I wanted to thank everyone who came out to our live audience taping of the podcast last night in DC. About 200 TPM Readers joined Kate and me in downtown DC where we discussed nomination hearings and more. We hope you had a great time. We definitely did. If you’re a regular podcast listener we’ll be posting last night’s edition, just a little later than usual. We expect to have it in your feeds sometime Friday afternoon.

This was our first time out doing one of these and we’ll be doing more of them. Later this year we’re going to try to do our first live event beyond the east coast. I know this can come off as some kind of east coast elitism. But really it’s logistical. We’re a very small organization. And we have staff in DC and New York. So we can scout out locations, set things up, have people in place to do all the little things that go into an event. Anywhere else is totally different and a different level of planning and resources. But we’re up for it. So we’ll be checking in with readers to see where the demand is — West Coast, Chicago, St. Louis, Texas or any of the gagilion other places in the USA … We have no idea. But somewhere off the eastern seaboard. So keep an eye out for that. And thank you again to everyone who came out. We truly appreciate it and we’re honored by your readership and support.

There’s a cottage industry of takes these days on how Democrats can again become the “party of the working class.” Many of those are reactive, defensive, operate on misleading or ill-considered concepts of what the 21st century working class even is. But today I had one of these pop into my inbox that I read and thought, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The gist is that Democrats should make themselves the party of gig workers. The title of the article is “Champion the Self-Employed.” But as author Will Norris explains, the demographic and economic profile of those technically categorized as “self-employed” has changed pretty dramatically in recent years. It still includes the generally high-earning and disproportionately white and male consultants and solo operators of various sorts. But as a group it’s now much, much larger — especially in the wake of the pandemic — and is more female and less white. It’s also much lower income, more precarious.

There are a few things that are critical to understanding the Trump Cabinet nominations and how Senate Democrats should approach them. The first and most important is that in the case of every nomination the question is entirely up to Republicans. Republicans have a three-seat majority. They have the vote of the Vice President in a tie. What happens or doesn’t happen is entirely a matter decided within the Republican caucus. It is totally out of Democrats’ control. What follows from that is that everything Democrats do, inside the hearing room or outside, is simply and solely a matter of raising the stakes of decisions Republicans make and raising those stakes for the next election. The aim isn’t for any Democratic senator to try to claw their way through the steel wall of Republican loyalty to Donald Trump. It’s to do everything they can to illustrate that Donald Trump staffs his administration with unqualified and/or dangerous toadies and that Senate Republicans are fine with this because they put loyalty to Trump over loyalty to country.

This all sounds obvious. And it is obvious. But people struggle to see the obvious as obvious. I’m seeing headlines and comments that Democrats failed to change the dynamic or knock any Republicans free. That’s a crazy standard since the dynamic is set. None of this is about whether Hegseth gets confirmed. Republicans control that. It’s about establishing the record Republicans will be running on in 2026 and the stakes for every Senate Republican in a competitive election.