growing No Surrender and making our mark on the 2026 midterms as best we can. That is the most important goal in my mind right now, and I welcome you to come along for the ride. It will be a tough four years no matter what, but I have to believe that we can survive it and do something about it when we get the chance.

I know this was long, but if you stayed to read all the way through, I thank you.

I’ll have more updates on this over the coming weeks and months, so make sure to subscribe for those updates and keep your eye out in your inbox!

Peace.