Election Day 2026 is still 27 days away, but the 2028 crowd isn’t even pretending to wait.
Vice President JD Vance last week chided Sen. Ted Cruz for making it “really obvious” that he’s already running for president, and Cruz responded by diagnosing the Republican front-runner as “insecure.” Sen. John Kennedy said he might join the fray in the (all-but-certain) event that “a bunch of goobers run.” And now comes the giggle-inducing news that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is talking about a possible run. (Proposed slogan: “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos.”)
On the Democratic side, several operatives took the knives out this week for former Vice President Kamala Harris to discourage the 2024 nominee from a repeat bid. That would be welcome news to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who waded in (literally) enough to say he won’t run if she does. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries talked up the prospects of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is weighing her options. Nobody is talking up Sen. Chris Van Hollen, but he is “kicking the tires” anyway — and probably finding them underinflated.
I hate to interrupt this august assembly of unbridled ambition, but I have a request: Could we all hit pause for just a moment?
Don’t get me wrong. I love a horse race as much as the next pundit. But we can’t keep going on like this.
For a couple of decades now, we’ve been pinging back and forth every two or four years because neither side has been able to deliver the relief that the voters are demanding. Instead, we’re stuck in a national doom loop of perpetual cycles of revenge.
President Donald Trump is in, then out, then in and now on the outs again. He has made our politics so much worse, but if we’re being honest we know that the revenge cycles predate him. Disenchanted voters reject one side, then the other — rinse and repeat. It’s not that individual voters change their minds but that different groups show up to vote in higher numbers, depending on who is suffering the most at the moment.
But this time we have a chance for an epic and permanent repudiation of Trump and his politics of fear and loathing. The voters know that Trump delivered on many of his promises: He imposed tariffs and massive roundups of noncitizens, he thumbed his nose at the world, he weakened the courts, the universities, the federal bureaucracy and the media, he rolled over any constitutional safeguard blocking his path.
And Americans see that it didn’t work. Things are inarguably worse for pretty much everybody except Trump’s family and billionaire friends.
Defeating Trump and his heirs in 2028 is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to break the fever that made him possible in the first place. This will require Democratic presidential candidates (and Republican candidates, if they are so inclined) to do things differently. It will also require each of us to change the way we do things.
My old friend Eric Liu, the civic entrepreneur who runs Citizen University, has an important and timely book coming out next week, “Live Like a Citizen: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country.” He describes the process we must undergo as overcoming “civic grief.”
“Why grief?” he writes. “Because our society is saturated in unnamed, unaddressed civic pain and loss. A half century of grinding inequality, 20 years of war that ended in a shambles, an epidemic of painkillers, a pandemic that killed a million and split apart the survivors.” He asks us to “consider how little opportunity we have in public life to name this pain in constructive, collective ways.”
This unacknowledged pain explains why we keep lurching back and forth in our elections, grasping for a change that never comes. “People sense that their prospects are dimming and their children’s prospects are dimming,” Liu tells me, “and there’s just so much more loss and grief in our common lives that we haven’t had a leader to help us grow through.”
We need a presidential candidate, or candidates, who will listen to that grief and acknowledge it — without blaming the other side for it all or suggesting that with just one easy fix (End the filibuster! Wealth tax on billionaires!) our troubles will disappear.
Liu spends much of his life traveling the country and listening, and he believes the presidential candidate who does the same will hear that Americans are losing their faith that working hard will give them a fair shot at success; that they are being made to feel small and powerless by big tech, big ag and big everything; that they don’t like being in a social media-driven state of constant stress and combat; and that they have to look out for themselves because no one else will.
“As a political candidate, if you can demonstrate that you are hearing this level of pain, that will get you a level of legitimacy that very few of our leaders have right now,” Liu argues. “To be heard on policy, you have to make people feel heard on pain.”
Bill Clinton had this ability to “feel your pain” to the point of caricature. George W. Bush showed it in the early days after 9/11. Even Trump was good at articulating the pain — if only to fuel rage.
For a candidate, naming the pain is relatively easy. The harder work is ours — and it’s a much longer-term project than the next election cycle. That’s the other part of Liu’s argument.
“Most elected leaders are not so much leaders as exquisitely attuned followers,” he writes. “We citizens drive this dynamic. If we the people become more self-aware and emotionally mature in civic life, we will get more self-aware and emotionally mature representatives.”
The book offers a series of practical, how-to tips on being a better citizen. In a chapter called “How to join,” he admonishes us to rediscover the American “art of association,” as philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville called it in the 1830s. “Pick anything,” Liu challenges. Choose a group that works on homelessness, early learning, mass transit, immigrant rights or anything else and commit to join its activities for a few months. That avoids the paralysis that comes from having too many options.
In a chapter called “How to fight,” he recalls what Thurgood Marshall said about the lawyer who argued against him in Brown v. Board of Education: “A good man. A great man, who just happened to believe in that segregation.” Liu counsels that “out-hating the other side isn’t a recipe for keeping a republic. It’s a way to feed fascism.”
Liu believes we can build a critical mass that will support “a grown-up, sane, practical kind of populism” and will demand better from our leaders. No doubt some will find this part too touchy-feely, and perhaps naive. I have no illusions that it will be easy to get ourselves out of this mess: Even as I hope for better, I know I sometimes contribute to the pathology he describes.
But what’s the alternative to trying? A whole lot more of the same.
Dana Milbank is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
Understand the complexities — and absurdities — of Washington as only Dana can describe them. To get his columns in your inbox, sign up here.
More Perspectives:
What Washington Gets Wrong About Education — According to 12 Teachers From Across the Country
I Almost Never Vote for Democrats. I’m Making an Exception This Year.