DL Open Thread: Monday, April 20, 2026

Sad.  We’re still screwed, though:

But only the entities that officially paid the tariffs are eligible to recover that money. That means that the fuller universe of people affected by Mr. Trump’s policies — including millions of Americans who paid higher prices for the products they bought — are not able to apply for direct relief.

FBI Head Too Drunk To Drive Drunk?:

He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and private conversations, they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.

They said that the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences. His behavior has often alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as he won support from the White House for his eager participation in Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement against the president’s perceived political enemies.

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Did I say ‘Too Drunk To Drive Drunk’?  Why, yes, yes I did:

Ah, I see you’re awake now.

The First Senator From The Post-Trump Democratic Party?:

In 2002, my classmate Graham Platner ran for student-body president of John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, Maine. I remember watching him in our auditorium debate his fellow candidates. He was the radical, wearing a revolutionary proletarian costume: overalls and a red armband. (When I asked him about this recently, he told me he thought he had a history presentation to give that day.) I don’t recall the issues they discussed, but I do remember Platner proposing collective action to overturn some school policy — saying something along the lines of, “They can’t suspend us all.” The history teacher serving as moderator interjected to remind Platner and everyone else that, yes, in fact, they could.

Students elected the safe candidate, a future chiropractor. But Platner had other outlets for his energy and ideas. Around that time, he skipped school to protest the coming Iraq war when George W. Bush visited our local airport — and was forcibly removed by the Secret Service. In the high school yearbook, our class voted him “most likely to start a revolution.”

What in the world is going on here? On the surface, Platner vs. Mills is just the latest chapter in the populist-left vs. establishment-center struggle that has been roiling the Democratic Party since Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders faced off in 2016. And the race certainly is that: Platner has been endorsed by Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren; Mills is backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.

But over the past few months, as I attended events and interviewed more than 50 people — former and current state officials, Democratic voters, local political experts, Platner and Mills themselves and those who know them — I came to suspect that something related, but also more specific, was at play: This race has become perhaps the country’s clearest referendum on how Democrats should be responding to Trumpism.

Since 2016, Democrats have debated whether or not the fundamental problem is Donald Trump himself or the circumstances that produced him. Mills has become a kind of personification of the first view. Outside of Maine, she may be best known for a viral moment from last year, when, at a White House event for the nation’s governors, Trump called her out directly, saying he would pull all federal funding from Maine if it refused to comply with the administration’s executive order on transgender girls and women in sports. From the audience, Mills responded coolly, “See you in court.”

Now, she has built her campaign around a promise to go toe-to-toe with the president. In a phone interview in February, I asked her directly whether she believes Trump is the symptom or the disease. “Good grief. I would like to think, I would like to believe that it’s a fluke,” she said. “But I know one thing: Whatever the origins, whatever the cause, we have to stand up to him. And I’m the person in this campaign who has stood up to Donald Trump, and I’ll do it again in the U.S. Senate.”

Platner is up to something different. He isn’t running a campaign so much as seeking to build a mass movement against the status quo. He’s not trying to woo the working class to the Democratic Party; he’s trying to mobilize the working class to take over the Democratic Party and use it to fundamentally change the relationship between government and citizens. To him, Trump is a symptom of a larger rot, a fundamentally broken system, and the old rules of American politics are already beside the point. The Democratic establishment is “still existing in this world where they think that if you know the rules the best, you’re going to win,” he told me. “When the other side is just beating you over the head with the rule book, it doesn’t matter.”