First Thoughts: Reviving and Redefining This Substack
After spending a few months processing everything, I feel it is time to give it another try.
Well … it’s been a minute.
Actually, it’s been several minutes. The last time I published an article on Substack, we were two hours away from last year’s presidential election. I had argued it would be very close, though I ultimately predicted then-Vice President Kamala Harris was slightly favored. I also listed several reasons why each candidate could win and lose. Roughly seven hours after I had submitted the article, I watched as my television screen read, “Trump 246, Harris 210.” Of the seven “swing states” on the map, President Donald Trump had already won two of them, and Steve Kornacki was breaking down how in key parts of the states that have yet to be called, Harris was not performing as well as President Joe Biden had done four years prior.
I knew what was coming. Trump would not be declared the winner until four hours later, but the election was practically over. I had spent several years worried about what a second Trump presidency would bring about and relaying those fears to anybody who would listen. I spent those next four hours blankly staring at the now-muted television screen, understanding that most of those fears were about to be realized. For example, I thought about how he promised to pardon all the January 6 terrorists who rioted at the Capitol. By doing this, the most concerted effort to reverse an American presidential election will have been officially legitimized. There would now be a “legal” blueprint for anyone to follow if they did not like the outcome of a future election. I also thought about the Trump campaign’s promises to essentially isolate us from the rest of the world (on foreign policy, trade, etc.), as well as the risk of my generation having to go through yet another economic recession.
More than anything else, however, I had to finally accept an uncomfortable truth: there will be no “post-Trump” America. Despite years of talk about moving on from a political era marked by deep internal divisions and performative meanness, Trump’s second win – this time with a popular vote plurality – made things unmistakably clear. Voters didn’t just bring back the man who helped usher in this era; they gave him enough momentum to maintain a grip on our national discourse well beyond his time in office.
To make matters worse, after the election, sources close to the Biden/Harris campaigns reported that both candidates (whose campaigns I had previously worked for as a local field organizer), were screwed from the get-go. According to Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau, internal polling from the Biden campaign showed Trump winning 400 electoral votes, “at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate.” Once Biden dropped out of the race, David Plouffe, one of the Harris campaign’s senior advisers, admitted that their internal polling never showed Harris ahead of Trump.
By far the most infuriating revelation though, was a Wall Street Journal report confirming what a lot of people had previously speculated, and that I should have predicted much earlier: that the Biden White House was operating with a boss in serious decline. The December 19 report stated that Biden was heavily insulated in the White House. Senior advisers would act as “go-betweens for the president.” Meetings would be cancelled depending on the president’s “good days and bad days” (a literal term my family would use when my late grandfather had dementia). And when he was running for re-election, he allegedly would not meet with his own pollsters (those same pollsters who found him losing in a landslide to Trump). These post-election discoveries caused me to mentally shut down when it came to caring about politics. Since the election, I have spent much of my time initially researching graduate schools, before later focusing on finding job opportunities. But it has been exceedingly difficult to write or talk about politics without feeling cynical about the future of this country, and angry at everyone who helped get us here. That said, after spending a few months processing everything, I feel it is time to give it another try.
I am writing this piece to share my vision for the future of First Thoughts. When I was a junior in college, one of our professors had us submit a weekly paper titled, “This Week in Policy,” where we discussed a current event or policy and offered our perspective on it. We had to keep each paper to under two pages. The professor argued that by being required to write less, we were more likely to express our ideas more clearly and effectively. This is the format I will be using when writing most of my future articles. At least once a week, I hope to publish a brief article – no more than two Word Document pages in length – on whatever is on my mind at the time. This could be a current political situation that warrants a perspective not yet shared, or a personal article that has nothing to do with politics – such as a piece discussing a show I am interested in, such as Survivor or Big Brother. Trying to write long, overly polished pieces has made the process feel more complicated, and thus my publishing less consistent. By keeping this Substack simpler and truer to my own voice, I hope to not only reignite my passion for writing but also express my thoughts more clearly.