NEW YORK—It's a god-awful small affair. Several dozen senior citizens and middle-aged weirdos are slouched in the Great Hall at Cooper Union, the historic lower-Manhattan venue where some of America's finest statesmen have spoken. (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Henry Kissinger, among others.)
They're here for the "Stop Trump Summit," a day-long extravaganza of panel discussions hosted by the New Republic, a once-prominent publication that nearly perished under the ownership of Chris Hughes, inventor of the Facebook "poke" button. The event is sponsored by a teachers' union (American Federation of Teachers), a billionaire-funded liberal propaganda machine (Courier Newsroom), and a once-prominent activist group (MoveOn).
Editor and emcee Michael Tomasky assures the crowd they are totally normal because "more than four thousand" others are watching via livestream. "We're here to fight the fight that we all need to fight," he said, channeling the distinctive rhetorical style of Vice President Kamala Harris. "We're here to have fun."
Indeed, for a certain mentally afflicted segment of the American population, the Stop Trump Summit is the definition of fun. "Like Coachella for white liberal wine moms," as my colleague Chuck Ross wrote after viewing the lineup of excruciatingly niche celebrities. A life-affirming self-care exercise for people who base their entire personalities around "being concerned about the future of American democracy."
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.). (The guy who led the second impeachment of former president Donald Trump.) George Conway. (Anti-Trump tweeter and ex-husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.) Miles Taylor. (Remember that low-level Trump aide and future cable news star who published the "anonymous" op-ed in the New York Times that everyone assumed was written by some senior cabinet official? That guy.) Tony Schwartz. (Trump's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal.)
Don Lemon. (The hack journalist fired from CNN for being a misogynistic asshole.) Al Franken. (Effectively fired from the U.S. Senate for similar reasons.) Robert De Niro. (Just trying to pay the bills.) Michael Cohen. (The unhinged former Trump fixer and former inmate who pursued a new career as an anti-Trump celebrity around the same time he became the target of a federal criminal investigation.) Michael Avenatti couldn't make it because he's still in prison.
One of the morning panels on Trump and the media featuring Tara McGowan, founder of Courier Newsroom and "soap opera villainess" (in the words of a former employee), misses the point entirely by urging the audience of Trump-obsessed #Resistance liberals to venture outside the "echo chambers" of Trump-obsessed #Resistance.
"The reason that the media is as bad as it is, the reason they’re as obsessed with Trump as it is, is because it makes them money," McGowan says, somewhat insightfully. Attendees nod along like the suckers they are. Weeks earlier, the New Republic sent an email to readers teasing the summit. "We need $20,000 to do all this," it read. "That's a VERY achievable goal—if people like you who are fiercely opposed to Donald Trump step up to join this urgent cause."
It's a clever grift, getting Trump addicts to donate money for the privilege of paying for a Trump fix. Everyone is in on it, none more so than the guests on the following panel, "Republicans versus Trump." New Republic moderator Walter Shapiro praises the "political courage" of the Lincoln Project affiliates seated next to him. The overwhelmingly white audience agrees with Stuart Stevens, who suggests American politics is "all about race" and Republicans are the "white grievance party."
Randi Weingarten, the teachers' union boss, tells Molly Jong-Fast, the nepo baby journalist, that reading her (mindless repetitive) anti-Trump columns brought "tremendous peace" during this time of upheaval in the Middle East. Oddly enough, the notorious anti-Semite Al Sharpton was the first person on stage to specifically address the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel.
"I'm sure it's been said," he asserts, incorrectly, several hours into the programming. "All of us should be in prayer for those in Israel that have faced this debauchery [???]." Sharpton continues, incoherently: "We also can identify with fighting for what is right. You have to fight, and I've learned that over my life, you have to fight for what's right in the right way, and for those who identify with whatever is going on in the Middle East."
The MSNBC host urges Democrats to put their differences aside—about "whatever is going on in the Middle East," among other things—and focus on being hysterical about Trump. Days earlier, and several miles uptown, left-wing groups held a rally celebrating the murder of Jews at the hands of Hamas, echoing the general sentiment expressed by students at America's elite universities. Sharpton's call for unity is eventually disrupted by a heckler who agrees that Trump is a "genocidal racist" but says the Democratic Party is also bad because America is bad or whatever.
Are we having fun yet? It's hard to say. A few of the elderly attendees have fallen asleep under blankets, while others do crossword puzzles on their iPads or obsessively refresh their stock portfolios. Congressman Raskin's appearance, via prerecorded video, rouses the crowd to a fever pitch, relatively speaking, and gets bigs laughs when he compares Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett to Mrs. Waterford, one of the bad characters from The Handmaid's Tale.
Miles Taylor takes the stage dressed like a tech bro hipster pitching dog-mounted solar panels on Shark Tank. He asks members of the audience to raise their hands if they remember 9/11. (They do.) After droning on about himself for a while, Taylor predicts that Trump, if elected to a second term, would be like "Richard Nixon on something stronger than steroids. Richard Nixon on fentanyl [???]." And the people in this audience are democracy's "last line of defense." Yikes, if true.
The half-bearded wonder boy concludes with a dramatic reading of a "personally dictated" statement from his pal "Bob" (De Niro), who called in sick with a "heavy case of COVID." Trump is "evil," yada yada yada. "This is our last chance" to save democracy. "I know I'm preaching to the choir here." Enlightened liberals can win over Trump supporters by talking about "kindness" and "humanity."
The next panelist I had only ever seen in heavily photoshopped headshots. Mary Trump, the anti-Trump author and psychologist, looks so much like her uncle Donald under the stage lights it is hard to concentrate on what she's saying. That's just as well, because it's getting late and the self-avowed expert on Trump's "physic energy" has just repeated her baseless accusation that the former president enabled the Hamas atrocities in Israel.
It occurs to me that watching a professional life coach with multiple graduate degrees derisively analyzing Trump's trauma-informed insecurities at a conference in Manhattan—indeed this entire summit—is the elite liberal equivalent of belting out the lyrics to "Rich Men North of Richmond."
I've been "doin' the work," tweetin' all week
Billing these hours for PwC
So I can sit out here and suffer anxiety
Coz gettin' my four kids into Yale ain't free
It's a damn shame, our democracy's through
If racists like you keep watchin' Fox News
Coz the orange man's plottin' his big red coup
Yes he is, oh, he is
Maybe Trump will be stopped. Maybe he won't be. The Stop Trump Summit and its related enterprises will have as much impact on the outcome of the 2024 election as they will on the outcome of the war in the Middle East. So what was the point? What did we learn?
Tomasky takes the stage to close things out, but even he isn't quite sure. "A lot of people say at events like this, 'What can I do?'" he says. "Um, and, uh, you know, I don't have any specific answers to that."
Apart from the one.
"If you liked what you heard today, subscribe to the New Republic."