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Stop Chuck Schumering
We don’t want to “get even.” We want justice. Democrats must elect leaders who understand the stakes...and who weren’t having secret meetings with Jared Kushner.
Here is today’s ramble. And here is a transcript, edited for clarity:
Good morning. As you’re watching this, it’s Friday morning, November 6th. I am recording on Thursday morning, November 5th. It’s very early in the morning. It is still dark outside. Daylight savings has wreaked havoc on me, and I was already being wreaked havoc upon by my body clock.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, a quick announcement. This week marks, incredibly, the seventh anniversary of the PREVAIL Substack! Seven years I have been doing this. And for all that time, you have been watching and listening and reading and subscribing and contributing great comments and energizing me with your support. And I appreciate it very much. Thank you to everybody who has been a subscriber or a commenter or a sharer of my work or a reader, listener, and viewer. Thank you so much.
I don’t know what I expected when I started this, but I don’t know that I expected it—the Trump era and this column in general—would go on for so long. But I’m still here, I’m still at it, and I want to thank you for that support, as I celebrate seven years of PREVAIL.
Obviously, this has been a nice week, relatively speaking. We made some history on Tuesday. We basically painted the whole country blue. Even in their stupid maps where it looks like it’s all red because Texas and the middle states are bigger in terms of land so it looks like it’s all red, it still looks blue—because Texas is a pretty big state and we won Texas.
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Not only did we win Texas, I mean, we won Texas. Like, Greg Abbott is gone! I can’t believe that. That was for me the biggest surprise of the whole night: Greg Abbott not winning reelection to be governor of Texas. Even though he’s clearly awful in every way. He’s a terrible human being, and every winter the power goes out and it’s his fault. I don’t know what else people needed to vote this guy out. So I’m very glad to see him gone. As for the rest of these GOP losers who who lost their seats, I have to say, “Goodbye and don’t let the door hit you in John Husted’s ass.”
Obviously, I’m happy about this result. If you’ve been watching me a lot or listening to what I’ve been saying lately, my big fear was that the “blue wave” was not going to materialize and that people were going to be confused by the result and come away thinking, “My God, people really do like Trump and what do we do now,” and it was going to be kind of a shit show. Instead, the vote has been, as they say, too big to rig. So whatever skullduggery they were planning—if they were planning something—is not going to work, because the numbers are just too vast. (Florida’s still Florida, of course. Some things are never going to change, I suppose. But even that race was close, a lot closer than people thought.)
So we’re in very good shape, and the nation really does not like Donald Trump, and they do not like these hateful policies. That’s the message, and that’s the takeaway. And yet I can’t really enjoy it. I can’t really enjoy it because, right away, I’m hearing the same shit that we heard back when I started reporting on all this stuff in 2017, 2018 from the people in leadership, from the Democrats themselves.
Back then on Twitter, there was a lot of talk, a lot of reassurance, that things are moving in the background. “Don’t worry. They’re going to say one thing publicly, but they’re working on stuff in the background. They’re just saying this to throw the Republicans off the scent. But when we get in power again, there’s going to be investigations and there’s going to be consequences for the crimes.” That’s what we were told—constantly, again and again, in a very condescending manner, nine years ago. And I remember believing that.
And if you go back and look at my tweets from 2017, 2018, the biggest mistake that I made at that time was not anything to do with my analysis of Trump being a Kremlin asset. That has obviously proved very true. The mistake I made was that I thought the Democrats would do something about it. I was really, really confident that once the Democrats got back in power, they would go after Trump—because he’s a criminal. Not because we want to “get even,” but because he was a criminal and we shouldn’t have a criminal in charge of the country—certainly not one that’s owned by Vladimir Putin. That’s what I thought at the time.
I remember distinctly Jerry Nadler, who was chair of the House Judiciary Committee—that was the committee that had to actually submit an impeachment bill, to make it go forward—I remember writing, “As soon as Nadler gets the gavel, we’re gonna get this thing that we want, this impeachment.”
That did not come to pass. That didn’t come to pass after Mueller. It didn’t come to pass all the way until Ukraine. We had years of this shit because the Democrats were too craven to do anything about it, even though they knew what the guy was doing and who he was and what he was up to. They knew, and they still allowed it to happen. They didn’t use the power at their disposal to try to stop it.
And I think the Democrats, in general, as a party, and certainly the current leadership, they’re so focused on elections and the mechanics of getting elected that they often make the mistake of not interpreting what just happened in an election as a mandate—an order by the American people to do what we elected them to do. All they’re worrying about is, “If we do this thing, the gas prices will go down, and then people will vote for us again,” and tra-la-la.
That’s not effective in this climate. It’s not going to work. And I’m hearing the same shit now from Schumer, who is completely out of touch. I mean, he shared a meme where he’s in front of a grill, and the the various Republicans are depicted as burger patties, and he’s flipping the burger patties, and he thinks this is funny or cute or appropriate to the occasion:
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And it’s just fucking not, man. Trump may nuke Iran in the next two weeks. What the fuck are you doing? Stop joking around and get serious about this!
But he’s incapable of it. Schumer is a narcissist. Remember when Cory Booker did the big filibuster? As he was going to beat the record, he had a plan, a speech ready to go, and he was working into this speech that he’d obviously been preparing for, and it got screwed up because Schumer had to call him on the phone and congratulate him—and make it the moment all about him, Chuck Schumer, instead of about Cory Booker.
That’s the sort of person that Schumer is. He can’t not be in the spotlight. And he’s so condescending and thinks he knows best. And he doesn’t. He doesn’t. The last time he was Senate Majority Leader, everybody joked that Mitch McConnell was still the Senate Majority Leader because he was so ineffectual. That’s that’s the truth. He didn’t do shit. He’s not good for the job. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get the threat that Donald represents. And I think that meme and his comments play light with it all. He’s condescending to the people that want justice. And I don’t like that. I do not like that.
So I am hopeful that the this new group of senators coming in will join forces with some of the existing senators who don’t like Schumer anymore and get rid of this guy. Put him to the curb. He’s not the man for the moment.
And the comments about, “We’re not gonna go after them,” or anything like that. Why are you talking like that? Everything that Schumer and Jeffries are saying suggests that they’re going to do the same thing that they always do, which is turn the page, look the other way, let bygones be bygones, blah blah blah. We can’t do that right now.
I get that everyone’s feeling good because we won the election, but Trump is still going to be president for two more years. And he could fuck up a lot of shit in two years. Even though we have the Senate, even though we can stymie a lot of things, he can still do enormous amounts of damage—and he will, unless he is held to account and removed. That has to be the priority. You know, accountability must be the priority.
These Trump people are corrupt, and they’re working for the bad guys—and you’re gonna dicker around with some domestic bill about the price of oil? Guys, everything that you want to do is tied to this. Trump is the ogre at the foot of the bridge. And until he’s gone, nothing is going to work. Even if you get stuff passed, it doesn’t matter, because he’s going to ruin it anyway. All of the emphasis has to be on shutting this administration down. And I don’t understand why it’s not—and why people are mad at me, for suggesting that that’s the way that things should be.
So Schumer has got to go. That guy’s a buffoon at this point. And I don’t know what he was doing at Roy Cohn’s birthday party, why he was invited to Roy Cohn’s birthday party, why he wanted to go to Roy Cohn’s birthday party. But remember that these people have all known each other for decades, and they all want to play nice-nice. That’s just how it goes with these people. So let’s bring in someone new who can look at the situation objectively and do what needs to be done on behalf of the American people.
That’s Schumer.
As for Hakeem Jeffries, I mean, he’s out there saying, “Affordability, affordability, affordability.” He said, “The American people didn’t elect us to get even. You know, we’re going to be focused on results and affordability and accountability, but no, no, no, no one’s talking about impeachment or anything like that.”
I don’t understand how you can be focused on accountability and not talk about impeachment. I wrote on Tuesday that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is a better approach to this than impeachment is:
But even so, like, you can’t not talk about it. What are you talking about? Donald Trump is the most corrupt, disgusting person who’s ever held office. The criminality is off the charts. And again, he may nuke Iran before you even take over the House. And you’re not going to think about removing him? You’re not going to entertain it? What the fuck are you talking about?
Even worse, we know that Jeffries was having secret meetings with Jared Kushner. And the more we learn about Jared Kushner and all the sneaky shit he’s been up to—all the hobnobbing and cavorting with weird foreign governments, and these vast sums of money going from the Bank of Israel, which normal people shouldn’t even have access to, through a bank in Azerbaijan to pay God knows who. And Hakeem Jeffries is meeting with him? In secret? In secret? And not telling anybody about it?
Why aren’t you telling anybody about it, Hakeem? Why? Obviously, you know that it’s the wrong thing to do, or else you would have said something. And I’m not the first person to point out how much money both of these guys take from AIPAC—and whatever happens next in in Congress, with Bibi and everything, it’s really a shit show.
So you have a guy who’s going to be Speaker of the House who had covert meetings with Jared Kushner—and when pressed about it, what did he say? Remember what he said? “What did you guys talk about?” “Affordability,” he said. Affordability. Well, Wednesday, all I heard out of his mouth was, “We’re going to focus on affordability. Affordability, American people care about affordability. We don’t care about getting even.”
No one’s talking about getting even, Hakeem. We’re talking about oversight. We’re talking about justice. We’re talking about an end to corruption. That’s not “getting even.” That’s doing your fucking job. And it occurs to me, reading the ChatGPT bullshit word salad coming out of his mouth, and then going back and looking at what he and Jared supposedly talked about—i.e., affordability: Did these two guys just sit around and make up this messaging? Did they use Claude to write it? Because it reeks of Jared Kushner-speak to me.
Just the fact that Jeffries met with Kushner at all, in my view, is disqualifying. I don’t care what they were talking about. That’s disqualifying. So I don’t want to be told to shut up and tamp down or anything like that. I don’t want to be assured that, “No, no, no, they know what they’re doing. They’re just saying this now to appease the Republicans.” What Republicans? Who? The MAGA? Fuck them. They lost bad. They lost bigly.
People want this, and Schumer and Jeffries are misreading the situation. We’re handing them a mandate, and they’re looking at the mandate and they’re misunderstanding it. And whether they’re misunderstanding it because they’re incompetent or because they’re corrupt is irrelevant. The fact is, they’re misunderstanding what we’ve instructed them to do. And if they don’t do it, we’re still fucked no matter how many states we turned blue. These two need to go. They need to be replaced by people who are actually patriots—who care about this country and are serious enough to get the job done.
And I’ll give you an example of somebody who is that way, and that would be Representative Robert Garcia, who is now the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight. He put out a statement. I’m going to read the whole press release, because it’s so delicious:
Today, Representative Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released the following statement after Democrats secured a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Following this win, Garcia will become Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, where he has vowed to take on the Trump crime family, corporate corruption, DHS and ICE abuses, and the cover-up of the Epstein files. His statement can be found below.
“Lawyer up.”
That’s the energy that we need. He’s not talking about “getting even.” He’s talking about accountability and oversight and justice. That’s what we want. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
So don’t tell me to calm down. Don’t assure me. Don’t pat me on the head like I’m a child and tell me, “No, you don’t understand how Washington works. In the background, things are happening. They’re just saying this to throw Trump off the scent.”
I’ve seen that movie before. I know how it ends, and it ends badly. I don’t want that. I want people to say what they’re going to do, like Garcia is doing, so that people know—so that we really are reassured. And so when it happens, we can be happy. And when it doesn’t happen, we can call them out for not doing it.
Instead, we’re getting flipping-cheeseburger memes and Hakeem Jeffries, it seems to me, just saying what Jared Kushner told him to say. That’s what it seems like to me. Having been through this in the first Trump term, and having watched the messaging and everything else then—that’s not what we need. What we need are Nuremberg trials. That’s what I want.
You know, it’s very tempting now that we won, and that we had this big blue wave, to exhale and rest and assume that now everything’s going to be okay. Now, it’s much more likely that everything’s going to be okay. And I’m very grateful for it. But we are not out of the woods yet. He’s still president for two more years and two more months. And lots of damage can happen in the meantime. And if our leaders don’t use the power that they’ve been granted by the American people in a resounding way—we voted in unvanquishable number, like Percy Shelley said, right?—if they don’t do what the people elected them to do, I mean, what’s the point of even having elections? What’s the point?
So we need to keep on the Democrats now. The Democratic leaders— the ball is in Schumer and Jeffries’s court. And if they fuck this up—which they will, those two guys will—I don’t know what we’re going to do.
So the best case is that we try to replace them before the new Congressional term even starts. That’s what I’m hoping for. And when that happens, when we have that, then I will know—then I will know—that we shall prevail.
TONIGHT
The season finale of The Five 8. We have a great guest. Please join me and Stephanie “LB” Koff tonight at 8pm ET.
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