For more than a decade, the biggest story in America has been Donald Trump, and for good reason. A real estate conman and reality TV star somehow, despite being a racist, sexist, narcissistic, juvenile, and just plain stupid man, became president of the United States. And then he did it again—after a failed coup, no less. In the process, he fitfully but ruthlessly took over one of the country’s two major parties and remade it in his own authoritarian image. Then he set about doing the same to the country as a whole. The Republican Party is now a cult of personality, and America is a plutocratic paradise governed by the president’s whims.
That is still very much the biggest story in the country. The president is waging two destructive wars—a literal one in the Middle East, and an economic one pretty much everywhere else—while jailing political opponents, detaining and deporting hundreds of thousands of people, attempting to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections, and musing—maybe joking, maybe not—about running for an unconstitutional third term.
But for Axios founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, that’s old news—a status quo that no longer raises alarm among the Beltway punditry. There’s a new political threat brewing in America, and it’s just as frightening as Trump: There are reds under Democratic beds. The democratic socialists have arrived, and they’re the left’s equivalent of MAGA. And the Democratic establishment may well succumb to these unhinged insurgents, just like the Republicans before them.
In the newest iteration of their “Behind the Curtain” column, which is ostensibly devoted to big trends in politics and economics, Allen and VandeHei warn about what may be in store for the Democratic Party. “Party transformations follow a predictable six-stage evolution—recoil, squint, rationalize, submit, amplify, and purge,” the wrote in Tuesday’s column. “Each stage has language you can hear long before you see it in the votes. Republicans just finished the full cycle. Democrats might be starting it.”
Sounds scary! But here’s the evidence Allen and VandeHei provide:
- “All three candidates New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed won their June 23 House primaries, defeating two incumbents: Brad Lander over Rep. Dan Goldman, Claire Valdez over Brooklyn’s borough president, and Darializa Avila Chevalier over Rep. Adriano Espaillat—the Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair, backed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
- Sit with that: A Jeffries-endorsed incumbent lost to a democratic socialist. That’s Stage 4 machinery switching on, with the primary electorate punishing the establishment side of the fight.
- It’s not just New York. In Colorado, 29-year-old democratic socialist Melat Kiros toppled 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette, who leans progressive.”
Wow, it’s not just New York City—a young democratic socialist also won in Colorado!
Four primary victories for the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives. That’s the sum of the argument here. But Allen and VandeHei nonetheless insist that Democrats are in the dreaded “Stage 3” of this entirely made-up “party transformation” scale: The Democrats are rationalizing their takeover by the socialists. “Now listen to the language: ‘It’s not socialism, it’s affordability’ is the left’s ‘It’s not the tweets, it’s the judges,’” the wrote.
It’s worth taking a moment to remember what those Trump tweets were, back in the day: Sexist attacks on news hosts Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski. Racist digs at entire nations and the Obamas. Ridiculous accusations of “wiretapping” and voter fraud. And he never stopped, of course. There were threats of state violence: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Incessant lies that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Today, we’re subjected a daily deluge of braindead AI slop—and, yes, the usual racist, sexist garbage.
But we’re supposed to worry that socialism is masquerading as affordability?
One problem with this suggestion that these candidates don’t really care about affordability—that they must have an ulterior motive to, I don’t know, force everyone to be vegan?—is that they are all Democrats, and the party has been very clear about communicating its top election message this year. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—hardly a leftie—talks about affordability all the time, as does New York City’s biggest loser in those recent primaries, Hakeem Jeffries. The House minority leader over the weekend unveiled his caucus’s closing argument for the midterms, summed up thus: “Fighting for an Affordable America.”
Are these establishment Democrats rationalizing their takeover by Jacobins, or are they—like the democratic socialists in their party—simply pushing talking points that any sensible politician would, given Americans’ enduring anger over rising costs? After all, Trump won in 2024 on an affordability message, too.
There are currently two members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (elected in 2018) and Rashida Tlaib (elected in 2022). Lander is not a member of the DSA, though Valdez, Chevalier, and Kiros are. Increasing their ranks to five is a big deal, but it’s not exactly a revolution. (Interestingly, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who may become Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate next week, said in a debate on Monday evening, “I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist who knows how capitalism works.”)
But the big problem with Allen and VandeHei’s attempt at a “conceptual scoop” isn’t that it makes a terrible case for a trend. It’s that the founders of one of the biggest political outlets in the country still don’t understand Trump. His cult of personality is so strong that it has easily withstood multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault, a longstanding and deep friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the pillaging of the federal government to benefit himself and his family, and the destruction of countless families across the country. He is sui generis.
That incontrovertible truth is rather inconvenient if you are in the business of dreaming up columns that depend on false equivalences between the country’s two major parties. For Allen and VandeHei, a handful of candidates who have found success in large cities with young demographics and who are pushing ambitious but hardly fascistic policies like Medicare for All and divestment from Israel are basically analogous to Trump and his actual fascism. That is not an insight; it’s a troll. But it does raise an important question about Axios’s leaders themselves: Are they genuinely fearful of the democratic socialists’ plans to ensure all Americans have healthcare and stop genocide, or are they just not horrified by what Trump has done to this country? Here’s what scares me: that Allen and VandeHei would say “yes” to both.
