I Hate the Fuckin' Eagles, Man
The Dude is at the lanes. White Russian. Creedence on the jukebox. Tuesday night happened and now everyone has opinions.
So here’s the thing, man.
I didn’t have big plans for Tuesday. Maybe knock a few frames. Maybe crack another White Russian, let the evening unspool the way evenings are supposed to unspool — gently, without incident, without anybody on television losing their mind about the future of the Democratic Party.
But then New York City went and had itself a primary.
Three candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept their races. Two Democratic incumbents got their rugs pulled right out from under them. A 32-year-old community organizer knocked off a five-term congressman who chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Brad Lander — man, Brad Lander — beat the guy who prosecuted Trump’s first impeachment by roughly thirty-four points. And somewhere in a Manhattan district that smells like artisanal anxiety and donor money, a former Republican who spent five years being very publicly outraged about Donald Trump discovered that Democratic primary voters would give him about six percent of their vote. Which is, like, not very much, man.
And the loudest upset people in the room? Not the candidates who lost. Not the institutional Democrats watching their rug get carried out the door. No, man. The loudest people are the Never Trumpers. The guys who’ve been riding shotgun this whole time, controlling the aux cord, insisting on The Eagles.
I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.
You know the type. They’ve been in the front seat since 2017, telling us what electability sounds like, who the acceptable Democrats are, why we need to play Hotel California one more time because it tests well in the suburbs. Abigail Spanberger. Mikie Sherrill. The kind of Democrat a Never Trumper can support without feeling like they’ve wandered too far from the party they actually belong to. Good people, maybe. But their music, their vibe, their ask.
Tuesday night, a significant chunk of the Democratic coalition got out of the cab.
And before we get to the full autopsy, man, I want to plant one thread we’re going to come back to, because it ties the room together. While all this was happening in New York, the woman who spent over $215 million to keep Donald Trump in power — Miriam Adelson, casino empire, Israel Hayom newspaper, the whole apparatus — had her own publication call Trump a failed president. Headline: You could have been the greatest president of all, but you failed.
We’re going to need to talk about that rug.
Walter Has Something to Say About the Incumbent Protection Racket
Walter has been waiting for this conversation. He has a lot of feelings. He may be slightly overhydrated with righteous fury.
“You want to know what this is, Dude? I’ll tell you what this is. This is the incumbent protection racket. Both parties. Carved out over decades. A self-perpetuating machine for insulating professional politicians from the one thing they cannot survive — accountability. Am I wrong?”
Walter is not wrong.
The machine works like this: you win a seat, the party apparatus closes ranks around you, the consultants get paid to keep you in the seat, the incumbency advantages compound, and the whole ecosystem optimizes for survival rather than representation. It’s bipartisan. It’s structural. And it has been running largely unchallenged for a very long time.
Trump cracked it on the Republican side. You can say a lot of things about that man, and the Dude has said some of them, but the chaos he brought to Republican primaries disrupted an incumbent protection apparatus that had produced its own generation of comfortable mediocrities. The Republican base decided it wanted something that was at least performing accountability, even if the performance was deranged.
What happened Tuesday in New York is the left-side version of that disruption. And here is the part that the national press isn’t fully covering, man: it wasn’t just three congressional seats. Mamdani-endorsed DSA candidates picked up multiple state assembly and state senate races across Queens and Brooklyn on the same night. State Assembly District 37. Assembly District 38. Assembly District 54. Assembly District 56. A state senate seat in Queens.
This is infrastructure. This is what it looks like when a political movement decides to build a pipeline instead of just audition for the main stage.
“The consultant class,” Walter continues, and at this point he’s really rolling, “the consultant class bills you whether they win or lose, Dude. You understand what I’m saying? There is no accountability mechanism. They lose a race, they book the next one. They hollow out the state party infrastructure, they get hired to run the next state campaign. You want to understand why the Democratic Party keeps losing races it should win? Follow the invoices.”
Walter, man. He’s not wrong. He’s also knocking over someone’s beer, but he’s not wrong.
The Dude Is Just Genuinely Baffled By Dan Goldman
Not angry. Just... man.
Look, I signed the Port Huron Statement. I was involved with the Seattle Seven. I have, over the course of a long and largely horizontal life, watched a lot of politicians make a lot of choices, and I try not to judge, man. People have their thing. I have my thing. The world is a complicated place.
But Dan Goldman, man.
Goldman had a rug. It was a good rug, actually — impeachment prosecutor, sharp on TV, spoke fluent outrage-at-Trump, had the whole institutional package tied together. AIPAC endorsement. Israel Day parade. The support of the House Democratic leadership. Governor Hochul. The works. That rug tied the room together, man.
Except it wasn’t his rug.
It was the district’s rug. And the district — which had been telling him for two years, in poll after poll, rally after rally, which way it was leaning on Gaza and Israel and the whole complicated knot of that — the district wanted its rug back.
A May poll had Brad Lander up 57 to 23. That’s not a trend, man. That’s not a late-breaking development. That’s the district putting a Post-It on the refrigerator that says we’ve moved on and Goldman responding by marching in the Israel Day parade.
And then the concession speech. Oh, man, the concession speech.
Rather than reckon with why a district that overwhelmingly agrees with him on virtually every other issue decided to send him home, Goldman blamed antisemitism. Talked about antisemitic tropes he heard on the campaign. Framed his loss as a warning sign for democracy.
That’s not reading the room. That’s blaming the room for existing.
Here is what makes Goldman’s position particularly untenable, and we’ll come back to this when we talk about Miriam Adelson: he spent his political capital defending a consensus that was fracturing simultaneously from his left and from within the Republican donor apparatus that built it. The rug was already being carried out before the votes were cast. He just didn’t notice, man, because the rug had been there for so long everybody forgot it wasn’t bolted down.
Maude Would Like to Explain What the Never Trumpers Actually Want
Maude has a glass of something expensive. She has done the work. She is not interested in being diplomatic about it.
The Never Trumpers are upset.
Charlie Sykes is upset. Rick Wilson is upset. The Bulwark’s notification feed has that particular energy of people who are performing alarm while being privately gratified because their preferred narrative — Democrats are self-destructing — has been handed to them on a platter made of other people’s political losses.
They will tell you this is about electability. They will talk about the heartland. They will invoke Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill as the gold standard of what a Democrat should look like — credentialed, moderate, safe. The kind of candidate who can win a swing district. The kind of candidate a former Republican can pull a lever for without feeling like they’ve crossed some invisible ideological line.
And here is the part that Maude would like you to sit with: Spanberger is a former CIA operations officer. Sherrill is a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor. These are not ideological stretches for people with Republican priors. These are, in fact, almost exactly the kind of Democrats that a certain kind of Never Trump Republican would have designed if given a blank sheet of paper and asked to describe their comfort zone.
“The demand structure,” Maude says, examining her wine with clinical detachment, “has always been asymmetric. The Democrats are expected to moderate rightward to earn Never Trump votes. In exchange, the Never Trumpers will continue to podcast about it. The transaction has never been equal. And when it stops producing the desired results, they revert to the position that the problem is the Democrats.”
The Eagles metaphor completes itself here. They were never actually passengers in your political project. They were just in your cab, controlling the music, and calling it a coalition.
That said — and Maude is nothing if not honest, even when it’s inconvenient — there is a real tension underneath all the bad faith. The DSA model has produced wins in deep urban cores. New York. Seattle. Washington D.C. These are not competitive districts. The one actually competitive New York seat — NY-17, the Lawler seat, the one that actually matters for flipping the House — was won in the Democratic primary by Cait Conley, a former NSC counterterrorism official. Not a democratic socialist. Not Mamdani-endorsed. A fairly conventional credentialed-Democrat candidate.
So the question of whether the Mamdani model can travel to districts where November actually matters is real. The people raising it are doing so in bad faith. Both things are true. Maude has noted this and moved on, because she has work to do and the wine is not going to drink itself.
Donny Has Just Learned About George Conway
He arrived late to this conversation, as he arrives late to all conversations.
“Wait,” says Donny. “So this guy — the one who was on TV all the time being mad about Trump — he ran as a Democrat?”
Yes, Donny.
“And he lost?”
He got six percent, Donny. In an eight-person field. In Manhattan. In Jerry Nadler’s old district. He finished fifth. Behind a guy whose entire qualification for public office is that his grandfather was John F. Kennedy.
“Huh,” says Donny. “Is that—”
“Donny,” Walter says, “you’re out of your element.”
But here’s the thing, man — Donny’s instinct that this means something is not wrong, even if Walter won’t let him finish the thought.
George Conway launched his congressional campaign on January 6th, 2026 — the fifth anniversary of the Capitol riot — with a video that opened on clips of the insurrection and an argument that the stakes for democracy had never been higher. His entire pitch, from start to finish, was: I hate Trump, I am very good at hating Trump on television, send me to Congress so I can hate Trump from there.
Democratic primary voters in the single most anti-Trump congressional district in the United States looked at that pitch and said: we’ll give you six percent.
They gave the rest to two actual Democratic politicians with records on actual Democratic issues, a Kennedy grandson coasting on legacy, and a handful of other candidates who had at least thought about what they wanted to do in Congress.
This is the cab scene, man. Conway thought the Democratic Party was a cab he could get into, flip the music to his preferred station — which is also, coincidentally, The Eagles, just a different Eagles, like a cover band of the same song — and ride to Congress on the strength of his anti-Trump credentials.
The Democratic primary electorate threw him out at fifty miles an hour.
The Resistance as aesthetic is over. You cannot build a politics out of the other team’s worst guy, even when the other team’s worst guy is genuinely, historically terrible. People want to know what you’re for, man. They want to know who you’re going to fight for. Six percent is the market rate for “I am extremely mad about Donald Trump and I have a Yale Law degree.” It is not a winning number.
The Adelson Rug: A Throughline Pays Off
The Dude, putting it together. This is the part that makes the whole thing weird.
Okay, man. We planted this thread at the beginning and it is time to pull it.
Miriam Adelson is not a household name in most households, but she should be. She is a dual US-Israeli citizen, a casino magnate, and the single largest financial force behind Donald Trump’s political career. Her PAC poured over $215 million into keeping Trump in power across his presidential campaigns. She and her late husband Sheldon had, by one accounting, more visits to the Trump White House than anyone else the man could think of. She is, in the most literal financial sense, one of the people who built the thing.
Her newspaper — Israel Hayom, the most widely distributed paper in Israel, which she owns — just published an op-ed calling Trump a failed president. Headline: You could have been the greatest president of all, but you failed. The piece called the Iran deal a “colossal mistake,” accused Trump of signing a “surrender agreement with a murderous terror regime,” and said he had lost his “moral and leadership compass.”
That is not a critic. That is the principal investor telling the CEO he blew it.
Now hold that next to Dan Goldman’s career trajectory and the whole picture comes into focus, man.
Goldman spent his political capital defending the proposition that unconditional support for the Netanyahu government was not only morally correct but politically necessary — that you couldn’t be a serious Democrat without the AIPAC endorsement, without the parade, without the full package. He was defending a consensus. The problem is the consensus was fracturing from every direction at once: from his left, where his district had clearly moved; and from within the Republican donor apparatus that built the pro-Israel political infrastructure in the first place, where the Iran deal just introduced a serious crack in the foundation.
Goldman lost his seat holding a position that Miriam Adelson’s own newspaper is now treating as politically complicated.
The rug that tied the whole room together — the “this is just how things work” consensus around unconditional Israel support as the price of doing serious politics — somebody pissed on it from every direction simultaneously. The left pulled it from below. The Iran deal yanked it from above. And Goldman was standing in the middle of the room looking surprised that the floor felt wet.
The Dude doesn’t gloat. The Dude has seen enough political certainties dissolve into White Russian to know better than to gloat. But the Dude does note, gently, man, that “marching in the Israel Day parade as your closing argument to a district that has been clear about where it stands” is going to look, in the fullness of time, like a real poor read of the room.
The Dude Abides (But He’s Watching the Spare)
The Stranger drifts through. The Dude finishes his White Russian.
I’m not going to tell you this is over, man. I’ve been around too long for that.
The DSA hasn’t flipped a competitive seat yet. The one race in New York where November actually matters went to a former counterterrorism official, not a democratic socialist, which suggests the model has some geographic limits that haven’t been stress-tested. The Never Trumpers will keep podcasting. They will keep invoicing their newsletter subscribers for hot takes about Democratic self-destruction. The consultant class will survive this particular reckoning and bill someone for the debrief.
And yet.
Something moved on Tuesday night. The Eagles got turned off — not everywhere, not permanently, but in a string of New York districts that just told the institutional party something pretty clear about who they want driving the cab. The Mamdani machine didn’t just win three congressional primaries. It won a stack of state assembly and state senate seats that are going to be the infrastructure for the next ten years of New York politics. That’s not a vibe. That’s a plan.
The rug is in play, man. The one the institutional party kept insisting tied the room together — the one that said acceptable candidates, acceptable positions, trust the professionals, play Hotel California one more time — a lot of people decided they wanted a different rug. A rug they actually picked. A rug that actually ties their room together, not somebody else’s.
George Conway is going back to television. Dan Goldman is going to write a Substack about antisemitism. Charlie Sykes is going to podcast about this being exactly what he warned about, while carefully not mentioning that his preferred alternative was The Eagles.
And the Dude? The Dude’s going to finish his White Russian, roll a few frames, and watch what happens when a political movement decides to actually build something instead of just holding the line.
The Dude abides.
And he is never, under any circumstances, getting back in that cab.
Sometimes there’s a primary... and sometimes that primary really ties the room together.
If you will it, Dude, it is no dream....
Dude we now know the answer to the question - who peed on the rug? - the NY Democratic primary voters.