Six Takeaways About the Democrats’ Merciless Rout of the GOP

As a person who abjures cable news, Tuesday night’s Kornacki Cam offered by NBC News was the best possible option: just a high-test dose of statistics and history fired right at my face, and instead of having to spend much time with whatever gaggle of talking heads had been rolled in from the green room, I just got to stick with Kornacki as he fussed with admin. Great stuff.

And it got even better as the results came in. The number of times Kornacki greeted breaking news about this race or that with, “Wow!” was uncountable. If your drinking game was to take a sip every time he made such an exclamation, you’re still recovering from it. As the night wore on, the results got even more eye-popping, the reactions more extravagant—like the scene in Jurassic Park where Laura Dern and Sam Neill first lay their eyes on living dinosaurs.

An impressive array of villains got their just deserts. I simply lack the space to list them all, folks. We got a two-for-one on mendacious Republicans named Collins, thanks to Jon Ossoff and Troy Jackson. Ken Paxton, who has gotten away with so much over his political career, finally saw his bill come due, going down to James Talarico. Smarmy reptile Vivek Ramaswamy went down hard—and Amy Acton reportedly didn’t take his concession call. (Good for her.) Oligarchs backing the GOP set their cash on fire. They had money, Democrats had people. There were 41 ballot measures on data centers and Big Tech lost 40 of them. It was a bad night for people fleeing other places (Flavio Bolsonaro to America; Elon Musk to Texas). Haley Stevens can go kick rocks with her tiresome fiancé and her stupid hats.

A Blue Texas feels miraculous. Back in August, TNR contributor John DeVore invited readers to start dreaming about a Blue Texas. “It is my birthright,” he wrote, reminding us that “Texas hasn’t always been red.” What seemed like cockeyed optimism then is a dream fulfilled now. Last night was an array of staggering results—Senate wins in Iowa and Kansas, a similar flip in South Carolina, the fact we woke up Wednesday morning with the Mississippi Senate seat still in doubt—but Texas has long been the Democrats’ white whale. Democrats are basking in victory largely because of a massive shift of Hispanic voters back to their side, which has become something of a vibrant trend. And one thing I heard Tuesday night was that the organizing efforts have been singularly great in Texas, with two groups in particular—Texas Organizing Project and Texas 4 All—being singled out for praise.

Democrats met the moment on corruption. As you no doubt heard, in the days leading up to the midterms, corruption had become one of voters’ top issues, and eye-wateringly so: As The Guardian reported at the end of October, a Harris poll found that “nearly nine out of 10 Americans said that government corruption, as defined as elected officials putting their own or their donors’ financial interests ahead of the public’s, is a problem, according to the survey.” The New York Times added some interesting analysis the next day, noting that voters’ views of corruption had shifted from a resigned “both sides do it” to something they uniquely associated with Trump and the GOP. As Alex Shephard wrote, Democrats did a good job on anti-corruption messaging with which they started seeding the earth on the early side of the year. And Democrats’ hunger has not dimmed. The message from Robert Garcia, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee on X: “Lawyer up.” His counterpart on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden, simply posted, “Subpoenas.”

Election Day doomerism was a bad bet. If you’ve spent any time in online spaces where liberals and leftists gather, you probably got your share of doomy takes on Election Day. Trump was going to unleash ICE on polling places! They’ll snatch people out of line! They’ll steal the vote. The Trump administration did deploy an unprecedented number of election monitors across the 50 states, and they got to sit there and watch the GOP get stomped. About the only hinky thing that happened at a polling place was the incident in Westchester County, where the paper on which the ballots were printed was too thick—a “you had one job” all-timer. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie spent a lot of time this year dismissing the doomers’ concerns, and this week, he was vindicated.

And what of Donald Trump? By all accounts, the White House was a grim place on Tuesday night. It’s fair to say that over the course of the evening, the president cycled through some toxic emotions, barracking his fellow Republicans and Fox News for the losses and bragging that if he’d been on the ticket, the GOP would have won in a “landslide.” By the end of the night, he was more subdued, announcing that he’d work with Democrats to achieve various nebulous deals. Then he woke up to learn that his vice president had shivved him, stating publicly that it was the Iran war that cost the Republicans the election. From here, who knows where Trump goes. Perhaps he’ll retreat into his various home decorating and monument-building projects. Maybe Stephen Miller will fill the vacuum Trump leaves behind. Trump’s a lame-duck president, but the gallery of goons he’s assembled could still make this a dangerous and daunting time in American politics.

Now the hard work begins. The Democratic Party is in an interesting place today. It won big last night, all across the country, running up vote tallies that were often mind-blowing. It also remains saddled with low approval ratings. The American people have extended their votes to Democrats, but not necessarily their affection. But Democrats will have a good chance to earn it over the next year. They’ll have to decide if dealmaking with Trump would be productive or damaging. They may actually want to have a stack of vetoes to point to in two years’ time, to tell voters that the next Democratic president will sign these into law. They’ll have to become more adept at using the modern media. And as I’ve said before, they need to get voters on board with packing the Supreme Court, whose 6–3 majority possesses a line-item veto on any kind of liberal governance. As TNR contributor Aaron Regunberg explains, the big looming debate is how big Democrats will go in the next few years to prove themselves.

For years I’ve thought of Democrats in Washington as the sufferers of twin maladies: the belief that the party must focus like a laser on one issue at the expense of all others, and an enervating caution that trained them not to take on tough votes because if you don’t “win” then you’re a “loser.” But I think that an interesting variety of Democrats are coming to power: There are some good communicators, some accountability hounds, some unconventional populists, and some lawmakers blessed with the ability to simply find out what voters want and then run on fixing those problems. Democrats need not worry about the legislative wins and losses, they need only bring the fight.

As TNR contributor Dan Froomkin reported, the affiliated organizations flying under the “No Kings” banner plan to continue their work after the midterms. They’re well aware of the limitations that Trump’s veto places on the Democratic Party’s legislative agenda. Still, they feel that they can help guide the party onto a bold agenda—a statement of intent for the future, if you will—while keeping expectations right-sized. That means, of course, that there is a role in this movement for you to play as well, whether it’s organizing, or protesting, or guiding Democratic lawmakers down the right path with timely praise and necessary constructive criticism. The way I see it, Tuesday night was a good time. Let’s keep the party going.

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

Going into Sunday’s elections in Brazil, I wasn’t harboring the highest of hopes that the votes were there to thwart the seething ambitions of far-right nepo-baby Flávio Bolsonaro, whose party seemed to have taken the decisive edge in the first round of voting earlier this month. My Brazilian contacts are few, but they were unanimously downcast in the days leading up to the second round. It looked like a familiar story: An aging sentinel of the left was poised to be swept from office on a rising tide of global authoritarianism and anti-incumbent sentiment.

So you can imagine my pleasant surprise as the vote tallies came in and the liberal Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva broke out of a narrow race to win handily. As Lula celebrates another term in office, Flávio has lammed it to Florida, hoping that the Trump administration will lick his wounds. As The New Republic’s Perry Bacon wrote, Lula’s shock victory was both “a win for democracy” and “an important defeat for global villains” like Trump. But it also gives us much to ponder about how this win was pulled off and what lessons we can take from it.

Analysts will likely spend some time picking through the details, but one aspect of Lula’s campaign jumped out at me in the days following the election: the work of “Lula’s Army,” a WhatsApp group with 10 million members that created space for solidarity and direct action. The army worked online and in meatspace: They promoted pro-Lula hashtags, provided their candidate’s content with much-needed algorithmic boosts, and recruited new voters from their neighborhoods. As the BBC reported, lawmaker André Janones took charge of the WhatsApp group, handing the army its “missions.” Per the BBC:

Lula’s Army messages often included ready-made templates for followers to share with friends and family. Each one assigned supporters a specific task aimed at boosting Lula’s visibility on social media. Janones frequently instructed his “troops” to “blow up” the latest campaign video or help a new hashtag “take off.”

“Guys, urgent!,” “Don’t go to sleep yet,” “No food before the mission!,” and “I have one more task before you’re dismissed,” were some of the instructions.

As the report notes, it is “notoriously difficult” to assess the role that social media plays in election results. That Lula’s Army was active in ground-level organizing and voter recruitment is just as important as liking and favoriting campaign videos. Plus, it takes two to tango: Lula’s successes were somewhat dependent on Bolsonaro’s failings. But if the social media battlefront was insignificant, then we wouldn’t be staring at reports accusing Meta of putting its finger on the algorithmic scale on Bolsonaro’s behalf.   

The way one member of the army described it in a series of posts, Janones’s contributions to the WhatsApp group were a mix of civic education and social media literacy. The congressman, according to this member, “helped motivate us, encouraged us to talk to friends and relatives to go vote and ... explained to us how social media worked so the people who were clueless about it understood.” Janones also apparently advised the army to stop engaging with the right-wing’s content because doing so only boosted it algorithmically. In a way, Lula’s Army found a way to gamify the resistance, all while practicing some disciplined social media hygiene.

Can this sort of political organizing work in the United States? It already is. As The New York Times reported in September, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has an army of social media influencers who dutifully promote his content and accomplishments. “The administration regularly sends the influencers memos on the mayor’s priorities and encourages them to trumpet his accomplishments, all outside of public scrutiny. The missives are delivered in group chats on Signal, an encrypted messaging app designed to shield posts from public review.”

The Times’ whiff of disapproval should come as no surprise, but not just because the paper’s own political alignment frequently runs afoul of Mamdani’s leftist leanings—the mayor’s online troops are, for the Times, its new competition in terms of influencing the direction of the city’s politics. No longer can the monolithic Gray Lady insist that the city must be run by its preferred centrist du jour. A more modern, social-media optimized force is going to have both an argument and an audience to counter the patricians who run the Times’ editorial board. 

As someone who is frequently dismayed by how Democrats too often seem to not understand the modern media landscape and how to exploit it, what Mamdani is doing is precisely the sort of thing that feels ripe and timely. And if anything, the people they need to reach are already there, waiting for them to connect. Over the past few years, armies of this nature have been forming all around us. In Minneapolis, the anti-ICE movement has used the same tools to keep watch over its neighborhoods, direct support to families in fear, and mobilize for street protests. And as TNR contributor Dan Froomkin reports, the No Kings movement and its affiliated allies are planning to continue their robust organizing after the midterms in the furtherance of a bold agenda that Democrats can run and win on in 2028 by building the “permanent field campaign” once envisioned by Obama insiders, which ended up falling by the wayside.

If anything, Democrats need to learn to fight in these trenches because the MAGA right is already on the march in these online spaces. As The Washington Post reported this week, Trump and his allies are using the same tactics that Lula’s Army used to save democracy in Brazil to undo it here at home: “Nearly 600 high-profile, right-wing social media accounts, podcasts and other online media have published more than 7,000 statements questioning the election’s integrity so far this year,” it reported, adding that “overstated claims that noncitizens are on voter rolls and that mail-in ballots enable widespread fraud” have been widely broadcast online. This isn’t a fight from which Democrats can afford to shy away.

All that said, there’s a broader lesson to be taken from the exploits of Lula’s Army and its online organizing. It’s pretty clear to me that the United States’ Silicon Valley oligarchy, which backs Trump’s MAGA forces and is skeptical of democracy, has designed its various platforms and algorithmic traps to keep people isolated and despondent, doomscrolling instead of hoping, and scraping what meager dopamine hits we can from a narrowing band of content. This suits authoritarians well: Politics is a hard road in a free society; when you feel alone, it can seem even more hopeless. 

But from São Paulo, to New York City, to Minneapolis, we’re seeing that the best way to achieve political change—maybe the only way—is to do it together. When we organize, we turn the arduous process of politicking into a game. We find purpose in shared burdens. We’re more apt to discover that the work actually brings joy rather than hopelessness. And if we lose, we lick our wounds together. Together, our possibilities bloom. On some rare days, you tip an election, thought to be lost, in your favor. On other days, you protect your neighbors from fascist goons. And sometimes, you gather at the Washington Monument to blow off steam, listen to a punk band, and raise a boatload of money for a good cause. As they say, birds are not meant to fly alone.

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

In a few short weeks, we’re going to learn whether and how the first half of President Donald Trump’s disastrous second term yields enough of a backlash to return Democrats to power in the House and Senate. At the moment, retaking the lower chamber seems like a done deal. Those are the words of Charlie Cook, anyway. The founder of the Cook Political Report is less bullish about the Democrats’ chances of seizing control of the upper house, but only just: “The Senate, a year ago, it wasn’t realistic to think that the Senate might flip, but now it’s very realistic.”

Folks, I’d love to flip the Senate. The possibilities are enticing. We might return Sherrod Brown to power in Ohio. The dream of a blue Texas is somehow in play, thanks to the fact that the GOP has, in Ken Paxton, nominated one of the most cartoonishly corrupt people to ever stand for office. Between Alaska, Iowa, Michigan, Kansas, and Nebraska, there are big dreams and vaulting ambitions. For me, however, there’s one race in particular in which I want to see the Republican candidate fail: Susan Collins in Maine.

Collins has been an irritant for me for as long as I can remember. Somehow or another, she has managed to carve out an identity for herself as a moderate Republican, despite being a Trumpist par excellence. She’s voted with Trump 92 percent of the time, which means one important thing: She has played a leading role in bolstering the administration’s corruption. But if there is one arena in which Collins’s mendacity shines, it’s in her unearned pro-choice pretensions.

Collins has snowed a lot of people; if you read the typical fare from the political media, you’ll mostly see her characterized as a pro-choice Republican who, somehow or another, keeps casting pivotal votes that further the ends of the anti-abortion movement. As someone who has boundless contempt for both Collins and the political press that has enabled her, I deeply hope that her lies might finally catch up to her.

Collins’s meretriciousness shines brightly on the reproductive rights front. And in recent days, she’s at it again. This week, Collins was asked to account for her pivotal confirmation vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose presence on the high court all but ensured the gutting of Roe: “I’m very disappointed in his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Collins attested. “There was no way for me to anticipate that.”

It’s pretty weird that this one Maine senator was unable to “anticipate” something that the right has been working toward for the past half-century, building out an entire right-wing legal movement and funneling anti-abortion judges through the pipeline of the federal judiciary, vetting each oh-so-carefully, remembering the betrayal of David Souter. This is where I wish journalists made a more robust effort over the years to hold Collins to account. Because the way I see it, her claims of not being able to anticipate the obvious means she is either a dullard or a liar. Either way, she’s not fit to be a senator.

Collins has sworn up and down that Kavanaugh convinced her that he had no plans to undercut the reproductive rights protections offered by Roe. That simply doesn’t square with Kavanaugh’s career. It was Kavanaugh who gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in 2017, in which he praised William Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe as well as his majority opinion in Washington v. Glucksberg—a defining case for Kavanaugh where unenumerated rights are concerned. “Even a first-year law student could tell you that Glucksberg’s approach to unenumerated rights was not consistent with the approach of the abortion cases such as Roe v. Wade,” Kavanaugh said, adding, “The Glucksberg case stands to this day as an important precedent, limiting the Court’s role in the realm of social policy and helping to ensure that the Court operates more as a court of law and less as an institution of social policy.”

Glucksberg would pop up again during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. During a back-and-forth with Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who was particularly interested in the would-be justice’s philosophy on unenumerated rights such as abortion, Kavanaugh told Cruz, “All roads lead to the Glucksberg test.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, the popular criticism of the justices who gutted Roe is that they walked into their confirmation hearings and fibbed about their intentions. But Kavanaugh’s testimony shows that he spoke pretty clearly about what he planned to do with abortion rights. You just needed to listen. As Ian Millhiser, who did, summed up: “So, to spell this all out, Kavanaugh believes that the way to determine whether the Constitution protects a particular unenumerated right is to apply the test the Supreme Court laid out in Glucksberg. And the judge also thinks that ‘even a first-year law student could tell you’ that Roe is inconsistent with Glucksberg.”

How much more clarity does Susan Collins need? Hopefully, in a few short weeks, we won’t need to keep asking her.

In recent weeks, I’ve been fortunate enough to observe two competing visions for Democratic senators should they retake the upper chamber in next month’s midterm elections. On the one hand, we have Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse, who announced at the end of September that they were teaming up with their Republican counterparts Mike Lee and Shelley Moore Capito on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, which the quartet believe will “reform the federal environmental review and permitting process.” Per their press release, “This groundbreaking agreement will deliver cheaper energy, more jobs, and responsible growth across the United States.”

On the other hand, we have Senator Jon Ossoff, who has taken the debate stage twice in recent days to tell his Republican opponent to his face that he’s a racist scumbag.

My paraphrasing here is more blunt than the rhetoric that Ossoff has been using, but only just. In the pair’s first debate, Ossoff threw daggers, accusing Representative Mike Collins of hiring “half the Third Reich to staff [his] congressional office,” adding, “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” During Tuesday night’s debate, an embittered Collins tried to play the civility card, claiming that Ossoff’s incendiary statements about Collins’s very real embrace of white supremacy had led to death threats. Ossoff breezily brushed away the accusation and went back for more. Referring to Collins’s son-in-law, a white-nationalist influencer, Ossoff jabbed: “Can you commit for just three weeks to stop the production of neo-Nazi propaganda from your home?”

This is like watching a fever finally break, and it’s not just Ossoff. In the Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed has gone at Mike Rogers with both barrels, repeatedly referring to the former congressman as weak and cowardly. In Maine … well, let’s just say that I wished Troy Jackson had a bit of that dog in him, but he doesn’t. Still, I can tell he’s trying, and his better moments against Senator Susan Collins, like telling her “You can’t eat road salt,” at least have a bit of a surly edge. At any rate, the rise of rude Democrats has got me believing in the potential cure for one of our greatest civic maladies: degenerative Senate brain, the very condition that leads a Sheldon Whitehouse or a Martin Heinrich to work with MAGA filth bent on desecrating the constitutional order.

Right now, there should not be a bipartisan anything, unless it’s a negotiated agreement to mass-retire Republican lawmakers. As I’ve noted numerous times before, the GOP is essentially a criminal syndicate, aiding and backstopping a corrupt and self-dealing presidential administration. There can be no collaboration with Donald Trump and his goons on any level. So, no: I don’t want to see Democrats reaching for comity and accommodation. I don’t want collegiality. What I want to see is Democrats dogwalking their Republican opponents on live television. People like Ossoff are giving me faith that there are members of this party who are truly wedded to the notion of robust accountability, which is what the post-Trump era desperately needs.

One thing that the years ahead can do without, however, is pundit and anthropomorphic smarm-fountain David Brooks, who is apparently not a fan of Ossoff’s sublime debating technique. This week, in an appearance on PBS Newshour, Brooks complained, “Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up. That’s just not what we do here in this country.”

Let’s take a look at the litany of things that we have been doing in this country that occasional TNR contributor Greg Greene compiled in response to Brooks’s call for toned-down rhetoric. The Trump administration is putting the finishing touches on a new prison for immigrant children and families. It has continued to murder people in the Caribbean. It has destroyed a girls’ school in Iran with a “double-tap” strike, killing 165 people. The shuttering of USAID has led to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Just this week, Representative Ilhan Omar’s home was raided by federal agents in a trumped-up criminal probe into her citizenship. Then there’s the ICE violence, the criminalization of dissent, the abrogation of the media’s First Amendment rights, and the constant flow of white supremacist rhetoric from the Department of Homeland Security.

All of that is to say that, contrary to Brooks, I don’t think Ossoff’s debate rhetoric really rates as a problem right now. Let me put it plainly: Civility is a con. It’s a tool of the status quo. It’s most often called for when the people who get mauled by the powerful try to vindicate their rights or their humanity. It’s a brand wielded by smarmy phonies; demagoguery dressed in the robe of a high priest. And as TNR contributor Nacona Nix explained at length, the liberal commitment to civility theater does a lot of real-world harm: It’s currently one of the primary vectors by which antisocial and undemocratic ideas get laundered into respectability. And while it may seem laudatory to wish for a day when there’s nothing but an abundance of highmindedness for all to share, the Trump era can’t be ended by a change in tone or temperament. We can’t nice our way to a better future. As Nix writes, “The task now is not to lower the temperature, but to raise the standard.”

Democrats should embrace the rudeness and vitriol if for no other reason than because it’s fully what the GOP deserves. But they should also just watch Ossoff cook, because the man is straight-up running a debate clinic. He’s calm, composed, and fully committed to tearing his Republican opponent to shreds. I find it comforting to watch Collins disconsolately shuffling his papers and stumbling back to his talking points. That he looks like a hunted man on that stage alongside Ossoff makes my soul feel lighter. That’s how Trump’s enablers should feel. That should be an essential part of the midterm message: Hunting season is coming. When I hear Ossoff’s debate rhetoric, I hear nothing discordant. I hear the sound of standards being raised.

With the midterm elections less than a month away, it would seem to be an absurd time to suffer a thought for the next election cycle and the challenges that any would-be Democratic presidential victor would have to tend to on day one. Unfortunately, sometimes current events intercede with a potent reminder of just how rough the road to recovery and post-Trump renewal will be. One such story broke this week in the pages of The New York Times, which detailed some of the Trumpian luminaries who have recently ascended to important positions at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, run by Trump acolyte Harmeet Dhillon.

The piece wastes no time: In short order, we’re introduced to “a former prosecutor forced off a high-profile murder case for peeking at the defense team’s strategy documents,” a “onetime gambling executive” with a sideline in promulgating “conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas massacre in 2017,” and a “Florida activist” whose “activism” included being jailed for several weeks for “hacking a local election system.” The long and the short of it is that the agency, once stocked with skilled professionals, is now chock-full of people who ordinarily wouldn’t pass the smell test for public service. Somewhere, a pool is missing its cess, and they might want to check whether it ended up at the DOJ.

Much has been made of the way the Trump administration, returning to power with Project 2025 as its guiding manifesto and Elon Musk as its chainsaw-wielder, went to war with the civil service in the hopes that it could be ground down by purging the dedicated civil servants who’d previously staffed whatever posts were relevant in keeping us free of cyclospora. This Times story is covering the other side of the equation: The full Trumpian takeover isn’t just about firing people en masse. Frankly, it’s not merely about placing people loyal to the cause in top positions. It’s about stationing borderline lycanthropes in powerful positions.

Daniel Flickinger, who began working on the division’s education cases earlier this year, was forced out of his job at a Birmingham, Alabama, law firm in 2020 after suggesting—to the disgust of his bosses—that George Floyd was fortunate to have died in a “fentanyl- and methamphetamine-numbed strangulation” because “it meant being worshiped in a nationwide funeral.”

Peter Feaman, a veteran lawyer from Florida hired in early 2025 as a senior counsel, has a history of far-right political statements. In a May 2021 post on social media, he accused the “diabolical” Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, of forcing citizens into getting the “mark of the beast” (a coronavirus shot).

This isn’t going to be a temporary problem by any means. The idea that the Trumpers who’ve come to Washington might take their leave if and when the federal government comes under Democratic control is a hopeful notion, but I worry that some of the true believers aren’t just here visiting; they intend to stay. That’s certainly the sense that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who’s gone to great lengths to stuff the agency under his control with all manner of cranks and quacks—strove to convey at last week’s MAHA Summit in Washington, D.C. As Mother Jones reported, Kennedy “proclaimed the changes he’s wrought to HHS are permanent, and praised his allies in the movement for helping to make them happen.” “Even if I got hit by a truck tonight,” he bragged, “HHS will never go back to what it was before.”

When it comes to government agencies that have suffered the most from this Trumpian takeover, none are as complete or as concerning as the Department of Homeland Security. On its best days, DHS is a walled garden of cops all hotboxing themselves with reactionary politics. Under Trump, it’s essentially become a hive of outlandish herrenvolk propaganda, pumping neo-Nazi memes into the social media bloodstream—the better to recruit the sort of person who might want to inflict terror on the streets of American cities.

As The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant documented, DHS’s tainted origin as a post-9/11 agency with a monomaniacal focus on Muslim extremism—and with a storied history of downplaying the threats of white nationalism—has only grown even more corrupted by the second coming of Trump. “We are doubling back around the same circular path,” Grant observed, “where agencies such as DHS downplay white nationalist violence, both potential and actual, while they draw recruits from those same ranks.”

For a future Democratic president, the challenge of righting the ship of state will not simply be a matter of reviving the federal workforce and bringing competent professionals back to the perches they once occupied. It will be a matter of fumigation, as well—or, to use a better term, lustration, which Yale Law professor Dina Francesca Haynes, writing immediately after the first Trump administration, defined as “the process of vetting and removing from public service those who engage in or support extremism or seek to undermine democracy.”

Lustration, Haynes explained, “has been carried out or proposed in many countries attempting to pull themselves from the wreckage of fascism, genocide, and nationalism.” As Haynes described, the idea is that for a country to successfully “move forward” from its authoritarian past, “it must rid itself of corrupt public servants by vetting them, and potentially dismissing from employment and cancelling pensions of those who harbor such deep bias that it would be impossible for them to fairly and impartially exercise the discretion they have been granted by virtue of their position in public service.”

This is something that those of us at The New Republic have already begun considering as a necessary bridge back to a functioning democracy. In fact, as The New Republic’s Matt Ford pointed out as he gamed out what a future president could do to gut ICE, Trump himself has already provided the working blueprint for a quick and effective purge of any Trumpian fifth column that might remain gummed in the gears of government after the president leaves office. A future president can claim the same “vast powers to decide the fate of federal agencies,” including terminating employees, cutting funding, and transferring staff and programs to other agencies.

Elsewhere, Ford also suggested that a future Democratic president make use of the power Trump claimed for himself to “reduce headcounts through a reduction in force, perhaps by firing every agent hired since 2024.” As Ford opined at the time, the administration’s “decision to drastically reduce hiring standards for incoming ICE agents would more than justify such a sweeping action.” That the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is studded with people who shouldn’t be managing a Pizza Hut, let alone prosecuting civil rights offenders, suggests there is ample room to expand these principles of lustration throughout a Trump-tainted civil service.

As I’ve said before, the right way to think about the Trump administration and its wholesale operations across the federal government is to accept the fact that it is essentially a criminal syndicate, dedicated to self-enrichment and political corruption. The next Democratic administration should have accountability on its mind, and a commitment to rooting out the Trumpian rot that’s infected the civic architecture of this great nation. It might be that the most useful thing the Trump administration has accomplished in its odious lifetime is to provide the playbook to right its wrongs and dismantle Trumpism permanently.

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