Vivek Ramaswamy is too young to remember George Wallace. I remember him well, which is why Ramaswamy’s snarky effort to compare Gavin Newsom to him drove me to a refutation at New York:

The last time tech bro turned politician Vivek Ramaswamy waded into American political history, he was touting Richard Nixon as the inspiration for his own foreign-policy thinking, so to speak. Unfortunately, he betrayed a pretty thorough misunderstanding of what Nixon actually did in office, not to mention somehow missing the Tricky One’s own role model, the liberal internationalist Woodrow Wilson.

Now the freshly minted candidate for governor of Ohio is at it again with an analogy aimed at Gavin Newsom that nicely illustrates the adage from This Is Spinal Tap that “there’s a fine line between clever and stupid.” He made this comparison on social media and on Fox News:

“I actually like Gavin Newsom as a person, but he won’t like this: there’s another Democrat Governor from U.S. history that he’s starting to resemble – George Wallace, the governor of Alabama who famously resisted the U.S. government’s efforts at desegregation. In 1963, JFK had to deputize the Alabama National Guard to get the job done, just like President Trump is doing now: – George Wallace fought against federal desegregation; Gavin Newsom now fights against federal deportations. – George Wallace wanted segregated cities; Gavin Newsom now wants for sanctuary cities. – George Wallace blocked school doors; Gavin Newsom blocks ICE vans. It’s the same playbook all over again: dodge the feds, rally the radicals, & do it in front of the cameras to pander to their base to carve out a lane for their presidential goals. And mark my words: Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambitions will end the same way George Wallace’s did – in the dustbins of history.”

Putting aside for a moment Ramaswamy’s dumb little quip about Newsom and George Wallace representing the same “Democrat governor playbook” (it would take all day simply to list the wild differences between these two men and the states and state parties they governed), his facile comparison of their stances toward the exercise of presidential power doesn’t bear any scrutiny at all. When George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” to block the enrollment of two Black students at the University of Alabama, he was defying a nine-year-old Supreme Court decision, an untold number of subsequent lower-court decisions, and ultimately the 14th Amendment, on which Brown v. Board of Education was based. He wasn’t opposing the means by which the federal government sought to impose desegregation, but desegregation itself, and had deployed his own law-enforcement assets not only to obstruct desegregation orders, but to oppress and violently assault peaceful civil-rights protesters. That’s why President John F. Kennedy was forced to either federalize the National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama or abandon desegregation efforts altogether.

By contrast, Newsom isn’t standing in any doors or “blocking ICE vans.” The deportation raids he has criticized (not stopped or in any way inhibited) are the product of a wildly improvised and deliberately provocative initiative by an administration that’s been in office for only a few months, not the sort of massive legal and moral edifice that gradually wore down Jim Crow. And speaking of morality, how about the chutzpah of Ramaswamy in comparing Trump’s mass-deportation plans to the civil-rights movement? Even if you favor Trump’s policies, they represent by even the friendliest accounting a distasteful plan of action to redress excessively lax immigration enforcement in the past, not some vindication of bedrock American principles. No one is going to build monuments to Tom Homan and Kristi Noem for busting up families and sending immigrants who were protected by law five minutes ago off to foreign prisons.

As he made clear in his speech last night, Newsom objects to Trump’s federalization of Guard units and planned deployment of Marines on grounds that they are unnecessary abrogations of state and local authority transparently designed to expand presidential authority as an end in itself. George Wallace made defiance of the federal government under either party’s leadership his trademark. John F. Kennedy wasn’t spitting insults at him as Trump is at Newsom; he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, negotiated constantly behind the scenes to avoid the ultimate confrontation with Wallace. There’s been nothing like that from Trump, who has all but declared war on California and then sent in the troops to run Los Angeles.

Beyond all the specifics, you can’t help but wonder why the very name “George Wallace” doesn’t curdle in Ramaswamy’s mouth. If there is any 21st-century politician who has emulated the ideology, the tactics, the rallies, the media-baiting, the casual racism, and the sheer cruelty of George Wallace, it’s not Gavin Newsom but Donald Trump. I understand Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t old enough to remember Wallace and his proto-MAGA message and appeal, but I am, and there’s not much question that if the Fighting Little Judge of 1963 was reincarnated and placed on this Earth today, he’d be wearing a red hat and cheering Trump’s assaults on what he described as the “anarchists … the liberals and left wingers, the he who looks like a she” and the professors and newspapers that “looked down their nose at the average man on the street.”

This terrifying week in California had a high point after all, and I wrote about it at New York:

In the second Trump administration, Democrats have had trouble finding a focal point for their opposition to the 47th president’s riotous agenda. It’s significant that the most galvanizing moments for congressional Democrats have been the scattered and uncoordinated signage they displayed during Trump’s address to Congress in March and a 26-hour filibuster by Senator Cory Booker in April. Neither provided much in the way of clear and sustainable leadership. Grassroots protest activities have ramped up significantly since January as Team Trump began violating constitutional norms and threatening key public services almost hourly; the “Hands Off” protests in April were impressive. But the net effect is reflected in the contrast between next weekend’s massive show of military force in Washington to celebrate Trump’s birthday and the diffuse “No Kings” events around the country aiming to counteract it. The opposition needs a singular voice among the many voices of protest.

Trump’s assault on Los Angeles and California may have provided such a focal point in the unlikely figure of Gavin Newsom. Longtime observers of the two-term governor, former San Francisco mayor, and veteran chaser of spotlights know him to be a man who sees a future president of the United States in his bathroom mirror each morning. But despite his obvious brains and policy chops, he’s never quite overcome his reputation as someone whose ambition isn’t matched by the political skills needed to achieve them, a problem displayed most graphically when he provoked a 2021 recall election by violating his own pandemic rules to attend a party for a lobbyist at one of the most exclusive restaurants in the world.

Most recently, California’s budget problems have forced Newsom to reverse his state’s long march toward expansion of health care and other progressive initiatives. A month ago, he looked a lot like a former political star beginning to fade from sight.

All that was changed by the Trump administration’s decision to go nuclear on California with respect to a broad range of policy disputes. Even as the president threatened to eliminate all federal assistance to the state to punish it for its alleged “wokeness” and incompetence, ICE launched widespread raids in and near the heavily Latino city of Los Angeles, and then Trump poured gasoline on small protest fires by federalizing National Guard units and deploying U.S. Marines. For all the world, it looked like the federal government was declaring war on the Golden State and its governor, whom it threatened to arrest and jail.

Now Newsom is rising to the occasion, delivering the best opposition speech of Trump’s second term. In a Tuesday evening address, Newsom said that the president sending the military to Los Angeles is just the first step in a broader move toward authoritarianism.

“California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here,” Newsom said. “Other states are next. Democracy is next … the moment we’ve feared has arrived,” he added.

Newsom’s speech, carefully scripted and telepromptered (a practice he normally disdains) and broadcast nationally through multiple social-media outlets, was notable for its simple and calmly expressed indictment of the administration’s conduct in Los Angeles and its defense of the besieged city and state. He made a point of denouncing violence by protesters and accepting the need for immigration enforcement that properly targets dangerous criminals, while accusing the president of deliberately creating an unnecessary crisis in order to inflate his own power. Newsom said:

“We’re seeing unmarked cars, unmarked cars in school parking lots. Kids afraid of attending their own graduation. Trump is pulling a military dragnet all across Los Angeles, well beyond his stated intent to just go after violent and serious criminals. His agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers and seamstresses.

“That’s just weakness, weakness masquerading as strength. Donald Trump’s government isn’t protecting our communities. They are traumatizing our communities. And that seems to be the entire point.”

Then the governor pivoted to the national implications:

“If some of us can be snatched off the streets without a warrant, based only on suspicion or skin color, then none of us are safe. Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.

“Trump and his loyalists, they thrive on division because it allows them to take more power and exert even more control. …

“[T]his isn’t just about protests here in Los Angeles. When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard. he made that order apply to every state in this nation.

“This is about all of us. This is about you.”

Newsom provided a subtle but unmistakable contrast with those who have responded to Trump’s provocations and power grabs by seeking compromises, making concessions, or changing the subject, as CNN observed:

“Newsom, people familiar with his thinking say, wants California to hold the line after some universities and law firms facing White House pressure reached concession deals with the administration.

“’What Donald Trump wants most is your fealty. Your silence. To be complicit in this moment,’ Newsom said in remarks released Tuesday evening. ‘Do not give into him.’”

It’s possible Trump’s war on California won’t be front of mind in a week or a month, but it’s more likely he and his allies will continue to demonize a state that Trump mocks for its struggles with wildfires and a metropolis that DHS secretary Kristi Noem calls “a city of criminals.” Every day this continues, with or without the deployment of troops or more terror tactics from ICE, Trump makes the California governor nationally relevant and potentially presidential. And nobody has spent more time preparing for this moment than Gavin Newsom.

One of the more outrageous Trump power grabs yet is occurring without much public attention, so I gave it a shout at New York:

With all the chaos that has pervaded the federal bureaucracy in Trump’s second term, some very basic MAGA “reforms” may have escaped attention. The best known is the reimposition of the so-called Schedule F, an initiative adopted late in the first Trump administration (and promptly revoked by Joe Biden) that reclassified around 50,000 civil service positions into political appointments. But as Don Moynihan explains, that initiative just makes it easier to fire “deep state” bureaucrats who haven’t bent the knee to the new regime. A broader hiring initiative has just been announced by the Office of Personnel Management, which is basically the federal government’s HR agency. Called the Merit Hiring Plan (reflecting the wording of the Trump executive order that mandated it), the initiative has many interlocking provisions aimed at simplifying and, well, politicizing federal hiring practices, partly to kill, bury, exhume, and kill again anything that looks like DEI policies, but also to build a spanking-new federal workforce composed of “patriotic,” hardworking proles.

What leaps right off the page and punches you in the mouth is the initiative’s new rules for federal job applications. All applicants for jobs graded at GS-5 or higher (or roughly 94 percent of federal jobs) will have to answer (in less than 200 words each) four essay questions. Two are pretty banal, involving testaments to applicants’ work ethic and examples of efficiencies they’ve achieved in prior jobs. A third raises some eyebrows:

“How has your commitment to the Constitution and the founding principles of the United States inspired you to pursue this role within the Federal government? Provide a concrete example from professional, academic, or personal experience.”

This is pretty rich coming from an administration whose leader has suggested he may not have to uphold the Constitution in his own job (notwithstanding that it was right there in his oath of office). In addition, the “founding principles of the United States” is a fairly subjective notion. But there’s a fourth essay question that takes the cake:

“How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.”

Now keep in mind that Trump’s EOs include such matters as the demonization of law firms and individuals who have crossed Donald Trump in the past. Would it be kosher for someone applying for a GS-6 gig to write a few sentences about how she or he will help implement Executive Order 14246, “Addressing Risks for Jenner and Block”? Expanding the scope of essays into presidential “policy priorities” adds an element of rather extreme subjectivity into the process. Do Trump “policy priorities” include items like his frequently repeated insistence that federal judges (particularly those he appointed) owe him 100 percent loyalty, or that Canada should become the 51st state? Do they extend to the policy priorities of his Cabinet members, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA anti-vaccine and anti-fluoride initiatives?

While much is unclear about this question, what’s unmistakable is that all federal job applicants are essentially being instructed to demonstrate their personal commitment to Trump and his erratic if very loud worldview. This isn’t just a hortatory gesture either; the OPM memo announcing the Merit Hiring Plan sets up monitored benchmarks for agency compliance beginning this month. As Moynihan notes, this is wildly unprecedented:

“I cannot think of anything like this level of politicization being formally introduced into the hiring process. Under the George W. Bush administration, it was a scandal when appointees in the Justice Department were caught scanning candidate CVs for civil servant positions to try to discern their political leanings. Now they will just ask them to explain how they can serve President Trump’s agenda. Within the space of a generation, backdoor politicization practices went from being a source of shame to a formal policy.”

Without much question, a No Democrats Need Apply policy would be in place. But it would guarantee massive turnover in the federal workforce the minute a Democrat — or even a Republican who isn’t a Trump mini-me — is elected president:

“With this policy, any future President would know that some portion of their workforce was selected because they had expressed explicit support with their predecessor, and an agenda that the current President might disagree with. For all the Republican complaints about rooting out “the deep state” or “Democrat holdovers” the policy specifically encourages selection into permanent civil service based on political leanings that will invariably run contrary to future Presidents. They want to build their own deep state!”

To put it another way, this Merit Hiring Plan institutionalizes a spoils system beyond the wildest dreams of the corrupt political bosses of the distant past. It deserves a lot of attention right now, if only to warn the poor schmoes who might want to apply for some lower-level federal job that they’d better bone up on their Trump EOs and get ready to pucker up and pledge allegiance. And of course, they better bury any past Democratic associations while they are at it.

As a long-time fan of Iowa politics, I was delighted to see some good news for Democrats appear in that once-competitive state, and wrote about it at New York:

Up until now, Iowa has been the poster state for Donald Trump’s alleged electoral revolution. Prior to Trump’s first race, it went Democratic in six of the seven presidential elections (and went Republican only by an eyelash in the other). Then Trump carried the state by 9.5 percent in 2016, by 8.2 percent in 2020, and by 13.2 percent in 2024. The red tide in the land of corn wasn’t strictly at the presidential level, however. As recently as 2018, Democrats won three of Iowa’s four U.S. House seats. Since 2022, all four have been occupied by Republicans. In 2016, the GOP won its first Iowa state government trifecta since 1998, and has held it ever since. And after the 2014 elections, Republicans held both U.S. Senate seats for the first time since 1984, thanks to the defeat of Tom Harkin’s hand-picked Democratic successor, Bruce Braley, at the hands of a state legislator with a background in hog farming and distinguished National Guard service, Joni Ernst.

Now an embarrassing gaffe from Ernst may have helped open the door to a 2026 midterm comeback by Iowa’s downtrodden Democrats. At a town hall meeting, Ernst dismissed a highly predictable question about the possibility of deaths ensuing from her party’s proposed cuts in Medicaid and SNAP benefits by snarkily saying, “Well, we are all going to die.” Worse yet, when her remarks spurred outrage and a lot of attention, she doubled down in a contemptuous Instagram post:

This hasn’t been a great year for the junior senator from Iowa. Before she sneered at the idea of poor people dying, she provided a profile in cowardice when threats of a MAGA primary challenge changed her almost overnight from a key Armed Services Committee skeptic of Defense-secretary nominee Pete Hegseth into a cheerleader for his confirmation. And now her previously 100 percent–sure reelection race in 2026 is attracting some potentially serious competition, as the Cedar Rapids Gazette reports:

“State Rep. J.D. Scholten, D-Sioux City, announced Monday a run for the seat held by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst since 2015.

“Other state lawmakers, Sen. Zach Wahls from Coralville and Rep. Josh Turek of Council Bluffs, have been talked about as possible challengers for Ernst but so far Nathan Sage, an Iowa Army and Marine Corps veteran, and Scholten are the only ones to make it official. …

“’After her comments [on Medicaid and SNAP] over the weekend, I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but that’s when I just said: This is unacceptable and you’ve gotta jump in,’ Scholten said.”

Scholten came within three points of knocking off the raging nativist Steve King back in 2018 in a deeply conservative western Iowa district. Two years later, he lost decisively to Republican Randy Feenstra, who purged King in a primary, but still performed credibly, before winning a state legislative seat in 2022.

Ernst is far from the only Iowa Republican incumbent feeling some heat right now. Three-term U.S. House member Mariannette Miller-Meeks lost three congressional races before finally winning in 2020 by a grand total of six votes. In 2024, despite Trump’s long coattails, she won by the smallest margin of any Republican House member who didn’t actually lose (799 votes). She looks extremely vulnerable if there is even the slightest pro-Democratic midterm trend. And her two-term colleague Zach Nunn (who won narrowly in both 2022 and 2024) looks vulnerable too. One 2024 preview based on varying national scenarios has both Miller-Meeks and Nunn losing if there is a Democratic “ripple,” much less a “wave.”

There’s an open governorship in Iowa in 2026 as well, as Republican incumbent Kim Reynolds leaves office with the opprobrium of having been rated the least-popular governor in America by Morning Consult. State Auditor Rob Sand, the only statewide elected Democrat at present, is running for the governorship, as is the aforementioned congressman Randy Feenstra. It could be a close race. While the demographic fundamentals of Iowa (which has a large white working-class population with relatively few nonwhite voters) have helped drive the state into Trump’s arms, reaction to his policy agenda (especially the trade war and mass deportations, which threaten the vital agribusiness sector) could drive it away.

Iowa Democrats are unlikely to suffer from overconfidence, but if they are tempted to get smug, they can remember the moment of excitement in 2024 when legendary Iowa pollster Ann Selzer showed Kamala Harris actually leading Trump among likely voters just before Election Day. It didn’t work out that way. At this point, just a thoroughly competitive election year would be a good showing for the Democratic Party in Iowa.

Being old and all, I remember a lot of intra-Democratic arguments over the decades. An allegedly brand new one brought back memories, as I explained at New York:

If you are an aficionado of wonky policy debates, or perhaps if you are a civically active Californian, you may have heard there’s a debate going on in left-of-center circles over a so-called “Abundance Agenda.” That term was coined in 2022 by Derek Thompson, whose recent book with Ezra Klein, entitled Abundance, has helped raise interest (and some hackles) over its tenets. Put briefly, “abundance” advocates believe progressive politics needs to be refocused around producing public and private goods that broadly raise living standards, instead of insisting on narrow and legalistic group agendas that often frustrate the operations of government, particularly with respect to prosperity-enhancing public projects.

The leading edge of this debate has been the issue that is in danger of consuming California politics: the massive regulatory and legal obstacles to creating an adequate supply of affordable housing for sale or rent. But as my former colleague Jonathan Chait points out at The Atlantic, the recent experience of the Biden administration has really intensified concerns that progressives are sabotaging themselves by embracing interest-group-driven roadblocks to getting things done:

“Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results.

“More than two years after signing the infrastructure law, Biden was ‘expressing deep frustration that he can’t show off physical construction of many projects that his signature legislative accomplishments will fund,’ CNN reported. The nationwide network of electric-vehicle-charging stations amounted to just 58 new stations by the time Biden left office. The average completion date for road projects, according to the nonprofit news site NOTUS, was mid-2027. The effort to bring broadband access to rural America, a centerpiece of Biden’s plan to show that he would work to help the entire country and not just the parts that had voted for him, had connected zero customers.”

The fateful failure of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda contributed, of course, to the opportunity Donald Trump had to become president again and launch his own very different BBB. And as Chait observed, that realization led to a lot of reconsiderations of prior assumptions:

“Policy wonks, mostly liberal ones, began to ask why public tasks that used to be doable no longer were. How could a government that once constructed miracles of engineering—the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge—ahead of schedule and under budget now find itself incapable of executing routine functions? Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?”

The obvious conclusion is that if “the government has tied itself in knots … enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.” But “untying them” would offend the progressive interest and identity groups who had built up an edifice of safeguards against potentially abusive government power, and whose entire approach to politics involved defending each other’s regulatory and legal turf. So any effort to ride roughshod over these safeguards, even in the most unimpeachably progressive causes like battling homelessness, has drawn a lot of fire from the left and “the groups” (as various interest and identity advocates are often called).

The rivalry between “common purpose” liberals seeking to do good things quickly through government, and progressives affiliated with various “groups,” is a lot older than the arguments over “abundance.” Reading Chait’s description of a progressivism that “seeks to maintain solidarity among its component groups, expecting each to endorse the positions taken by the others” reminded me instantly of one of the best political speeches I ever heard, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who said his piece before delivering his endorsement to party presidential nominee Michael Dukakis:

“When I was a child growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, my grandmama could not afford a blanket, she didn’t complain and we did not freeze. Instead she took pieces of old cloth — patches, wool, silk, gabardine, crockersack — only patches, barely good enough to wipe off your shoes with. But they didn’t stay that way very long. With sturdy hands and a strong cord, she sewed them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture. Now, Democrats, we must build such a quilt.

“Farmers, you seek fair prices and you are right — but you cannot stand alone. Your patch is not big enough. Workers, you fight for fair wages, you are right — but your patch of labor is not big enough. Women, you seek comparable worth and pay equity, you are right — but your patch is not big enough.”

And on through the litany of groups he went … students … Blacks and Hispanics … gays and lesbians, in every case their “patch” was not big enough alone. Jesse Jackson’s very clear vision was a Democratic Party that was a coalition of groups linking arms to protect their stuff, their solidarity more important than any particular thing that they might do together. And that’s the entrenched and emotionally compelling point of view the abundance advocates are trying to overcome. It’s a struggle that is also evident in separate discussions over the morality of policy positions that leave any vulnerable group less than fully empowered, such as restricting athletic opportunities for transgender women, a wildly popular but deeply offensive position from the point of view of progressive solidarity.

But here’s the thing: The current emergency created by Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory has given the abundance camp a powerful new argument. Had Joe Biden been able to implement his BBB and show results, might his performance on the economy have been viewed as superior to Trump’s? Possibly so. And if Democrats during his administration had made a visible effort to “reinvent government” to make it more efficient, would hostility to bureaucracy and alleged “runaway government spending” have been a potent issue for Trump? Possibly not.

What we do know is that Trump’s victory gave us an administration that is systematically working to destroy all the causes “the groups” hold dear. A total revocation of environmental regulations is underway in an ongoing frenzy to “drill baby drill.”  “Civil rights” are beingredefined as exclusively for the protection of straight white Christians and Jews, while transgender folk are literally being defined out of existence. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is blowing up government and delegitimizing the very idea of public service. Everyone’s “patch is not big enough” today, but out-of-power Democrats can’t do much about it. “The groups” might develop an overriding stake in making things work and restoring the credibility of both the public sector and the progressive movement that built it over the decades. It could mean political as well as economic abundance for all.