Like many Americans, I’ve been watching with fascinated horror the Trump administration’s first big steps towards mass deportation, and wrote about the political underpinnings of the issue at New York:

To those who are worried about the threat to the rule of law represented by the first president to enter the White House as a convicted criminal, the brinkmanship being exhibited by Team Trump over court orders involving an erroneously deported immigrant seems ominous.

The Trump administration has been taunting the judiciary via dilatory tactics and obfuscation in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This protected-status immigrant from El Salvador, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has three children, was shipped off to a brutal Salvadorian rent-a-prison without due process, based on a faulty identification.

U.S. district court judge Paula Xinis has ordered the administration to find and return Abrego Garcia so that he can receive due process prior to deportation, and a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court concurred that the order must be obeyed, albeit with some consideration of the complications of the case. But even though Judiciary Department lawyers have admitted in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was the result of an error, the White House has stalled in complying with Xinis’s order. And in a bizarre Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran president (and self-described dictator) Nayib Bukele, Trump and his attorney general suggested it was now Bukele’s problem. The Salvadoran leader said he would not “smuggle” a “terrorist” back into the United States. Right there in front of the cameras, White House policy director and infamous nativist Stephen Miller misstated the Supreme Court decision and kept referring to Abrego Garcia as a terrorist, the disputed attribution at the very center of the legal case. It all seemed like an extended mockery of the rule of law.

The administration is clearly playing rope-a-dope on the entire situation. And while it may ultimately comply with the courts, extract Abrego Garcia from prison, and give him a real hearing, the political question is why Team Trump is dragging this out in the glare of global bad publicity. Is this really the ground on which the 47th president will trigger a much-feared constitutional crisis by openly defying the judicial branch of government, including the Supreme Court that has been so very good to him? That’s what a lot of Trump critics believe is happening before our incredulous eyes.

I personally believe the administration will eventually submit to the courts, albeit as minimally as possible. But it’s possible Team Trump thinks the president’s foreign-policy powers, which they claim are at stake in such cases, are strong enough that it’s the Supreme Court that will submit to Trump’s authority to do as he wishes with immigrants.

Politically speaking, this is a fight the administration is eager to take on even if it temporarily loses, because it’s all happening on Trump’s favored turf at the intersection of the immigration and crime issues. At a time when the president is losing popularity steadily thanks to his economic policies, and particularly his tariff policies, it’s probably a relief to get back to the argument that America is succumbing to an “invasion” by criminal immigrants eager to rape, pillage, and eat pets. It seemed to have worked in 2024. Why not in 2025?

Recent polls regularly confirm that of all the controversial things Trump has done in the first 11-plus weeks of his second term, his handling of immigration policy is the most popular. This is true in polls that rate his overall job performance negatively (an April 8 Economist–YouGov survey giving him a net minus-seven approval rating overall but a plus-six approval rating on immigration) and positively (an April 10 Harvard–Harris survey giving him a net plus-two approval rating overall but a plus-seven approval rating on immigration). It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that when the full implications of the Trump-Miller immigration agenda become manifest, particularly when legal immigrants and even citizens are affected, this general-public approbation will fade or even head due south. Indeed, pollster G. Elliott Morris has published an analysis arguing that support for Trump’s positions declines steadily as questions about them become more specific:

“[W]hen various pollsters asked if they would support deporting immigrants who have been here more than 10 years (as in the case of Abrego Garcia), U.S. adults said “no” by a 37 percentage point margin; Americans disapprove of deporting immigrants who have broken no laws other than laws governing entry; they oppose deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign jails, such as [El Salvador’s] CECOT, and they oppose housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay while they are processed. All of these are policies the Trump administration has now floated or is actively carrying out.”

So the administration may be guilty of rhetorical overreach on immigration at a time when the mass-deportation program is actually going pretty slowly. But what about all the constitutional fears raised by cases like that of Abrego Garcia? Won’t Americans recoil at those signs of a presidency determined to become imperial? Maybe not.

Team Trump has clearly internalized one of the big lessons of the 2024 presidential election: that threats to “the rule of law” or “the Constitution” or “democracy” don’t mean a lot to persuadable voters who are most concerned about living costs and their own sense of well-being. If what Trump tried to do on January 6, 2021 doesn’t rise to the level of a voting issue for well over half the electorate, then is there any reason to believe that Abrego Garcia’s “due process” rights will matter? What is “due process,” anyway? Like the “presumption of innocence” from which Abrego Garcia should also benefit, it’s a legal concept that an awful lot of regular folks either don’t understand or find problematic, particularly when applied to someone the president of the United States has labeled an alien criminal terrorist.

So Team Trump is happy to defy the rule of law, at least at a level short of overt defiance, in any controversy involving immigrants. It pleases the nativist MAGA base immensely to see the administration run circles around “activist judges” in ridding the country of the people Democrats allegedly brought in to “replace” the country’s historic white majority. And it’s unclear at this point that Democrats and other Trump critics can make smash-and-grab ICE operations that land peaceful American residents in overseas hellholes as frightening as they should be. But as with the increasingly unpopular Trump tariff program, the immigration agenda may lose support the longer, the louder, and the more chaotic it becomes.

I realize trade policy has been a very contentious issue among Democrats during the last 30 years or so. But they absolutely must seize the current opportunity to go after Trump’s tariff program, as I argued at New York:

For months, Democratic elected officials have been trying to figure out a compelling message on Donald Trump’s agenda that will gratify the grassroots Democratic demand for vocal and united opposition. At the moment, the headlines are full of extremely high-profile turmoil involving Trump’s “Liberation Day” agenda of tariffs and trade warfare. It is likely getting the attention of not only politically active people but anyone whose investments or 401(k) accounts are affected by equity markets. And there is zero question that rank-and-file Democrats hate what Trump is trying to do with greater unanimity than on any of the other things they hate about Trump 2.0. If you have any doubts about that, check out the very latest, post–Liberation Day findings from Quinnipiac:

“97 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of independents and 44 percent of Republicans think the tariffs will hurt the U.S. economy in the short-term. Forty-six percent of Republicans, 19 percent of independents and 2 percent of Democrats think the tariffs will help the U.S. economy in the short-term. …

“95 percent of Democrats, 57 percent of independents and 10 percent of Republicans think the tariffs will hurt the U.S. economy in the long-term. Eighty-seven percent of Republicans, 35 percent of independents and 3 percent of Democrats think the tariffs will help the U.S. economy in the long-term.”

You don’t see polling that conclusive very often, even in this era of hyper-polarization. But beyond the simple fact that the Democratic base instinctively hates Trump’s tariff agenda, this should strike Democratic politicians as a heaven-sent opportunity to expose Trump on an issue of maximum vulnerability: the cost of living. One would think, given the crucial importance of this issue to his victory over Joe Biden last November, that the 47th president would do anything imaginable to avoid a spike in consumer prices anytime soon. But instead, Trump is courting exactly the worst kind of disaster, and voters across the board recognize it:

“Most Americans are bracing for higher prices on a wide range of consumer goods following President Donald Trump’s move to impose sweeping new tariffs on imports from most of the world, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

“The three-day poll, which concluded on Sunday, found that 73% of respondents said they thought prices in the next six months would increase for the items they buy every day after the new taxes on almost all imports took effect.”

So in recognition of this potentially earth-shaking own-goal by Trump, the product of his economic ignorance and long-held ideology, Democratic elected officials should be issuing a trumpet call of great volume and total clarity, right?

Check out this description in the Washington Post of a speech by one of the Democratic Party’s brightest stars and see if it reflects the total opposition to Trump’s tariff agenda that is clearly called for at this particular moment:

“Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, sought Wednesday to distinguish herself from fellow Democrats who have been strongly criticizing President Donald Trump and his tariffs, offering a more nuanced assessment during a speech emphasizing bipartisanship in Washington.

“The speech came ahead of a meeting with Trump at the White House, her second since Trump returned to office.

“Whitmer made clear that she disagreed with Trump’s sweeping and abrupt use of tariffs, saying it has been ‘really tough’ on her state and the auto industry that powers its economy. But she withheld more pointed criticism of the president, saying she understands the “motivation” behind his tariffs and agrees that Americans ‘need to make more stuff in America.'”

Now, as it happens, Whitmer made her mixed message immeasurably worse by immediately going into a private Oval Office meeting with Trump that the president (either craftily or fortuitously) turned into a photo op in which the Michigan governor stood there while he signed some particularly obnoxious executive orders. It’s not exactly the picture of vicious hand-to-hand combat with the authoritarian of the White House that grassroots Democrats have been demanding. But Whitmer’s not alone in struggling to bring herself to blast Trump’s tariffs entirely, as Jonathan Chait quickly pointed out at The Atlantic:

“Two days after President Donald Trump’s shambolic “Liberation Day” announcement, which set off a full-scale economic meltdown, House Democrats released a video response. It was oddly sedate, almost academic in its nuance. The video featured Representative Chris Deluzio, from western Pennsylvania, who calmly intoned, ‘A wrong-for-decades consensus on “free trade” has been a race to the bottom’ and ‘Tariffs are a powerful tool. They can be used strategically, or they can be misused.’

“As the American public was screaming, ‘Please, God, no!’ the Democrats were calmly whispering, ‘Yes, but.’”

From a purely historical perspective, this anti-anti-protectionism is astounding. Until very recently, basic support for free trade (albeit sometimes with exceptions) was the oldest continuing policy tradition of the Democratic Party. Every Democratic president from Martin Van Buren to Barack Obama favored expanded global trade to create new markets and reduce consumer prices. But, as Chait observed, that changed with Joe Biden, who embraced “a decade-old strategy designed to co-opt Trump’s appeal to working-class voters by backing away from the party’s general support for free trade under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama” (and, I’d add, under Wilson, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, and Carter). This reversal was reinforced by multiple factors, including the longtime protectionism of manufacturing unions, the hostility to globalization among progressive activists, and the pivotal role Rust Belt swing states have played in the politics of the Trump era. It’s no coincidence that Whitmer represents one of those states, and one in which Democrats have long embraced trade restrictions.

In the current Trump 2.0 emergency, maintaining an anti-anti-protectionist position is incredibly shortsighted. Democrats do not need to declare themselves 100 percent free traders in order to 100 percent deplore what Trump is doing, instead of tut-tutting that he’s doing a good thing in a bad way. Trump’s innate 19th-century protectionist instincts will always create enormous pressures for falling economic growth and rising consumer prices; indeed, the ultimate economic nightmare of stagflation is precisely what some economists consider the most likely consequence of a MAGA trade war.

If Democrats believe half of what they are saying about the threat to democracy Trump 2.0 represents, they’ll recognize that a strong pushback against Trump’s tariffs is absolutely the best way to undermine his political position and divide Republicans, a majority of whose elected officials are stone free traders in the Reagan-Bush tradition. Democrat thinkers and political practitioners have plenty of time to figure out exactly what their own international economic policies will be if they regain the White House in 2028. But if they don’t take full advantage of the present opportunity to unite grassroots Democrats and inflation-hating voters generally and exploit Trump’s unforced errors on trade policy, they will have nobody but themselves to blame if power continues to remain elusive.

Taking a closer look at some of the 2024 trends that have alarmed Democrats, it’s possible to see some silver linings, and I wrote about a couple of them at New York:

In the 2024 presidential election, Republicans performed better among marginal voters than the opposition, which meant that a boost in turnout would improve their percentage of the vote, reversing a longtime Democratic advantage. A second and even-better-known development was a significant boost in the Republican vote among Democratic “base” constituencies, particularly Latinos and Gen-Z voters.

These are both good long-term signs for the GOP. But in the very short term, as in the elections between now and 2028, they could portend underwhelming results for Republicans. For one thing, their new success among marginal voters in a high-turnout presidential election will not matter much in special, off-year, or midterm elections, when the voters Democrats now rely on are relatively sure to show up, particularly given the current panic over Trump 2.0’s radical early shape. And as Politico notes, right there in the 2024 returns are signs that the GOP’s overperformance among Democratic base voters probably won’t carry over to non-presidential elections. That’s because there was a lot of ticket-splitting last November, notably among Latinos:

“Underlying the 2024 election results was a subtle trend that could signal a dramatic reshaping of the electorate: a surge in ticket-splitting among Latino voters who shifted sharply toward Donald Trump but also supported Democratic House and Senate candidates.”

This helps explain why Democrats managed to win Senate races in four states Trump carried (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin) and no less than 13 House races in districts carried by Trump. It seems entirely probable that downballot Democratic strength will carry over to the midterm congressional elections of 2026, as Politico suggests — unless, of course, 2024 reflected a more fundamental shift that will intensify even without Trump on the ballot:

“Heavily Hispanic and Latino areas that saw significant ticket-splitting are key to many swing districts and battleground states. The party that can win over those voters — Republicans converting Trump supporters into reliable GOP voters, or Democrats bringing them back into the fold more firmly — will have a clear electoral advantage in the years ahead.”

I wouldn’t count on long-term trends toward the GOP mattering much in the midterms, particularly given the other dynamic we are likely to see in 2026: an almost invariable loss of support by the party controlling the White House. One leading indicator: Of the 13 House districts that went for both Trump and a congressional Democrat in 2024, six have electorates that are at least 40 percent Latino. Democrats in those districts should do pretty well without a presidential candidate dragging them down.

Right now, I don’t think many Democrats are all that worried about how they’ll do in 2028 or 2032 or 2036. A comeback right away would be most welcome both in boosting Democratic morale and warning Republicans that all the over-the-top triumphalism we’re hearing from MAGA folk is built on a fragile foundation.

 

This week’s election results in Wisconsin had a pretty clear message for Democrats, as I explained at New York:

The most tiresome intra-Democratic debate of them all soon reached crisis levels after Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory. Should the “party of the people” focus on the threat to democratic institutions MAGA authoritarians most definitely pose? Or should they instead pursue lost non-college-educated voters via the ancient “populist” formula of class warfare over purely economic issues? The debate has often become very personal, with “populists” tending to dismiss arguments about democracy as elitist mumbo jumbo unintelligible to working stiffs who just want to see the money, and people frightened about fascism worrying that Americans will cheerfully sell out our heritage of liberty for $2 a gallon gas.

Fortunately, and just in the nick of time, a figure has emerged at the highest levels of government who can instantly unite “populists” and “defenders of democracy.” That would be Elon Musk, who is simultaneously the richest man on earth (and in modern history) and an even greater threat to democratic institutions than Trump. He is, moreover, via the DOGE initiative, waging aggressive war on public-sector programs that restrain his tiny class of corporate predators and benefit the general public while violating every constitutional norm imaginable. And suffusing this entire assault on the people and the institutions to which Democrats should feel loyalty is a nihilistic personality exhibiting some of the worst impulses of the human race: narcissism, messianism, ethnocentrism, worship of power and technology, and a testosterone-poisoned lust for combat and destruction. It’s as though Bruce Wayne had decided to become the Joker instead of Batman.

Terrifying as Musk is, Democrats should thank their lucky stars that he doesn’t simply operate in the background of the MAGA movement, financing Trump’s antics but otherwise remaining anonymous. No: He has insisted on a very public place on the stages of politics, commerce, and culture, rivaled only by his benefactor and enabler in the White House. And the more people see of him, the less they seem to like him.

This week’s judicial election in Wisconsin shows what happens when this peculiar man makes himself the center of attention in a popularity contest not limited to his sycophants on X. The most polarized electorate in the entire nation fed by the most expensive campaign ever to revolve around judges decided by a healthy margin that they did not want Elon Musk in charge of their destiny (much less the “destiny of humanity” he so fatuously claimed was at stake). And better yet, the dispirited ranks of Democrats turned out disproportionately at the polls in the first electoral test since last November’s disaster.

It’s now clear that so long as Musk is the most powerful figure in the administration and the living symbol of Trump 2.0, Democrats should make Musk-bashing even more of a daily preoccupation than it has already become. Populists can draw fresh attention to the very real class implications of DOGE’s assault on corporate regulation and on practical services like Social Security offices accessible to old folks and medical facilities that can keep middle-class people alive. Defenders of democratic institutions can continue to expose (and attack in courts) the arrogant pretense that self-appointed engineers who brag about their destructive intentions should be entrusted with “reforming” government. And everyone can keep exposing the deeply sinister tech-bro worldview Musk and his accomplices exemplify, aimed at converting the United States of America into a privately held corporate oligarchy governed by insanely wealthy elites deploying AI at will and treating life itself as a video game in which the losers are the rest of us.

Musk-bashing won’t solve all the problems facing Democrats. They still need to regain public trust about their own values and competence. For one thing, DOGE’s very existence remains a terrible indictment of the contempt for government that is now so epidemic, and that Democrats have for so long either ignored or tried to buy off with popular benefits; they need their own credible “government reform” agenda and the determination to carry it out.

But make no mistake: Elon Musk is a political gift, particularly if his ego and Trump’s reliance on his support mean he will insist on keeping himself front and center, showing up at Cabinet meetings and MAGA rallies alike while indulging his endless glossolalia on X. So long as he remains the face of Trump 2.0, Democrats would be wise to make sure that face is the first thing Americans think of when they survey the political landscape. If Musk and DOGE crash or are subdued by the jealous god in the Oval Office (as some reports suggest Trump has signaled may happen), that is a very good thing in itself and a worthy goal for the opposition.

 

Cory Booker’s 25-hour Senate speech this week broke all kinds of records, obviously. But it also should make Democrats rethink the idea that some bumper-sticker-length message is the key to beating Trump, as I argued at New York:

My initial take on the news that Cory Booker was going to hold the Senate floor for many hours to dramatize his opposition to Trump 2.0 was a bit despairing: Having demonstrated that they no longer have any leverage over the administration and its supine congressional allies, Senate Democrats would now just talk as long as they could, as the chamber’s rules allowed. It wouldn’t change anything, but what was the harm?

But now that Democrats everywhere are greeting Booker’s historic non-filibuster filibuster with joy, I realize there was a practical benefit to his feat of endurance beyond consigning Strom Thurmond’s 1957 speaking record to the dustbin of history, where it belongs next to the segregationist cause it served. After months of strenuous efforts by Democrats to identify a precise silver-bullet argument against Trump’s agenda and how it was being pursued, Booker showed pretty unmistakably that a general indictment of the administration and its enablers, delivered with passionate intensity, is actually what alarmed Americans are craving.

Booker didn’t concentrate on Trump’s potential Medicaid cuts, illegal deportations, cruelty to public employees, abandonment of Ukraine, violations of civil liberties, reckless tariffs, usurpations of legislative powers, rampant corruption, or thuggish threats to federal judges. He talked about all this and more as a way to dramatize the ongoing assault on both democracy and the well-being of poor and middle-class Americans.

It’s the sheer avalanche of bad policies, bad administration, and bad faith that makes the current situation such an emergency. And forgetting about that in order to identify some single poll-tested nugget of messaging has been a mistake all along. Among other things, the coolly analytical approach of sorting and weighing Trump outrages robs such criticism of the moral outrage circumstances merit. Booker wasn’t just appealing to a rhetorical tradition in treating today’s challenges as a “moral moment” requiring the “good trouble” exhibited by the civil-rights movement. He was calling attention to the fact that the MAGA movement truly has mounted a sustained, comprehensive assault on decades of slow but steady progress toward a wide array of worthy goals involving the health, wealth, liberty, and happiness of the American people, all in pursuit of a hallucinatory, often destructive vision of “American greatness.”

This does not mean other Democrats should emulate Booker by seizing the nearest megaphone and talking for many hours. But it does mean a broad coalition of resistance to Trump 2.0 may require an equally broad message about what’s going on in this country and why it’s urgent to push back. Calling to mind the wide variety of outrages underway could also help Democrats develop a broad, credible agenda for what they intend to do if and when they return to power. Every day, it’s becoming more obvious that just returning to the federal policies and personnel in place on January 19, 2025, won’t be advisable or even possible. Rebuilding an effective set of public institutions and domestic and international relationships will involve the work of many hands, and many words of inspiration from leaders like Cory Booker.