Senate Democrats: Get Your Stories Straight!

On Tuesday evening, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley stepped onto the Senate floor to begin a marathon speech that extended well into Wednesday. The topic of his stemwinder was most urgent: “I’ve come to the Senate floor tonight to ring the alarm bells. We’re in the most perilous moment, the biggest threat to our republic since the Civil War. President Trump is shredding our Constitution.” For Merkley, the matter hit close to home, quite literally: “President Trump wants us to believe that Portland, Oregon, in my home state, is full of chaos and riots. Because if he can say to the American people that there are riots, he can say there’s a rebellion. And if there’s a rebellion, he can use that to strengthen his authoritarian grip on our nation.”

One shouldn’t expect the president to be moved by Merkley’s admonishments. And there are not likely to be many Senate Republicans swayed by his overtures. But there were plenty of people on hand who needed to hear what the Oregon lawmaker had to say—specifically, his Democratic Senate colleagues, who haven’t been singing from the same pro-democracy hymnal lately. Merkley’s oration arrives at a time when some spines need stiffening.

The U.S. Senate: For a long while now, it’s where Democratic Party ambitions, along with democracy itself, have hit the skids. There are structural reasons for that: Far fewer voters are represented by the GOP majority, and this malapportionment problem is exacerbated by changing demographics that could one day allow 30 percent of Americans to elect 70 of its senators. But Republicans learned long ago that their agenda—showering tax benefits on the wealthy and breaking the government—only requires 51 votes most of the time. Democratic governance—which involves building, fixing, regulating, preserving, and improving—requires 60 nearly always.

One might have expected by now that Democrats would have recognized how the Senate filibuster, which requires them to regularly conjure these supermajorities, is something of a suicide pact. Or that it’s a recent innovation that’s easily discarded. Or that it runs so counter to the Founders’ ideals that its very existence should be offensive. But not enough Democrats have made this leap. And the reason is that too many of them suffer from what The New Republic contributor Christopher Sprigman calls “Degenerative Senate Brain.”

Having observed this less than august body operate over the past few years, I think that the main problem with many of our Democratic senators is that they believe their own hype. They all think they’ve signed up for an austere debate club—the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” the “cooling saucer” of government. They don’t seem to have noticed that when it comes to deliberating, or maintaining a reputation for judiciousness and equanimity, everyone has to agree to participate in those ideals. And Trumpist Republicans do not: They’ve shut down the government. They’ve willingly ceded the power of the purse. They rarely if ever question the Mad King’s desires. Do you remember the public agonizing of Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment to Health and Human Services? And then Cassidy ended up meekly endorsing him, to Cassidy’s lasting chagrin? That’s about as robust as GOP deliberations get.

The state of the GOP means that you can’t really have a Senate anymore. Unfortunately, the most Senate-brained Democrats still naïvely believe that they can revive this moribund body, through actions that at best send mixed messages and at worst directly undermine the work of Democrats like Jeff Merkley.

Case in point: This week, amid the government shutdown, 13 Democratic senators joined forces with all but one Republican to advance the nomination of Harold Mooty to a judgeship in the Northern District of Alabama. Some fun facts about Mooty that The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling collected: He has gone to some lengths to dance questions about the January 6 riots and who was culpable; he practically invented new verb tenses to avoid saying directly that Joe Biden was the legitimately elected president.

When it comes to deal-breakers, to each their own, but I find it puzzling that these weren’t some crimson flags for Senate Democrats. But even if they weren’t, everyone should understand that the only role a Republican judicial nominee plays in American life is serving Trump as if he was their personal legal client and backstopping his savage corruption. For that reason alone, there should never be a Democratic name signed to the advancement of Trump’s judges.

Why would 13 Democrats (and Maine independent Angus King, who I find too tiresome to explain to people) do such a thing? My theory is this: In their own skewed, Senate-brained view of the world, taking these kinds of votes helps to bolster democracy. That is to say, any time there is a small window in which they can make a gesture of comity and bipartisanship, they believe the right thing to do is to take it—the better to demonstrate that the ol’ ship of state is still humming along, normal business and regular order is possible, and that we aren’t so far off from recovery. Democrats are leaving the door to deliberation open. They’re keeping that saucer on ice.

Folks, I would love to believe that a small overture might seed a future coming together of polarized parties. But if watching schoolchildren get shot to pieces several times a year isn’t going to foster that fellowship, then we’re definitely not getting there by throwing the other side a bone in the form of Harold Mooty. The government is shut down, there’s a hole in the White House, the president is ordering extrajudicial killings in Latin America as part of some run-up to a regime change war, and citizens are getting snatched off the streets by Brett Kavanaugh–inspired goons. The system so loved by the Senate-brained is currently offline! And these votes to approve the odd judicial candidate are simply small enabling acts that only help to fuel the disorder.

Is democracy in grave danger? This week, it looks like Merkley and his allies agree, and that 13 other Democrats aren’t really ready to believe him. But with midterms looming, everyone in the party has to be of one mind on the matter in order to not sow confusion among critical voters. And if they all truly agree that Trump is some unique threat, we cannot have Democrats in double digits signing their name to support his agenda—not now, not ever.

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

Believe it or not, there was a time when the Supreme Court’s emergency docket rulings did not regularly garner controversy; they were simply the means by which the court could consider time-sensitive legal crises, such as motions related to capital punishment. But a key feature of the Trump era is the transformation of the emergency docket into the “shadow docket”: unsigned rulings that have had a profound effect on the country. Beyond the fact that these rulings have a “heads Trump wins, tails Democrats lose” bent, they are, as Erwin Chemerinsky notes, often proffered without much in the way of jurisprudential explanation while frequently bulldozing precedent. The justices themselves may not like the term “shadow docket,” but they seem to relish operating in the shadows all the same.

But there is one instance in which a justice did attempt to explain himself in a recent shadow docket ruling, only for that justice’s reasoning to blow up nearly immediately after its first encounter with the real world: Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, in which the Supremes stayed a lower court ruling that was specifically impeding the Department of Homeland Security from racially profiling people for immigration stops. The larger court, as is its wont, failed to offer a ruling. But Kavanaugh opted to weigh in all the same. His reward is a heaping helping of infamy in the form of a specific secret police tactic that many have taken to calling “the Kavanaugh stop.”

Here’s the essential background. As The New Republic’s Matt Ford reported after the ruling in Noem was handed down, Kavanaugh’s surprise concurrence went to some pains to “minimize the impact” of a law enforcement encounter: “Importantly, reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status,” Kavanaugh wrote. “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.”

As Ford noted, the law enforcement encounters that formed the basis of the case itself could hardly be called “brief.” One of the plaintiffs in Noem testified that his attempt to show valid proof of U.S. citizenship did not make the encounter any shorter, as the agents “refused to believe the validity of his California driver’s license.” As Justice Sonia Sotomayor recalled in her dissent, “The agent said the ID was insufficient, ‘grabbed [his] arm,’ escorted him to a vehicle, and drove him to a ‘warehouse area’ for further questioning.” None of that sounds at all like the quick interaction that Kavanaugh suggested was the theoretical norm. And in practice, the Kavanaugh stop hasn’t hewed to his imagined brief encounter, either.

The quintessential components of a Kavanaugh stop involve a person detained for immigration enforcement specifically, with race a certain or likely factor in the decision behind the stop—the Fourth Amendment’s protections from unlawful searches and seizures be damned. Sotomayor saw a grim future in the court’s decision: “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”

If the news is any guide, Sotomayor’s fears are now reality. As the Chicago Tribune recently reported, Chicago resident Rueben Antonio Cruz, a 60-year-old man originally from El Salvador, was sitting with a friend in Rogers Park when “immigration officers stopped their truck and went straight after them.” What followed was a classic Kavanaugh stop: Cruz and his friend were asked for “papers” proving their citizenship. Cruz, who was not carrying such papers on his person, was then bundled into the agents’ vehicle and interrogated. Cruz was eventually let go, but not before the agents fined him $130 for “not having his papers.” The ordeal left Cruz angry: “It’s not fair because I said, let’s go to my house and I’ll show you my papers. I’m a resident.”

The Tribune notes that while federal law requires registered foreign nationals to carry proof of registration with them at all times, “prior to a second Trump administration, it was rarely enforced.” The detention drew the criticism of the ACLU’s Ed Yohnka: “America has never been a place where people need to ‘show one’s papers.’ Ticketing a lawful permanent resident—and forcing him to appear in court and pay a fine for not carrying their papers—is unnecessary and cruel.” Unfortunately, it’s likely to become commonplace as Trump’s goons, freed from legal obligations by the Supreme Court, make the Kavanaugh stop part of their daily operations.

The possibility that Trump’s ICE agents, who have effectively been given carte blanche to abuse their authority, might simply dismiss their quarry’s valid proof of citizenship appears to have not occurred to Kavanaugh. But it has definitely occurred to the jabronis snatching up brown people in American cities. In a second Kavanaugh stop detailed by the Tribune, a 44-year-old Latina woman named Maria Greeley was out for a jog when she was jumped by federal agents who zip-tied her and detained her despite the fact that she carries her passport with her at all times to prove that she was born in the United States. According to the report, agents remarked that she didn’t “look like a Greeley,” dismissed her documentation, and accused her repeatedly of lying.

One of the most obviously impeachable things about the Supreme Court is that it’s so frequently out of touch with the real world—a perhaps inevitable condition of giving nine people special robes and lifetime job security and then stuffing them inside a sepulchral building to stew in their own partisan juices with no one to answer to. Kavanaugh’s flawed reasoning may simply be the product of profound naïveté. But since this all came about in a shadow docket case in which the Trump administration asked for emergency relief in the form of the permission to racially profile people, I think it’s hardly beyond belief to think that Kavanaugh felt compelled to try to put a good spin on a reprehensible ruling.

That Kavanaugh has to own the Kavanaugh stop is cold comfort. Who knows if it’s even possible to shame or humiliate Brett Kavanaugh anyway? It’s very possible that transforming the United States into a country more reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s “Ihre Papiere bitte” era is precisely the legacy that Kavanaugh sought for himself. We’re the ones who are stuck with the consequences.

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

The popular way of describing what’s going on in Washington right now is to say that on October 1, the federal government shut down as a result of Congress’s inability to pass an appropriations bill to keep it funded. Chief among the sticking points was the fact that Democrats and Republicans could not come to terms on the future of Affordable Care Act subsidies. The Republican bill did not include them; Democrats balked at signing their name to a budget that would cause skyrocketing premium costs for millions of mostly low- and middle-income Americans.

You wouldn’t be faulted if that was your capsule summary of the shutdown. It’s essentially the story to which most of the political press is sticking, and there’s nothing fundamentally untrue about it. It would appear for now, in fact, that the broad public acceptance of this state of play is boosting Democrats’ fortunes in the game of who “owns” the shutdown. CNN’s Harry Enten reported this week that voters blame the GOP more, by an average of 12 points, and he noted that historically speaking, the party blamed at the outset is who gets blamed at the end. (It probably helps Democrats’ cause that those perusing the Obamacare exchanges for plans right now are already seeing the huge spikes in premium costs.)

Still, these facts only tell part of the story. This government shutdown isn’t merely about an appropriations bill, and it’s not entirely about health care subsidies. This shutdown is actually the culmination of a much deeper dysfunction, to which blame can indeed be wholly attached to President Donald Trump and his GOP apparatchiks. But the underlying cause of the shutdown is tricky terrain for Democrats to negotiate, and it calls into question whether they can—or even should—speedily resolve it. And the key to understanding the problem begins with acknowledging that this didn’t start in October. The government shutdown began a few weeks after Trump was sworn in.

Trump’s second term is broadly defined by his monomaniacal desire to either end or fatally impair the federal government. With the help of Elon Musk and Russell Vought, the Trump administration managed to do this in the most alienating possible way. As my colleague Alex Shephard noted this week, the administration’s slash-and-burn speedrun through the civil service has been broadly unpopular. It also probably goes a long way toward making any of the GOP’s rhetoric about Democrats being to blame for this most recent shutdown harder to take seriously.

But the reason things have dragged to a legislative standstill in October is essentially because Republicans in Congress willed it to be so when they returned to Washington to rejoin Trump as devoted supplicants. Their most fateful decision in that regard? Giving up one of the legislative branch’s core functions—the power of the purse. As NPR reported, by the first week of February, Republican lawmakers had already begun to master the art of explaining away why they were happy to surrender the power to appropriate money to Trump.

I characterized this at the time as an escalation in GOP lawmakers’ expansive campaign of self-abnegation. But it has ended up being so much more. The decision to give the White House full power to decide what, when, and how congressionally appropriated money is spent has created an impasse more deep and intractable than the shutdown itself, because the question of how the conflict over Obamacare subsidies gets resolved has become impossible to answer.

Let’s think about it for a minute. The White House’s position, as advanced by Vice President JD Vance and others, is that Senate Democrats should stop filibustering the appropriations bill now, and the matter of the subsidies can be negotiated later. The problem is that it’s impossible for a reasonable person to view that offer as sincere. Sure, Congress can go through the motions: meet in committee, hash out a deal, pass a bill, and send it to Trump’s desk. Trump can even sign that bill. But none of it matters when you know that Trump is likely to simply appropriate or not appropriate that money as he sees fit through pocket rescissions.

What we have here is a fully busted appropriations process; it is impossible to have faith in anything that Trump and his Republican cronies do with taxpayer dollars, even in instances in which bills have been negotiated, agreed to, and passed. And Republicans just keep on tipping their hands that they don’t really care about restoring that faith. This week, the chief way they responded to Democrats’ demands was to threaten federal workers’ back pay, despite the law being very clear that workers are entitled to those wages once the shutdown ends. Here, Democrats should say, “If the Trump administration is willing to break faith, and the law, to not pay you now, there is no reason to believe your steady paycheck is safe under any circumstances.”

So when and how does this get resolved? Knowing of the Trump administration’s faithlessness and the physiological impossibility of him honoring any deal made on Obamacare subsidies—or anything else—it’s not clear that Democrats should even play a role in resolving the matter. As Garrett Graff wrote, “If appropriations bills are not seen as enforceable contracts, why should any Member of Congress vote to fund any part of the federal government under Donald Trump? You’re voting to provide money for lawlessness.” Having once opted to give Trump’s paramilitary forces the money to invade American cities, Democrats should not position themselves to be fooled a second time.

It’s worth pointing out that Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress, so they can end the impasse any time they want, all on their own. I’ll admit that I do not know what Devil Magic has heretofore kept the GOP from simply nuking the filibuster and getting on with this. Perhaps they desire even the slightest whiff of bipartisan assent for Trump’s designs because of the cover it earns them from the mainstream political media, who are as desperate as ever to find the smallest scintilla of evidence that the American experiment is still working. But from here, the shutdown calculus becomes simple: If Democratic votes are what Trump and his GOP enablers need the most, they must never be provided.

According to a fresh Gallup poll this week, 43 percent of Americans regard the Supreme Court as “too conservative,” against 36 percent who feel that the Roberts court is an even-tempered administrator of justice. That 43 percent is a new high, per Gallup: “Before the court shifted to a 6-3 conservative advantage after Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg in October 2020, no more than 33% had ever characterized it as too conservative.” But then, that conservative majority started doing things—like gut Roe—and disapproval followed. Don’t expect things to turn around, by the way. As Matt Ford noted earlier this week, the court is expected to take a rightward lurch during its next term.

I got to thinking about the Supreme Court this week after Brian Beutler invited the readers of his Off Message newsletter to engage in a thought exercise: If you could thwart MAGA and the rise of fascism, but only by “turning the Democrats’ ideological clock” back to 2005, would you take that trade-off? Moderating would mean a lot of ideological progress on the left would have to fall by the wayside (Democrats in 2005 weren’t robustly defending marriage equality, and were nowhere near President Joe Biden’s vision of a pro-worker economy). But the idea is tempting—and the Supreme Court looms large. I would not call the high court’s 2005 incarnation “good” by any stretch of the imagination. But during the transition from Chief William Rehnquist to John Roberts, the court came studded with justices—Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Sandra Day O’Connor—who were willing to swing between ideological poles. Going back sure sounds like a good deal.

Alas, the world only spins forward. There’s no “moderation” button that Democrats might press to take us back to a more halcyon era. As provocative as Beutler’s thought experiment is, I’d prefer Democrats to think more deeply about the present moment—and more strategically about getting out of it. I don’t think we escape the fascism trap without Democrats who are willing to spend a lot of political capital, and I think those Democrats will have to commit themselves to some radical thinking along the way.

There is a place, to my mind, where Democrats can and probably should moderate. The big intraparty battles of the pre-Trump era revolved around whether Democrats should go big on policy or stay toward the center; here were the debates over Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and taxes designed to soak the rich. This is, alas, not the moment to revive or promote these ideas—and I say that as a fervent supporter of them. That’s because they don’t stand a chance under this extremist Supreme Court, which must first be dealt with.

I spelled out some of my thinking on this matter back in 2024, at a time when Kamala Harris was being dogged by daily reports of her reversing herself or becoming suddenly noncommittal about policies she once supported in the years prior to her vice presidency. I was fairly sanguine about this state of affairs because the Supreme Court had, by then, entered its Enemy of Liberal Governance Era, and it was quite clear to me that the six-member conservative majority was simply going to stamp a line-item veto over anything a Democratic president or legislature did.

Under this judicial regime, things like Medicare for All are a complete nonstarter. Hell, so is any hyper-timid means-tested bullshit if five justices don’t want Democrats to succeed. As I urged at the time, conflict with “a Supreme Court that’s holding the policymaking apparatus hostage” is inevitable, and it is “not a fight [Democrats] can duck.”

All of which means that while Democrats might be able to pick and choose some avenues of moderation, the task of arresting and reversing the degradation of the Trump era will inevitably require a hard swerve toward a more radical type of political thinking—especially with regard to the Supreme Court. The polite norms around the Supreme Court have been obliterated. This should be apparent to everyone; every one of these shadow docket rulings where the majority semi-anonymously grants a would-be dictator more power to overthrow the Constitution only reinforces the fact that the high court’s age of respectability is over.

The Democrats who want to win back power in 2026, and win the presidency in 2028, need to embrace this conflict and nurture the growing public antipathy toward the Supreme Court. They will also have to do things that the Democrats of 2020—let alone 2005—dared not: Packing the court needs to be on the table. Reforms must be forcefully imposed. The justices need to be brought before Congress and explain themselves in regular reviews. And to get there, Democrats must engage in a content-creation campaign depicting the Roberts court as it truly is: a promoter of political corruption, a despoiler of the environment, an enemy of democracy, an institution that has pilfered wealth right from the people’s pockets.

I feel for Democrats facing this moment. Institutionalism has served them in decent stead in the recent past. But those institutions have been perverted in the Trump era and must be brought to heel and firmly restored to their civic purpose. There’s no purely moderate path to what should be the ideal “moderate” outcome: a restoring of balance to our civic lives.

But rather than look back to 2005 for solutions, Democrats must wind the clock back still further, to 1862, and find their purpose in this passage from President Abraham Lincoln’s second State of the Union address: “We can succeed only by concert.… The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” The Democratic leaders of the future will be those who disenthrall themselves of the dogmas of the quiet past, and face a moment piled high with difficulty with courage and conviction.

Donald Trump was lustily booed at the U.S. Open in New York, and his excursion to one of D.C.’s despots’ club restaurants was interrupted by chanting protesters. But the opposition to the president extends well beyond the Acela corridor. As CNN’s Harry Enten noted this week, Trump’s approval rating is plummeting and he’s now “underwater on every issue”—including on crime and immigration, his supposed strengths. Across the board, Trump continues to have a “consent of the governed” problem, and it’s gotten so pronounced that former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is wondering whether “a despised autocrat can consolidate power.”

It’s a question that Krugman ultimately leaves unresolved. “I guess we’re going to find out,” he concludes. But there’s a hint of passivity here, as though the outcome is beyond our control—which could not be further from the truth. There’s a large and growing anti-Trump movement across the United States that is just waiting for powerful allies to join them, and it just so happens that there’s a minority party in Washington that is desperate for ways to exert its power that don’t require controlling the levers of government. It’s a no-brainer for the Democrats, who can keep the public animus toward the president well stoked by turning Trump’s elite enablers and supplicants—not just in the capital but across society, from Silicon Valley to academia—into objects of opprobrium.

We’ve been over this before, but the most important thing to remember about Trumpism is that it doesn’t work as a matter of policy. He doesn’t know how to run the economy anywhere other than into the ground, and with each passing day come fresh harbingers of shocks to those mythical kitchen tables. (According to recent reports, agricultural economists believe prices for a slew of grocery staples could be set to double this winter.)

As Krugman notes, Trump is running the inverse play from the Dictators’ Guide to Consolidating Power: Instead of using his power to shore up a weak economy, Trump is taking a roaring economy and wrecking it. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed: TNR’s Greg Sargent reported on a recent poll that found that “48 percent of overall likely 2026 voters say Trump’s tariffs are hurting their own economic situation, versus only 29 percent who say they’re not having any effect and an abysmal 8 percent who say the tariffs are helping their economic prospects.”

Still, as Krugman writes, Trump is governing like he has “an overwhelming mandate to do whatever he wants,” which raises the question: How is he getting away with it? Part of the answer is that denial has become his administration’s stock-in-trade—like the hilarious claim that the president’s signature does not appear in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday sex-crime book. But another part of the answer, Krugman continues, “is anticipatory compliance on the part of members of the elite, from corporate CEOs to university presidents to law partners.”

Let’s linger on this a moment: Krugman is correct to note that one of the key forces enabling Trumpism is this grotesque collection of oligarchic weirdos that everybody hates: Big Law goons, Ivy League ivory tower types, corporate predators, and the tech-bro billionaire set. While some of these supplicants are more willing than others, they’re also the only ones receiving—or hoping to receive—some tangible benefit from Trump. Whether it’s Trump’s Silicon Valley dinner party guests or the university president who tried to cut a deal, all of these elites are operating from the same premise: “Maybe if I’m nice enough to Trump, he’ll let me keep the money.”

But the salient point is this: In the not-so-recent past, it would be the GOP endeavoring to paint Democrats as the captive party of America’s economic and cultural nobility. Now Trump has embraced all of these political albatrosses as his boosters. And as fortunes decline for you and me, it’s these already uber-privileged members of society who are staying whole—or getting ahead. The only people for whom Trumpism works, in other words, are the same sort of people who rigged the system in their favor in the first place. The only thing that’s changed is that the new mob boss is demanding a bigger cut.

It may be that the same forces that are enabling Trumpism could enable the opposition to Trumpism, provided that Democrats lose their risk-averse ways and demonize the elites that are now at Trump’s beck and call. And while it’s true that some have bent the knee more readily than others, we must have the stomach to castigate Trump’s allies no matter how willingly they came to his side. For my part, it’s OK with me if Democratic messaging included the line, “While Trump’s Harvard cronies were cutting deals, the cost of your groceries has doubled.”

There are no allies for Democrats to be found in Trump’s teeming hive of enablers. Anyone who might serve the ends of democracy and the rule of law has, by now, explicitly announced themselves as having taken that side. As Jonathan V. Last notes, “Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump.” One day, we might need to have a conversation about whether some of these people or institutions should receive a path back to respectability after violating the social compact on behalf of a wannabe fascist strongman. But that’s not the pressing business of the day.

For now, brave Democrats can and should implicate and vilify those who have abetted Trumpian misrule and have, by extension, reaped the fruits of its poisonous economic tree. It may be that one of the keys to denying Trump long-term power is to foment the public’s ire at the company he keeps, paint the whole lot as crooks and brigands who are looting the proceeds of the public trust. The burgeoning anti-Trump movement in the streets will be cheered to hear from some political allies who are promising to name the villains of the Trump era and to crush them in whatever era comes next.

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

As Donald Trump’s goon-squad occupation of the nation’s capital wends its way into its third week, the president is already eyeing the next Democratic stronghold he’d like to strangle with his bruised hands in the name of “fighting crime.” Among the municipalities facing the mad king’s wrath is Chicago, which has loomed in far-right lore as some kind of Third World hellhole. While we wait for many Democratic leaders and media elites to take Trump’s authoritarian spree seriously, TNR editor Michael Tomasky this week urged Illinois officials to steel themselves for what’s to come. “Okay, JB Pritzker,” he wrote, “you’re up.”

It didn’t take long for the reply to come. In a Monday afternoon news conference, Illinois’s Democratic governor joined a slew of state leaders speaking out about Trump’s plan to deploy troops to Chicago. Pritzker has, over the past year, begun to cement his national profile ahead of what many presume to be a presidential run in 2028. He has firmly planted himself in the same “fighter” lane as California Governor Gavin Newsom—the better to distinguish himself from, say, whatever it is that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer thinks she’s been doing lately.

Pritzker ended up being the headline figure of that Monday news conference, thanks to the simplicity and directness of his message. “Mr. President, do not come to Chicago,” he said. “You are neither wanted here nor needed here.” He offered some satisfying digs at the evident decline of Trump’s mental faculties. He hit many of the right notes for someone who wants to establish himself as a leader of a dissident movement. But Pritzker saved his best for last, when he promised to take the fight against Trump a step farther than most Democrats have allowed themselves.

Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: We are watching and we are taking names.

This is where Pritzker has leveled up over his fellow Democrats, by promising a future of accountability and retribution for the destruction Trump and his minions are doing to the constitutional order and our individual freedoms. As I wrote back in May, the Trump White House and the GOP are no longer a political party by any definition; rather, they are a sort of criminal syndicate with an extensive portfolio of white collar crimes, violent offenses against our civil rights, and an ongoing sort of imposed cultural tyranny that is killing off the well-paying jobs of the future by decimating academia, and literally sparking public health crises at home and abroad through the Lysenkoism of key administration figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

As I noted at the time, “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.” The only thing we were lacking then was an ambitious political figure who was willing to say that they were ready and willing to make accountability a key plank in their platform. Pritzker has made a timely arrival.

As Discourse Blog’s Rafi Schwartz points out, this isn’t the only uniquely consequential aspect of Pritzker’s speech. The Illinois governor—channeling the feelings of so many who’ve forewarned of what was to come in a second Trump term—told those assembled, “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

Pritzker’s willingness to straightforwardly announce the existence of a crisis with “no caveats” and “no conditionals,” Schwartz writes, helps to “[neutralize] the latent anxieties of those worried about coming off as unduly panicked or oversensitive to the political realities around us.” In short, Pritzker allows those so inclined to finally grant themselves the permission to see the fascism that’s on the march, and speak of it out loud.

In the same way, I think that Pritzker has kicked open a door to an alternate future: One in which the restorative work of post-Trump patriots involves accountability for criminals and reparations for the people they’ve harmed. The taking of names and the doling out of punishments: This is now part of the larger political discussion; this is now part of the Democrats’ intraparty debate about What Is To Be Done. By including this as part of his political ambition, and broadly suggesting it may be the major goal of some future Pritzker administration, he allows us to imagine this future and have a hand in creating it.

And it sure sounds like Pritzker wants to put his hands to the task right now. “If you hurt my people,” he said, “nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.” In a week where Beltway Democrats passed their time pointlessly debating whether or not they were using words like “food insecurity” too much, and congratulating each other for calling the D.C. occupation a “stunt” or a “distraction,” hearing a Democratic politician speak in plain English is pleasingly bracing. These are, indeed, encouraging words to hear after Democrats long implored us to “look forward, not backward” and allowed misrule to go unpunished, thereby paving the road for Trump’s fascist second act.

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

Less than a fortnight into President Trump’s federal takeover of D.C. by the National Guard and an alphabet soup of federal law enforcement agents, Washingtonians have rendered an unsurprising verdict on the president’s latest display of authoritarian corruption: They hate it, in large numbers. And they’re organizing against it: A “Free D.C.” movement has taken root—and taken to the streets—to resist the president’s latest power grab.

The response from political and media elites to this militarized takeover of our capital, however, has been rather limp. As The New Republic’s Monica Potts reports, Democrats apparently have been caught flat-footed by Trump’s maneuver; to the extent that they’ve said anything about it, they’ve largely dismissed it as a manufactured “distraction” rather than loudly calling it what it is: a fascist occupation—and a prelude to worse.

But Trump is getting plumped by some in the media as well: The Atlantic’s Michael Powell idly handwaves the fact that D.C. brought the violent crime rate to a 30-year low in 2024 to admonish Democrats for “downplaying crime.” (In this case, “downplaying crime” means “marshaling statistics demonstrating that the crime rate is trending in the right direction.”) Charles Fain Lehman, also in The Atlantic, goes to similar lengths to dismiss the actual facts to assert that “the reality is more complicated” and that some “deliberate intervention”—atop the one that brought the crime rate to a 30-year-low, presumably—is warranted.

These authors and others are making a profound error from the jump in assuming that Trump sincerely desires to lower the crime rate in D.C. Trump is actually a “blank, sucking nullity” who wants to see himself on television and has decided that his second term in office will be about self-enrichment and revenge. He is inventing a crisis of crime as a pretext for further consolidating his power; this is authoritarianism 101.

Personally, I think downplaying crime in the nation’s capital is not nearly as irresponsible as downplaying Trump’s authoritarianism. But if we must pretend that Trump’s efforts are sincere, then I’d challenge the proponents of his militarized deployments to approach their work with more rigor, and less vibes. Trump has proposed a thesis: Crime in D.C. will go down if masked paramilitaries flood the city and amble about the streets. The task, then, is to see if his theory stands up to the test—to take this seriously.

Trump’s critics do take this seriously, and they have a thesis of their own backed up by data. The District of Columbia had a miserable year in 2023; as crime rates were dropping across the country, D.C.’s were spiking. The New Republic’s Grace Segers took an in-depth look into the phenomenon and reported that the city’s woes stemmed from an interlocking array of local failures, structural problems, and lack of investment. But city officials got busy in 2024 and reversed the trend, achieving a 35 percent reduction in violent crime and the aforementioned 30-year low in the violent crime rate. (Trump is now contending that the city lied about these results. As always, the safe harbor for journalists is to treat every Trump claim as a probable lie—unless, for example, you relish being the type of dummy who reported that Trump had “disavowed Project 2025.”)

As the city pulled off this feat without unleashing goon platoons into the streets, Trump’s challenge is to somehow demonstrate that his way of doing things is more effective. While it’s early days, I’m not sure that we’re getting much bang for what I’m guessing will be a lot of bucks taken from taxpayers. What statistics the administration has put forth are scant: The White House told Axios that “212 people have been arrested for various [non–immigration related] crimes” between August 8 and August 18, 101 of which were from Wards 7 and 8.

That sounds fine, but there’s a lot I don’t know about these numbers and no one at Axios bothered to do much in the way of scrutinizing Trump’s claim. Which agency is reporting these numbers? Is this a coordinated data dump from multiple agencies? Are these adult arrests, juvenile arrests, or both? Do these figures include the Metropolitan Police Department’s own arrest tallies during that period? Does “212” reflect the number of defendants or the number of arrest charges? Because that’s how the MPD tabulates its own arrest statistics. Speaking of, in the same time period in 2024, the MPD made 596 adult arrests.

Crime statistics can be treacherous waters in which to wade; in my experience the lack of consistency and the eminent cherry-pick-ability of them is fodder for crime fearmongers to beat their drum. Moreover, as my colleague Matt Ford pointed out to me, arrest statistics can be unreliable because they are more reflective of law enforcement priorities than they are of actual criminal activity. But that suggests there is a ripe avenue for curious reporters: Find out from the administration what their priorities are. Make them stake a specific claim about what they want to achieve and then hold them accountable.

By all outward appearances, Trump’s crime crackdown priorities seem odd. As The New York Times reported this week, most of the troops that have been sent to D.C. are aimlessly wandering around “the National Mall, large monuments and other tourist-heavy areas,” as well as “metro stations, most of which are also near tourist and entertainment sites.” These patrols aren’t exactly taking place in the mean streets, folks.

The big accomplishment of this deployment seems to be a big uptick in the number of selfies tourists are taking with troops. The other achievement is public displays of ridiculousness: My former New Republic colleague Prem Thakker spent Wednesday morning at the Columbia Heights metro station witnessing a farce as various troops and cops rode the escalators up and down and back again, only to eventually nab a single alleged fare evader. Those who think Trump is in the right should probably explain how these activities will achieve a lower crime rate than city officials were managing themselves.

But it’s not all so benign. Gangs of vaguely identified pseudo-cops are brazenly beating up people in the street, in a manner that The New Republics Melissa Gira Grant likens to the violent exploits of the Proud Boys. The occupying forces are carrying out a sadistic campaign against the city’s homeless population. And beneath it all, the city is being subjected to the mother of all ICE raids, with unidentifiable agents snatching food deliverers off the street (one GrubHub driver was rammed by a police car while making a delivery on his moped) and swarming local churches, grocery stores, and daycare centers. That’s certainly a lot of activity, but those who’ve criticized the city’s own approach to law and order should explain what’s being achieved.

Proponents of Trump’s intervention should also explain whether or not what D.C. needed was a swift kick to the local hospitality economy. While the Trump administration has recently tried to claim that restaurant reservations are “up 30 percent” since the takeover, this is a lie. As The Washington Post reported this week, “Restaurant reservations have dropped in the city by as much as 31 percent year over year for a single day,” since Trump kicked off his military takeover, and “business owners are concerned that the continued surge in law enforcement could impact their revenue during a vital period of the summer.” For everyone who pooh-poohed the Democrats who wielded actual facts about crime in D.C., please enlighten me: Is this good? Are these the results we wanted?

You can absolutely mark me down as extremely skeptical that Trump’s interventions are going to reduce crime in D.C. As always, I’m prepared to be wrong. Can the same be said of the pundits who’ve criticized anyone who dares use facts to question Trump’s fearmongering on crime?

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

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.