The California governor made the remarks at an event to promote his new memoir, 'Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.'
Abid Rahman at THR:
California Governor Gavin Newsom compared Israel to an “apartheid state” and questioned future U.S. military support for the country.
Speaking on stage at an event to promote his new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, Newsom, who is widely expected to enter the 2028 presidential race, was asked by Pod Save America host Jon Favreau about the U.S.-Israel relationship and whether it should be reconsidered. “It breaks my heart, because the current leadership in Israel is walking us down the path where I don’t think you have a choice about that consideration,” Newsom said about the U.S. potentially rethinking its support for Israel.
Newsom’s comments come in light of the devastation in Gaza and the ongoing war with Iran. But also as the Democratic base’s views of Israel have shifted markedly to being negative, so much so that even minor links to the country have become an electoral liability for Dems in primary races.
Even longtime pro-Israel California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has seen the tide turn.
Newsom rightly calls Israel an “apartheid state” and urges a rethink of the US’s blank check military support to Israel.
See Also:
The Guardian: Gavin Newsom likens Israel to ‘an apartheid state’ and decries war on Iran
Haaretz: Gavin Newsom Says Israel 'Sort of an Apartheid State,' No Choice but to Reconsider U.S. Aid
Congressperson says US president and Marco Rubio are tearing apart transatlantic alliance
Andrew Roth at The Guardian:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused Donald Trump of tearing apart the transatlantic alliance with Europe and of seeking to introduce an “age of authoritarianism”, as she condemned his administration’s foreign policy in front of its allies’ top policymakers at the Munich Security Conference.
Speaking at a panel on populism on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez outlined what she called an “alternative vision” for a leftwing US foreign policy, challenging the Trump administration’s shift to the right in front an audience of US allies who have grown increasingly wary of the US’s increasingly nationalist – and militaristic – global posture.
In her remarks, Ocasio-Cortez said Trump and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, were “looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianism”, as they sought to “carve out a world where Donald Trump can command the western hemisphere and Latin America as his personal sandbox, where Putin can saber rattle around Europe and try to bully our own allies there”.
She also condemned the US capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and the US support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most prominent progressive figures in US national politics, traveled to Munich as an apparent counterweight to Rubio, who is due to address the high-profile gathering of leaders and top ministers on Saturday, and said he would tell them the “old world is gone … and we live in a new era in geopolitics”.
[...]
Ocasio-Cortez also said that she and her fellow Democrats were calling for a return to a “rules-based order” without the “hypocrisies” of US foreign policy that have dominated the past and current administrations.
“Whether it is kidnapping a foreign head of state, whether it is threatening our allies to colonize Greenland, whether it is looking the other way in a genocide, hypocrisies are vulnerabilities, and they threaten democracies globally,” she said.
[...]
Ocasio-Cortez was scheduled to appear later in a panel on the “future of foreign policy”. During her remarks, she said that the international tide in authoritarianism had been fueled “not just by income inequality, but the failure of democracies over decades to deliver, the failure to deliver higher higher wages, the failure to rein in corporations”.
Congresswoman and possible 2028 Democratic Presidential nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) spoke plain truths at the Munich Security Conference in München (Munich), Germany about how the Trump Regime is ushering in an “age of authoritarianism” by blowing up the post-WWII transatlantic order.
See Also:
NBC News: In Munich, AOC warns that democracies must deliver for the working class to stave off 'authoritarianism'
HuffPost: AOC Tears Trump Apart As 'Authoritarian' And Warns He Wants To 'Carve Out The World
The Independent: AOC says Trump is ‘tearing apart transatlantic partnership’ between US and Europe
We need rules for the Democratic primaries that will lift up the voices of talented Democrats
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) for The Guardian:
In democracy, the rules matter. Six months before the midterms, the US supreme court’s Callais decision dramatically changed the rules of US elections by gutting the Voting Rights Act and capsizing the 15th amendment.
As the Maga party races to restore Jim Crow politics with voter suppression and all-white congressional delegations in the south, Democrats must act shrewdly to advance party rules of our own that promote majority rule, interracial political solidarity and the power of the voters.
While most Democrats are organizing on the ground for victory in the congressional midterms, a group of about 50 leaders at the helm of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is meeting soon to write the rulebook for the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries. They need our support too.
This is an important job. We can expect an incredibly crowded field of perhaps more than two dozen presidential candidates from all over the country. As the party of the people rather than the monarchs and oligarchs, we will engage in a sustained debate about how to repair and transcend the wreckage of Trumpism to refortify democracy and renew the progress of our party, our country and our world.
We need rules for these primaries that will lift up the voices of these many talented Democrats in order to improve our party’s prospects, while avoiding the dangers of a protracted, divisive and confusing battle. The key goals are that our nominee be able to win a real majority, including votes outside his or her core base, and that the process be a positive one rather than a race to the bottom with Republican-style negative politics. We know Trump’s party is the party of character destruction; we are the party that builds people up and favors unity over division.
The best tool to empower voters to make constructive choices among exciting new voices in such a crowded field is the mechanism of ranked-choice voting, which has been used consistently with great results all across the US, from Maine to Illinois to Alaska.
In a ranked-choice election, voters have the power to rank their favored candidates in order: first, second, third and so on. If their first choice can’t win, their vote counts for their next choice and so on. This system encourages candidates to seek all voters’ support in the hopes they might rank them, if not first, then second, third or fourth, in what becomes an exercise in coalition majority politics.
Compare that to the “Hunger Games”-style 2016 Republican primaries that resulted in the nomination of Donald Trump, a polarizing candidate who managed to prevail repeatedly in party primaries with negative politics and one-third of the vote in a large and broken field. He used bully tactics to target opponents one-by-one and was then simply the last person standing.
We could try to mimic that race-to-the-bottom negative politics, but all Americans can now see exactly where that model leads – to national disaster. Ranked-choice voting offers a shift in emphasis – from destroying the rest of the field to unifying it. This change in incentives produces positive campaigns where candidates actually praise and encourage their opponents rather than tearing them down.
Allowing greater use of ranked choice voting in states where Democratic party organizations choose it should be a slam-dunk for DNC decision-makers as it provides a big win for voters, candidates and our party. It would help create better campaigns, and unify Democrats behind a strong nominee.
[...]
Ranked-choice voting is working everywhere it has been adopted. It’s used for almost every election in Maine and Alaska, and in a growing number of cities nationwide, from Oakland to New York City, San Francisco to Washington DC. Six states successfully used ranked-choice voting for presidential primaries in 2020 or 2024. Everywhere it’s used, people overwhelmingly say they understand how to rank candidates and greatly appreciate the extra power and fine-grained choices it gives us as voters.
The 2028 primary isn’t that far away. It will begin in earnest as soon as the midterms end. We know what lies ahead of us. We have two options. We can have another bitter and confusing primary like 2016, another primary where millions of early votes don’t count like 2020, and another last-minute scramble like 2024. When that happens, we lose focus and fall victim to our own creaky voting practices.
But we can also choose to have a rich and competitive Democratic primary that gives voters a real voice that can’t be repealed or redrawn into oblivion. Ranked-choice voting makes competitive choice a productive and positive non-zero-sum practice, and showcases the complete innovation and ingenuity of our party.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) wrote in The Guardian that the US should consider adopting ranked choice voting.
Until recently, it seemed Donald Trump would cement the GOP’s status as the political home of “faith”-driven voters that it took on decades ago.
But since returning to power, Trump and his celebrations of corruption and debasement have begun tearing away at that foundation. It presents Democrats with an opportunity to seize the mantle of the party of faith-based morality, or at least share it with Republicans in a previously unanticipated way.
To understand how the GOP became the political party for white Christians, we have to go back to the Reagan administration. The first evangelical Christian president was on the ballot during 1980 — Jimmy Carter. Yet it was Reagan who would cement the Republican Party’s hold over not only white evangelicals, but a large swath of white Catholic voters too. The alliance was both transactional and performative.
While Reagan was a Hollywood actor who rarely set foot in a church and signed legislation liberalizing California’s abortion restrictions, as a child of rural Illinois, he knew how to appear devout on TV. He managed to come across to many voters as the true embodiment of Midwest “Christian” values, despite running against a deeply committed born again Christian.
Reagan’s appeal was politically calculated.
In the wake of the Roe v. Wade ruling less than a decade earlier, a growing cohort of anti-reproductive rights activists had become the fulcrum for a nascent conservative Christian movement. For the first time, suburban Midwestern Catholics became allies with right-wing Southern Evangelicals who, not so many years earlier, would have been deriding them as “Papists.” Reagan’s calls from the Oval Office to “March for Life” rallies in DC during the 1980s marked the beginning of the merger of the Republican Party with what not long before had seemed to be a marginal crew of religious extremists.
While women gaining control over their own bodies was the initial catalyst for the movement, it reflected the rise of a broader and deeply reactionary “cultural” political conservatism — one deeply opposed to growing diversity. The movement is grounded on the claim that the United States needs to reclaim its purportedly foundational “Christianity,” often serving as a code word for the “threat” posed by women and Black Americans receiving civil rights (just this week, the Southern Baptist Convention overwhelmingly voted to reiterate its opposition to women pastors).
Republicans’ effectiveness over the ensuing years in convincing many observant evangelical and Catholic voters that the Democratic Party was a threat to their religious institutions and values goes a long way toward explaining how they could be so successful defining Democrats — even those who were devoted people of faith, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden — as avatars of moral decay.
A merger of convenience reaches its apotheosis
After the 2024 election, it was clear that Trump’s second presidency marked a new era in the GOP’s identification as the party of faith. Trump, despite his own ostentatious irreligiousness and amorality, was far better even than Reagan in tapping into the apocalyptic fear of moral decay that powers many right-wing Christian movements.
For a time, Trump’s increasingly hyperbolic adoption of culture war tropes, particularly his portrayal of children under assault by “Democrats” intent on changing their genders, seemed remarkably effective. In 2024, he managed to add a material number of Hispanic and even Black voters to his base of white evangelical and Catholics despite a candidacy grounded in racism and xenophobia.
But as soon as he retook office, Trump began gratuitously testing the limits of the tolerance of key parts of his “Christian” coalition.
Trump’s full-bore assault on the nation’s immigrants, including targeting family members and neighbors of many Hispanic Americans who voted for him, almost instantaneously destroyed any hope that his presidency heralded the addition of substantial numbers of observant Hispanics to the GOP’s “faith” coalition, particularly from the growing cohort of Hispanic evangelicals.
[...]
Can there be a new party of faith?
Paxton’s Democratic opponent is James Talarico, a state legislator and seminarian who has chosen to make faith a centerpiece of his campaign. This is a relatively unusual strategy for a Democratic candidate — but one that could well prove to be a harbinger of what’s to come for the party during the run up to 2028.
While a raft of self-described progressives are presenting
themselves as challengers to the “establishment” in primaries, there is actually remarkably little in the way of major policy disagreement within the Democratic Party. (In fact, there is a growing consensus on the need for structural change to increase economic fairness and reclaim and preserve democratic institutions.) Most every successful Democratic politician advocates taxing the rich, protecting the environment, expanding health care in the face of GOP assaults, and so forth.
But some progressive politicians may distinguish themselves in other ways, including by bringing appeals to faith into Democratic politics.
Like Talarico, some prospective Democratic presidential candidates are signaling they intend to run campaigns based on messages of curing the moral rot that Trumpism has wrought upon the nation, albeit with different approaches — some more openly rooted in religion than others.
Sen. Chris Murphy — a longtime progressive opponent of Trump — has released a pre-campaign book titled “Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.” Murphy argues the Trump era has left much of the nation not only materially weakened, but also spiritually broken. (Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky also has a book about his faith coming out later this year.)
Pete Buttigieg discusses his Christian faith in conjunction with his commitment to public life, stating that “God does not belong to an American political party. But moral frameworks are essential for fashioning a conscience that can stand up against injustice.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew, has long drawn a connection between his faith and his politics — to remarkable success, somewhat surprisingly, given that he does not belong to the religion of most Pennsylvanians. As he begins to formulate a nascent campaign message, Shapiro argues that Trump has failed a “morality test” by repeatedly seeking to divide Americans. While emphasizing pragmatism, Shapiro also contends there must be a moral repair of the nation in the post-Trump era, a cure Shapiro suggests could be inspired by the faith of believers of different religions.
As those examples demonstrate, while the next Democratic standard bearer may appeal to religious faith in a way Democratic leaders have often shied away from in the past, that appeal will almost certainly be quite different from that of Reagan — and certainly from that of Trump.
For over 45 years, Republicans have effectively focused their appeals to “Christian” Americans on sectarianism, and melded them with messages designed to enhance fears of demographic and social change. In the process, as some emerging Democratic leaders contend, they have left Americans with a society that is morally, spiritually, and materially broken.
It is just possible that Trump — whose appeals to a certain cohort of the religiously observant have morphed into an almost gleeful celebration of amorality — may have, entirely unintentionally, opened the door to a new kind of faith-inspired politics. Time will tell.
The Democratic Party, in recent years, has started to reclaim the faith mantle to represent a Christian vision that isn’t loaded with MAGA prejudices.
If not we will live rest of our lives under GOP control!
Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:
Call it Supreme Court “reform,” call it expansion or even call it “court packing.” The label doesn’t matter. What does is matter is that 2028 Democratic presidential candidates need to make winning control of the corrupt GOP Supreme Court a top priority. And by doing so, it will enable them to say that he or she has a mandate to reform this so-called “court.”
We have watched these six GOP justices gut the Voting Rights Act, strip women of constitutional right to reproductive freedom, protect Trump from prosecution, legalize discrimination, given the wealthy more political power, overturn progressive federal/state laws and more. And they did this by invalidating federal and state laws, overturning nearly 100-year-old precedents and in essence legislating from the bench all in service of the GOP’s goals.
Look at what we saw in just the past seven days. The Court delivered for the GOP on issue after issue. In a six to three ruling on Tuesday, the GOP justices sanctioned discrimination against transgender Americans by holding that states may ban transgender girls from participating in sports at publicly funded schools. The added pain and stigma this will cause to the transgender community is immeasurable--but the GOP enjoys this cruelty.
On Monday—in another six to three ruling—the GOP justices ruling gave Trump more power by overturning a 91-year-old precedent that prevented presidents from removing members of independent agencies like the FTC at will. The ruling effectively turns FTC commissioners and others into at-will employees who serve at the pleasure of the president despite Congress clearly not wanting that. But the six GOP justices don’t care what elected officials have enacted—they care about power for the GOP.
The six GOP justices on Tuesday also struck down longtime campaign finance rules challenged by Vice President JD Vance that place limits on how much a national political party committee can spend in coordination with individual candidates. In other words, the wealthy GOP oligarchs can now have even more influence over our elections as they can more easily buy and sell candidates.
Last week, the six GOP justices did what Trump wanted and ended temporary protected status for 330,000 plus Haitians and Syrians living in the United States because their nations are too dangerous. This is all part of Trump and MAGA’s agenda to protect white supremacy by deporting Black and Brown people.
And speaking of white supremacy earlier in this term the GOP justices—again in a 6 to 3 ruling—gutted what was left of the seminal 1965 Voting Rights Act. It was this law that finally fulfilled the promise that Black Americans would have the same rights as whites to vote and have their vote matter. That is why the GOP has long been hostile to the VRA. And shortly after this court ruling, numerous states that had been part of the Confederacy redrew their congressional maps to erase Black elected officials.
[...]
It appears with each term, these right-wing justices become more drunk on power and emboldened to overturn laws, take away freedoms, help the wealthy and create a President who is almost a king. It’s almost as if the GOP justices believe there will not be another Democratic President for many, many years to come—and if they have their way, that would be the reality.
That is why the 2028 election may be our last, best hope to reign in this court. And it’s why Democrats need to make court reform a visible issue.
We openly work to win control of the White House, Senate and House. We should view the Supreme Court no different. We need to plan to win it using every available means. In fact, these unelected justice have more power than any member of Congress because all they need is five votes to legislate new laws and rules we are required to follow.
Perhaps we need to refer to the Supreme Court as simply a supreme council—like a city council. But regardless how we frame it, if a 2028 Democratic presidential candidate or candidates for Congress refuses to commit to winning the Supreme Court, they are telling you they are on board with what they are seeing.
If not, we will live the rest of our lives under GOP Supreme Court rule. Are you ready to simply allow that or do you want to fight?!
Dean Obeidallah is right: the Democrats should consider expansion of SCOTUS to be a major priority in the 2028 Presidential elections.
This is a necessary maneuver to correct the decades-long right-wing imbalance on the court.
Given the ongoing nightmare of the Trump presidency and the terrifying erosion of our democracy, the 2028 election feels like it’s about a billion years away right now. Nonetheless, for many candidates, the primary has already begun. California Governor Gavin Newsom, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, former VP Kamala Harris, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, and a range of other politicians are pretty clearly running for president now, whether or not they make it to the primary.
One politician who seems to be running—with possibly some ambiguity— is NY representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez went on a nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” with Vermont Senator and perennial left presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders in 2025. That was a strong signal that Sanders was passing the torch and left leadership—including presidential aspirations— to his younger colleague.
Ocasio-Cortez has also been fundraising on behalf of more centrist colleagues like Mary Peltola, who is running for Senate in 2026—a sign that AOC is working to defuse the establishment opposition which helped sink Sanders in 2016 and 2020. And she’ s shortly embarking on a trip abroad to speak at the Munich Security Conference and burnish her foreign policy credentials.
Ocasio-Cortez has not made a formal announcement, and has signaled she won’t do so until 2027. But she’s doing the sorts of things that you’d expect a presidential contender to do. And that’s a good thing, because she would be a great president—and 2028 looks like the year she could win the nomination and the presidency.
AOC would be a good president
There are a lot of reasons to believe AOC would be an excellent president. She’s got a strong grasp on policy details, and uses those to highlight and advance, rather than to obscure and deflect from, moral goals. She’s been a legislator for 8 years and has formed strong bonds both with ideological allies on the left and with more moderate legislators. She is someone who could both set ambitious goals and organize coalitions to achieve them—much like Biden, another longtime legislator.
She would not, however, share Biden’s major weakness—a ossified commitment to bipartisan norms and to transcendent normality as a value. The biggest problem with Biden’s presidency (next to the disgusting and violent Zionism, which AOC also does not share) was his bedrock belief that the American people wanted things to return to the status quo circa 2013. That led him to conclude that prosecuting fascists, or prioritizing fascist-proofing the country, would be unpopular and unnecessary.
Biden thought you could defeat fascism by just doing good things for working people and winning every election. It’s clear that AOC knows better. She’s called for sweeping prosecutions of fascists at every level of the administration. She’s said we need to expand the Supreme Court. She’s an enthusiastic supporter of DC statehood. She wants to abolish the filibuster. She wants to abolish ICE.
More than any other likely candidate in 2028, knows that Democrats need to fight for their values by using the power they have to crush fascism, rather than just counting on electoral wins to solve all their (and our) problems. Post Trump, we need a transformative Democratic president. AOC could be that.
AOC can win
Historically, progressive outsider candidates have not done well in Democratic primaries. More, the two women that Democrats ran for president both lost. As a result, a lot of people believe that AOC can’t win, and/or that voting for her would sink Democratic chances.
I wrote in early 2025 about why Democrats should not be afraid to nominate women and non white men in general. But I think we’ve got more evidence about the 2028 cycle now, and all of it points to these fears being extremely misguided.
Democrats are vastly overperforming in special elections; they have gotten 13 point swings on average, and Republicans haven’t flipped a single Democratic seat since 2024.
More, though, progressives have been overperforming, suggesting that the backlash against Trumpism is damaging not just Republicans, but Democratic centrists. The most obvious case here is the victory of Zohran Mamdani, a pro-Palestinian Democratic socialist, who beat disgraced centrist assholes Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams in the New York mayoral election of 2025 and led the New York based Working Families Party to a great year across the board.
And progressive strength continues into 2026; socialist Analilia Mejia just defeated centrist Tom Malinowski for a New Jersy House seat in a shocking upset. Other progressive challengers, like Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois and Brad Lander in New York look well positioned to make strong showings, or win, against more establishment candidates.
[...]
When it’s your time, roll the dice
AOC is only 36; you could argue that she’s got a lot of time and doesn’t need to attempt a run this cycle. She could instead run (and very likely win) Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s New York Senate seat; his term ends in 2028 and he’s so unpopular he will probably either retire or lose his primary. Wouldn’t it make more sense for AOC to spend a term or two in the Senate and then run for president when she’s in her late 40s or early 50s? What’s the rush?
It’s true that AOC might well be able to win a presidential bid in 2040 or 2044. But the thing about the future is it’s difficult to predict. Obama saw an opportunity and took it even before his first Senate term was over because he realized that you can’t be sure that the stars are ever going to align again. Right now there’s an unprecedented backlash against fascism and also an unprecedented threat to democracy. There may be another chance for AOC—and then again maybe we won’t have anything like free and fair elections in 2044 if someone doesn’t step into the breach and fight for democracy now.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is one of my top favorites to run for President on the Democratic Party ticket.
Critics teased the veep over the way he thinks the party could “do a lot better.”
Ben Blanchet at HuffPost:
Vice President JD Vance on Monday gave his “very simple” piece of “free political advice” for Democrats when asked by Fox News’ Jesse Watters about the electability of the party’s candidates with the midterms around the corner.
“It’s just elect — nominate normal human beings,” said Vance, who chuckled and claimed he was the “worst person to ask” how the party could win votes.
Vance, who was responding to a question on whether Texas state Rep. James Talarico and Maine’s Graham Platner could “win back men” with Democrats, proceeded to offer a bouquet of right-wing talking points.
“Don’t run on men playing in women’s sports, don’t run on letting illegal immigrants flood our country and don’t let run on letting fraudsters in Minnesota’s take advantage of the American taxpayer and you guys would do a lot better,” he said.
“I don’t know why Democrats can’t just find normal, well-adjusted candidates, whether men or women; I think they would do a lot better. But I’m not complaining, Jesse, because I think it puts our party, my party, in a much better position to perform in the midterms.”
Dear JD Vance, it’s the Democrats that are running “normal human beings”. Your party, on the other hand, are running corrupt and extreme weirdos who bootlick the MAGA/Project 2025 agenda.
From the 06.08.2026 edition of FNC's Jesse Watters Primetime:
Former Vice President Kamala Harris waded into New York City politics Monday night, endorsing Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani for mayor an
Alex Samuels at Daily Kos:
Former Vice President Kamala Harris waded into New York City politics Monday night, endorsing Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani for mayor and giving the democratic socialist candidate his biggest boost yet from the party establishment.
The endorsement came during Harris’ first major TV interview since losing the 2024 election to President Donald Trump, and it was timed to promote her new book, “107 Days,” a memoir about last year’s campaign. Speaking with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Harris was asked what she thought of Mamdani’s candidacy—and why so many top Democrats have been slow to back him after he beat disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the primary.
“Look, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the Democratic nominee and he should be supported,” Harris said.
Maddow pressed her: “Do you endorse his candidacy?”
“I support the Democrat in the race, sure,” Harris replied, not mentioning Mamdani’s name. She quickly pivoted, saying, “He’s not the only star” running for office. Harris highlighted candidates like Barbara Drummond, who is running for mayor of Mobile, Alabama, as also worthy of major attention.
Harris’ remarks stood out because other top Democrats—including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who would both be Mamdani’s constituents if he wins—have either kept their distance or opposed him outright. Even as Mamdani dominates recent polls, moderate Democrats worry his democratic-socialist label will give Republicans ammo to paint the entire party as too far left and hurt them in next year’s midterm elections.
Progressives, however, have rallied around Mamdani. He has secured endorsements from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Harris’ nod should give him a boost heading into November.
Harris’ interview made headlines for more than just the mayor’s race, though. Maddow also asked whether Harris was considering a 2028 presidential run.
“That’s not my focus right now,” Harris said. “That’s not my focus at all. It really isn’t.”
[...]
Harris also weighed in on ABC’s decision to bring Jimmy Kimmel back on the air after public backlash to the company’s suspension of his show.
“Talk about the power being with the people and the people making that clear with their checkbooks as it relates to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel,” she said. “We saw the power of the people over the last few days, and it spoke volumes. And it moved a decision in the right direction.”
She did not hold back when talking about Trump. Calling him a “tyrant,” Harris accused the president of “abusing the power that the people vested him with,” blasting corporations like Disney for giving in to FCC pressure when they pulled Kimmel’s show.
“I always believed that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy, for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions,” Harris said. “And one by one by one, they have been silent. They have been … feckless. It’s not like they’re going to lose their yacht or their house in the Hamptons.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show Monday, former VP Kamala Harris endorsed Zohran Mamdani for New York Mayor, criticized the Trump Regime’s war on free speech, and whether she would give another try at the Presidency.
