The Democratic Party pledged its own headquarters to a lender, and the man running the place is throwing phones at his staff. Those two facts landed in the same story this week, and together they say more about the state of the Democratic National Committee heading into the midterms than any spin memo ever could.
DNC Chairman Ken Martin “furiously threw his phone at the desk of an aide in a fit of rage earlier this month” after scolding the staffer, the New York Post reports, citing a New York Times account of the episode. The junior staffer took the outburst to human resources, which then had to sit the chairman down to discuss his conduct. The committee declined to comment.
The tantrum came as the DNC leans on a $15 million loan — its largest off-year borrowing ever — secured by putting up its Washington, D.C. headquarters and other assets as collateral, according to Federal Election Commission filings cited by the Post. The committee closed out last month with $16.3 million in cash and $18.5 million in debts and loans on the books. It owes more than it has. The Republican National Committee ended the same month with $128.5 million in the bank and no debt at all.
An unnamed DNC official waved the whole thing off. “This is not new. The loan documents were publicly released in November, and the DNC’s building was also used as collateral in our prior lines of credit in 2019, 2018, 2014, and many other years,” the official told the Post. Notice what that defense concedes — that hocking the building is a habit, not an emergency. Democrats have also asked vendors to hold off on billing them until after the midterm cycle ends, which DNC Executive Director Roger Lau described as “nothing more than standard negotiations with vendors over contracts and payment processes.”
Martin, for his part, has been out publishing his own numbers. “The current DNC has raised the most money of any DNC without the White House in the 198-year history of the Democratic Party,” he wrote in a recent Substack post, touting $154.8 million raised through June 2026 against $95.2 million over the comparable stretch in 2017 and 2018. Record fundraising and a mortgaged headquarters in the same breath is a remarkable thing to brag about. Somebody is spending it faster than the grassroots can send it.
None of this is new turbulence for a chairman elected to a four-year term in February 2025. Martin inherited a demoralized party, then spent his first months managing then-Vice Chairman David Hogg’s meddling in Democratic primaries, and his spring fighting over the DNC’s autopsy of the 2024 election — first refusing to release it, then absorbing the backlash over its errors when he caved. He has reportedly grown paranoid about leaks and privately joked about how long he will last. In a May staff meeting, per the Times account, he told employees: “It pisses me off when I see leaks out of this building. No more of that s–t. No more.” Then, revealingly: “My success is your success. So the weaker I am, the weaker all of you are.”
This is a window into what happens when a party spends a decade telling donors it speaks for working Americans and then has to borrow against the roof over its own head to make payroll on a midterm. Martin reportedly went into a meeting with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer this month and came away with assurances they weren’t planning to push him out. His term runs to 2029. On the current trajectory, the building may not.
Source: nypost.com