Hakeem Jeffries Is Feeding The Bad Faith Machine And He Knows It
There is no difference, Jeffries says, between accountability and political vengeance
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis got behind a lectern on Wednesday, after Republicans suffered an electoral humiliation without precedent, and said his party might be finished as a national party after the "extinction-level event" that was the 2026 midterms.
Every media outlet in Washington is talking to Trump regime sources about which fascist hangers-on will serve as human sacrifices to the incoming Democratic congressional majorities.
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Corporate leaders and tech fascists who have groveled before our petty tyrant for two years are trying to sound somewhat woke after American voters said with a primal scream that they're ready to move into a future without a proudly fascist, backward, anti-democracy major political party that yearns for nothing more than the void.
Everywhere you look today, fascism – the kind that stems from the edgelord shitposting that exposed Republicans for who they are – is in retreat. And Hakeem Jeffries is doing his best to fuck it all up.
Having had absolutely nothing to do with the historic Democratic victories in Tuesday's midterms, the de facto leader of the House Democrats got in front of the cameras a mere 24 hours after those resounding victories and did everything he could to create a toxic narrative that will be weaponized against elected Democrats who want to do shit like end the country's Article I constitutional crisis, resurrect the rule of law, and hold accountable the corrupt fascist traitors who have gleefully dismantled the U.S. government and lined their blood-drenched pockets with government largesse.
"The American people don't want us to get even; they want us to get things done on their behalf." House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is now poised to become the next House Speaker, says that Democrats will focus on affordability concerns and not retribution after their midterm wins.
— MS NOW (@ms.now) November 4, 2026 at 8:01 AM
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Prompted by lifelong right-wing Republican Joe Scarborough, who – like everyone else in American public life – immediately caved to the president upon his re-election, Jeffries said the new (massive) Democratic majorities would not seek retribution against the president and his allies. Rather, Jeffries said, they would bring down the cost of gas and groceries, a promise that Democrats can't keep because they can't do anything about the price of gas and groceries.
Scarborough, like so many in mainstream media circles, either can't or won't understand the vital importance of accountability, and so he begs Jeffries to tell him what he wants to hear: That American politics will return to what it was in the 90s, when things were more stable and politics was for nerds and American leaders put the empire on a glide path toward the End of History. Jeffries, who is not made for this moment in any way, was all too eager to play Scarborough's game, to say there would be no vengeance against enemies of the republic.
In doing so, in going along with this narrative, Jeffries is willingly feeding the Bad Faith Machine, the one that will tell Americans in 2027 and 2028 and beyond that there is no difference between Trump's authoritarian weaponization of the federal government and Democratic efforts to re-establish the rule of law by telling both the American public and the rest of the world that there are, in fact, consequences for breaking the law and violating cornerstone tenets of the constitution.
Denny Carter
Jeffries appears to be invested in creating and spreading the narrative that good and bad things are exactly the same. He is saying this: Delivering legal consequences to corrupt government officials is the same as using the Department of Justice as your personal law firm and sending armed government forces to occupy cities and states that did not vote for you. It makes me wonder if Jeffries is banking on Republican House votes to make him the next Speaker of the House. A party serious about righting the wrongs of the past couple years would not put a man like Jeffries in charge without bloodying a few noses.
There is a real appetite for accountability right now. Look around and see Chris Van Hollen talk seriously and somberly about ending the Senate filibuster and halting all funding for the president's personal paramilitary force and going after Elon Musk and his criminal empire. See Democrats on the House Oversight Committee urge the fascists to lawyer up and get ready to choke on subpoenas. Recall Ron Wyden telling Trump Ladies Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem that he would be sure to see them at Nuremberg 2.0. You can almost feel the (legal and political) bloodlust animating the new congressional majorities who have watched constitutional governance cease to exist outside a handful of federal judges who aren't having the regime's shit and bore holes through the right's bad-faith legalism.
Democrats who didn't even mean to win came away with Election Day W's because, apparently, the country is so thoroughly done with the degraded, anti-human politics of our first tyrant and those who did nothing to check his basest impulses. Bad Faith Times readers knew this was coming, of course: The swings we've seen over these past 20-plus months in special and off-year elections spoke to the critical alternative consciousness that formed and grew as young men and Latinos guys and others who backed the tyrant in 2024 understood how hot the stove could be and course-corrected in ways that even the biggest shitlib could not have anticipated. As NPR likes to remind their listeners in the aftermath of the GOP midterm drubbing, Democrats are not popular. That's missing the point entirely. Voters, either consciously or subconsciously, recognized that there is no place here for a party of radicalized and wretched as the Republican Party.
Tuesday's astounding results made that clear. People are ready to move on in a far more permanent way than usual.
And yet Jeffries sees fit to go on TV and lie about the reasons Americans voted for Democrats in numbers that have no precedent whatsoever. He's setting the stage for crucially important, republic-restoring congressional investigations to be dismissed as the product of sour grapes and nothing more. Big media outlets need this fuel from high-ranking Democrats if they are to play the bad-faith game in 2027, lazily comparing Democratic congressional investigations to the president's haphazard use of government power to attack people who annoyed him on his TV. Horserace coverage cannot exist unless the horses are the exact same. Jeffries knows this game well and he's happy to play his part.
If Jeffries is going to feed the Bad Faith Machine, other Democrats – those who might have some interest in a new American Reconstruction – have to step up and push back everywhere all the time. They have to be clear that holding the president and his lackeys accountable for the many crimes they've committed against the people and the republic itself is in no way the same as turning federal agencies into weapons against regime enemies, both real and perceived. It is, in fact, the direct opposite: Reviving and upholding the foundational rule of law as a response to those who set it on fire and pissed all over its ashes.
Good and bad things, Democrats must say, are not actually the same.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
