Ever since I watched the zombie takeover of the GOP by Trump, I've been fascinated by how that happened.

And we likely just watched the Democrats manage to avoid a similar takeover by Bernie Sanders. Of course there's plenty of game left to play, but the events of the last week have been fascinating to watch. Here's my latest on that:

WASHINGTON — If President Trump is defeated in the fall election this year, history books will most likely pinpoint Leap Day weekend as a decisive moment, when Democrats did what Republicans could not do four years earlier.

Until this past weekend, Democrats were headed for a hostile takeover by a candidate with only about 30 percent support in the party, Bernie Sanders. It was eerily similar to Trump’s path to the Republican nomination in 2016.

The Republican Party did not want Trump in 2016: not the majority of voters, or party leaders, or even delegates to the convention. Even Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, described him as “unacceptable” early in the process, according to an associate of his.

But Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and John Kasich and Ted Cruz split the majority vote among themselves and let Trump in the door and on his way to the White House. When it was all over, Trump won the nomination after winning about 45 percent of the primary vote. On the Democratic side in 2016, meanwhile, Sanders won 43 percent of the vote but still lost to Hillary Clinton, the only other major candidate in the race.

Sanders watched what happened when Trump took on a crowded field and saw a path to the nomination for himself in 2020. This might help explain why the democratic socialist from Vermont did not make more of an effort to reach out to supporters of other candidates after strong showings in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.

Sanders did not anticipate that Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer might learn from 2016 and adapt.

I ended with this:

Sanders complained Wednesday that his campaign “has taken on the entire political establishment, and that is an establishment which is working frantically to defeat us.”

But the truth is that the only organized action taken by establishment figures was to remove themselves from consideration, of their own free will, to narrow the options for voters, who then overwhelmingly went to the polls on Tuesday to support Biden.

The massive turnout numbers — up exponentially from 2016 — are not a sign of a Democratic electorate that is dissatisfied with fewer options, but rather an indication of excitement that the party is uniting around a consensus pick to take on Trump.

Read the whole piece here.

Another interesting moment of note, to me at least: on Tuesday night, Sanders said this at his rally in Burlington:

"What makes this movement unique is we are taking on the corporate establishment. We are taking on the greed of Wall Street, the greed of the drug companies who charge us the highest prices in the world, the greed of the insurance companies ... We are not only taking on the corporate establishment, we are taking on the political establishment."

This distinction between corporate and political establishments caught my ear because I'd written about that very thing in early February, after a 15-minute phone conversation with Sanders' campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, on that topic.

Shakir said Democrats should be ashamed that Trump has brought middle-class working people into the Republican Party tent, while the Democrats’ base is increasingly composed of the upper-income and highly educated.

“That’s pretty embarrassing,” Shakir said. “That’s a dynamic you absolutely have to flip.”

What makes Sanders uniquely antiestablishment is that he wants to disentangle the financial establishment from the political establishment.

Shakir said that understanding this distinction — between financial insiders and political insiders — is key to Sanders’s case that he is the true outsider. Trump, he argues, is a “fake Bernie Sanders” who kowtows to big business

The whole point of Sanders’s candidacy, in fact, is the argument that the political establishment has been co-opted by the financial establishment. The Democratic Party used to be more independent of big business and needs to be once again, he believes.

Sanders says he wants to reorient the Democratic Party to prioritize the poor and working class, taking it back to its roots in the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Democratic Party has drifted from that focus — in the minds of anti-poverty crusaders like Sanders — since the mid-’80s, when it started taking donations from corporations and Wall Street. Clintonism, in the minds of modern progressives, stands for the moment when political pragmatism and the need to keep up with Republicans in the arms race for political donations led them away from first principles.

I texted Shakir on Tuesday night to see if Sanders had made that distinction between corporate and political establishments before. It was the first time, Shakir said.

Keep an eye on whether Sanders makes this a point of emphasis over the next few days. I've already heard him say it more than once.

Here's a photo of my son at Spring Training in West Palm Beach in late February, watching Juan Soto take batting practice.

BOOKS

In the fiction department, this year I've read "Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead, and loved it. And I read "Water Dancer" by Ta-Nehisi Coates and didn't love it. I didn't even finish it. I agreed with this Vox review of the book by Constance Grady:

The Water Dancer is a novel in which everyone talks in basically the same way, which means everyone talks in essays. And that, in turn, means it is nearly impossible to get a real feel for any of the characters besides Hiram, because all of them are more or less interchangeable: They’re just walking illustrations of various intellectual ideas that Coates would like to parse out.

It all starts to feel a little like how, on Aaron Sorkin shows, everyone speaks with the same voice and the characters will never meet a problem they can’t solve with a great speech.

... He doesn’t have the kind of command over the novel as a medium that will let him meld disparate genres together; he doesn’t seem to care about his characters as people rather than as devices he can use to convey ideas; he doesn’t really understand how to keep a plot moving.

I also just reread "Fahrenheit 451" with my 12-year old. We made a deal that he'd read a book a month if I gave him a Nintendo Switch for Christmas. Thus the inspiration for the name of this newsletter.

Anyway, Fahrenheit is great. Lovely writing. Very prescient in some places. Worth your time.

POD

My interview with AFSCME President Lee Saunders is here.

My interview with Addisu Demissie, the campaign manager for Cory Booker's presidential campaign, and a top political adviser to Gavin Newsom, is here.

MUSIC

Andy Shauf's newest album is a series of songs that chronologically tells the story of one night at a bar. It's good.

Until next time ...