CHICAGO — You could hear the bass from the warehouse at the end of a deserted street from blocks away. Inside, influencers hoisting “Hotties for Harris”-branded coconuts and “Walz on the Beach” cocktails were twerking to a remix of Tinashe’s Nasty Girl on the dance floor, while their friends posed for photos on the “Property of J.D. Vance” couch. Across town, young Black and brown activists and staff for Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden crammed into a pop-up dance club blaring house music at The Second City comedy theater on W North Avenue.
“The highlight of the party was seeing the current [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] director get down on the dance floor to Chicago house music legend Derrick Carter,” says Brad Jenkins, a former Obama White House official and a Second City board member who organized the Tuesday event. “And also seeing Congressman Gabe Amo of Rhode Island just be himself and get down and dance — the whole night was a night of joy.”
Former President Obama had concluded his speech just hours earlier at the United Center, and throngs of Democratic staffers and elected officials were doing what attendees (and, to be fair, media people…) at these types of decadent, cash-and-sponsorship-drenched nominating conventions always focus on as the clock inches closer to midnight: snagging every opulent party invite they could. But even at the constellation of different themed late-night parties, some of which spilled over into the 4 a.m. hour, the rowdy conversations and rejuvenated optimism were peppered only very occasionally with a small sense of, well, dread.
“I think the vibes are ahead of the polls,” said one person who works with Democratic causes. “I think it’s good to be happy, but [we] need to make sure everyone still recognizes the actual state of things.”
Even with Vice President Harris’ recent uptick in the battleground-state polling, the presidential contest between her and former President Donald Trump — who is running on a blatantly authoritarian, almost cartoonishly brutal platform of MAGA revenge and abuses of power — remains confined to razor-thin margins. At this time, for so much of the Democratic Party elite and rank and file, this race is still the No Country for Old Men election, as in: “What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?”
“We have to keep things in perspective,” Jenkins adds. “That’s why we threw that party for all those young staff and organizers. They’re going to be the ones not sleeping, and traveling the country, and knocking on all the doors, and doing all this shit while we’re bedwetting and sharing memes. We win elections because of those kids…I mean, this election is going to be really, really close… The memes are nice, but memes don’t win elections.”
Earlier that day, inside a warren of hotel conference rooms and ballrooms at McCormick Place — the Democratic convention hall — group after group unveiled internal polling that portended the tectonic shift that had taken place in the 2024 campaign over the last month, especially in battleground states.
A pollster for EMILY’s List, the powerful pro-choice Democratic Super PAC, presented reporters with a survey, fielded eight days after Kamala Harris was named the nominee. Between July and August, they found, enthusiasm among voters in battleground states has jumped 47 points, with 79 percent of likely voters reporting they were excited to vote in November. The shift was even more dramatic among young women 18 to 44, a group that experienced a stunning 57 point jump in enthusiasm after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
“Kamala Harris erased the enthusiasm gap,” said pollster Jill Normington. A few doors over, the Gen-Z group Voters of Tomorrow was touting polling of their own that detected a similar phenomenon: “massive” growth enthusiasm among voters age 18-29, with more than two-thirds now reporting that they were excited to vote in November.
But even with that enormous shift in enthusiasm, Biden had been losing so badly that the net effect, essentially, puts Harris roughly neck-and-neck with Trump in the race overall. Chauncey McLean, president of Future Forward, one of the super PACs supporting Harris’ bid, said something to that effect this week. “Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” McLean said.
All across Chicago on Tuesday, blissed-out Democrats sporting Brat-green wristbands and swilling coconut-rum cocktails were basking in a strange, new feeling: pure, uncut cockiness that they had this thing locked up — a confidence that, it bears noting, was at odds with the polls themselves. The vibes were so good — so different from what they had been just a few weeks ago — that it almost felt like Democrats had temporarily repressed the potential horror of a Trump restoration. Political staffers from D.C. who had worried just a month ago that their jobs might be purged, Project 2025-style, were now able to speculate giddily on the prospect of expanding the child tax credit.
The good vibes carried over to the United Center where red-white-and-blue blinking bracelets lit up the venue and, just as the roll call was getting underway, Lil Jon bust into the aisles, belting “Turn Down for What,” his megahit collab with DJ Snake. By the time the Obamas took the stage, the United Center felt like it was going to bust loose from its foundations and levitate from the sheer weightlessness of Democrats’ collective spirit.
In this moment, Democrats are not cowed by finger wagging critics telling them to cut out the dick jokes and the couch-fucker cracks. Democrats are trolling Trump — projecting taunts on Trump Tower Chicago, skipping over to Wisconsin and filling Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum during their own convention just for kicks, making jokes about the size of Trump’s… crowds to an audience of 12.9 million at-home viewers — with abandon.
In their convention speeches Tuesday night, both Obamas gave a nod to the reality that while the feelings are stellar, the presidential race is deadly close.
“Yes, Kamala and Tim are doing great right now. They’re packing arenas across the country. Folks are energized. We’re feeling good,” Michelle Obama said. “But there are still so many people who are desperate for a different outcome… No matter how good we feel tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day, this is still going to be an uphill battle.”
On Tuesday at least, there wasn’t time to worry about that: there were too many parties. For now, Democrats are still soaking it all up.
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.