Free America

How to stop being the victim of nefarious MAGA framing and turn our country around. Right. Freaking. Now

Heather Cox Richardson today talks about HOW the Trump regime and RW ecosystem dominate the narrative. We need to know this in order to flip the script and start dominating it ourselves. First, they set the agenda and the frame. How do we talk about this, what words do we use? What are stories that will distract from worse stories about how Trump policies are killing folks (for example).

May 16, 2025

The first place to start is framing the debate…or changing our terminology. Let’s start with the murderous budget. I know the bill died in committee, but it’s an object lesson. Instead of calling it a “reconciliation” bill, which is all about process and balancing one’s checkbook (who has reconciled their checkbook in the last 30 years, except my mom? Hi Mom!) We need to be calling it the MAGA Murder Budget (h/t Anat Shenker-Osorio).

As in “Hell no, I won’t vote for the MAGA murder budget.” This cuts straight to the cuts that will kill people; ie Medicaid. The right called it the Big Beautiful Bill. Which, frankly, is a much better framing for the public, even if MAGAs thought it wasn’t extreme enough.

Recently, my inside-the-beltway source told me that as a party we need to find a message and agree on it. That’s both true, false, and impossible all at the same time. Why? We already know the message, we just haven’t named it.

It’’s as both Pete Buttigieg and AOC (wow, she needs to get on this platform) discuss….it’s about making people’s lives better in every avenue of their life, for everyone. Anat suggests “Free America” which I think is as good as anything else at this point. So, even if we don’t have a concise message, we have values, which is step 1.

We’re a party obsessed with purity tests, in every direction. We’re currently talking about Joe Biden’s brain. This is a diversion from the brain of the man who is actually president, abducting people off the streets and sending them to concentration camps, and refusing to say whether he’ll follow the constitution.

Trump’s brain shows its indifference to fair play, its transactional cruelty, its treasonous corruption, and its mushiness all the time, but we’re still talking about Biden? Move on, folks. We need to get over the need for ideological uniformity in favor of an alliance of necessity. We need to stop the purity tests of anyone who steps out of line, which is usually someone who started by purity testing someone/something else. And we need to rearrange our priorities. Stop focusing on the stuff like DNC Vice Chair and start focusing on MAGA Murder Budgets and MAGA Kidnapping, how many people USAID cuts are killing, and other life and death situations.

Third, open your mind to possibilities. My source asked me who I thought was leading the pack for 2028. First of all, that’s an absurd question. We need to get there and whether there’s going to be a free and fair election is a battle we need to be fighting now. But that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be out advocating for their values: AOC, Pete, Crockett, Murphy, Pritzker, etc.

When I told my source that I thought Pete and AOC were kicking ass, and I thought they were much closer together on values than anyone assumes, my source thought I was both 1) insane; and 2) simpleminded. We’ve got to get over this notion of 1) Focusing on only the big elections; and 2) pitting people against each other when we need to be combining forces right now, and not competing for an office that may or may not be on the table in 3+ years.

So, I encourage you to take a look back at my conversations that talk about language with Antonia Scatton L O L G O P Aviv Russ

and so many more), and let’s reframe the current situation according to our own values. And for goodness sake, let’s start to organize everywhere, year round and not leave state and congressional seats uncontested, instead of thinking only on the midterms and the presidential elections. That’s how we’ll win. We compete everywhere, use helpful language, focus on the important stuff, engage the base so they can spread the word, get out of our houses into community, get creative with our opposition, and get imaginative about our vision of the future. Plus a lot more.

Free America.

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Distress.