THE NEWS

Former Chicago mayor and Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is laying the groundwork for a potential 2028 presidential campaign. Almost immediately after that news was broken by Politico, various and sundry Democrats began voicing negative reactions that ranged from exasperated boredom to outright disgust.   

After wrapping up his stint as President Biden’s ambassador to Japan, Emanuel’s flurry of 2028-minded efforts have included landing a CNN contract and a highly-coveted Washington Post columnist slot, hitting the lecture circuit and racking up political podcast appearances. 

In his lengthy profile, Politico‘s Jonathan Martin positively gushed over Emanuel’s resume: 

There’s not another living Democrat who hasn’t already run for president who’d better grasp every dimension of the job. In fact, this side of Leon Panetta, who’s even close? Emanuel worked on campaigns, including a presidential, was a senior aide in two White Houses, did a cameo in high finance, served three terms in Congress, was a big-city mayor for eight years and then envoy to one of the world’s largest economies for nearly four. And he’s only 65.

To say the least, a host of leftists didn’t share Martin’s enthusiasm. Here’s a sampling compiled by Daily Mail:  

• “Eric Adams, Andrew Cuomo, Rahm Emanuel – they are in the corruption wing of the Dem party,” posted Saikat Chakrabarti, former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The lesson from Trump cannot be that Dems could win if only they were more corrupt.”
• “Rahm Emanuel is running in 2028. If he’s the candidate I’m leaving the party. I’m not interested in a boring club membership,” wrote Matt Stoller on X. 
• “The generation of leaders that got us into this mess will not be the ones to get us out of it,“ said Amanda Litman, president of Run for Something, a progressive group that says it’s recruited nearly 100,000 people to run for state and local offices. 
• “What if the path to Democratic Party renewal was always just to bring back the biggest a**holes, like Rahm and Andrew Cuomo?” asked pollster Patrick Ruffini. 

Emanuel is perhaps most famous for pointing to the 2008 financial meltdown as an opportunity to advance the leftist agenda. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” he said. “And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

Rahm Emanuel was a NAFTA architect, cheerleader of the Iraq War, proponent of Wall St dereg that created the financial crisis & mayor whose administration covered up the murder of a teenager.

Him being a presidential contender is a perfect commentary on today’s Democratic Party.

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) March 12, 2025

Late last month, the 65-year-old Emanuel used an appearance on “Realtime with Bill Maher” to stake out a socially conservative position, distancing himself from the breed of Democrats who’ve failed to focus on what’s important to most people and ruined US cities: 

“We’ve gone through five years where people became way too permissive as a culture, which is why everything is locked up at Walgreens and CVS, that’s a disaster. And I’ll say this about our schools: I don’t want to hear another word about the locker room, I don’t want to hear another word about the bathroom. You better start focusing on the classroom…In 7th grade if I had known I could have said ‘they’ and got in the girls bathroom, I would have done it.”

Bill Maher asks Rahm Emanuel why Chicago’s mayor has such a low approval rating, and the panel agrees that Democrat policies have ruined large American cities:
Bill Maher: “I read that the current mayor of Chicago has an approval rating of 6.6%. What’s going on in Chicago?”
Rahm… pic.twitter.com/Wn3rj5kQ9v

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 1, 2025

For those across the political spectrum who think US presidents cater far too much to the State of Israel, Emanuel’s family history isn’t exactly encouraging. His father, Benjamin Emanuel, was a member of the Zionist terrorist Irgun organization that used murder and the destruction of infrastructure to bring about the creation of the country. Most notoriously, Irgun carried out the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel that killed 91 soldiers and civilians, including 28 British, 41 Arabs and 17 Jews. 

In polling that surely gives Vice President JD Vance cause for both hope and laughter, the most popular 2028 pick for Democrats is the demonstrably terrible Kamala Harris. In a February Echelon Insights poll, she commanded 36% support. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was a distant second, at 10%, followed by California Governor Gavin Newsom. There was no sign of a Rahm Emanuel presidential pulse, but this donkey show has barely begun.