In recent years, elected officials have faced threats and suffered a deterioration in mental health. While coverage of such incidents often focuses on federal and state officials, local leaders have come under attack as well.
The Elected Leaders Coalition is trying to help local officials work through those challenges, one small group at a time – for now.
Skippy Mesirow is a member of the Aspen (Colo.) City Council. He’s also the founder of the Elected Leaders Coalition and has spent the past six months directing the first cohort of a new ELC initiative called The Pride.
“It’s a one-year commitment but a lifetime opportunity,” Mesirow said of the program. Participants “cultivate a space that is truly safe, open and peer level, where they get a sense of bonding and community they can’t get anywhere else.”
The program welcomes both elected officials and staff, who separately negotiate the hazards that come with their roles in government. Participants gather once per month for 90 minute sessions covering three areas: skill training (such as overcoming personal blocks, dealing with hate and communication), group coaching and peer counselor support.
“I did not know then that the root of my desire to eat was coping mechanisms cleverly designed by my subconscious to protect me. They were the first of my unconscious self-medication strategies, nor would they be the last whose side effects I had to overcome,” Mesirow explains on the ELC website. “Over the following few decades, I remade my life, delved deep into the heart of my traumas, and turned crisis into creation and roadblocks into building blocks.”
And now he is trying to use his own growth experiences to help others to create a better political system. “I want to keep people from dropping out and burning out,” he said.
ELC surveyed participants at the six-month mark to determine whether the program has been successful. And measuring against a benchmark survey conducted at the beginning of the program, Mesirow sees positive results, even though not everyone was able to stick with the program.
“We lost a couple cohort members early on. We know the work is challenging. Most of us [at the local level] are overwhelmed,” he said. “It’s hard to look in the mirror sometimes.”
In fact, ELC grew out of Mesirow’s own desire for self-improvement, going all the way back to his years in youth football, when he was punished by a coach for being too heavy.
Everyone still in the program said they have seen either significant or slight reduction in mental health symptoms since the cohort first started meeting. And everyone also said the program has helped them with professional relationships.
“We have seen across-the-board improvements with colleagues across the council table including people they’ve had challenges with … as well as staff and the public,” Mesirow said.
Of course, working with a dozen people isn’t going to bring about nationwide change – but ELC has a plan for that.
“We need to roll out more cohorts. We need to get more data,” Mesirow explained. “We need to be more robust and reflect the larger kaleidoscope of elected leaders.”
In addition to The Pride, ELC runs a number of other programs that offer similar learning opportunities without the long-term commitment. For example, it offers multi-day “immersive” retreats for local governments or regional gatherings.
“We are trying to get enough data by the two-year mark to support what types of intervention will be the most efficacious in driving mental health and mental well-being,” Mesirow said. “That’s where we can be the best for our community.”
People interested in participating in the cohort kicking off in January can sign up now.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.