Having lived through a lot of military conflicts that initially enjoy bipartisan support, I thought it was important to note at New York that Trump’s Iran War is different:

As expected, on March 4 the U.S. Senate rejected Tim Kaine’s War Powers Act resolution ordering Donald Trump to cease attacks on Iran within 30 days unless he gets congressional authorization. It was basically a party-line vote, with (as is often the case) Rand Paul voting with Democrats for the resolution and John Fetterman voting with Republicans to kill it. The vote was mostly symbolic anyway since the House counterpart resolution was on the road to failure, too, and Trump could veto any war-powers measure that arrived at his desk.

But what the Senate vote did establish is that Trump can conduct his war on Iran without interference from Congress indefinitely — or more specifically, until the Pentagon runs out of money to prosecute it. And once again, his party is fine with giving this supposedly peacemaking president a blank check, even though he’s done a wretched job of providing any coherent rationale for going to war, any consistent set of war aims, or any clear timetable for winding it all down. The branch of the federal government with the exclusive constitutional authority to declare war seems ready to stand aside.

If the war does drag on long enough to exhaust the vast new funding Congress gave the Pentagon last year, there’s already talk of giving it more. Senator Lindsey Graham, credited (or blamed, by some) for talking Trump into a regime-change war against Iran, made that clear this earlier this week, notes Politico:

“During closed-door meetings on Capitol Hill … senior intelligence and defense officials described a vast military operation that many members anticipate will require extra funding on top of the nearly $1 trillion Congress has already given the military over the last year.

“’I think there will be a supplemental coming,’ Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters upon leaving his classified Senate briefing. ‘We’ll have to approve that.’”

Actually, they won’t “have to” approve additional funding. If the money runs out, suddenly Democrats will have some leverage over this war, just as they do over all spending that’s not provided for in a filibusterproof package like last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (which by all accounts isn’t happening again prior to the midterms and won’t happen at all if Democrats flip control of the House in November). And despite their tendency to write blank checks for this administration, cries for more money for the war in Iran could arouse questions from conservative fiscal hawks, as a separate Politico report observes:

“Passing any emergency funding will be a major fight on Capitol Hill, with Democrats already decrying the lack of details about how much the military is spending and Republican fiscal hawks wary of more spending. Reuters reported Tuesday that Deputy ‌Defense ⁠Secretary Steve Feinberg has been leading Pentagon work on a roughly $50 billion request.”

This does create a messaging problem for those Republican fiscal hawks who happily vote to let the president do whatever he wants with our country’s massive war machine but aren’t sure they want to pay for it. Just as importantly, a debate over war funding in Congress would provide a forum for Democratic questions about the purpose and duration of a conflict no one had reason to anticipate just a few weeks ago.

So for now, Republicans fully own this war, and share responsibility for the president’s decision to make it his top priority for the foreseeable future. It comes at the expense of other international obligations, and instead of any action on an “affordability agenda” his advisers and GOP lawmakers have been begging him to undertake ever since Democrats began winning off-year elections in 2025. Trump’s party better hope it all goes very well and ends very quickly.

At New York, I offered some thoughts about the opportunity costs (and for Democrats, opportunities!) of Trump pursuing a war of choice in an election year:

Donald Trump’s “war of choice” against Iran is a big departure from his administration’s alleged determination to focus on improving the domestic economy and addressing concerns about affordability before crucial midterm elections this November. But aside from the president’s spectacular failure to stay on message, there is a more specific problem with the sudden lurch into a regional war in the Middle East. To the extent Trump had an actual affordability agenda (other than calling concerns about living costs “a hoax”), a central pillar was keeping energy prices low by demolishing any obstacles to maximum exploitation of fossil-fuel resources. Aside from the beneficial effect this might have on prices for other goods and services influenced by energy costs, the “drill baby drill” mentality was designed to reduce gasoline pump prices, one of the most visible inflation indicators from the perspective of regular folks.

Suddenly, the United States has produced an energy-price crisis for itself and for the whole world, Reuters reports:

“Traffic through the Strait ​of Hormuz was closed for a fourth day after Iran attacked five ships, choking off a key artery accounting for about 20% of global oil and LNG supply. …

“The conflict risks triggering a renewed spike in inflation that could choke off economic recovery in Europe and Asia if the war is prolonged in a region that accounts for just under a third of global ​oil production and almost a fifth of natural gas.

“Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, on Tuesday said it may be forced to cut production by more than three million barrels per day ​in a few days if oil tankers cannot move freely to loading points, according to two Iraqi oil officials.”

While other countries face the most dire immediate economic consequences from a war that Trump is now projecting to last a month or more (“whatever it takes,” to be precise), it’s about to affect Americans too:

“American motorists could soon pay more at the pump amid spiking oil prices due to the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran, with experts predicting gasoline prices could rise sharply this week.

“The price of West Texas Intermediate crude, a type of oil primarily produced in the U.S., jumped 6.2% on Monday to $71.19 per barrel, according to data from FactSet. Brent crude, the international benchmark, surged nearly 9% to $79.31 per barrel on Monday, its highest point in more than a year.

“Gas prices in the U.S. could start moving higher as soon as Monday, according to GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan, who predicted that some gas stations could be charging as much as 30 cents more per gallon by the end of the week.”

And the indirect effects could be even more severe, as Canadian energy expert Rory Johnston told our own Benjamin Hart:

“I think if this lasts a couple more days, we’ll see it reflected at the gas pump in terms of overall gas prices. Diesel will be even more acutely affected. I think the big impact will be on freight and shipping rates, and that’s going to hit consumers more on the price of produce, the price of random consumer goods. That’s the type of stuff that diesel will complicate more. So I think you will see an impact at the price of the pumps, but the biggest impact won’t be as visible to consumers immediately. It will take a while to work through the supply chain.”

As part of their furious spin about a war that’s already unpopular outside Trump’s Republican base, administration gabbers are arguing that Trump’s expansion of fossil-fuel production is giving him the strategic flexibility to wreck global oil markets without catastrophic consequences, notes the New York Times:

“The Trump administration has said that it has more leeway to act aggressively in the Middle East because the world is flush with oil and gas, thanks in part to record U.S. production, and has less to fear than it once did from energy price shocks.

“The ongoing war in Iran could put that theory to the test.”

While it may be comforting to Americans to be told they won’t be paying as much for this war as they might have had Trump not impatiently brushed aside environmental fears about fossil fuels, it doesn’t explain the decision to subordinate economic policy to another presidential military adventure. Yes, MAGA true believers are buying Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear-weapon and missile programs posed an immediate threat to the United States, but other Americans aren’t at the moment. So his decision go in this radical direction sure looks like a conscious choice to subordinate the daily concerns of his own people to a globalist agenda and an alliance with Israel that already troubles a majority of Americans.

Even as Republicans cheer this war, Democrats have an obligation to discuss the agenda being blown up by the explosions in Iran.

After recovering from the dull headache induced by watching Trump’s State of the Union Address, I gave some thought at New York to the growing resistance of MAGA folk to any “pivot to affordability” prior to the midterms.

Virtually every Republican political strategist agrees that the economy, and particularly the cost of living, will be the dominant issue in the 2026 midterms. Convincing swing voters that Donald Trump is decisively bringing back the best-ever economy and lowering the price of essential goods and services — which he promised to do a thousand times during his 2024 campaign — is the key to the Republican Party’s hopes of defying the odds and hanging on to control of Congress in November. It’s reinforced by many polls that show the economy is the No. 1 concern for voters, and that there’s a great deal of anxiety, some of it generated by the rise of AI and the immense power of billionaires on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, that goes beyond prices at the gas pump and the grocery store.

But just as the midterm campaign season begins in earnest, Trump’s MAGA movement, and perhaps Trump himself, are showing signs that they really don’t want to dwell on the economy beyond braying that it’s better than ever, blaming Democrats for every problem, and implying that unhappy Americans are ingrates.

Immigration has always been the favorite issue of Trump’s base. What made Trump’s 2024 comeback magical to his most loyal supporters was that he finally stopped dillydallying around with border walls and travel bans and pledged to deport every single undocumented immigrant in the country, and maybe some documented immigrants as well, as part of an effort to purify a country cursed by diversity.

A year ago, the immigration issue was a net positive for Trump as border crossings plunged. But it soon became obvious that his mass-deportation program would go far beyond the “worst of the worst,” or the violent criminals Trump and J.D. Vance liked to talk about, to encompass millions of peaceful, productive people working in farms and factories and hospitals. Many were legally in the country under refugee protections the administration soon revoked. Some were small children, others even citizens, including bystanders who had the temerity to get in the way. And the whole enterprise was being supervised by the cartoon villains Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, deploying a huge army of hastily assembled and poorly trained masked thugs. When immigration agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota and virtually the entire administration lied about it, the issue turned sharply negative for Trump and the GOP. Hence the demand in Republican ranks for an “affordability pivot” that would displace images of blood in the streets with hopes of relief from high prices and poor job security.

Then came the president’s State of the Union address, in which he churned through the affordability passages in a sleep-inducing manner and only came to life when he could return to savaging immigrants and the Democrats who defended them. And now a reenergized MAGA movement is waging a two-front war to keep immigration front and center in the national political discourse.

First, Trump supporters are running ads capitalizing on the Trump SOTU stunt in which he demanded that Democrats (who had agreed to a strategy of seated, “silent defiance” during the speech) stand up to validate a contrived choice between protecting “American citizens, not illegal aliens.” The big narrative line on the first ad I saw was: DEMOCRATS ARE FOR ILLEGAL ALIEN CRIMINALS.

We will see these images again and again in individual and partywide GOP campaigns between now and November, suggesting that Democratic protests over ICE tactics and mass-deportation overreach are just a veil for a fundamental disloyalty to the country. This was a big part of Trump’s 2024 campaign narrative, and it’s back with a vengeance now.

Second, MAGA influencers are joining Trump in insisting that congressional Republicans make promoting the SAVE Act, their top, and perhaps only, priority this year. The bill would deny voter registration to anyone who cannot produce very specific documents proving citizenship. Democrats universally oppose this legislation, partly because it addresses a completely imaginary noncitizen-voting plague and partly because up to 21 million U.S. citizens don’t have ready access to the documentation it requires. If imposed in the brief period prior to the midterms, the legislation would upturn voter rolls and suppress millions of valid votes.

SAVE Act proponents understand perfectly well that it will never see the light of day in the Senate. But they are nonetheless insisting that Senate Republicans keep it on the floor for weeks, maybe even months, in an effort to force Democrats to stop it via a “talking filibuster” that would have to go on and on. Senate Republican leader John Thune is beside himself about these demands, Punchbowl News reports:

“[House Speaker Mike] Johnson has met with and boosted MAGA influencers like Scott Presler, who are leading the charge.

“The online vitriol has become so heated that all of Thune’s social media posts — even one congratulating a Korean War hero awarded the Medal of Honor — are regularly spammed with calls to pass the SAVE America Act, some using threatening language.

“Thune has also been on the receiving end of public and private lobbying from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), both on X and during senators-only GOP Conference meetings.”

Advocates for the SAVE Act invariably cite polls showing strong bipartisan support for some sort of voter ID (which most states require anyway prior to voter registration or initial voting) that’s far short of what this legislation would demand. It’s likely that if Republicans insist on a monthslong national debate on the subject, support for this specific kind of voter ID would steadily shrink. But any way you slice it, a day spent ventilating about the completely made-up noncitizen-voting scourge (and all the attendant conspiracy theories and election denials justified by this myth) is a day when Republicans are not addressing affordability. That might be fine with MAGA activists, but GOP candidates in purple states or marginal districts will surely think otherwise. Aside from the peril associated with ceding economic issues to Democrats, a nation riveted on immigration is going to be reminded again and again that the Trump administration is carrying out mass deportation in a manner that large majorities of Americans are rejecting as cruel and unnecessary. It’s a lose-lose proposition for the GOP, but MAGA does not care.

Looking back at the last Trump Midterms of 2018, and ahead to 2026, a destabilizing possibility occurred to me that I discussed at New York:

This week, there’s been a lot of attention focused on the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to its stunning decision blowing up the rationale for Donald Trump’s tariff agenda. In his bitter remarks about the decision, the president went out of his way to praise dissenters Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh.

It’s Alito who could make some additional political news later this year. To understand why, you must step back to 2018, when Trump faced his first midterm election as president and the dynamics looked grim. He had lost the popular vote in 2016. His job-approval ratings had been underwater from the second week of his term in office. One of his two big first-term initiatives, legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, had ended in dismal failure. And unsurprisingly, his party wound up losing 40 net U.S. House seats and control of that chamber.

But at the same time, Republicans actually posted a net gain of two U.S. Senate seats and increased their majority from a fragile 51-to-49 margin to a more robust 53 to 47. Why? Well, according to many GOP spin-meisters, it was to a significant degree owing to “Kavanaugh’s revenge,” as CNBC reported at the time:

“Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., both credited the so-called Kavanaugh effect for Republican victories in key Senate races against red-state Democrats.

“Graham, in a thread of tweets Wednesday morning, said that the constituents of those Democratic incumbents who voted against Kavanaugh ‘held them responsible for being part of a despicable smear campaign orchestrated by the left.’

“The ‘#KavanaughEffect,’ Graham said, should be renamed ‘#KavanaughsRevenge’ …

“Republicans in critical states for the party were ‘highly offended’ by the Democrats’ conduct during the confirmation proceedings, McConnell said, and the fallout from the process acted ‘like an adrenaline shot for GOP turnout.”

Graham, as you may recall from his feral attacks on Senate Democrats during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, chaired the Judiciary Committee during that confirmation fight and contended that accusations of sexual assault against the soon-to-be Justice were blatantly unfair — nay, villainous. So it was natural for him to claim the hearings enraged both Republicans and swing voters and saved the Senate (an interpretation that also inflated his own importance, as it happens).

It was a dubious interpretation of the midterms at the time, but the important thing is that many Republicans believed it. And that could feed a parallel development going into the 2026 midterms: a possible retirement by Kavanaugh’s senior and very right-wing colleague Samuel Alito.

Alito has been on retirement watch for a while now. He’s 75 years old (and will turn 76 on April 1) and recently celebrated 20 years on the Supreme Court. And as the intrepid Court watcher Joan Biskupic noted in 2024 after he twice lost an initial majority on a case, Alito’s influence within the Court has been slipping, leaving him visibly frustrated:

“Alito has long given off an air of vexation, even as he is regularly in the majority with his conservative ideology. But the frustration of the 74-year-old justice has grown increasingly palpable in the courtroom. He has seldom faced this level of internal opposition.

“Overall, Alito wrote the fewest leading opinions for the court this term, only four, while other justices close to his 18-year seniority had been assigned (and kept majorities for) seven opinions each.

“His unique year in chambers was matched by the extraordinary public scrutiny for his off-bench activities, including lingering ethics controversies and a newly reported episode regarding an upside-down flag that had flown at this home in January 2021, after the pro–Donald Trump attack on the US Capitol.”

There is also evidence that Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, would like him to step down from the bench so that both of them can openly express their political opinions.

Thus, there’s been speculation, mostly from the political left, that an Alito retirement could happen before or immediately after the current Supreme Court term. The Nation’s legal expert Elie Mystal, then Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Joseph Stern, drew attention to the odd timing of a new Alito book. Here’s the clue on which Mystal focused:

“[T]he book is scheduled to be released October 6, 2026. That’s a curious date. The Supreme Court starts its 2026–27 term on October 5, the first Monday of October. Alito’s book is set to drop the next day.

“It sure feels like Alito doesn’t plan on having a real job the Tuesday his book launches and instead thinks he’ll be free to run around the country promoting it.”

There’s also a political reason Alito might want to step down at this particular moment. He clearly cares about his legacy on the Court and wants to solidify the conservative majority for which he and Justice Clarence Thomas have served as the point of an ideological spear. Trump is leaving office at the beginning of 2029, and it’s possible Republicans will lose their Senate majority in November. Confirmation of anyone remotely like Alito would be impossible with a Democratic Senate and difficult with a smaller majority than Republicans currently enjoy.

Add in the “Kavanaugh’s revenge” theory of 2018, and you can see why Republicans might really want to press for an Alito retirement and then a good, savage Senate confirmation fight over a controversial nominee to succeed him, possibly 40-somethings like Andrew Oldham or Emil Bove, both Trump-nominated Circuit Court judges. If Alito was to retire at the end of the current term (perhaps announcing the retirement earlier), then the shape of the future Supreme Court could become a base-mobilizing issue for the GOP, all right — but potentially also one for Democrats.

That leads us back to the idea that poor Kavanaugh’s persecution by Democrats “saved the Senate” in 2018. The alternative explanation is that Republicans had an insanely favorable Senate landscape that year in which three Democrats who lost (Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri) were doomed from the get-go by the rapidly rightward trends of their states, and a fourth, Florida’s Bill Nelson, lost by an eyelash in another red-trending state after being massively outspent by then-Governor Rick Scott.

Even if you believe the Kavanaugh fight provided Republicans with a net benefit in 2018, there’s no reason to assume the same thing will happen in 2026, a year in which the Senate landscape is far less favorable to the GOP than it was in 2018.

But between Alito’s motives for retiring, the GOP’s fear that it could lose control of the confirmation process, and the “Kavanaugh’s revenge” mythology about 2018, don’t be surprised if there’s a Supreme Court fight this summer or fall. Democrats would be happy to bid farewell to the author of the infamous decision reversing Roe v. Wade. Even if it hurts rather than helps their midterm prospects, Alito’s right-wing fans will be happy to welcome a younger version of the cranky conservative onto a life-time seat on the Court.

Texas state legislator James Talarico got quite a bit of buzz for his semi-censored interview with Stephen Colbert, which went viral on YouTube. But as I noted at New York, the substance of what the Texan had to say about Christian Nationalism was significant too, particularly when compared to what’s being said at the Pentagon lately:

At the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on February 5, President Donald Trump indulged himself in a 75-minute rambling tirade devoted to glorifying himself, attacking his enemies, claiming a Republican monopoly on faith, and pledging to “viciously and violently” defend his kind of Christians. But his wasn’t the most alarming speech at the event. That distinction belonged to Trump’s secretary of Defense, as Baptist minister Brian Kaylor observed:

“Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself the ‘Secretary of War,’ spoke after Trump to baptize the U.S. and especially its military. He did so by highlighting the worship services he’s been leading at the Pentagon. And he even suggested that soldiers can gain salvation by fighting for the United States.

“’America was founded as a Christian nation. It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it. And as public officials, we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify him,’ Hegseth said as he pointed upward. ‘That’s precisely why we instituted a monthly prayer service at the Pentagon, an act of what we see it as, spiritual readiness.’”

This was just an appetizer. As Kaylor notes in a separate dispatch, Hegseth has used his government-sanctioned Pentagon worship services to promote the rawest kind of Christian nationalism, most recently treating military leaders to the spiritual stylings of Doug Wilson:

“The Idaho pastor and self-described ‘paleo-Confederate’ preached about the importance of trusting God for protection in battle and praised the monthly worship services as perhaps a sign of a new revival like the Great Awakening or the biblical Day of Pentecost….

“Wilson, an outspoken proponent of Christian Nationalism, has sparked numerous controversies over the years for what he preaches and teaches. He has downplayed the horrors of slavery and defended enslavers. He also pushes a hardline version of patriarchy, not just insisting only men can serve as pastors or in other church leadership roles but also that they should rule in families.”

Hegseth doesn’t just promote Wilson’s views at the Pentagon; he is a member of a congregation affiliated with the denomination Wilson founded and seemed thrilled to be able to welcome this prophet of patriarchy to bless America’s war fighters: “Thank you for your leadership, for your mentorship, for the things you’ve started, the truth you’ve told, your willingness to be bold.”

Irreligious folk accustomed to hearing this sort of divinization of cultural conservatism proclaimed as “Christianity” should be aware that this isn’t what all Christians believe. Indeed, when it comes to the fraught subject of church-state separation, Christian nationalists stand at one extreme on a spectrum that includes many millions of believers who staunchly defend rigorous church-state separation on religious grounds. The same day that Hegseth and Wilson were whooping it up for a militarized American Jesus, Texas legislator and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico gained a viral YouTube audience for an interview with Stephen Colbert in which he pronounced Christian nationalism as a dangerous heresy:

“We are called to love all our neighbors, including our Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, atheist neighbors. And forcing our religion down their throats is not love. It’s why I fought so hard for that sacred separation in our First Amendment.

“My granddad [a Baptist minister] raised me to believe that boundary between church and state doesn’t just benefit the state or our democracy, although it certainly does, but it also benefits the church.

“Because when the church gets too cozy with political power, it loses its prophetic voice, its ability to speak truth to power, its ability to imagine a completely different world. And this separation between church and state is something we have to safeguard. It’s something we have to fight for.

“And I think we need someone in the U.S. Senate who is going to confront Christian nationalism and tell the truth which is that there is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism. It is the worship of power in the name of Christ. And it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Talarico, as it happens, is a Presbyterian seminarian. Mainline Protestant horror at the Prince of Peace being turned into a Man of War is not unusual, although until now it has gotten little attention. Alongside the faith-based backlash to Trump’s mass-deportation effort, which is especially strong among Catholics, we are beginning to receive regular reminders that alongside partisan and ideological polarization is a quiet battle among religious believers spurred by the particularly aggressive version of Christian nationalism espoused by Trump allies. It may be an accident that Talarico’s interview went viral after CBS clumsily discouraged its airing at the behest of Trump’s FCC chairman Brendan Carr. But the MAGA conquest of American Christianity will not be uncontested.

Like a lot of Democrats of a certain vintage, I felt sad and old upon hearing of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s passing. But at New York I undertook a brief reassessment of his political legacy, and came away more impressed than ever.

As a longtime Democratic National Convention staffer, I have two ineradicable memories of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who died yesterday at the age of 84. The first was a famous moment at the 1988 convention, when, after a hard-fought primary season, he endorsed nominee Michael Dukakis in what everyone instantly recognized as the best speech of the entire campaign cycle.

The second was a quiet, behind-the-scenes moment at the 2000 convention, when Jackson entered a rehearsal room where I was working. The last thing he needed was a rehearsal, and it turned out he showed up only so his wife, Jacqueline, could stand behind the rehearsal podium and get a sense of what it was like to address a national convention.

Whether in a huge arena or a small room, Jackson commanded attention wherever he went and represented a challenge to anyone complacent about the Democratic Party or America itself. Now that he’s gone, it’s appropriate to assess his political legacy. As a former policy director of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council — a group Jackson often criticized and once excoriated as “Democrats for the Leisure Class” — I feel particularly compelled to express appreciation for his accomplishments, which were sometimes easy to underestimate in the heat of intraparty conflict. Without question, he was the best orator of his generation. But he aimed, and succeeded, at so much more than words.

First and most obviously, Jackson proved a Black politician could run a viable presidential campaign. In 1984, he was the first significant Black presidential candidate since Shirley Chisholm in 1972 and much more successful as a vote getter. In 1988, his campaign rose to another level, winning over 6 million votes, 13 primaries or caucuses, and over a thousand delegates, making him the clear runner-up to the nominee. By the time the Democratic convention of 2004 rolled around, the two big oratorical stars were Jackson protégé Al Sharpton and the dazzling young state senator from Jackson’s hometown, who would become president just four years later. (As Barack Obama rightly said yesterday, “We stood on his shoulders.”)

By 2020, two Black candidates ran major presidential campaigns and Black political self-expression was secure enough that Black voters were crucial in awarding the nomination to Joe Biden. When the second Black presidential nominee was named in 2024, her gender was probably more controversial than her race. None of this would have been possible without Jackson.

Second, Jackson presented a vision of the Democratic Party as a “rainbow coalition” of interest and identity groups united around a progressive agenda. This seems rather unremarkable today, but when Jackson was at his peak in influence, Democrats had a severe identity crisis over the loss of traditional voting blocs like white southerners and white ethnic Catholics and was focused more on trying to win them back than on looking for new constituencies. Jackson’s campaigns helped turn Democrats toward their own future.

And while Jackson could battle with the best of them for the “soul of the Democratic Party,” he was a pragmatist, too. He once told a DLC conference the party needed “two wings to fly,” and his support for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns was crucial.

But third, it’s important for self-identified centrists like me to admit that Jackson was right and we were wrong about some important policy issues. As New Republic editor Mike Tomasky points out in his assessment of the Jackson legacy, there was a pointed edge to the “two wings to fly” message:

“’It takes two wings to fly,’ I remember Jackson saying regularly at the time, reminding the dominant centrists that there were Democrats who were leery of free trade, angry about this new problem of income inequality, perfectly happy with big government, and eager to see their party defend unions and workers.

“The centrists called the shots for a long time. But 30 years on, who’s won that economic argument? On the four matters I name above, and a few more, it’s Jackson’s positions that are today ascendant. And it all traces back to his brave decision to confront Reaganism head-on at the precise moment that it was at its most triumphant. Jackson was a man of many accomplishments, and yes, a fair share of flaws. But for that decision, he deserves our thanks, and history’s respect.”

Democrats today call for renewed courage in the face of great adversity, an unalloyed commitment to progressive values like inclusion and equality, a connection with the great social movements of the past, and yes, the ability to speak compellingly with some poetry as well as prose. Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is the heir to the 20th-century reactionaries Jackson grew up battling. The struggle to overcome it is very much part of his legacy too.

It’s a week, a month, a year when Republicans will continue to demand federal legislation to prevent the phantom menace of non-citizen voting. So at New York I wrote about new evidence that the whole thing is just an excuse to keep citizens from voting.

This week, congressional Republicans will counter Democratic demands for ICE reform by changing the topic to alleged noncitizen voting. The House is expected to pass the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act once again, though Democrats are sure to block it in the Senate. The SAVE Act would prevent roughly 21 million U.S. citizens from voting by requiring that they produce documentation they don’t have (like a Real ID, passport, or birth certificate). The premise for this legislation is dubious. It suggests that vast numbers of people are defying existing federal and state laws prohibiting noncitizen voting and influencing U.S. elections.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the myth of mass noncitizen voting to the MAGA mind-set. It’s at the heart of the white-supremacist Great Replacement Theory, which claims nonwhite immigrants are taking over America via the ballot box. And it’s not just fringe voices pushing this myth. It’s the basis for Donald Trump’s bizarre claim in 2016 that he would have won the popular vote against Hillary Clinton if not for the “millions” of votes cast by illegal immigrants. It’s a key part of Trump’s 2020 “stolen election” claim as well. In 2024, it ascended to the level of a foundational myth in MAGA circles. Throughout the campaign, Trump claimed America had been destroyed by traitorous Democrats who had opened the borders to herd millions of criminals into the country. Supposedly, once here, these “worst of the worst” aliens preyed on innocent citizens, fleeced taxpayers by accessing welfare benefits, and went to the polls to keep their Democrat enablers in power.

Given that background, it’s no surprise that the second Trump administration has put so much emphasis on aggressive mass-deportation efforts and on addressing mostly imaginary noncitizen voting with executive orders (like the one he issued in March on “election integrity”), legislative proposals (like the SAVE Act), and sinister-sounding plans to monitor and perhaps “take over” polling places during the 2026 midterms, potentially with armed thugs.

There has never been any evidence of signifiant levels of noncitizen voting in the United States. As Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice observed in 2024, it’s an “urban myth”:

“It’s worth saying, once again, that the notion of widespread noncitizen voting is a lie. An urban myth. It’s simply not true. States have a multiplicity of systems in place to prevent it from happening. Noncitizen voting is illegal four times over, and the reality is that it’s incredibly rare. My colleagues at the Brennan Center have compiled these resources on the topic. We’re fighting fear with facts.”

Recently, several states have conducted investigations into noncitizen voting, checking voter rolls against citizenship status. As Stephen Richer, a Republican and a former local-election official from Arizona, pointed out in a New York Times op-ed last week, all of these probes found noncitizen voting is “virtually nonexistent.”

Richer cited data from multiple states: There’s Utah, where an analysis of 2.1 million voter registrations found one noncitizen; Idaho, where noncitizens were found to represent “10 thousandths of a percent” of the voter rolls; and Louisiana, whose 390 verified noncitizen voters sounds substantial until you realize there are 2.9 million registered voters there; and Georgia, “in some ways the model for these investigations,” where a 2024 audit found 20 noncitizens among 8.9 million people on the voting rolls.

Michigan, said Richer, offers a good example of how even the tiny numbers of suspected noncitizens tend to melt away on examination:

“In Michigan, the Macomb County clerk, Anthony Forlini, who is running for the top election office in the state, the secretary of state, recently announced to great fanfare that he’d found 15 noncitizens on his county’s voter rolls of over 724,000 registered voters. The incumbent secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, then tasked her team with investigating the 15 files. It found that three of the people were U.S. citizens, four were previously removed from voter rolls, four were under further investigation and four do seem to be noncitizens.”

Richer added his own testimony: “In my four years in office in Maricopa County overseeing voter registration, I came across a total of two possible instances of noncitizens voting out of some 2.5 million registered voters.”

No, these jurisdictions don’t include the entire country, but if the conspiracy theory of a nationwide Democrat plot to overwhelm the country with noncitizen voting were real, there would be evidence everywhere. Instead, it’s nowhere.

We’ll hear much more this midterm election year about the SAVE Act and perhaps about ICE raids on or near polling places. These aggressive efforts to root out voter fraud are unnecessary and dangerous; they’re a real threat to democracy masquerading as a way to address an imaginary threat to democracy. The Big Lie of widespread noncitizen voting is a far bigger problem than the minimal noncitizen voting that appears to exist. Instead of making American citizens show their papers to exercise their constitutional rights, MAGA folk should be challenged to show their evidence.

There’s been a lot of talk about venerable European parties melting down. At New York I discussed why this is happening and whether it could happen here.

If you aren’t too distracted by the unprecedented events in America’s political system recently, you might have noticed that even more shocking developments have overtaken established and once-indomitable political institutions in Europe. These include the stunning, real-time apparent collapse of the two major parties in Great Britain.

Politico’s Jamie Dettmer observes it like this:

“They seem like punch-drunk prizefighters struggling to catch their breath as they slog it out. Is the party over for Britain’s storied heritage parties?

“Neither the Conservatives nor their traditional Labour rival have proven strikingly fit for purpose for some time. Their combined share of the vote in recent elections has been falling and the tribal loyalties they could always rely on in the past are eroding. Increasingly the public impression is that neither has the ability to tackle the country’s huge post-Brexit problems.”

The Conservatives (a.k.a. Tories), a center-right party from the 19th century that gave the U.K. Disraeli, Churchill, and Thatcher, suffered the worst electoral fiasco in British history in 2024:

“They lost almost 70 percent of the 362 seats won just five years earlier. And equally alarming for party bosses, they attracted their lowest share of the vote ever in their modern history — a remarkable humbling for a party often cited as the most successful in the democratic world.”

Meanwhile, the left-leaning Labour Party has rapidly lost popularity since its massive electoral win in 2024.

With the two major parties in freefall, the ascendant entity is U.K. Reform, formerly the Brexit Party. Until very recently, Reform was a pariah party widely considered to be a xenophobic gang of demagogues. But it has not only won over the Tory rank and file, it has also attracted a growing number of high-level Conservative converts — former Tory members of Parliament and government officials who have switched their affiliation to Reform. This upstart, right-populist party generally comes out on top in U.K. polling these days.

In general, the two-party system in Britain as we’ve known it seems to be in danger of collapsing, Dettmer suggests:

“Scottish and Welsh nationalists have chewed away at the mainstream parties. So, too, have the revived Liberal Democrats — had they attracted two or three percent more of the overall vote 16 months ago, they might have won more seats than the Tories, becoming the main official opposition party. And now the Tories have a genuine competitor on the right.”

For many years, Britain’s first-past-the-post election system (like ours) was considered an unassailable barrier to minor parties, but it doesn’t appear that way right now.

This phenomenon is not limited to Britain — across Europe, many other center-left and center-right parties are seemingly being marginalized by new populist parties. In Germany, the far-right AfD party — endorsed by Elon Musk in late 2024 and defended by J.D. Vance in early 2025 — is threatening the power of the conventionally conservative Christian Democratic Union, the party of Angela Merkel and many other German leaders. At the same time, the center-left Social Democrats, an electoral powerhouse dating back to the late 19th century, is losing vote-share to the recently created left-populist BSW party. In France, fragmentation of past political allegiances has become the rule, along with predictable instability. But there, too, a far-right party (if an older, better-established one), Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, has become the largest political force in the country.

There is no single reason for these destabilizing political trends, but it’s clear that ambivalence about economic globalization, heavy levels of refugee migration, and the dislocations created by the COVID pandemic have all contributed to the struggles of the old centrist parties and the rise of more politically extreme competitors.

Of course, this isn’t limited to Europe — similar dynamics have roiled American politics. So it’s worth asking: Can the major-party meltdown spread to the United States?

Certainly there are pervasive signs of popular disgruntlement with both Republicans and Democrats. Gallup has been tracking self-identified party affiliation since 2001, when Americans were almost evenly divided into Democrats, Republicans, and independents. As of 2025, 45 percent self-identified as independents, an all-time high, while 27 percent identified with each of the major parties. But in contrast to Europe, none of this disaffection has fed the growth of minor parties. Indeed, in both 2020 and 2024, the major-party share of the presidential vote rose to 98.1 percent, as compared to 94.3 percent in 2016 (and as low as 81 percent in 1992). Nor have any of the periodic efforts to organize a new “centrist” third-party borne any fruit, despite constant complaints about partisan and ideological polarization. Yes, America’s own first-past-the-post system has made it hard to organize, fund, and gain ballot access for nonmajor parties. The major parties have fought like hell to maintain their duopoly.

But something else is clearly going on. And the most obvious thing when you compare the United States to Europe is that the “populist” movements that have upended the centrist parties across the pond have gravitated here toward one of the major parties, the GOP. Indeed, instead of undermining the two-party system, the enemies of globalization, refugee migration, and pandemic-driven anti-elitism have reinforced it as they took control of the Republican Party via the MAGA movement of Donald Trump.

There are, unsurprisingly, distinctly American mutations of right-wing populism in the MAGA takeover of the GOP. There’s the very un-European religiosity of both pre-Trump and post-Trump grassroots conservatives, compounded by an anti-government ethos that helped fuse the interests of populists and economic elites. Trump’s own cult of personality helped make the transition from the old to the new system rapid–not only in his party but among Democrats, where ideological differences were generally subsumed in a common response of horror at the changes in the GOP.

What killed off much of the old pre-Trump Republican Party was the dynamic that accompanied its birth back in the 1850s: the rapid replacement of one of the two major parties by a new and different electoral coalition. America didn’t need a Reform U.K. or an AfD or a National Rally party to represent a radical new movement of cultural, economic, and social reaction. It had Trump’s GOP.

The issue that Democrats last year thought might boost them this year has not gone away. One key Senate candidate understands, as I noted at New York:

Enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies benefiting over 20 million Americans expired at the end of last year. It was such a big deal that the need to address it became the principal Democratic rationale for triggering the longest government shutdown in U.S. history last October. It remained a big deal as 2026 arrived: The House actually passed a “clean” three-year extension of the subsidies on January 8, with 17 Republicans joining Democrats on the vote. There were bipartisan negotiations in the Senate to cut a deal that would include some sort of subsidy extension.

Republicans were all over the place on health-care costs more generally. Some tried to change the subject to non-insurance health-care cost issues like pharmaceuticals. Others spoke of some huge conservative health-care overhaul that would be enacted on a party-line vote using budget reconciliation (a sort of One Big Beautiful Bill Act 2.0). On January 15, Donald Trump himself suddenly announced he was unveiling a “Great Healthcare Plan” that turned out to be a hodgepodge of old Republican gimmicks fleshed out with vague promises, with no real plans for legislation.

And then … everyone got distracted, mostly because federal immigration agents conducted a mass-deportation “surge” in Minneapolis that resulted in two deaths, a terrorized city, worldwide outrage, and a partial government shutdown. Even as the two parties in Congress fought over the immigration-enforcement guidelines Democrats were demanding, prospects for any sort of bipartisan action on health care sickened and died, as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week:

“Top Senate negotiators said an effort to renew expired healthcare subsidies had effectively collapsed, likely ending the hopes of 20 million Americans that the tax-credit expansion could be revived and lower their monthly insurance premiums.

“Talks had centered on a proposal from Sens. Bernie Moreno (R., Ohio) and Susan Collins (R., Maine) to extend a version of the enlarged Affordable Care Act subsidies for at least two years, while cutting off higher-income people from participating and eventually giving enrollees the option of putting money into health savings accounts. It also would eliminate zero-dollar premium plans. But lawmakers from both parties now say the chances of a deal have all but evaporated.

“’It’s effectively over,’ Moreno said Wednesday. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.)—the architect of an adjacent plan—agreed.”

Some conservative Republicans are still talking about a second budget reconciliation bill to repeal and replace Obamacare (the task that famously eluded them during Trump’s first term), but this seems extremely unlikely given the fragile nature of GOP control of the House, obvious intraparty divisions over the substance of health-care policy, and the universal preoccupation with the midterms.

Speaking of the midterms, every day that goes by without action on the aftermath of the Obamacare subsidy lapse, it becomes an even more potent campaign issue for Democrats. One Democratic senator whose reelection in November is critical to his party’s hopes of flipping the Senate, Jon Ossoff, has made it his principal campaign issue. It’s pretty clear why he’s focused on the issue. Georgia, like other red states that rejected the Affordable Care Act’s optional Medicaid expansion, is a place where reliance on private health-insurance markets that go under the name of Obamacare is especially important. About 1.5 million Georgians, or 13 percent of the state’s population, obtained health insurance via Obamacare in 2025. Facing premium hikes, that number has dropped by 200,000 in 2026 so far. And those sticking with their policies are paying premium increases averaging 75 percent over last year’s costs. Ossoff talks about this problem constantly:

“‘If we don’t extend these tax credits, it’s projected that half-a-million Georgians will lose their health insurance altogether,’ Ossoff said [in early January]. ‘More than a million Georgians will see their health insurance premiums double, in some cases triple.’

“’I challenge all of my opponents today … to make clear where they stand,’ Ossoff said. ‘This is not a time for vague promises and political talking points. Do my opponents support throwing half-a-million Georgians off their health insruance? … I think it’s a very straightforward policy and moral question.’”

Ossoff is taking advantage of the fact that three major Republicans who are competing in a tight race to oppose him in November — congressmen Buddy Carter and Mike Collins and former football coach Derek Dooley — want to discuss almost anything else. Carter and Collins voted against the subsidy extension, and Dooley has no known position. As they compete for a potentially decisive Trump endorsement for their May primary (with a June runoff quite likely), they are not about to go out on any limbs on health care, particularly if it involves continuing what Trump calls the Unaffordable Care Act.

While the issue is particularly acute in Georgia, it will be a point of contention in campaigns everywhere, particularly if Trump and the GOP continue to ignore it or make vague promises to do something about health-care costs some other day in some other ways. Health-care policy has been a political albatross for Republicans for many years, and this looks like one year it could weigh on them heavily.

I certainly don’t make a habit of criticizing congressional Democrats, who have an especially difficult job right now. But their handling of the crisis over immigration enforcement really struck me as misguided, and I said so at New York:

A brief but loud partial shutdown of the federal government ended yesterday when just enough House Democrats joined Republicans in approving appropriations for a host of major departments, along with a ten-day stopgap spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security. Now, supposedly, the two parties will negotiate over the rules governing the immigration-enforcement activities DHS supervises, particularly through its lethal ICE and Border Patrol agents.

But nobody believes these negotiations will go anywhere. Here’s how Punchbowl News puts it:

“Is there any agreement that Republicans and Democrats could reach that makes some progress but leaves everyone a bit disappointed?

“Probably not.” 

Politico reports there’s “broad Republican opposition” to the kinds of restrictions on ICE that Senate Democrats have already proposed, which are themselves considered weak tea by many progressive Democrats, not to mention the grassroots activists who want ICE closed down forever. Meanwhile, there’s steadily increasing pressure in the GOP ranks to counter Democratic demands with proposals to crack down on “sanctuary cities” or to impose vast new “show your papers” requirements on people who want to vote in November to address imaginary widespread noncitizen voting.

If, as appears very likely, negotiations on immigration enforcement go nowhere or even go backwards by February 13, when the continuing resolution for DHS runs out, what then? Republicans are talking about another short-term CR, or even one that runs until October. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is saying “hell no” to that, and again, Punchbowl News reports there is “zero chance” of Senate Democrats supplying enough votes to just fund DHS under present levels until the end of the year. And in the meantime, MAGA Republicans will be tempted to sabotage any accommodation by attaching nativist poison pills to any DHS continuing resolution.

What all this means is that the partial government shutdown that ended yesterday will soon morph into just a DHS shutdown, while the two parties shout past each other about ICE and sanctuary cities. This will, it’s important to understand, have no effect whatsoever on immigration enforcement. ICE and the Border Patrol have access to an immense slush fund created by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which means that absent new legislation restricting their operations, they are free to continue their brutal treatment of immigrants and protesters. The brunt of a DHS shutdown will fall entirely on parts of other parts of DHS like FEMA, TSA, and the U.S. Coast Guard, all of which perform vital services unrelated to immigration enforcement. In that very likely scenario, Democrats will have achieved less than nothing from their decision to use appropriations to block or reform ICE.

It may perhaps be protested that Democrats have drawn new and powerful attention to the abuses of power being exercised by masked agents on the orders of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem. But in truth, the whole world was already watching the terrible scenes from Minneapolis thanks to the courage of observers who recorded every nanosecond of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and of protesters around the world who made sure we didn’t avert our eyes. All congressional Democrats have done is to rush to the front of the parade of protesters and pretend they were doing something to stop the assault on Minneapolis. Perhaps continued public outrage and the likelihood of midterm-election consequences will convince the Trump administration to get a grip on its thugs and even ramp down mass deportation to less disruptive levels. But congressional Democrats will have little or nothing to do with it.

It’s hard for politicians to admit their powerlessness or acknowledge that empty gestures of defiance really do nothing to “stop Trump.” After the midterms, they may have the real ability to force changes of policy on the tyrant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But for now, congressional Democrats are just noisy bystanders. They should recognize their limited role in the resistance to Trumpism and act more strategically.