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.

I took a look at Senator Amy Klobuchar’s announcement video for her gubernatorial run, and found a lot to like, which I noted at New York:

Many millions of eyes are on Minneapolis this week as the city, the state, and indeed the nation try to cope with the violence unleashed by a federal immigration-enforcement “surge” that has taken the lives of two U.S. citizens and created a huge backlash against the Trump administration’s mass-deportation initiative. Now Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar is stepping into that maelstrom and a very bright spotlight. The veteran legislator and onetime presidential candidate announced she’s running for governor this year. If she wins (and she will be a strong favorite), Klobuchar will succeed embattled two-term governor Tim Walz, the normie progressive icon who’s had a very tough 2026 already and recently decided to fold his planned bid for a third term.

It’s not just the ICE invasion of Minnesota that Klobucher will be asked to deal with as a gubernatorial candidate. Her position in the Senate (which she does not intend to resign during the campaign) means she has an enormous stake in securing legislation to rein in the abuses of law-enforcement authority so evident in her state and in ensuring the disastrous “surge” isn’t repeated there anytime soon. But she also has to cope with a very real (if exaggerated) child-care-fraud scandal that served as the pretext for the “surge” and fed Trump’s racist argument that inherently criminal immigrants are fleecing the American welfare state for benefits as Democrats stand by with approval or indifference.

Klobucher is relying on her history as a county prosecutor and her reputation as a “centrist” figure in Washington to make the case that she’s what Minnesota needs to deal with both the federal invasion and the local fraud scandal. Her campaign launch video’s relentless message is that she knows how to “stand up for what’s right and fix what’s wrong.”

More specifically, Klobuchar is calling for an end to ICE deployments in Minnesota. But she’s also pledging to “make sure the people who steal taxpayer money go to jail, and root out fraud by changing the way state government works.” She may be a Washington insider after 18 years in the Senate, but she’s an outsider when it comes to the current problems in St. Paul. Republicans, of course, will tie her to old friends and acquaintances back home and to non-centrist Democratic politicians like the Squad’s Ilhan Omar and State Attorney General Keith Ellison. But she gives Democrats a fresh political start in a state where they already have many advantages. And Klobuchar also has some demonstrated political chops: In 2024, she ran five points ahead of Kamala Harris and won 12 counties carried by Donald Trump.

Until she took this step, Klobuchar was on some lists of potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates. Does running for governor this year enhance or demolish such prospects? You could make the argument that being a governor is a far better platform from which to run for president at present, particularly for a politician who prides herself on “getting things done.” But on the other hand, dealing with the situation in Minnesota could take some serious time, particularly given the current close division of the state’s legislature and the partisan furies so evident on the streets of Minneapolis. Running for president is not something you can do part time or half-hearted. Besides, Klobuchar could very well be pressured to rule out a presidential run during her current campaign. Since she’s 65, she could (according to current standards) run in 2032, assuming everything goes well with a gubernatorial tenure and the job at the White House is available. But realistically, she’s probably giving up presidential dreams in the face of such big challenges back home.

Many Minnesota Democrats will likely be grateful to Amy Klobucher for joining this gubernatorial race. Her famous temper could even help her convey righteous indignation over what the Trump administration has been doing to her state. If she can continue to strike the right balance between promises to fight Trump and promises to fix fraud as the election year unfolds, she should be on the road to victory.

After the shocking events in Minneapolis in recent weeks, an old debate over the nature of Trump and his MAGA movement has changed, as I pointed out at New York:

For nearly a decade, there has been a recurring debate in center-left intellectual circles about whether you could properly describe Donald Trump, his MAGA movement, and the administrations he has led as “fascist.” Such discussions have accelerated since Trump returned to the White House in 2025 and began stretching the powers of his office to target his many enemies, real and imagined. Hardly anyone in either party would argue that Trump is just a regular, old-school conservative, or that the Republican Party has undergone anything less than a major transformation since he came down that escalator in 2015. But have he and his supporters drifted so far from normal politics as to represent something as sinister and, well, un-American as fascism?

Perhaps the most thorough examination of this question I’ve ever read has just appeared at The Atlantic, written by the regularly brilliant Jonathan Rauch, who has previously warned against loose application of “the F-word” to Trump. He’s changed his mind, and concludes that “the reluctance to use the term has now become perverse.” Rauch concludes that Trump is a “fascist president” because he meets 18 different criteria for classic fascist thinking and conduct, ranging from “demolition of norms” and “glorification of violence” to “alternative facts” and “politics as war.” He denies the United States has become a “fascist country” just yet because of the still-viable forms of resistance against Trump’s plans.

Most Americans have a limited interest in political theory and an even more limited recollection, from long-ago history classes or World War II lore, of facts about the European fascist movements of the 1930s. They can’t be expected to care much about how Trump is classified on some spectrum that leads from Ronald Reagan to Benito Mussolini. But now recent events in Minnesota, as crystallized by two viral videos showing U.S. citizens being shot and killed by federal immigration agents, have done more to arouse widespread horror at the the Trump administration’s abnormal modus operandi than all those warnings from experts about creeping authoritarianism or incipient fascism.

Trump’s mass-deportation program, as displayed in Minnesota, plays a prominent role in Rauch’s account of the president’s emergence as a fascist leader:

“Trump has turned ICE into a sprawling paramilitary that roves the country at will, searches and detains noncitizens and citizens without warrants, uses force ostentatiously, operates behind masks, receives skimpy training, lies about its activities, and has been told that it enjoys ‘absolute immunity. …’

“In Minneapolis and elsewhere, the agency has behaved provocatively, sometimes brutally, and arguably illegally—behaviors that Trump and his staff have encouraged, shielded, and sent camera crews to publicize, perhaps in the hope of eliciting violent resistance that would justify further crackdowns, a standard fascist stratagem.”

A picture of fascism in action is worth a thousand words. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of his inability to precisely define pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Americans who are not blinded by loyalty to Trump or visceral hatred of immigrants or “leftist” protesters saw masked agents execute Renee Good and Alex Pretti and knew they were seeing something that didn’t belong in this country. And efforts by J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Trump himself to gaslight the country and blame the victims made it all worse.

It’s far too early to tell what will happen next in Minnesota; in other places where the mass-deportation surge is underway; or in Washington, where the shots — an unfortunate but in this case all-too-accurate term — are being called. The president seems to be backpedaling or “pivoting” to a different posture than the belligerence he has shown toward all criticism of mass-deportation efforts up until now. Perhaps there is some strategic retreat underway that will mitigate, if not erase, the horrible images emanating from Minneapolis.

But right now, the video evidence of fascism in action could rival in significance the televised scenes of Alabama state troopers clubbing peaceful civil-rights protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965. The “Bloody Sunday” when the brutality of that time and place became evident to the whole world was the beginning of the end for the Jim Crow regime that had gripped the South since Reconstruction. Perhaps a “Bloody Saturday” in 2026 can represent the beginning of the end of the fascist threat posed by the MAGA movement and its leader.

A fresh look at some recent polls shows that it’s really not 2024 any more, as I noted at New York:

In his description of a new survey from the New York Times–Siena outfit, Nate Cohn nicely sums up a trend every political observer outside the MAGA fever swamps has probably noticed: “The Voters Who Have Taken a U-Turn on Trump.”

“When President Trump took office for his second term one year ago, he was — at least compared with his usual polling — relatively popular.

“His approval rating was above 50 percent, and he had made enormous breakthroughs among groups that have traditionally voted Democratic, like young, nonwhite and lower-turnout voters. It had some of the markings of a potential political realignment …

“The major demographic shifts of the last election have snapped back. In today’s poll, Mr. Trump’s approval rating by demographic group looks almost exactly as it did in Times/Siena polling in the run-up to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. If anything, young and nonwhite voters are even likelier to disapprove of Mr. Trump than they were then, while he retains most of his support among older and white voters.”

No wonder the president fired off a Truth Social post denouncing the results and threatening to sue the Times. But there was nothing all that startling about the poll. The sources of Trump’s sagging job-approval numbers are sometimes missed by those fixated with looking for defections from his base or “splits” in the Republican Party. The Times-Siena poll shows Trump’s job-approval rating from self-identified Republicans at a robust 86 percent. But among independents, it’s a sour 34 percent, with 48 percent strongly disapproving of his job performance. Similarly, 54 percent of under-30 registered voters and 53 percent of non-white registered voters strongly disapprove of the job the president is doing. Without much question, the same cluster of issues that fed Trump’s strong 2024 performance in such demographic groups is weakening him now, as Cohn notes:

“And over our last two polls, the voters who have soured on Mr. Trump — those who say they voted for him in 2024 but disapprove of him today — have been likeliest to cite an economic issue as the biggest problem facing the country: 44 percent of the Trump defectors cite economic issues, compared with just 24 percent of other voters.

“This is a familiar story. The economy was one of the biggest reasons these same voters flipped to supporting Mr. Trump in the first place. In the last campaign, these voters disapproved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy, said it was the most important issue, and said they thought Mr. Trump would handle the issue well. Today, all of those conditions have flipped, and these voters have as well.”

Trump is now suffering from incumbency at a time when voters remain unhappy with conditions in the country, particularly with respect to the economy and the cost of living. And in the Times-Siena findings, as in other polls, a lot of voters don’t think Trump is paying much attention. A startling 69 percent of under-30 voters and 67 percent of non-white voters, along with 62 percent of self-identified independents, say the president is “generally focused on the wrong issues.” So he’s in a poor position and isn’t helping himself when he launches overseas adventures and interminably celebrates his alleged accomplishments. And even in areas where he has traditionally had robust support, like immigration enforcement, his record is alienating swing voters. Seventy-six percent of under-30 registered voters, 73 percent of non-white registered voters, and 71 percent of self-identified independents say ICE tactics have “gone too far.”

All these numbers track recent polling trends that have been in place for months. And the story is quite familiar. According to the Silver Bulletin averages, Trump’s net job-approval rating is currently minus-13.9 percent. That’s squarely between the minus-12.2 percent approval Joe Biden had at this point in his presidency and the minus-16.6 percent Trump himself posted at this point in his first term. In 2018, Trump lost control of the House, as did Biden in 2022. Trump will turn 80 before the midterms; Biden turned 80 shortly thereafter. In the newly released Silver Bulletin generic congressional ballot averages, Democrats currently have a 5.3 percent advantage (it’s at 4.6 percent at RealClearPolitics and 4.9 percent at Decision Desk HQ). They need a net gain of just three seats to flip control of the U.S. House. According to the ratings by the authoritative Cook Political Report, the House landscape is beginning to tilt blue: Of 18 races rated as “toss-ups,” 14 are for seats now held by Republicans. Particularly now that Trump’s gerrymandering drive appears to have been largely and perhaps completely countered by Democrats, it won’t take much of a breeze to wreck the presidential party’s current trifecta in Washington.

So it’s a bad sign for Trump that his winning 2024 coalition is showing definite and persistent signs of shrinking back to its pre-2024 shape and dimensions. He can rage against “fake polls” all he wants. But it’s not looking good for the 47th president in November.

The big strategic and policy argument among Democrats at the moment is whether the increasingly popular slogan of “abolish ICE!” makes sense politically, or is even the right position morally. I weighed the pros and cons at New York:

For two overriding reasons, Democrats are intensively debating what to say and do about the future of ICE. First and most obviously, that agency is running wild in Minneapolis and other cities, pursuing a very deliberate policy of terrorizing immigrant communities and their allies in order to (a) encourage “self-deportation” and (b) titillate Donald Trump’s MAGA base. ICE has become the tip of a spear that seems aimed not only at mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, but at the military occupation of politically hostile territory by an increasingly authoritarian administration.

Second, an appropriations package that includes money for ICE (along with the rest of DHS, plus multiple other federal agencies) has become the flash point in another potential (if partial) government-shutdown cliff on January 30, which is when the stopgap-spending bill that ended last year’s total government shutdown expires. Many Democrats within and beyond Congress want to dramatize their opposition to what ICE is doing by voting against the new money, even though (as other Democrats argue) it won’t stop ICE for a moment thanks to the special slush fund for mass deportation created by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

While nearly all Democrats oppose both current ICE tactics and Trump’s entire mass-deportation regime, the funding fight has exposed an increasingly large gulf between those who advocate abolishing ICE and those who seek to reform the agency. The latter camp isn’t necessarily a solid bloc; there’s language in the above-mentioned spending bill that authorizes body cameras and other measures for ICE accountability that some reformers consider inadequate. But without question, ICE abolition advocates have a lot of momentum among congressional Democrats and ICE resisters nationally (including, notably, Mayor Zohran Mamdani). One very recent poll from Economist-YouGov showed self-identified Democrats favoring the abolition of ICE by a margin of 77 percent to 19 percent (Americans generally were split right down the middle on the proposition). So is this the line in the sand the party generally should draw? Has Trump’s toxic immigration crackdown now made ICE abolition a mainstream position with little political downside?

While “Abolish ICE” may be the only position emotionally consonant with justified outrage over its agents’ conduct, it’s not necessary at all if the goal is simply to radically change the immigration-enforcement status quo. ICE has been around since 2003. Its agents weren’t masked until March 2025. ICE (along with the allied Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations agencies) wasn’t deployed to achieve mass deportation until a Trump executive order one year ago yesterday. The administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden didn’t publicly defend brutal tactics or accuse immigration-enforcement protesters of being “terrorists.” Columnist Will Bunch recently spoke out in opposition to Democratic efforts to reform ICE on grounds that “You can’t reform fascism.” Were the Obama and Biden administrations “fascist”?

More than a few progressives (and particularly advocates for undocumented immigrants) did indeed believe that enforcement of immigration laws generally, and deportation practices specifically, were too harsh during past Democratic administrations. In 2020, famously, most Democratic presidential candidates called for the decriminalization (or, in some cases, abolition of felony charges for immigration violations) of illegal border crossings. The national debate over lax immigration enforcement then played an unquestionably major role in Trump’s return to power in 2024. And as recently as September, a Washington Post–Ipsos survey showed only 29 percent of Americans trusted Democrats more than Republicans on immigration policy.

So despite widespread and steadily increasing public disapproval of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, Democrats aren’t on such solid ground that they can embrace some total abandonment of immigration enforcement without courting political peril. There’s no evidence that Americans actually want the “open borders” stance that Republicans have falsely accused Democrats of embracing in the past. Embracing it now makes little sense. The broadest and strongest position for Democrats right now is the abolition of both mass deportation and ICE terror tactics, alongside a new path to citizenship for noncriminal immigrants and fairer and more uniform enforcement of immigration laws without the sort of violence and cruelty perpetrated and celebrated by Trump, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller. If they need a slogan, it might be: “End ICE As We Know It.” Anyone who thinks such a position represents a surrender to MAGA needs to remember how and why these terrible people rose to power in the first place.