Say no to the yes-men | Mary Sheehy Moe

Here we are again — drowning in post-Citizens United swill. Every other TV commercial has this candidate touring a factory, that one standing on a mountaintop in his plaid flannel shirt, yet another firing her gun to display her Second-Amendment bona fides — or put her dog down, maybe.

Every day at least one flyer in your mailbox from a group with a lofty-sounding name like Leadership in Action or Americans for Prosperity accuses this candidate of setting fire to your hard-earned money, that one of being “woke,” and yet another of running plays from Barack Obama’s playbook.

It’s dizzying. Dumb. Depressing. The only legitimate way to evaluate candidates, especially candidates new to office-seeking, is to follow their campaigns, ask them important questions, and assess what their answers say about their homework, authenticity, and heart. Citizens United has all but eliminated these interactions in Montana. PACs make sure you see and hear candidates constantly, but in a scripted monologue, not a true dialogue.

The most recent Leadership in Action flyer for one of the congressional candidates hand-selected by his predecessor, replicates the general themes of the other. On one side, you get a picture not of the candidate, but of the president, fist pumped, assuring you the candidate WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN. The other side depicts the be-flanneled candidate against a Montana skyline and presents an itemized list of “the issues.” The top one? “Out-of-control government spending.” (For the other heir apparent, it’s “tightening the government’s belt.”)

Seriously? You two are going to stop your most important endorser’s out-of-control spending, the extravagances the congressmen who whisked you into the race at the eleventh hour dared not oppose for 10 years? And in Trump’s second term, “out-of-control” has gone berserk.

In the first 100 days, federal spending outpaced the same period in 2024 by $200 billion. So far in Fiscal Year 2026, it’s risen by another $84 billion. And Trump’s FY2027 budget proposes “one of the largest budget increases in American history,” according to Forbes — an increase of $1.5 trillion for the defense budget alone.

Then there’s the “little” stuff. We’re told the ever-increasing tab for the One Big Beautiful Ballroom will not come from public funds. We shall see. In the meantime, the construction firm building the ballroom just secured an “emergency” contract to renovate the fountains in Lafayette Park for $17.4 million — five times the existing bid for the work.

Contrary to previous assurances from the White House, the proposed Arch d’ Trump also uses public funds, specifically a $15 million earmark from the National Endowment for the Humanities — the Montana branch of which DOGE smashed to smithereens last year. Without a peep from our retiring congressmen.

And the self-dealing! Remember the farce with the mile-high stack of folders at Trump’s January 2017 press conference, assuring us he wouldn’t cash in on his presidency? Pfft. In the first year of Trump 2.0, Trump had what Forbes called “the most lucrative year of his life.” His net worth nearly doubled.

It isn’t just Trump’s “entrepreneurship” that’s further enriching him. It’s your tax dollars and mine. Last January, he sued “his own” IRS for $10 billion — two-thirds of its current budget! — for leaking information on the tax filings he repeatedly promised to release once the agency’s “routine audit” was complete. The previous October he sued “his” Department of Justice for $230 million to compensate him for its investigations of his handling of classified documents in 2023 and alleged collusion with Russia on the 2016 election.

Yeah, he acknowledged, “it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.” I’m betting he’ll rise above it.

Montana’s congressional delegation did ZERO to stop this self-dealing. Worse, they participated in the deception involved in passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), knowingly delaying its deepest impacts until after the upcoming mid-terms. You think affordability is an issue now? Wait till the OBBBA impacts to healthcare, food assistance, agriculture, energy diversification, and student loans kick in after the election!

But by that time, unless Montanans finally insist, through the ballot box, on representation rather than supplication, Leadership in Action will have achieved its lofty goal: leadership inaction.