Brian Tyler Cohen believes in the future of the Democratic Party
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/7/17/800071521/news/brian-tyler-cohen-believes-in-the-future-of-the-democratic-party/
Brian Tyler Cohen believes in the future of the Democratic Party
President Donald Trump and his MAGA-infected GOP made promises that motivated people to put on their red hats again and vote for a future that seemed to offer something better than what they had. But as promises began to break, from the (non)release of the Epstein files to starting foreign wars to our own affordability issues on American soil, public discourse began to shift.
However, polling reveals that Democrats aren’t necessarily gaining momentum. Even as Trump’s approval takes a nosedive, voters appear to be fed up with establishment politicians and are looking for fresh alternatives.
For Brian Tyler Cohen, a successful media personality and influencer who has amassed a large following by engaging in the conversation around U.S. politics, this could be an opportunity for the left.
“If you want to win one election for midterms, sure, you can probably skate by on anti-Trump sentiment,” he tells Daily Kos. “But if you want to have a durable coalition that lasts beyond just 2026, it’s going to require having a party that’s willing to figure out how to overcome obstacles to deliver for people in a meaningful way and a lasting way.”
Cohen’s new book, “The Day After: How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World,” is a blueprint, he says, for how Democrats can successfully gain—and sustain—power in the years to come.
Check out our conversation below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, please watch the video on Daily Kos’ YouTube channel.
Daily Kos: There’s a lot to talk about, but I want to start with Thursday night’s speech, with really everything that Trump said. What did you take away from this?
Brian Tyler Cohen: I largely expected everything that kind of came from this. Look, Trump is hell-bent on trying to perpetuate these ideas of voter fraud because, at the end of the day, he needs to do the very thing that he claims to be fighting against, which is to interfere in the elections. And he’s pushed forward a lot of different methods to try and do that. We know that he signed an executive order to ban mail-in voting that was blocked in the courts. He refuses to rule out the possibility, along with the rest of his administration officials, of sending ICE to the polls. He keeps trying to pass the Save America Act, which is stalled in Congress right now, which would basically amount to a federal takeover of elections.
He keeps trying different avenues and failing. And so if he wants to swing for the fences here and really ramp up this effort, then he needs some pretext to be able to do that. That’s what this is. That’s what these reheated election denialism claims are. They are the foundation for him to claim that China or Venezuela or “insert foreign country here” interfered in the election, and as such, to make sure that this never happens again, he has to take extraordinary presidential powers to do so.
The sad truth for him is that he wouldn’t have to do this if he was operating from a position of strength, but he’s not, and that is the direct result of the fact that he and his party, who have full control of government … have failed to deliver on all of their promises. They failed to deliver on lowering costs and releasing the Epstein files, and no new foreign wars, and keeping gas prices low, or bringing inflation down.
And they have no Democrats to blame. That’s the double-edged sword of full control of government. There are no Democrats to pin the blame on here, and so you know again this is a testament to the fact that these people are polling poorly. We have midterms coming up, and Trump, in his desperation to try and preserve what power he can, or even try and ensure that there is no democratic oversight of his corruption, is again offering up these last gasps of 2020 era election denial redux.
Daily Kos: It does feel like this precursor to the midterms should there be a blue wave. And I hear people talking about that as well. Do you agree?
Cohen: Yes. I mean, the special elections that we’ve seen thus far offer some indication as to where Americans stand in terms of both approval of the Republican Party and willingness to give Democrats another chance. And frankly, you know the interesting part about this is Democrats should not have this opportunity. But for the glaring incompetence of the MAGA GOP, the majority of the country was willing to abandon the left in deference to the GOP in the 2024 election—and they won the popular vote for the first time in decades. They were largely disillusioned with the left, and any competent, adept, good faith Republican Party would have taken advantage of that not just for one cycle, but for a generation as they had been able to do.
But because they’re so focused on self enrichment and blind deference to Trump instead of delivering for their constituents, now we’re in a position where suddenly you’ve got a disillusioned electorate on the right. So Democrats have a rare second bite at the apple. That again, we frankly shouldn’t have the opportunity to have. But since we do, I think that it’s incumbent on Democrats not just to run against what we’re seeing from the MAGA GOP right now, but to make sure that they actually deliver once they get into office. So it’s not just a one and done.
Daily Kos: You basically just teed up your entire book right here. It’s called “The Day After: How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World.” So talk to me about that.
Cohen: Well, that’s basically it. I mean, I think that we have seen for so long Democrats be so deferential to institutions and traditions and norms, and in a way, I understand it, because we’ve watched as Republicans have torn all of our institutions of government down, and so there’s a sense that because they’re tearing those institutions down reflexively, Democrats have to be the ones to prop them up. But that’s not where the American electorate is. These are institutions that have largely created conditions where Americans are not thriving right now, and so when you’re the party that’s preserving all of these institutions in a country where 40% of Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency, people are going to obviously revolt against you.
So I think that Trump has dispelled this notion that our institutions are sacrosanct, immovable, but he’s done it for self-enrichment. He’s done it so that he can build vanity projects. He’s done it so that his family can get rich and have real estate deals. You name it. I argue in the book that Democrats have to have that same mentality toward the sacrosanctity of the institutions, but we have to do it for virtuous reasons.
You have to be willing to barrel through these norms and traditions and processes, so that you can deliver on healthcare. I argue that we need universal healthcare. The time has come. We need to pass a freedom to vote act and a voting rights act, especially in the aftermath of the Supreme Court gutting it. We have to take serious action on climate change. We have to make sure that workers can have some dignity and pass legislation to increase the minimum wage at a bare minimum. I even argue that we have to expand the Supreme Court so that when we do all of this, there’s not an instant veto for a Republican Party and a Republican movement that’s been perfectly content to strike all of these things down.
Daily Kos: Well, some recent polling has come out this past month that, to put it frankly, Donald Trump’s approval rating is shitty. It’s not good. It’s terrible.
Cohen: I think “shitty” was the official language that they used in the sponsored poll, if I’m not mistaken.
Daily Kos: But as Trump’s approval rating has gone down, though, we haven’t seen Democrats really inch up.
Cohen: This is a party that has long since been the party of strongly worded letters. You know, I understand the frustration with the Democratic Party. That’s what I seek to do with this book. Look, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to sit down with a lot of these elected officials to interview them for my channels, and hopefully, if I can do my part and offer up my message to these people that this is where the electorate is standing right now in terms of this issue.
Then maybe that will give them an indication of where they need to go, because as I said before, we’re not going to have the automatic support of these people just because they voted against Trump. If you want to win one election for midterms, sure you can probably skate by on anti-Trump sentiment. But if you want to have a durable coalition that lasts beyond just 2026, it’s going to require having a party that’s willing to figure out how to overcome obstacles to deliver for people in a meaningful way and a lasting way, so that we are not just ping-ponging back and forth between Democratic control and Republican control as Republicans tear down the very foundation of government in an effort to consolidate power for themselves.
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Daily Kos: You know, I think a lot about what happened recently. Including the scandal with Graham Platner. There was a lot of support behind Platner, as you know, because he was someone who was challenging the norms people are so tired of. So are you saying we should bring in more candidates, ideally less problematic, like Platner or are you saying these Democrats in power now need to just do something different?
Cohen: I think the former. I think that in large part we need to see generational change in this Democratic Party. You can do everything you can to teach an old dog new tricks, but at the end of the day, we’re seeing from some of these younger, more dynamic candidates like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even California Gov. Gavin Newsom, are more effective because they’ve grown up in an era where we use social media.
They’re more used to the technology that we use on a daily basis. They’re able to communicate in this political ecosystem, and so we can try to shove a square peg into a round hole, or we can just make it easier for ourselves and elect candidates who are younger, more progressive, more dynamic, more charismatic, more articulate, and more tech-savvy, and I think the success of these candidates who espouse all of those qualities goes to show that it doesn’t have to be this hard. We don’t have to keep trying to shoehorn through aging candidates who are less and less reflective of the electorate to try and represent us.
Millennials like myself have been locked out of political power for so long because we have a generation of politicians who think it’s more appropriate to die in office rather than make way for younger people to come forward. So I think, in large part, we can learn a lot of lessons from Graham Platner in terms of the fight that he was willing to convey and the passion that he espoused for his positions. Obviously, we have to do a much better job at vetting these candidates so that they don’t come with compromises to their character. I think you can and must do both.
Daily Kos: This tech savviness is of huge importance. We need candidates who are able to spread that message in a way that is reaching voters. But there’s also a lot of misinformation coming out there as well. And you’re a big component of that, of influencers in the media space where information is very fragile. How do you feel about handling politics moving forward in a place where information isn’t really regulated in a safe, reliable way?
Cohen: That’s the difficult part. I think what’s important right now is building up the progressive media ecosystem because we have seen such an asymmetry between the right and the left for years. The right-wing media ecosystem, especially the independent space, was so well funded, and the Democrats … just said, “Okay, well, we have liberal media, we have ABC and CBS and NBC, and so we’re good.” And this came at the same time that fewer and fewer people were tuning in to those outlets because they started moving to digital spaces.
Republicans saw a need because they weren’t getting what they needed from legacy media outlets on TV. They started investing in these spaces. They started investing in Daily Wire and Daily Caller and Megyn Kelly, Alex Jones. I mean, Ben Shapiro.
Daily Kos: In personalities.
Cohen: Correct, and it hit at the same time that influencer culture really started to build up. So there was a confluence of events that really benefited the GOP, and that came to a head in the 2024 election, where we had so little infrastructure and the right had so much well-established infrastructure that we couldn’t get our message out. And it felt, for my entire career in politics, like Democrats are just chasing narratives, trying to debunk and rebut whatever Republicans are saying. And when we finally can get the fact check out, the Republicans have moved on to something else.
And before you know it, you have an entire presidential campaign where the prevailing narrative is about trans swimmers. I mean, something that doesn’t impact Americans at all.
I’ve started a 501(c)(4) called Chorus, where we try and build up some infrastructure and invest in content creators across not only the political spectrum, but the non-political spectrum, to try and get more voices into this space, especially as more and more people move to their phones and the internet to get news. And so I think you have a right wing that has such a proclivity to just vomit out mis- and disinformation, and the only way to stop that is to make sure that we can do what they do in the sense of flooding the zone and get accurate information out, so that we’re not just chasing after false narratives that are being put there by Republicans.
Daily Kos: There was a report that came out some months ago by Taylor Lorenz for Wired. She said that Chorus was taking money from a dark money group called the Sixteen Thirty Fund. How did you respond to that?
Cohen: So I mean, talk about misinformation online. Sixteen Thirty was a fiscal sponsor. Sixteen Thirty Fund didn’t fund Chorus. Chorus was self-funded, and there were, I think—at this point we have had 7,000 donors.
But I think the broader point that the article was contending was that there is an issue with disclosure for content creators, and I think that has merit if you’re talking about content creators advocating for candidates and if they’re being paid to advocate for a certain candidate.
But that’s not what Chorus is. Chorus is basically grad school for content creators. We talk about how they can expand their platforms so that if somebody’s on YouTube, they should also be on Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and TikTok or vice versa, we teach them how to make content that is engaging for audiences.
I’m really proud of the work that we’ve been able to do with Chorus, and I think that if some folks weren’t so hell-bent on trying to tear things down, that we might be able to build up some of the infrastructure that we so desperately need in the pro-democracy ecosystem.
Daily Kos: I want to shift back to your book. You do say a post-Trump world, but, you know, even when Trump leaves office, we’re still going to be in a Trump world. So, what are you imagining there?
Cohen: I think the question I’ve gotten from most people is, will there be a world post-Trump? And the answer to that, in my opinion, is yes. I wouldn’t be doing the work that I do if I didn’t believe that there would be a time where Democrats are able to take power again and start rectifying all of the issues that we’re contending with right now.
I think in large part, what we’re going to see from this MAGA Republican Party, is that there’s already a sense of an albatross tied around their necks because they’ve decided to contract every ounce of their autonomy over to Trump. Just as he is contending with all of these failures because he’s focused on self-enrichment, these people are going to have to wear the baggage of that.
When Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio decide to run for president in 2028, they are going to be the people who were part of an administration that decided to suppress the Epstein files. They’re going to be part of an administration that decided to engage in a foreign war after beating their chests for years about no foreign interventionism. So I think right now, it may feel to them like political gravity doesn’t exist, but I think it exists to an even greater degree, because they own the consequences of the fallout of the Trump administration.
Daily Kos: Is there in your blueprint a world where democratic socialists, who are rising in popularity, fit into this?
Cohen: Yeah, absolutely. Part of being a big tent coalition is that you’re a big tent coalition. In places like New York or California you elect democratic socialists, and in places like Texas and Florida, you have more moderate candidates. That’s what politics is. At its core, politics is about building up a coalition. It’s not about purity. It’s not about having people who are 100% ideologically aligned with you. If that’s your goal, you’re going to lose every election.
You’ll have absolute purity, but you’re not going to have any power to actually achieve any of the outcomes that you desire. So I think that if we can get back to this idea of cobbling together coalitions in very much the same way that Obama was able to do, then yeah, we’re going to have a party with democratic socialists and moderate Democrats.
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Daily Kos: I know we’re heading into midterms, but looking at the presidential election, do you see anyone that really stands out to you personally for president?
Cohen: You know, I’m not especially focused on the 2028 race, and I only say that because I do try to push back on the notion that everything is politics as usual. That we can just sit here and kind of opine on who the next Democratic nominees are going to be, as if everything is fine, as if Trump isn’t trying to undermine free and fair elections every day. So I’m kind of focused on what’s immediately in front of us and making sure that the elections go off without a hitch.
Daily Kos: Before I let you go, is there anything we haven’t talked about that you think we should hit on now?
Cohen: I think we covered a lot. Look, I would offer up one more thing, and that is to reiterate this idea that there is a lot I think to be hopeful for in this moment, and it’s meaningful because what we’re contending with is not just a lot of despair, but engineered despair. I think that Republicans and this administration in particular want people to feel helpless.
And to have seen millions of people take to the streets, whether we’re talking about No Kings protests, to see massive overperformances at elections across the country, even in deep red districts and states, that offers up some hope that there is still political gravity.
And so, I have a lot of hope for what the future of politics could look like, but I would ask folks to not disengage because there is a light at the end of the tunnel and in large part, that’s what I seek to do with my book: To give people hope about what a Democratic Party, not of yesterday but of tomorrow, can look like and can bring about for people.
Daily Kos: Brian, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.
Cohen: I appreciate it, Alix. I appreciate it. Thank you.
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