Bill Scher writes at The Washington Monthly that “Democrats should not look at poll numbers about general immigration sentiments and conclude the Garcia case and its horrific particulars is a political loser. The party has a moral and constitutional case to make against the Trumpian authoritarian approach to government. For that case to have any legitimacy—for it to not be dismissed as cheap political point scoring—Democrats must act on the principles they have long articulated…Throughout the 2024 campaign, Democrats warned that if elected Trump would behave like a dictator and undermine the foundations of American democracy. They were right, and now he is. It’s not the time to act as if constitutional checks and balances are no longer important because it doesn’t poll as well as some other issue…  Will the 2026 and 2028 elections more likely turn on the economy? Yes. Isn’t it the case that Trump is sandbagging the economy with arbitrary tariffs? Yes. Shouldn’t Democrats focus on that? Yes. But Democrats can do that while also calling out Trump’s abuses of power… In fact, Democrats can easily tie Trump’s disregard for the economy with his disregard for Garcia’s human rights. They can say, “Instead of lowering our prices like he promised to do, Trump and his Republican allies are obsessed with raising the cost of all imported goods and abducting people legally in America and sending them to foreign prisons.”… Fortunately, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have unequivocally stated Garcia should be returned home. They should continue to set that tone and encourage their colleagues to keep up the pressure until justice is done.”

United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain has an article at Jacobin, in which he writes: “In the labor movement, at our best, we have a different way of doing politics. We don’t make politics about personalities or parties; we see politics as a negotiation. We don’t sit down to negotiate with corporate executives because we like them or trust them. We focus on what we need as a working class and what the hell it’s going to take to get it, and we do that whether we’re sitting across from the friendliest CEO or the meanest Wall Street con artist…Politics is just like contract negotiation. You win what you have the power to fight for, and that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in right now…We’re negotiating with the Trump administration; our approach to President Donald Trump is no different than our approach was to President Joe Biden, and it’s no different than our approach at Stellantis or Columbia University or General Dynamics…I keep hearing people say, “UAW loves Trump now,” or “The UAW only supports Democrats.” It’s all bullshit. Our union has a clear North Star, and that’s the working class. The working class’s issues don’t change because somebody has a D or an R next to their name…We’ve seen some reckless and chaotic activity on trade from this administration, and there’s a lot of fear of disruption. But what we have to remember is that disruption is not new to factory workers in this country — disruption is what we’ve been living with for thirty years under a free-trade disaster…It doesn’t mean we support reckless random tariffs. I don’t believe that’s the answer to all this. But there is a reason for tariffs, and it’s also a mistake to just defend the status quo, especially when it comes to free trade…We have to end this free-trade disaster, and we don’t care if it’s a Democrat or a Republican who ends it.”

Fain continues, “It’s not enough for politicians to talk a good game about wanting to bring back jobs — they need to be good union jobs, with good standards. And we have good reason to be suspicious that the Trump administration is not interested in supporting the right to organize or bargain…Because here’s what we’ve seen so far from the Trump administration: we’ve seen the destruction of bargaining rights for a million federal workers. That’s not good for the working class. We’ve seen attacks on the National Labor Relations Board, including illegally firing a board member, leading to deadlock on workers’ cases. That’s not good for the working class. We’ve seen attacks planned on Social Security,Medicare, and Medicaid, programs that millions of workers depend on. That’s not good for the working class…We’ve seen the absolute trampling of constitutional rights. We have seen the First Amendment go up in smoke at college campuses — with detentions, deportations, expulsions, and firings of people who dared to speak out against and protest against a war, just to call for a cease-fire. We have seen the right to due process disappear as working people are deported for no crime and no reason. That’s not good for the working class…When we speak out against these actions, we get called liberals by the right-wingers; when we speak out in support of tariffs, we get called right-wingers by the liberals. People say we’re flip-flopping or doing a 180. The truth is, what we are doing is acting with integrity…We disagree with 99 percent of what the Trump administration is doing, when it comes to attacks on labor and working-class people and attacks on free speech…But no matter what party you voted for, understand there is a direct line between the free-trade disaster and the political chaos in this country. Plant closures and mass layoffs resulted in intense pain and suffering and anger for hundreds of thousands of working families in our country. All that pain and anger had to go somewhere — a lot of it went to support Donald Trump for president…We need to build a political movement that can put the working class first, and to do that we’re going to need working-class people to step up, to speak up, and take on corporate America, from the bargaining table to the ballot box.”

In “The daunting task facing Democrats trying to win back the working class,” Christian Paz writes at Vox, via yahoo.com: “It’s perhaps the most urgent reason Democrats lost in November: The party has solidly lost the support of working-class voters across the country and doesn’t have a solid sense of how to win them back…Now, a group of Democratic researchers, strategists, and operatives are launching a renewed effort to figure out — and to communicate to the rest of their party — what it is that these voters want, where they think the party went wrong, and how to best respond to their concerns before the 2026 election cycle…Led by Mitch Landrieu, former Democratic lieutenant governor of Louisiana and former mayor of New Orleans, the Working Class Project plans to offer guidance over the next few months on how to build “a more sustainable majority” in future elections…Last year marked the first time in nearly 60 years that the lowest-earning Americans voted for the Republican presidential candidate over the Democratic one…“Since President Obama was first elected in 2008, Democrats have seen over 25 percent in net loss of support among working class voters,” Landrieu explains in the project’s launch announcement. “In other words, for two decades, Democrats have been on a downward slide among the very voters whose interests we champion and who benefit most from our policies.”…Housed within the liberal opposition research firm and Super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, the Working Class Project is primarily focused on research, polling, and focus group works. They’re focused on reaching and listening to voters in 21 states: the traditional seven battleground states, seven safely Democratic states with large shares of white and nonwhite working-class voters (which drifted right last year), and seven solidly Republican states.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,  and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

This just in: Americans love nukes! New Gallup data show attitudes toward nuclear energy doing a U-turn from negative views in the mid-teens to strongly positive views today. In less then 10 years, positive views have spiked by 17 points while negative views have plummeted by 19 points. That’s taken net support (favor minus oppose) from -10 to +27.

This is surprising but it’s worth asking why this is surprising. Nuclear power, after all, is a clean, carbon-free energy source in an era when the center-left is obsessed with eliminating carbon emissions. Moreover, nuclear can provide the necessary firm, baseload power to the grid that intermittent renewables (wind and solar) cannot. So where is—or has been—the love?

The answer goes back to the origins of the modern environmental movement and the apocalyptic strain that always lurked there, ready to be activated by an issue like nuclear power and, later, climate change. Here you need to make the acquaintance of a man named William Vogt.

Vogt was an ornithologist and ecologist whose experiences in the developing world had convinced him that economic growth and overpopulation would inevitably lead to civilizational collapse unless both growth and population were radically curtailed. He published his book-length polemic Road to Survival in 1948.

Vogt’s book had an enormous impact. It was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, condensed by Reader’s Digest for its 13 million subscribers, translated into nine languages and immediately adopted as a textbook by dozens of colleges and universities. It became the best-selling book of all-time on environmental themes until the 1960’s and the publication of Silent Spring.

Vogt argued that humans were worse than parasites, who lacked enough intelligence to be truly destructive. But humans had used their brains to rip up nature and compromised their own survival to become richer. Only drastic measures could prevent worldwide environmental disaster (sound familiar?).

Vogt argued that beliefs in progress were weighing humanity down and were actually “idiotic in an overpeopled, atomic age, with much of the world a shambles.” He concluded that the road to survival could only lie in maximizing use of renewable resources and accepting lower living standards or reduced population.

In his language and outlook, one can see all the strands of apocalyptic environmentalism that were brought to bear, first on nuclear power, then on climate change. This especially applies to his description of the United States and its economic system. He said:

Our forefathers [were] one of the most destructive groups of human beings that have ever raped the earth. They moved into one of the richest treasure houses ever opened to man, and in a few decades turned millions of acres of it into a shambles.

He continued:

’Free enterprise has made the country what it is!’ To this an ecologist might sardonically assent, ‘Exactly.’ For free enterprise must bear a large share of the responsibility for devastated forests, vanishing wildlife, crippled ranges, a gullied continent, and roaring flood crests. Free enterprise—divorced from biophysical understanding and social responsibility.

Vogt’s outlook was enormously influential. Historian Allan Chase observed:

Every argument, every concept, every recommendation made in Road to Survival would become integral to the conventional wisdom of the post-Hiroshima generation of educated Americans…[They] would for decades to come be repeated, and restated, and incorporated again and again into streams of books, articles, television commentaries, speeches, propaganda tracts, posters, and even lapel buttons.

More benignly, Vogt’s book marked the evolution of traditional conservationism into environmentalism. Stripped of the apocalyptic verbiage, he was arguing that conservation of nature was not enough. The interdependence of man and nature meant that human activities could not be isolated and instead were having negative effects on the entire planet—wilderness, settled areas, oceans, everywhere. The balance of nature was being destroyed, dragging down the natural world and humanity with it. Restoring that balance, not merely conserving parts of the ecosystem, was the new meaning of being an environmentalist.

Also key to Vogt’s analysis was the concept of “carrying capacity”—how much the environment/planet could sustainably bear of a species’ imprint before disaster ensued. This was not precisely defined but it is easy to see the relationship of this idea to how climate change is conventionally thought of today.

The modern environmentalist movement kicked off in the early 1960’s with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (as with Vogt’s book, a Book of the Month Club selection). Carson was directly inspired by Vogt and in fact was a friend of his. Her book was primarily focused on the impact of synthetic chemicals, especially DDT and other pesticides, on the natural environment. Her prognosis was dire; not only were these chemicals destroying the balance of nature by disrupting ecosystems but they were also destroying the ecosystem of the human body. These chemicals have “immense power not merely to poison but to enter into the most vital processes of the body and change them in sinister and often deadly ways.” Moreover, these chemicals would “bioaccumlate” and have enhanced effects over time. Perhaps eventually even the birds would not sing (producing a “silent spring”).

The serialization of the book in The New Yorker took the middlebrow educated audience by storm. The chemical industry fought back, which only raised the profile of the book. The public furor led to a report on pesticides by President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee which, in 1963 issued a report largely sympathetic to Carson’s analysis. The general issue of pollution of the natural environment by commercial processes and chemicals received a huge boost from the intense and prolonged public discussion and from this the modern environmental movement was born. Protecting the environment and natural systems now had a truly mass base.

Read more…

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.

By almost any measure that statisticians cook up, more than 40 percent of America’s labor force is employed in small businesses (Go ahead and ask Siri, Alexa or Google). Some of them are managers and more of them are blue collar or office workers. But they are all significantly affected by the climate of economic uncertainty created by Captain Chaos.

In the stub of the Bulwark interview we recently ran, GOP strategist Sarah Longwell noted that a lot of small business owners and employees “understand supply chains…They really understand tariffs…they thought he would be better for their small business in the economy. And those are the people right now who are like, well, this kind of uncertainty makes it impossible for me to run my business…uncertainty is the worst condition for a small business because…you got to order things in advance.”

Democrats would be smart to pounce on this insight and ride it to the midterms with unbridled gusto. Here’s a few recent articles to peruse for ammo:

Small businesses sue Trump administration over authority to impose tariffs by Matthew Kaufman, CNN.

Small business owners speak out about effects of Trump tariffs: ‘Unsustainable‘ by Daniella Genovese, FoxBusiness.

Two-Thirds of Small Business Owners Say Tariffs Will Hurt Their Company  by and at pymnts.com.

A doomsday scenario’: CEO says Trump’s China tariffs could shutter his business ‘within months by Tom Huddleston, Jr. at CNBC.com.

Tariffs create costly chaos for Amazon sellers — including the Trump supporters: Small businesses that depend on overseas suppliers have endured a week of stressful uncertainty by Caroline O’Donovan at The Washington Post.

Do ​Tariffs Mean Raising Prices? The Question For Small Businesses by Rohit Arora at Forbes.

Trump’s China tariffs are slamming small businesses — the heart of our economy and his own voters by The New York Post Editorial Board.

Tariffs have small business in ‘survival mode’ by Kai Ryssdal and Nicholas Guiang at Marketplace.

‘We’re in a New Reality’: Small Business Owners Suffering from Tariffs Are Speaking Out On social media, entrepreneurs are expressing confusion and concern about what import duties mean for their supply chains by Brian Contreras at Inc.

In his first big speech since leaving the white House, former President “Joe Biden accuses Trump and Musk of taking ‘hatchet’ to social security.” So reports Lauren Gambino at The Guardian, and continues: “Joe Biden on Tuesday accused Donald Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, Elon Musk, of “taking a hatchet” to the social security administration as they moved at warp-speed to dismantle large swaths of the federal government…In his first public remarks since leaving office, the former president avoided any explicit mention of Trump – his predecessor and successor – but he was sharply critical of the new administration for threatening social security, which Biden called a “sacred promise” that more than 70 million Americans rely on each month…“In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction,” Biden said, addressing the national conference of Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled in Chicago. “It’s kind of breathtaking that it could happen that soon.”…On Tuesday, Democrats across the country held a day of action to “sound the alarm” over the Trump administration’s plans to downsize the social security administration, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said earlier on Tuesday. Biden referenced the sweeping cuts to the agency’s workforce and its services in his remarks…“In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the social security system, people have always gotten their social security checks,” Biden said. “They’ve gotten them during wartime, during recessions, during a pandemic. No matter what, they got them. But now for the first time ever, that might change. It’d be a calamity for millions of families.” Read on here.

Aging and somnolent Democratic members of congress alert: The younguns are coming for your seat. That’s the gist of “In unprecedented move, DNC official to spend big to take down fellow Democrats” by Elena Schneider at Politico, who writes: “David Hogg, a controversial Democratic National Committee vice chair, is pledging to upend Democratic primaries by funding candidates who will challenge “ineffective, asleep-at-the-wheel” Democrats…The move puts Hogg, the now 25-year-old who first gained national stature as an outspoken survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, on a collision course with his own party and some Democratic House members…Leaders We Deserve, which Hogg co-founded in 2023, announced plans on Tuesday to spend $20 million in safe-blue Democratic primaries against sitting House members by supporting younger opponents. In an interview with POLITICO, Hogg said the group will not back primary challenges in battleground districts because “I want us to win the majority,” nor will it target members solely based on their age…“We have a culture of seniority politics that has created a litmus test of who deserves to be here,” Hogg said. “We need people, regardless of their age, that are here to fight.” Some may grumble about ‘ageism.’ But isn’t that what is going on right now, effectively locking out capable young people who want to become Democratic office-holders? In any case, few sentient Dems would doubt that their party could benefit by a makeover featuring a more youthful look, or at least a less ossified one. Hogg is doing something about it, and it looks like he has the smarts do it intelligently. We sure as hell could use more young voters.

“Working-class voters respond to arguments about protecting America from foreign “invaders” because being American is blue-collar people’s strongest boast; it’s the source of their status, so they like politicians who emphasize it,” Joan C. Williams, author of “White Working Class” and the forthcoming “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” writes in “Democrats need to speak to cultural concerns as well as economics” at The Los Angeles Times. She notes further, “A 2020 poll found that being American was an important part of the identity of 79% of Americans with (at most) high school degrees, but only 43% of predominantly college-educated progressive activists. The college-educated, in contrast, prefer to stress their top-of-the-heap membership in a globalized elite. Working-class voters also define their communities geographically, where they have networks based on neighborhood and kinship. By contrast, the “Brahmin Left” (to use Thomas Piketty’s term) see themselves as part of an international community characterized by “feeling rules” that mandate empathy for immigrants and racial minorities but less often for class-disadvantaged citizens of their own countries…People’s values reflect their lives, and their lives reflect their privilege — or lack of it. This is a message progressives, with their acuity about racial and gender privilege, should be able to hear. It could help them come to terms with an uncomfortable fact: Non-college voters of every racial group are less liberal than college grads of the same group…But moderates need to expand their cultural awareness too. When moderates like commentator Ruy Teixeira and the advocacy group Third Way argue that Democrats should throw identity politics under the bus and abandon their strong views on trans rights and climate change, they too are overlooking the cultural dimension of contemporary politics. Just as members of the Brahmin Left need to acknowledge that the logic of their lives differs from the logic of working-class lives, moderates need to acknowledge that progressives won’t just give in on issues like climate change. Those issues are deeply etched into progressives’ identities: The Brahmin Left is truly worried about the end of the world, even as non-elites are more concerned about the end of the month.”

Maeve Reston writes at msn.com that “Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs at the centrist group Third Way, said the size of Sanders’s crowds has been impressive. But he argued they are driven largely by anger about the Trump administration’s policies rather than any sudden embrace of Sanders’s agenda of controversial policies like Medicare-for-all…“The problem with the far left is that they have scored their victories only against other Democrats. They have yet to flip a single House seat, not to mention the Senate,” Bennett said…Bennett said the only way to stop “the absolute catastrophe of Trumpism” is “to win majorities, and the only way to win majorities is with moderates in purple and red districts and states…But Faiz Shakir, a longtime Sanders adviser who ran for Democratic National Committee chair earlier this year, said Sanders is ascendant in this moment because he is channeling the wrath of regular people toward the billionaire class and “the hubris and lack of humanity” in people like Musk. Sanders remains popular at a time when the Democratic brand has hit historic lows because he’s known as “a class-based populist warrior against concentrations of wealth and power,” Shakir said…The Democratic brand, by contrast, Shakir said, is still “unsure of the class prism, far more focused on left versus right, social racial justice issues that are not on the main highway of the thing that millions and millions and millions of people are upset about.”

Like many Americans, I’ve been watching with fascinated horror the Trump administration’s first big steps towards mass deportation, and wrote about the political underpinnings of the issue at New York:

To those who are worried about the threat to the rule of law represented by the first president to enter the White House as a convicted criminal, the brinkmanship being exhibited by Team Trump over court orders involving an erroneously deported immigrant seems ominous.

The Trump administration has been taunting the judiciary via dilatory tactics and obfuscation in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This protected-status immigrant from El Salvador, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has three children, was shipped off to a brutal Salvadorian rent-a-prison without due process, based on a faulty identification.

U.S. district court judge Paula Xinis has ordered the administration to find and return Abrego Garcia so that he can receive due process prior to deportation, and a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court concurred that the order must be obeyed, albeit with some consideration of the complications of the case. But even though Judiciary Department lawyers have admitted in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was the result of an error, the White House has stalled in complying with Xinis’s order. And in a bizarre Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran president (and self-described dictator) Nayib Bukele, Trump and his attorney general suggested it was now Bukele’s problem. The Salvadoran leader said he would not “smuggle” a “terrorist” back into the United States. Right there in front of the cameras, White House policy director and infamous nativist Stephen Miller misstated the Supreme Court decision and kept referring to Abrego Garcia as a terrorist, the disputed attribution at the very center of the legal case. It all seemed like an extended mockery of the rule of law.

The administration is clearly playing rope-a-dope on the entire situation. And while it may ultimately comply with the courts, extract Abrego Garcia from prison, and give him a real hearing, the political question is why Team Trump is dragging this out in the glare of global bad publicity. Is this really the ground on which the 47th president will trigger a much-feared constitutional crisis by openly defying the judicial branch of government, including the Supreme Court that has been so very good to him? That’s what a lot of Trump critics believe is happening before our incredulous eyes.

I personally believe the administration will eventually submit to the courts, albeit as minimally as possible. But it’s possible Team Trump thinks the president’s foreign-policy powers, which they claim are at stake in such cases, are strong enough that it’s the Supreme Court that will submit to Trump’s authority to do as he wishes with immigrants.

Politically speaking, this is a fight the administration is eager to take on even if it temporarily loses, because it’s all happening on Trump’s favored turf at the intersection of the immigration and crime issues. At a time when the president is losing popularity steadily thanks to his economic policies, and particularly his tariff policies, it’s probably a relief to get back to the argument that America is succumbing to an “invasion” by criminal immigrants eager to rape, pillage, and eat pets. It seemed to have worked in 2024. Why not in 2025?

Recent polls regularly confirm that of all the controversial things Trump has done in the first 11-plus weeks of his second term, his handling of immigration policy is the most popular. This is true in polls that rate his overall job performance negatively (an April 8 Economist–YouGov survey giving him a net minus-seven approval rating overall but a plus-six approval rating on immigration) and positively (an April 10 Harvard–Harris survey giving him a net plus-two approval rating overall but a plus-seven approval rating on immigration). It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that when the full implications of the Trump-Miller immigration agenda become manifest, particularly when legal immigrants and even citizens are affected, this general-public approbation will fade or even head due south. Indeed, pollster G. Elliott Morris has published an analysis arguing that support for Trump’s positions declines steadily as questions about them become more specific:

“[W]hen various pollsters asked if they would support deporting immigrants who have been here more than 10 years (as in the case of Abrego Garcia), U.S. adults said “no” by a 37 percentage point margin; Americans disapprove of deporting immigrants who have broken no laws other than laws governing entry; they oppose deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign jails, such as [El Salvador’s] CECOT, and they oppose housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay while they are processed. All of these are policies the Trump administration has now floated or is actively carrying out.”

So the administration may be guilty of rhetorical overreach on immigration at a time when the mass-deportation program is actually going pretty slowly. But what about all the constitutional fears raised by cases like that of Abrego Garcia? Won’t Americans recoil at those signs of a presidency determined to become imperial? Maybe not.

Team Trump has clearly internalized one of the big lessons of the 2024 presidential election: that threats to “the rule of law” or “the Constitution” or “democracy” don’t mean a lot to persuadable voters who are most concerned about living costs and their own sense of well-being. If what Trump tried to do on January 6, 2021 doesn’t rise to the level of a voting issue for well over half the electorate, then is there any reason to believe that Abrego Garcia’s “due process” rights will matter? What is “due process,” anyway? Like the “presumption of innocence” from which Abrego Garcia should also benefit, it’s a legal concept that an awful lot of regular folks either don’t understand or find problematic, particularly when applied to someone the president of the United States has labeled an alien criminal terrorist.

So Team Trump is happy to defy the rule of law, at least at a level short of overt defiance, in any controversy involving immigrants. It pleases the nativist MAGA base immensely to see the administration run circles around “activist judges” in ridding the country of the people Democrats allegedly brought in to “replace” the country’s historic white majority. And it’s unclear at this point that Democrats and other Trump critics can make smash-and-grab ICE operations that land peaceful American residents in overseas hellholes as frightening as they should be. But as with the increasingly unpopular Trump tariff program, the immigration agenda may lose support the longer, the louder, and the more chaotic it becomes.

Here we have a lucid discussion between two Republican apostates about how to defeat Trump at their website, The Bulwark, which provides a full transcript, a stub of which is cross-posted below. You can also watch the discussion by clicking on this link. 

 Many will recognize the interviewer, Bill Kristol, as a venerable conservative commentator and analyst, who frequently appears news discussion shows. The interviewee, Sarah Longwell is a Republican strategist, who is strongly committed to defeating Trump. Her perceptive insights deserve serious consideration by Democrats.

From “Democrats dislike the ‘chaos’ of Trump’s trade war but are OK with some tariffs” by Josh Boak and Matt Brown at the Associated Press: “Democrats are quick to say that President Donald Trump’s tariffs are horrible, awful, terrible. But Democrats are also stressing that they are not inherently anti-tariff…What Trump’s political opponents say they really dislike is the “chaos” he has unleashed…“Tariffs are an important tool in our economic toolbox,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “Trump is creating chaos, and that chaos undercuts our economy and our families, both in the short term and the long term. … He’s just created a worldwide hurricane, and that’s not good for anyone.”…Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Democrats have a consensus around “a unified concept, which is targeted tariffs can work, across the board tariffs are bad.”…“The right targeting is in the eye of the beholder, but nobody on our side thinks zero tariffs ever,” Kaine said…The Democrats’ message is meant to convey that they are reasonable, focused on capable governance and attuned to financial market distress. It’s a pitch toward swing voters who would like to see more manufacturing yet are uncomfortable with the consequences of Trump’s approach to tariffs. The risk is that it also is a nuanced argument at a time when pithy critiques travel faster and spread wider on social media than do measured policy analyses…“Farmers, in particular, who were hit very hard by Trump’s last trade wars, are terrified that this may be existential to their businesses,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis. “These are mostly small and medium-sized family farms. Their input costs are going to go up and their export markets are going to close down.”…“I’m a little uninterested in what the Democratic response should be like,” said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. “Trump is intentionally destroying the American economy, and I think we should just say that and not make it very complicated.”

“A growing majority of America’s top executives now expects the U.S. economy to enter a recession in the near future, according to a survey released Monday,” Alex Harring writes in “More than 60% of CEOs expect a recession in the next 6 months as tariff turmoil grows, survey says” at nbcnews.com. “Of the more than 300 CEOs polled in April, 62% said they forecasted a recession or other economic downturn in the next six months, according to Chief Executive, an industry group that runs the survey. That’s up from 48% who said the same in March…Chief Executive’s data underscores the growing concern within corporate America around the future of the U.S. economy. Fears about a forthcoming recession hit a boiling point in the last two weeks, as President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff policy ratcheted up volatility in financial markets and stirred panic among some consumers…Indeed, around three-fourths of CEOs surveyed said tariffs would hurt their businesses in 2025. About two-thirds said they did not support Trump’s proposed levies, many of which are currently on pause…just 37% said they believe their companies’ profits will increase. That’s a steep drop from the 76% who gave this response in January.”

In “The House: Democrats Favored on What Starts as a Small Battlefield” Kyle Kondix explains at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Electorally, Democrats have been punching above their weight in special elections much like they did in 2017, and they just decisively won the first big statewide election of Trump’s second term, maintaining liberal control of the Wisconsin state Supreme Court last week. Democrats are grappling with some internal strife, as their own voters are starting to express wider dissatisfaction with the party. But fortunately for Democrats, a party’s voters don’t have to love their own party in a midterm context in order to deliver wins—they just have to be motivated enough to turn out against the other guys. For instance, Republicans’ internal issues didn’t prevent them from strong showings in the 2010 and 2014 midterms, although fractious primaries did produce some candidates who kicked away key races, most notably in 2010 Senate contests (the quality of nominees coming out of primaries will be something to monitor during the primary season). Back then, the conventional wisdom was that the smaller midterm electorate had a generic Republican lean. Now that conventional wisdom has been turned on its head, given the migration of higher-turnout voters into the Democratic camp. In a recent episode of the Ezra Klein Show, Democratic consultant David Shor found that Kamala Harris would have beaten Trump in an electorate made up of only 2022 midterm voters, while Trump would have won the popular vote by close to 5 points if all registered voters had cast a ballot. Democrats clearly have some longer-term problems to work through, but that to us is more of a 2028 issue than a 2026 one, at least when it comes to the House…To sum up this preamble, we would just say the following: Democrats became favorites to flip the House as soon as Trump won, and what has happened since then has not really changed that assessment…Our bottom line assessment of the battle for Congress is that Democrats should win the House, and Republicans should win the Senate (as we explained in our initial ratings back in February). One way to track 2025 and 2026 is whether either of these assessments look like they are in danger of being upended—does the race for the House seem like more of a true Toss-up in fall 2026, or does the Senate majority seem to be in doubt?”

From “Trump Opens the Door to More Medicare Advantage Fraud” by Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect: “One of the most preposterous narratives about Donald Trump’s second term in office is that his administration is engaged in “cost-cutting.” Elon Musk and his DOGE goons are hacking away randomly at the federal bureaucracy, it’s true, but all the salaries of all federal employees combined come to only about 5 percent of government spending. And many of those layoffs are going to lead to increased spending—for instance, massive cuts to the IRS workforce have already reduced tax revenue by an estimated $500 billion this year, which will require the money to be borrowed instead, thereby automatically increasing spending on interest payments (the fifth-largest category in the federal budget)…Sure enough, as John Green points out, total federal spending has steadily increased this year each month—indeed, faster than it did in 2024. Now it is likely to increase yet more, as Trump has proposed a trillion-dollar military budget, and more importantly, released a new reimbursement schedule for Medicare Advantage (the privatized version of the program). Where the Biden administration had proposed a 2.23 percent increase to that program, Trump officials have proposed more than twice that: 5.06 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal…Under Medicare Advantage—which now covers more than half of the seniors in the program—the government pays private companies to insure Medicare enrollees. As we have covered at the Prospect for years now, the program is, at best, a pointless waste of money, and at worst an outright scam. It was set up back in the 1990s at the height of bipartisan neoliberal hegemony, when virtually everyone in power assumed as a matter of faith that business could always operate more efficiently than government, amen…The problem, of course, is that markets have a lot of perverse incentives when it comes to health insurance. There is every reason to deny coverage to sick people, or cancel their coverage when they are injured, or deny claims out of hand, so as to boost profits. (Before Obamacare, by the way, all three of those tactics were more or less standard practice in the private insurance market.)…So if Medicare Advantage were to pay out a flat fee for every enrollee, for instance, private insurers would scoop up all the youngest and healthiest seniors, stick the government with the sicker and older ones, and cream off fat profits. That’s why CMS operates a gigantic database with individual risk codes for all 67 million Medicare enrollees, indicating how sick they are, and pays Medicare Advantage insurers based on the illness level of their insured population.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,  and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Trump’s “golden age” is presenting Democrats with a golden opportunity. The reason isn’t excesses around DOGE, deportation, DEI, universities, research funding, and the like—though all of these have been problems for the Trump administration. But they pale in comparison to current developments around Trump’s tariff regime and its economic effects. Put simply, while Trump’s populist working-class coalition was certainly animated by issues around cultural leftism, illegal immigration, and government waste, they also believed putting him in office would fix what they viewed as a broken economic system.

That does not appear to be happening. The chaotic rollout of Trump’s tariff regime has simply made voters more nervous about the economy rather than convincing them the economic system is being fixed. Trump’s average net approval rating (approval minus disapproval) on the economy is now -10 points and on inflation it is -13 points. Economic approval ratings were Trump’s great strength in his first term! No more.

A CBS News poll taken right before “Liberation Day” (whose aggressive tariffs have only increased economic angst and uncertainty) found that views on whether Trump’s policies are making you financially better or worse off have flipped since January; the percentage believing Trump policies are making them better off has declined by about 20 points and now those who believe Trump’s policies are making them worse off far outnumbers the “better off” group. As for the tariffs specifically an overwhelming 72 percent believe they will make the prices they pay go up rather than down (a mere 5 percent).

And here’s the kicker: by more than 2:1 (64 percent to 31 percent) people believe the administration is not focusing enough on lowering the price of goods and services but the result is reversed for tariffs—they strongly feel the administration is focusing too much on this area. That marks a clear break between Trump and working-class priorities and a big—a golden—opportunity for Democrats.

But can they make the most of it? It seems doubtful at this point. Of course, they will pillory the Trump administration mercilessly for their economic mistakes and the pain and uncertainty voters are experiencing. That’s Politics 101: make the incumbent administration pay when the economy goes south.

The problem, however, is that Democrats are still struggling to find their way in the current populist era where they are the Establishment in the eyes of the working class and their brand therefore extremely unpopular—“toxic” as even many Democrats have put it. By definition, beating up on the Trump administration doesn’t do much to change that brand; you’re simply trying to make the other party more unpopular than you.

What would be better—much better—would be for Democrats to use this opportunity to craft a new image for themselves that connects to the populist zeitgeist. Otherwise their denunciations of Trump and the GOP, however hard-hitting and creative, will strike working-class voters as an implicit defense of the Establishment and the current system.

That’s not what these voters want, even those among them who are disconcerted with Trump’s actions and worry about their economic effects. As David Shor has documented, we live in a country where 78 percent of voters think change is more important than preserving America’s institutions and where delivering a “shock to the system” is preferred to a “return to basic stability.” Democrats need to make their sale in that populist environment not in deep blue, highly-educated America where anti-Trump sentiment easily outruns the populist impulse. Those voters are not the Democrats’ problem.

With that in mind, let’s look at what the Democrats have on offer to take advantage of Trump’s vulnerabilities. I’d put the approaches in three basic buckets:

1. Resist! This is the default option for most Democrats. EverythingTrump does must be resisted all the time. The latest economic problems are just one more manifestation of his unspeakable evil. The important thing is to Fight! Those like Chuck Schumer, who pursue practical compromises, should be pushed aside in favor of leaders who wave the blue flag of resistance high. Cory Booker’s 25-hour filibuster against the administration is precisely the right spirit. The nationwide “Hands Off!” demonstrations on April 5 show that the masses are rallying to the cause, etc.

Implicitly, “hands off” also means hands off all Democrats priorities, programs and interest groups—in other words a return to the status quo ante, which we already know populist working-class voters don’t want. This approach seems well-designed to rally the Democratic faithful going into the midterms but not to change the image of the Democratic Party.

2. Fight the Oligarchy! This is a close cousin of the Resist! approach, which essentially juices it with a heavy dose of naïve economic populism. Basically, not only is Trump doing all these terrible things but he is doing them to enrich the oligarchy and maintain their power. They twirl their moustaches and laugh (bwa-ha-ha) as Trump does their bidding! This approach is particularly popular on the left of the party and is currently on nationwide tour with the redoubtable AOC and the ageless Bernie Sanders. Perhaps coming soon to a theater near you.

I get why this seems like a good idea. As noted, it certainly makes sense that in our current populist era, Democrats need to be responsive to that populist mood. But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populist pitch by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats who don’t want to make hard choices.

To begin with, Democrats have plenty of oligarchs on their side that they seem much less interested in fighting (remember JB Pritzker, who proudly proclaimed himself a billionaire at the Democratic convention, and the countless other fabulously wealthy individuals in the Democratic orbit). Voters are not unaware of this fact.

They are also painfully aware that the professional-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power is overwhelmingly Democratic. To working-class voters, the professional upper middle class may not be the super-rich but they are elites just the same—junior oligarchs if you will.

This is a bitter pill for most Democratic elites to swallow. In today’s America, they are the Establishment even if in their imaginations they are sticking it to the Man and fighting nobly for social justice. The failure to understand that they themselves are targets of populist anger is a central reason their populist pitch fails—and will fail—to get traction among the working class. Call it the “old wine in new bottles” problem—these voters hear the economic populist words but they sense that behind them is the same old Democratic Party with the same old elites and the same old cultural priorities. So far, the Fight the Oligarchy! crowd has done nothing that would disabuse working class voters of this notion.

3. Abundance Now! This approach is gaining adherents in Democratic circles though it lags far, far behind the first two approaches. But it has the advantage of directly posing an actually different path for Democrats thereby mitigating the old wine in new bottles problem. The central idea of the approach is to radically reduce the barriers, bottlenecks, and regulations that prevent Democratic governance from meeting progressive goals in areas like housing, infrastructure, and public services. Their approach aims to make these things “abundant” and therefore tamp down the widespread anger at Democratic governing failures.

This is promising and, as Derek Thompson has pointed out, a sort of “centrist populism,” where the elites standing in the way of getting things done are targeted, is consistent with an abundance approach. That would speak to the populist moment in a way that is certainly fresher than just bashing the rich, which is well past its sell-by date.

However, the very elites that such a centrist populism might target are by and large Democratic, presenting an awkward problem for abundance Democrats. Are they willing to take on “the Groups” and entrenched interest groups that are likely to fight a drive for deregulation and efficiency tooth and nail? So far, I’m not seeing it. A failure on this front will undercut the whole abundance project and vitiate any populist appeal to working-class voters.

Moreover, the goals of an abundance approach tend to be linked to a concept of abundance that does not line up well with the preferences of actually-existing working-class voters who, quite simply, want to be richer and have more stuff. Abundance Democrats, on the other hand, seem to have in mind a socially liberal ecotopia that is highly appealing to educated, upper middle class liberals but much less so to the working class. As Josh Barro notes Democratic abundance advocates tend to support “policies that would make energy, and the aspirational suburban lifestyle, more expensive.” And that lifestyle, he points out, is what “abundance” means for most ordinary Americans. Arizona Democratic senator Ruben Gallego underscores the issue: “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.”

Call it the “big-ass truck problem.” Any abundance approach in a populist era needs to reckon with this problem. Otherwise, like the other Democratic approaches, it will fall short among the populist working class.

Democrats who truly want to find their way in our current populist era need some new approaches. But first they should accept that they’re still lost. That is the beginning of wisdom and renewal.

Chris Matthews reports “Trump tariffs to hit working class the hardest, costing an average family $3,800 a year” at Marketwatch, and writes that “President Donald Trump has plunged the United States into a new phase of his trade war, and this time the economic casualties will be clear, immediate and, for many Americans, painful.” Further,

The new levies, combined with other tariffs already implemented this year, will raise costs for the average American family by $3,800, according to a new report by the Yale Budget Lab.