The Dictatorship

James Clyburn says Democrats are misreading their own base. Here’s his fix.

Published

1 month ago

May 31, 2026

James Clyburn says Democrats are misreading their own base. Here’s his fix.

May. 30, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

COLUMBIA, S.C. — If you ask James Clyburn why the Democratic Party has such low approval ratings, he won’t start with the platform. He won’t even start with the candidates. He’ll start with a critique of the chattering class.

“We pay too much attention to the consulting class and not enough attention to our constituents,” the 85-year-old congressman said in a wide-ranging interview ahead of his annual fish fry this weekend, which has become a rite of passage for every Democrat mulling a presidential run. “Our constituents know what they feel, and we have to pay attention to people’s feelings.”

For someone who has spent decades inside the machinery of Democratic politics, Clyburn’s prescription is striking. He was the majority whip who counted the votes for the Affordable Care Act, the highest-ranking Black member of Congress and the man credited with reviving Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. He has been, in other words, the kind of power broker he’s now critiquing.

Maybe it’s all that experience that gives him the standing to say out loud what many Democrats only say behind closed doors. His diagnosis: The party is losing a fight over perception that it doesn’t fully understand it’s in — and that’s true despite Democratic overperformance in nearly every race since Vice President Kamala Harris lost to President Donald Trump.

The data isn’t on the party’s side, and Clyburn knows it. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that 70% of respondents were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, including 54% of people who voted for Harris. Asked what he would say to Black voters — the party’s most dependable bloc — who feel their loyalty has gone unrewarded, Clyburn didn’t dispute the sentiment. Instead, he reframed it.

“People think that you’re making progress when you’re making headlines,” he said. “You make progress when you make headway. And we have been making headway all across the board, and then we get a lot of criticism because the headlines aren’t there.”

That instinct — do the work, let it stand on its own — is vintage Clyburn. But he also knows the communications failure that comes with it is real and costly. He said he has told colleagues, including Biden, that “there is no substitute for substance,” a line he credits to the Republican civic leader John Gardner.

The problem is that maxim no longer wins.

“That’s not quite true anymore,” he said, “because of the media ecosystem. Style trumps substance today.”

His prescription, nonetheless, is a return to the basics he believes the consultant class has quietly billed out of the party.

“We’ve got to listen to [the voters],” he said. And he offered a theory of the case for why the consultants don’t: “They don’t get their percentages out of ground operations; they get it off how much [is spent] on television.”

In his telling, Democrats keep trying to convert voters instead of turning out the ones already in their camp. Clyburn, the preacher’s son, went looking for a metaphor in the church he grew up in. His father preached every Sunday, he said, without expecting the entire congregation to come down to the mourner’s bench — the spot reserved for those ready to be saved. “I don’t think conversion therapy ought to be placed on voters. What you got to do is energize voters.”

A calendar fight

For Clyburn, you can’t energize a base you have misidentified. And right now, he believes his party is making that mistake: The consultant class often conflates the base of the Democratic Party with its louder, progressive wing rather than Black voters, who are often more moderate.

He sees that misidentification at work in the fight over which states should vote first in the presidential nominating process.

Biden and the Democratic National Committee elevated South Carolina to the first slot in the nation in the 2024 cycle. More recently, party leaders including DNC Chair Ken Martin have signaled the lineup is about to be reshuffled.

Clyburn is not asking for South Carolina to remain first; he’s asking for it to remain first in the South. His argument: It is four distinct political cultures crammed into one inexpensive media market, a place where a candidate can test-drive a message without going broke.

Demoting it, he said, would be “a slap in the face” and a betrayal of the Black voters the party keeps vowing to protect. He draws a direct line between Republican redistricting efforts across the country, which are set to gut Black political representation across the old Confederacy and his own party’s willingness to sideline South Carolina. He worries Democrats are undercutting Black political power even as they accuse Republicans of doing the same.

A map fight

The calendar battle is running parallel to a more immediate one. For several weeks this month, the future of Clyburn’s congressional district hung on whether a handful of Republican state senators would follow President Trump’s lead and eliminate his seat entirely. They didn’t … for now. A gerrymandered map, he acknowledges, is likely coming back. The process isn’t dead — it’s stalled.

“I don’t think you’ll stop the map from coming back, and I don’t know that we should,” he said. His plan is to fight it on the merits, arguing that a 45% Black district is a far smaller racial outlier than the 75% white districts the proposed map would create. He believes some Republican legislators may already see it that way.

The collapse, he said, came down to three converging forces: a Supreme Court ruling two years ago that the existing district passed constitutional muster, thousands of overseas and military ballots already cast in the 2026 cycle and early voting turnout that shattered records.

“Almost 100,000 people have voted” already in the state’s 2026 elections, he said. “What we’re supposed to do? Tell those people, ‘your votes don’t matter’?”

What plainly irritated him was the map’s origins. It was drawn with the help of artificial intelligence and pushed by people who don’t live in South Carolina.

“There’s a certain independent streak about them,” he said of his fellow South Carolinians, noting that the same streak made the state both the first to secede from the Union and the first to implement Reconstruction. A few Republicans broke ranks, including one he had never met who called to say his conscience wouldn’t let him vote for it.

It is, he said, a fight he intends to win. But even as he’s waging it, the phone keeps ringing with calls from people who want to know what comes next.

Looking toward 2028

It is impossible to sit across from Clyburn for long without 2028 entering the room. The fish fry, now in its 35th year, will be attended by Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and California Rep. Ro Khanna — two Democrats openly flirting with runs for president. Clyburn’s blessing, as ever, would make any primary fight considerably easier.

He has worked the phones with a long list of potential contenders: Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, among others. He insists, the way kingmakers often do, that he hasn’t picked a favorite.

Pressed on whether he keeps a list of the possible candidates in order of preference, he offered nothing. “I may have, but I wouldn’t share them with you.”

What he says he’s hunting for is vision. He draws a careful distinction, lifted from his father’s sermons, between that and a dream. He name-checked former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as leaders who drew voters to something larger than just a policy sheet.

“Find that candidate who can articulate a vision that will appeal to the emotions in the Democratic voters,” he said. His other note for the eventual nominee amounted to a critique of the present: Stop letting Republicans set the terms. “You can’t play the other person’s game.”

One more term?

It’s a game Clyburn knows well. At 85, he is on a glide path to an 18th term in Congress, a fact that invites an obvious question: After the ACA, after electing a president, after everything, why run again? What else is there?

His former counterparts in House Democratic leadership, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, have already announced they are stepping aside this year to make room for younger leaders. Clyburn said he considered doing that, too, then reversed course after sitting down with his three daughters and hearing from constituents terrified of losing the seat to a newcomer right as the redistricting fight loomed.

“The question was, ‘Who would be best to hold on to this seat: someone brand new, or you with your record and relationships?” Clyburn told MS NOW.

He bristled at the premise that he owes anyone a goodbye. He wasn’t elected to Congress until he was 52.

“I didn’t get there when Nancy Pelosi or Steny Hoyer got there,” he said. “So why do I have to leave when they leave?”

He acknowledged a secondary motive that allies have floated privately: the chance to advise Hakeem Jeffries, who would become the first Black speaker if Democrats retake the House — a rise Clyburn helped engineer. A seat in Congress would make him a considerably more powerful kingmaker with a Democratic majority.

For now, Clyburn is doing what he has always done: counting votes, working the occasional Republican and watching November. If turnout holds, he believes, even the strategists in Washington will have to take the hint.

That, in the end, was the whole case he spent the conversation making: The voters were never the problem.

Eugene Daniels is an MS NOW senior Washington correspondent and co-host of “The Weekend,” which airs on Saturdays and Sundays from 7 to 10 a.m. ET on MS NOW.

The Dictatorship

Could feds’ changes put more people with disabilities in institutions?

Published

3 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Could feds’ changes put more people with disabilities in institutions?

WASHINGTON (AP) — For decades, disabled people have fought for their rights to go to school and live alongside peers without disabilities — rights that some fear could be losing ground under the Trump administration.

Last month, the Department of Education announced it would shift oversight of special education to the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose comments on the limits of disabilities such as autism have drawn sharp rebukes from advocates and lawmakers.

Meanwhile, after a White House push to police homelessnessthe Department of Justice released guidance that lowered the barrier to institutionalizing any person with a disability.

Taken together, the actions signal a worrying return to a reality where people with disabilities are pushed to the margins of society, advocates said.

“It’s a direct, frontal assault on the rights of people with disabilities to live their lives the way that people who are nondisabled live their lives,” said Selene Almazan, legal director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. “I can’t imagine that as a country, that would be something that we would agree we should go back to.”

Whitman Althaus, 12, who has autism and a neurological disorder called apraxia, poses for a portrait at his home Wednesday, July 1, 2026, in Luckey, Ohio. (AP Photo/Nic Antaya)

The move away from confining people with disabilities

Since the 1960s, legislation and court decisions have expanded supports and protections for people with disabilities to go to school with nondisabled peers and to live and work in their communities. Before that, people with mental illnesses or developmental and intellectual disabilities were largely confined to institutions.

Advocates have pushed back on what is known as the “medical model,” where an individual’s disability is viewed as a defect to be cured. Instead, under a “social model” of disability, differences can be accommodated and supported, as people with and without disabilities learn and work alongside each other.

Families and advocates have warned that moving special education to a health department marks a return to the medical model. They also have been angered by Kennedy’s attempts to link vaccines to autismgoing against decades of research that show no such link, and his framing of autism as a debilitating disease.

Kennedy’s comments last year, where he said children with autism would never write a poempay taxes or hold a job, raised questions about how he would oversee an agency meant to help students develop those skills. Kennedy later said he was referring to people with ” severe autism ″ or those who are nonverbal.

“Many of the things he said autistic people will never do, (special education) is in charge of making sure students with disabilities have the opportunity to do,” said Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. “Will he execute that faithfully, or does he consider disabled students a lost cause until we find some medical cure?”

The Supreme Court weighs in on disabilities

In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled that segregating disabled people who are otherwise able to live in their community with proper supports was a form of discrimination. The Olmstead v. L.C. decision led to requirements that government agencies provide disability services in the most integrated setting possible — in mainstream schools, homes and workplaces.

But in a memo issued in June, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel upended that guidance. It argued that neither the Americans with Disabilities Act nor Section 504, two major disability rights laws, requires states to provide services in the most mainstream setting. While the memo does not change the law, it signals how federal agencies may interpret and enforce civil rights issues related to the topic. It could embolden states or school districts to decline to support people with disabilities in mainstream environments.

The White House has already acted on a similar philosophy. Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order on homelessness that endorsed civil commitment, where a court orders individuals into involuntary hospitalization or treatment programs. Trump directed HHS to reduce barriers to institutionalizing people with mental illnesses.

In its memo, the Justice Department acknowledged its interpretation of the Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision is “out of step” with the common understanding. If a state starts to provide services in institutional settings, legal challenges likely would follow, the department said.

The Republican administration’s steps fit a worldview in which the government has no obligation to support people with disabilities, said Claudia Center, legal director at Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.

“It’s dark, and it’s awful,” Center said. “And I think it’s contrary to the majority view in our country. … It’s out of touch with where our society is.”

The application that Whitman Althaus, 12, who has autism and a neurological disorder called apraxia, uses to communicate is seen on a phone Wednesday, July 1, 2026, in Luckey, Ohio. (AP Photo/Nic Antaya)

Families say their kids thrive in mainstream classes

The moves have created a deep sense of uncertainty for students with disabilities.

Lindsey Althaus says home and community-based services in northwest Ohio have been instrumental to her family. Her 12-year-old son, Whitman, has autism and a neurological disorder called apraxia, in which the brain struggles to tell muscles how to move to form words or perform other motor skills. For some of his school career, with proper support services, Whitman was able to spend much of his school day in a classroom that included kids without disabilities.

Through a Medicaid waiver program, Althaus pays her mother to care for Whitman in her absence. That allows him to spend time out in the community with his grandmother while Althaus and her husband are working or away with their daughter.

Under the Justice Department’s new interpretation of Olmsted, states would have fewer obligations to fund and support those programs. Kennedy, in testimony to lawmakers on Capitol Hill earlier this year, criticized similar programs as subject to fraud.

“We want to be able to have him in the community,” said Althaus, who works as a disability rights advocate. “It’s just starting to feel like Whitman’s not going to be welcome anymore. We’re going back to this: You’re either perfect, or you’re not in the light.”

For many students with disabilities, schools are where they receive the majority of support services and where they are integrated among their peers. Before Magda Nakassis’s 8-year-old son, who is autistic and nonverbal, started public school in Maryland, his preschool experience had largely been defined by being kicked out of things, she said.

In school, Nakassis said, she found teachers and staff members who understood her son’s needs and told her to stop apologizing for them. A program at his school called Fantastic Friends teaches mainstream fifth graders about autism and they spend recesses with children in the autism program. Every year, Nakassis said, there is a waitlist to be a Fantastic Friend.

Nakassis said that it has been difficult to see the ways autism in particular has become politicized. Every child is entitled to a public education in this country, Nakassis said, and special education is a response to the fact that some children have differences that require additional support.

Regardless of his diagnosis, his right to an education is not a medical issue, she said, but rather a question of equity and access in a society that often pushes disabled people to the margins.

“There are lots of kids like him out there, and I sometimes wonder, ‘what did we use to do?’” Nakassis said. “I can’t believe it was better.”

___

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

The Dictatorship

Trump filing shows he took in about $1.2 billion from crypto businesses last year

Published

11 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Trump filing shows he took in about $1.2 billion from crypto businesses last year

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump took in nearly $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses last year, a federal filing released Tuesday shows, locking in profits while his investors were socked with losses.

Mere startups when he took the oath of office, the new ventures have now eclipsed in revenue much of his vast property portfolio that took him decades to accumulate. Fueling their rise were billionaire investors and Trump’s own move to quash a federal crackdown on the industry.

Trump got more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products, including “governance tokens,” according to the required annual disclosure report with the Office of Government Ethics. It also showed another crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, took in more than $600 million from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with his face.

Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales.

Trump also took in millions last year from selling Trump-branded Bibles, sneakers and other small items in another unprecedented move for the presidency. The sale of Trump-branded watches alone brought in $4.7 million.

The 927-page disclosure form paints a stark, if incomplete picture of the massive growth of the president’s wealth since taking office last January through a web of business interests — many of which have benefited from the policy moves of Trump’s own government. Trump has insisted that his sons direct his finances but the arrangement rejects the conflict of interest protections that his recent predecessors in office had instituted.

Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.

The Trump business is growing abroad

The rise of crypto relative to Trump’s property is especially noteworthy because he first rode to office boasting of his property wins. It’s also remarkable because that mainstay business also boomed last year. Trump took in tens of millions in fees from a flurry of new hotel, resort and condo deals overseas that amounts to the biggest property expansion ever in the century since the family business was founded.

Many of those countries were negotiating with the U.S. over tariffs, military aid and other important matters while the family business was striking the deals.

A property in the United Arab Emirates generated $10.4 million for the Trump business last year. One in Saudi Arabia being built by a real estate developer close to the ruling family sent the president’s company $9 million. And one in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Qatar sent him $5 million each.

One of his prominent domestic properties, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, notched big growth last year, too.

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Trump took in $77 million from the property, a 50% jump from the year earlier when he was just another citizen, as heads of state and business people flocked to it in his new term.

The disclosure report doesn’t give profit figures, just revenue, so it’s impossible to know how much he is earning.

Trump is now the billion-dollar crypto man

Trump said Wednesday that most of his gains last year came from the stock market and he’s just riding along with everyone else.

“We’re all profiting,” he said. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash.”

But crypto was clearly the big revenue generator last year in part due his own moves since taking office — pushing policies friendly to the industry and reversing a Biden administration regulatory crackdown.

The regulators are still worried. Before Trump’s World Liberty began selling “governance tokens,” they issued warnings about this new kind of crypto asset, saying that unlike stocks, the tokens offer no ownership stake in the issuing company, just voting power on certain corporate policies, and are difficult to value.

Buyers pounced anyway, including a Chinese billionaire who spent $75 million on the tokens and $200 million on the souvenir coins. In February last year, a federal lawsuit charging him with duping investors was paused before being settled for a $10 million fine.

The billionaire, Justin Sun, has repeatedly denied his spending on Trump businesses had anything to do with his federal case, while World Liberty has dismissed the notion of a conflict of interest.

Meanwhile, investors have seen the value of their Trump-tied holdings drop significantly.

The price of World Liberty tokens has fallen 80% since they started trading in September. And the Trump souvenir coins that spiked to more than $74 in the days after launching in January 2025 now sell for $1.68.

The White House says Trump only acts in the public interest

The White House has repeatedly said Trump put his business in a trust managed by his sons and is not involved in its decisions and that there are no ethics issues to discuss.

“Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”

The Trump umbrella company, the Trump Organization, has said its deals overseas were with private companies, not with governments.

Still, it is difficult to know what is truly private in countries ruled by authoritarians, royal families and one-party governments.

For a new Trump resort in Vietnam, the report shows Trump took in $5 million last year after the ruling Communist Party sent its deputy prime minister to sign off on the deal and, according to The New York Times, pushed farmers off the land to make way for the construction.

Whether the deals played any role in changing U.S. policies in ways these countries sought is nearly impossible to know, but the countries did get what they wanted.

Vietnam got tariff relief. Qatar got access to advanced U.S. technology previously off limits, and Saudi Arabia got U.S. fighter jets it had coveted for years.

___

AP White House reporter Josh Boak contributed from Washington.

The Dictatorship

‘REGIME CHANGE’ sold 300,000 copies…

Published

11 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

It turns out readers still want to learn more about President Donald Trump after all.

“Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the l atest book on the Trump presidencywritten by political journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, has sold more than 300,000 copies in its opening week, according to publisher Simon & Schuster.

They’re the kind of sales that numerous works about Trump reached during his first term, but had been rare during his second term. Publishers had speculated that the public had tired of Trump books, believing there was little left to know.

The total figures include preorders, print book sales, ebooks, and e-audiobooks and orders that have yet to be fulfilled because of demand, the publishing house said. Simon & Schuster said the book is into its third hard copy printing, with 200,000 copies on order, after it sold out quickly in bookstores and on Amazon. It’s the best first-week clip of any hardcover nonfiction book in 2026.

The book covers the first 14 months of Trump’s second presidency and takes readers inside the West Wing, White House residence and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, aboard Air Force One and on foreign trips with the president.

Trump, who has a long history with Haberman from her days covering him as a New York City business and society figure, has trashed the book as “mostly made up.” Haberman and Swan are now New York Times reporters.

Their manuscript depicts meticulous details of Trump’s military decisions, how he’s wielded the power of the Justice Department against his political opponents, his conversations with other power players, and the time and attention he’s devoted to remaking the aesthetics and structure of the White House.

The book spells out a thesis that Trump himself believes: Had he not lost the 2020 election, he would not be as powerful in his second term as he is now — emboldening him to trample norms, dismantle established institutions and push the limits of presidential power.

Haberman and Swan have been featured regularly across news talk shows promoting the book and sharing details of their reporting, including a sit-down with Trump in which he boasted about being compared to some of history’s great villains.

Sean Manning, vice president and publisher at Simon & Schuster, said the book “has entered the national conversation” and will hold up as “a work of historic importance.”