Make Colin Cowherd DNC Chair You Cowards

Colin Cowherd is a sports radio talk show host who has risen to the upper echelons of his industry. This is another way of saying he is an expert gasbag and knows all the cynical tricks to keep his audience engaged and upset. He runs the entire gamut of bad to truly offensive takes, as demonstrated by when he famously said last year that deceased quarterback Dwayne Haskins could not win a Super Bowl, or when he was fired from ESPN for saying offensive things about Dominican baseball players. No matter how he has to do it, Cowherd gets the attention he and so many other shock-jocks so desperately need to make this crappy business go.

But even someone who plays as dumb as Cowherd does from time to time can see that Donald Trump is a fraud who needs to be taken down a peg. After Trump was convicted on 34 felony charges last week, Colin Cowherd said the following on his podcast The Volume, which is better than the vast majority of Democratic responses to date.

“Donald Trump is now a felon. His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his National Security Adviser, his Trade Adviser, his Foreign Policy advisor, his campaign fixer and his company CFO. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep, it’s a cabal of convicts.”

“A cabal of convicts” is a better line than anything the Democratic National Committee has come up with this century. This is how the Democratic Party should talk about Trump’s guilty verdict. So how are they responding to it? Here’s the quote from Biden’s White House after the conviction.

“We respect the rule of law and have no additional comment.”

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said that responsible leadership “requires the verdict to be respected” and ended his statement there. This talking point is out in full force as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi also said “Trial by a jury of peers is a fundamental principle of democracy, which must be respected.” One Democratic aide told The Huffington Post that “What is the point of crowing? As an important fact, it makes its own point.”

ARE YOU GUYS TRYING TO LOSE???

Polling has consistently indicated that there is a significant group of voters who are willing to abandon Donald Trump over his guilty conviction. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that “about 13% of [Trump’s] supporters said they would not vote for him [if he were convicted]. Additional polling has also suggested that this figure of potential Trump voter abandonment is somewhere around ten to fifteen percent.

It’s criminal negligence to not harp on these 34 convictions to voters.

And yet blowhard sports talk radio guy Colin Cowherd seems to understand the necessity of pointing out that incontrovertible fact more than the Democrats do, who have never seen a fight they didn’t want to tuck their tail between their legs and turn and run away from.

Lest you think I’m the only one who believes this avoidance of Trump’s legal woes to be a catastrophic campaign mistake, a Democratic strategist texted Semafor and told them that “Trump trauma syndrome has led Dems to artificially divide issues into kitchen table issues and Trump behavior issues, which totally misses the gray area where the voters who will decide this election live. It’s all about vibes and trajectory.”

David Rothkopf, who has done work all throughout elite political America, including working in the Clinton White House, wrote a column for The Daily Beast pushing the Dems to talk about Trump’s conviction. Greg Sargent, who has also worked in elite newspaper circles, most prominently for The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023, wrote in The New Republic that “we should hold institutional Democrats responsible if they don’t use it—ruthlessly and effectively.”

Brian Beutler, the former Editor-in-Chief of Crooked which was created by ex-Obama staffers, sent out an “emergency edition” of his newsletter Off Message over the weekend, pleading with the party to attack their convicted criminal opponent. Matthew Yglesias, a high-profile blogger read by the White House who I blogged about last week for being a doofus, retweeted this post agreeing with Beutler’s analysis.

Between myself, Beutler, and Yglesias, the inaction of the feckless Democratic Party in response to Trump’s conviction has united the left, the center-left and the neoliberal center against them, to say nothing of experienced institutional types like Rothkopf. Great job folks!

I’m not joking, make Colin Cowherd DNC chair and at least when it comes to the party’s messaging on Donald Trump, you will see a more engaged and aggressive posture from a party currently refusing to play a winning hand.

This is utterly insane. If you just do the back of the envelope math on what it would look like if Trump lost ten to fifteen percent of his supporters, it would be a landslide in favor of Biden. Why would you cede this opportunity to Trump and let him define this supposed “political” verdict and chip away at these supporters’ doubts about whether they should vote for him?

If you remove ten percent of Trump’s vote share from his 2020 campaign, he would have lost Florida and North Carolina, and he would have only won Texas by about 40 thousand votes. I understand that the basic Democratic Party instinct is one of cowardice and hoping that their sycophants in the media will do their politicking for them, but this is on another level.

Trump is guilty! He’s a liar! He’s a fraud! Why do I have to hear this kind stuff from discount Skip Bayless and not a Democrat campaigning for president?

“[Trump]’s trying to sell me an America that doesn’t exist. I don’t see crime, I’m not stumbling over homeless people. I see happy people. Dodger Stadium is full, leads Major League Baseball in attendance. Laker games are full. NFL games are full. LAX is packed, I just saw record airline revenue over the weekend. I’m constantly being sold an America by Donald Trump of ‘crime rates are skyrocketing.’ No, they’re actually not.”

Colin Cowherd is one of the poster children for the degradation of sports talk. It’s not like this was some highbrow industry in the first place, but the race to the bottom of braindead sports takes that you see around the media landscape now was accelerated in part by people like Cowherd. If you listen to his show, you will incur some form of irreversible sports talk-induced brain damage.

But he still has a better grip on political communication than the elite Democratic Party does. Jen Psaki, Biden’s former White House Press Secretary, led a panel on MSNBC this weekend where she talked about the importance of not attacking Donald Trump, saying that “I don’t think [Biden]’s going to say, ‘yeah, I’m running against a convicted felon,’ right? That’s not his style, nor do I think he should say that, because I do think it feeds into the politicization that the other side is accusing him of.”

Trump is a convicted felon! In what world is stating unequivocal facts politicizing a guilty verdict? These people are fucking hopeless. Bring me the shock-jocks instead.