Andrew Varsanyi

Purchasing Assets Out of Bankruptcy

Donald Trump wasn’t the bankrupt one — it was the American political system.

This past week, we got yet another painful reminder of just how painfully deluded the Democratic Party’s leadership has become. Original Sin, the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, lays bare what many already suspected: Joe Biden was never truly up to the job of president — and certainly not capable of running for re-election. The book doesn’t just expose one man’s decline; it reveals a whole party apparatus built on denial, arrogance, and the smug certainty that “anything but Trump” would be enough to carry them through.

It’s a familiar pattern — Democratic elites have been in denial for more than a decade. They knew living standards for the bottom third of Americans had stagnated. They knew Hillary Clinton couldn’t reproduce Barack Obama’s coalition. They knew she was deeply unpopular in key swing states. They knew Biden’s 2020 win owed much more to the pandemic than to any groundswell of enthusiasm. They knew that labeling the U.S. a white supremacist country wasn’t a winning strategy with independents or working-class voters. And they definitely knew inflation was tanking Biden’s approval ratings. But they chose to ignore it all, and instead ran the same tired playbook: yell “Trump” loud enough, and hope the voters flinch.

It worked once, maybe. It didn’t again.

They lost in 2016. They lost the moral high ground. And they delivered 2024 into Trump’s hands. This was not just political miscalculation — it was strategic bankruptcy. A party that once claimed to be the voice of workers, of civil rights, of change, now finds its base — young voters, non-white voters, working-class voters — quietly drifting away. What’s even crazier is that in the months since their defeat they still seem deluded.

But Trump’s resurgence isn’t just about Democratic failure. The other half of the story is the Republican Party’s own bankruptcy — moral, intellectual, and political.

For decades, Republicans sold a brand: low taxes, small government, and free trade. But the reality never matched the brochure. Since the Reagan era, their actual record has been one of deficits, deregulation, and disaster. Yes, Reagan helped end the stagflation of the 1970s (though Paul Volcker at the Fed deserves most of that credit), and the Soviet Union did fall on his watch — but since the end of the Cold War, the GOP has been on a nonstop losing streak when it comes to delivering for average Americans.

The 2000s were a turning point. George W. Bush dragged the country into the ruinous Iraq War, spending trillions and costing hundreds of thousands of lives, with no clear gains to show for it. Meanwhile, his administration pushed massive tax cuts that ballooned the deficit without lifting wages or rebuilding infrastructure. The 2008 financial crisis, triggered by years of deregulation and financial recklessness (by both parties), shattered the middle class — and Republicans had no answer but more of the same.

Even programs meant to cushion Americans from globalization’s shocks — like Trade Adjustment Assistance, originally created in the 1960s — were slashed or left to rot under Republican leadership. All this while they chiseled away at public education, healthcare, and state capacity, the very mechanisms that had made the American middle class strong in the first place. And Democrats, in denial of their involvement, quietly echoed the same ideas.

So here we were: one party addicted to technocratic delusion, the other selling snake oil and soft authoritarianism. It’s no wonder someone like Trump — shameless, theatrical, and unencumbered by the truth — could walk in and seize control. Like a bankruptcy vulture, he bought up the gutted Republican Party for pennies on the dollar.

And the Democrats couldn’t stop him — because they were still pretending everything was fine. That the economy was working for everyone. That the system just needed a few more tweaks. That voters were just confused, or stupid, or misled, or racist. They weren’t. They were angry. And they had good reason to be.

Trump didn’t win because he was competent. He won because he pointed at the rubble and said, “Look what they’ve done to you.” The Democrats, meanwhile, were too busy sipping their kombucha and lecturing to stop him.

Now, unless something changes fast, they’re going to lose again. What they need isn’t just a new candidate — they need a reckoning. A full acknowledgment of the failures that got us here. And so far, even after Original Sin, we’ve heard nothing but excuses.

Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, all of this gang that followed neoliberal Republicans into this cul-de-sac while pretending to be leaders — need to go. They were complicit in the Biden lies, just as they are complicit in the other denials. Not because they’re uniquely terrible, but because they’ve shown they cannot adapt to a changed country. The Democratic Party needs a leader who sees reality, speaks plainly, and tells the truth — even when it hurts. Very few seem to be willing to do so.

Because if we don’t confront this political bankruptcy now, Donald Trump might not just buy up the distressed assets that are left.