Democrats Finally Have a Plan to Fight Back

Republicans in Congress are refusing to hold town halls in their districts out of fear of criticism, and now Democrats are swooping in.

In Wisconsin, Representative Derrick Van Orden didn’t show up at a town hall meeting Tuesday in his district in Viroqua, so Democratic Representative Mark Pocan showed up, speaking to 300 people next to an empty chair with Van Orden’s name on it.

“Derrick was a NO SHOW, but over 300 people in the town of 4500 showed up. Empty seat for him,” Pocan posted on X. “Of note: Derrick doesn’t respond to constituents & they don’t like cuts to Medicaid & other programs.”

Van Orden “is afraid of his constituents, and he can be fired in 2026,” Pocan noted in a follow-up post. The Republican congressman plans to switch to virtual town halls, calling protesters at Republican-led town halls “George Soros-funded agitators” and comparing them to Nazis.

Pocan has done this before to Van Orden, mocking the Republican for being “on vacation” last month after Van Orden and other Republicans refused to show up at a Wisconsin Farmers Union event where farmers spoke on their concerns with Donald Trump’s policies. And it appears that Democrats elsewhere may soon take a similar approach.

The Democratic National Committee announced Wednesday that it will put up billboards in Republican districts in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania telling local residents to push their members of Congress to hold town halls. The billboards will even include these Republicans’ phone numbers.

“Republicans are refusing to meet with their constituents after voting to take away health care and make it harder for families to put food on the table,” the new chair of the DNC, Ken Martin, said in a statement. “This isn’t surprising—over the last few months, one word has come to describe Republicans: cowards.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who was Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, is also holding events in Republican districts, visiting Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in Van Orden’s district on Tuesday for a “People v. Musk” rally following earlier visits to Iowa and Nebraska. Senator Bernie Sanders has held several rallies in Republican territory, and he and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plan to visit Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado later this week.

Will it help, though? Democrats are currently struggling to come up with an effective plan to fight against Trump and the GOP’s massive overhaul of the federal government. Meanwhile, tech oligarch Elon Musk is throwing millions of dollars into political races to shore up support for the Trump agenda. The Democrats need to grab the attention of an already frustrated electorate and leverage its rage against the GOP.

Repealing the Inflation Reduction Act—something President Trump is currently trying very hard to do—could result in a $160 billion hit to the gross domestic product, according to Semafor.

A complete IRA repeal would devastate the country’s economy. It could lead to 790,000 lost job losses by 2030, while household energy bills would increase by up to $370 per year, on average, by 2035.

This is ominous news for an economy already on the brink of recession. That recession is being driven by Trump’s ongoing trade war with America’s closest allies—25 percent levies are currently being placed on many imports from Mexico and Canada—which Fed Chair Jerome Powell just admitted was making inflation worse. Cuts to the IRA would have a massive negative impact on American manufacturing, delivering a devastating blow to a sector that those tariffs are theoretically intended to boost. Slashing the IRA would also particularly harm red states, which have received a whopping 77 percent of clean energy manufacturing and deployment investment since the third quarter of 2022.

A full repeal of the IRA is not expected, of course, but Speaker Mike Johnson did describe his vision for the cuts as “somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.” Even if the bill is not repealed—or curtailed—by Congress, agency cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have likely already affected its implementation.

The National Archives released thousands of declassified documents this week relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy—but in its effort to make the unredacted trove public, it published the Social Security numbers of over 200 former congressional staffers.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that buried within the 60,000 pages of mostly unredacted documents were the Social Security numbers of more than 100 staff members of the Senate Church Committee, and more than 100 staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The names of those who were doxxed include several high-profile figures, including a former assistant secretary of state, a former U.S. ambassador, and several prominent figures in the intelligence and legal fields.   

The Senate Church Committee was formed in 1975 to study the intelligence abuses of federal agencies, and the Committee on Assassinations investigated Kennedy’s death. 

Joseph diGenova, a former Trump campaign lawyer who previously investigated intelligence abuses in the 1970s, was not aware that his private information was included within the JFK files until the Post reached out to him. He called the move “absolutely outrageous,” “sloppy,” and “unprofessional.”

“It makes sense that my name is in there,” diGenova said. “But the other sensitive stuff—it’s like a first-grade, elementary-level rule of security to redact things like that.”

“It not only means identity theft, but I’ve had threats against me,” diGenova added. 

One former Senate staffer, who spoke with the Post under the condition of anonymity, directed their ire at the Trump administration, now that they had become a target for identity theft and fraud. 

“It just shows the danger of how this administration is handling these things with no thought of who gets damaged in the process,” they said. 

Following up on his executive order from January, Trump had promised Monday that all the files related to the assassination would be made public by Tuesday afternoon—setting off a scramble at the Department of Justice to make it happen as quickly as possible. Attorneys in the DOJ’s National Security Division were called to urgently provide a second set of eyes to review the documents for release, even though they had already received an initial review by the FBI. 

Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security, told the Post that the mass publication of sensitive information was “absolutely” a violation of the 1974 Privacy Act, which requires agencies to be careful in their handling of sensitive information. 

“Social Security is literally the keys to the kingdom to everybody,” said Callahan.

Some of the undocumented immigrants that the Trump administration deported to El Salvador were not hardened criminals or gang members, as it claims, but rather people without criminal records whose gang affiliations are dubious at best.

Linette Tobin, an attorney for detained Venezuelan immigrant Jerce Reyes Barrios, released a sworn statement about the accusations against her client Wednesday night. Reyes Barrios, her statement says, was a professional soccer player in his native country but sought asylum in the United States after being detained and tortured for marching in two political demonstrations against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Reyes Barrios’s petition for asylum was pending, with a hearing scheduled for April, when he was deported March 15 to El Salvador without any notice to his family or attorney. Tobin only was able to reach an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official three days later.

The government accuses Reyes Barrios of being a member of the Tren de Aragua gang based on two “Gang Membership Identification Criteria.” The first was a tattoo on his arm of a crown on top of a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “Dios,” which is Spanish for “God.” Reyes Barrios chose this tattoo because it resembles the logo for Spanish soccer team Real Madrid. The second was a social media post with a picture of Reyes Barrios making “rock and roll” or “I love you” hand gestures.

Reyes Barrios’s account is one of many sworn statements from immigrants detained and immediately sent off to El Salvador as part of an agreement with the country, without any due process. Some, like Reyes Barrios, were detained merely because they have tattoos that look suspicious to immigration officials but are in fact harmless. Many had pending hearings about their asylum claims.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has pursued a hard-line immigration policy that disregards due process in favor of swift deportations, cutting a deal with a friendly autocrat in El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele without much in the way of legal justification. Unlike any of President Trump’s other Cabinet picks, Rubio got the vote of every single Senate Democrat in his confirmation. Some Democrats now regret their votes, and it’s easy to see why.

Corporate executives are allegedly trying to talk the president “off the ledge” of his tariff plan, according to an ex-Trump official.

In an interview with MSNBC Wednesday, former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci claimed that Donald Trump’s weekends are consumed by fearful phone calls from CEOs looking to reverse the clock on the president’s trade war.

“Remember, he’s living alone in the White House, Nicolle,” Scaramucci, who was fired after serving just 11 days during Trump’s first term, told host Nicolle Wallace. “I think it’s important for people to understand that there’s nobody there to hand-check him. There’s no family in there.

“And so he’s taking calls over the weekend from various CEOs that I know that are trying to talk him off the ledge of this sort of stuff,” Scaramucci said.

Scaramucci further predicted that Trump’s economic actions won’t only fail to bring manufacturing back to American shores but could also lead to a recession—something that he argued won’t bode well for the president or his allies in upcoming elections.

“The stock market will. I mean, you take the market down another 15 percent, we go into a recession, you’ll flip the Congress, even though the Democrats weren’t really doing so well from an approval rating right now,” said Scaramucci. “You knock the economy off the grid, the Democrats will be back in power, and that will liquidate some of President Trump’s power.

“So he’s doing this thinking that it’s going to restore manufacturing, but it’s actually going to have the opposite effect, and market participants know this,” Scaramucci said, pointing to the flow of capital into European markets since Trump announced the tariffs.

Trump has repeatedly attempted to spin the tariffs to claim that foreign countries will pay the difference on the rising cost of goods, but economists point out that’s not how tariffs work. Instead, Trump’s global tariff war is expected to affect just about every sector of life for the average American.

Products that will see prices rise include groceries such as avocados, maple syrup, ground beef, cherry tomatoes, sugar, bananas, nuts, cooking oil, squash, cucumbers, strawberries, and pineapples. The order also had immediate ramifications for countless other business sectors, raising the price on everything from liquor to gas.

Children’s toys, shoes, beer and alcohol, and crude oil were all hit in Trump’s 25 percent tariff hike on Canada and Mexico, alongside an additional 10 percent tariff on China. Car manufacturers BMW, Audi, Nissan, and Mazda were also affected, as was American-owned Ford. And every industry that relies on lumber, aluminum, and steel—from artisan goods to construction—will see markups as the materials themselves become more costly.

Four major political organizations focused on young voters—the Sunrise Movement, College Democrats of America, United We Dream of Action, and Voters of Tomorrow—are calling on Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to either stand up to Donald Trump or step down from leadership.

“Chuck Schumer, your leadership is failing to meet the moment. Your decision—along with nine other Senate Democrats—to cave and support the MAGA budget bill is just the latest example of how you and other Democratic leaders are driving young people away from the Democratic Party,” the groups wrote in a joint letter released on Thursday. “Instead of taking a stand against Trump’s illegal actions to gut our healthcare, dismantle public education, attack immigrants and trans people, and tear up climate action, you supported a budget that gave tax cuts to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their billionaire buddies. You sided against us.”

This is just the latest call for Schumer’s resignation. Representative Glenn Ivey was the first national elected official to call for him to step down as Democratic Senate leader, with Representative Delia Ramirez following soon after. Even Nancy Pelosi recently expressed her doubts in Schumer. While the longtime Democratic Senate leader insists that a shutdown would have granted the Trump administration control of the narrative, Democrats young and old are begging him to resist rather than capitulate.

“Gen Z voters want leaders with a backbone who will stand up to billionaires and fight for working people,” the letter continued. “If you want our support, it’s time to get bolder, get louder, or make way for leadership who will. If you don’t get this right, we are ready to take the reins of this party ourselves to shape it into a force that can fight for working people and defeat growing authoritarian power.”

After Donald Trump’s surreal turn as a car salesman last week, the president’s Cabinet members are now also taking turns as shills for Elon Musk.

During an appearance on Fox News Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick gave a pitch for buying the billionaire bureaucrat’s struggling Tesla stock. 

“I think if you wanna learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla! I think it’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It will never be this cheap again,” Lutnick said, appearing on-screen beside footage of burning electric vehicles—the results of protests at Tesla dealerships across the country. 

“When people understand the things he’s building, the robots he’s building, the technology he’s building, people are gonna be dreaming of today and Jesse Watters, and thinking, ‘Gosh, I should have bought Elon Musk’s stock!’” Lutnick said, some laughter leaking through his desperate bid. 

“I mean who wouldn’t invest in Elon Musk, you gotta be kidding me!” Lutnick continued. 

Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm once run by Lutnick but now helmed by his children, also upgraded Tesla stock from “neutral” to “overweight” Wednesday, citing a buying opportunity. At the end of 2024, Cantor Fitzgerald held roughly 740,000 shares of Tesla stock. So it seems Lutnick is trying to rescue Musk’s falling stock to the benefit of his family business.  

Despite an initial “Trump bump” after Election Day, Tesla shares have fallen more than 40 percent since Trump took office, shedding nearly $121 billion of Musk’s personal net worth. 

The hit to Musk’s popularity resulting from his antics with the Department of Government Efficiency has also coincided with the release of competitive technology in China. Investors who once needed to play ball with the erratic Musk may be starting to realize that they might not have to. 

Last week, after Musk saw a huge drop in a single day (not unrelated to the market-wide fall caused by Trump’s tariffs and recession waffling), the president refashioned the White House into a car dealership and held an eerie promotional event where he pretended to drive a Tesla. 

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the country Wednesday that Donald Trump’s tariffs are partially to blame for rising prices, and that the likelihood that the country will enter a recession has grown, but the president doesn’t seem ready or willing to confront that reality.

In an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham that night, the MAGA leader once again ducked and dodged direct questioning on whether his policies would result in an American recession.

“There is a lot of talk about a possibility of a recession, and CNBC had a report from the Fed saying they can’t rule it out. It could actually happen,” Ingraham said, before Trump interjected that “everything could happen.”

“What can you say to Americans tonight who are concerned about the possibility of a recession, given the fact that you’re trying to reorient the economy to a manufacturing economy again?” the Fox host continued.

“I think, if I didn’t get elected, our country would be finished, to start off with,” Trump said. “And I think I—now that I did get elected, I think we’re going to have the strongest economy in the history of the world. And I had that economy in four years. With all the harassment, with all the crazy people after me, with all of the things that went on, even with Covid, I had the strongest economy in the history of our country.

“I had a stock market that went up 88 percent: 88 percent, number one in history. The other markets went up 66 percent, and I think like 71 percent,” he continued.

But that didn’t answer the question.

“Will we see a recession in 2025? Are you ruling it out?” Ingraham pressed.

“We’re going to have the strongest economic country in the history of the world, of the planet. We are taking in so much money,” Trump said.

“Now, some people are unhappy, because it has to come from somewhere. Some of it’s going to come from Europe, because not everybody’s going to be doing as much business maybe in Europe and other places. But I can only speak for the United States. And I am a nationalist, and I’m proud of it. I love this country. And I want to help other countries too.

“Look, I’m the one. If it wasn’t for me, they wouldn’t be talking peace in Ukraine and Russia, because there are not Americans being killed. They’re Ukrainian soldiers and Russian soldiers, and I’m trying to make peace. And, again, it has not that much to do, other than, we don’t want to be paying,” Trump said, before continuing to blame former President Joe Biden for the cost of the conflict.

In just a handful of weeks, Trump’s global trade war has weakened America’s relationships with some of its longest allies, compromising strategic military alliances while also sparking fears of a forthcoming recession as the market slumps hundreds of points in reaction to his whiplash tariff negotiations.

Economic experts have always cautioned that Trump’s tariff plan would hurt the country. In a joint letter released before the election, nearly two dozen Nobel Prize–winning economists formally warned against Trump’s economic plan, arguing that the MAGA leader’s stiff tariff increases and tax cuts would spell disaster for the average American.

Once Trump began to formally enact his tariffs in February, that concern went into overdrive.

“This is a ‘Stop or I’ll shoot myself in the foot’ threat. It defies economic logic,” economist Larry Summers told CNN at the time. “It means higher prices for consumers. It means more expensive inputs for American producers.”

Earlier this month, Trump floated that the “little disruption” caused by his aggressive trade policies could go on for quite a bit longer, suggesting that Americans should model their economic projections on a 100-year model—like China—rather than assess his performance on a quarterly basis.

At least one Republican senator is willing to criticize Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government as part of his Department of Government Efficiency.

Senator Lisa Murkowski called out the tech oligarch in a press conference on Tuesday in Juneau, Alaska, the capital of the state she represents. She criticized the mass firing of federal employees and freezing of federal funding in an address to the Alaska legislature the same day.

“These terminations are indiscriminate, and many, we’re now learning, are unlawful. And they’re being made regardless of performance and with little understanding of the function and the value of each position,” Murkowski said to the legislature. “So at any human level, they’re traumatizing people, and they’re leaving holes in our communities.”

She told reporters at the press conference that she knows her willingness to criticize Musk will likely come with consequences.

“It may be that Elon Musk has decided he’s going to take the next billion dollars that he makes off of Starlink and put it directly against Lisa Murkowski,” the senator said to reporters. “And you know what? That may happen. But I’m not giving up one minute, one opportunity, to try to stand up for Alaskans.”

Murkowski has a theory about why her fellow Republicans aren’t willing to criticize Musk or the Trump administration, even as their constituents grow angry over lost federal jobs and looming cuts to social services like Social Security and Medicaid.

“They’re looking at how many things are being thrown at me, and it’s like, ‘Maybe I just better duck and cover,’” Murkowski said. “That’s why you’ve got everybody just like, zip-lip, not saying a word, because they’re afraid they’re going to be taken down, they’re going to be primaried.”

Murkowski isn’t up for reelection until 2028, and defeated a Trump-supported primary challenge in 2022, so she has breathing room that other Republicans don’t have. But Musk is the world’s richest man, having donated more than $250 million to help Trump get elected, and his well-funded America PAC already has plans for the midterms to push out the politicians he doesn’t like. Still, his GOP support isn’t ironclad, and as Murkowski shows, cracks are beginning to form.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused Wednesday to reveal how the government had identified the hundreds of supposed gang members who were flown to El Salvador over the weekend.

Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act on Saturday, hoping to use the eighteenth-century law to suspend due process and deport scores of noncitizens who his administration claimed were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. But the government has yet to provide any information on who those individuals are, or exactly how they were determined to be members of the gang, now declared an invading force.

During a White House press briefing Wednesday, ABC News’s Rachel Scott asked Leavitt to reveal any actual information about the hundreds of people the government had deported.

“Can the administration provide any more details on how authorities determined that each of those men were in fact members of a gang?” asked Scott. “And if the White House can publish images, photos, videos of those men, why can’t the administration just release basic information like their identities and names?”

“We are not going to reveal operational details about a counterterrorism operation,” Leavitt said. “But what I can assure you, as I said on Monday, we have the highest degree of confidence in our ICE agents and our customs and border control agents who have committed their lives to targeting illegal criminals in our country, particularly foreign terrorists.”

Leavitt insisted that immigration authorities “had great evidence and indication” that those who were deported were foreign terrorists, or members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

Authorities “were 100 percent confident in the individuals that were sent home on these flights, and in the president’s executive authority to do that,” Leavitt said.

But there was cause for concern on the government’s judgment from the beginning. Judge James Boasberg’s original order Saturday was to prevent the deportation of five of the individuals, after two legal advocacy groups said that some individuals had been falsely labeled gang members. Boasberg later issued a second order for a total stay on any individual deported under the AEA—but by then, planes were already in the air.

Meanwhile, ICE has openly admitted that it has nothing on several of the noncitizens who were deported, and implied that the lack of evidence was the very thing that helped the government assume their guilt.

ICE Acting Field Office Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert Cerna argued that “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose,” and “demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile,” according to ABC News.

The family of one man, Francisco Javier Garcia, who was among the 261 individuals deported to prison in El Salvador, claimed that their loved one did not have a criminal record in the U.S. or in Venezuela, according to NBC Miami.

It appears that at least a few of the individuals rushed on the planes were marked as gang members simply because of their tattoos.

The White House said that of the 261 people who were deported, 101 were removed as part of “regular immigration proceedings.”