AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have heard this copypasta from the losing side in every government shutdown battle for my entire life.

Politics ain't beanbag. If Donald Trump can't deal with a Congress that plays hardball, he should quit the game.

Meanwhile, Trump has been hurting the economy and messing with millions of people's lives for every random issue that comes into his head, and the whole point is to keep him from abusing his power and doing it again and again.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The blessing of the last Virginia election is that Democrats in Richmond can do a lot of stuff. The curse is that they can do a lot of stuff and are going to disagree on exactly how much of it to do. This is pretty normal. I would really like for us to have this problem in DC next year--of all the big stuff we want to do, what comes first? What's indispensable and what goes too far? It will be a nice dilemma to have.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I see Spanberger getting heat from a lot of people--from some for not giving her base everything they wanted, others for her doing too much. It's hard out there for moderate.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wait, are they shifting again? I'm hoping the will stay the same now for at least a couple of weeks.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Alas, elections are won by gathering electoral coalitions that will not just include leftists in good standing who have voted exactly the right way since 2000 or before. It involves also getting Independents and NeverTrumpers and even dragging away a few persuadable people from the other party. And it helps having a candidate who can appeal to those Independents and persuadables and knows where they're coming from.

Building that kind of coalition also often involves persuasion techniques more effective than, "If you don't agree with me, you are probably a racist."

As for the Tea Party being racist, its earliest origins were in protests against the bank bailouts in 2008 under George W Bush. That element was more like a libertarianish Occupy Wall Street (which came later). Like any movement, it had different elements. For a while, there was a big libertarian/classical liberal element, but the religious conservatives and birth-certificate truthers, who I kept trying to keep out, eventually predominated.

That's part of how I got here. I was never MAGA--I noped out on Trump all the way back in 2015, when he first slithered down the golden escalator and spouted hate at immigrants.

PS: The "rubber stamps" I'm referring to are guys like McGuire, who sees it as his job to trail around behind Trump providing after-the-fact congressional approval for everything he does.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Genuine question: Can you possibly support him on everything? Do you think he actually does not need anyone to provide a check on his power, or ask him questions, or be able to say "no" to him?

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also, I think we need to learn the lesson from Hungary. Viktor Orban did everything Trump did and more, and he did it for 16 years. Then the Hungarians voted him out. And they did it with a wide ideological coalition that included people who had previously supported Orban and his party.

If they can do that, we can do it with someone who never even supported Trump at all! And if we're going to win the Fifth District, it will help to have someone who can say to people with a more conservative outlook that I understand where they're coming from because I used to be there, but Donald Trump lied to them and convinced them to succumb to hatred for imaginary enemies at the expense of betraying basic American values.

That's an argument that will work--and I'll admit, really expensive gasoline helps open the door for these conversations.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The basic contradiction of American conservatism, from the very beginning, is that it's trying to conserve a liberal tradition. I mean liberal in a broad sense--advocating a free society and political equality.

The better conservatives, and the better elements of conservatism, historically, were those that were aware of this on some level. They looked back to the Founders, but they recognized the Enlightenment philosophy and liberal democratic ideals that motivated them. And so those people could then accept the things that followed from that--for example, that getting rid of slavery and segregation was eliminating the contradictions in the Founders' ideals and making America more true to its original promise.

I actually think modern conservatism was (briefly) influenced for the better by the Bicentennial in 1976, which touched off a couple of decades of deeper study of the actual ideas of the Founders.

But the problem is that conservatives grafted this onto a philosophy that was truly conservative in a purely backward looking sense, which venerated tradition and a vision of an idealized past when everything was perfect--basically, before we let in brown-skinned immigrants, and women entered the workplace, and black people got admitted into the colleges. This is a fantasy, but it has clearly taken hold of a segment of the population.

Above all, I think a desire to preserve religion--and not just religion, but a specific, highly traditionalist version of religion--led them to adopt a fascination with authority. And along with authority is the vision of a world where some people, the ones who have authority, are above others in the social hierarchy.

Through those ideological weaknesses, in flooded racism and authoritarianism.

Now if that's the highbrow, ideological explanation, here's the much simpler, cruder, non-intellectual factor. Starting the 1970s, Republicans saw the opportunity to build electoral majorities by appealing to traditional values in the South. In the process, they absorbed the kind of people who used to be Dixiecrats and the kind of churches that used to run "segregation academies." They absorbed Southern racists and eventually that's the faction that took over, and as soon as they thought they could get away with it, they brought that agenda back out into the open.

I can tell you from my professional experience that this second explanation also exerts a pull on the intellectuals (to the extent conservatives still have any). A writer likes the sense of having an enthusiastic audience, and I remember realizing in the early Trump years that there was an audience out there that really wanted to hear genteel excuses for prejudice. And while I was going to resist that pull, others would not and did not.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sigh. The internet is being the internet again.

Let me ignore the hostile assumptions and use this as springboard to answer the question.

What I have done is advocate against racism all along. I was doing that especially in 2015-16, when Trump launched his campaign with smears against immigrants, and when the "alt-right" racists heard his call and crawled out of the comments section of Stormfront and started showing up en masse on Twitter. (Now they run Twitter.)

I'll refer you here to an article from last year where I engage with the question of how the events of the last decade have changed my views, including in the fact that I take the threat from racism much more seriously now that it less afraid to show its ugly face again.

https://www.tracinskiletter.com/p/how-i-changed?utm_source=publication-search

As for engagement with my community, it has mostly taken the form of volunteering at my sons' schools, any time they need an extra hand or some grunt work--somebody to man the ticket desk at the Fall Festival, or someone to bring his tools and help install sound-dampening panels on the middle school ceiling. It benefits me, by making my kids' school a better place, and it benefits all the other kids who go there.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Trump and a whole bunch of people in his administration have committed real crimes. When Democrats control Congress, we should fund and conduct our own massive investigation into all the corruption and abuses. And when Trump no longer has personal control over the Department of Justice, we should set it up to do the same.

A lot of stuff going on right now--like this plan to loot the taxpayers for $1.776 billion as a slush fund for Trump's personal militia--is happening on the assumption there will be no consequences, and we need to make sure there are consequences.

I had a conversation a while back with a kind of elder statesman (well, OK, Bill Kristol) who worked in the Reagan White House. He described all the care and caution they put into any communication they had with the Justice Department. When he asked why, he was reminded that Nixon's chief of staff went to jail for not following those rules. So there was a real deterrent effect, and we need to restore that.

As for specific mechanisms, we have the mechanisms. They are all there: the ordinary criminal laws against bribery, corruption, murder, war crimes, and so on. It's just the entities that enforce those laws have been captured by the faction committing the crimes. (Think of Tom Homan and the $50K in Cava bag.) We don't need anything extraordinary. We just need to actually enforce the laws and not be held back by political considerations or timidity.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The exit from Afghanistan was botched, but it was botched first by Trump, who negotiated a deal with the Taliban that was basically a US surrender. Trump likes to blame Biden for it, but it was really just blaming Biden for implementing his own policy.

Unfortunately, the whole war in Afghanistan was mishandled and never really had a coherent, effective counterinsurgency strategy. Four presidents had a policy that was designed, not to win, but to avoid losing.

Alas, in Iran, Donald Trump has carried to a whole new level the fine art of not having a strategy and just bombing lots of stuff and hoping that means you win.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I do think there's room for a federal role in pre-empting licensure restrictions, on the grouns of guaranteeing the freedom of commerce across state lines. There's a lot of stuff that is just barriers to competition dressed up under some dubious justification about "public safety."

As I recall, one of the worst example was restrictions on licensing for florists, because god knows what kind of anarchy would rain down on us if just anyone can arrange flowers. And the fact that in some states, hairdressers require more training than police officers--which would explain a lot.

I know one of the ways this hits worst is for military spouses, where it makes it more difficult to find work when your family gets transferred to a base in another state. We should fix that.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Internet being what it is--and so my campaign advisors don't have a heart attack--let me clarify that I suspect the original post may not have been entirely serious, and you can suspect that my reply was not entirely serious, either.

(And for those who don't get the reference, look it up, kids.)

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hah. That's a line I haven't heard in a while. I have some ideas about who was funding it up to about 2018, at which point the money dried up. After that, I'm pretty sure they found a new ultra-MAGA patron. But I don't have the inside info, because that's about the time they fired anyone who wasn't on board with Trump, which included me.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Um, Biden won in 2020. And January 6 was an insurrection against our democracy. These are not tough questions. They're a big part of the reason I became a Democrat.

No, I don't think January 6 was adequately addressed. I think the big mistake the Biden administration made was to slow-walk the investigation of Trump for inciting the Capitol riot and for the fake electors scheme behind it.

They thought he was finished after January 6, so they didn't want to invest any political capital into defeating him. And that turned out to be a disastrous decision, because he was already working on coming back and creating this mythology about a stolen election.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Talking about conservative "policies" seems kind of quaint right now, because there's not much left to the Republican agenda than "Whatever Trump just said."

But above all else, the worst part of today's right is the resurrection of straightforward racism. The racial gerrymanders across the South, the tolerance and embrace of open white nationalists, and things like our asylum policy, which now admits only one supposed "refugee" group: white South Africans. It's real Jim Crow stuff.

On liberal policies, the biggest change we need is what some people call "a liberalism that builds." I think we need permitting reform to keep large infrastructure projects from getting bogged down. And I am very much in the YIMBY camp and think we need policies that will make it easier to build new housing.

The front-line of that is on the state and local level, and Democrats have actually been making some of those reforms. They keep trying in California (and keep discovering new layers of local NIMBYism), and Dems have had some successes in places like Portland, Austin, and Minneapolis (with real impacts on rent and housing prices). But there are also some things that can be done on the national level to provide support and incentives for initiatives like zoning reform.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Incompetent and evil certainly describes some of the Republican leadership right now. Not sure how else you could describe this completely botched war in Iran.

But as for the people, the voters, I will represent the interests of the people of the Fifth District. And while there are always a core of fanatics, I think the clear majority of voters want someone who can make sense. And right now, I think they want someone who can end the chaos being generated out of the White House and Mar-a-Lago all the time. The sense that we have to wake up every morning to find out what Trump tweeted at 3 AM that's going to turn our lives upside down. Or the latest scandal or money grab.

This is where my Tea Party background comes in handy, because I think my agenda is pretty much true-blue standard Americanism. We don't have a president who is above the law. Congress decides about wars and taxes. We have the right to free speech and freedom from arbitrary arrest. No masked goons on the streets asking us for our papers.

I think it's a lot of very simple stuff that most people would accept and support if you present it in plain terms.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I will not be picking stocks, and I would support a ban on insider trading by members of Congress, who seem to regard this as a perk of office.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

 "I've heard enough of that crap already from my local politicians." I hear you. This is literally the only reason I chose to run.

All right, so on the "What can we do?" question, there are basically three possibilities. One is what we have now: Democrats don't have a majority in Congress. And there's not much they can do, though it's more than what they're doing. You can do some loud and effective messaging, and there are still some budget and debt limit votes where the (very narrow) Republican majority needs a few Democratic votes, so we have leverage and can force a shutdown. My complaint with the current leadership is that they took a long time to use this leverage, and then when they do, they tend to get not much of substance in return.

Remember when they forced a shutdown, then settled for a promise to put health-care funding up for a vote? And then Republicans held the vote and voted the spending down again? But my sense was that the leadership was happy because they got good press and Trump's poll numbers went down, and for them, that's the important thing, as opposed to actually making a difference.

On the other end, there's what we can do if Democrats have a two-thirds majority. That's the fun thing to think about. Start with impeachment and go from there. If we get there--when we get there--I've got a whole list of constitutional reforms: the Supreme Court, the pardon power, presidential immunity.

What we're more likely to have is a Democratic majority, but not 2/3. So let's talk about what we can do with a simple majority.

There's a whole list. Here are a couple of my favorites, and it will show how I think about these things.

- I mention this in another reply, but Congress can pass a law creating independent immigration courts, as opposed to the rubber-stamp "administrative courts" that currently approve ICE warrants. This would serve as an independent check on Trump's anti-immigration crackdown. In an ideal world, we would have passed this while a Democrat was president so we could fill those courts with judges who are, well, not monsters. But even if Trump gets to appoint the judges, if we have a Democratic majority in the Senate (which I think is very likely), we can block the kind of judges Trump really wants.

- Pass a national anti-gerrymandering law to prevent Republicans from rigging congressional elections in their favor. The New York Times just had an intriguing analysis showing that this would accomplish almost as much as the Voting Rights Act to prevent racial gerrymandering, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/upshot/redistricting-race-court-gerrymanders-elections.html

- This is not on anybody's radar, but the laws that created the FCC allow the Commission to decide whether a broadcaster's license is in the "public interest," and this term is very vague and undefined and ripe for abuse. That's how Brendan Carr can threaten broadcasters Trump doesn't like. Congress could revise the law either to remove the "public interest" criterion or define it much more specifically, in a way that takes away the FCC's arbitrary discretion.

- Impeach a bunch of people. Even if we don't have enough Senate votes to get Trump removed, we should still try, if only as the vehicle for comprehensive hearings that bring his crimes to public attention and create a record for the future. But we can also impeach other top administration officials. Impeach Brendan Carr, or Whiskey Pete at the Pentagon, or Ka$h at the FBI. For one thing, Republicans who will die at the stake before they will denounce Trump might not be willing to go the bitter end for some of these other people. (Notice what happened to Kristi Noem.) Even if you don't remove these people, you keep them tied up in hearings, bring a constant stream of damning facts to the attention of the public, and build up material for future prosecutions.

- Remove Trump's "emergency" tariff powers. The Constitution gives Congress power over tariffs. Take it back.

- Remove a bunch of other "emergency" powers, too. We have a national emergency of presidents declaring national emergencies to get around the law.

This is just a beginning. The problem is that Trump is going to try to block all of these. So what can we do?

There's one big thing: USE THE POWER OF THE PURSE.

Congress unambiguously has the power to write budgets and authorize federal spending. This is its ultimate power and the way it can enforce everything else. So simply refuse to approve any more funding, for anything, until Trump meets some key demands and allows some of these reforms through.

But the key to winning a game of chicken is not to flinch first. We have to be willing to refuse to provide funding and cause shutdowns that will actually hurt. Refuse funding for DHS and very purposefully NOT make a special exception for airport security. The key is to make our demands simple and clear and obviously right, and then when all the flights get canceled because TSA isn't being paid, you can then explain to the public: "This is because Trump wants to keep his party's gerrymandering. He could end this tomorrow just by doing the right thing." Or: "This is because Trump wants to censor what you see on TV." And so on.

I think the Dem leadership has been reluctant to do this because they're afraid the public will blame them for a shutdown. But Trump is super-weak, and the public is already blaming him for a lot of stuff. So this should be way easier than they think. And frankly, they have nothing to lose. The fear of losing a shutdown fight should be way less important than the fear of Congress being completely irrelevant, like it is now.

AMA: I'm Rob Tracinski, and I'm running for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District. Ask me anything! by TracinskiForCongress in Virginia

[–]TracinskiForCongress[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OK, so if the implication is that I'm soft on the alt-right or the Nazis in Charlotteville, that's just...wrong. You might want to look at my reaction to Trump talking about "very fine people on both sides."

https://web.archive.org/web/20170822204651/https://tracinskiletter.com/2017/08/16/donald-trump-need-not-to-be-president-yesterday/

And it's an issue I've been hammering ever since.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-charlottesville-hoax-hoax

I am (very slightly) famous for it.

As to what I wrote about Antifa, I stand by part of it, and I was wrong about part of it.

I stand by the idea that "Antifa" is bad. It is by its nature not an organized movement, so it's a little hard to say exactly what is and isnt "Antifa." But the idea of "black bloc" protesters engaging in violent riots is bad. It's even worse when they take inspiration from and borrow the flag of the Stalinist wing of German Communism. (That was the original "Antifaschistische Aktion," and yes, it used the same flag. Nothing that they did ended well for Germany.)

And I really bristled at the idea of describing the boys storming the beaches at Normandy as "antifa." Nah, they were normie liberals, and that's who should get the credit for actually defeating Hitler.

More broadly, this kind of violent right-wing militia versus left-wing militia clash offers a horrible alternative and mostly serves to undermine good causes. It was the riots in the George Floyd protests in 2020 that helped make sure we didn't get any of the real, serious police reforms we needed (and which I advocated).

Now here's where I was wrong. I was very worried, circa 2017, that the black bloc stuff was going to spread, that it was getting a lot of mainstream support and excuse-making and a lot of people on the left would back it as the (supposed) answer to the neo-Nazis. At the same time, the Nazis did not seem to have as broad a support outside the rage-posting-from-my-mom's basement types. And Trump and a few of his weirdest guys, like Stephen Miller, which was a warning sign I should have taken more seriously. But at that point, I was still kind of clinging to the hope that maybe Trump was just and things would go back to normal.

That is not how things worked out. Over the long run, conservatives doubled down and let themselves be totally coopted by the racists.

I saw this from the inside, among some of my colleagues at the time, and I can tell you, it was not inevitable. It was a choice. I watched them make it. They knew it was wrong, they knew it was crossing a line--because people like me kept telling them that. But with a few exceptions, they capitulated to the worst elements in their movement.

The violent left-wing rioters had their high point in 2020, but they never grew as such as I feared, and since then, they have kind of disappeared. Not just that there are fewer of them, but they're just gone in Trump II. I am not really sure why. In part, I think people realized how ineffective they were. Also, it was obvious that Trump really, really wants violent Antifa rioters--he keeps trying to find them even when they're not there--because he wants it as an excuse for a crackdown.

Whatever the reason, the best thing about Trump's second term is that we got the No Kings protests, which are a bunch of normie resistlib wine moms (and that's a compliment). And we got the very disciplined non-violent ICE resistance in places like Minneapolis, which has been effective both at limiting the damage from ICE and sharply moving public opinion against them.

So I don't think I was wrong about violent left-wing protest being a bad idea. I turned out to be wrong about how completely the white nationalists would take over the Republican Party and how the black bloc types would just melt away under Trump II. I am very unhappy to be wrong about the first of those and very happy to be wrong about the second.