Watching various Democrats try to strike the right chord with grassroots supporters, it may be impossible to out-do J.B. Pritzker, as I explained at New York:

Ever since Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump last November (along with her party losing control of the U.S. Senate), Democrats have been arguing, not very quietly, about the best strategy for fighting Trump 2.0 and regaining some positive momentum. There have been three areas of disagreement, by my reckoning: Should Democrats have a strategically selective response to what Trump is doing? Should Democrats appeal to 2024 Trump voters with messages that concede some ground to Republicans and/or stress points of agreement? And should Democrats conduct a sort of internal purge to highlight fresher or younger leadership options for the future?

An inflection point in all these arguments was the incident in March when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stirred up and then killed a definitive challenge to a stopgap spending bill that might have shut down the federal government. Grassroots Democrats everywhere were infuriated, and for a hot minute it looked like the 74-year-old Schumer might get the heave-ho from his leadership post. He weathered the storm, but the reaction to his willingness to back a high-profile Trump measure fed all sorts of combative Democratic gestures right there in the Senate, most notably Cory Booker’s record 25-hour indictment of the administration and then Chris Van Hollen’s flight to El Salvador to investigate the plight of deported and imprisoned constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Meanwhile, talk of greening the Democratic ranks with primary challenges to old goats spiked with Deputy DNC Chair David Hogg’s plans to finance a purge, which did not go over well.

But now, a voice from outside Washington (much more distinct than that of California’s voluble governor, who has been all over the place in the debate over how to grapple with Trump 2.0) has turned the volume knob all the way up to 11 and may have preempted the ground for maximum combativeness. In a perfectly timed speech in New Hampshire (which may or may not regain its status as a crucial early state in the Democratic presidential nominating calendar), Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker offered a 21st-century version of Churchill’s we’ll-fight-them-in-the-streets address to an embattled England, as The Guardian reported:

“Illinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, scorched Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday night, calling for ‘mass protests’ and declaring that Republicans ‘cannot know a moment of peace’ during a fiery speech in New Hampshire that immediately sparked presidential speculation.

“’It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,’ Pritzker said to a ballroom filled with Democratic activists, officials and donors. ‘Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.’

“The billionaire heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune addressed more than 800 people at the New Hampshire Democratic party’s annual McIntyre-Shaheen dinner — a state traditionally crucial to the early cycle of presidential primaries and a launching pad for anyone with White House ambitions.”

To say that Pritzker pulled no punches is an understatement. He compared the conduct of the current administration to those who ruled Nazi Germany and czarist Russia. Additionally, he went out of his way to rule out pivots on hot-button issues, as The Advocate observed:

“He also confronted the scapegoating of transgender youth, people of color, and immigrants, saying Democrats lost voters not because they defended vulnerable communities but because too many leaders lacked the guts to do it boldly.

“’Those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people, of trans kids, of immigrants — instead of their own lack of guts and gumption,’ he said to loud applause.”

Pritzker is following, or perhaps even personifying, a hoary tradition dating back at least to Democrats during the George W. Bush administration who styled themselves as progressives or populists, arguing that the party’s chief problem is a lack of spine among its politicians. It was the chief contention of the Bush-era band of “netroots” lefty bloggers, and later on, of Bernie Sanders fans. As Republican extremism shot through the roof with the advent of the MAGA movement, Democrats who took the conventional approach of seeking to occupy the abandoned center of the ideological spectrum were routinely denounced by those who believed counter-mobilization and professions of a willingness to “fight back” — or just fight, period — were uniquely capable of appealing both to the party base and to authenticity-seeking swing voters. The mood of grassroots Democrats right now, and the objective horror of what Trump and his people are doing, have created the perfect atmosphere for Fight Club messaging. And it’s hard to imagine anyone exceeding Pritzker’s combativeness.

Being a billionaire, Pritzker is an unlikely populist (though he does regularly make the point that he’s never used public service to improve his own wealth position), and at the age of 60, he hardly represents a youth movement. But he is a governor from the heartland, albeit a blue enclave in the heartland. And it’s not lost on Democrats that they’ve let senators and former senators represent them in presidential elections (and even presidential-nomination challenges) dating back to 1992. So in one fell swoop, the Illinois governor has placed himself at or near the top of the early list of presidential hopefuls for 2028, even as earlier ’28 favorites like another midwestern governor, Gretchen Whitmer, vastly lose ground by accommodating (and literally embracing) Trump. We will soon know if others emulate or attempt to outdo Pritzker in promising total war.

An old issue came back up as congressional Democrats mulled one of the things they may have to consider if they regain control of the House next year, as I explained at New York:

Donald Trump was just the third president to be formally impeached and the first to be impeached twice (yes, his second impeachment by the House happened a week before he left office, even though his trial and acquittal by the Senate occurred when he was an ex-president). Now, there’s growing talk among congressional Democrats that a third impeachment may be in order if the Democratic Party flips control of the House in 2026, thus putting it in position to consider such a step (a chamber controlled by Trump’s vassal Mike Johnson is less likely to entertain an impeachment resolution than to petition Canada to make the U.S. its 11th province).

Michigan Democrat Shri Thanedar recently introduced new articles of impeachment against Trump, the first of his second term. Thanedar is a House incumbent fighting to head off progressive primary opposition in a heavily Democratic Detroit district, so this sort of gesture is to be expected. It’s more interesting that Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia has publicly said impeachment should be on the table if Democrats flip the House. Ossoff won in his red-leaning state by an eyelash in a January 2021 general-election runoff and is considered highly vulnerable as he runs for a second term in 2026, particularly if term-limited Republican governor Brian Kemp takes him on. He should have no significant primary opposition and doesn’t really need to do anything to cleave the Democratic base to his campaign. If Ossoff thinks support for impeaching Trump may be a good general-election issue in Georgia, that is eyebrow-raising to say the least.

On the merits, if you compare what Trump was impeached for earlier with what he has already done in 2025, the case for a third impeachment looks pretty strong.

The first impeachment, in December 2019, concerned a complex case involving both Trump’s thinly veiled effort to ensnare Ukrainian president Vlodymyr Zelenskyy in a scheme to accuse Joe Biden of corruption and Trump’s obstruction of congressional inquiries into the incident. There were legitimate questions as to whether his misconduct met the constitutional threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” even though his tendency to court the appearance of impropriety made sanctions unavoidable.

The second impeachment followed the Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021, and was vastly less complicated; the misconduct in question was precisely the sort of thing (an attempted insurrection) the Founders had in mind when providing for impeachments. But some factual questions lingered about the extent to which Trump had ordered the attack on the Capitol and whether it was even possible to hold an impeachment trial for someone no longer in office.

Trump’s 2025 abuses of power, lawless actions against his perceived enemies, and unconstitutional power grabs are as wide-ranging as the Ukraine brouhaha was narrow. And there is zero doubt about the president’s responsibility for these outrages since most of them stem from executive orders he signed. So it was easy for Thanedar to come up with quite a list of draft articles:

1. Obstruction of Justice and Abuse of Executive Power: Including denial of due process, unlawful deportations, defiance of court orders, and misuse of the Department of Justice.

2. Usurpation of Appropriations Power: For dismantling congressionally established agencies and impounding federal funds.

3. Abuse of Trade Powers and International Aggression: Including imposing economically damaging tariffs and threatening military invasion against sovereign nations.

4. Violation of First Amendment Rights: Through retaliatory actions against critics, media, and attorneys exercising constitutionally protected speech.

5. Creation of an Unlawful Office: By establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) and unlawfully empowering Elon Musk to unilaterally violate the Constitution.

6. Bribery and Corruption: Involving dismissing criminal cases, soliciting foreign emoluments, and extortionate settlements for personal and political gain.

7. Tyrannical Overreach: Seeking to consolidate unchecked power, erode civil liberties, and defy constitutional limits on presidential authority.

This seventh article is a bit of a catchall, but there’s plenty of meat on the rest of the bones. And Team Trump is taking the threat seriously enough that it’s reportedly “war-gaming” an impeachment defense on grounds that otherwise it could distract from everything else the administration is doing. It’s also more than possible that Republicans would use the threat of an impeachment to mobilize the MAGA base for the 2026 midterms; otherwise, there are major concerns about GOP turnout in an election without Trump on the ballot. The tactic worked for former president Bill Clinton back in 1998, when Democrats pulled off the rare feat of making midterm House gains while controlling the White House thanks to an impending GOP impeachment bid. Nothing would please Trump more than to play the victim of partisan persecution again despite his total control of the federal government and his own incredible levels of vituperative action and rhetoric.

In the end, of course, even if Democrats do control the House in 2027, they have to decide whether it’s worth the trouble to impeach Trump a third time knowing that he will almost certainly be acquitted yet again owing to the two-thirds requirement for conviction in Senate impeachment trials. Odds are they’ll try to hold Trump accountable even though he’ll escape conviction. It’s not like he will quietly adopt the role of a lame duck before being evicted from the White House at the end of his final term.

 

Sometimes dogs that don’t bark are very significant, and I noted one at New York:

Republicans have both an arithmetic and a messaging problem as they try to enact Donald Trump’s second-term agenda via a giant budget-reconciliation bill. The former involves finding a way to pay for the $4 trillion-plus tax cuts Trump has demanded, along with a half-trillion or so in border security and defense spending increases. And the latter flows from the necessity of hammering popular federal programs (especially Medicaid) to avoid boosting budget deficits that are already out of control from the perspective of conservatives. This sets up Democrats nicely to deplore the whole mess as a matter of “cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for Trump’s billionaire friends,” a very effective message that has vulnerable House Republicans worried.

To interrupt this line of attack while making the overall agenda slightly more affordable, anonymous White House sources lofted a trial balloon earlier this month via a Fox News report:

“White House aides are quietly floating a proposal within the House GOP that would raise the tax rate for people making more than $1 million to 40%, two sources familiar with discussions told Fox News Digital, to offset the cost of eliminating taxes on overtime pay, tipped wages, and retirees’ Social Security.

“The sources stressed the discussions were only preliminary, and the plan is one of many being talked about as congressional Republicans work on advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda via the budget reconciliation process.

“Trump and his White House have not yet taken a position on the matter, but the idea is being looked at by his aides and staff on Capitol Hill.”

The idea wasn’t as shocking as it might seem. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts reduced the top income-tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, so just letting that provision expire would accomplish the near-40 percent rate without disturbing other goodies for rich people in the 2017 bill like corporate-tax cuts, estate-tax cuts, and a relaxed alternative minimum tax for both individuals and corporations. One House Republican, Pennsylvania’s Dan Meuser, suggested resetting the top individual tax rate at 38.6 percent, still a reduction from pre-2017 levels but a “tax increase on the rich” as compared to current policies.

Crafty as this approach might have been as a way of boosting claims that Trump had aligned the GOP with middle-class voters (the intended beneficiaries of his recent tax-cut proposals) rather than the very rich, the idea of backing any tax increase on the allegedly super-productive job creators at the top of the economic pyramid struck many Republicans as the worst imaginable heresy. You could plausibly argue that total opposition to higher taxes, or even to progressive taxes, was the holy grail for the party, more foundational than any other principle and one of the remaining links between pre-Trump and MAGA conservatism. At the very idea of fuzzing up the tax-cut gospel, old GOP warhorses like Newt Gingrich and Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist arose from their political rest homes to shout: unclean! Gingrich called it the worst potential betrayal of the Cause since George H.W. Bush cut a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal in 1990 that included a tax increase.

As it happens, it was all a mirage. In virtual unison, both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have said a high-end tax cut won’t happen this year, as Politico reports:

“President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday came out against a tax hike on the wealthiest Americans — likely putting the nail in the coffin of the idea.

“Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he thought the idea would be ‘very disruptive’ because it would prompt wealthy people to leave the country. …

“Johnson separately knocked the idea earlier in the day, saying that he is ‘not in favor of raising the tax rates because our party is the group that stands against that traditionally.’”

Trump’s real fear may be that wealthy people would leave the GOP rather than the country. Many are already upset about Trump’s 19th-century protectionist tariff agenda and its effects on the investor class. Subordinating the tax-cut gospel to other MAGA goals might push some of them over the edge. As for Johnson, the Speaker is having to cope with the eternal grumbling of the House Freedom Caucus, where domestic budget cuts are considered a delightful thing in itself and the idea of boosting anyone’s taxes to succor the parasites receiving Medicaid benefits is horrifying.

If Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill runs into trouble or if Democrats set the table for a big midterm comeback wielding the “cutting Medicaid to give billionaires a tax break” message, squashing the symbolic gesture of a small boost in federal income-tax rates for the wealthy may be viewed in retrospect as a lost opportunity for the GOP. For the time being, that party’s bond with America’s oligarchs and their would-be imitators stands intact.

News that Elon Musk has told Tesla investors he plans to cut back on his destructive service to Donald Trump and pay more attention to his troubled company felt like a victory to many Democrats. But at New York I warned that it might not matter as much as we had hoped:

This has been one of Washington’s favorite games lately: When will Elon leave? The planted axiom is that Elon Musk’s bizarre and wildly destructive adventures as head of the shambolically established Department of Government Efficiency can’t last long, for multiple reasons.

First, his far-flung corporate empire could use more of his attention, and his extracurricular activities haven’t exactly helped his bottom line (notably at Tesla, where public reaction to DOGE’s antics severely damaged the once-cool brand). Second, it’s assumed that infinitely large egos like Musk’s and Donald Trump’s (not to mention the other highly self-regarding MAGA veterans in the Trump Cabinet) cannot perpetually coexist in the same public and private space for very long, particularly since there are elements of the Trump 2.0 agenda, like his trade war, that may not enchant the chief bankroller of the 47th president’s 2024 campaign. Third, the incredible yet deliberately induced chaos that has been DOGE’s signature contribution to public administration must soon give way to some sort of sustainable operating model for delivering benefits and services. And fourth, Musk’s own lagging popularity (punctuated by the defeat of a Republican judicial candidate in Wisconsin whom Musk had bankrolled and personally campaigned for) isn’t helping the Boss’s own gradually eroding job-approval numbers.

But assuming Musk’s days at the helm of DOGE are numbered (his original appointment as a “special government employee” expires next month, and the entire DOGE operation is supposed to wrap up in July of next year), can his minions sojourn on without him?

They probably can. DOGE employees are now routinely “embedded” in federal agencies, typically at the very peak of the administrative pyramid and with top-shelf access to the all-important data. They are typically working hand-in-glove with Trump political appointees who share their deep hostility to agency missions and to career civil servants. In many parts of the federal bureaucracy, the mid-level managers that might push back against DOGE demolition efforts are already gone or are so terrified of losing their jobs that they do exactly what DOGE staffers tell them to do. They no longer need much adult supervision.

Perhaps just as importantly, there is a powerful permanent institution in the Trump administration that shares DOGE’s hatred of the “deep state” and is much better equipped to manage a gradual transition from slash-and-burn cuts in spending and personnel to a regularized if downsized bureaucracy devoted to the administration’s policy goals. That would be the Office of Management and Budget and its director, Project 2025 co-author and Christian nationalist zealot Russell Vought.

Vought formed an alliance with Musk shortly after the 2024 election, when DOGE was just an evil glimmer in the Tech Bro’s eye, based on their shared vision of a vast purge of the bureaucracy to root out non-MAGA influences and blow up programs and policies that did not serve the reactionary cultural and economic agenda of Trump 2.0. And the deeply experienced OMB director has almost certainly played a key role behind the scenes in coordinating DOGE’s raids on federal agencies with OMB’s plans and harmonizing both with what the administration is demanding from its congressional allies. Vought is the “glue guy,” to use a sports metaphor, who keeps the team together. And his authority will likely expand if Musk leaves Washington, as Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin explained earlier this week:

“A Trump administration official, who requested anonymity to share internal discussions, says Vought is widely perceived as preparing to pick up wherever Musk leaves off. Where Musk has shown a zeal for smash and grab, Vought has the institutional knowledge—and perhaps the patience—to make the DOGE cuts stick. Vought, this person says, ‘is waiting in the wings.’”

Unlike Musk, Vought knows the federal government’s many nooks and crannies like the back of his hand and is perfectly positioned to deploy Musk’s orphaned raiders in a much more coordinated campaign to take DOGE and its hollowed-out agency hosts to the next level (or, in the eyes of their victims, the next level of hell). They don’t need their turbulent creator around with his attention-grabbing habits and over-the-top cartoon-villain malevolence. Vought’s dull knife will cut even deeper than Musk’s chain saw, and a lot less noisily.

There’s a mini-debate among Democrats at the moment over the propriety of fighting against the deportation and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia when other issues beckon, and I made my own thoughts known at New York:

As the story of the abduction, deportation, and detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia plays out in El Salvador and U.S. federal courts, the politics of the situation are roiling many waters. For the most part, Republicans are following President Trump’s lead in wallowing in the misery of Abrego Garcia and other deportees; exploiting unrelated “angel moms” and other symbols of random undocumented-immigrant crimes; and blasting Democrats for their misplaced sympathy for the “wrong people.” Even as Team Trump risks a constitutional crisis by evading judicial orders to grant due process to the people ICE is snatching off the streets, it seems confident that public backing for the administration’s mass-deportation program and “border security” initiatives generally will make this a winning issue for the GOP.

For their part, Democrats aren’t as united politically on the salience of this dispute, even though virtually all of them object in principle to Trump’s lawless conduct. Most notably, California governor and likely 2028 presidential contender Gavin Newsom warned against dwelling on it, as The Bulwark reported:

“Asked to comment on the ongoing standoff between Trump, El Salvador, and the U.S. judicial system, Newsom scoffed. ‘You know, this is the distraction of the day,’ he said. ‘This is the debate they want. This is their 80-20 issue, as they’ve described it …’

“’Those that believe in the rule of law are defending it. But it’s a tough case, because people are really — are they defending MS-13? Are they defending, you know, someone who’s out of sight, out of mind in El Salvador? … It’s exactly the debate [Republicans] want, because they don’t want this debate on the tariffs. They don’t want to be accountable to markets today … They want to have this conversation. Don’t get distracted by distractions. We’re all perfect sheep.’”

Newsom is reflecting an ancient Democratic “populist” prejudice against non-economic messaging, which was revived by the 2024 presidential election, in which warnings about the threat to democracy and to the rule of law posed by Trump were widely adjudged to have failed to sway an electorate focused obsessively on the economy and the cost of living. And it’s true that the Abrego Garcia case arose precisely as Trump made himself highly vulnerable on the economy with his wild tariff schemes.

But the emotions aroused by the administration’s cruelty and arrogance in launching its mass-deportation initiative have struck chords with major elements of the Democratic base, particularly among those attuned to the constitutional issues involved. And it’s not a secret that even though Trump enjoys generally positive approval ratings on his handling of immigration issues, they begin to erode when specifics are polled. It’s also quite likely that whatever the overall numbers show, deportation overreach will hurt Trump and his party precisely in the immigrant-adjacent elements of the electorate in which he made crucial 2024 gains.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of communications strategies that turn message discipline into message bondage, persuading political gabbers and writers to grind away on a single note and ignore other opportunities and challenges. In the current situation facing Democrats, strategic silence on a volatile issue like immigration (which was arguably one of Kamala Harris’s problems during the 2024 campaign) enables the opposition to fill in the blanks with invidious characterizations. In politics, silence is almost never golden.

Perhaps more to the point, as G. Elliot Morris argues, there are ways to link messages on different issues that reinforce them all:

“One way to focus messaging on both the economy and immigration, for example, might be to show how unchecked executive power is dangerous. After all the most unpopular parts of Trump’s agenda — tariffs and deportations for undocumented migrants who have been here a long time and committed no crimes — are a direct result of executive overreach.

“The power that gives Trump the ability to levy extreme tariffs was given to the president when Congress expected him to be forgiving of tariffs on an individual basis as an act of diplomacy, not to plunge the world economic order into crisis. Similarly, the judiciary has said Trump’s deporting of Abrego Garcia, as well as hundreds of Venezuelans, runs afoul of multiple Court orders.”

Even if you conclude that “unchecked executive power” is too abstract a line of attack for today’s paycheck-focused swing voters, it shouldn’t be that difficult to hit two messages simultaneously, particularly since the message on Trump’s tariffs doesn’t require a whole lot of reiteration from Democrats: Voters can see it in the stock market, and soon enough they will likely see it in the prices they are paying for goods and services.

But the real clincher in persuading Democrats to take the Abrego Garcia case very seriously is this: Anything less than full-throated opposition to the administration’s joyful embrace of Gestapo tactics and un-American policies in deportation cases will undoubtedly dishearten constituents who already fear their elected officials are unprincipled cynics who won’t lift a finger to fight Trump without first convening a focus group of tuned-out swing voters. Politicians don’t have to emulate Senator Chris Van Hollen’s decision to fly down to El Salvador and meet with his imprisoned constituent to recognize that his willingness to do so was impressive and authentic. As he told my colleague Benjamin Hart in an interview earlier this week, “The issue here is protecting the rights of individuals under our Constitution … I do believe this is a place that we need to stand up and fight.” It’s hard to do anything else without shame.