The good news, at least relative to yesterday’s newsletter, is that strong contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination aren’t talking about the future of the party like infighters casting blame. They see swift, confident rebuilding as a top priority and a political necessity.

Back in March, Tim Walz compared the degenerate Trump government to a car with a bricked engine. “I use the analogy of the car running out of gas. Car runs out of gas, you go get a can, you pour some in, you start it up, and it’s all fine. This is the car running out of oil, and it’s broken…. I think we need to start messaging right now. We need to put our experts on this. How will we build back next time? I think it’s an opportunity. I think it’s an opportunity to create the agencies the way we saw them in the first place, functioning better, without all the barnacles. So, Trump might be doing us a favor. He stripped it down, he blew the motor up. We’re going to put a new motor in it and take off.”

More recently Wes Moore said something similar. “I don’t think that the answer is: Let’s just go and rebuild what was there before. Truthfully, there were people being left behind before. Saying we have to move with a sense of speed and urgency does not mean we have to put things back the way they were.”

This is a much more productive mindset than you’ll find in factional efforts to gain control of the leaderless Democratic Party. But it’s just a mindset. It’s not terribly concrete.

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Even just restoring the government’s capacity to do things it currently can not do, it won’t be as simple as reversing steps Donald Trump and Elon Musk took. Where systemic damage is at a minimum, and the main problem is a lack of bodies, a new administration will still have to grapple with the challenge of hiring a workforce that will have good reason to be wary of the federal government as an employer. People Trump canned, without understanding their value, will have to be enticed back or paid to hand over priceless knowledge. Civil service reforms will have to be designed to be more resilient to sabotage. Democrats in Congress will probably have to be prepared to give bureaucrats a raise.

But some things will have been destroyed too thoroughly to rebuild through hiring and human resources. USAID is still a lawfully constituted agency. Its shuttering is illegal. As of today it can be reopened and repopulated by presidential fiat. But by 2029, the networks of experts and NGOs and government partners that allowed it to function in the world will have disintegrated.

A functioning soft-power agency is important for substantive reasons, but it’s also critical to prove to Republicans that they can’t criminally vandalize the government and get away with it. Democratic operatives need to be planning to solve problems like that. They should also be able to look around corners and recognize that other problems will be thornier still.

GUANTANA-NO

I wrote Monday about rebuilding with an emphasis on health care—both how to make the public whole with universal or near-universal coverage, and how to make the GOP pay a political price for reneging on the social compact.

But the same bill creates an immigration police force and an immigration prison network with a budget that rivals the GDP of whole nations. ...