MAGA Dems Rip Off Mask
From California to Colorado to New Jersey, Democrats line up to serve Trump
At Christmastime in 1992, Tom Cruise defended military fratricide in the blockbuster feature A Few Good Men. By the Fourth of July the following year, he was onboarding as the mob’s in-house tax attorney in The Firm.
Hollywood’s golden boy lawyered his way to becoming its leading man, only to cement his platinum star status in 1996 as – you guessed it – lawyer-turned-sports-agent Jerry Maguire. That same year, Cruise fully arrived starring in – and for the first time, producing – Mission: Impossible. Worldwide, the four films grossed $1.24 billion. He was untouchable.
Then in 1999, Cruise appeared in Eyes Wide Shut as an Epstein class aspirant and Magnolia as a manospheric grifter. In the span of a decade, the heartthrob next door embodied the legal class protecting state murder and organized crime, the triumphant bootstraps small business owner, millionaires who want to be billionaires so they can securely fuck kids, and entrepreneurs selling misogyny to the mediocre men capitalism left behind.
Cruise became the entire MAGA coalition.
Tom Cruise becoming fabulously wealthy by performing the worst of us isn’t controversial. That’s his job. That we continued to idolize him is the real scandal. And I’m not talking about the evils of Scientology, which is its own thing. I’m talking about the people who ended up leading the Democratic party, coming of age in the nineties. It was the era of Clinton, Gingrich, and Francis Fucking Fukuyama – sure – but culturally, the nineties were peak Cruise.
Ted Lieu graduated from Stanford in 1991 with dual degrees in computer science and political science, then Georgetown Law in 1994. The following year he joined the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps – that’s right: Lieu became a JAG, just like Cruise’s character in A Few Good Men. He was elected to the California state legislature in 2006, then to Congress in 2014.
Mikie Sherrill received her B.S. from the Naval Academy in 1994, but was barred from walking at the ceremony as punishment for failing to rat out classmates who cheated. It’s hardly cadet-on-cadet murder, but even with dramatically lower stakes the A Few Good Men parallel is impossible to miss. Sherrill also graduated from Georgetown Law, moving to New York as an elite litigator, then finally serving as a New Jersey AUSA before being elected to Congress in 2018.
Back at Princeton in 1996, Jared Polis (then Jared Schutz) was earning a B.A. and founding the first of a series of internet companies that would make him a mega-millionaire through the dot-com era. His senior thesis: “Paradigm Shift: Politics in the Information Age.”
Four years later Polis was first elected to office as a member of the Colorado State Board of Education. As a megadonor he helped shift the state blue, sponsoring ballot initiatives and first securing election to Congress in 2008. He was elected Colorado Governor in 2016. While Polis deserves credit for advancing Democrats statewide and for strong leadership on LGBTQ issues, he remains a libertarian more aligned with his peers in the tech oligarchy than with the regular people in their crosshairs.
Last year Polis vetoed Senate Bill 86, which would require social media companies to remove accounts illegally targeting children under thirteen. He vetoed a bill to ban ambulance companies from surprise billing, and a measure to ban rent-fixing algorithms that collude in defrauding renters.
Polis joined with red state Governors in the barbaric stunt of bussing migrants to major under-resourced blue-state cities. He pushed for the interstate distribution of raw milk, endorsed the shambolic RFK, Jr. for his current position of Secretary of Health and Human Services, and was the first politician to solicit campaign donations in Bitcoin.
Jared Polis isn’t a Democrat because he opposes the authoritarian MAGA agenda. He’s a Democrat because as an openly gay man, the Republican party simply will not have him. Like many corporate-aligned Democrats, Polis has successfully executed the deceptive brand of Good Liberal by standing firm on low-stakes cultural issues (cannabis legalization, gay rights) while backing down on high-stakes economic and justice issues. That is, until the commutation of Tina Peters’ sentence.
Last month, the mask fell completely. Convicted election-meddler Tina Peters was up for a resentencing after four years of time served, with Governor Polis under pressure from President Trump to release her and rewrite his state’s history with January 6. Not only did Polis comply, he lied about his decision and the underlying facts, then shamefully sold the capitulation as a matter of restorative justice.
Nearly the entire statewide Democratic party joined in rebuking their governor (and, in many cases, benefactor), including a rare formal censure from the Colorado Democratic Party. Polis chose to free Peters, granted Trump a sorely needed victory, inverted the meaning of restorative justice, lied to his constituents, then mocked his critics with a trolling video of himself with masking tape over his mouth.
Jared Polis is MAGA. He took the one shining example of the American justice system actually working correctly to hold seditionists accountable, then did exactly everything wrong. That’s not a mistake. It’s not even a close call. It’s fully absorbing Trump’s authoritarian aspiration, validating the great lie of election theft, spitting in the face of the pro-democracy movement, and abandoning the infrastructure he spent decades building up. Jared Polis took a hard look at the political environment and decided it better to join MAGA than oppose it.
What’s Mikie Sherrill’s excuse? Is she broken from her tenure in the Air Force? Corrupted by a career as a federal prosecutor? Is she simply concerned, as newly elected Governor of New Jersey, that a “blue” state coming uncomfortably close to assigning its electoral votes to Donald Trump in 2024 deserves a pinch of MAGA from its executive leadership?
When those illegally detained at ICE’s Delaney Hall facility organized a hunger strike to protest being subject to biological weapons, slavery, and torture, Sherrill sided with ICE. She sent New Jersey’s state police to assault those protesting outside in peaceful solidarity with the imprisoned. New Jersey could arrest and prosecute ICE members for violations of numerous laws and dismantle Delaney Hall, yet Sherrill deployed her power to protect the American Gestapo from the regular people courageously raising awareness of the abominable conditions inside.
What’s her excuse?
Why did Mikie Sherrill choose MAGA? Polis has been Governor for two full terms. It makes a certain kind of sick sense, given his background and class interests, to drop the liberal mask at this point. But why is a brand new blue state governor committing her good name to Trump’s lawless goon squad?
And why, for that matter, is Congressman Ted Lieu championing the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for California Governor? As the field of primary candidates narrows from three to two, Lieu tweeted the following remarkable admission:
“I endorsed Xavier Becerra. That’s why I hope Republican Steve Hilton remains in the top two. The latest vote updates show Hilton will likely beat Steyer.”
It is no secret that AIPAC Dems like Ted Lieu often prefer a Republican opponent over a progressive from their own party. What’s shocking here is Lieu admitting the quiet part out loud. He may believe that Hilton is a better matchup against his preferred candidate, Xavier Becerra, but Becerra is remarkably weak and could well lose to Hilton. Lieu is not just putting the future of California at risk – he’s boasting about it.
Public officials don’t usually reveal their support for a villainous outcome unless they have ceased fearing accountability – whether at the ballot box, or from the jury box. The mask is off. On the one hand, we know who these Democrats truly are. On the other hand, how chilling it is that they don’t seem to care.
I put a lot of stock in the stark analysis that concludes Trump and the GOP no longer care for public opinion because they’re insulating themselves from even the most extreme of electoral rebukes. If everything else fails, refusing to leave power when duly defeated is all but guaranteed (Polis: ✅). When the people march and protest against a military coup, ICE is there to detain and kill us (Sherrill: ✅). And for those in positions of power, signaling a willingness to work with Republicans like Steve Hilton ensures they’ll still have a seat at Trump’s totalitarian table (Lieu: ✅).
MAGA Democrats’ dropping the mask reveals deeper values and beliefs, but it also exposes the terrifying degree to which they’ve absorbed and embraced a new vision for a wholly anti-democratic form of government. A government without any pretense to accountability or popular will. They’re not conceding. They’re negotiating. They’re not fighting an ascendant dictatorship whose victory is in no way assured – they’re lining up to join it.
While Tom Cruise’s public image has descended into out-of-touch religious cult weirdo, he has quietly donated hundreds of millions to crucial causes all over Los Angeles. He has allowed himself to become the villain, hiding his secret status as unheralded benevolent rainmaker. He earned our admiration acting out the core constituencies of the MAGA coalition, then deployed his immense wealth to lift up the regular people and institutions of the industry that made him. It’s not too late for his mask to drop, either. Our Democratic politicians might just learn a thing or two.
This is really strong writing, Evan.
I’m surprised you didn’t throw some Spanberger in there for good measure. Vetoing collective bargaining and class action lawsuits in Virginia is pretty anti-democratic