Why is $30M of MAGA cash funding this Dem’s fight against her progressive rival?

Ed Luce of The Straits Times/Financial Times recently argued, like so many other conservative and liberal commentators do, that the Democratic Party was missing a golden opportunity in the upcoming midterm elections due to its internal squabbling, stalled approval ratings, and a failure to effectively address the causes of the 2024 election losses.

Like most media coverage of the Democratic Party divisions, Luce has misunderstood the substantive differences between the two democratic factions. Because they have actually been discussing and arguing about party power going forward in relation to why they lost in 2024.

These media commentators do a disservice by highlighting the so-called radical and alienating rhetoric coming from the moderate or liberal mainstream Democrats and from the progressive socialists, or social Democrats, in relation to the radical right-wing or authoritarian rhetoric coming from the Trumpian administration.

Like falsely inserting into these political contests that antifa is a “domestic terrorist organization,” and the Democratic Party has been taken over by “communists,” as the Outlaw-in-Chief has invoked more than 81 times in a two-week period.

Meanwhile, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) from a press conference at the Republican National Committee: “We’re fighting right now in Congress about whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic or we’re going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism.”

It seems as though Trumpism is trying to pull off a Red Scare 3.0, and the question becomes: are the American voters as stupid as the Speaker, the Racketeer-in-Chief and his crew of miscreants?

Then again, these “social realities” about communism, antifa or the Democratic Party are about as real as Trump having won the 2020 presidential election or that January 6th was a nonviolent patriotic sit-in.

At the same time, Jim Messina, the former White House Deputy Chief of Staff who served as campaign manager for President Barack Obama’s successful 2012 re-election and is often referred to by the media as the White House’s Fixer, on Morning Joe’s Tuesday airing this week was making the case for why Democrats should be sticking with moderate rather than progressive democrats.

This framing or narrative problem by “old guard” Democratic operatives and by most mass media commentators is that, fundamentally, they cannot wrap their heads around democratic socialism as a legitimate alternative to neoliberalism or as having nothing in common with the former USSR or other highly centralized and contemporary authoritarian regimes like China and Cuba.

Meanwhile, these media outlets or platforms have been ignoring, for the most part, that these democratic socialists or progressive democrats in the U.S. have everything in common with the Social Democratic parties of Western and Northern Europe that emerged between 1945 and 1960 during the “Golden Age” of social democracy. And then these social democrats were accentuated by a second wave of dominance in the 1990s after the reunification of Germany and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Today, these Social Democratic parties remain in place despite the wannabe authoritarian-like political parties that have emerged on the right and are trying to kill democratically administered governments, not unlike the efforts of President Trump and his loyalist minions who are trying to do the same in the United States.

Winning the “War on Crime” or Losing the Wars on Authoritarianism & Democracy

When it comes to the Trumpian 2.0 “war on crime,” nothing could be more of an oxymoron than the political actions and talking points of the deputy to the former Attorney General Pam Bondi — now the acting and nominee for the permanent post of AG — Todd Blanche. As a steward of the Justice Department for the past 18 months and as the legal “fixer” for the Fraudster-in-Chief since he became Trump’s criminal defense lawyer in April 2023 ahead of his arraignment in the New York hush-money case, here is the non-exhaustive record of Todd “Carte” Blanche and his lawless “war on crime” on behalf of the reconstituted Department of Retribution:

• “No MAGA left behind” began on day one of the second administration when he facilitated the president’s office to erase the insurrection, which began with the pardons of Rudy Giuliani and the fake slates of electors and finished with virtually everyone, some 1,500-plus persons, who were charged and convicted for their activities on Jan. 6.
• Dropping the prosecution of 10 unnamed additional “co-conspirators” of Epstein and Maxwell that were under investigation with plenty of evidence in the Epstein Files that supported additional charges on behalf of hundreds of victims seeking redress. As well as withholding key material about the perpetrators, while disclosing information and even naked photos of the survivors, transferring Ghislane Maxwell to a minimum custody facility which was against the Federal Bureau of Prison guidelines for sexual offenders, failing to release some two million pages of Epstein files as required by law, and last but not least, for covering up the judicially alleged sexual predatory behavior of victimizing a teenage girl of 13 years by defendants DJT and Jeffrey Epstein.
• Overseeing and executing Trump’s revenge indictments like the two against Jim Comey or the ongoing investigation in the Southern District of Florida into his political enemies like former CIA Director John Brennan, and even the recent prosecutions of a former Olympian and a few others for putting their hands in the Reflecting Pool.
• Signing off on Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund to use taxpayer money to reward Jan 6 defendants. And as part of this bogus “settlement agreement,” he also signed off on allowing Trump, his family, and their businesses to walk away from pending lawsuits and unpaid tax liability, while precluding any future investigations of this kind.
• Failing to pursue investigations into the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti as ICE continues to kill more innocent people while violating the Fourth Amendment, among others.

In addition to the usual “wars on crime,” Blanche has overseen the DOJ’s closing of more than 23,000 pending criminal investigations while shifting resources away from white-collar crime, corporate fraud, and minority civil rights law enforcement in order to prioritize the “lawless” and mass deportation of noncriminal and nonviolent undocumented workers.

While protecting the crimes and the perpetrators of the powerful and of Trump’s corrupt allies in particular, Blanche, during his confirmation hearing, was trying to offset his own lawlessness and corruption by touting several accomplishments of DOJ’s operations over his first year such as combating violent crime, the fentanyl crisis, and protecting children from child predators. And most importantly, about how he has been “restoring American trust” in the DOJ after it had “turned against” President Trump.

Before continuing, allow me to go on the public record and say that, based on this non-exhaustive review of all the lawless behavior of Blanche in his assisting or acting capacities as AG, it is really quite insane that he should receive one vote let alone be confirmed as anyone’s AG, especially DJT’s. Rather, he should be immediately disbarred, and he should also be facing charges for a variety of criminal and civil offenses.

After losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, and after the failed insurrection to steal the election on January 6, 2021, the GOP won back the House in 2022 and expanded its marginal lead in the Senate by one vote, from 50-50 plus VP Mike Pence to 51-49. This time around, however, because of the daily “in your face” lawlessness, corruption, and weaponization of justice from top to bottom, as well as the president’s ongoing and incessant efforts to interfere and suppress voter turnout in 2026, his Republican flunkies will lose control of the House in November, if not the Senate.

That’s thanks mostly to the fact that Trump has made a disastrous and chaotic living nightmare out of everything he has touched, from One Big Beautiful Bill to reciprocal tariffs to wars of choice – that have each raised the cost of living and made affordability nothing more than a “pipe dream.” And, internationally, Trump couldn’t have messed up U.S. foreign relations any more than he already has.

So now let’s see how the gross “mass media” mischaracterization or depiction of the intramural Democratic party politicking between factions struggling for inner and outer party control/power has been playing out in the 2026 midterm primary and general elections, within and between the Democrats and the Republicans, by focusing in on the race to become the next Democratic U.S. Senator (or not) from Michigan.

Democrats Haley Stevens v. Abdul El-Sayed v. Republican Mike Rogers?

It seems like only yesterday when Michelle Obama first said those words, “When they go low, we go high.” That was back on July 25, 2016, during the opening night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on behalf of presidential nominee Hillary R. Clinton.

A lot has changed in our politics over the past decade of Trumpism — for the better and for the worse depending on how one looks at it. Polemically, what is “better” or “worse” will be decided by a combination of financial muscle and ideological power.

I can think of no better example – perhaps because I have been a resident of Ann Arbor, MI for the past 36 years – than the Senate race between Democratic Party House Rep. Haley Stevens from Michigan’s 11th congressional district and Abdul El-Sayed, M.D., Ph.D., Rhode Scholar and a former Executive Director of the Detroit Department of Health — and a progressive Democrat. The primary for the Democratic Party candidate is on August 4.

The 11th covers mostly Oakland County, a highly affluent urban-suburban area that stands as one of the wealthiest counties in Michigan with a median household income that sits at about $97,760. Much of the anti-El-Sayed, and pro-Stevens spending has come from AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project. UDP relies heavily on multi-million-dollar donations from prominent Republican and Trump-aligned billionaires.

With about five weeks left before the primary, rising Democratic star and Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow, who was also in the race, exited. Two months before, El-Sayed was already leading the three-way race and was the only candidate beating likely Republican candidate Mike Rogers by one point, 49 to 48, while McMorrow and Stevens were trailing by five and four points respectively. Presently, El-Sayed leads Rogers 47 to 42.

At this point, Stevens and her backers began lying about her record, even trying to infer from 2018 film footage that Barack Obama was endorsing her for the U.S. Senate, though he had remained neutral. Meanwhile, UDP was doing its best to smear El-Sayed, spending roughly $30 million on television advertisements and mailers to back Stevens. It was its largest single-race investment ever.

Here are the “crimes” that El-Sayed is guilty of: He has been campaigning for universal health care or Medicare for all. He does not take money from corporate Political Action Committees. And, last but not least, he has made well known his opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel and has referred to Israel’s campaign in Gaza as “genocide.”

Guess what? According to a Quinnipiac poll taken in August 2025, “Half of US voters think Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza.” The same as the United Nation’s commission of inquiry concluded in its report in September of that year.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several award-winning books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm election.