“Can you never do that again?” my son texted me on Monday in our family group chat. I had sent a series of photos of my flight in the tiny Cessna Caravan that had just flown my mortal being 120 miles, from Chicago O’Hare International Airport to West Lafayette, Indiana. The nine-seat aircraft, which runs on a single turboprop engine, was so small that the ground crew had to weigh luggage and passengers in order to distribute their weight evenly in the cabin. It was, in short, the kind of plane that makes it easy to fear for your life. By contrast, I hadn’t been concerned at all—and my son had found no cause to worry—about the American Airlines regional jet that I’d taken on the first leg of my trip, from St. Louis to Chicago.

Just a few days later, an American Airlines regional jet collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C., killing everyone involved: 60 passengers, four crew members, and three service members. The National Transportation Safety Board has said it will take at least a year to identify a final probable cause of the crash. Until then, one can only guess that the aircrafts and their machinery were not themselves to blame. The New York Times has reported that the relevant air-traffic-control tower may have been understaffed and that the helicopter might have been outside its flight path. As Juliette Kayyem wrote for The Atlantic yesterday, a rise in flight traffic has been increasing the risk of midair collisions for years, especially in busy airspace such as Washington’s.

[Read: The near misses at airports have been telling us something]

Statistically, for now at least, flying is still much safer than driving. According to the International Air Transport Association, on average a person would have to travel by plane every day for more than 100,000 years before experiencing a fatal accident. A host of factors has made flying more reliable, among them more dependable equipment, better pilot training, tighter regulations, stricter maintenance standards, advances in air-traffic control, and improved weather forecasting. But the amorphous, interlocking systems that realize commercial flight are hard to see or understand, even as they keep us safe. For ordinary passengers—people like me and my son—any sense of danger tends to focus on the plane itself, because the plane is right in front of us, and above our heads, and underneath our feet, and lifting us up into the sky. A fear of flying makes little sense, because flying is just physics. One really fears airplanes, the aluminum tubes in which a fragile human body may be trapped while it is brought into flight. A machine like that can crash. A machine like that can kill you.

The Boeing 737 Max’s recent string of mishaps, including two fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019, and, more recently, a lost door during flight, are still fresh in the minds of passengers, and history only reinforces the fear. In 1950, a TWA Lockheed Constellation en route from Mumbai to New York crashed when its engine caught on fire and detached. In 1979, another engine detachment on a DC-10 wide-body jet caused the crash of American Airlines Flight 191. In 1988, an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 lost an 18-foot-long section of upper fuselage on the way from Hilo to Honolulu. Human error—a contributing factor in most crashes, if not their direct cause—can also stem from equipment failure, as in the case of Pan Am Flight 812 in 1974 and Air France Flight 447 in 2009.

Yet the salience of an airplane’s actual machinery has been fading too. For passengers, the experience of commercial flight may be worse than ever, but the planes themselves now seem more reliable and more accommodating (if only so many passengers weren’t packed into them). Twenty years ago, regional flights would commonly use turboprops to transport passengers between hubs and small-to-medium-size cities. These planes were louder and bumpier. Flying in them felt worse, and it inspired more anxiety for that reason.

Are little turboprops actually more dangerous than jets? A direct comparison is difficult, because the smaller planes are often used for shorter flights, and more flights mean more takeoffs and landings—when most accidents occur. But the numbers are somewhat reassuring overall, at least when it comes to commercial flight. (The numbers for general aviation, which includes recreational planes, skydiving operations, bush flying, and the rest of civilian noncommercial flight, are less reassuring.) The NTSB filed investigations into eight fatal aviation accidents in the United States from 2000 to 2024 that involved commercial aircraft with turboprop engines, and 13 for aircraft with turbo fans (the most common passenger-jet engine).

In any case, modern airport logistics, just like modern jumbo jets, have helped build a sense of safety—or at least hide a source of fear. U.S. passengers used to board and disembark their flights from the tarmac with more regularity. This was true of prop planes and bigger jets alike. The shrill whine of turbines and the sweet smell of aviation fuel made the mechanisms of flight more palpable; it reminded you that you were entering a machine. Nowadays, that reality is hidden. You board comfortable, quiet cabins from the climate-controlled shelter of jet bridges.

All of these changes have tamped down the fear of planes to the point that, for many passengers, it will now resurface only under certain throwback conditions—such as when I found myself bobbing over the Hoosier farms in a plane cabin the size of a taco truck. That sort of white-knuckling is a distraction from the truer, more pervasive risks of air travel in 2025. The systemic lapses and conditions that have produced frequent near misses in aviation, and that may have contributed to this week’s accident, now seem likely to worsen under the Trump administration, which has purged the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration, and blamed DEI for a fatal crash.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

The nation’s pervasive weakness in aviation safety is genuinely scary, but it’s shapeless, too. It provokes the sort of fright that you feel in your bones, the sort that makes you entreat a loved one to please never fly in one of those again, okay? And yet, I might well have been safer in the cold cabin of a turboprop 5,000 feet above Indiana than I would have been on an approach to an overcrowded, understaffed airport in a quiet regional jet. The plane still seems like the thing that might kill you. Even now, I suspect it always will.

After Donald Trump visited the Los Angeles area late last month to observe the damage from recent fires, he made a nakedly political demand: As a condition of releasing federal aid to stricken areas, he wants California to make voters show ID at the polls. Trump is reportedly convinced that he would have won the state if it had such a law, but that has nothing to do with fire safety.

If Trump wants California to mend its ways before receiving federal disaster relief, he could make some reasonable requests: The state should stop encouraging suburban sprawl in fire-prone areas, for example, and start pushing property owners to take more precautions. To the exasperation of emergency-management experts and budget hawks alike, California fires are like many other disasters all around the country. They lead to massive insurance settlements and outflows of government aid, which in many cases pay for rebuilding the same physical environment that left people and their homes vulnerable in the first place.

[M. Nolan Gray: How well-intentioned policies fueled L.A.’s fires]

State governments typically manage the aftermath of natural disasters; when they are overwhelmed, they appeal to Washington for additional money. For years, people in my field have been urging Congress to put strings on that relief. Unfortunately, Trump’s voter-ID demand—along with his insistence that the state should also change its water policies, which he did not appear to fully understand—triggered a righteous response among prominent California Democrats. “Conditioning aid for American citizens is wrong,” Governor Gavin Newsom declared in a statement. No, it isn’t, but Trump is setting back the cause of reform.

The present federal disaster-relief system, built over decades, involves multiple pots of money from a variety of agencies: the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The 1988 Stafford Act, which governs the distribution of many of these funds, is built on the presumptions that major disasters are random, rare acts of God, and that communities hit by them need to be made whole again. But as climate change repeatedly exposes certain regions to the same disasters—fires in California, hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, tornadoes in the Great Plains—rebuilding the status quo looks less and less defensible. “Okay, that was a 40-year-old building; let’s rebuild a 40-year-old building,” one recovery official in Louisiana memorably said in a 2009 PBS report, capturing widespread frustration with federal rules governing New Orleans’s long recovery after Hurricane Katrina.

Some local jurisdictions have responded to disasters by taking steps to avoid a repeat. In 2018, the Camp Fire destroyed most of the buildings in Paradise, California, and killed 85 people. To build there now, homeowners must abide by local regulations, known as defensible-space requirements, that require them to remove vegetation that would otherwise help a fire move more quickly. In 2013, a tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, killed 24 people, including seven children in an elementary school. The community responded in part by imposing stringent new residential building codes.

When I visited Moore last year, after a devastating tornado season in Oklahoma, a builder named Marvin Haworth walked me through a home that requires sheathing, nail shanks, and hurricane straps under the new regulations. He was originally concerned about the changes, but the added cost to home purchasers is minimal, and the matter is settled now. “It is not a part of the discussion anymore,” he told me. “It’s the code. This is the way we are building and are going to build.”

[Nancy Walecki: The place where I grew up is gone]

Moore and Paradise both had the foresight to acknowledge the risks they face and take it upon themselves to change. States generally do not require such steps. Sweeping policy changes are difficult to enact immediately after a disaster. People are hurt and in need; political considerations demand that immediate distribution of money. That’s why FEMA administrators under presidents of both parties have proposed some version of conditional relief funding. Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s policies, calls on states to pay a “disaster deductible” before securing federal aid—a requirement that might motivate governors and legislators to demand better preparation for disasters. As The New York Times reported, that idea originally came from Craig Fugate, President Barack Obama’s FEMA chief, who insisted that Washington needed a mechanism to force states to do better advance planning. But states want money unconditionally, and substantive reform proposals such as Fugate’s have not survived political pushback.

Nevertheless, a lot of little changes—stronger nails, cleared yards—can add up to a more resilient society. Trump’s focus on political payback is unfortunate, because the current system needs an overhaul. Disasters are no longer random or rare. When disaster strikes, we should rebuild accordingly.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

The worst aviation disaster in almost a quarter century is one of the first tests of Donald Trump’s second administration. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss how the president responded to the crisis.

Following the aviation crash over the Potomac this week, Trump moved to blame diversity in the Federal Aviation Administration’s hiring process for the crash. These comments are a continuation of Trump’s behavior throughout his first term and both of his campaigns—but how his response will affect him politically remains to be seen, Mark Leibovich said last night.

Trump is working in “a consequence-free environment,” Leibovich continued. “Ultimately, Donald Trump will do what he can get away with, and whether a few points on his approval ratings are going to move the needle on this are unclear.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Ali Vitali, the host of Way Too Early on MSNBC; Nancy Youssef, a national-security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

Donald Trump threatening to annex Canada? It was an absurd situation. I briefly considered recycling an old joke of mine about merging all of the High Plains states into a single province of South Saskatchewan. But as I toyed with it, the joke soured. The president of the United States was bellowing aggression against fellow democracies. The situation was simultaneously too stupid for serious journalism and too shameful for wisecracks.

In this second Trump presidency, many of us are baffled by how to respond. The former Trump strategist Steve Bannon memorably described Trump’s method as “flood the zone with shit.” Try to screen all the flow, and you will rapidly exhaust yourself and desensitize your audience. Ignore the flood, and soon you’re immersed in the stuff neck-deep.

The first Trump term was very different.

[Read: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

More than a million people demonstrated against him on January 21, 2017, many more than had attended his inauguration the day before. On January 27, Trump issued an executive order purporting to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Thousands of people thronged airports across the nation to protest. About a hundred were arrested. In less formal ways, civic-minded Americans also rallied against the new administration. They read and viewed more news, and paid for it at record levels, too. Trump reviled one news organization more than any other: the “failing New York Times.” In 2017 alone, the company’s revenues from digital subscriptions climbed 46 percent, pushing total company revenues above $1 billion.

Meanwhile, the administration bumbled from fiasco to fiasco. Within the first week, Trump’s choice of national security adviser lied to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian government, setting in motion his early resignation and then criminal indictment. Trump that same week summoned then–FBI Director James Comey to dinner to pressure him to end the bureau’s investigation of Trump-Russia connections. The demand would lead to Comey’s firing, the appointment of a special counsel, and the prosecution and conviction of important Trump allies such as Paul Manafort.

First-term Trump knew what he wanted: unlimited personal power. But he did not know how to achieve it, and an insufficient number of those around him was willing and able to help him. The senior administration officials who supported Trump’s autocratic ambitions lacked bureaucratic competence; the officials who possessed the bureaucratic competence did not support his ambitions. That’s one reason it took Trump more than a year—until March 2018—to impose the first major round of the tariffs that he wanted but his top economic adviser opposed.

First-term Trump also lacked reliable partners in Congress. Then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struck devil’s bargains with Trump to achieve their own agendas: tax cuts, judicial appointments, the attempted repeal of Obamacare. But they were not his men. They overlooked his corruption, but also imposed limits on what he could do. In 2019, Trump tried to name two personal loyalists to the Federal Reserve Board. McConnell’s Senate rejected them.

[Read: Donald Trump’s first year as president: a recap]

Second-term Trump is very different. He has moved rapidly to consolidate power. Even before he took office, the Department of Justice preemptively stopped all legal actions against him for his attempted seizure of power on January 6, 2021. As soon as he was inaugurated, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of those convicted for the violent attack on Congress. He then announced investigations of the lawyers who had acted to enforce the law against him.

Trump has moved rapidly to oust independent civil servants, beginning with 17 nonpartisan inspectors general. He moved fast to install loyalists atop the two most important federal management agencies, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management. His administration is united in claiming power to refuse to spend funds already appropriated by Congress and to ignore laws that constrain the absolute power of the executive branch. The whole Trump team, not only the president personally, is testing another important tool of power: stopping congressionally approved grants to states, to ensure that he is funding supporters and punishing opponents. The Trump administration retreated from the test after two days of uproar—but how permanently, who can say?

Trump’s administration has launched large-scale immigration raids in Democratic cities and commenced legal action against local officials who stand in the way. The administration has stopped all international humanitarian aid, cutting off Ukraine. Trump is backed, not undercut, by senior national-security officials in his threats of territorial aggression against Greenland, Panama, and Canada. The Republican platform and congressional budget-writers approve Trump’s musings about replacing tax revenues with hoped-for windfalls from tariffs. Even his seemingly juvenile move to rename the Gulf of Mexico was immediately endorsed by his Department of the Interior. The absurd act carries an underlying serious message: The Trump administration stands behind its president’s high-handed rewriting of rules, even the most established and uncontroversial.

Looming ahead are even more crucial acts of consolidation, including the appointment of an FBI director who has proclaimed his willingness to use the federal police force as a tool of presidential personal power.

Trump’s opponents seem dazed, disoriented, and defeated. Despite the GOP’s slender majorities in both chambers of Congress, and despite Trump’s own low approval rating, the new White House for the moment carries all before it. There have been no mass protests. The demand for news and information—so voracious in 2017—has diminished, if not vanished. Audiences have dwindled; once-mighty news organizations are dismissing hundreds of journalists and staff.

[Read: It’s already different]

Compared with eight years ago, Trump is winning more and his opponents are resisting less.

What’s changed?

Four major things.

First, this time Trump is not arriving in power alone. He and the Republican mainstream have merged, a convergence symbolized by the highly detailed Project 2025 plan written for Trump by the Heritage Foundation. Trump disavowed the plan during the campaign. He was lying when he did so. Now its authors are his most effective henchmen, and unlike the situation he faced in 2017, Trump can now combine expertise and loyalty in the same body of staffers.

Second, this time Trump’s opponents feel beaten in a way that they did not after 2016. That year, Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than Trump. Clinton’s popular-vote advantage had no legal meaning. The office of the president is won or lost according to the arcane rules of the Electoral College, not by direct vote-counting. Politically, though, the popular vote matters a lot—that’s why Trump confected all those silly lies about his supposedly historic victory in 2016 and his allegedly enormous crowd size at the 2017 Inauguration. Back then, Democrats felt outmaneuvered but not out-voted. By contrast, Kamala Harris’s unqualified loss in 2024 has crushed morale. Democrats are divided, criticizing one another for their loss, not yet uniting to sound the alarm about how Trump is using his victory.

Third, Trump owes many of his early successes to previous Democratic mistakes. On issue after issue—immigration enforcement, crime and public order, race and gender—Democratic governments over the past eight years have drifted away from the mainstream of American public opinion. The drift is best symbolized by that notorious answer Harris gave to a 2019 questionnaire asking whether she favored taxpayer-funded gender-transition operations for undocumented immigrants and federal prisoners. Her related response in an interview with a progressive group was like some kind of smart-aleck word puzzle: How many unpopular hot-button issues can be crammed into a single sentence? Harris believed that punching every one of those buttons was necessary to be a viable progressive in the 2019–20 cycle. She, and America, paid the price in 2024.

A real quandary arises here. The best-organized Democratic interest groups want to fight Trump on the worst possible issues; the Democrats who want to fight on smarter issues tend to be less organized to fight. Until that conundrum is solved, Democrats are disabled and Trump is empowered.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the workforce? Not popular.

Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers entering the United States with little way to expel them if they are ultimately refused (as almost all of them will be)? Even less popular.

Create a rift between the United States and Israel? Very unpopular.

Trans athletes competing in girls’ and women’s sports? Wildly unpopular.

These are bad fights for Democrats to have. For that very reason, they are the fights that Trump Republicans want to start. Dangerously and unfortunately, they are also the fights that some of the most active of Democratic factions seek to have.

The fourth difference between 2017 and 2025 is the difference in the information space in which American politics is conducted. In 2017, politically minded Americans used platforms like Facebook and Twitter to share links to news sources. Some of those sources were deceptive or outright fake, but even fake news at least replicated the form and style of actual news.

Since then, new platforms have risen to dominance, especially among younger Americans and those less connected to politics. These new platforms are far more effective at detecting and manipulating user bias, fear, and anger. They are personality-powered, offering affirmation and bonding as their proofs of truth.

For pro-Trump Republicans, this new information space is marvelously congenial. They love and hate based on personal recommendations, and will flit from issue to issue as their preferred “influencers” command. Such a movement centered on celebrity and charismatic leadership has no problem with the fact that its favorite media spread disinformation and distrust. In fact, it’s useful. Trump has in effect adapted a slogan from Mussolini: “Trump is always right.” Its corollary is: “Only Trump is right.” Nothing important is lost from a Trump point of view if right-wing media encourage their users to despise science, law, and other forms of expertise.

[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini]

The anti-Trump coalition, however, is all about institutions. It depends on media that promote understanding of, and respect for, the work that institutions do. The new-media age is inherently inhospitable to institutionalists, and deeply demoralizing for them. Before they can organize to resist Trump, they must build new ways of communicating that adapt to contemporary technology but do not succumb to that technology’s politically destructive tendencies.

All of the above takes time. But it all can be done and must be done.

The second Trump administration has opened purposeful and strong. Its opponents have opened confused and weak. But today’s brutal reality can be tomorrow’s fading memory.

The second-term Trump synthesis does not even pretend to have an economic agenda for middle-class people. The predictable next round of tax cuts will disfavor them. The ensuing deficits will keep mortgage rates high. The tariffs and immigration crackdowns will raise consumer prices. Trump is offering nothing to help with the cost of health care and college.

Trump using James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” as his walk-on song, staffing his administration with accused abuser of women upon accused abuser of women, and relying heavily on reactionary anti-woman gender politics as his political message and messengers: All of that will exact a political price in weeks and months ahead.

Trump himself will lead and epitomize an administration of rake-offs and graft. He may succeed in sabotaging laws designed to prevent and punish corruption in high offices. He won’t be able to suppress awareness of his corruption.

The second-term Trump world will bubble with threats to U.S. security. Trump is determined to make each of them worse by fracturing our alliances in both the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific regions. The worst threat of all is that Trump will be drawn into military action inside Mexico, without the cooperation of the Mexican authorities. Trump’s project to brand drug cartels as international terrorist organizations has legal implications that Trump supporters refuse to consider. Right now, the cartels have powerful incentives not to commit violence against U.S. citizens or on U.S. territory. Yet Trump is poised on the verge of actions that could change the cartels’ calculus and import Mexico’s criminal violence north of the border on a huge scale.

[Read: What’s guiding Trump’s early moves]

Trump won the election of 2024, but still failed to break 50 percent of the vote. His hold on Congress could slip at any time. His plans to foster voter-ID laws and gerrymandering to disenfranchise Democrats will collide with the new reality of American politics that these measures will harm his prospects more than his opponents’: Trump does best among the most disaffiliated Americans, whereas Democrats are widening their lead among those Americans who follow politics closely and vote most often.

The most immediate task for the anti-Trump coalition in these early months of 2025 is to avoid more mistakes. President Joe Biden ended his presidency by listening to advice to grant clemency to thousands of drug offenders, including heinous murderers. Who offered that advice? Don’t listen to them anymore! Fight Trump where he’s most vulnerable, not where progressive interest groups are most isolated and most dogmatic. Build unity from the center, rather than indulge the factionalism of the ultra-left.

A great many Americans despise Trump for the basic reason that he’s a very nasty person who speaks in demeaning ways and does cruel things. The movement to stop him should look and sound and act nice. If you get reprimanded for “respectability politics,” or caricatured as “cringe,” or scolded for appealing to suburban “wine moms,” that’s when you’ll know you’re doing it right.

The MAGA elite feels and fears the weight of American democracy. It knows that democratic accountability and action will grind down its authoritarian aspirations and corrupt schemes. The MAGA elite’s best plan for success is to persuade the American majority to abandon hope and surrender the fight. Its most useful allies are the extremists who have too often misled the great American center into doomed leftward detours.

November 2024 was bad. January and February 2025 are worse. The story is not over yet—unless you agree to lay down in despair the pen that can write the remainder of the story.

Speaking to the Democratic National Committee, which met to select its new leadership this weekend, the outgoing chair, Jaime Harrison, attempted to explain a point about its rules concerning gender balance for its vice-chair race. “The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced,” Harrison announced.

As the explanation became increasingly intricate, Harrison’s elucidation grew more labored. “To ensure our process accounts for male, female, and nonbinary candidates, we conferred with our [Rules and Bylaws Committee] co-chair, our LGBT Caucus co-chair, and others to ensure that the process is inclusive and meets the gender-balance requirements in our rules,” he added. “To do this, our process will be slightly different than the one outlined to you earlier this week, but I hope you will see that in practice, it is simple and transparent.”

The Democratic Party, at least in theory, is an organization dedicated to winning political power through elected office, though this might seem hard to believe on the evidence provided by its official proceedings. The DNC’s meetings included a land acknowledgment, multiple shrieking interruptions by angry protesters, and a general affirmation that its strategy had been sound, except perhaps insufficiently committed to legalistic race and gender essentialism.

The good news about the DNC, for those who prefer that the country have a politically viable alternative to the authoritarian personality cult currently running it, is that the official Democratic Party has little power. The DNC does not set the party’s message, nor will it determine its next presidential candidate.

The bad news is that the official party’s influence is so meager, in part because the party has largely ceded it to a collection of progressive activist groups. These groups, funded by liberal donors, seldom have a broad base of support among the voting public but have managed to amass enormous influence over the party. They’ve done so by monopolizing the brand value of various causes. Climate groups, for instance, define what good climate policy means, and then they judge candidates based on how well they affirm those positions. The same holds true for abortion, racial justice, and other issues that many Democrats deem important. The groups are particularly effective at spreading their ideas through the media, especially (but not exclusively) through the work of progressive-leaning journalists, who lean on both the expertise that groups provide and their ability to drive news (by, say, scolding Democratic candidates who fall short of their standards of ideological purity).

The 2020 Democratic primary represented the apogee, to that point, of the groups’ influence. The gigantic field of candidates slogged through a series of debates and interviews in which journalists asked if they would affirm various positions demanded by the groups. That is how large chunks of the field wound up endorsing decriminalization of the border, reparations, and other causes that are hardly consensus positions within the Democratic Party, let alone the broader electorate. It is also how Kamala Harris came out for providing free gender-reassignment surgery to prisoners and migrant detainees, which became the basis of the Trump campaign’s most effective ad against her.

The ongoing influence of the groups can be seen in a new New York Times poll. Asked to list their top priorities, respondents cited, in order, the economy, health care, immigration, taxes, and crime. Asked what they believed Democrats’ priorities were, they cited abortion, LGBTQ policy, climate change, the state of democracy, and health care. That perception of the party’s priorities may not be an accurate description of the views of its elected officials. But it is absolutely an accurate description of the priorities of progressive activist groups.

The poll is a testament to how well the groups have done their job. They have set out to raise public awareness of a series of issues their donors care about, and to commit the party to prioritizing them, and they have done so. Democrats in public office may be mostly engaged in fighting about the economy, health care, and other issues, but they lack the communications apparatus controlled by the groups, which have blotted out their poll-tested messages in favor of donor-approved ones.

Over the past year or so, and especially since Harris’s defeat, some centrist commentators have begun to question the groups’ influence. But the DNC meetings offered no evidence that their thinking has gone out of style.

If Democrats learned from Harris’s campaign that they should try to stop holding events that are easily repurposed as viral Republican attack ads, they showed no sign of it over the weekend. When activists repeatedly interrupted speakers, they were met supportively. “Rather than rebuff the interruptions,” observed the Wall Street Journal reporter Molly Ball, “those onstage largely celebrated them, straining to assure the activists they were actually on the same side and eagerly giving them the platform they broke the rules to demand.”

Neither Harrison nor his successor, Ken Martin, has questioned Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term, nor any of the messaging or policy that contributed to his dismal approval ratings. When MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart asked one panel of candidates if they believed racism and misogyny contributed to Harris’s defeat, every panelist agreed. “That’s good, you all pass,” he said. (Note that this diagnosis of the election result has no actionable takeaway other than that perhaps the party should refrain from nominating a woman or person of color.)

The most sadly revealing outcome of the meeting may be the elevation of David Hogg as vice chair. Hogg, a 24-year-old activist, rose to prominence as a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and then quickly assimilated the full range of progressive stances—defund ICE, abolish the police, etc.—into his heavily online persona. And despite the horrific experience he endured, he does not seem to be notably wise beyond his years. After the far-right activist and pillow peddler Mike Lindell gained prominence as an election denier, I joked online that progressives needed their own pillow company. (The joke, of course, is that there is obviously no need for your pillow company to endorse your political views.) The next month, Hogg went ahead and turned this joke into reality, founding Good Pillow before resigning a few months later.

Hogg’s takeaway from the 2024 presidential race is that Democrats lost because they failed to rally the youth vote with a rousing message on guns, climate, and other issues favored by progressive activists. Polling, in fact, showed that young voters had similar issue priorities as older voters, but Hogg’s elevation was a tribute to the wish masquerading as calculation that Democrats can gain vote share without compromising with the electorate.

Some Democrats observed the events of the weekend with wry fatalism. At one point, a protester in a Sunrise Movement T-shirt interrupted by shouting, “I am terrified!”

She was not alone.