In the wake of the assassination of conservative superstar activist Charlie Kirk, Democrats have largely been bystanders as the president decides how to exploit the tragedy for his own advantage. But there is one prominent Republican voice that should be heard, as I explained at New York:

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination in Utah earlier this week, before there was any real information on the identity or motives of the assassin, President Donald Trump addressed the nation with an angry screed blaming the “radical left” (his term for Democrats) for the crime and vowing official vengeance against those who had allegedly inspired the killing by uttering high-volume insults at Kirk and other MAGA folk.

From that point, we all held our breaths in anticipation of the terrible moment when the assassin would be connected tangibly to one of America’s political or culture-war “tribes” and efforts like Trump’s to assign collective responsibility gained real steam.

This morning, after a rather clumsy leak by the president on Fox & Friends, a press conference featuring federal, state, and local law-enforcement figures and presided over by Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, officially unveiled the name of the suspect, 22-year-old Utah student Tyler Robinson, along with some preliminary data from discovered evidence suggesting “anti-fascism” might be his motive. You could hear the engines of partisan and ideological vengeance getting ready to rev up across the internet.

But then Cox seized the spotlight with an extended and heartfelt call for a de-escalation of efforts to assign collective responsibility for the assassination. He even quoted Charlie Kirk himself on the essential nature of “forgiveness” and implicitly repudiated Trump’s claim that the “radical left” had incited the killer with anti-MAGA rhetoric:

“We need moral clarity right now. I hear all the time that words are violence. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. There is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody.”

He went on to cite the pacific reaction from his own state to a crime many of them deplored for ideological, moral, and religious reasons,

As it happens, Cox, who is getting more national exposure than ever before, has made this sort of call for civility a hallmark of his political career. He apologized to a Utah LGBTQ+ group for his own past homophobia after the Pulse-nightclub murders in Florida in 2016. As National Governors Association chairman in 2023–24, he spearheaded a “Disagree Better” initiative to foster less-polarized bipartisan conversation. And when he broke from his own history of disdain for Donald Trump (not unusual among Utah Republicans) to endorse him in 2024, it was because he naïvely imagined that Trump’s own near brush with death might make him more amenable to a “national unity” message.

Now that there is at least a shred of evidence linking the prime suspect to “the left” (though a lot more suggesting he’s a mentally ill young man living in an essentially apolitical gamer fantasy universe), we get to find out if Cox’s pleas that Kirk’s assassination not be politicized strike a chord among his fellow partisans, beginning with Trump himself.

The next move is Trump’s. But he must implicitly or explicitly respond to Cox and his call for peace — the kind of peace we used to expect presidents to supply whenever the country was in turmoil.

I know there’s a lot going on this week that’s more important than still more look-backs at 2024, but one development does require a look within the Democratic camp, and I wrote it up at New York:

The period of finger-pointing and blame-shifting among Democrats for their 2024 election defeat should be near its end, but not before hearing from Kamala Harris. Her book on the 2024 campaign, 107 Days, will be released by Simon & Schuster on September 23, but The Atlantic has published an excerpt about her life as vice-president prior to Joe Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out. The only way to put it is that Harris is seething with anger over her treatment by Team Biden before she was suddenly thrust into the global limelight as the putative replacement candidate.

The excerpt begins on the very day of Biden’s withdrawal, when in her eyes the president subtly disrespected her one more time in his speech to the nation:

“I watched it at the hotel that night. It was a good speech, drawing on the history of the presidency to locate his own place within it. But as my staff later pointed out, it was almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address before he mentioned me.

“’I want to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris. She is experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and leader for our country.’

“And that was it.”

The rest of the excerpt is an indictment of the preparation she was given for the herculean task she inherited when Biden stepped away. The White House staff undermined her from day one, says the former veep:

“When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire,’ the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans …

“They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.”

Indeed, says Harris, Team Biden was encouraging nasty stories about her:

“I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a ‘chaotic’ office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.

Instead of defending her from “unfair or inaccurate” stories, Biden’s “inner circle” came up with an infernal first major policy assignment so that she could be “knocked down a little bit more”: immigration.

Harris dutifully went on a whirlwind trip to the Latin American countries from which migrants were heading to our southern border, a chore that led to the ludicrous but very damaging conservative label of “border czar” that Republicans hit her with right down to Election Day.

“[N]o one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved….

“Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.”

She finally got the task at which she would subsequently shine when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. But according to Harris, she was not assigned the role of chief defender of reproductive rights. She seized the opportunity created by Biden’s inhibitions about discussing abortion publicly:

“Here was a huge issue on which the president was not seeking to lead. Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment. He ceded that leadership to me.”

So when Democrats made a stronger-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections, she should have gotten some real credit, certainly within the White House:

“Joe was already polling badly on the age issue, with roughly 75 percent of voters saying he was too old to be an effective president. Then he started taking on water for his perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza.

“When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging …

“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital….

“His team didn’t get it.”

That’s where the excerpt ends, with a blunt accusation of Biden White House cluelessness, compounding the “recklessness” that Biden himself showed in delaying his withdrawal from the campaign so late in the day:

“’It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

To be very clear, we don’t know yet whether the bulk of the book devoted to her campaign continues this narrative of Team Biden sabotage, or simply treats it as a handicap as she began the uphill climb toward November. In a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, she disclaimed any intention of “piling on” to criticism of the 46th president. But even if you take her word as gospel about her treatment by the president’s “inner circle,” it doesn’t offer much of a rationale for why she lost to Donald Trump.

Yes, some of the attack lines his campaign pursued against her with Elon Musk’s money reflected narratives begun or strengthened during her vice-presidential tenure. But others very clearly went back to positions she took and things she said during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, which for the most part she never bothered to contradict or contextualize. Biden and his staff had nothing to do with the disastrous 2019 interview she did in which she appeared to enthusiastically endorse free gender-transition surgery for imprisoned criminals who were also illegal immigrants, a huge combo platter of MAGA bait that led to an incredible number of attack ads in 2024 and helped obliterate her own message.

More generally, it was the overall Biden administration record on inflation and immigration that sank the Harris-Walz ticket, according to most informed analysis, not insufficient veep prestige within that administration. If she was treated as poorly as she now claims, perhaps she should have talked about it publicly as a way to distance herself from an unpopular president.

Now it all sounds like sour grapes. But she has every right to tell her side of the sad story.

It’s hard to look much of anywhere in discussions among Democrats right now without encountering a lot of hand-wringing over a party leadership vacuum, often combined with demands to purge the congressional leadership. I offered some pointed thoughts on the general topic at New York:

A key object of complaints about the Democratic Party’s performance during the second Donald Trump administration has been the Democratic congressional leadership, and particularly House and Senate minority leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. Both men are from New York and have a vague association with the centrist wing of the party, but otherwise these men don’t necessarily have all that much in common. The House and Senate are very different institutions with wildly varying perspectives on the legislative process and divergent incentive systems. Yet we often hear their fecklessness is responsible for the unsavory reputation of the Democratic Party and the ever-simmering anger of “the base” at the alleged unwillingness of their elected officials to “fight Trump.” A recent example of the monomania over Jeffries and Schumer came from the Guardian’s Mehdi Hasan:

“If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.

“If you want to understand why 62% of Democratic voters say ‘the leadership of the Democratic party should be replaced with new people,’ again, look no further than Jeffries and Schumer.

“Week after week, month after month, they embarrass themselves, undermine their colleagues and demoralize their voters. Theirs is a record of cowardice and capitulation.”

Hasan’s biggest beef with Schumer and Jeffries seems to be that they haven’t yet endorsed Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. To be clear, I think they should endorse him too, mostly because the alternatives to Mamdani are so incredibly bad, not because positions on municipal elections are the litmus test for national leaders. But Hasan also bashes the congressional figureheads for admitting they don’t have much power at present:

“Let’s start with Jeffries. In February, the hapless House minority leader wondered aloud: ‘I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. They control the House, the Senate. And the presidency. It’s their government. What leverage do we have?’ It was a shrug of impotence; a sign of pre-emptive submission only weeks after Trump’s inauguration.”

But you know what? Jeffries was absolutely right. There is no one more “impotent” than a House minority leader, unless it’s a House minority leader at a time when maximum partisan polarization makes coalitions to thwart the Dear Leader in the White House literally impossible. Should he pretend to have power only to disappoint Democrats when he can’t actually exercise it? Indeed, doing just that earned Schumer special contempt from Hasan:

“Remember that cringe chant of ‘We will win’ and ‘We won’t rest’ that he led outside the Treasury building in February, as Elon Musk’s Doge teams rampaged through the federal government?

“Or when he shamefully backed down from a confrontation with Trump over a government shutdown in March and earned the scathing soubriquet ‘Surrender Schumer’?”

On the government-shutdown threat, Hasan has a point. Unlike Jeffries, Schumer and Senate Democrats did have one and only one bullet in the chamber: the ability to shut down the government with a filibuster against a stopgap-spending bill. But you can understand Schumer’s fear of wasting this one bullet, or using it when the prime victims would have been the same federal employees Musk and DOGE were threatening. My sense is that his biggest mistake was brandishing the pistol before putting it away. But it wasn’t going to bring Trump 2.0 to a halt in any event.

Hasan contrasts the feckless leaders with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who toured the country making speeches about the need to resist “oligarchs.” Good for them. But that’s not a proper task for congressional leaders, who have time-consuming day jobs even if they have no power.

A far better idea than deposing Jeffries and Schumer in favor of superior communicators or tougher fighters of fights they can’t win would be for Democrats to stop looking to Congress for national leadership, at least before the next presidential cycle. Even in the best of times, members of Congress are famously unrelatable thanks to their narrow legislative perspectives, their strange parliamentary jargon and their inscrutable traditions. There’s a reason only four sitting members of Congress (James Garfield, Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama) have ever been elected president, with the two most recent being transcendent political talents hardly defined by their congressional service.

It’s actually unclear whether Democrats need clearly defined leaders in order to break Trump’s hold on Washington in the 2026 midterms, and they’ll have a presidential-nominating contest in 2028 to choose a national leader then. But if they do need visible leaders for the Midterms, they should look at the Democratic governors instead of anyone in their powerless ranks in Congress.

Governors are by definition chief executives, not legislators dependent on party status. They can wield executive authority with or without legislative cooperation and can’t be locked out of power like their counterparts in Congress. They have countless platforms for communicating their views, not just unwatchable maneuvers on C-Span. And many of them are very good at talking to voters across party lines. Democrats Laura Kelly of Kansas and Andy Beshear of Kentucky have twice won in deep-red states. Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper is a red-hot Senate prospect because he’s been running for office in that relatively conservative state for over 30 years without a single defeat.

If Democrats consider politicians like Kelly, Beshear, or Cooper too moderate and insist on a fiery “fighter,” they can obviously look to such highly combative governors as Gavin Newsom of California and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, who have battled Trump on a broad front for years and have actually achieved some victories. Nobody in Washington can outdo them for rhetorical volume and intensity, and they tend to speak in language that voters can understand.

Should Democrats flip either congressional chamber next year, then it will be appropriate to expect more of their leaders in Washington. But for now Democrats would be well advised to leave Jeffries and Schumer to their largely irrelevant tasks and look around the country for leaders, not just to governor, but to mayors, attorneys general, and civic leaders who are fighting the good fight without constantly displaying their powerlessness.

The intra-Democratic debate over messaging in the second Trump term has many legitimate perspectives. But as we watch our cities fall under armed military rule and other institutions crumble, it may be time to set some basic priorities, as I argued at New York:

One chronic vice in politics is failing to learn lessons from electoral defeats out of stubborn attachment to priors. But it’s also possible to overlearn lessons, too. That may be happening to Democrats right now, as Ron Brownstein observes at CNN:

“As President Donald Trump openly contemplates sending military forces into more American cities, the leading congressional Democrats almost invariably describe his actions as an attempt to create a ‘distraction’ from something else — whether that’s the cost of living, the massive Medicaid cuts he signed into law, or the controversy around the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“That reflex captures the overwhelming preference of top DC Democrats to frame the 2026 election on familiar partisan grounds, particularly the charge that Trump has failed in his core 2024 promise to bring down the cost of living for average families. It also reflects their hesitation about contesting Trump’s actions relating to immigration and crime.”

The preponderance of evidence suggests that Democratic efforts to depict Donald Trump as a “threat to democracy” in the 2024 election did not move that many voters. What persuadable voters did seem to care about was the cost of living, which they perceived as having been vastly more affordable during Trump’s first term. And Trump also benefited from “issue advantages” over Kamala Harris on immigration and crime/law and order.

Unsurprisingly, many Democrats have been allergic to “threat to democracy” messaging ever since the 2024 election and have also shied away from much talk about immigration or crime on the hoary theory that you shouldn’t “play on enemy turf.” While waiting for Trump’s tariffs to produce the inflation that they rightly regard as a potential disaster for the 47th president, they have typically tried to identify a few narrowly material but broadly shared concerns associated with Trump’s agenda and have mostly settled on the Medicaid cuts that helped finance the high-end tax cuts in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Aside from the fear that swing voters are fine with dictatorship if it delivers cheap groceries and gasoline and are bored with hearing about Trump’s own criminal lawlessness, Democratic monomania about “kitchen-table issues” is also reinforced by the ancient prejudice of progressive “populists” in favor of pocketbook issues at the expense of cultural matters or “insider” institutional concerns they tend to dismiss as distractions from the real politics of class struggle. So there’s a double temptation for Democrats to downplay angst over Trump’s power grabs as “distractions” from the arguments that turn public opinion and win elections.

But there’s a big problem with this tunnel vision: Trump no longer represents a prospective “threat to democracy” who might fail to follow through on his thuggish authoritarian rhetoric, just as he often did during his amateurish first term. Depending on how you view his trajectory, he poses at the very least an imminent danger to democracy and is arguably in the process of converting America into an authoritarian regime. Nearly every step he has taken since last November, from building an administration stuffed with MAGA shock troops, to relentless, almost hourly claims of new presidential turf, to unprecedented assaults on private businesses and universities, to the rapid development of a national police force, shows that something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary — formally still a democracy, but under rigid one-party control — is Trump’s goal. So dismissing creeping fascism as a distraction from Medicaid cuts or the Epstein files is rightly infuriating to many Democratic activists. This approach implicitly legitimizes Trump’s lawlessness as relatively unimportant. When rank-and-file Democrats demand their congressional representatives show more “fight” against Trump, they aren’t asking for more frequent or louder protests about the distributional effects of Trump’s tax cuts. They are alarmed more fundamentally about what’s happening to their country under a proto-fascist regime whose leader treats all opponents as traitors to be jailed, sued, deported, gerrymandered, or physically intimidated.

As Brownstein points out, it’s no accident that the non-congressional Democrats most focused on the fight against Trump’s authoritarianism are becoming rapidly more popular with the rank-and-file:

“[J.B.] Pritzker has been unsparing in denouncing Trump as a ‘wannabe dictator,’ as he put in a fiery news conference last week decrying the president’s threats to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. Surrounded by local business, religious and civic leaders, Pritzker struck a conspicuously more urgent tone than the party’s Congressional leadership. ‘If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm,’ Pritzker insisted, before describing the prospect of troops on Chicago streets as ‘unprecedented, unwarranted, illegal, unconstitutional, un-American.’

“[Gavin] Newsom has attracted even more attention among Democrats by resisting Trump actions he’s portrayed as a threat to democracy through over three dozen lawsuits; speeches; mocking social media posts; and his ballot initiative to offset the Texas Republican gerrymander.”

This isn’t to say that the GOP’s chronic assaults on the material interests of Americans, or its alignment with oligarchs, doesn’t matter, but it’s precisely what history tells us you can expect from any right-wing authoritarian movement with the kind of power Republicans now enjoy. Trump is forever declaring emergencies to justify his endless expansion of his own power. It’s time for Democrats to recognize the real emergency that threatens to make economics a side-show.

As regular readers know, I love historical parallels, and so was intrigued by comparisons between MAGA influencer Laura Loomer and a famous demagogue of the distant past, and discussed it at New York:

Most people in political life have role models from the past that they venerate or imitate. Donald Trump, for example, is a big fan of former presidents Andrew Jackson and William McKinley. Some of his MAGA acolytes love Richard Nixon. Lots of Democrats burn candles, literally or figuratively, to the memories of FDR, JFK, RFK (the senior, not the junior) and such quasi-political titans as Martin Luther King Jr.

In an interview with the Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, the notorious MAGA influencer (or perhaps more specifically, Trump-whisperer) Laura Loomer identified an unusual hero who may help inspire her career: Joseph R. McCarthy.

“I suggested at one point that her effort to get federal employees fired for supposed disloyalty to Trump recalled the Red Scare of the early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited the private musings and personal associations of alleged communist sympathizers to end their careers. She loved that.

“’Joseph McCarthy was right,’ Loomer responded without missing a beat. ‘We need to make McCarthy great again.’”

Loomer may have been kidding; her whole act could be described as having a deadly serious core wrapped in candy-coated trolling. But maybe she wasn’t. Despite his censure by a Republican-controlled Senate and his malodorous reputation as a bully and a demagogue, McCarthy has never lost the allegiance of a significant segment of conservatives who either believe his poorly documented charges of massive communist infiltration of U.S. government or simply admire his “populist” willingness to attack bipartisan elites. There are also some tangible connections between his cause and Loomer’s thanks to Trump’s close relationship with McCarthy aide (and later New York superlawyer) Roy Cohn and the 47th president’s zest for conspiracy theories.

But what’s really fascinating to think about is that Loomer may be as powerful as McCarthy ever was. As Scherer notes, while she’s had her ups and downs in a relatively brief career, she’s having quite a run in 2025:

“In just the first seven months of Trump’s second presidency, she successfully lobbied Trump to end Secret Service protection for Joe Biden’s children. She has pushed the president to fire six members of his National Security Council, remove three leaders at the National Security Agency, end an academic appointment at West Point, fire the director of the National Vetting Center at the Department of Homeland Security, dispatch an assistant U.S. attorney in California, and remove a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. After Trump’s intel chief stripped 37 current and former national-security officials of their security clearance Wednesday, she claimed credit for first labeling 29 of them as threats to Trump.”

Loomer has exercised all this pull and become a global celebrity (with a huge social-media and podcast audience) and an adviser to the president of the United States without trudging up the political ladder like McCarthy did. McCarthy was elected to a local judgeship before serving in World War II, upsetting an incumbent U.S. senator in a GOP primary in 1946, and then winning two general elections. Loomer has twice run unsuccessfully for Congress. McCarthy built his national presence through grueling campaign work for Republicans and years of committee hearings in the Senate. Loomer just needs a well-placed tweet or quote — or a private conversation with her White House friends — to change the course of events and demonstrate her power.

The big question at the moment is whether Loomer could experience a fall from grace and power as precipitous and complete as McCarthy, who faded into political irrelevance after his censure (and then reportedly drank himself to death). By most accounts, McCarthy’s trajectory decisively changed when he began training his fire on Republicans rather than Democrats, for the obvious reason that the Eisenhower administration replaced the Truman administration when Ike took office with Joe’s active assistance. The term “deep state” didn’t exist back then, but McCarthy played on perceptions that there was a permanent bipartisan foreign-policy Establishment riddled with communists who didn’t just go away with a change of party management. As an article in the National Archives concludes, Ike was the secret assassin of McCarthy’s career:

“Former President Harry S. Truman openly denounced McCarthy for three years, but his rhetorical attacks only enhanced the senator’s prestige; Ike ruined him in less than half that time.

“[O]n August 31, 1953, McCarthy launched hearings into communist infiltration into the United States Army—Ike’s Army. While Eisenhower did not respond in public, it was only a matter of time. Joe McCarthy had signed his own political death warrant by assaulting the service to which the general had devoted his adult life.”

Much more obviously than McCarthy, Loomer owes absolutely everything to her president, and there’s not much question she has to remain in his good graces to survive, much less thrive. Yet she has flirted with great danger in recent months by going after some fellow Trump acolytes, as Scherer notes:

“She has no problem going after Republican targets. She has publicly accused Senator Lindsey Graham of being gay, which he denies, and called the podcaster Tucker Carlson a ‘fraud’ and a ‘terrible person.’ Loomer let loose on [Marjorie Taylor] Greene, claiming without evidence that she committed obscene acts in CrossFit gyms. (She did link to a Daily Mail article that had suggested, based on anonymous sources, that the congresswoman had extramarital affairs with people she knew through her gym.)”

But even though she almost certainly has enemies in Trump’s inner circle who resent her influence, she keeps registering wins. Just last week, she trained her fire on an aide to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suggesting the aide was quietly preparing a 2028 presidential run for her boss. Loomer didn’t immediately bag her trophy but did accomplish something arguably more important: a statement from Kennedy ruling out a future presidential bid.

The incident suggests that Loomer has plans for influencing the MAGA movement and the GOP even after Trump goes back to Mar-a-Lago for good, which is precisely what she accuses some of her targets of doing:

“She speaks of the White House overall as a self-dealing den of duplicity, where staff regularly conspire against the president she adores.

“’Everyone is positioning themselves for a post-Trump GOP,’ she told me, adding that Trump is often surprised by what she tells him about his own administration. ‘Every time I have these briefings, he looks at his staff and says, “How come you didn’t tell me this?”‘”

Maybe Trump truly believes Loomer has no motives beyond intense personal loyalty to him and his legacy. But Trump is justly famous for discarding anyone who begins imagining themselves indispensable. Joe McCarthy arguably elevated his anti-communist principles above loyalty to party and president and got fatally burned. Loomer would be wise to avoid his trajectory.