Do this: spend every waking minute publicizing Trump's known high crimes and misdemeanors. He didn't just become a sociopath yesterday; he's been one for 50 years. Find out every last bit of it. We have a month until the Electors meet and cast their votes. and the Constitution still says they have the right to make their own choice. The Electoral College still exists because it still actually does something. Their votes are not a rubber stamp, even in states that think they passed laws saying they are. The Constitution has the final say.

If it were proven he were a rapist, or was on the Russian payroll, or addicted to painkillers, would the Electors still vote for him? Maybe. Let's find out.

If you are a reporter and anybody is paying attention to what you say, this right now is your only chance to avert this catastrophe.

I like Bernie's answer:

"Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids - all while the very rich become much richer.

To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him."

Cenk Uygur has a few ideas on how to proceed.

"But people are not going to fight with you if don't acknowledge their struggle." That's it, right there! The left needs to find an inclusive narrative about how everyone is fighting a struggle. And how progressive policy can help. Stop telling blue collar workers about their privileged, even if it exists, and don't call half the electorate deplorable. Those aren't wining campaign slogans.

I am sure this will get some "ohh the poor white mens" reply. But I think the left has to decide if they want to be an electorial college minority party of minorities or build a coalition of all working class voters. But maybe I am just a deplorable.

@3 Great editorial by Cenk.

Step 1: fire everyone at the DNC

"What we need to do is stop picking internecine quarrels." *proceeds to pick internecine quarrel*

@4 That's a good look. And I agree, poor people aren't going to be open to hearing that they are privileged when it is coming from people who use words like internecine.
@6 old habits die hard. We lefties get in way to many "who is the leftest today?" contests.

IMHO I think we dems just straight up dropped the ball on nailing the bankers. The Rs were never going to do it. But those bankers ruined a lot of peoples lives, and the Ds seemed like they might do something about it. Occupy, etc. Then the cities recovered and we started talking about other things. Lots of places never recovered. They aren't over it.

Trump inherits Obama's global assassination programme and his vast surveillance state which has created a climate of fear for whistleblowers.

Can anyone let me know if Dan Savage has spoken out against the primitive treatment of Chelsea Manning?

Me: Remember when Hillary Clinton described black youth as "super predators" and hinted at Obama's assassination?

Libs: Hillary Clinton is an extraordinarily talented politician.

Everyone needs to read Glenn Greenwald's article on The Intercept, the one titled "Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit" It's spot on. You cannot through progressive jargon at the working class, pick fights over issues that are mainly the concern of ensconced and privileged college students, and expect the working class to be on board. You can't lecture them about their privilege. Go to rural Appalachia and see if you find much privilege. Or the Upper Peninsula of MI.

And it's not as simple as sexism, either. The right was in love with Sarah Palin. They still are. And she was not a demure wall-flower, either. She outshone McCain. She was probably the most popular running mate in US history (at least among the right.)

Hillary Clinton's policies would have failed. She was going to move forward the same Clinton-era neo-liberal, corporate friendly, insider agenda that has so thoroughly screwed over the rust belt. And many in the rust belt voted for Obama. I don't doubt there is a lot of bigotry among blue-collar whites, but it may not be as rampant as we thought. Maybe.

The establishment, coastal left failed miserably. They were so disconnected with the issues that the working class was facing (and not just in flyoverland: in Queens NY, Staten Island, Long Island, and similar places outside of the expensive real estate Ivy League educated bastions) that they couldn't even successfully ask them who they were going to support.

But Glenn Greenwald's article: Amazing. He gets it.

Throw, not through in my comment above. Can you not edit your comments once posted?

@8, the last act Obama can do is pardon whistle blowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. But that's not gonna happen (I want to be wrong in this). That act takes political courage. Hillary has a better chance.

This is why dems lost it. This democratic leadership bunch aren't liberal or all that progressive. They got comfortable jet setting to billionaires' home for easy money like their Republican counterparts.

What Bush/Cheney started, Obama piled on until Snowden leaked the abuses. Trump with Giuliani at his side will castrate what's left of our civil liberties. What President-elect Trump, Congress and the Courts won't gut, the emboldened, angry base will.

I love to say "I told you so." It's one of my big character flags. I fucking love being right and I love making other people acknowledge how smart I am. It's insufferable. I hate myself for it sometimes. And in this instance I really hate being able to say it but...

I fucking told you so. Me and millions of other people said "The only way the Democrats can lose this election is to pick Hillary Clinton." That doesn't make people who voted against Hillary right, they are ignorant and/or bigoted. But the Democratic leadership is dumb as shit, and people like Dan Savage, who spent the whole cycle ignoring all of Hillary's flaws and all of the electorate's obvious desires, need to step the fuck out of the way and shut their damn pie holes. There were hundreds of thousands of votes (most of them independents) for the asking in swing states that the Democrats pissed on by picking Hillary Clinton. Sure, some of them were loathsome shit people who wouldn't vote for a woman, but most of them were just fed up with a Democratic Party that has spent the last three decades failing them and then nominated the stalest name they could find.

@13 Ok fine, you were/are right, but who else if not Clinton? I'm not being snarky, just asking an honest question as a non-American who nevertheless followed the whole cycle pretty closely; who else?

Here's why the over confidence with Hillary...closet Trumpers.

Unfortunately we as the left have developed a shaming tactic to anyone who opposes us to such a public and harmful extent, that people don't want to say they're voting for Trump. Supporting Trump doesn't get you laid.

People lie. That's the best answer I can give you.

This is a wake up call. Because when we assume and feel entitled - we lose.

@14 Bernie Sanders, who inspired passionate support as Hillary Clinton never could. Voting in many parts of the US is a pain in the ass. If your supporters aren't passionate enough to go wait in line for far longer than they should have to, you don't win.

@16 Jumping in on your question to 14: I wish I could agree; I'm an ardent fan of Bernie Sanders, but he simply didn't have the numbers. Maybe that would have changed after Trump secured the nomination, but based on the numbers we have now, Clinton had more support. It's not a given, or safe to assume, that Sanders' numbers would have a increased. Maybe they would have. But we'll never know. I don't know that the dems had anyone who was a given. We all know the republican party was broken, but what we failed to see was how profoundly broken the democratic party is/was. It was so broken we couldn't even see how broken. Frog in boiling water, etc. The democrats became (slowly) so disconnected from what they should have been fighting for, and it was so far gone, that they probably didn't have much of a chance at all anyway. The nation was so sick of "insider politics" that a reality TV clown sexual predator was able to rise to the top of the sewage. And who to the democrats nominate? Who was the "most capable" a person blue collar white America has hated (sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly) for more than 20 years. It seems so glaringly obvious now. But hopefully this really will revitalize the democrats and move them away from their ensconced bastions, away from cozy relationships with Wall Street and Big Money, and even away from the "liberal" never-never lands of elite college campuses where so called SJWs fight for issues that simply do not resonate with the rust belt. One example: trigger warnings. Ok...why? Because it might "trigger" a college kid by causing them to relive a dramatic experience. All very well and good, but that's not new. PTSD has been around forever, but these same academics, spouting academic abstractions, never cared until the privileged kids on their campus cared. Combat vets face very real and true PTSD, but there was no concern for them. The liberal left has moved away from fighting for what's important to working class people and confined itself to the concerns of an elite few.

Edit: And who do the democrats nominate? Who was the "most capable?" A person blue collar white America has hated

@7

Yeah, that's kind of what I noticed. When Sydney tried to justify past fights and pick a new fight with Dan, I could almost feel the other people in the room staring at her wordlessly saying, "WTF is wrong with you?"

I would be willing to bet you $50 right now that if you asked her about the negative effects of globalization and where they are concentrated or about the opioid addiction epidemic and where it is concentrated she'll just stare blankly.

I'll give you a hint on both of them. It's where people voted for Obama in 2012 and voted for Trump this time around.

@17 I hate it when people say Bernie couldn't have won when the evidence suggests otherwise, so Hilbots if you don't like ur face rubbed in it, then STFU.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/2016…

The Democrats won BECAUSE Trump is an ass. People who are angry about what's happening to them like asses because they think said asses "tell it like it is". We said to ourselves that surely, surely what Trump said last week and yesterday and today would disgust everyone. Nope. He was considered to be a fighter talking about "winning" when he was simply an entertainer. This was a reality TV election and enough people voted for the show that he won.

Move to Canada like you promised?

@10 nailed it.

Both parties never fulfill all their campaign promises. I don't know if the GOP actually cares but when the Dems don't make good on them, their voter base get really upset and go on the search to find someone who could give them everything they want, even to the point of being delusional when they think they've found Mr Perfect. So I can see how anyone with nothing to lose could vote for someone other than Clinton. That's real privilege, when it never really mattered to you who won because you were not one of the people on Trump's hit list.

@22 The most important lesson is that no matter how much you insult people, no matter how much you hate their ideas or their looks or their intelligence or their culture or their poverty, it doesn't work if they can vote against you and make you lose. Even Mean Girls had that lesson.

This podcast was refreshing. It was delicious to hear Savage almost learn the lessons. They were really being choked down, but he was learning just before the segment ended.

Hey...whatever happened to Matt Baume? Maybe he should be eating a bit of crow around here too.

@17- Bernie had the numbers that actually mattered: Approval from independent voters. The only number Clinton had was Democratic Primary voters.

@19- did we listen to the same thing? Sydney did not pick a fight. She provided some perspective the old white guys did not want to hear.

@15- That probably the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I do not know how many "closet Trumpers" you think there are, but a grain of reason indicates they are a tny fraction of the potential votes Clinton did not get.

No, Comrade Sanders, as Trump would have called him, would not have won. Pew Research did a study last year to find out what voters are looking for in a candidate - from the most desirable characteristics to the least. At the very bottom of the list was socialist/communist, right behind atheist and Muslim, which is funny and depressing all at the same time.

Of course honestly was at the top of the list, and that's how Sanders came across early on. Most voters had never heard of him and he generally makes a good first impression. But Trump's ghouls knew exactly what they had with him as an opponent and were drooling at the prospect of running against Comrade Sanders, rather than the Clinton machine, and stoked the animosity between the two camps. And Clinton didn't go after Sanders because she wanted his supporters to vote for her in the general election. So Bernie got a pass during the primaries, but ultimately crashed and burned on his own, sparing the bloodbath that would have been coming had he won the nomination.

It would have started with pictures of Sanders standing on the stage with the Sandinista coup leaders in Nicaragua, smiling approvingly as they called for the destruction of the US, returning to Burlington and praising their bread lines as a sign of economic health, supporting their complete crackdown on the free press, gleefully calling their propaganda minister "a Hippy!" who wrote really cool poetry for their brutal and ruthless army, and pledging to turn his sleepy little town into a similar communist utopia, and set an example for the entire country and world. It was so wacky, god bless him, that even his very progressive hometown newspaper, that had once supported him, wrote an editorial calling him a "useful idiot for communist dictators around the world", and retracted their endorsement. A great tag line for the TV ad would have been: Vote Donald Trump. He's nobody's useful idiot.

Next would come Bernie's pilgrimage to Lenin's tomb, and then hanging out with the Castro's. Thrump would have called him a pedaphile and a pervert, the creepy old guy everyone hates, crazy, a traitor, a Jew ("You tell me whether he believes in god or not? I don't know"), a loser, but worst of all, a commie, and far worse than any and all of Trump's sins, a commie. The truth would've been irrelevant. And it would have scared the hell out of many many voters.

The irony is, of course, that we now have something far scarier and more real than the bogeymen the cognitively challenged community seems to see everywhere. Comrade Sanders would have played right into those fears, and Trump would have relentlessly used that to belittle, smear and trivialize everything about the guy and his movement ("loooosers"). And although I never supported him (electability), I think Bernie is better than that. He would have been creamed anyway, but I also think that he and his supporters are in a better position to live and fight another day than they would have been had Trump and the Republicans been lying about and trashing them and their ideas over the last year.

Great podcast. One thing I would add is that is not all that puzzling why white working class voters are not enthusiastic about Democratic social welfare programs. People in areas of the country that have been devastated by the loss of manufacturing want jobs, not only to provide money, but to provide dignity. They don't want welfare.

Time and again in this election, I've heard politicians and journalists on both sides say: "Those jobs aren't coming back" So the choice for these voters is between A. taking a big gamble with a guy who's unqualified, but who claims to have a plan, and B. Accepting that they are screwed forever.

Yeah, not surprising they went with A. I probably would too.

I want to hear a lot more from Mudede on this topic.

(on the election in general and the state of the world I mean)

Dude's great to listen to

First step in how to proceed is to have Dan Write more exposés of Jayapal that her next opponent can use in an ad.

@35 You're a really poor judge of electability considering you thought Clinton was the most electable. Especially when you admit that a Pew Research poll said the electorate valued honesty, and she started out with extremely low ratings on honesty and trustworthiness. You once said that she was electable even though she was a very unlinked candidate before she even escaped the goddamn primaries.

Clinton Democrats had their chance and failed with flying colors. It's now time to give up the reigns. Get over it. You failed to correctly gauge the temperature of the nation, and now we have a President Trump thanks to Democrats like you.

I'm not going to tell you to shut up because I like being able to hold you up for being completely wrong about Clinton's electability. but, you may want to avoid trying to say Bernie was even less electable than Clinton when your candidate lost the electoral college in a landslide.

Learn from your mistakes. Please. For the sake of this country. We'd like you to be with us when we take over. But, we're not going to wait.

The reason Trump won can be found at about 15.45 here. Nobody cares about intersectional feminism, or any other academic navel gazing you will learn about on your social sciences courses. Nobody wants to know that their victim status gives them common ground with someone else's victim status. Step out of your echo chamber. People care about jobs, schools, healthcare and security. That is what they want from their politicians.

Misanthrope - I can't wait to meet the screwball you guys come up with for 2020. And like the parents of a child who can't stop making terrible relationship choices, we'll listen patiently, once again, as you try to convince us, once again, that this time it's the real thing, not like all those others, and Dennis was too short anyway. And when it turns out that, surprise surprise, they really are pretty much like all of the other pretenders you've dragged home over the years, we'll do our best to pick up the pieces, knowing, sadly, that this probably won't be the last time you'll do the same damn thing all over again.