Yes, Dems Should Push to Repeal Trump’s Big Bad Law—but Not Stop There

Earlier this month, I brought you the good news that Democrats were developing a concept of a plan for their upcoming midterm campaign, having spent the first half of the year on a concentrated strategy of sitting back and letting Republicans screw things up. The precipitating event for the change of heart, according to reports, was the passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which I guess was the trap that Democrats were hoping to spring. Well, as if to confirm that the game is, finally, afoot, James Carville—the chief advocate of his party’s “roll over and play dead” strategy—is calling for a big shift, in a recent op-ed in The New York Times.

To my surprise, there is merit to be found in his proposed line of attack. But it’s sandwiched between a confused read of the political landscape and a rather limp call to action that really fails to contemplate the real harms that Trump’s legislation is about to unleash. For this garden to bear fruit, we need to do some weeding.

As is their wont, the minders of the rubber room in which New York Times opinion pieces are formed did permit Carville to spend several paragraphs throat-clearing about how the Democrats are “constipated” and “leaderless”—which, you know, shouldn’t bother someone who advised them to do nothing for six months, anyway. He also seems weirdly panicked at the fact that Zohran Mamdani won his party’s nomination for the upcoming New York mayoral election, which to Carville represents “an undeniable fissure in our political soul.” To my mind, our political soul would be more gravely imperiled had serial sex pest Andrew Cuomo won the nomination, but it’s always interesting to learn about what elite Democrats and their favorite newspaper editors are prepared to forgive.

After this simultaneously overwrought and underbaked beginning, we finally arrive at Carville’s big idea: Democrats should let Trump “rope-a-dope with MAGA on the Jeffrey Epstein case” without “get[ting] in the way” and instead train their fire on the depredations of Trump’s budget bill.

Now, I come from a controversial school of thought that holds that a political party can, and even should, do two things at once. But I’m willing to concede that the Epstein matter has become something of a perpetual motion machine, with Trump’s own actions being the strongest force keeping this hurdy-gurdy spinning. It is also the precise kind of story—salacious, wicked, and conspiratorial—that our cynical political media doesn’t need outside encouragement to cover. As always, Democrats should take note of what it is the political press wants to spend its time covering and do more to provide low-minded fodder for partisan conflict.

But Carville is very much on point where one vital matter is concerned: This is a phenomenally favorable environment to wage war on Trump’s signature law. Carville cites a July 16 CNN poll that found that a majority of respondents oppose the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 61–39 percent, and expect it to hurt the economy, 51–29 percent.

What can I say? The public basically has it correct. Taken as a whole, we have strong evidence that there is fertile terrain to wage a maximal battle against Trump on this issue. So it’s puzzling that Carville’s clarion call to action is so oddly muted—and so fundamentally illogical:

Our midterm march starts with a simple phrase every candidate can blast on every screen and stage: We demand a repeal. A repeal of Mr. Trump’s spending law is the one word that should define the midterms. It is clear, forceful and full-throated. It must be slathered across every poster, every ad, every social media post from now until November 2026. That single word is our core message. Every Democrat can run on it, with outrage directed not at the president or a person but at this disastrous bill. And the reasons are countless, each one a venom-tipped political dagger.

I am really struggling to understand how we’ve landed at “We demand a repeal.” In the first place, are Democrats … not planning on winning the midterm elections? I thought the goal here was to take back both houses of Congress, in which case they wouldn’t need to demand a repeal from anyone, they could simply—you know—pass their own bills to repeal things and then demand the president sign them. Which Trump wouldn’t do, of course, but hopefully Democrats understand that the goal here would be to use politics to cross-pressure vulnerable Republicans and construct an anti-GOP electoral majority, not expect Trump to give in to their demands. Republicans spent the Obama years trying to send Obamacare repeals to his desk, not because they thought he’d sign them but because doing so helped reaffirm their commitment with their base.

At any rate, “Demand a repeal” is strained and supine—it suggests that you’re either not planning on using your power to fight or you somehow still intend to attempt bipartisan collaboration once you gain back power. A clearer and more full-throated campaign message would be, “Not only will we repeal this bill, we will pass bills to undo the damage done to the government, we will fight to get the civil service rehired, and we will crush the corrupt thieves who stole your wealth and health care.”

And they shouldn’t stop there. Democrats need to contend with what the One Big Beautiful law will do—and it’s not clear that Carville, at any rate, is prepared to do that. Yes, the law, as Carville suggests, filches wealth from the American people in a thousand different ways, but he fails to connect the all-important dots as to where that money is actually going. Beyond the usual, bog-standard creation of yet another taxpayer-funded slush-fund for oligarchs, Trump’s law is a massive transfer of wealth from the American people to fund a domestic deportation army and construct a nationwide network of concentration camps.

Phenomenal sums of money are already changing hands. The law allocates $8 billion to ICE to go on a massive hiring spree, for which the agency is offering $50,000 signing bonuses. This week, an eye-popping Bloomberg story reported that the Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics Company was awarded a $1.26 billion contract to build another detention facility in Texas. Prior to winning that contract, the firm had collected a mere $29 million in Defense Department contracts. And the fact that the company “doesn’t appear to have any experience with detention” was no impediment to its receiving this windfall.

The law is not merely greedy; it’s not merely cruel. What Trump is doing is nefarious. Needless to say, I’m troubled by Carville’s omission of the way this one law furthers and funds what can only be called the president’s fascistic designs for our country’s future. And I’m troubled by the feeling that Democrats—who are far from great on the issues of immigration and asylum—may try to duck this fight.

Democrats are notoriously conflict-averse, and I worry that they’re still intimidated by Trump’s alleged mastery of the immigration issue. But the biggest reason to take this fight to Trump is that Trump doesn’t think Democrats have the heart for it. As Brian Beutler recently noted, Trump is “betting that grappling with a giant, masked right-wing police force and a multistate immigrant gulag will tear Dems apart if they ever retake power.” Anyone authentically concerned with “undeniable fissures” in the Democrats’ “political soul,” as Carville purports to be, needs to make sure Trump loses this bet.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

The first six months of Donald Trump’s second presidency have been a master class in what he truly excels at: wanton misrule. With an absence of adult minders and a determination to run roughshod over all of the democratic guardrails that have historically only been propped up by a fealty to norms and the waning spirit of fair play in Washington, Trump has moved fast and broken the government, put the economy into trauma with his constantly shifting tariff demands, perpetrated the deaths of HIV-infected children abroad, and cut the ribbon on a spanking new concentration camp in Florida.

These first six months have also featured a Democratic Party that has done what it does best: kept its stockpile of powder nice and dry. While some Democratic electeds have broken from the herd (often to the disdain of Democratic leadership) to confront Trump and his Republican minions, the party’s age-old theory of how political change happens—wait for the GOP to screw up—has remained in effect. Though now, with the passage of Trump’s big new “kick people off health care and funnel the money into an American Gestapo Act of 2025,” it looks like Democrats finally have their quarry right where they want them.

Or … almost? As it turns out, Democrats are planning to take on the GOP—in a few weeks, anyway. “House Democrats are plotting to turn the August recess into the opening salvo of the midterms, including through town halls and organizing programs,” reports Politico, as the party is experiencing “renewed bravado after months in the political wilderness.” And to think that all it took for Democrats to exit this self-imposed exile was Trump getting everything he wanted.

But come on, feel the bravado, folks. Maine’s centrist weirdo Representative Jared Golden, who is part of a group of Democrats who’ve lately decided that swearing more often makes them look edgy, shows up in the same Politico piece, bragging, “There’s almost nothing about this bill that I’m going [to] have a hard time explaining to the district. This is a giant tax giveaway to wealthy people. Everyone fucking knows it.” Can confirm! The New Republic has been covering this bill rather relentlessly over the past few months, which raises an uncomfortable question: What was stopping Golden from explaining this to his district at any point during the legislative meanderings of this bill? (Perhaps Golden, the most Trump-curious member of the Democratic caucus, was weighing whether to vote with the Republicans, as he has in the past.)

If there’s one thing that Democrats do seem committed to, it’s their August timetable for finally unleashing the spittin’, cussin’, new-look party to officially open the midterm election campaign. Over the past weekend, as Texans faced the now-familiar tragedy of mass casualties from devastating floods, House minority leader and energy vampire Hakeem Jeffries found it premature to go on an attack. Instead, he joined the Sunday morning talk show idiot parade to express his firm hope that Democrats might work productively with the party that’s hell-bent on destroying the government and wiping climate change from our brains: “I think we are going to have to figure out what happened, why did it happen, and how do we prevent this type of tragedy from ever happening again? And so the question of readiness is certainly something that Congress should be able to explore in a bipartisan way, particularly as we head into a summer where we can expect intensifying extreme weather events.”

It’s hard to fathom a Democratic leader speaking these words aloud in July of 2025. In the first place, the hows and whys of this flood should be glitteringly apparent: Trump’s executive branch misrule has led to cuts in the programs and personnel that keep people safe from these disasters, his shell of a disaster-response agency was slowed by Kristi Noem’s penny-pinching and is (as of this writing) “slow-walking the response,” and the federal government’s weather resources are being sold to his cronies. There is also ample evidence of Republican misrule closer to home, from a Republican governor who keeps presiding over these needless disasters to local officials who passed on funding a more robust emergency system so they could score partisan political points. Meanwhile, the GOP’s commitment to the promulgation of deranged conspiracy theories has the MAGA faithful engaging in the sorts of crimes that might cause the next disaster.

Therefore, the question of “How do we stop this tragedy from happening again?” has a pretty clear and obvious answer: Drive Republicans out of office. And that, I’m sorry to say, precludes the possibility of working arm-in-arm with the members of this criminal syndicate to solve the problems of the world. The scores who perished in these Texas floods deserve the finest politicization-of-their-deaths that the Democrats can muster: Take the cheapest shot, force Trump and his lackeys to defend themselves, shred their defense to pieces by demanding more and better, and then reload for the next disaster, which under Trump, as we know, will always be soon in arriving.

I agree with The New Republic’s editor Michael Tomasky that Trump’s murderous new piece of legislation will reveal how cruel and stupid the Republicans have become; how could it not? But the GOP has a distinct advantage over Democrats not just because they, as Tomasky correctly points out, have “a multibillion-dollar propaganda machine that will see to it that [their] vast audience never learns the truth about the impacts of this bill”; they are also vastly better at playing the media game with outlets outside their immediate control, where they are quicker to the punch and more relentless in bringing controversy and conflict to market. It would be a good idea to follow Delaware Representative Sarah McBride’s lead and start referring to the future Medicaid cuts as “Trumpcare.”

Until these widening strategic gaps start to close, I wouldn’t put my faith behind the belief that Trumpism will discredit itself. It’s not enough to simply vote against Trump’s bad ideas—though that is mandatory. You have to engage in full-frontal war with the GOP, relentlessly force them to defend themselves, find a way to blame them for everything that goes wrong, and use your available resources and expertise to help those who will be harmed by the GOP’s policies. This is the time for Democrats to get a lot less civil.

To bide one’s time in the hopes that a more favorable political environment might emerge is malpractice—because while you’re waiting, people are getting crushed economically and snatched off the street by masked paramilitary thugs. And to pretend that you have a productive relationship with the GOP on any level, as Jeffries asserted in the wake of more deaths by Republican hands, is simply brain-dead. I’m pleased as punch to know that in a few weeks’ time, the Democrats will supposedly be firing their powder. I hope to see some real pyrotechnics at last.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory in Tuesday night’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York City is the latest event heralding the potential end of what we frequently refer to as “politics as usual.” Disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo, the candidate of Big Cynicism and the broken status quo, naturally collected the biggest piles of billionaire boodle and got The New York Times edit board to hand him a sideways endorsement after they vowed to abjure such activities. We’re used to such advantages proving decisive, so Mamdani’s rocket ride through the early returns and Cuomo’s swift concession were stunning developments. It’s not every day that Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Ackman, and The New York Times all get pantsed at the same time.

Mamdani’s true upset—he trailed Cuomo in all but a couple of polls—has given bloom to myriad “What It All Really Means” analyses in the political press. But I think it would be wrong to let the moment pass without shining a light on one of Tuesday’s also-rans: Brad Lander. The New York City comptroller may have finished third behind Mamdani and Cuomo, but during the latter half of this month he has played a pivotal role in American politics and been a warrior for his party, as he helped to elevate Mamdani while also putting a thumb in the eye of the two most venal politicians in America: Cuomo and Donald Trump.

It’s hard to imagine Mamdani putting Cuomo’s comeback bid to bed without Lander’s assistance. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Mamdani adviser Morris Katz put it best Tuesday night: “Hard to tell the story of the Election Day results without [Brad Lander,] who went all out in the closing 10 days, defending Zohran, spending nearly half a million dollars attacking Cuomo, and building momentum that could not be overcome.” You can also hear the appreciation among Mamdani’s voters, who gave Lander a hero’s welcome when he arrived at the newly crowned nominee’s watch party last night.

It’s not every day a defeated candidate walks into the winner’s campaign celebration and receives such acclaim. But two weeks ago, when Mamdani and Lander cross-endorsed each other—that is, urged their supporters to rank their rival second on the ballot to take advantage of the primary’s ranked-choice vote system—it felt like the ground was starting to shift. The pair’s affable, charming cross-endorsement video was a soothing balm to what had been a bruising war with Cuomo. Instead of cynicism, voters got to see something that looked more like a budding bromance. This is what ranked choice is meant, in part, to accomplish.

Obviously, it helped immensely that Lander, who is Jewish and a self-proclaimed Zionist, had this genial relationship with Mamdani as attacks from Cuomo-aligned super PACs amped up their anti-Muslim rhetoric in the final press of the primary campaign. It also helped that Lander was willing to lustily deride Cuomo all campaign long, frequently in defense of his fellow (non-Cuomo) nominees.

But Lander’s most important political actions in this past week had little to do with the mayoral election and more to do with the people he has worked tirelessly to serve—which brought him into direct conflict with the Trump administration when he was arrested and detained by ICE while accompanying a defendant out of an immigration court. Lander had, by then, quietly made it a habit to help defendants get into and out of the courtroom. That he had not bragged about this humble service to New York’s most vulnerable residents helped cement his integrity, and that he was taking these kinds of risks while running for office highlighted his courage. (Upon his release, he held a press conference joined by other mayoral candidates and took another jab at Cuomo for not being there.)

Most importantly, Lander joined a small pantheon of Democrats—including Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, California Senator Alex Padilla, and others—putting themselves in direct confrontation with Trump’s mass deportation policies. As I noted two weeks ago, conflict with Trump is inevitable and Democrats need to be more ready, willing, and able to get confrontational with the administration. And as Brian Beutler recently observed, Democrats’ willingness to fight seems to have a real yo-yo effect on Trump’s numbers. At the peak of the party’s confrontation over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful arrest and remanding, Beutler writes, “Democrats dragged Trump’s immigration approval underwater. Instead of viewing their quick success as an invitation to continue pressing their advantage, they viewed it as the perfect time to quit while they were ahead. Once they relented, though, Trump’s numbers floated back up.”

Over the course of the last two weeks, which featured nationwide anti-ICE protests and the arrests of Padilla and Lander, Trump has lost considerable ground—so much so that CNN data maven Harry Enten recently declared, “I think we can say that Donald Trump has lost the political battle when it comes to what has happened out in Los Angeles.” Even if the confrontational tactics of Democrats like Lander aren’t directly pushing these numbers down, the fact that Trump is so underwater on what the punditocracy presumed would be his best issue in perpetuity should only embolden Democrats to keep bringing the fight to Trump and his minions. Moreover, what Lander’s derring-do shows is that you don’t have to file lawsuits or pass bills—you don’t even have to win elections—to play a vital role in the anti-Trump resistance.

Where Lander goes from here is anyone’s guess. There may be opportunities for him to lend his considerable skills to a prospective Mamdani administration, but he could also set his sights higher. He’d be a good look—and a great leader—for Democrats aiming to take back the House of Representatives. Should he want to bide his time, the 2028 cycle offers the possibility of a Senate run, where he’d be a massive improvement over Chuck Schumer, whose weak-kneed approach to confronting Trump leaves him unsuited for the moment.

At the root of all of Lander’s recent newsmaking are qualities that are often so hard to come by in the average politician. His willingness to put bigger matters ahead of his own near-term political aspirations cuts a huge contrast with Democratic members who grab political office only to play it safe and, in so doing, boost the broken status quo. But what’s truly refreshing is Lander’s innate understanding of this political moment. In a statement to Politico after the election, he said, “I don’t think the line right now is between progressives and moderates. I think the line is between fighters and fakers.” By all means, let’s get this man to his next fight.

In the end, I was only on hold with the Trump Mobile customer service line for about 13 minutes. I’d been offered the opportunity to simply leave a number for an agent to call me back, due to “unprecedented demand,” but my extreme reluctance to give anyone affiliated with the president my contact information left me listening to a limp jazz instrumental loop for what I felt was a perfectly precedented amount of time. Maybe there is a massive number of people ready to ditch their wireless provider and follow the president on this new venture, but I’ve honestly been on hold with CVS longer.

Once on the phone with an agent, I was quick to learn that this new side hustle was at least refreshingly free of Donald Trump’s signature bombast. There was no braggadocio; no outrageous claims being made about the phone’s capabilities. Instead, I was treated to that other signature Trumpian quality: the unreadiness for prime time that those of us who lived through the Covid pandemic knew all too well. But this time, it also comes with the stink of self-dealing, if not outright corruption.

What is Trump Mobile? First and foremost, it’s a very gaudy, very gold-looking mobile device—most renderings show a screen emblazoned with the president’s name, an American flag, and the “Make America Great Again” motto. The exact model name is the “T1 Phone 8002,” and no, I don’t know why they’ve skipped “8001” but I wouldn’t be surprised if it all has something to do with obscure white-supremacist lore. The phone can allegedly be yours for $499 (they are taking $100 preorders). Trump Mobile is also a wireless service that you can join right now with your current device, if you’re so inclined, for—sigh— $47.45 a month.

The agent I spoke with wasn’t prepared to do a side-by-side comparison between the iPhone and Trump’s wares. (Strange because they were in many ways comparable—at least on paper.) She could tell me nothing about cloud storage. She knew the screen dimensions and the weight of the phone but could only add that “it looks like it had the standard thickness.” The Verge’s David Pierce (who calls the phone “bad and impossible”) reported that there was no processor listed on the website for the phone, and I was unable to get any clarification on this matter beyond the assurance that this was going to be an Android phone. Gen Z can rejoice, however, because Trump is bringing back headphone jacks.

Of course, the most important question was the one I asked first—and one she couldn’t answer: Where was this phone going to be made? After all, the major selling point of this whole enterprise is that the Trump phone was going to be made right here in America. Instead of cheerful affirmation, I got a long, suspicious pause followed by a plaintive, “I don’t know.” That’s fine. With Trump, it pays to be suspicious; you’d do well to keep yourself unassociated with his central claims. But the salient point is this: Even as he collapses the government, shreds the economy, and potentially takes us to war, the president is at all times expanding his scam empire.

My experience with Trump Mobile seems pretty typical—though I wasn’t willing to actually put my credit card at risk for journalism, sorry. The Washington Post’s Shira Ovide said that while Trump Mobile successfully charged her for joining Trump’s wireless service, it charged her more than the listed price and she hasn’t been able to use it yet. 404 Media’s Joseph Cox attempted to make a $100 down payment on the Trump phone itself (due to hit the market in September), only to be billed $64.70 and sent a cryptic confirmation email. “It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone,” he wrote.

And experts, asked by CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal to weigh in on the likelihood that this phone will be made in the United States, respond with a resounding LOL. “There is no way the phone was designed from scratch, and there is no way it is going to be assembled in the U.S. or completely manufactured in the U.S.,” said one, adding, “That is completely impossible.” Says another, “The U.S. does not have local manufacturing capabilities readily available.” In fact, all signs point to the inconvenient truth that China’s vaunted manufacturing hubs will have to be involved.

If Trump has a magic power, it’s that no matter how much evidence you marshal in the service of letting the buyer beware, the president still manages to get fools to part with their money pretty regularly. Whether it’s for Trump steaks or the Trump presidency, the one constant is the multitudes willing to be his marks. Frankly, even Trump’s self-conception borders on the level of delusion necessary to con oneself. His own recollections of dealmaking derring-do, when probed, tend to reveal a disastrous self-pantsing.

But maybe the Trump phone is more than meets the eye. As Business Insider reported this week, Mark Cuban thinks that it has something to do with the Trump family’s emerging interests in cryptocurrency:

“I think the smart game they are probably playing is to put a crypto wallet on the phone that leverages WLF, $Trump, and their stable coins,” Cuban posted in response to the product launch. WLF is a reference to crypto firm World Liberty Financial, which is connected with the Trumps.

“Whatever transactions they can create [generate] fees for them, and there are so many ways to sell things and pre-load whatever they want,” he added.

Cuban may be onto something. Crypto has become the new, transcendent dimension of Trump’s scam empire. This week, Eric Trump announced that the family is planning to start “American Bitcoin,” a “company focused on Bitcoin mining, the business of running energy-guzzling machines to generate new coins.” Alongside Trump’s interest in WLF and his emoluments clause–busting memecoins, the president is now tightly entangled in what The New York Times refers to as a “business portfolio … fraught with conflicts of interest that have blurred the boundary between government and industry.”

Between his own up-to-the-gills involvement with the industry and his orders to have both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission effectively stand down on policing the industry, the president’s capacity for self-dealing and favor trading has reached steroidal new highs. As Harvard University’s go-to expert on authoritarian regimes Steven Levitsky told The Guardian this week, “I have never seen such open corruption in any modern government anywhere.”

Perhaps the most distressing thing about this is the extent to which Democrats are helping to further Trump’s ends. This week, 18 Senate Democrats helped pass the “GENIUS Act,” which is essentially the crypto industry’s version of Gramm-Leach-Bliley. As University of California-Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen describes at length, the GENIUS Act would bring widespread mayhem in the way it would grant “hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of American companies” the power to issue their own bespoke cryptocurrencies. “Imagine Walmart issuing a Walmartcoin, and Amazon doing the same with an Amazoncoin, enabling them to bypass the banking system and credit card networks,” he writes.

While the idea may seem dizzily postmodern, Eichengreen says that these proposed arrangements bear “an uncanny resemblance to the way America’s monetary system functioned from the mid-1830s until the Civil War,” when “bank failures, personal bankruptcies and financial instability” were part of daily life. “Lawmakers should think twice before passing this piece of legislation,” he writes. Whoops!

Trump might be the nation’s biggest problem right now, but the crypto industry ranks high on the list. As The New Republic’s Paige Oamek reported last September, Washington has lately been flooded with crypto cash: “Crypto companies spent over $121 million to sway elections during [the 2024 election] cycle,” she wrote. “By comparison, since the Citizens United ruling in 2010, the fossil fuel industry has collectively spent $176 million over 14 years of election cycles.”

With that kind of filthy lucre sloshing around, it’s not hard to buy off some Democrats. As The Lever reported this week, the crypto industry has purchased key allies, in the form of scheming strategists who’ve spun through the government-to-private-sector revolving door, now coaching Democratic lawmakers in the art of offering “symbolic anti-corruption amendments” knowing that they would, in the end, be “dead on arrival, since the language would likely be voted down by Republicans.” I suppose that in this way, Trump has done the impossible: He’s brought both parties together in a rare demonstration of bipartisan comity. Too bad, then, that it’s all in the furtherance of the president’s corrupt self-enrichment.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

The only real surprise about the clashes in Los Angeles is that anyone is surprised by them. Of course Donald Trump, in an attempt to get his moribund deportation numbers up, sent masked goons to indiscriminately snatch undocumented immigrants from their workplaces; he long ago made clear that this was part of his plan. And of course the people of Los Angeles have erupted with fury, seeing their loved ones and co-workers hauled away for swift deportations to unknown destinations. It would be shocking if they hadn’t.

There’s little about this presidency that a majority of Americans support, and Trump seems uniquely uninterested in changing their minds. This is his m.o. His entire reelection platform was basically, “They can’t throw me in jail if I’m the president,” and the only thing he’s done since his return is to use the office to mete out vengeance on everyone who he believes has wronged him—just as he said he would. That’s why the biggest lesson of the unrest in Los Angeles is simply this: We are, at all times, hurtling toward conflict with the Trump administration, and the future of our democracy depends on understanding this and fighting it head-on.

Angelenos know the score and have responded in kind. As TNR’s Melissa Gira Grant wrote this week, “What we are witnessing in Los Angeles is not only a protest; it is self-defense.” When indiscriminate ICE raids ramp up in other metropolitan areas, I’d expect the same level of citizen resistance. But the protests have been a vital counteroffensive to Trumpism, as well: As TNR’s Matt Ford explains at length, they have done much to expose the weakness of the president and the fakery behind his anti-immigrant crackdown. Over at The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie concurs, wryly noting that “strong, confident regimes are largely not in the habit of meeting protests with military force, nor do they escalate at the drop of the hat.”

The Trump administration is angry and humiliated—and grossly unprepared. They have not done the planning necessary to pacify a city, and they don’t have the numbers to do it either. The National Guard members they have activated are famously sleeping on floors and complaining about how the administration is using 29-day deployments to avoid having to pay for active-duty benefits. And the president’s coalition is starting to fracture: Florida state Senator Ileana Garcia, who helmed Latinas for Trump during the election campaign, denounced the president’s crackdown this week. Another California Republican issued a statement urging the administration to “prioritize the removal of known criminals over the hardworking people who have lived peacefully in the Valley for years.”

The protest movement, meanwhile, is in the ascendance. Polls indicate widespread disapproval of the president’s actions in L.A. It’s having somewhat of a magnetic effect. California Governor Gavin Newsom—who’s spent the year running a clout-chasing podcast themed around the virtue of conceding political arguments to right-wing weirdos—finally put his instincts for self-aggrandizement to good use. His daring the president to come and arrest him was an excellent moment of bluff-calling. And much to my astonishment, The New York Times editorial board managed to get through an entire essay excoriating Trump without also slagging the protesters. The days for that sort of bothsidesism are over: Studies show that a robust civil resistance movement is absolutely necessary to stem the slide into authoritarianism. The forces that are mobilizing against Trump fit the bill.

While these displays of courage should be celebrated, there are still too many Democrats in Washington who are hesitant to step up—and who mirror the administration’s lack of preparedness. This week, California Senator Alex Padilla demonstrated that he was up for the fight, disrupting a press conference from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and getting manhandled and briefly detained as his reward. Still, many of his Capitol Hill colleagues seem to not understand the moment at all. Even as Angelenos were putting themselves in harm’s way to stop ICE raids and humiliate the Trump regime, 75 House Democrats were signing their name to a resolution expressing “gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland.” Beyond that, I’m seeing the same basic reluctance among Beltway Democrats to recognize that they’re in a content-creation war. Republicans are still much quicker to grab a microphone or position themselves in front of a television camera. And even Trump understands that the biggest virtue of deploying Marines to California is that he’ll get the media to report it.

But this is precisely why Democratic reluctance to frontally confront Trump, in the hopes that some more favorable political terrain might reveal itself—or the president might finally, fatally, shoot himself in the foot—is dangerous. Like I said, we are at all times hurtling toward a conflict with this administration. And the number of people carrying guns to this conflict continues to go up. At some point, someone is either going to be ordered to fire one of those guns on a civilian or they are going to refuse the order to do so, and we’ll be knee-deep in the big muddy of a turbocharged crisis. At that point, pivoting to the price of eggs isn’t going to be sufficient.

As Brian Beutler explains in a recent Off Message newsletter, Democrats have been having an almighty struggle with the basic concept of forethought. We have, for a long time, been operating under the ambient threat that the administration was going to provoke the public into a spectacular anti-administration response, whereupon Trump would do something like invoke the Insurrection Act or otherwise activate some militarized rejoinder. People have long been anticipating the need for blue-state governors to get out in front of the threat. “We knew he’d wield immigration enforcement cruelly, in a manner designed to draw protesters into the streets, and we knew he’d be eager to deploy troops once protests began,” Beutler writes.

For all of Newsom’s recent exploits, Beutler believes that he might have done much better if he had “prepared for wide-spectrum confrontation with Trump, instead of brushing aside almost all hot-button issues as perilous distractions.” It’s hard to fathom that anyone anticipated that Trump’s anti-immigrant animus could have been hand-waved away with rhetorical tricks or a strategy of avoidance: Trump’s pledge to deport millions of people was his only noteworthy policy proposal on the campaign trail. The day to start preparing to confront the inevitable abuse of power was, thus, the day after Trump was elected. As Beutler notes, “I’m pretty sure all of these questions were ponderable and answerable in November of last year—but only by leaders who understood what was coming and [were] determined to fight it.”

At any rate, the time for anticipating what Trump might do has long passed. The conflict has arrived, and we are in a perilous moment. That said, I’d worry more if the people were mirroring the reticence and timidity of many of our political elites. But as we’ve seen in Los Angeles—and are likely to see as anti-Trump protests spread across the nation this weekend—no one is waiting for politicians to step in and be the grand marshal of this growing dissident movement. Democratic leaders may still be waiting for the “time, place, and manner of our choosing” to take the fight to Trump. But Angelenos have countered, “What better place than this? What better time than now?”

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.