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.

Well, folks, the Democratic Party really went through it this week. Last weekend, it was disclosed that former President Joe Biden was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of prostate cancer that had metastasized to his bones. Coming smack-dab in the center of the hype cycle from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book about how Biden’s inner circle kept his infirmity out of sight, the episode only magnified the party’s gerontological problems. On Wednesday, like a rush delivery from the coda store, all of this was underscored by the passing of Virginia Representative Gerry Connolly, who recently was named the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee despite his own cancer diagnosis.

The Democrats’ Biden reckoning is a real choose your own adventure. To my mind, this was a case of elite failure: not just from the fabled “politburo” troika of Biden insiders that led the charge to keep Biden’s struggles from the limelight, but also from the party elders who engineered this mishap in the first place. They slaughtered their younger candidates in the 2020 presidential primary, mercilessly took down the one among them who dared to suggest Biden was too old, and forced a party-wide acclamation of Biden’s nomination following the South Carolina primary, which put us irrevocably on the path to his subsequent 2024 candidacy. This was, indeed, the Original Sin.

While there’s no end of atoning to do, some commentators have stretched this melodrama to the breaking point by suggesting that Biden’s “age and mental acuity” will be a litmus test for the party’s 2028 candidates. Let me just say this: I truly hope that it will be one, because if voters in three years still care a whit about Biden then that would mean the economy did not end up in shambles, the constitutional order and the rule of law are still very much intact, and the decimation of the civil service has been reversed. This is what a lot of pundits don’t understand: The only way Biden would have salience as a “litmus test” issue in 2028 would be if his successor governed through wisdom and competence.

Naturally, that will not be the case because Biden’s successor is Donald Trump—an omnidirectionally corrupt fuckup and criminal. If anything, Trump has provided a new avenue for those journalists who maybe neglected the story of Biden’s mental infirmity to redeem themselves, by hopping on the story of Trump’s own mental infirmity. Though oddly, few seem to be working that beat, and many of the voices that admonished the Biden-era media for these failings have fallen curiously silent. (TNR, I should note, is all over the story of Trump’s cognitive decline.) That’s too bad: The scandals at the core of the Tapper-Thompson tome remain live issues in American life. Gather unto you some scoops, reporters! This is low-hanging fruit!

Meanwhile, as the entire political journalism industry dithers, Republicans are using the story as a heat shield to skate on their bad plans for the country and their worse abuses of the Constitution. Flying under the radar this week is a report from the Cato Institute that included detailed profiles of 50 undocumented immigrants whom the Trump administration sent to a prison in El Salvador even though they were not guilty of any crimes while stateside. The administration ran afoul of another federal judge after shipping another group of migrants to South Sudan, a nation that’s on the verge of a renewed civil war.

In Washington, Republicans are trying to bring a budget bill to term that will slash programs for the needy to furnish a one-time payout for plutocrats, throw millions off their health insurance, and explode the budget deficit. Beyond that, we have the ongoing crimes of the administration that I laid out last week, up to and including the needless deaths that will occur at the hands of Elon Musk’s destruction of critical aid agencies and Robert F. Kennedy’s lethal grotesqueries of public health. All of which is to say: There will be no reason in the world for any Democrat worthy of office to be on any kind of apology tour by the time 2028 rolls around.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be critical litmus tests for Democrats—or that all of them will pass with flying colors. Right now, the most important way that the Democratic leaders of the future are going to distinguish themselves will be the extent to which they devote their lives to fighting Trump, tooth and nail. As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall wrote this week:

The overriding problem Democrats have today is a general belief that they’re not effective at fighting for what they believe in or what the country needs to be protected from. There’s a related, but secondary issue that they worry that Dems are most focused on issues that are obscure or not connected to the lives of the great majority of people struggling to make ends meet. That lack of fight is shattering for self-identified Democrats as well as highly damaging for genuine independents and low-information voters who genuinely flip from party to party from election to election. That is overwhelmingly the challenge Democrats have right now.

“The idea,” Marshall adds, “that up-for-grabs voters are waiting for important signals out of a bizarre intra-party score settling over Joe Biden’s age is just such unreal bubble thinking that it beggars belief.” Meanwhile, if we are looking to recent events for Democrats failing those crucial litmus tests, consider the fact that 16 of them joined Trump’s Senate acolytes in passing a crypto-friendly deregulation bill, in just the latest example of the party’s willingness to cave to that scam industry. The fact that this bill would most likely set the clock ticking on the next great financial crisis, in much the same way that the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 paved the way for the last one, is to my mind a more massive failure than anything that Biden’s inner circle did as they conspired to hide his enfeeblement.

At any rate, for those so concerned about Biden and his health, I’ve good news: He won’t be running for office again. The Democratic campaigns of the future can and should opt to neither hire nor rely upon the bad and incompetent advisers whose actions helped Trump get elected.

These are the easy bars to clear. More important litmus tests remain: Who fought the hardest? Who proved worthy of the public trust? Who best used the tools available to them to relentlessly discredit Trump and the GOP? Who sent packing the small army of loser pollsters and consultants that have kneecapped the party? Who successfully learned to speak to the public like someone not umbilically connected to a Beltway focus group? The road out of the Trump Dark Ages will be paved by those who pass those tests, not those who occupy the pundit-approved opinion on a prior president who, come 2028, will be … well, let us not speculate.

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

What’s in the water in the state of Maryland? Whatever it is, it’s certainly more invigorating than the sewage that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his grandchildren have been swimming in. A few weeks ago, one of the Old Line State’s senators, Chris Van Hollen, dropped his gloves to take on President Donald Trump’s unlawful banishment and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This week, his House colleague Kweisi Mfume was responding to an administration flirting with suspending the habeas rights of its citizens in stark, but welcome terms. “It’s a damn shame to continue to see what is happening to our nation under the guise of this Trump administration and his Department of Government Evil,” he said. “He and Elon Musk, really in my opinion, deserve to be arrested and charged with assault on the Constitution.”

One of the more unfortunate realities of the Trump era is that to speak the plain truth about it requires you to get over the feeling that you’re being shrill or alarmist. “I know that might sound crazy and ludicrous,” Mfume said, commenting on his call to arrest the president and his pet oligarch. As someone who’s spent the past few years issuing Cassandra-like warnings only to watch so many of my ostensible industry peers take a dive, I can relate. But the thing about Cassandra is that she’s correct, and so is Mfume. Trump isn’t a president. He’s the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power.

Trump 2.0 has been a remarkable speedrun into lawlessness, a testament to the fact that there might have actually been some adults in the room during his first term. (During which time he still fomented an insurrection and got impeached twice!) Now, freed from those guardrails that were once upstanding, he’s rocketed into a new level of infamy. I once held that George W. Bush’s reign was much more costly than Trump’s. No longer; his return has truly been a thing apart. As TNR’s Alex Shephard documented this week, Trump’s trip to the Gulf States has been a vertically integrated grift, in which the president has racked up more corrupt enterprises than most politicians manage in their whole careers.

This week’s skullduggery is, of course, just one brief crime spree among many. Over at The Nation, Jeb Lund lays down the lengthy rap sheet that Trump has written for himself in his first 100 days. The Trump administration has heisted the private data of millions of Americans, unlawfully terminated thousands of federal employees, extorted law firms and businesses and broadcasters; they’re gaming the markets, raking in corrupt money with crypto-tokens, kidnapping people and exiling them to foreign prisons without due process, and much much more. As Lund notes: “The question is not whether Trump and his people committed a crime while you read that last sentence but how many.”

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Trump administration is canceling the FBI’s investigations into white-collar criminals. But if these sorts of crimes aren’t dramatic enough for you, we could also simply stick with good old-fashioned manslaughter. As TNR’s Matt Ford reported this week, one of the hallmarks of Trump’s public health policies is that they will kill a lot of children—probably not a surprise given that the aforementioned Kennedy is well known for directing officials in Samoa to run an open-air eugenics experiment that killed 83 kids. “The net effect of these policy changes,” Ford writes, “is to make this country a more dangerous place for Americans to give birth and grow up.”

Abroad, Trump administration policies have the same eugenicist bent. As TNR contributor James North chronicled, the gutting of PEPFAR—the Bush-era HIV/AIDS intervention that has saved countless lives in Africa and one of the most highly regarded U.S. policies the world over—“has already sentenced tens of thousands of people in Africa to death, and with each week that passes with the program stuck in limbo, many thousands of needless deaths will follow.”

The administration’s approach to PEPFAR is of a piece with a range of policy decisions that will, in the best-case scenario, cede soft-power space to China and others to secure the developing world’s regard for stepping into a vacuum and providing humanitarian assistance. The worst-case scenario is, naturally, millions of needless deaths. Back in March, The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof attempted to quantify the harms done by the Trump administration’s decimation of foreign aid agencies in terms of lives lost. Here are his calculations: 1.65 million deaths from AIDS, 500,000 from lack of vaccines, 550,000 from lack of food aid, and approximately 300,000 each from lack of malaria and tuberculosis prevention, respectively.

This all raises an interesting question: How many people have to die before the word holocaust is in play? I’m not gunning for shock value here, at least not solely. I want to suggest that there is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate.

It’s an undertaking that will require no small amount of courage, and it will break with a long-standing status quo that has favored the absolution of numerous mortal sins, from the Bush administration’s unlawful torture network to Wall Street’s ruination of the economy to the many costly foreign misadventures that have feathered the nests of the military industrial complex over the years. The “look forward, not backward” ways etched into the civic firmament have served us poorly; in retrospect, what we had to look forward to was this exact moment with this perfidious administration.

Real accountability is not something I expect will be popular with the rotted mass media and its grotesque aversion to good governance or the wholly out-of-touch pundit class, whose opinions on Trumpian corruption tend to lag years behind most functional adults’. This is where the avatars of “Let the bad guys off the hook and move on” obtained their intellectual cover over the years. Suffice it to say, they’ll like a better world wrought from taking these criminals down and locking them up just fine. But those who want to pursue justice for all those wronged by this administration should expect to be branded as heretical.

We hear so much about the “rule of law” these days. So many people are concerned about it! They just don’t know what’s going to happen to it. Even among the gravely worried, there is this sense that the “rule of law” is like a machine someone turned on at some point in the past, which runs in the background of American life like some sort of ambient presence. What the rule of law really is, it turns out, is the sum total of our deeds—and our inaction. The rule of law lives or dies on our willingness to act—occasionally with grim resolve. It’s time for people who value justice to screw their courage to the sticking place.

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

It goes without saying that Democratic voters have developed some grave misgivings about the party’s gerontological bent. Well before President Joe Biden’s advanced age took him out of the 2024 presidential race, a Pew poll found that 79 percent of Americans favored some kind of age limit on elected officials. The fever for fresh blood and fighting energy has only advanced since then. As The Washington Post reported last month, “Younger Democrats are treating their party’s age issue with more urgency after” Biden’s loss.

The Wall Street Journal added fuel to the fire last week with a story that pitted younger House Democrats against their elders. “Age is a bigger headache for Democrats than Republicans for one central reason: Democrats have a lot more old members,” the Journal noted. This has come at a cost recently: Five House Democrats have died in office in the past 11 months. All were 65 or older; younger replacements might have been able to kill key GOP bills, had some key vacancies been filled. Another aging Democrat, Gerry Connolly, will have to give up his recently claimed ranking membership of the House Oversight Committee because the severe cancer diagnosis he was dealing with at the time of his ascension did not magically get better.

The Journal suggests that tensions are spiking: “Now, some younger Democrats are pushing to oust older party lawmakers, citing the need to connect more closely with the next generation of voters and energetically spar with Trump.” Representative James Clyburn went on the record to offer some wan pushback. “Nancy left her seat. Steny left his seat. I left my seat. What the hell I’m supposed to do now?” said Clyburn, who is 84, when asked about promoting younger members. “What do you want—me to give up my life?” There are many good reasons to vote for someone, but doing so to allow an aging grandee to cling to relevance deep into retirement age isn’t among them.

I’m sensitive to the argument that we cannot just discount experience and hard-won knowledge, and anyway, age isn’t the Democrats’ main fault line. What I’m seeing emerge among the Democratic base isn’t so much a tension between old and young but between inertia and the willingness to fight hard against Trumpian misrule. And that’s going to make for some strange bedfellows: Right now, the octogenarian Senator Bernie Sanders and the much younger Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are raising hell on an anti-oligarchy tour; they’re going to end up basically in the same trenches against Trump as would-be presidential candidate and current Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who is—let’s face it—pretty much an oligarch himself. Still, these are three Democrats raring for a fight, while others either blanch at the prospect of open conflict or simply accommodate Trump.

It may be that age really is only a number. But having the ability to nimbly adapt to a new way of doing political business, in a media-information environment unlike the one with which we began this century, is what should determine if someone has a place in the Democratic Party’s ranks. In that sense, Clyburn is asking the right question: “What am I supposed to do now?”

I’m happy to assist. The most important thing any Democratic elected official can do today is wake up each morning planning to relentlessly criticize and discredit the president and his party, who give Democrats a lot to work with. This is a task that needs far greater participation among Democrats than I’m currently seeing, especially on the economic front. As I said last week, we are headed into the Summer of Scarcity, which means barren shelves, shuttered businesses, lost jobs, and a deep recession. For Democrats too afraid to talk about anything but “kitchen table issues,” this is your moment. Get after it!

I worry a lot when Clyburn says stuff like, “I think the message coming from the Democratic Party is a good message.… The problem we’ve got, I’ll say, is that we have to depend upon the media to deliver it.” Sorry, Jim, but I’ve been over this. We aren’t reforming mass media anytime soon. We have to use the cynical one we’ve got, and that means giving it what it wants: conflict, controversy, cheap shots. If you want your message in the media, you have to load up the cannon and fire. You have to give up the high road and get in the gutter, where the big political battles are fought these days. Instead of trying to beat Trump with gauzy appeals to high-flown principles, you need to follow The New Republic’s Tori Otten’s advice: Get mean and stay petty.

The Democratic Party also needs some of its members and best-known figures to start seeding the earth with the future they envision if they return to power. This begins with paving the way for “CTRL+Z 2028”—a promise to undo the damage done to the civil service with the same alacrity and doggedness with which Trump and his flunky Elon Musk destroyed it. Those plans, by the way, emerged into public view two years before the presidential election—numerous reports revealed the magnitude of right-wing schemes to dismantle the government, and numerous figures were excited to talk about the shock-and-awe tactics they were going to deploy. If we aren’t soon seeing similar stories about Democratic plans for renewal, then something is deeply wrong.

Lastly, in the middle ground between quickfire attacks and long-range vision there is the basic task of holding the Republican Party accountable. As federal jobs get cut, grants get gutted, and the important work of keeping Americans safe and healthy goes undone, Democrats need to be counting up the costs to ordinary people and raising holy hell about the harms that the Trump administration is unleashing. In fact, they allegedly have a plan to do just that: Back on April 4, the Democratic National Committee’s Ken Martin announced that the party would be launching a “People’s Cabinet,” as part of an effort to “fiercely counter Trump’s chaos and lies.” But here we are, a month later, and no such shadow Cabinet has emerged on the scene. I suspect I know why this has foundered: The party is still too in thrall to what’s known as “the iron law of institutions,” and cannot nimbly start creating positions of perceived influence without first walking through a minefield of seniority, entitlement, and ego.

Democrats need their own anti-DOGE, they need their own Project 2025, and they need to get this People’s Cabinet—or something else with the same goals—off the ground. What we need less of is navel-gazing, pissing and moaning about your cable news coverage, sops in the direction of “working with Trump” and “reaching across the aisle,” defending outdated norms, and heeding the suggestions of political consultants who haven’t made a correct observation since last century, if ever. If you’re up for the real job of uprooting Trump and building a better future, then I say it’s fun for all ages. But if you’re only suited for the latter set of tasks, then it doesn’t matter if you’re 25 or 75—politics just isn’t your bag.

Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office may have been the longest, figuratively speaking, of any U.S. president in history. But we can also say definitively that they were the most disastrous, ever. His draconian deportations, destruction of the federal government, and insane tariff Tilt-a-Whirls have driven his approval numbers so low as to be a modern marvel; the last time a president was this disliked after 100 days, we were fighting a world war and the Slinky was the country’s most popular toy. Trump has ended up here for no other reason than that he pursued the very policies he promised to pursue on the campaign trail. That’s the story of his first 100 days: Americans elected a dumb asshole, and natural consequences followed.

Now let’s consider the next 100 days, which look to be even worse for all of us—including the president. As The New Republic’s Alex Shephard wrote this week, there are a lot of good reasons to believe Trump’s standing with the American people hasn’t hit bottom yet, the main one being that the worst is yet to come. The president, Shephard writes, “is still stubbornly clinging to tariffs, which inevitably will cause product shortages and rising costs in the near future—not to mention a potential recession, the odds of which are worryingly high.”

Last weekend, Apollo Global economist Torsten Slok published a preview of coming attractions in the form of a report documenting what he’s calling the imminent “Voluntary Trade Reset Recession.” As Slok documents, Trump’s economy—though quite sluggish—has been boosted by the fact that inventories rose rapidly as firms acted in anticipation of tariffs being imposed. Now that tariffs have arrived, the sugar high is over and collapse is on the way. The most straightforward way of looking at the future is on page 4 of Slok’s report.

What we have here is the prelude to the summer of scarcity, coming soon to a retailer near you. We are already well and fully in the stage where activity at our ports falls off a cliff. As TNR’s Tim Noah wrote this week:

This is how it begins. The recession has arrived in Seattle, with cargo shipments down 60 percent. Los Angeles will be next. As recently as November, the Los Angeles Times reported that cargo traffic at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach reached record highs. But last week it quoted the port’s executive director, Gene Seroka, predicting that “in two weeks’ time, arrivals will drop by 35 percent.” The reason, Seroka said, was that “essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers have ceased, and cargo coming out of Southeast Asia locations is much softer than normal.”

From here, Tim says, there will be less cargo to ship across the country, and inevitably, fewer people employed to do that work. Already, UPS has laid off 20,000 workers because of “current macro-economic uncertainty” that I really think wasn’t all that uncertain when Trump was reelected. This only highlights another grim reality: Even if Trump called off his tariffs tomorrow, much of the coming mayhem is baked into our future, as it would take a substantial amount of time to restart the global shipping machine. “Expect ships to sit offshore, orders to be canceled, and well-run generational retailers to file for bankruptcy,” says Slok.

The latter half of that prediction may well be the more devastating part. As Marketwatch’s Steve Goldstein highlighted, Slok said that “small businesses that account for more than 80 percent of employment and capital expenditure don’t have the working capital to pay tariffs.” In other words, Trumpnomics will soon be best known for that which is absent: products on the shelves of retailers, and businesses on the streets where you live, now shuttered.

Here is where the Wall Street versus Main Street divide is going to be keenly illuminated as Trump’s tariffs start the economic bloodletting. The White House has rather persistently explained away the turmoil its tariffs have wrought as a harm done only to high-flying financiers, and claimed that the benefits to ordinary people would soon emerge. A day after he got hit with a hundred dreadful evaluations of his first 100 days, Trump was spinning out on Truth Social, promising that the boom was on the wing.

But even as the stock markets have pitched and yawed as investors cling to their naïve beliefs that Trump has a plan (he doesn’t), those plying their trade on Main Street are planning for a different sort of boom. To hear Casey Ames—the founder of Harkla, a small, 10-person firm in Idaho that sells products for special needs children—tell it, Trump’s tariffs have already forced him to make some grim considerations.

Ames told the Idaho Statesman that his company was set to have a banner year. “We had just hired more people, and we were forecasting a really good year, even with the initial Trump tariffs,” he said. Now, however, he’s facing a massive hike in the amount of import taxes he’ll have to pay, from $26,000 to $346,000. With no domestic manufacturer capable of supplying the same goods, and knowing that even modest price hikes could crater sales, Ames is suddenly facing a situation where he may have to lay off employees.

Ames has garnered a lot of attention for sharing his experiences on social media, taking his audience behind the curtain to reveal what small-business owners have to expect as the summer of scarcity begins. Over at The New York Times, where they’ve been doing a long-running bit where Frank Luntz interviews the 14 dumbest voters in America, this fissure recently emerged: Meagan, the focus group’s lone small-business owner, told Luntz that the tariffs were a “very, very scary thing” and that she was, as a result, in “crisis mode.” If reality has started to penetrate Luntz’s Delulu Conclave, we’re all in for a world of hurt.

And that’s probably the most dreadful reckoning, as we mark the 100th day of Trump’s second term. Trump’s collapse in public opinion polling—along with the fact that he’s not likely to reverse many of his worst decisions or repair the things he’s broken—has probably set his presidency on the road to ruin. But if Trump has truly sown the seeds of his own undoing, it will be ordinary Americans who reap the proceeds of that dire harvest first, in the form of lost livelihoods and scuppered wealth. It’s going to be a rough summer—and many seasons thereafter, until one day we finally hit the nadir of Trumpian despair.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here. If you’re a small-business owner with a story to tell about how tariffs are impacting your bottom line, contact my colleague Grace Segers.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it—well, two or three other times, at least: Democrats have found themselves in a content-creation war with the Trumpian right. And this pitched battle isn’t being fought on your grandfather’s media landscape. There’s no more publishing a white paper or a New York Times op-ed and hoping for the best. Today’s information environment favors brawlers, cheap-shot artists, and the commitment to creating conflict and controversy around any issues that can possibly be politicized.

For a party that favors civics over salaciousness, this has been a tough lesson for Democrats to learn. But we’re seeing some of them adapt. The biggest success story of late is Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, who took up the cause of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who was wrongfully deported and imprisoned in El Salvador. But Van Hollen finds himself in an annoying two-front war: On one side, there is an unrepentant Trump administration; on the other, some of his more sclerotic Democrat colleagues.

Van Hollen made a politically risky commitment to travel to El Salvador last week to meet with Abrego Garcia, and promoted his trip relentlessly. His visit provoked the right into mini-meltdowns, including a try-hard attempt to engineer some fakery involving margaritas, while sending Trump himself into one of his Truth Social tailspins, in which he accused Van Hollen—in a pot-meets-kettle classic—of “grandstanding.”

But it’s 2025, baby. He who grandstands best wins, and in Van Hollen’s case, his efforts earned him a place on every single Sunday show. From pillar to post, this was a stunningly well-executed bit of political theater, proof positive that if you’re willing to give the media what it wants—conflict and controversy—they will reward you with coverage. Best of all, Democrats have ample room to pick big fights on matters that are righteous and substantive, like our rights to due process, and not on weird, off-putting GOP fixations, like the relative fuckability of a cartoon piece of candy.

Sadly, not all Democrats are seeing the light. One of Axios’s recent collections of aggregated bullet points included a comment from an anonymous “centrist” Democrat who called Trump’s rendering of immigrants to foreign prisons a “soup du jour,” insisting that the president was “setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual we’re falling for it.” And one Democrat who was at least willing to put their name to similar convictions was California Governor Gavin Newsom, who called the fight to secure Abrego Garcia’s rights a “distraction” from arguing about tariffs and the economy.

This is a deeply funny thing to say when you’re a governor who has launched a side hustle as a just sayin’ podcaster. More to the point, there are some staggering misapprehensions at work in these critiques, the first being that Democrats have “walked into a trap.” There seems to be an abiding belief that to stick up for a legally wronged immigrant somehow puts Democrats on the wrong side of the issue, but this is simply not the case. Yes, I’ve seen and lamented some of the public opinion polls in which majorities support deportations, but what Trump is doing is a thing apart—and deeply unpopular. As Alex Shephard wrote last week:

Even polls that show voters broadly favoring Trump’s approach to immigration show that the public is furious about his handling of cases like Garcia’s. Fifty-six percent of respondents to a late March Reuters/Ipsos poll said that the administration should not “keep deporting people despite a court order to stop,” with only 40 percent agreeing it should keep doing so. Nearly every poll tracking the administration’s refusal to obey with court orders stopping deportation shows something similar: Voters really do not like it when Trump ignores court orders. And the issue is bringing down overall support for his approach to immigration.

Between the time Alex wrote that piece and I typed this paragraph, it became official: Public support for Trump’s approach to immigration is tanking. In some surveys, he is underwater. Half of Americans say Trump should bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., versus just a quarter who say he should not. Someone sprung a trap all right: Chris Van Hollen.

The second bit of stupidity here is that talking about the curtailment of immigrants’ due process rights is a “distraction.” The notion that Democrats lack the bandwidth to talk about immigration and the economy at the same time really looks ridiculous in light of the fact that Trump ran an entire, successful presidential campaign on talking about immigration and the economy—plus a constant demonization of trans people. Forever defying convention, Trump somehow managed to talk about three whole things! And yet, Democrats can’t dare to talk about just two.

This is simply out-of-touch thinking. We live in a world where ordinary Americans have to contend with a litany of political problems. To tell voters that some of their concerns don’t actually matter is a recipe for disaffection. Beyond that, our information environment requires political parties to be nimble and varied, keeping old conflicts burning while surfacing new controversies. But that doesn’t mean every Democrat has to do it all. There’s nothing wrong with taking up a pet issue and becoming the go-to person on the matter, as Van Hollen has done with Abrego Garcia. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to be latching onto the issue of congressional stock trading. If Newsom wants to be one of the tariff guys in the party, he’s free to dig in and make himself useful.

The interesting thing about this approach is that it mirrors some of the things that the best journalists do to make their name in this industry: Reporters who can grab a hold of a specific story and work it relentlessly can quickly become a star on a particular beat. Democrats would be well served to treat their organization against Trump the way a roomful of reporters and editors tackle the news each day: Assign people to dig deep into a particular issue, build good sources, surface the stories of victims of Trumpian misrule, and otherwise constantly iterate on the assignment anytime there is fresh material. By thinking like a newsroom, Democrats might actually find themselves more seamlessly jibing with an industry with which they’ve struggled to synchronize.

Suffice it to say, success begins with an acknowledgment that the landscape is shifting—and the rules have changed. Some, like Van Hollen, are getting with the program and easing into a new way of doing things. Other Democrats may find themselves being left behind; but the worse scenario is that the more moribund members of the party might undermine the efforts of their more highly effective peers with their carping and complaining. This is a time for some to lead and some to follow, and for others to get out of the way.

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