Russell Berman | The Atlantic

The State That Could Decide Trump’s Gerrymandering War

2026-04-09T07:00:00-04:00

Updated on April 10 at 6:55 p.m. ET

Democrats in Virginia desperately want permission from voters to gerrymander the state beyond recognition. They also want Virginians to know how profoundly sorry they are to have to ask. “I believe that people should choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn’t choose their people,” State Senator Creigh Deeds declared on Friday, as he stood flanked by a dozen young Democrats at the University of Virginia.

This is typically the main argument against gerrymandering, but for Deeds, it was just the windup to a pitch for his party to cast aside its highfalutin principles and start hurling spitballs back at Republicans. “We’ve been pushed,” he lamented, “into a situation not of our own choosing.”

The situation to which Deeds so gravely alluded is the all-out redistricting war that Republicans started last summer in Texas. At President Trump’s behest, state lawmakers redrew congressional lines to bolster the GOP’s narrow House majority. Democrats, initially aghast but quickly emboldened, responded by matching Republicans with an equally aggressive gerrymander in California, which voters approved overwhelmingly in November. The battleground expanded from there, as Republicans added seats in North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri.

With new opportunities to gain an edge dwindling, the two parties are waging an expensive campaign in Virginia that could prove decisive. The congressional map that Democrats have proposed is, in its ways, even more audacious than those enacted in either Texas or California. They’re asking voters to temporarily set aside a bipartisan redistricting system they approved just six years ago. Under their proposal, Democrats would be favored to win all but one of Virginia’s 11 House seats—a huge shift from the current districts, which are currently split between six Democrats and five Republicans. The boldness of Virginia’s plan stands out all the more in light of the reticence of neighboring Maryland, a stronger Democratic bastion where the senate president rebuffed a push from national leaders and Governor Wes Moore to draw a map that could have given Democrats the lone remaining House seat they don’t currently hold.

Just how far Democrats would reach in Virginia was the subject of weeks of internal debate within the party. Some had pushed for a slightly more restrained proposal that would have given Democrats the upper hand in nine of the 11 House seats. But advocates of a maximalist approach prevailed, and now Virginia voters will decide in an April 21 referendum whether to use the new maps this fall. The party has unified behind the 10–1 proposal—even if some Democrats seem to be bringing a touch of shame to their campaign.

“Nobody wants to do this. I don’t want to do this,” Michelle Maldonado, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates, told me after delivering a pep talk to campaign volunteers near her home in Manassas. But, like Deeds, she cited as a rationale Trump’s demand for Republicans to carve into Democratic seats wherever they had the power to do so. “We can’t sit back and wait.”

Democrats confronted the same ethical qualms last fall in California, another state where voters had previously acted to remove politics from redistricting. But that campaign took place in a far bluer state at a time when anger among rank-and-file Democrats over the GOP’s Texas gerrymander was raw and fresh. Five months later, the Republican redistricting campaigns have stalled in states such as Indiana and Kansas, where GOP lawmakers rejected pressure from Trump to redraw their maps. The Florida legislature will meet later this month to consider gerrymandering proposals, but there too, many Republicans have become skittish.

[Read: The state that handed Trump his biggest defeat yet]

The GOP’s struggles are welcome news for Democrats nationally, but they have complicated the “Yes” campaign in Virginia, where polls are close and some left-leaning voters are questioning whether their party really needed to gerrymander so audaciously. Deeds, who was the Democrats’ nominee for governor in 2009, is one of Virginia’s longest-serving state legislators. He said he’s tried to explain the stakes to Democratic critics, with mixed success. “Sometimes I’ve been able to convince them otherwise,” Deeds told me. But other skeptics of the plan, he acknowledged, haven’t budged. “Ultimately,” Deeds said, “if this isn’t successful, I think it will be because of people like that.”

Perhaps the biggest risk for Virginia Democrats is that their cutthroat approach to redistricting will wake up a state Republican Party that they thoroughly trounced in November. Abigail Spanberger won the governorship by 15 points and the largest raw-vote margin in state history. But Republicans have been heartened by strong early-voting turnout in conservative areas, along with a landslide victory in a legislative election last month. (The result was a rare overperformance by Republicans in a special election during Trump’s second term, which Democrats have been dominating across the country.)

Democrats “have overreached,” Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader who is helping lead the opposition to the amendment, told me. “There’s no doubt that gives us an advantage.” Representative Ben Cline, a fourth-term Republican whose conservative district would become a Democratic-leaning battleground in the proposed map, has launched another group to defeat the referendum. “Virginia had a Republican governor less than three months ago, but Democrats now want to take 91 percent of the House seats. That’s insane,” he told me.

A narrow majority of likely Virginia voters favored the redistricting amendment in a poll released last week by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School. But the same survey found that Republicans and other opponents of the measure were more enthusiastic about voting. “People understand the hypocrisy and are really angry,” Cantor said. Turnout for an April election “is a tough thing,” he added. “But when you’re angry, I think you win the turnout.”

Democratic ads have featured Spanberger and former President Obama urging voters to fight back against Republican efforts “to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years.” But opponents have tried to muddy the debate by reminding voters of Obama’s long history of campaigning against gerrymandering. Civil-rights leaders accused a dark-money group of engaging in a racist misinformation campaign by sending mailers to Black voters invoking the civil-rights movement and implying that Obama opposes the redistricting amendment. “It’s despicable,” Maldonado said. (The chair of the committee that sent the mailers, a Republican former state legislator who is Black, has defended the tactic.)

With tens of millions of dollars already spent on TV ads, Democrats have dwarfed Republicans in fundraising so far. But turnout has been robust across Virginia, even exceeding the early vote in the fall governor’s race. At the early-voting site in Waynesboro, a small city west of Charlottesville near Shenandoah National Park, cars pulled into the parking lot every couple of minutes on a recent Thursday afternoon. The area is a conservative part of Cline’s district, and most people I interviewed were voting no. Voters expressed more than the usual amount of disgust with both parties. “They’ve all let the power go to their head,” George Trent, a 56-year-old Trump voter who opposed the amendment, told me. J. Strickland, a 71-year-old independent who leans Republican and “reluctantly” backed Trump in 2024, told me he voted no because if the amendment passed, “Democrats would control the entire state.” Strickland, who did not want his first name used while talking about politics, said the whole gerrymandering war made a strong case for term limits in Congress. “This two-party system is crazy,” Strickland said. “Both parties are fighting against themselves.”

As they did in California, Democrats are trying to reassure voters about the redistricting amendment by emphasizing that it’s temporary. The new maps would be used through 2030, after which the state would return to a system in which a bipartisan commission draws House districts after the decennial census. Supporters have also noted that unlike Republican gerrymandering efforts that have won approval only from state legislatures, California and Virginia have each put their redistricting proposals before the voters, as state law required in both cases.

[Read: ‘California is allowed to hit back’ ]

Opponents of the Virginia amendment doubt the claims that these new maps are only a short-term response. Republicans have made no such promises about their own mid-decade redistricting plans, and because of population trends, blue states are likely to lose seats to GOP-controlled states after the 2030 census, putting more pressure on Democrats to maximize their advantage where they can. A Supreme Court ruling rolling back the Voting Rights Act, which could happen later this spring, would allow Republicans in southern states to draw themselves even more seats in the next few years.

If gerrymandering is a tough sell in Virginia, Democrats are also offering voters a simpler rationale for supporting the amendment. This, they tell them, is your chance to fight back against Trump, to “level the playing field” against the president’s many attempts to accumulate power for himself and for his party. The various messages from the “Yes” campaign have a choose-your-own-outrage feel to them. In addition to running commercials with Obama and Spanberger, the “Yes” campaign has released ads featuring military veterans warning about Trump’s threat to democracy. Another ad warns about the prospect of a national abortion ban if Republicans accrue even more power.

At the University of Virginia, “Yes” campaigners were using their own Trump-related controversy as motivation: the ouster last summer of UVA’s president, James Ryan, who resigned under pressure from the Justice Department in a dispute over DEI policies. During a press conference last week, Semony Shah, the president of UVA’s University Democrats, cast the referendum as an opportunity for students to stop what she called “federal overreach” into the university. “These are things that frustrate students, because their voices weren’t accounted for. Their voices weren’t heard,” Shah told me afterward. “This,” she said, “is your way to make your voice heard.”

Democrats acknowledged the strong start that Republican areas of the state have had in early voting, but they told me turnout was picking up among their target constituencies. The campaign is planning a surge of rallies and canvassing events this weekend, timed for the expansion of early voting to dozens more satellite locations across Virginia. At the canvass launch in Manassas, Maldonado warned volunteers that they might encounter concerned and even angry voters who were “worried that this is a power grab by Democrats.” The door-knockers themselves seemed more confident, suggesting that the party’s pearl-clutching over gerrymandering was not as widespread as politicians like Deeds and Maldonado feared. Dylan Salgado, a 24-year-old digital fundraiser from Loudoun County, told me he’s been canvassing regularly since early voting started. I asked him if he had encountered Democrats who planned to vote against the amendment out of a principled opposition to gerrymandering. “I haven’t found someone who’s said that yet,” Salgado replied, “which makes me think we have it in the bag.”

This article originally misspelled Dylan Salgado’s last name.

Public Anger Is Rising

2026-04-01T16:59:47-04:00

For a brief moment last week, Congress started to do something productive. The Senate, after weeks of bickering and fruitless negotiations, unanimously approved legislation to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, taking a small but meaningful step toward resolving one of the many crises that have sprung up like targets in a game of whack-a-mole during President Trump’s second term. All that stood between tens of thousands of federal employees and their paychecks was a similar vote in the House.

But House Republicans would not agree. Instead of considering the DHS bill, Speaker Mike Johnson denounced the bipartisan compromise and then sent the entire chamber home for a two-week Easter recess. The move all but guaranteed that the government’s third-largest department would remain unfunded indefinitely as the nation wages war against Iran. Meanwhile, as lawmakers enjoy time with their families—or jet off on vacations and taxpayer-financed junkets overseas—millions of Americans are struggling with a spike in gas prices caused by the war.

“It’s a failure of everyone,” Representative David Schweikert, a Republican who represents a politically divided district in Arizona, told us.

Public anger is rising rapidly. The president’s approval ratings—which were already anemic—have sunk to new lows, and Republicans are facing the prospect of an electoral wipeout in this fall’s midterm elections. The GOP’s hold on the House majority has appeared precarious for months, but now its more comfortable advantage in the Senate may be in jeopardy too. Even TMZ is channeling the national discontent: The website known for trailing celebrities has begun hounding members of Congress, encouraging its readers to send in photos and video of lawmakers fleeing Washington, D.C., and living it up while the public servants responsible for protecting the homeland go unpaid.

Back in their districts, members of Congress—particularly swing-seat Republicans—seem to be in hiding. Hardly any are holding town halls or other well-publicized events that could put them face-to-face with frustrated voters. We contacted the offices of more than a dozen House Republicans in tight reelection races this year. Only Schweikert responded. No one else would agree to interviews about what they were hearing from constituents, nor would they disclose the events they were holding to solicit public feedback. (One of those members, Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, was spotted by TMZ on a trip to Scotland with several colleagues.) A spokesperson for Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, a Republican who won her last campaign by just 799 votes, referred us to a Facebook post in which Miller-Meeks called for Congress to return to the Capitol and “resolve this impasse.” “Our office does not share the congresswoman’s schedule,” the spokesperson said, “but she will be busy and has several exciting events planned in the case that Congress remains out of session.”

Trump did alleviate one pain point for the public last week by declaring that he would go around Congress to pay TSA agents, a move that reduced the snaking lines at airport-security checkpoints across the country. Wait times had stretched to hours as missed paychecks thinned the ranks of on-duty TSA agents, causing staffing shortages.

Yet the president’s unilateral action, though welcomed by lawmakers and air travelers alike, addressed only the most visible part of a crisis that has dragged on for weeks. Thousands of DHS employees, including members of the Coast Guard and FEMA, and administrative staff, have worked without pay for more than a month—and that’s after they missed paychecks during the larger 43-day government shutdown last fall. (Because most DHS employees are deemed “essential,” relatively few of them have been furloughed, and therefore most have had to report for duty during the funding lapse.)

In Congress, the dispute over DHS funding has centered on ICE and Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. After federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year, Democrats said they would not agree to fully fund DHS without reforms to the way that ICE operates. They’ve demanded that ICE agents wear body cameras and not masks, and have asked for requirements that agents seek judicial warrants before entering private homes in search of undocumented immigrants. The two parties appeared to be making progress toward an agreement early last week before Trump scuttled the talks by insisting that Republicans tie any DHS-funding deal to passage of the unrelated SAVE America Act, an elections bill that Democrats staunchly oppose.

[Read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill ]

Trump briefly considered a rarely used move to force Congress back into session, but on Wednesday he urged Republicans to ensure long-term DHS funding without Democratic votes. Such a process would circumvent the Senate filibuster, but it could take weeks or even months to enact. In response, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune issued a statement agreeing to the president’s demand and saying that Congress would act “in the coming days” to end the shutdown.

Schweikert’s House district in and around Scottsdale, Arizona, is one of the wealthiest and most highly educated in the nation. But its voters are livid at Congress. In interviews this week outside grocery stores, gas stations, and at the airport, many told us they were scrimping on food—cutting back on pricier meats and fruits—and others said they had changed their driving habits because of gas prices that are nearing $5 a gallon in some locations. Retirees, and those close to retirement, told us they are anxiously riding the volatility of financial markets amid the war.

Erica Squires and her sister Christina made trade-offs as they shopped for Easter goodies for their niece and nephew at Walmart. Grass filler, which they typically use to stuff Easter baskets, had just about doubled in price, they said, and basket prices were up too. They skipped both and opted to surprise the kids with a prefilled mermaid-themed gift for $15.97 and a lawn-mower bubble toy: “It was actually cheaper than making a basket,” Christina said.

The Squireses also are intentional about buying gas. They opted to fill up at the Walmart in Scottsdale, where they paid about $4.20 a gallon—less than in other parts of town. And rather than driving solo to visit their sister in a far-flung Phoenix suburb, they are now carpooling. Erica gave up shopping at a natural-grocery store because of rising prices. While they are hustling to make ends meet, the sisters told us, they don’t see Congress doing anything to make their lives better. If anything, they said, lawmakers are making it worse. Asked how they felt about Congress at this moment, Erica—a freelance digital marketer who voted for Trump in 2016 (and the libertarian Chase Oliver in 2024)—dryly replied, “Aren’t they not doing their job right now? They’re on vacation while we’re over here driving five miles to get cheaper gas.”

Others we encountered felt the same way. One young Democrat who works as a health-care administrator said his girlfriend’s luxury car has been sitting at home for the past month because it needs premium gas, which is almost $6 a gallon. He blames Congress: “It’s ridiculous.” A middle-aged woman whose truck sported a Don’t tread on me sticker matter-of-factly summed up her feelings about the country’s lawmakers: “Everything is terrible.”

At Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, officials had set up a donation site for unpaid TSA employees at its Compassion Corner, where people and businesses could donate items including nonperishable food, diapers, and gift cards of $20 or less for groceries and gas. The airport collected more than 3,700 gift cards and 1,800 food and household items, an airport spokesperson told us. The collection could open back up if a long-term funding measure for TSA does not pass.

[Read: American aviation is near collapse]

The security lines had dissipated yesterday, a day after TSA employees began receiving back pay. Passenger frustration had not. Layton Martin, a Republican from Phoenix who was flying to Salt Lake City, told us that members of Congress were playing with the livelihoods of government employees for their own political benefit. “They’re having, like, an ego party,” the 28-year-old fitness trainer said. “It seems very childish.” Martin’s rent is up $300 compared with last year, he said; his cost to fly to Salt Lake was double the normal price, and his friends can’t find jobs.

Schweikert, the Republican who represents Scottsdale in Congress, seemed just as frustrated. He told us that he views the DHS shutdown as a symptom of a larger unwillingness by Congress to tackle the nation’s structural problems. (He frequently warns that the Medicare trust fund could be insolvent in fewer than seven years, for example.) “I’m in a 50–50 district and I keep introducing bills to try to stabilize the debt, and I can’t even get a co-sponsor,” Schweikert told us. His constituents, he said, complain that their wages haven’t kept up with inflation, so they are poorer today than they were five years ago and are stressed about rising housing costs and making car payments.

Schweikert said he would have been happy to stay in Washington over the Easter break if it had looked as though a funding deal was possible, but the votes weren’t there. He placed blame on everyone—“Republicans, Democrats, leadership”—who refused to sit down and keep negotiating. “One side is using their rage at DHS to raise money and the other side—my side—is often terrified to actually have detailed, mathematically honest conversations about population and immigration.” Schweikert insisted that he is still working during the break, attending both community and political events. He’s not campaigning for reelection, however. Instead, he’s making a bid for governor. When he announced his candidacy for governor last fall, the eight-term lawmaker deemed Congress “unsavable.”

A Serious Senate Debate About an Unserious Bill

2026-03-20T06:00:00-04:00

The United States has launched a war in Iran. Soaring gas prices are pounding an economy that many Americans already considered unaffordable. And the federal department responsible for protecting the homeland ran out of money more than a month ago.

Naturally, the Senate is debating none of those things.

Instead, Republicans in Congress’s upper chamber are spending this week trying—likely in vain—to pass a bill aimed at addressing President Trump’s yearslong obsession with his 2020 defeat. The proposal, known as the SAVE America Act, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot.

The legislation is ostensibly designed to toughen enforcement of a core tenet of American democracy that most election experts say is already rigorously enforced: the law that only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections. But those same experts, along with Trump himself, view the SAVE America Act as much more far-reaching. If it’s passed, voting-rights experts contend, more than 20 million eligible voters could lose ready access to the polls, including many married women who have changed their name and young people who have moved out of state to attend college. (Some Republicans and election experts say that these claims are greatly overstated.) In the president’s estimation, the bill’s passage could seal a Republican win in this year’s elections. “It will guarantee the midterms” in favor of Republicans, Trump told the House GOP conference earlier this month.

The president’s problem is that even the SAVE America Act’s GOP supporters believe that it stands little chance of becoming law. For that to happen, at least nine Democrats would have to join Republicans to defeat a filibuster—a scenario about as likely as Democrats agreeing to carve Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore. A slightly more realistic path would be for Republicans to end the filibuster altogether, which Trump has been urging them to do since his first swing through the White House. Although nearly all of the Senate’s 53 Republicans support the SAVE America Act, far fewer of them are willing to blow up the institution’s most controversial quirk to get it passed.

None of these challenges has stopped Trump or his most fervent allies from demanding that Senate Republicans take up the SAVE America Act and try their best to pass it anyway. The president has threatened to not sign any legislation—even a resumption of funding for the Department of Homeland Security—until Congress puts the elections bill on his desk. The proposal’s leading champion, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, has posted on X about little else for months, and he warned that GOP senators who don’t try to outlast Democratic attempts to filibuster the legislation should lose their seat. (Senate Majority Leader John Thune pointedly brushed back this threat.)

The most pressing question about the SAVE America Act is not whether it’s going to pass, but why Trump and his allies are so determined to see the Senate put up a bill that’s doomed to fail. The White House told us in a statement that the legislation is “commonsense” and pointed to polling showing high support for voter identification. “This has always been a top priority for President Trump,” the spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. “Our elections should be treated with the utmost security.”

Voting-rights advocates have a theory. “It’s a pretext for the next authoritarian escalation,” Alexandra Chandler, who oversees the elections team at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told us. Chandler and others we interviewed see the Senate’s high-profile debate as one episode in a broad, sustained, coordinated effort by the White House to seed doubt in American elections ahead of what Republicans believe could be steep losses this November. This, she said, would follow a pattern that Trump set both before and after his 2020 loss: before the election, manufacture a crisis upon which he can then blame defeat. “When his allies lose elections, it’s a talking point,” Chandler said: “You didn’t pass the legislation that would have solved this fake problem, and therefore the election results are not valid.”

[Read: Arizona is now at the center of election investigations]

Trump has said plainly that he wants to “nationalize” elections that by constitutional design are run by the states. A year ago, he issued an executive order— portions of which a federal court blocked from being implemented—that directed the federal Election Assistance Commission to enforce a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration and sought to compel states to hand over voter rolls to DHS. The FBI has seized materials from the 2020 election in Georgia, federal investigations into that contest are under way in Arizona, and state election officials are alarmed by requests to coordinate their activities with federal agencies whose staff now include election deniers.

Given the bill’s dim prospects, we asked Chandler how seriously her group is taking the legislation. “We’re taking it seriously for what it is,” she replied, “which is not necessarily just an effort to pass a bill.”

If and when the SAVE America Act is defeated, voting-rights advocates don’t expect that Trump will be deterred. Rather, they predict that he will escalate attempts to interfere with the midterm elections. But their fears would become far more acute were the bill to somehow pass. Its requirement for people to prove citizenship in person when registering to vote would cut off the mail- and online-registration options now available in many states. (Trump has pushed the Senate to go even further to limit mail and early voting, both of which are popular options with voters of all political affiliations.)

More than 21 million people lack “ready access” to the documents that the bill would require Americans to provide—a passport, a birth certificate, a military ID, or a driver’s license compliant with the Real ID program, according to Michael Waldman of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. New Hampshire passed a similar law in 2024, and voting groups cited reports that hundreds of people were turned away at the polls during municipal elections last year due to lack of proper documentation.

Celina Stewart, the CEO of the League of Women Voters, said the bill would disproportionately affect the approximately eight in 10 married women who change their name. “We just haven’t seen anything on the scale where nearly 70 million women, in one fell swoop, could be challenged and have real barriers to being able to access the ballot,” she said.

Both Trump and the bill’s Democratic critics have characterized the proposal as an overt attempt to swing future elections in the GOP’s favor. But the actual impact the SAVE America Act would have on voting is hard to predict. In a shift from the Obama era, Republican candidates now rely more on their ability to register and turn out less frequent voters, and they have made gains among young and nonwhite voters, who election experts say would face the biggest hurdles if the bill were enacted. And Trump narrowly carried married women in his victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, exit polls showed.

Democrats and some nonpartisan voting advocates have in recent years grown more open to the idea of a national voter-ID law; they considered a proposal from then-Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia when they desperately needed his support for a broader package to expand voting access. “Democrats support commonsense voter-ID proposals,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on Tuesday. “But the SAVE Act is not a voter-ID bill. It’s a voter-suppression bill.”

[Read: The last MAGA prisoner]

With primaries already under way for this fall’s elections, the effort to implement the changes, should the bill pass, could result in chaos, election experts told us. Many election offices—especially those in rural America—lack the staff, funding, and technology to carry out such a significant mandate, they said. (In Washington State, the bill could cost at least $35 million to implement this year, according to estimates from Senator Maria Cantwell’s office. The National Association of Counties pegs the nationwide cost to administer changes at $510 million each election cycle.)

Election workers already face enormous strain, and many jurisdictions are struggling to retain and recruit enough people to staff the polls. The SAVE America Act would only exacerbate those challenges, advocates told us, because it could expose election workers who erroneously register people without proper citizenship records to criminal penalties. Under the bill, states would have to give voter lists to DHS to run against citizenship data. Already, dozens of states have refused to provide full voter lists to the federal government as part of its efforts to collect the information. (At least 12 states have either complied or said that they will, according to the Brennan Center. The Justice Department has sued more than two dozen states for the information, and three federal courts have ruled this year that the federal government has no right to the data.)

Some Republican secretaries of state view the debate as an unserious attempt to create policy, election experts who have spoken with them told us. (Several GOP secretaries of state we contacted didn’t want to talk about the legislation; one spokesperson described it to us as a “hypothetical” proposal unworthy of his boss’s time.) Should the bill pass, they figure, the courts will block it—at minimum because of a legal theory that courts should not allow rules to be changed so close to an election, because it could lead to confusion among voters and poll workers. They also argue that state and local election officials already routinely kick ineligible people off of voter rolls and that some states are taking on more restrictive proof-of-citizenship requirements on their own. Proof-of-citizenship bills have been signed by the South Dakota governor and passed by legislatures in Utah and Florida.

[Read: Trump’s favorite voter-ID bill would probably backfire]

Derek Monson, the executive director of the Sutherland Institute, a Utah-based conservative think tank, said the centralization of election authority and processes, as well as of citizenship information and voter data, in the hands of the federal government could make voter fraud easier to commit. “What we’ve done is simplified the act of voter fraud for people who want to commit it,” he said. He laid out a scenario in which a clearinghouse of voting data maintained by fewer people at the federal level (as opposed to more people across all 50 states) is accessed by bad actors. “It seems like every other week some federal agency is being hacked,” he added. “Now you’ve just gift-wrapped everyone’s personal voter data for a hacker to get.”

The SAVE America Act’s biggest supporters wave off these concerns. To the many Trump fans who have come to share his unfounded grievances about the 2020 elections, the Senate’s debate represents a moment of validation—win or lose. It “is a sea change from 2020,” Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn his defeat that year, told us. As for the bill’s long-shot chances, she said: “You can’t win if you don’t try.”

‘I’m Far Angrier’

2026-03-18T11:36:58-04:00

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

A touch of annoyance flashes across Cory Booker’s face as we talk about fighting. “Why do people preemptively, continually, mistake kindness for weakness?” he asks. By “people,” he means, at this moment, me. I had just brought up the festering concern, expressed by fans and critics alike, that he is simply too nice to win the presidency. Booker has been trying to convince me that he’s tough enough for this uncivil American era—that a pathologically genial New Jersey Democrat who preached love in his (mostly unloved) 2020 campaign could, if called to, knock a guy on his ass.

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To make this case, Booker must reach back more than 30 years, to his days as a second-string tight end at Stanford. He told me how he almost started a fight with Junior Seau, the future NFL Hall of Famer, after the first snap in a game against the University of Southern California. (A teammate wisely pulled him away.) A coach once told Booker, “Between the whistles, when the play starts, you are ferocious. But when the whistle’s over, you help the guy up. And there’s something about that that’s even more scary to those who go against you.”

Booker is telling stories like these to audiences around the country for a reason. Over his dozen years in Washington, his image has grown soft, and he needs Democrats to remember the brash up-and-comer who became mayor of Newark, New Jersey. (Declarations such as “I love Donald Trump” in response to an insult from the then–presidential candidate may have helped his reputation among Christian theologians, but not necessarily with voters.) Booker has criticized his party for not confronting the president aggressively enough during his second term; during a debate over police-funding legislation last summer, he angrily accused two Senate Democratic colleagues of complicity. Most memorably, Booker spoke out against the Trump administration for more than 25 hours, breaking Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest Senate speech—and performing miracles of bladder control.

Booker’s shift over the past year isn’t a complete transformation. He still gives out hugs and selfies, tells dad jokes, and occasionally sounds like a motivational speaker, sprinkling half a dozen inspirational quotes into any speech he delivers. But he wants the country to know that he’s got an edge to him, too. “You can be someone who believes in the values of loving your neighbor and fight like hell,” Booker told a crowd in South Carolina in January. Then, for emphasis: “You could love your neighbor and punch somebody in the face.”

Booker spent the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend in a traditionally early-primary state very much on purpose. This was as clear a sign as any that he is preparing for another presidential run. He visited New Hampshire in the fall and is publishing his second book on March 24. Booker is releasing a policy agenda—national in scope but timed to his Senate reelection bid—filled with the kind of proposals he believes Democrats need to embrace to win back working-class voters: digestible, deliverable, and designed to appeal across ideological and geographic lines. His model is Trump’s “no tax on tips,” the 2024 campaign pledge that some Democrats mocked but that many now regard as a stroke of genius. First on Booker’s list is a proposal to eliminate federal income taxes on most earnings up to $75,000.

The way-too-early surveys of potential Democratic candidates place Booker about where he languished for most of the 2020 primary—in the low single digits. Over the past few months, voters in New Hampshire and South Carolina greeted him warmly if not rapturously. Few Democrats can match his oratorical and storytelling skills (even if they don’t quite measure up to the politician to whom he’s long been compared, Barack Obama); nearly everyone I spoke with left Booker’s events equal parts impressed and inspired. Yet doubts persist, even among his longtime friends and advisers. They aren’t sure Booker’s brand of relentless hope and optimism—notwithstanding his recent effort to portray himself as both a lover and a fighter—will resonate any more in 2028 than it did in 2020, when Booker could not break out of a crowded Democratic pack.

Booker, who married for the first time in the fall, will be 57 in April but doesn’t look it; one advantage of a closely shaved head is that it keeps any gray hairs in hiding. He remains a vegan teetotaler and a fitness buff: With his wife’s permission, he wears a health-tracking Oura ring in place of his wedding band. (On the day of our interview, the Oura app told him he’d had more “restorative time” than usual, which he attributed to skipping leg day at the gym.)

The next White House campaign will occur 30 years after Booker first won a city-council seat in his adopted hometown of Newark, which also happens to be 30 years after a New Jersey newspaper first printed the prediction that he would one day be president. Every friend, adviser, and ally I spoke with for this story said that Booker has changed very little, if at all, in that time. Not all of them meant the observation entirely as a compliment.

Spencer Platt / Getty

Cory Booker in Newark during his 2006 mayoral campaign

Booker seems to be on a quest to rediscover the young politician with the otherworldly resume (high-school football star, Rhodes scholar, degrees from Stanford and Yale) who dazzled national Democrats during his rise in Newark. In his 20s and 30s, he deployed his considerable charisma and no small amount of bravado—“I’m the most ambitious person you’d ever meet,” he once told a reporter—to challenge the city’s entrenched machine while drawing media coverage both to his causes and to himself.

His exploits on the Newark city council included launching a 10-day hunger strike in 1999 to protest open-air drug dealing and, the next year, living for months in a van that he drove around the city to point out blight and crime. When critics accused Booker of attention seeking, he proudly defended his tactics. “Publicity stunts? You’re darn right,” he said in 2000. “You’ve got to attract attention to a problem sometimes to get something done about it.”

Booker grew up in an affluent New Jersey suburb and chose to build his career in Newark after he graduated from Yale Law School—a fact that left some residents skeptical. Booker lived in a boarding house when he first moved to the city three decades ago, and paid about $400 a month to live next door to an abandoned building that had been used as a drug den. (He told me he wanted to buy the house he once lived in—“I thought it’d be a full circle for me”—but real-estate speculators beat him to it. It is now decrepit, its windows cracked or boarded up.) Booker later moved into the Brick Towers housing project nearby, where he lived until after he became mayor; he was among the last tenants to leave before the building was demolished.

Booker’s exploits didn’t always go over well with constituents, but they helped him stand out in a crowded media market. Newark is about a 20-minute train ride from New York City, but the dense suburbs, heavy industrial zones, and wetlands separating them make the distance feel far greater. “People know about Newark by the EWR, by the airport. Not much else,” Mo Butler, a Booker adviser who has known him for more than 25 years, told me. “It’s not a place that people, to be frank, talk about the same way they talk about great American cities. So we had to come up with all kinds of creative ways to get people to think about Newark in a different way.” Booker was “one of the best at doing that,” Butler said.

Booker’s early years in Newark also gave him a deeper familiarity with political retribution than most Democrats now confronting the excesses of Trump’s second term. Former Mayor Sharpe James governed the city like an autocrat, and when Booker challenged him in 2002, he lobbed insults that even Trump might deem too harsh. (Among the lowlights: James said Booker “would have to learn how to be an African American”; he also claimed Booker was “a Republican who took money from the KKK,” and, incongruously, “collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark.”) The police tapped Booker’s phone, and during his campaign against James, residents who lived in public housing feared eviction by the city if they displayed Booker signs in their windows.

Booker reminded me that he nearly punched James in the face during an altercation outside a youth basketball game. (The mayor, unhappy at Booker’s presence at the event, had tried to have him kicked out.) Booker called the incident “one of the more ignominious moments of my life.” But he retells the story with delight (and devoted a chapter of his upcoming book to it), much like someone fondly recalling an epic but embarrassing party from their college days. Booker lost the 2002 race to James—the campaign became the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary Street Fight—but won the mayoralty four years later after James decided not to seek a sixth term. Time eased their rivalry, and Booker, ever the nice guy, does not hold a grudge. When James died last year, Booker lauded the man who once called him a “faggot white boy” as “a beloved pillar of our shared community.”

These tales from Booker’s political rise bear repeating because, as fresh as they may be in his memory, they are now nearly a quarter century old. His years as Newark mayor also feel like a bygone era. Facebook and Twitter were hot new websites and allowed Booker to attract outsize attention. He tweeted dozens of times a day, at all hours. Residents tagged the mayor when they needed help, and he often delivered—rescuing a dog left out in the cold; delivering diapers during a snowstorm; acting as an emergency dispatcher during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

He directly responded to direct messages (there was a small kerfuffle when mildly flirty private messages between Booker and a woman who worked at a vegan strip club in Portland, Oregon, were made public). Then, as now, he made a lot of corny jokes (“‘Sleep’ and I broke up a few nights ago. I’m dating ‘Coffee’ now. She’s Hot!”) and offered meditations on personal growth (“Life is about purpose not popularity, significance not celebrity. If u have no detractors, critics or adversaries ur probably not doing much.”) He briefly starred on Conan O’Brien’s The Tonight Show, declaring that the comedian was on Newark’s no-fly list after he made a joke at the city’s expense. Then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a guest appearance to broker a truce.

Booker was looking for his next move when Senator Frank Lautenberg died in 2013. Running for Senate was not an obvious choice. How would a politician as active and energetic as Booker make the shift from running a city to plodding along in the world’s most deliberative body? “I don’t think the idea of it initially appealed to him,” Butler said. Booker gave some thought to challenging Governor Chris Christie in his bid for reelection, but Harry Reid, then the Senate majority leader, persuaded him to run for Lautenberg’s seat instead, Booker told me. “You can make more of a difference here than you think,” Reid told him. By the end of his first full term, Booker was a lead Democratic negotiator on the First Step Act, a criminal-justice-reform package that became one of the few significant bipartisan bills that Trump signed during his first term. The law remains one of Booker’s biggest legislative accomplishments.

Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii told me that Booker’s talent as a communicator obscured his equally strong skills as a legislator, citing Booker’s work on the First Step Act in addition to less sexy negotiations over funding bills that make up the bulk of a senator’s work. “He understands the need to execute on things better than some legislative leaders do, because he’s got that background as a mayor,” Schatz said.

Christie, who is good friends with Booker, told me that Booker has simultaneously become “more of a practical politician” and moved further left, particularly on education. (Booker denied this.) The two worked closely together on expanding charter schools in Newark with a $100 million gift from Mark Zuckerberg that had been announced on The Oprah Winfrey Show—a stance that put Booker at odds with teachers’ unions and some progressives. Christie and Booker would sometimes give each other a heads-up before criticizing each other publicly. In private, Christie said, Booker’s “language gets a little bawdier and maybe less lofty. But this is basically the same guy.”

To some on the left, Senator Booker hasn’t lived up to the hype that Mayor Booker brought to Washington—a young star who could use his creativity to take on entrenched interests. Progressives see him as too chummy with Wall Street and Big Tech, and they aren’t particularly impressed by his legislative record. Booker was an early backer of the expanded child tax credit enacted under President Biden, which lasted just a year before it expired. “None of those hopes have really been fulfilled,” one progressive advocate told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “He’s an okay senator from New Jersey, but nothing transformative, and nothing all that inspirational.” When Booker earlier this month unveiled his proposal to eliminate taxes on most income up to $75,000, some in the party panned the idea, saying it would still benefit the wealthy more than working-class Americans.

Both Booker and his confidants insist that he has come to genuinely enjoy the Senate, despite its frustratingly glacial pace. (He is clearly a natural at one key part of the job: delivering long speeches.) Yet during our interviews, most of the stories Booker told—and Booker always has lots of stories—came from his time in Newark. During one animated moment in his Senate office, Booker leaned forward over his desk and said, “I’m a mayor.” He quickly corrected himself, perhaps realizing that he has not held that job for more than a dozen years.

Erin Schaff / Getty

Booker and Kamala Harris await a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2018.

A few weeks after Trump took office for the second time, when the new administration seemed to be chopping down the federal government at will while Democrats bickered among themselves, Booker was at the Whole Foods in downtown Newark—a brand, he makes sure to add, that he personally recruited to the city when he was mayor. As he was shopping in the frozen-food aisle, an older man approached him. He told Booker that Democrats were not doing enough to push back against Trump. Booker, who was familiar with the frustration, explained that Democrats were fighting hard, but without the majority in Congress, they couldn’t do very much.

The answer did not satisfy the man, who told Booker that he had been voting for the senator since he first ran for city council. “Where is the guy who beat the machine in ’98?” he asked Booker. “Where’s the guy that did the 10-day hunger strike?....Why is that guy not showing up now?”

Like many Booker stories, this one sounds a bit apocryphal, as though it were written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin. But it is how Booker explains his reawakening. He had spent his first years in the Senate trying not to stand out—a way of demonstrating to his colleagues that he was a serious legislator. That changed during Trump’s first term—Booker ran to replace him as president, after all—but he receded again during the Biden years, seemingly content to be a team player with a Democrat in power. The grocery-store encounter “really lit a fire underneath me to do what we used to do in Newark,” Booker told me. “I really believe that imagination is the best weapon you can have, to think of creative ways to get out of problems.”

Greg Kahn for The Atlantic

Soon after, Booker told his staff that he wanted to make a stand in the Senate, and asked them to prepare enough material so that he could speak, as he would later say, “for as long as I am physically able.” Booker’s aides were initially flummoxed by the idea, Butler told me. He was not planning to filibuster any particular legislation, and they knew he would be asked to explain the point of his gambit. “I think the majority of his aides didn’t really understand it, but it was something he was focused on,” Butler said. At a time when Democrats were consumed by angst and anxiety, Booker felt he could do something that, Butler said, “would allow the base to see that we heard you, and we’re fighting, and we’re doing the best we can with the tools that we have.”

To prepare for the talkathon, Booker fasted for a weekend and limited his water intake so that he wouldn’t need to use the bathroom. He had passed on the suggestion that he wear a diaper. “I believe in courageous vulnerability, but peeing in my pants on C-SPAN is a step too far,” Booker writes in his forthcoming book, Stand, a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its release. He ended up speaking for more than 25 hours, blowing past the 21-plus hours that Senator Ted Cruz had held the floor for in 2013—unlike Cruz, Booker did not resort to reading Green Eggs and Ham to fill the time—and beating Thurmond’s 1957 record for the chamber’s longest speech by nearly an hour.

The symbolism of a Black senator surpassing a segregationist’s stand against civil-rights legislation was lost on no one. Booker’s office was inundated with supportive messages during the speech, including one, he writes in his book, from Thurmond’s granddaughter, Wanda Williams-Bailey. (In 2003, Williams-Bailey’s mother, a Black woman, revealed in a press conference that she was the late senator’s daughter.) When Booker finally yielded the floor, the entire Senate chamber erupted in applause, including the Republican presiding at the time, Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.

As expected, the speech did not result in any policy change. But it broke through the Trump-dominated din more than just about anything else that Democrats did during the early months of 2025. This was the moment that had eluded Booker in his run for the presidency, and many months later, several Democratic voters I spoke with in New Hampshire and South Carolina brought it up as soon as the conversation turned to Booker.

[Read: Cory Booker, endurance athlete]

The speech also helped with another 2025 Booker project: reclaiming his status as a star on social media, where he had faded into a more generic politician. Booker launched his official Senate TikTok page (he has had a personal account since 2022) the morning of his speech and livestreamed the entire thing; at one point, more than 300,000 people were watching the address across all of his platforms. Booker is now overseeing the Democratic caucus’s strategic communications, educating and advising his less digitally savvy and in many cases much older colleagues on how, where, and what to post on social media. According to Booker’s staff, Senate Democrats collectively have increased their follower counts across platforms by 80 percent and boosted their engagement by 430 percent over the past year.

Yet nearly a year after Booker’s 25-hour speech, the moment now seems like less a catapult to the top tier of Democratic politics than a viral blip. His aides say that on social media, Booker has sustained the momentum that the speech generated, and that his TikTok accounts drive the most engagement of any member of Congress, Republican or Democrat. At the same time, being a senator does not afford Booker nearly as many opportunities to stand out as does, say, being the governor of California. He hasn’t come close to recapturing the nation’s attention, and he still lags far behind in surveys asking Democrats whom they might support for president in 2028.

Kent Nishimura / Reuters

Booker fist bumps Senator Eric Schmitt outside the Senate chamber last year.

Last summer, Booker fought with two of his Democratic colleagues, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota (a 2020 rival) and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, after he objected to the passage of a bipartisan package of police-funding bills. He argued that the legislation would allow the Trump administration to continue withholding money from blue states such as New Jersey; Booker pushed for an amendment to prohibit federal officials from conditioning funding on support for the president’s agenda. Booker accused Democrats of being “willing to be complicit” with Trump. “No, not on my watch,” he thundered. “I’m protecting Jersey today. I’m protecting the Constitution today. I’m standing today.” The outburst angered Klobuchar, who noted that Booker had skipped a key committee meeting where the legislation had been discussed. “I like to show up,” she said in response.

Klobuchar’s critique echoed a complaint that progressives both nationally and in New Jersey occasionally make about Booker: that the dramatic stands he makes are too selective and highly choreographed to be authentic. “It’s all so performative,” one progressive advocate told me.

Booker can also be more comfortable speaking in platitudes than in specifics. And if he is now more eager to denounce his party as a whole, he still shrinks from criticizing individual Democrats—especially those with whom he has a warm relationship. During Trump’s second term, Booker has aligned himself with the Senate’s unofficial “fight club,” which seeks more confrontation with the administration, and has taken the side of shutting down the government each time Congress has reached a funding impasse. After last fall’s government shutdown ended just before he arrived in New Hampshire, Booker issued a statement that said, in part: “The Democratic Party needs change. It is time for a new generation of leaders to stand up to Trump.” Reporters and potential voters pressed him on whether he was calling for the ouster of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, but Booker pulled back. When the topic came up during his January swing through South Carolina, Booker made a gentle jab at Schumer’s use of a flip phone, then deflected the question.

The same friendly deference applies to his potential 2028 rivals. During our interviews, Booker was uninterested in relitigating Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign with any specificity, and his forthcoming book does not dish on his fellow Democrats. (The reader feedback that Booker has loved the most—“This is not a politician’s book”—probably won’t juice sales inside the Beltway.) At one point, Booker declared, “I don’t want a Democratic version of Donald Trump.” I wondered if he was referring to anyone in particular. Could it be a sly reference to Gavin Newsom’s Trump-style mean tweets and online mudslinging? Nope, Booker said: “Gavin and I have been friends for a long time. I find his tweets hilarious.”

There’s plenty of time, of course, for Booker to start throwing elbows at his political opponents like he insists he once did as an athlete. The 2028 campaign won’t really begin until after the midterm elections. But showing this sharper edge, his friends and allies say, is a necessary, if uncomfortable, part of Booker’s effort to correct a perception that held him back in 2020. “People need to know that you’re not a pushover,” Jaime Harrison, a former Democratic National Committee chair who considers Booker his “political brother,” told me, “and I think that’s going to be particularly important for somebody who is genuinely one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”

Showing off a feisty side was not part of Booker’s calculus in 2020. His presidential campaign had begun in late 2018 with a meeting at his modest home in Newark, only a few blocks from the boarding house where he lived before becoming mayor. Booker told his new campaign manager, Addisu Demissie, and a longtime political adviser, Matt Klapper, that he wanted to run a race true to himself—an earnest, positive, hope-filled campaign. “Basically, what he is, what he always has been,” Demissie recalled. Booker would pitch himself as the antidote to Trump’s “hate and division.” “If that’s what the party wants, it will meet me here and I’ll win. And if not, I will lose,” Booker told them.

Over the next year, Booker never really deviated from that path, and his campaign never really took off. During his Newark days, Booker had always been a big fish in a relatively small pond, but in a crowded national campaign—as in the 100-member Senate—he struggled to stand out. “He doesn’t neatly fit into a bucket,” Klapper told me. Booker was never going to be a progressive favorite like his fellow senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Polls showed that Democratic-primary voters, meanwhile, did not consider him as experienced or electorally safe as Biden. Pete Buttigieg seemed to impress moderate white voters in Iowa and New Hampshire more than Booker did. Neither Booker nor then-Senator Kamala Harris could win over Black Democrats in South Carolina, who stuck with Biden.

Booker’s polling languished in the low single digits for most of the campaign, and he could not pull off the signature viral moment that just about every candidate was seeking. With money running low, he pulled out of the race in January 2020, just a few weeks before the Iowa caucus. Booker also suffered from voters’ perceptions about his electability, Demissie said: “They were looking for the person who could beat Trump, and they did not believe that a Black guy from Newark preaching about love and unity could do it.”

Demissie points to a what-might-have-been moment before the first primary debate when the DNC, unable to reasonably fit 20 candidates onto a single stage, split the field in half. Biden, the front-runner, and Booker appeared on different nights. Sharing a stage with the former vice president, Harris sharply—and memorably—confronted Biden over his opposition to busing students to desegregate schools, recounting the story of one California girl who traveled every day by bus to an integrated school. “That little girl was me,” she told him. The moment generated a huge fundraising boost for Harris, and briefly catapulted her to the top tier of candidates. “We were dying to be onstage with Biden,” Demissie said. “Imagine how different things would be if that literal lottery had gone differently.” Perhaps, he argued, Booker would have had that moment instead of Harris, and perhaps he would have made it last longer than she did.

Booker did mix it up with Biden at a later debate and, at one point, called the author of the 1994 crime bill an “architect of mass incarceration.” But other Booker advisers I spoke with doubted that he would have gone after Biden as directly and as personally as Harris did. “That’s just something that Cory wouldn’t do,” Butler, his longtime adviser, told me. “He was a happy warrior.”

The usually voluble Booker wasn’t eager to dissect his 2020 race. “We ran a great campaign,” he told me. Why didn’t he do better, I asked. “I have no idea.” Neither Booker nor his advisers believe the 2020 failure damaged him as a national candidate. According to data collected by the campaign, Democratic voters liked him better at the end of the race than at the beginning, even if he was never their top choice for president. “If anything,” Booker said, the 2020 experience “left me with more of an appetite to potentially run in the future.” How, I asked, would this time be different? “I’m far more fed up than I was in 2020,” he said. “I’m far angrier.”

Matt Smith / Alamy

Booker at an August 2019 presidential-campaign rally in Philadelphia

Booker says he hasn’t decided whether to run for president again. He must first tend to his reelection in New Jersey, and, like other Democrats with national stature, he’ll help the party in its bid to regain power in the midterm elections. Booker often mentions his recent marriage during speeches, and he is open about his desire to have children. “Lord, pray for me,” he’ll say, before pivoting to the kind of so-bad-it’s-funny dad joke he’s been telling for years. (“What do you call a guy who tells dad jokes but isn’t a dad? A faux Pa.”) During a roundtable conversation about health insurance in Newark, he talked about how he and his wife, Alexis Lewis Booker, now had to consider whether their plan covered IVF treatments.

When I asked Booker what might cause him not to run in 2028, he brought up Alexis. “She and I are going to have to have a different kind of conversation than I’ve ever had before,” Booker said. But he quickly added that being a family man for the first time makes him “more effective in my public life.”

In every other respect, Booker seems to be all in. The 2028 Democratic field is likely to be just as crowded, if not more so, than it was in 2020. Booker could be competing for attention with rivals from his own generation and from a younger crop of candidates who might better satisfy primary voters’ yearning for a fresh face. Yet the case that Booker’s advisers sketch out for his viability is plausible, even compelling. Without Trump on the ballot, voters may want to turn the page on an era of nastiness and division, back toward hope and healing and inspiration. Booker will be better known than he was eight years ago, with more experience—neither a gray-haired has-been nor too much of a youthful risk. “He’s in sort of a sweet spot,” Butler argued.

As I followed Booker around New Hampshire and South Carolina, I found plenty of Democrats who saw precisely that balance in Booker and wanted him to run for president again. (Several urged him to do so directly.) “I have not seen anybody else that I would prefer to run,” said Lonnie Hosey, a South Carolina state legislator who, like many Black Democrats in the state, supported Biden in the 2020 primary. “As of today,” Hosey told me, “he is my choice.” Others weren’t exactly pining for Booker, but they wanted to give him a longer look. After seeing Booker speak in Beaufort, Susie Gombocz, a 78-year-old real-estate agent, told me she loved his message. “He’s aggressive,” she said, “but he’s got a lovely way about him.”

But in many ways, Booker can’t move beyond being mayor of Newark. The climax of his stump speech is a new riff on an old storm: Hurricane Sandy. The (long) story is a paean to a gentler political moment, when leaders in both parties could get along and be decent to one another. (This is not a tale that features a young Booker decking a guy on the field.) Mayor Booker is driving around the city assessing damage when President Obama and Governor Christie call to offer their assistance. The hero ends up being an ordinary citizen who is standing outside in a dangerous storm, waving a light in the driving rain so that his neighbors won’t get electrocuted by a downed power line.

Sean Rayford / Getty

Booker during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in South Carolina in 2019

“That is who we are. That is the story of America!” Booker tells the crowd, his voice rising in a familiar crescendo. “Not people with position, but people with purpose! Not people on high, but the grassroots soldiers in the trenches! That’s how America is made. That’s how we redeem the dream!”

I watched Booker tell this story to Democratic audiences throughout South Carolina. The largest crowd he addressed was in front of the state capitol on MLK Day. This crowd was also the toughest for him; by the time he finally stepped to the podium, most had been standing in the cold for several hours, listening to a cavalcade of more than 30 speakers paying tribute to King’s legacy. “I will not be speaking for 25 hours,” Booker began, drawing laughs. “The hour is late, and the temperature is cold.”

Most in the crowd had stuck around to hear him. And when, near the conclusion of his story about the storm, Booker summoned them to rise—“South Carolina, I ask you right now, will you stand up?”—they dutifully obliged. People stayed on their feet all through Booker’s stirring peroration, the kind that feels more natural on the eve of a big election than during the dead of winter.

This is Cory Booker returning to form. As much as he wants to show that he’s a fighter, he has no intention of morphing into anything too far from the idealistic law-school graduate who moved into a housing project. There is a danger in changing too much, he told me in his Senate office a few weeks later, citing Vice President J. D. Vance’s sharp turn from Trump critic to loyal running mate as a cautionary tale. Booker then repeated the same theory of the election that he pitched to his aides more than seven years ago. He held one hand steady in front of him and slowly moved the other up to meet it. “This is who we are. We are not moving,” Booker said. “And if the time and the moment meet us, that’s great.”

The Republican Party Continues Eating Its Own

2026-03-12T07:00:00-04:00

In a sea of congressional bloviators, Kevin Kiley has always stood out. The two-term California lawmaker, unlike most of his colleagues, does not reflexively defend the president and, at least recently, has been a frequent critic of his own party’s leadership. So it shouldn’t have been particularly shocking when, earlier this week, Kiley announced that he would run for reelection not as a Republican, but as an independent.

Kiley will be the newest initiate of Congress’s tiny club of independents, which, until this week, consisted of just two senators: Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. More important, though, the switch represents the latest example of the Republican Party eating its own.

Politically, Kiley’s decision is something of a Hail Mary pass. The new House maps that California voters approved last fall as part of the Democrats’ retaliation for GOP gerrymandering in Texas carved up his district, which stretches from the Sacramento suburbs hundreds of miles south along the Nevada border. Kiley had to choose whether to challenge a conservative colleague, Representative Tom McClintock, in a safe Republican seat, or to run in a district that Democrats drew in their own favor. He chose to avoid a potentially nasty intraparty primary and seek the seat that includes his hometown (and that voted for Kamala Harris by about 10 points in 2024). In such a Democratic-leaning district, however, running as an independent might be Kiley’s only chance to win.

[Read: ‘None of this is good for Republicans’ ]

Kiley’s move may have been prompted by short-term expediency, but it fits into a longer-running pattern of the Republican Party becoming less tolerant of free-thinking legislators and Congress as a whole becoming more polarized. Over the past two decades, the GOP’s moderate wing has shrunk to the point where most members avoid the term altogether. The Republicans who hold a dwindling number of swing seats are more conservative (and more loyal to party leadership) than were the most electorally endangered Republicans in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In recent years, those GOP lawmakers who regularly criticize Trump or vote against the party don’t last very long. In the Senate, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis voted against the president’s signature tax-cut bill last year and then promptly announced that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska voices his displeasure with Trump regularly; he, too, is retiring after this year.

Gerrymandering has only worsened this trend among House Republicans, as has Trump’s demand for near-total fealty within the party. With fewer competitive districts, GOP lawmakers fear a Trump-backed primary challenge more than a general-election defeat at the hands of Democrats. And when Republicans—egged on by Trump—launched their nationwide redistricting war last summer in Texas, Kiley became a casualty. His district was one of five held by the GOP in California that Democrats targeted; they redrew another five of their own seats to make them harder for Republicans to flip. “One of the evils of gerrymandering is that it elevates partisanship above everything else. It makes it the sum and substance of our politics,” Kiley told us in an interview. “So I thought, well, maybe one antidote to that is to just take partisanship out of the equation.”

[Read: ‘California is allowed to hit back’ ]

Kiley has bucked the GOP a few times in the past, including, most recently, when he criticized House Speaker Mike Johnson’s handling of the 43-day government shutdown, and then signed a discharge petition to force a vote on extending health-care subsidies. But even in shedding his party label, Kiley isn’t completely abandoning Republicans. He will continue to caucus with the party in the House, which helps the GOP retain its slim majority and ensures that Kiley can keep his committee assignments. Kiley attributed this decision to House rules that hand power almost exclusively to the majority party, though he said he would try to change them. “It’s a practical necessity to remain associated with one of the two caucuses,” he said. “And since I was elected for this term as a Republican, that seems like the right thing to do.”

Political independents have lately been more common in the Senate than in the House, although there, too, they tend to align themselves with one party or the other. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona left the Democratic Party in 2022, and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia did the same in 2024, briefly joining Sanders and King as independents who still caucused with the Democrats. (Neither sought reelection, and they both left Congress in January 2025.) In the House, Representative Justin Amash quit the GOP to become an independent in 2019; he, too, decided against seeking another term. Political prognosticators see Kiley’s experiment expiring with similar speed: The nonpartisan Cook Political Report, a top electoral forecaster, projects that Democrats will win Kiley’s district easily.

In declaring his independence, Kiley joins a parade that has been led not by politicians but by voters. The number of Americans registering as independents (or simply not choosing a party) has dwarfed gains made by either major party over the past several years. Kiley said he hopes other members of Congress follow his lead: “If I can help to encourage others to at least adopt that mentality, I think it’d be a really good thing for politics in this country.” Whether he does might depend on whether California voters reward his independence this fall.

The Republican Who Wants to Banish His Own Constituents

2026-03-11T17:15:26-04:00

The Islamic Center of Columbia, Tennessee—a small city about 45 miles south of Nashville—had been around for only a few years when white supremacists burned it down. On a Saturday in early 2008, three young men went to the mosque armed with spray paint and Molotov cocktails. According to a federal indictment, they first defaced the exterior walls with swastikas and phrases including White Power. Then they broke into the building and set it aflame.

“Everything on the inside was charred,” a former member of the Islamic Center told me. “The roof had come down, and they had to demolish the building afterwards.” The mosque, which had a few dozen members, had been the first in Columbia and was, for a time, the only Muslim house of worship between Nashville and Huntsville, Alabama. After the fire, its leaders bought an empty church building nearby and converted it into a new mosque, though they initially kept their plans for the space a secret to avoid a community backlash.

The former member who related this to me asked that I not publish his name, because nearly two decades later, the Muslim community in middle Tennessee is again on edge. The membership of the rebuilt Islamic Center of Columbia is smaller but still active. Its mosque sits less than a mile from the district office of the area’s U.S. House member, Andy Ogles. But Representative Ogles, a Republican in his second term, doesn’t seem to want Muslims to reside in his district. And he doesn’t want them anywhere else in the country, for that matter. “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Ogles posted on X on Monday. “Pluralism is a lie.”

[Ali Breland: Meet the new Proud Boys]

Ogles is a Trump loyalist who has proposed amending the Constitution to allow the president a third term. Ogles has long denigrated Muslims; he’s pushed for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who was born in Uganda and with whom Trump has lately been chummy) to be denaturalized and deported, and just last week, he called for a ban on immigration from several majority-Muslim countries. His comments on Monday were more sweeping, and a more direct attack on America’s constitutional values. They also imply an outright rejection of thousands of Ogles’s own constituents.

Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional District includes parts of Nashville and several counties to the south. For 20 years, its House representative was a centrist Democrat, Jim Cooper, who had welcomed a Muslim community in Nashville that grew over the years to more than 40,000 people. It comprises significant Kurdish and Somali populations that arrived as a result of refugee-resettlement programs, as well as a sizable number of Palestinians. In Columbia, as in other parts of the region, Muslim physicians who had been recruited to the area because of a need for more doctors brought along their families.

After the 2020 census, Republicans in the state legislature targeted Cooper’s seat in redistricting, prompting him to retire. Ogles now has more Muslim people in his district than does any other member of Tennessee’s House delegation (including its lone Democrat, Representative Steve Cohen), according to Sabina Mohyuddin, the executive director of the Nashville-based American Muslim Advisory Committee.

But Ogles barely acknowledges his Muslim constituents, much less represents them, Mohyuddin told me. “This is not someone that anyone feels comfortable contacting for any kind of issue,” she said. “It is a total disconnect.” The AMAC formed in 2012 from a coalition that successfully fought a state bill targeting Muslim communities by seeking to ban “Sharia organizations” in Tennessee. Mohyuddin has since become accustomed to fielding calls about Ogles’s attacks on Muslims. To protect imams seeking a lower public profile, the council advises area mosques to direct media inquiries to Mohyuddin. She was busy preparing a statement responding to Ogles’s proposed Muslim immigration ban on Monday when she saw his even more incendiary comments. “This is going to make everything worse,” she told me.

There was a time, not too long ago, when Republican leaders would sanction, or at least denounce, a member who made a statement like Ogles did. In 2019, then–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy stripped Representative Steve King of his committee assignments after he defended the terms white nationalist and white supremacist in a newspaper interview. (King had been making offensive remarks about immigrants for years, some of which GOP leaders would call out.)

In Trump’s second term, however, the avowedly anti-Muslim influencer Laura Loomer has the ear of the president, and top House Republicans have oscillated between silence and equivocation in response to bigotry from their members. Republican leadership said nothing last month when Representative Randy Fine, a Florida Republican less than a year into his term, compared Muslims unfavorably to dogs and then proudly defended the comments. Some other Republicans, though, did criticize Fine and Ogles. Richard Grenell, a special presidential envoy and Trump’s appointee to lead the Kennedy Center, replied to Ogles by saying, “Stop attacking the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

When a reporter asked Speaker Mike Johnson about the comments from Fine and Ogles during a press conference in Florida yesterday, the closest that Johnson came to criticizing them was to say that they had used “different language than I would use.” He devoted the bulk of his answer to validating worries about Sharia law. “There’s a lot of energy in the country, and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem,” Johnson said. “That’s what animates this.”

[Jonathan Chait: What the Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani reveal]

Idle warnings about Sharia law—a fixation among conservatives during the 2010s—have reemerged on the right in recent months. They spiked during the Texas Republican primaries after a deadly shooting at an Austin bar early this month, allegedly by a man wearing a sweatshirt that said Property of Allah. To Mohyuddin, the refrains about Sharia law are familiar and ridiculous, but no less disturbing. “Where is Sharia law being used?” she asked, a tone of exasperation in her voice. “This is a made-up boogeyman.”

Ogles’s office did not return a request for an interview. He’s spent the past few days on X reiterating his call to banish Muslims and multiculturalism from American society. Mohyuddin seemed torn about how—or even whether—to respond. On one hand, she felt the need to speak up for Muslims in and around Ogles’s district, who have few allies among the conservative Republicans dominating Tennessee politics. (Muslim constituents have reported being kicked out of meetings with state legislators, the former member of the Islamic Center of Columbia told me.) Yet, on the other hand, Mohyuddin worried that by denouncing Ogles, she and others were just playing into his desire for attention and notoriety. “He’s targeting our community and trying to gain relevance, because no one takes him seriously,” she told me. “And, honestly, it’s working.”

Why Trump Changed His Mind on Kristi Noem

2026-03-05T19:00:00-05:00

Kristi Noem played “Hot Mama” as the walk-up song for her formal introduction at the Department of Homeland Security headquarters in January 2025. President Trump had put her in charge of his signature campaign promise—the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history—and Noem took a fast, flashy approach to the job. She dressed as a Border Patrol agent and an ICE officer, and rode horseback at Mount Rushmore in ads. She flew to El Salvador and posed in front of a prison cell crammed with tattooed inmates. She made no apologies for aggressive enforcement tactics on American streets, even those that likely broke the law, or for the deaths of two U.S. citizens who opposed her approach.

But it wasn’t the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year that finally cost Noem her job today, making her the first ousted Cabinet secretary of Trump’s second term. Instead, it was her self-promotion.

Noem’s standing was already shaky when she went to Capitol Hill to testify this week. On Tuesday, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a Republican, asked whether Trump himself had approved Noem’s $220 million ad campaign that featured her urging migrants to self-deport. Noem said yes, and defended the ads as “effective.”

The ads “were effective in your name recognition,” Kennedy told Noem, saying that she put Trump “in a terribly awkward spot.” He was implying the commission of a cardinal sin for a Trump Cabinet member: seeking to outshine the president. Kennedy told reporters today that he had spoken with Trump. “Her version of the truth and the president’s version of the truth are decidedly different,” Kennedy said.

Noem had been saying for more than a year that the idea for the ads came from Trump himself. But with public opinion souring on Trump’s mass deportations, the messaging campaign that Noem touted as a success—and the no-bid contracts behind it—had come under suspicion from lawmakers. A person familiar with the decision to fire Noem told us that the president was upset about her attempt to pass the blame for the ad campaign onto him, and for her equivocation on the questions about her alleged romantic relationship with Corey Lewandowski, who has been working at DHS as her de facto chief of staff.

“Replacing Kristi was based on the culmination of her many unfortunate leadership failures including the fallout in Minnesota, the ad campaign, the allegations of infidelity, the mismanagement of her staff, and her constant feuding with the heads of other agencies, including CBP and ICE,” one administration official who requested anonymity texted us. “Kristi’s drama sadly overshadowed and distracted from the Administration’s extremely popular immigration agenda, which will continue full force.”

The White House declined to comment.

Some Republicans had urged the president not to get rid of Noem until next month, after the filing deadline for candidates in her home state of South Dakota. Allies of Senate Majority Leader John Thune and members of Trump’s political team were worried that Noem would gather the necessary signatures to announce a campaign for the U.S. Senate or the U.S. House later this year—and thus create a messy primary contest.

Trump clearly couldn’t wait that long, but he added a provision midway through the Truth Social post announcing Noem’s departure: Her transition out of the office would take place on March 31, 2026—the same day as the filing deadline. Trump said Noem will then serve in a newly created special-envoy role for a White House initiative called the “Shield of the Americas,” and promised to give more details at an event in Doral, Florida, on Saturday.

Noem has been fighting to keep her job ever since federal officers shot and killed Pretti on January 24. Suddenly there were calls for Noem to be removed from office not just among Democrats but among some Republicans. Trump removed her from overseeing deportation efforts in Minnesota and sent Tom Homan, his “border czar,” to take over DHS operations there and clean up the mess. Homan and Noem are political rivals.

White House advisers were upset that Noem, nine days after the shooting, announced that all federal agents in Minneapolis would begin wearing body cameras and that the policy would expand across the country as funding became available. This was a central demand of Democrats, who were then threatening to not fund DHS, but Noem had not tied the concession to the ongoing negotiations. Later, White House aides grew concerned when Noem’s team signaled that it would be receptive to a continuing resolution to fund her department, even though the White House wanted a new bill. (At the time, an aide to Noem denied that the secretary supported continuing funding for the department at previously set levels.)

One Trump adviser mused to us that the sustained Democratic attacks on Noem were actually one of the few things helping her stay in her job, because the president did not want to reward his political enemies with her dismissal.

Another nagging issue for the White House was Noem’s personal and professional relationship with Lewandowski, her alleged paramour. After the 2024 election, Lewandowski had angled to become Noem’s chief of staff, only to face pushback from the president, who worried about the reports of their romantic involvement. (Both have denied any improper relationship.) He joined the department instead as a special government employee.

[Read: The first couple of a dysfunctional DHS]

The arrangement did not prevent rumors from spreading, however, and becoming a major distraction for the department. Noem’s acquisition of new DHS aircraft—and use of a luxury jet with a bedroom—brought additional scrutiny to their relationship. During the hearings this week, Democratic lawmakers tried to force Noem to deny under oath any sexual relationship with Lewandowski. She refused to answer directly, dismissing the questions as “tabloid garbage.” Seated behind Noem was her husband.

Lewandowski is expected to leave DHS with Noem at the end of the month, according to a senior department official who was not authorized to discuss the transition. Noem’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, left last month amid bipartisan criticism of DHS’s decision to accuse Good and Pretti of “domestic terrorism.”

On the same day that Trump took away Noem’s authority in Minnesota, the secretary spent more than an hour in the Oval Office with the president, hoping to win back his favor. One focus of that meeting was Noem’s continued frustrations with the pace of the border wall’s construction, which she blamed on Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott. The move appeared to buy her some time, and in the week that followed, Trump privately and publicly praised her leadership of DHS.

Noem had long described her relationship with the president as a close one. She told the audience at a Conservative Political Action Committee dinner in February 2025 that it was Trump’s idea to have her play the lead role in an ad blitz that the department had launched earlier that month. “We had several meetings during the transition, talking about it,” Noem said. She had previously appeared in ads for the group FreedomWorks that had impressed the president, Noem told the audience.

“Those beautiful ads you did about South Dakota,” Noem said Trump told her. “They had Mount Rushmore. I want you to do those for the border.” According to Noem, Trump directed her to launch a “marketing campaign” that would “make sure the American people know the truth of what you’re doing.”

Trump told Noem he didn’t want to appear in the ads. “He said: Nope, nope. I want you in the ads. And I want your face in the ads,” Noem told the audience, adding that Trump instructed her about the first ad: “I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.”

“They will run throughout the world,” Noem said Trump told her, “letting America and the world know it has a new leader.” On Thursday, Trump told Reuters that he had nothing to do with the ad campaign: “I never knew anything about it.”

[Read: Fast times at Immigration and Customs Enforcement ]

It’s unclear how Trump’s succession plan at DHS will play out over the next few weeks. The president, in a Truth Social post today, said he would install Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma as the new secretary, but Mullin will have to be confirmed by his peers. The deputy-secretary position at DHS is vacant, and the official next in line to take over as acting secretary is Rob Law, the undersecretary for strategy, policy, and plans. But DHS could change its order of succession to install a different official.

Mullin should not have trouble winning a majority vote; Senate Republicans quickly issued statements supporting his nomination, as did at least one Democrat, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. Although the bipartisan desire to see Noem leave could be an incentive to confirm Mullin quickly, his nomination hearing will give Democrats an opportunity to press him to publicly commit to some of the changes to ICE operations that they are seeking as part of negotiations over DHS funding.

By choosing Mullin, Trump is also taking one of his top congressional loyalists out of the Senate. Mullin played a prominent role in shepherding several of the president’s Cabinet picks to confirmation at the start of his second term. Whether Mullin’s successor in the Senate will back the president as staunchly is unclear: Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican whom Trump derided last month as a “RINO,” or “Republican in name only,” will appoint a replacement to serve until a special election is held. Under Oklahoma law, the interim senator cannot be a candidate in that race.

Noem thanked the president for appointing her to the new position and, in a statement, rattled through her achievements during her 13-month stint. “We have made historic accomplishments at the Department of Homeland Security to make America safe again,” she said.

Within the department, Noem’s ouster was celebrated by some who viewed her as a self-promoter who ran the department erratically. One official put it this way to us: “Lots of happy people here today.”

It Wasn’t Democrats Who Persuaded Trump to Change Course

2026-01-27T17:35:14-05:00

The statements from congressional Republicans after Saturday’s shooting of Alex Pretti were relatively mild. Lawmakers said that they were “deeply troubled” or “disturbed” by the second killing of an American citizen by federal immigration officers this month; most called for an investigation into Pretti’s death. But the statements kept coming, one after another, all through the weekend and into yesterday.

The reactions from across the GOP sent an unmistakable message in their volume, if not in their rhetoric, to Donald Trump: Enough. The defining characteristics of the Republican-controlled Congress during the president’s second term have been silence and acquiescence. That so many in his party felt compelled to speak up after Pretti’s killing was a sign that Republicans had finally lost patience with federal agents occupying a major American city—a deportation operation that has soured the public on one of Trump’s signature policies and sunk the GOP’s standing at the outset of a crucial midterm-election year.

Republican committee chairs in both the House and the Senate summoned top administration officials to public hearings—a rarity in the past year. From the right, the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights advocates criticized comments from senior law-enforcement officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, that blamed Pretti for carrying a firearm and said that people should not bring guns to public demonstrations. (Videos showed that officers disarmed Pretti before they fatally shot him.) Few Republican leaders rushed to defend the unnamed agent who’d killed Pretti, nor did they echo the rhetoric of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who referred to Pretti, an ICU nurse, as a “would-be assassin.” In at least one case, the lack of comment from a top Republican was significant: House Speaker Mike Johnson—ordinarily quick to pick up talking points from the president and his top aides—has said nothing about the shooting.

The harshest Republican condemnation came from one of the party’s candidates for governor of Minnesota, Chris Madel, who yesterday declared that he was quitting the race in part because of the federal deployment. “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state,” Madel said in his video announcement, “nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.”

Watching all of this unfold was Trump, who already did not like what he saw. For the president, it was a rare winter weekend when he wasn’t in Palm Beach or at the golf course. He never left the White House. And he was glued to news coverage that showed little besides another horrific shooting in Minnesota. Videos of Pretti’s killing were inescapable on TV and social media, and the story broke through to nonpolitical media—drawing reactions from the likes of Charles Barkley and Bill Simmons—in ways that the fatal shooting of Renee Good on January 7 did not.

[Read: Lethal force on a frozen street]

Trump’s first move was to defend the federal officers carrying out the immigration operations in the moments before the deadly clash. He reposted a Department of Homeland Security–supplied photo of the gun Pretti had been carrying, before again making claims about fraud in Minnesota’s immigrant communities. But he otherwise remained publicly silent as more videos of the shooting cast doubt on the administration’s statements about what had happened.

Trump began asking aides and outside advisers if it had been an “okay” shooting, trying to figure out whether the agents had made the right decision to fire, a White House official and two allies close to the West Wing told us. His top aides, among them Miller—including in a post that was amplified by Vice President Vance—immediately blamed Pretti for instigating violence (as the administration blamed Good after her death) and suggested, without evidence, that Pretti had been a “domestic terrorist.”

But this time, fewer Republicans joined the chorus. And as the weekend wore on, more GOP lawmakers and conservative media voices began to call for an investigation into the shooting and to question the administration’s assertion that an armed Pretti had violently resisted agents. Senator John Curtis of Utah called out Noem by name, saying that he disagreed with her “premature” response to the shooting.

Trump grew concerned at the response, the White House official and one outside ally told us. He again on Sunday demanded more cooperation from local officials and blamed Democratic lawmakers for violence in Minnesota—but he noticeably did not defend the officers who’d shot Pretti, in either his posts or in a brief interview with The Wall Street Journal. The president, who has long enjoyed near-total fealty from Republicans, took note of the lawmakers calling for a probe or quietly suggesting that federal officials roll back operations in the Twin Cities. (He was glad that the lawmakers did not blame him personally for the administration’s response, one of the allies told us.)

Trump was particularly bothered by the NRA’s strong reply to an assistant U.S. attorney in California appointed by the administration who said that if a person approaches law enforcement with a gun, there is a “high likelihood” that officers will be “legally justified in shooting you.” Trump has long prided himself on the support he receives from those he calls “my Second Amendment people,” and he has often been deferential to the gun lobby despite its waning influence.

When something becomes too controversial for Trump’s liking—or when the blowback becomes too fierce—he has in many cases found a way to declare some sort of victory, even a far-fetched one, and then move on (as he did with Greenland last week). Aides wondered whether he was trying to do the same with Minneapolis. Yesterday, Trump appointed his designated “border czar,” Tom Homan, to head the federal operation in Minnesota. Although most Democrats are deeply skeptical of Homan, he has not been involved in the Twin Cities operations and has been more consistently careful with his language than Miller or Noem. (After Good’s killing, Homan said that he would reserve judgment on the matter until an investigation had concluded.) Trump later claimed, after a phone call, that he and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are largely aligned in their goals for the federal operation—and even offered some faint praise for the governor, who is under investigation by the Department of Justice for allegedly impeding the operation of immigration agents.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said yesterday that if local officials increased their cooperation with the federal government, Border Patrol agents would “no longer be needed to support ICE on the ground in Minnesota.” The administration decided to pull some federal agents out of Minnesota, aides said, but did not suggest a sweeping overhaul to the mission in the state or to Trump’s broader immigration agenda.

Trump’s unease, along with pushback from Republicans, grew by the hour and forced a major change: As The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff first reported, the administration yesterday ousted Gregory Bovino from his role as the Border Patrol’s “commander at large” and removed him from Minnesota, where he had become the public face of the federal operation. Many in Trump’s orbit saw Bovino as an easy scapegoat; he’d claimed, without evidence, that Pretti had planned to attack federal agents. (His choice of coat and interactions with Minnesotans in social-media posts had also generated an uproar.) Despite this, a senior administration official insisted that Bovino’s transfer had been in the works before the announcement of Homan’s new role. Not all of Trump’s allies were happy with the change in Minneapolis. “You can’t sugarcoat this,” the Trump ally Steve Bannon said on his podcast. “It wasn’t just a blink. It was a crater.”

[Read: Greg Bovino loses his job]

Last night, the president met for two hours in the Oval Office with Noem and one of her top advisers, the former Trump-campaign chief Corey Lewandowski, but the senior official made clear to us that no additional leadership changes are imminent. Leavitt, in her briefing, also said that Trump continues to have confidence in Noem. For the moment, she remains at her job.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl contributed reporting.

The Rumbles Within Trump’s GOP

2026-01-23T18:06:00-05:00

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Earlier this month, Representative Blake Moore of Utah, a Republican, signed a bipartisan statement about Donald Trump’s aggressive pursuit of Greenland that, by the standards of the Trump-loving GOP, amounted to a rare and sharp rebuke of the president. “Sabre-rattling about annexing Greenland is needlessly dangerous,” Moore and Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, a Democrat, said in the statement.

The 45-year-old Moore is in just his third House term, but he’s no rank-and-file member of Congress. For the past two years, he has served as the vice chair of the Republican Conference—the same leadership perch from which Mike Johnson leapt to the House speakership after the mid-session ouster of Kevin McCarthy. Moore also happens to be, with Hoyer, the co-chair of the Congressional Friends of Denmark Caucus, and it was in that capacity that he delivered his warning to Trump. “The last thing America needs,” Moore and Hoyer said, “is a civil war among NATO that endangers our security and our way of life.”

When I spoke with him yesterday, Moore seemed relieved to see that, at least for the moment, the president’s sabers had calmed down. “I think we’ve landed in a really good spot relatively quickly,” Moore told me by phone the morning after Trump announced that he had reached “the framework of a future deal” with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. Moore had yet to be briefed on the developments in Davos, but he said he was happy that the administration had backed off its threat of slapping tariffs on European allies that had opposed Trump’s Greenland endeavor.

Trump’s obsession with acquiring the territory of a long-standing NATO ally has posed yet another test for Republican leaders who have allowed him to largely ignore Congress on both foreign and domestic policy. “I have no intention of getting in the way of President Trump and his administration,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday. He was speaking about the president’s tariff authority, but he could have been referring to any number of issues on which the administration has stretched or entirely obliterated the normal bounds of executive power—including unilaterally dismantling congressionally authorized federal agencies and capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a military raid without even notifying lawmakers. Johnson might still be in lockstep with Trump, but some congressional Republicans have shown signs of wavering. GOP lawmakers joined Democrats to force a vote first on releasing the Epstein files and then on extending expiring health-insurance subsidies.

A few Republicans on Capitol Hill, such as Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, had taken a much stronger stand in opposition to Trump’s move on Greenland than their colleagues usually would have. One House Republican, Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, had suggested that an unauthorized military attack on the island could lead to the president’s impeachment—with GOP support. (Whether Bacon’s prediction is correct is another matter.)

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Tillis and Bacon are planning on leaving Congress at the end of this year, unlike Moore. The most recent member of the Republican leadership to openly defy Trump, former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, lost her job as House Republican Conference chair and then her seat in relatively quick succession.

Yet Moore’s close ties to Denmark—his family has roots there dating back to the 16th century, a spokesperson told me—and his leadership post make this a tricky moment for him. “Folks don’t recognize how long-standing our ally relation with Denmark is. It’s one of our longest ever,” Moore said. During our conversation, he mixed in praise for the administration’s renewed focus on Arctic security while making clear that, unlike Trump, he does not think that the United States needs to possess Greenland. “There is already so much we can accomplish without having to purchase, acquire, own that land to achieve the outcome that we want,” Moore said.

Moore told me that Congress would need to approve any “sustained military presence” or “trillion-dollar acquisition of Greenland.” And breaking with Johnson, he said that Congress should take a more active role in tariff policy. “I believe we need to be far more involved in all trade discussions,” Moore said.

In his and Hoyer’s statement, they warn that “an attack on Greenland” would “tragically be an attack on NATO.” But when I asked Moore if he agreed with Bacon that a military incursion could lead to Trump’s impeachment, he dismissed the possibility altogether. “There was no potential of an attack on Greenland or military operation there,” he said. “It’s not even in the realm of possibility.”

So, I asked Moore, did Trump back down on Greenland, or did his heavy-handed pressure successfully force NATO to make concessions they would not otherwise have made? Despite his earlier condemnation of “sabre-rattling,” Moore adopted the more charitable view of Trump’s approach. He compared Trump’s pursuit of Greenland to the president’s aggressive first-term push for NATO countries to boost their contributions to the alliance. “President Trump’s a tough negotiator, and people know that,” Moore said. “Denmark is going to stand firm, too, and they should be able to because” they bring a lot to this table, Moore continued. He noted that “if we come to an agreement, I only think it’s going to be a net positive for everybody.”

Moore’s optimistic response struck a familiar note. His brief break with the president was more a hairline fracture than a full rupture. And it still doesn’t take much—in this case, the barest outlines of a diplomatic agreement—for Trump to bring a jittery congressional Republican back into the fold. But as global crises mount and the midterm elections near, the president is discovering that his party is not quite as sanguine as it once was.

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Does Congress Even Exist Anymore?

2026-01-07T18:34:19-05:00

Representative Seth Moulton is a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, but he learned about the U.S. military’s middle-of-the-night capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the same way many Americans did: A friend who saw the news on the internet texted him.

“That is not the way Congress is supposed to be notified of operations by the Department of Defense,” Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told us wryly. Still, Moulton was surprised neither by the Trump administration’s decision to attack Venezuela nor by the fact that it declined to give Congress a heads-up about the mission, much less seek its approval. A Marine who served four tours of duty in Iraq, Moulton had watched for months as the military stationed warships off Venezuela’s coast, and he gave little credence to the insistence of senior administration officials, in classified briefings to lawmakers, that they were not planning to take out Maduro. “I know what it means to be a Marine, sitting on a ship off the coast, and you’re not there to interdict boats or conduct a naval blockade,” he said. “Those are ground troops. And so it was no mystery to me why they were there.”

The president and his aides can lie to Congress with impunity, he argued, because the Republicans who run the House and Senate have shown they will do nothing about it. “This is the weakest Congress in American history,” Moulton said, accusing Republican leaders of making a co-equal branch of the federal government “essentially fade away.”

Moulton is running for a Senate seat, giving him even more reason than usual to criticize the GOP. But his views about Congress’s self-diminishment are widely shared inside and outside the Capitol, and the facts are hard to dispute. In the first weeks after Donald Trump returned to the White House, top Republicans offered no protest as his administration flouted their constitutional authority over spending, shutting down agencies that Congress had authorized and funded. Now the same leaders are handing over Congress’s power to authorize war-making without a fight. They’ve hardly made a peep over a military attack in which the administration cut out even the senior-most lawmakers, who are customarily informed about major operations.

Speaker Mike Johnson has praised the capture of Maduro and parroted the administration’s argument that the mission amounted to a law-enforcement action rather than an act of war to oust a foreign leader. “We are not in a war in Venezuela,” he told reporters today. “It is not a regime change. I want to emphasize that. It is a change of the actions of the regime.” With rare exceptions, rank-and-file Republicans have offered similar support for the Venezuela mission. Some have joined Trump in denigrating Congress, echoing his assertion that congressional leaders couldn’t be trusted with advance news about the operation. “Congress is a sieve,” Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee told us. “I’m glad that the president would forgo that formality.”

Other Republicans compared the Maduro mission to President George H. W. Bush’s unilateral 1989 invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega and President Barack Obama’s drone strikes on suspected terrorists in the Middle East. They also noted that the Biden administration put a $25 million bounty on Maduro’s head. But as in so many other areas, Trump has pushed the boundary of executive power further than his predecessors. Representative Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, acknowledged that if Obama had, say, “bombed Israel and not told us about it,” the GOP would want to hold him accountable. But he said Congress’s role in this case was simply to listen to the administration’s briefings about Venezuela. “I don’t think any accountability is warranted here,” Fine told us. “I think the president did the right thing.”

For a moment last fall, Congress showed some life. A group of Republicans joined Democrats to force the passage of legislation requiring the Justice Department to release its files on the convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, defying an aggressive push by both Trump and Johnson to kill the proposal. Similar bottom-up efforts have gained steam, including a bill that would extend health-insurance subsidies that expired last year. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California, an author of the Epstein bill, told us the legislation “changed the entire game. It’s opened up a floodgate of Republicans willing to stand up to the president.”

Still, the administration isn’t exactly demonstrating renewed deference to Congress. In addition to ignoring (and, according to Democrats, deliberately misleading) lawmakers on the Maduro operation, the administration has released only a small fraction of the required Epstein files, and those have come with heavy redactions. And the floodgates of Trump criticism end, apparently, at foreign and military policy—an area where, Khanna acknowledged, Congress has been abdicating its responsibility for decades: “I’ve unfortunately not seen enough of a reaction against these strikes.”

[Read: ‘They’re delusional if they think this is going to go away’ ]

Khanna’s Republican partner on the Epstein bill, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has sharply criticized the Venezuela attack. But other Republicans have returned to the president’s side. “He’s doing the right thing to keep America safe,” Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a Republican backer of forcing a vote on the Epstein legislation, told us. She didn’t fault Trump for the lack of a congressional heads-up, saying it would have been “a recipe for disaster because members of Congress just can’t be trusted.”

Beyond the GOP’s acquiescence, Khanna and Moulton have also been frustrated by the lack of a unified and unequivocal Democratic condemnation of the Venezuela attack. The House and Senate Democratic leaders, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, began their initial statements by noting how detestable Maduro is before shifting to criticism of the Trump administration for acting unilaterally to take him out. That kind of throat clearing, Moulton said, took some of the sting out of their response. Democrats, he told us, need to stick to “the blunt truth, which is that this is insane, utterly insane.”

In the Senate, Democrats are hoping that at least four Republicans will join them in passing a War Powers Resolution to bar the president from taking further military action in Venezuela without congressional approval. Its author, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, told reporters that it was time for Congress to “get its ass off the couch” and reassert its war-making powers. At least one Trump ally, Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa, took issue with the administration’s claim that the Maduro mission was a law-enforcement operation. He released a statement with the panel’s top Democrat, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, saying that if that was the case, it was “unacceptable” for the administration to exclude the committee that oversees the Justice Department from its classified briefings.

Over the weekend, it looked like another Trump ally, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, might break ranks over the Maduro operation. “I look forward to learning what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action in the absence of a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force,” Lee posted on X before dawn on Saturday, briefly returning to his pre-Trump roots as a separation-of-powers hawk. Within two hours, however, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had brought his former Senate colleague back into the fold. By Saturday evening, Lee was reposting memes of Rubio dressed as a saint and a Latin American warlord.

A few Republicans have sought something of a middle ground, backing the Venezuela attack while arguing that Congress should have a say in what happens next. “From here on out, Congress needs to play a central role,” Representative Kevin Kiley of California told us.

Moulton sees little chance of that happening—at least as long as the Republicans in charge remain subservient to Trump. “At this point,” he lamented, “Trump could kill these Republicans’ kids, and they’d tell him it was a great job.”

House Republicans Aren’t Having Any Fun

2025-12-23T10:54:52-05:00

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On a particularly stressful day in a particularly stressful week during what has been, honestly, a particularly stressful year for House Republicans, the ever-sunny but perpetually beleaguered Mike Johnson insisted that he retained at least a modicum of power over the institution he ostensibly leads. “I have not lost control of the House,” the speaker declared to a gaggle of reporters trailing him through the Capitol.

Johnson’s own members, in the past month, have accused him of stretching if not wholly disregarding the truth, and his assertion last Wednesday that he has a firm grip on power was correct only in the most technical sense. On the day he uttered it, a group of Johnson’s most electorally vulnerable soldiers abandoned him to help Democrats force a vote on extending health-care subsidies, and a longtime lawmaker became the 25th House Republican—with many more expected to follow—to announce that he would not seek reelection next year. “This place is disgraceful,” GOP Representative Mike Lawler of New York vented on the House floor, calling out Congress’s failure to prevent a spike in health-insurance rates set to occur in January. In the preceding weeks, a member of the speaker’s leadership team—Representative Elise Stefanik of New York—publicly denounced Johnson as ineffective (shortly before she announced that she was, for now, quitting politics altogether), and another high-profile (albeit perpetually aggrieved) Republican, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, pined, in the pages of The New York Times, for the sturdy hand of Nancy Pelosi.

As Republicans approach the one-year mark of their trifecta under President Donald Trump, their party’s rank-and-file lawmakers are not a happy bunch. And like so many unhappy employees, they are directing much of the blame toward the boss: the speaker they elevated from obscurity a little more than two years ago.

“We need a course correction here,” Representative Kevin Kiley of California told us. A host of current and former GOP members of Congress we interviewed echoed his sentiment; they used more pungent terms when granted anonymity to speak candidly. These Republicans described a speaker who had, contrary to Johnson’s avowal otherwise, lost practical control of the House.

“I think he’s a good man, a good attorney, a good constitutionalist, and a bad politician,” one House Republican told us. Another said Johnson was well meaning, but to a fault: “In his obsession with not offending anyone, he offends everyone.”

The roots of Republican despair are both political and legislative, and they extend far beyond Johnson. Democrats will begin the new year favored to recapture the House in the midterm elections. (A Trump-led effort to fortify the GOP’s majority through aggressive gerrymandering has stalled.) With the majority in jeopardy, Republicans are bracing for a flood of additional members quitting their reelection campaigns after the holidays. A few, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are leaving even before their terms are up.

Dim electoral prospects aside, many Republicans are also realizing that being a member of Congress in the Trump era is not all it’s cracked up to be. For that, they have themselves at least partly to blame. From the opening days of the president’s second term, congressional Republicans largely ceded their constitutional authority over spending to the executive branch. With a few mostly tepid exceptions, they made no effort to constrain DOGE while the Elon Musk–led department ransacked federal agencies established and funded by Congress. They approved provisions, slipped into House resolutions by Johnson, that restrict lawmakers from acting to cancel Trump’s tariffs. Even the House GOP’s biggest legislative victory—the summer passage of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act—was a ratification less of their agenda than of the president’s. The speaker’s decision—criticized by some in his party—to keep the House out of session for the entirety of the six-week government shutdown this fall only added to the sense that the chamber was verging on irrelevance.

[Read: The state that handed Trump his biggest defeat yet]

It’s no wonder, then, that Republican frustrations seem to be intensifying. “They’re basically put in a position where they’ve got an honorary title as a member of Congress but no authority to do anything,” former Representative Reid Ribble, a Wisconsin Republican who retired in 2017, told us. “Until the actual way you govern changes, they’re going to feel this way.”

From the start, Johnson’s unwavering loyalty—some would say obsequiousness—to Trump has defined his speakership. He’s developed a reputation for never saying what he actually thinks about anything, lest he cross the president. Yet some Republicans are beginning to join Democrats in seeing that as a fault of Johnson’s rather than a credit. “The reason he’s hanging on is because President Trump wants a weak speaker,” a House Republican told us. “He wants a speaker that essentially functions like a staff member, which is what Mike Johnson does.” Former Representative Bob Good of Virginia, an arch-conservative who left Congress in January, called Johnson “a puppet of the president” and said that Johnson remained speaker after Trump’s election only because of the president’s personal urging. “As has been sadly the case throughout the year, Republicans simply surrendered to his wishes,” Good said.

Johnson has also faced criticism from Republican women, who have accused him of not taking them seriously as policy makers. It did not go over well, one lawmaker told us, when Johnson remarked in a podcast interview that the Republican he would most trust to cook him Thanksgiving dinner was Representative Lisa McClain, the chair of the GOP conference—the rhetorical equivalent of a man giving his wife a vacuum cleaner for her birthday.

Among lawmakers’ many other complaints are that Johnson, perhaps even more than his predecessors, has tightly centralized power and deprived rank-and-file Republicans of the ability to secure votes on their legislative priorities, much less pass them. They say he also takes too long to make decisions and frequently punts the most difficult ones. “You can’t over-deliberate. Over-deliberation in this town is not good,” Representative Byron Donalds of Florida told us. Representative Chip Roy of Texas, who like Donalds is forgoing a reelection bid next year to run for statewide office, said that House leadership needed to be more aggressive about acting on conservative priorities, even if they stand little chance of clearing the Senate. “We’ve done some good stuff, but we need to be on offense and do more,” Roy told us. “You can’t just rest on your laurels and hope that you’re gonna win the election.”

Some of these gripes are time-honored grievances, the kind that House members make about their leadership no matter who is speaker or which party is in charge. After we asked Johnson’s office to comment for this story, calls started pouring in from members who wanted to vouch for him. “The speaker is doing a beautiful job in a really tough situation,” Representative Celeste Maloy, a second-term Republican from Utah, told us. She specifically defended Johnson’s treatment of women in the Republican conference and gently chided his critics. “I would rather see women supporting each other and supporting the causes we all believe in, and working towards long term goals,” she said, “instead of focusing on short-term disagreements.”

Representative Jodey Arrington, the chair of the House Budget Committee, cast Johnson’s deliberative and collaborative style—a source of complaints from some Republicans—as a “member-driven model” of leadership. “With that, there’s more discussion and debate. It’s always more efficient in leadership if you just tell them what to do,” Arrington told us. Johnson, he said, “is not your typical Washington leadership guy who works in power plays and side agreements. He is fully transparent.” (In a statement, a Johnson spokesperson did not address the criticism of the speaker directly, instead boasting that under his leadership, the House GOP had “one of the most productive first years of any Republican Congress in history” and “stuck together to deliver the bulk of the America First agenda.”)

Johnson and his allies point out that the GOP majority is historically small, leaving him almost no room to maneuver and forcing him to achieve near-total party unity on any major vote. In shepherding Trump’s domestic-policy bill to passage, the speaker achieved a significant number of conservative wins—so many, in fact, that if they were split into different bills the House’s achievements for the year would look much more impressive. The speaker “is not getting enough credit for what House Republicans have been able to accomplish,” Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota told us. He turned to Jay-Z for inspiration: “I would say that Congress has 99 problems, but Mike Johnson is not one of them.”

[Read: The accidental speaker]

Yet dissatisfied Republicans have rebelled against Johnson in ways that Democrats rarely if ever did against Pelosi when she presided over a similarly slim majority during the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency. GOP lawmakers have frequently stalled legislation by defecting on key procedural votes, and in recent months they have gone around Johnson by signing Democratic-dominated discharge petitions to force votes on legislation that the speaker has tried to block.

These tactics have, in turn, annoyed Republicans who believe that their restive colleagues are making an already challenging political environment even worse for the party. As the year draws to a close, they have taken to complaining about all the complainers. “We need more happy warriors,” Dusty Johnson said, arguing that Republicans have fallen into a culture of “victimhood” that he used to associate only with the American left.

Whether the speaker’s job is secure has become a topic of some debate inside the Capitol. The most obvious threat will come in the November elections, but could Republicans depose Johnson as they did his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy? Stefanik told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month that if a vote were called tomorrow, Johnson would not have enough support from Republicans to stay as speaker. Greene has also reportedly been talking with colleagues about an effort to oust Johnson, but she plans to leave the House next month. Asked if he was ready for new leadership, Donalds said, “Yeah, but I mean, look, it’s not coming up.” But then he added: “You never know in this town.” With Johnson’s support, Republicans changed House rules to make it harder to remove a speaker in the middle of a term. “Usually there are tremors before a speaker goes down,” one House Republican told us, “and this speaker has faced a number of tremors.”

Johnson’s challenges won’t get any easier when his unhappy Republican campers return to Washington in 2026. He’ll probably have to watch as the House passes a bill to extend health-insurance subsidies over his objections, and Congress faces the prospect of another partial government shutdown at the end of January. Johnson might hold the speaker’s gavel for another year, but the extent of his sway has never seemed more in doubt.

The State That Handed Trump His Biggest Defeat Yet

2025-12-11T07:11:12-05:00

Updated on December 11 at 6:20 p.m. ET

The Indiana legislature does not keep its constituents at a great distance. As lawmakers convened in Indianapolis on Monday to consider a bill backed by President Donald Trump to redraw the state’s congressional map, all that separated them from protesters who had gathered in a corridor just outside the capitol chamber was a series of glass windows. Inside the room, chants of “Just vote no!” and “We want fair maps!” could be heard as clearly as the legislative debate.

In an era when politicians typically operate at arm’s length from their voters, the public’s easy access to elected representatives is refreshing. In Indiana this week, it’s also a bit jarring. The state Senate is meeting under threat. Trump and his allies have vowed to target Republican lawmakers who vote against a redistricting plan that could wipe out the state’s Democratic congressional representation, protecting the U.S. House GOP majority. Over the past several weeks, Republican state legislators have faced a wave of “swatting” incidents, bomb threats, and other anonymous acts of intimidation, leading some to worry about their personal safety. The current climate of fear in Indiana, lawmakers in both parties told me, is without modern precedent in the state.

“We can have an argument and still be nice,” Mike Gaskill, the Republican chair of the senate’s elections committee, said as he opened a hearing on the redistricting bill. It was a plea as much as a declaration.

Indiana Republicans have been targeted because a number of them have done something that few others in the party, either in Washington, D.C., or in state capitals across the country, have dared to do: They have stood up to Trump. The administration launched its redistricting campaign over the summer in Texas, where GOP legislators quickly signed on to a plan to gerrymander the state’s congressional map to flip as many as five Democratic U.S. House seats. Republicans in Missouri and North Carolina acceded to similar White House demands.

In Indiana, the GOP holds the governorship and a supermajority in both chambers of the legislature. But from the outset, Republicans in the state Senate have resisted the president’s push. Two visits from Vice President J. D. Vance failed to secure enough support, and last month, the senate voted to reject Governor Mike Braun’s call to hold a special session this month to consider a redistricting proposal.

Under intense pressure from the White House—Trump has singled out Indiana legislators by name in Truth Social posts—the state Senate president pro tempore, Rodric Bray, reversed course shortly before Thanksgiving and announced that the chamber would return to Indianapolis this week to consider a redistricting bill passed by the state House. But the president’s threats of retribution ultimately failed: This afternoon, the Indiana Senate—including a majority of Republicans—overwhelmingly rejected a new congressional map drawn to give Republicans all nine seats—they currently hold seven—in the state’s U.S. House delegation. The vote handed Trump a major loss in his redistricting fight and represented perhaps Republicans’ sharpest rebuke of the president in his second term.

[Read: The fear taking hold among Indiana Republicans]

Heading into today, the outcome was a mystery even to the highest-ranking Republicans in Indiana. Senators whose votes were decisive kept quiet until they cast their votes; they sought to buy as much time as possible and avoid making themselves the target of even more harassment. When the elections committee approved the bill on Monday, teeing it up for today’s floor vote, three of the Republicans who supported the proposed map cautioned that they were pushing it forward only “for additional vetting” and that they could change their minds. “I’m going to continue listening to my constituents,” one of those Republicans, Linda Rogers, told me afterward. She said public opinion in her district, along the state’s northern border, was split “pretty equal” between supporters and opponents. Top Republicans in Washington, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and James Blair, the White House deputy chief of staff, have been calling and texting Indiana holdouts this week in hopes of flipping their votes.

The committee vote followed a marathon hearing in which senators heard four hours of testimony from more than 100 members of the public, the large majority of whom urged Republicans to stand strong and defeat the redistricting bill. “It’s not just politics. It’s a calculated assault on fair representation,” Ethan Hatcher, a local radio host who said that he voted for Trump in each of the past two presidential elections, told the committee as cheers erupted from the demonstrators listening outside the chamber.

In the hearing’s closing moments, Senator Greg Walker, a Republican, described the harassment he received after declaring his early opposition to redistricting, including an unsolicited pizza delivery and a separate incident in which heavily armed police responded to a false emergency call to his home. He said he was fortunate, because unlike other Republicans subjected to such swatting attempts, he did not have small children who might have been traumatized by the scene. “I refuse to be intimidated,” Walker said, reaffirming his intent to vote no. Through tears, he described having held a friend’s newborn the night before and worrying about the world the child would inherit. “I fear for this institution,” Walker said. “I fear for the state of Indiana. And I fear for all states if we allow threats and intimidation to become the norm.”

Over the past few days, I’ve asked both Republicans and Democrats here to explain why Indiana has become the new hotbed of GOP resistance to Trump. It is not the only state to rebuff the president’s redistricting demands; Kansas Republicans also have been unable to muster the votes for gerrymandering, and success in Florida is not assured. But no state has faced the White House–directed onslaught that Indiana has.

I received several answers. Most, however, said that the push for mid-decade redistricting simply ran afoul of the small-c conservatism on which many Indiana Republican legislators still pride themselves. “Midwesterners being midwestern,” one anti-redistricting advocate replied with a shrug outside the senate chamber. Republicans told me that state Senate opponents of redrawing the maps tended to be more institutionalist than MAGA, echoing a divide that still crops up among the party’s lawmakers in Washington. “I’m such a rule follower, it’s not even funny,” Walker said during his committee speech on Monday.

[Read: ‘None of this is good for Republicans’]

Democrats told me that many Republican senators in Indiana remained far more pragmatic than their counterparts in Congress have become during the Trump era. In this, they have more in common with Indiana Republicans from an earlier era, such as former Governor Mitch Daniels (a public opponent of redistricting) and the late Senator Richard Lugar, who was known for his friendship with President Barack Obama. Senators have clashed with Republican governors (including former Vice President Mike Pence) over other national flash-point issues such as abortion and gay rights. Most of what they debate, however, draws little interest from the president and his allies. “A lot of these people are not die-hard partisans,” Nick Roberts, a 25-year-old member of the Indianapolis city council, told me. Roberts has spoken out against the redistricting plan and is the only Democrat known to have received threats as a result.

The debate on Monday was notably more collegial than the acrimonious exchanges that have proliferated in Congress. Democrats are largely powerless in the Indiana legislature, holding just 10 out of the senate’s 50 seats. But they effusively praised Gaskill, a redistricting supporter and staunch Trump backer, for his handling of the hearing even as they encouraged their colleagues to continue bucking the president. “He does not care about Republicans in Indiana. He does not care about Republican senators,” Senator Fady Qaddoura, a Democrat representing part of Indianapolis, said of Trump during the hearing. “And if you stand in his way, he will destroy you.” Then he said to Republicans: “I pray for you. I pray for your safety.”

In the lead-up to Thanksgiving, opponents of redistricting believed that the pressure campaign was fading. A significant bloc of Republicans had joined with Democrats to reject a special legislative session demanded by Trump and called by the governor. But then Bray announced that, indeed, the state Senate would return this month to vote on any redistricting bill passed by the state House, where GOP support for the proposal has been stronger. “Getting that call was a call no one wanted to get,” Shelli Yoder, Indiana’s Senate Democratic leader, told me. “We really wanted to turn that page.”

The lobbying intensified once again. Turning Point Action, a political arm of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, declared that it would help raise more than $10 million to spend in primaries against GOP legislators in Indiana who vote against redistricting. As Republicans filed into the chamber yesterday to continue debating the bill, Senator Dan Dernulc told a colleague that he had received a bomb threat to his home the night before. In a brief interview, he would not say how he planned to vote today but declared that the threat would not move him. “I’m going to do what’s right and let the chips fall where they may,” Dernulc said.

Senator Sue Glick, a Republican opponent of redistricting, received a text from Blair, the senior Trump aide, shortly before the floor debate began yesterday, she told me. Earlier this week, she answered a call that she thought was coming from one of her aides. “Hello, Jim,” she said. “No,” the caller replied, “this is Mike Johnson from Washington.” Perplexed, Glick asked him, “And who are you with?” He replied that he was the speaker of the House. “You know,” Glick joked to me, “I’m from the sticks.”

Glick said that she and Johnson had a cordial conversation, but she would not back the bill. “There’s no good reason for this,” she said, commenting that it was “ridiculous” that Indiana had been dragged into a Washington fight that the state did not want. Glick said emails and phone calls from her constituents were running overwhelmingly against the redistricting plan. Backers of the bill have accused Democrats of orchestrating a public outcry—a charge Glick dismissed. In her district, she said, a meeting of the Democratic county committee could be held “in the phone booth behind the courthouse. There’s not that many Democrats.” When I asked her about Trump’s threats to launch a primary challenge against Republicans such as her, she replied: “That’s fine. I trust the people to make the right decision.”

[Read: The Trump steamroller is broken]

There were other signs that the White House’s strong-arm tactics were backfiring. After Trump used a slur demeaning people with disabilities late last month against the governor of Minnesota, State Senator Mike Bohacek, a Republican who has a daughter with Down syndrome, called out the president and reaffirmed his opposition to the proposal. A rally held last week by Turning Point Action at the statehouse in Indianapolis drew a paltry crowd compared with demonstrations organized by redistricting opponents.

Threats of primary challenges are more potent in Indiana state House races, where lawmakers are up for reelection every two years and will face a filing deadline early next year. Only half of the senators will be on the ballot next year, and a number of Republicans in the chamber have already announced their retirement. GOP senators also have reason to doubt that either Trump or his allies will follow through on promised spending in the coming years, particularly for those whose next election isn’t until 2028. “The idea that Trump would be spending political capital not just four months from now, but two and a half years from now, individually targeting Indiana senators who defied them on one vote? Just crazy,” Roberts said. By 2028, “they will have bigger fish to fry.”

As the week wore on, opponents of redistricting grew cautiously optimistic that the state Senate would defeat the bill. One Republican critic told me that they were confident the legislation would fail, but added: “I don’t want to say anything that’s going to jeopardize the vote.” Another, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of how sensitive the debate had become, told me that “if anything,” the heavy-handed tactics had made Republican senators “dig in their heels a little bit.” The senator, who opposes redistricting, said that as he was driving to Indianapolis on Monday, he was worried about how many “no” votes would flip to “yes.” But as he began talking with his colleagues, he realized they were holding firm. Today, he and the rest of the country discovered just how much arm-twisting Indiana Republicans could withstand.

A vote expected to be close turned into something of a rout, as a majority of Republicans in the senate banded together to reject a bill that Trump had aggressively pushed. “You don’t change minds by being mean, and they were mean-spirited from the get-go,” Senator Jean Leising, a Republican who voted no, told reporters afterward. With the matter settled, she said that she wasn’t worried much about threats of retaliation: “I’m sure that the president and the governor will get over it.” Another senate Republican who voted no, Eric Bassler, had higher aspirations for the message that Indiana sent today: “I hope that this is the beginning of the country stepping back from the brink.”

The Fear Taking Hold Among Indiana Republicans

2025-11-26T08:00:00-05:00

On Monday I spoke with a Republican member of Indiana’s legislature who opposes President Donald Trump’s push for the state to redraw its congressional map to gain two GOP seats and help the party hold its House majority in next year’s midterm elections. Trump, with support from Indiana’s Republican governor, Mike Braun, has vowed to back primary challengers against members of the GOP who are, for now, blocking the redistricting plan. The lawmaker I spoke with asked that I not publish his name. He isn’t worried about Trump’s political wrath; he doesn’t plan to run for reelection. His fear of speaking out is much more personal: “I’d rather my house not get firebombed,” he told me by phone.

Such a worry is not as far-fetched as it might sound—not in an America that has seen an eruption of political violence over the past few years, and not in Indiana over the past few weeks. Republicans in the state have faced a wave of “swatting” incidents, in which a false call to emergency services draws a police response, for not endorsing the redistricting plan. (Braun said he and his family have also received threats.)

Indiana lawmakers have reported other apparent attempts at intimidation, including at least one bomb threat, as well as subtler forms of harassment. Not all of them have been made public. Earlier this month, the Republican I interviewed was returning home from an evening walk and saw a Domino’s Pizza car parked out front. The delivery was under his name, with his home address, but he had not ordered it. The phone number that was given to the delivery driver was not his. The confirmation that no one in his family ordered it came when he asked the driver what was on the pizza: sausage and pepperoni. “We don’t eat meat,” he told me with a laugh, “so none of us ordered that pizza.” When the lawmaker later called the number affiliated with the order, it went to the state police in Indianapolis. Hoax pizza deliveries have been a favored tactic of MAGA supporters who have tried to enforce loyalty to Trump and his agenda. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia reported a similar incident before she abruptly announced her resignation from Congress. “The whole idea is, We know who you are. We know where you live,” the Indiana lawmaker said. “They’re trying to intimidate us.”

So far, Trump’s heavy-handed pressure campaign and the anonymous harassment directed toward Indiana Republicans have not worked. The White House wants the state legislature to adopt a new congressional map that would make Republicans the favorites to win the two House seats currently held by Democrats. (Republicans already have the other seven.) Although a majority of the GOP-controlled general assembly reportedly backs the idea, the state Senate has balked. The senate initially flouted Braun’s move to call a special session of the legislature next month to consider redistricting. Its president pro tempore, Rodric Bray, opposes redistricting and has said the proposal lacks the votes to pass, but he announced on Tuesday that the senate would return next month to render “a final decision” on the idea.

Indiana is only the latest red state to resist Trump’s demand that it join a gerrymandering arms race against Democratic-led states like California. The administration launched this campaign over the summer by leaning on Republicans in the Texas legislature to approve a map that could wipe out as many as five Democratic-held seats in the state’s House delegation. GOP lawmakers in Missouri and North Carolina soon followed, but the redistricting effort has stalled elsewhere. Kansas Republicans announced earlier this month that they lacked the votes to enact a map that would eliminate a Democratic-leaning House seat in and around Kansas City.

In Ohio, Republicans struck a deal with Democrats that only marginally improves the GOP’s chances of picking up two additional seats. Meanwhile, California voters earlier this month overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to redraw the state’s House map and hand Democrats as many as five new seats. Democrats in Virginia launched their own redistricting push that could yield the party multiple GOP-held seats. And last week, a federal judge ruled that the GOP’s new Texas map was unconstitutional, throwing the party’s biggest redistricting win into doubt. (The Supreme Court has paused the ruling while it considers whether to take the case.)

[Read: ‘None of this is good for Republicans’ ]

Trump’s drive to padlock the Republicans’ House majority may be backfiring, and it could be Democrats who emerge from the gerrymandering war with more seats. As the administration’s bravado has turned to desperation and anger, Trump has put even more pressure on Indiana Republicans to deliver. Vice President J. D. Vance traveled to the state last month to lobby lawmakers, and the president has been calling out individual legislators by name in his Truth Social feed.

Republicans hold a 40–10 supermajority in the Indiana Senate, so the aversion to Trump’s push is not limited to a few renegade members. Several opponents have criticized the plan on the grounds that Indiana should not redraw its maps in the middle of the decade; the Constitution calls for reapportionment of representatives among the states to be done after the decennial Census. “I’m not inclined to ever redistrict mid-decade,” the lawmaker told me. He said he voted with other Republicans to enact the state’s current congressional map after the 2020 Census. “What has changed from the Census five years ago that would lead us to redistrict today?” the legislator asked. “Nothing has changed.”

The president’s purely political argument—“they could be depriving Republicans of a majority in the House,” he wrote of the idea’s GOP critics in Indiana—isn’t persuasive to this legislator. “Other states need to do what they want to do, but I don’t think it makes sense for them to do it either.” The lawmaker said Republicans should be trying to win elections on the merits, not through gerrymandering: “If you’re not confident enough in your policies that you think that it’s going to have a negative impact on your politics, then maybe you need to be doing something different.”

This lawmaker was hardly alone among Republican opponents of Trump’s redistricting push in Indiana who were reluctant to speak publicly. None of the critics I contacted over the past week would agree to an on-the-record interview. Supporters of the president’s plan, by contrast, were less reticent. “It’s not unconstitutional, it’s not illegal, and it’s not immoral,” Beau Baird, a GOP state representative, said of redistricting. Baird is also the Republican Party chair of Putnam County; his father, Jim Baird, has represented the area in Congress since 2019. The younger Baird told me that he wanted Republicans to draw a maximally favorable House map after the 2020 Census but that the party ended up favoring a less aggressive approach. He was initially hesitant to revisit the district lines in the middle of the decade, but he told me he came around to the idea pretty quickly. “I believe that it is important that we do it, and we do it now,” Baird said.

[Read: Donald Trump’s plan to subvert the midterms is already under way]

Indiana’s entire GOP House delegation is publicly backing the redistricting effort, as is Senator Jim Banks. (The state’s senior senator, Republican Todd Young, has said only that he “supports our state legislators and trusts their judgment” on the issue.) Representative Marlin Stutzman, a Republican in his second stint in Congress, justified the proposal to sweep Democrats entirely out of the state’s delegation by pointing to New England, where not a single Republican across six states is serving in the House. “I would argue that the Democrats have been doing this much longer than Republicans have, and President Trump has just finally shown the Republican Party how to fight back and play the same game,” Stutzman told me.

Baird told me that when he recently spoke to a group of about 100 Republican constituents, the crowd initially seemed opposed to redistricting but emerged supportive after he made his argument in favor. Stutzman predicted that if redistricting were put before the voters—as Democrats in California did earlier this month—Hoosiers would endorse the idea. Other Republicans, however, say public opinion is running in the opposite direction.

In a statement earlier this month, State Senator Kyle Walker said he informally surveyed his constituents and found that 93 percent were against redistricting, leading him to oppose the plan. The lawmaker I spoke with asked an aide to tally up the emails and voicemails his office had received from constituents expressing a view on redistricting over the past few months. (The office did not actively solicit opinions on the issue.) The results floored him. Out of a total of nearly 400 constituents who called and wrote, just eight voiced support for redistricting; the rest were opposed.

It might seem that such strong public backing would embolden a politician to take a more forthright stand against their own party—especially one who does not plan to be on the ballot again. But police are still patrolling the streets around his house and neighborhood. The threat has not yet passed, and an elected state legislator still does not feel safe in publicly crossing the president. “It’s a sad testament to our politics right now,” he told me.

What Happens When Attention Seeking Eclipses Policy Making

2025-11-22T16:55:49-05:00

A junior member of Congress from Georgia announced her resignation last night, ending a brief tenure in the House that produced, well, not a whole lot.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is no legislative powerhouse, and in the grand sweep of American history, her five years as a U.S. representative will be a mere blip. She wrote no major laws and had little discernible impact on national policy. (For two of those years, she did not serve on a single House committee, having been booted from her assignments in a bipartisan vote because of comments she made prior to serving in Congress that, among other things, promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the execution of Democratic lawmakers.)

Yet if that had been all there was to say about Greene, then her abrupt decision to quit in the middle of her third term would not have made international headlines. In her short time in Washington, she has become one of the most well-known House members, embodying a performative style of politics that rewards attention seeking over policy making. Her star power has also been tied to—and as it turned out, was completely dependent on—her fervent support for Donald Trump.

The president withdrew that support last week, calling Greene a “ranting lunatic” and a “traitor” after she broke with him over the GOP’s strategy on health care and his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. He said that he would back “the right person” to challenge her in a primary next year. Greene—who during Trump’s first term replied to a Facebook follower asking if “we get to hang” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over their support of the Iran nuclear deal by stating, “The stage is being set”—accused the president of jeopardizing her safety with his rhetoric. Last night, she announced that she would resign from the House on January 5. “I have too much self-respect and dignity,” Greene says in a video she posted on X. “I love my family way too much, and I do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the president that we all fought for.”

[Read: Four simple questions for Marjorie Taylor Greene]

Greene professed confidence that she would have won her primary anyway (and with it, the general election in a deeply Republican district). But she said a victory might not be worth much, because Republicans will “likely” lose their House majority, and she would have found herself expected to defend Trump from a Democratic impeachment attempt after he spent millions trying “to destroy me.”

The president welcomed her departure, telling ABC News that it “was great news for the country.” Trump told reporters earlier today: “I said, ‘Go your own way,’ and once I left her, she resigned because she would never have survived a primary. But I think she’s a nice person.”

“Honestly shocked,” one former White House official texted us in response to the news. “Makes me question how much she truly cares, it seems like a surrender.”

Greene’s prediction of a win notwithstanding, she surely knew that another possibility—perhaps even a probability—was that she would have wound up like another once-influential Republican lawmaker who turned on Trump: Liz Cheney. As a new House member in early 2021, Greene helped to defenestrate Cheney after she voted to impeach Trump for his role in fomenting the January 6, 2021, riot that sought to overturn the president’s defeat. Cheney, too, had largely supported Trump for four years; after their split, she lost her position in GOP leadership and was trounced in a Wyoming primary by a Trump-backed challenger.

Greene has been a bigger Trump booster than Cheney ever was. She built her improbable 2020 campaign—her emergence from a nine-way primary took Republicans by surprise—on support for the president. On the day Greene was sworn in, she wore a face mask that read Trump Won, and one of her first acts was to object to the certification of Michigan’s electoral votes for President Joe Biden.

That a political neophyte who spouted conspiracy theories—about 9/11, school shootings, and California wildfires that she claimed might have been caused by space lasers controlled by Jewish bankers—could win election to Congress appalled leaders in both parties; Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader, called Greene’s views “a cancer” on the Republican Party. But she was a representative in the truest sense, in that she symbolized the many Americans—surely more than the 800,000 who composed her Georgia constituency—who both loved Trump and believed things that weren’t true.

Greene understood that the keys to achieving power in Trump’s GOP are loyalty and an ability to command attention. She excelled at each for a time. Greene once compared Trump to Jesus and Nelson Mandela, gushed about “how good” he looked, and said she appreciated that he was “genuinely kindhearted and caring about everyone.” Her ties to Trump forced then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy to restore her committee assignments once Republicans retook the House majority in 2023. Earlier this year, McCarthy’s successor, Mike Johnson, appointed her to lead a House subcommittee overseeing DOGE, the cost-cutting agency that Trump tapped Elon Musk to lead. Although the assignment gave Greene an ostensible platform and some legitimacy, it epitomized the perfunctory role that Congress has come to play in Trump’s second term; in practice, DOGE operated wholly without regard for the prerogatives of the legislative branch. (Greene alluded to this dynamic in her resignation announcement, bemoaning that for most of Trump’s first year back in office, “the legislature has been mostly sidelined.”)

Through it all, Greene was rarely far from the news. She seemed to reach her breaking point with Trump during the shutdown, when she denounced the GOP’s refusal to extend expiring health-insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. Greene infuriated Trump even more by aligning with a GOP nemesis, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who was pushing to force the administration to release the entire Epstein FBI file. Greene quickly discovered what most everyone else in Washington had long since learned: Loyalty does not go both ways with Trump.

Whether the president can still end a Republican politician’s career will be tested next year; he is trying to oust Massie in a primary. But Greene knew that without Trump’s friendship and blessing, her power within the GOP was gone. Even if she had stuck around and prevailed next year, she would have faced a future of diminished clout in a diminished Congress—not as first among equals, but merely as a single member out of 435, and not a particularly distinguished one. And where would be the fun in that?

Why the Democrats Finally Folded

2025-11-10T19:28:51-05:00

This is how the government shutdown was always going to end.

For the past 30 years, the party that has forced federal agencies to close their doors in a funding fight has never actually achieved the policy outcome it was demanding. Republicans did not successfully pressure then-President Barack Obama to defund his signature health-care law when they shut down the government in 2013. President Donald Trump, during his first term, failed to persuade Senate Democrats to authorize his border wall in 2019.

And over the past two weeks, a pivotal faction of Democrats abandoned their hope that Republicans would agree to extend insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act anytime soon. So late last night, they provided the key votes to begin the process of reopening the government after what has become the longest shutdown in United States history. (Final votes to end the impasse are expected in the coming days.)

“I came to the conclusion that they were not going to cave on that red line,” Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, one of five Democrats who flipped his vote yesterday after previously backing the shutdown, told us by phone this afternoon. He acknowledged that many of his colleagues disagreed. But when he would press them on whether they believed that Republicans might come around on health care, they could not say. “There really was no evidence to suggest that they would.”

The decision to fold by a few senators infuriated other members of the Democratic caucus; indeed, it was hard to find an elected Democrat inside or outside Washington who praised the move today. These critics could not fathom why the party would yield after an election in which voters appeared to vindicate their fight against Trump. Why abandon a winning hand?

But even though polling had swung in the Democrats’ favor, it was not enough to move the president or GOP leaders in Congress. They refused to negotiate on a proposed extension of insurance subsidies, which expire at the end of the year, as long as the government remained closed. For weeks, the Democrats’ best hope for achieving their shutdown goals had been to persuade Trump to strike a deal on health care. Over the weekend, however, Trump dug in further. After earlier suggesting that he might be open to an eventual agreement, the president reversed himself and called on Republicans to forgo a subsidies extension in favor of a new plan for direct payments to consumers through health-savings accounts. Any chance of quick consensus on the Democrats’ terms seemed to be dead.

“I understand that not all of my Democratic colleagues are satisfied with this agreement, but waiting another week or another month wouldn’t deliver a better outcome,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, another Democrat who switched her vote, told reporters.

Shaheen, Kaine, and their colleagues accepted terms similar to those that Republican leaders had been offering all along. Senate Majority Leader John Thune agreed to hold a vote within the next several weeks on a Democratic proposal to extend the subsidies, but that is widely expected to fall short. The deal clears the way for passage of a package of bipartisan appropriations bills providing full-year funding for the Departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs, as well as Congress. If approved by the House, those measures would ensure that food assistance continues for the next fiscal year and would limit the impact of another shutdown if the parties cannot agree on another spending bill by January 30. Democrats also secured GOP support for a provision forcing the Trump administration to reinstate federal employees laid off during the shutdown and preventing it from implementing another round of mass firings for the next three months.

[Watch: How lawmakers are responding to the shutdown]

Kaine disputed the idea that voters were endorsing Democrats’ shutdown strategy in Tuesday’s election. He pointed out that Abigail Spanberger, who coasted to victory in the Virginia governor’s race, called after her win for the government to reopen. But Kaine argued that even though Republicans did not relent on health care, their electoral defeat prompted Trump to reengage in shutdown talks—and resulted in more protections for federal workers. “He knows he was getting blamed,” Kaine said. “And as soon as he realized that, we found the off-ramp that does some good for some of the people he’s been kicking around, like SNAP recipients or federal workers.”

Yet Democrats won nothing on their core demand, except for the vague promise of future negotiations on health-care subsidies. Critics in the party were especially galled that the senators caved at a moment when Trump, who had lashed out after blaming the GOP’s election losses on the shutdown, appeared to be spiraling. “I think a bunch of adults looked at a toddler’s temper tantrum and came to the conclusion that you can’t negotiate with a toddler who’s going to pitch a goddamned fit in Toys ‘R’ Us,” a Democratic aide, dismayed by the decision to fold and granted anonymity to speak candidly, told us. “They were like, ‘Give him the Barbie and leave the store.’”

Inside the West Wing, Trump’s aides greeted the end of the shutdown as evidence that the White House’s take-no-prisoners approach to the crisis worked: Sure, it took longer than expected, but Democrats were always going to cave.

Beyond the bluster, there was some relief in Trump’s orbit that the Democrats had offered a reprieve from a shutdown that was dragging down Republicans’ poll numbers. It likely would have gotten worse had it continued into Thanksgiving and ruined holiday travel. Aides also worried that the issues at the heart of the shutdown—increased health-care costs—could flare up again next year. Predictably, Trump focused on claiming a win, believing that he had bested Democrats once more. He also reveled in the Democrats’ divide, even though, people close to him told us, he was miffed that Senate Republicans rebuffed his calls to abolish the filibuster.

[Jonathan Chait: How Trump wants to help Democrats ]

Ultimately, Tuesday’s elections were not the turning point in the shutdown; they served more as a temporary interruption in negotiations between Republicans and a group of wavering Democrats. But as bipartisan talks resumed, the impact of the shutdown spread from furloughed federal workers to SNAP beneficiaries, air travelers, and others. In recent days, the Trump administration ratcheted up the consequences of the shutdown by appealing to the Supreme Court to block a full payment of SNAP benefits to needy families, and by causing chaos at airports with an order to reduce flight volume because of staffing shortages. The Democrats who flipped their votes concluded that the shutdown wasn’t worth the damage it was causing.

Historically, shutdowns have ended when the pain they cause becomes too much for the party that provoked them. Democrats may have been winning the political fight this time, but they had made little headway on policy. They are now vowing to keep up their push to extend health-insurance subsidies, this time with the government open. The next funding deadline will be in late January, and with it comes the risk of another shutdown. At the end of a press conference yesterday, Shaheen was asked whether she might again vote to shut down parts of the government if Republicans haven’t relented by then. “That’s certainly an option,” she replied, “that I think everybody will consider.”

‘None of This Is Good for Republicans’

2025-11-05T20:55:03-05:00

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President Donald Trump’s gerrymandering war has never looked riskier for his party.

Prodded by Trump, Republicans earlier this year launched an audacious plan to entrench their congressional majority by redrawing House-district maps to squeeze out Democrats—anywhere and everywhere they could. The gambit was an exercise in political power and, coming outside of the traditional decennial redistricting process, without precedent in modern history.

Yet if Democrats feared not long ago that they would be locked out of a House majority, their decisive victories across the country last night have made them, arguably, the favorites heading into next year’s midterm elections.

In California, an overwhelming majority voted to redistrict, essentially canceling out the five House seats that Republicans had thought they gained through redistricting in Texas over the summer. The GOP’s steep losses farther east cast even more doubt on the wisdom of its redistricting push. Voters repudiated Republicans virtually across the board, handing Democrats convincing victories for the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, important judicial and legislative races in Pennsylvania, and, for the first time in two decades, a pair of statewide elections in Georgia. In Virginia, the breadth of the Democrats’ win gave them their largest majority in the state House of Delegates since 1989.

[Read: The anti-MAGA majority reemerges ]

For Democrats, the results were reminiscent of—and in many cases stronger than—the victories they posted during the 2017 elections, in Trump’s first term, which presaged the wave that delivered them the House majority a year later. Even if the GOP’s gerrymandering advantage nets the party a few additional seats, Democrats will have a narrower gap to overcome next year than they did eight years ago.

Among the constituencies that swung the hardest toward Democrats yesterday were Latinos, who helped power Trump’s presidential win last year and were key to the GOP’s redrawn congressional map in Texas. The Republicans’ chances of flipping five additional House seats there rest in part on their holding Trump’s gains among Latino voters. That was a questionable assumption from the start, the longtime GOP strategist Mike Madrid told me. It appears even shakier in light of Tuesday’s election results; in New Jersey, for example, the state’s three most heavily Latino counties moved sharply back to the left after swinging toward Trump in 2024.

“None of this is good for Republicans. It’s all their own doing, though,” Madrid said. Latinos in Texas border towns may vote differently in 2026 than Latinos in New Jersey did this year. But the anti-GOP shift in this week’s elections could boost the Democrats’ chances of winning two and possibly three of the five Texas seats that Republicans redrew in their favor, Madrid told me. It could also open up even more opportunities for Democrats, because to create the additional red-leaning seats, Republicans had to cut into previously safe GOP districts. “The problem is they’re spreading their other districts thin as they’re getting greedy,” Madrid said.

Yesterday’s election results could complicate both parties’ plans to escalate their gerrymandering tit-for-tat across the country. In addition to their Texas effort, Republicans have enacted newly drawn congressional maps in Missouri and North Carolina that could yield them an additional House seat in each state. Florida legislators are eyeing a gerrymander that could boost the GOP’s chances in multiple seats, although the state’s significant proportion of Latino voters could pose similar redistricting challenges for Republicans there as those in Texas saw.

Internal opposition, however, has slowed the GOP’s drive elsewhere. Ohio Republicans cut a deal with Democrats on revised districts that are more favorable for the GOP but not nearly as aggressive as some party leaders had advocated for. In Indiana, Republicans remain short of the votes they would need in the state legislature to gerrymander both of its House Democrats out of their seats, despite an intense pressure campaign from the White House. And just as polls were closing in eastern states last night, Kansas Republicans announced that they lacked support to call a special legislative session to redraw the House seat of Representative Sharice Davids, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation.

Some Democrats, meanwhile, were emboldened by the success of California’s Proposition 50, the ballot measure devised by Governor Gavin Newsom that temporarily redraws the state congressional map to target five Republican-held House seats and strengthen five additional swing districts represented by Democrats. With 75 percent of precincts reporting today, the referendum was leading by more than 25 points. (Republicans immediately filed a lawsuit to block the new California maps, as they had promised to do if Prop 50 passed.) The GOP’s “biggest strategy for trying to steal the 2026 election is falling apart before their eyes,” Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, told reporters on a conference call trumpeting the party’s electoral wins.

Even before Democrats swept Virginia’s elections last night, the party’s state legislative majorities began a two-year process to gerrymander two or three Republicans out of their House seats in the 2026 elections. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has pushed Democratic leaders in Illinois and Maryland to similarly redraw their state’s congressional maps. But the effort has met resistance from some Democratic lawmakers.

In Maryland, the state Senate president, Bill Ferguson, used the party’s electoral success yesterday to argue against an attempt to draw a new map that would likely give Democrats all eight of its House seats. (Republicans currently hold one.) “Tonight’s resounding Democratic victory shows we don’t need to rig the system to win,” Ferguson wrote on X. His comment earned a sharp rebuttal from his counterpart in neighboring Virginia, the state Senate president pro tempore, L. Louise Lucas. “Get our victory in Virginia out of your mouth while you echo MAGA talking points,” she posted this afternoon. “Grow a pair and stand up to this President. This is just embarrassing.”

[Read: ‘California is allowed to hit back’]

Martin said he hoped Tuesday’s election results, and especially the Prop 50 vote in California, would “send a chilling effect to Republicans” who are trying to gerrymander more states. “It’s not going to net you enough seats to guarantee that you’re going to control the U.S. House next year,” he said. “So knock it off now.”

There was no signal from Republicans that they planned to abandon their efforts. Although Trump voiced disappointment in the election results, other party leaders dismissed them. “There’s no surprises. What happened last night was blue states and blue cities voted blue,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters outside the Capitol. “Off-year elections are not indicative of what’s to come.” (The speaker had a different interpretation of the off-year elections four years ago, when they went the GOP’s way: “RED WAVE is coming,” Johnson posted then.)

One GOP strategist, who was granted anonymity to candidly assess the party’s performance, told me that yesterday’s results were “a wake-up call.” But the strategist said Republicans remained “full-steam ahead” on their redistricting push in Florida.

Madrid said the elections should send each party a message on redistricting. Republicans should “pause and stop and contemplate. Say, ‘Wait a second. Maybe we made a mistake here.’” At the same time, Democrats should understand, he said, that they can win elections at the ballot box without sacrificing the moral high ground on gerrymandering. Madrid wasn’t optimistic, however: “There’s a lesson for both parties in this, and neither one of them will learn it.”

What If the Government Doesn’t Need to Be Shut Down?

2025-10-31T13:55:35-04:00

President Donald Trump’s theory of executive power does not lend much weight to the views of his predecessors—especially those who happen to be Democrats. But as the government shutdown enters its second month, Trump is showing an odd degree of respect for legal guidance first adopted under a president he has mocked: Jimmy Carter.

Government shutdowns are a relatively modern phenomenon. For most of America’s nearly 250-year history, a lapse in congressional appropriations forced federal agencies to limit their spending, but not to close entirely. That changed only under Carter. In 1980, his attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti, wrote a memo in which he argued that according to federal law, the government could not operate once funding bills expired. The era of shutdowns had begun, and from that point on, legislative impasses over spending have put hundreds of thousands of federal employees out of work and reduced government services for millions more.

The way the United States handles these spending gaps—deeming many workers essential while furloughing the rest—is unusual, Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers, told me. “It’s a very strange practice,” he said. “It’s not like shutdowns are a feature of governments everywhere.”

[Read: The missing president]

Not even Civiletti realized how significant his memo would become. “I couldn’t have ever imagined these shutdowns would last this long of a time and would be used as a political gambit,” he told The Washington Post in 2019, in the midst of what was then the longest shutdown in U.S. history. He said his opinion “has been used in ways that were not imagined at the time.” (Civiletti died in 2022.)

For the past 45 years, presidents in both parties have adhered to Civiletti’s interpretation of the Antideficiency Act, the 19th-century law that governs federal spending. But Trump could take a different view. His administration “could come up with a revised interpretation of the Antideficiency Act that’s totally reasonable,” Matthew Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University and a former congressional-appropriations aide, told me.

Indeed, it’s easy to see how Trump might warm to an idea that would free him to unilaterally end the shutdown without making concessions to Democrats. He has already allowed his budget director, Russell Vought, to enforce federal spending laws during a shutdown far more selectively than previous presidents, and he has ordered his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to take actions much more significant than revising the government’s interpretation of a statute that dates to 1870. “It would have been more difficult to picture past presidents heading in that direction than it would be to picture Trump,” Glassman said. “It would be in line with his thinking and something that he certainly would not have any qualm with.”

During funding gaps before 1980, the government advised federal agencies to “avoid hiring, grantmaking, nonemergency travel, and other nonessential obligations,” Civiletti wrote in his memo to Carter. The White House could return to that practice or, Wallach said, it could simply treat all federal employees the way “essential employees” are treated during a shutdown: They work without pay, under the expectation that they’ll be paid retroactively once Congress enacts a new spending bill.

A more dramatic step would be to keep the government operating as normal during a lapse of appropriations. Over the years, Republican members of Congress have introduced variations of a proposal known as the “End Government Shutdowns Act” that would keep agencies open continuously while directing them to reduce spending by 1 percent (or more, depending on the legislation). None of those bills have made it into law, however, and a unilateral move by Trump to put the government on autopilot would be much harder to defend as being consistent with the Antideficiency Act’s bar on incurring obligations not “authorized by law.” More broadly, Wallach argued, it would threaten Congress’s constitutional control over spending altogether.

“That sounds dangerously close to, Hey, let’s put Congress out of business,” he told me. “Frankly, we’re already hurtling in that direction.”

Democrats might have welcomed a new interpretation of the Antideficiency Act during the Clinton and Obama administrations, when congressional Republicans began taking routine funding extensions as legislative hostages, leading to multiple shutdowns. But now they would surely view such a move as one more power grab by a president who has delighted in Congress’s fading relevance. Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told me that allowing the administration to keep the government open during a funding gap would be akin to handing the White House a blank check. “When would you reevaluate budgets? Who would check the executive branch?” DeLauro asked. “What if Congress never weighed in?”

As my colleagues and I reported earlier this week, Trump has displayed no particular urgency to end the shutdown, even as it nears the record length of 35 days set during his first term. Yesterday, he called on Republicans to scrap the Senate filibuster, which would allow them to reopen the government without relying on Democratic votes. (GOP leaders have long opposed eliminating the filibuster, making such a move highly unlikely anytime soon.) When I asked the White House whether the administration might revisit the Carter-era shutdown guidance it was following, the spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not answer directly. “The Trump administration wants the Democrats to end their pathetic stunt, stop hurting the American people, and reopen the government,” she replied by email.

[David A. Graham: This is the shutdown that doesn’t end]

As for Civiletti, he might not have foreseen the impact his 1980 legal opinion would have on nearly half a century (and counting) of legislative brinkmanship; it took another 15 years for government shutdowns to become the political weapon they are today. But at least one of Civiletti’s surviving lieutenants says he was—and is—right about the law. “It was absolutely straightforward,” John Harmon, who directed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Carter administration and advised Civiletti on the memo, told me by phone this week. The Antideficiency Act “says you can’t spend money that’s not been appropriated by Congress,” he said. “It was clear on its face.”

The way to keep the government open when funding lapses isn’t to reinterpret an old law, Harmon argued, but to amend or repeal it. “Congress,” he said, “can fix this.” Don’t hold your breath, however, waiting on lawmakers to agree on a plan to prevent future shutdowns—they’re having enough trouble finding a way out of the one they’re in.

The Missing President

2025-10-29T07:00:00-04:00

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In the 29 days that the government has been closed, President Donald Trump has not traveled to Capitol Hill to jump-start negotiations, brought congressional leaders to the White House to broker a deal, or given a speech to the American public about the crisis.

He’s done a lot else in October: traveled out of the country twice; defended the demolition of the East Wing to make room for a giant ballroom; asked for (and, in several cases, received) prosecutions of his political enemies and granted clemency to allies; demanded a $230 million payment to himself from the Justice Department; and authorized numerous strikes on alleged drug boats. Trump has also posted AI-generated videos of himself dressed like a king, using a fighter jet to drop excrement on protesters, or, parodying Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” playing cowbell as his budget director (dressed as the Grim Reaper) seeks to traumatize the federal workforce.

But when it comes to the government shutdown, Trump barely seems to be paying attention. Some of this aloofness is by design, the president’s aides told us, describing a month-long strategy of putting the onus for reopening the government on Democrats. It’s a departure from how Trump handled a shutdown during his first term, when, over the course of 35 days, he employed tactics that are a lot more standard for a president: huddling with lawmakers, empathizing with furloughed workers, and addressing the American public. As the country approaches November 1, when money for food-assistance benefits will run out and many Americans will receive notices stating that their health-care premiums for next year will skyrocket, some Republicans have begun to push back against Trump’s absentee approach. They’re signaling publicly and in private that they want him to employ a The Art of the Deal–type strategy and help end the shutdown.

Trump is “the leader of the band,” Senator Jim Justice of West Virginia told reporters recently. “So at some point in time, the leader of the band is going to step up and guide us.” Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky also urged Trump to engage. “I suggest President Trump come forward and name three Republicans and three Democrats in the Senate to an official commission to figure this out,” he said on Fox News Sunday.

[David Frum: The shutdown is a knife at a gunfight]

Some of Trump’s closest advisers told us that the president has been distracted and busy dealing with other matters. The past four weeks have been among Trump’s most active on foreign policy: The president has brokered a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, inched the United States to the brink of war with Venezuela, financially supported Argentina, advanced a trade deal with China, slapped additional tariffs on Canada, and attempted diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine. On Sunday, Trump told reporters traveling with him in Asia that he would be open to extending his five-day trip in order to meet with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. As Trump has spent his time shaping—or, as is often the case, generating—headlines on these and other issues, the shutdown has receded from the front page, even as large swaths of the bureaucracy remain closed and hundreds of thousands of employees go without pay.

For much of the past month, Republicans felt that they were winning the shutdown debate and that the Democrats they blamed for the impasse would likely splinter. But Democrats have surprised them by remaining largely united on their demands to extend expiring health-care subsidies in exchange for reopening the government, even as the Republican strategy of keeping the House out of commission for weeks and repeatedly holding failed votes in the Senate has started to wear thin with some members.

A group of 13 House Republicans wrote a letter last week to Speaker Mike Johnson, saying that Congress should “immediately turn our focus to the growing crisis of healthcare affordability” once the government reopens. Several Republicans have also called for the House, which has not held a vote since September 19, to return to work.

As the impact of the shutdown threatens to spread deeper into the country, Trump could soon confront the reality that when a crisis hits, the public often turns to the president for leadership—or for blame. It would not be a new concept for Trump, who repeatedly singled out then-President Barack Obama during congressional stalemates over funding. “If there is a shutdown, I think it would be a tremendously negative mark on the president of the United States,” Trump said on NBC’s Today in 2011. “He’s the one that has to get people together.”

By 2018, Trump was still publicly opining on the president’s ability to make shutdown deals, but this time, he was weighing in from the West Wing. “I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal,” he tweeted on Christmas Eve. As the shutdown continued into the new year, Trump invited Democratic leaders to the White House; canceled a planned trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; and gave a prime-time speech to assure Americans that his administration was “doing everything in our power to help those impacted by the situation.” Even mundane events at the White House became opportunities for Trump to drive his shutdown messaging. When football players from Clemson University visited the White House to celebrate their 2018 national championship, Trump ordered McDonald’s. The White House said that Trump paid for the spread himself, because furloughed staff were not available to serve more upscale fare.

Such constraints have not been a factor during the current shutdown. On October 15, dozens of millionaires and billionaires gathered at the White House to sip wine and hear Trump’s vision for a grand ballroom. (Most of the attendees, among them executives from Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and other companies, were also paying for it.) They were served heirloom-tomato panzanella salad and beef Wellington on gold-trimmed plates, according to the Associated Press. By the president’s own admission, the 90,000-square-foot ballroom has taken up a large share of his focus lately. He’s been having multiple meetings a week about it, and as a demolition crew was reducing the East Wing to rubble, he pointed to a model of the White House that included the ballroom and declared, “I’ve shown this to everybody that would listen.”

Trump sees the project as another way to leave a permanent mark on the White House, his allies told us. He enjoys living in the building—far more than some of his predecessors, who thought that it felt like a museum. For Trump, it’s the ultimate status symbol, but the real-estate mogul believes that even the most famous address in the world has gotten a little dated. He has told associates that he wants more of the comforts of Mar-a-Lago at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—and moving back in after reelection, he wasted little time paving over the Rose Garden for a patio, adding gold trim to the Oval Office, and planting large flag poles on the lawn. The president has told confidants that he loves the idea of seeing Donald J. Trump Ballroom—written in gold letters—etched somewhere in the White House. (The president recently told reporters that he would not be naming the ballroom after himself, and, if you believe that, we’ve got a fully intact East Wing to sell you.)

Some in the West Wing have delighted at what they perceive to be exaggerated outrage from critics over the destruction of the East Wing. But Trump, Democrats argue, cares more about a ballroom with a $350 million (and rising) price tag than about keeping prices and health-care costs down for average Americans.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont highlighted the dichotomy last week, asserting that millions of Americans are on the verge of losing their health care amid a broader cost-of-living crisis.

“Meanwhile, Trump’s priorities are demolishing the White House, bailing out Argentina & now threatening war with Venezuela,” he wrote on X. “What happened to America First?”

This has become the go-to talking point for Democrats, who are openly seeking a political advantage amid their highest-profile battle in Trump’s second term. But Trump, who once boasted, “I alone can fix it,” has made himself vulnerable to such attacks by pushing the limits of his presidential powers and repeatedly steamrolling Congress. Democrats and Republicans have said that no legislation to reopen the government will pass without his blessing (Trump recently joked to allies, “I’m the speaker and the president,” The New York Times reported).

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York told reporters last week that he and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had contacted Trump to try to set up a meeting “anytime, any place.” Trump has shown no interest, instead asserting that he would be happy to meet with the Democrats after they vote to reopen the government.

[Russell Berman: How Democrats backed themselves into a shutdown]

Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate Republican and an occasional Trump critic, told us that he thought it would be “helpful” for the president to get involved, especially because his signature will be needed on any bill that ends the impasse. Unlike GOP leaders, Bacon wants Republicans to start discussing a deal on health care even while the government remains closed. “I’m for negotiating now,” Bacon told us.

But he and other Republicans believe that Democrats might fold without a health-care agreement. This week, the largest union representing federal workers, the American Federation of Government Employees, called for an end to the shutdown. The union is a longtime Democratic ally, raising pressure on the party’s Senate caucus to relent. “Hopefully, we’re close to a cracking point,” Bacon said, citing the AFGE’s announcement.

Although Trump’s strategy has precedent—Obama in 2013 similarly took a stance of no negotiations while the U.S. government was held “hostage over ideological demands”—the president has not made his views clear on the issue at the core of the shutdown fight. Obama asserted that Republican demands that he repeal or delay his signature health-care law were a nonstarter, whereas Trump has not said whether he supports extending health-care subsidies, which are key to any deal to reopen the government.

Instead, Trump has mainly listened to the hard-liners in his inner circle—including Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller—who have seen the shutdown as a chance to further slice government and target civil servants and perceived political enemies.

Trump has said the closure of the government is “an unprecedented opportunity” to reshape the federal bureaucracy, but his efforts to target “Democrat agencies” for permanent destruction have been stymied by the courts, political realities, and his own limited attention span. He is also struggling to shield his MAGA base from the consequences of the shutdown. Trump accepted $130 million from a wealthy donor to pay the troops after his gambit to repurpose existing funds ran into what he called a “shortfall.” (Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said that there probably will not be enough money to give troops their next paycheck, on November 15.) Publicly, White House officials remain confident in their strategy. The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told us that Democrats are “holding Americans hostage” and that Trump is “continuing to work night and day” even as the government is closed.

[Toluse Olorunnipa: Trump is trying—and failing—to shield MAGA from the shutdown]

“Whether it be ensuring troops were paid, forging historic peace deals, removing dangerous criminals from the streets, lowering prices, or securing more investments for America, President Trump will never stop delivering,” she said.

But many in the West Wing have taken notice of the growing number of polls showing that Americans are predominantly blaming the White House and Republicans for the shutdown. They come amid a backdrop of lengthy lines at food banks and airports. Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who worked in House leadership during the 2013 shutdown, told us that both Democrats and Republicans who are waiting for Trump to engage will have to be patient for a while longer.

“Nothing is going to happen before November 1,” he said. “And that’s when we’ll learn where the pressure points are.”

‘California Is Allowed to Hit Back’

2025-10-27T16:33:56-04:00

Updated on October 29 at 11:23 a.m. ET.

When I found Darshan Smaaladen earlier this month, she had joined several hundred of her neighbors at a “No Kings” demonstration in Orange County, California. Not that she was there to protest. “Rallies are great,” Smaaladen told me, “but they don’t get people out to vote.”

A year ago, Smaaladen had helped lead a successful campaign to recall two ultraconservative members of her local Orange County school board. Now the 52-year-old mother of three was using the “No Kings” protest as a campaigning ground for Proposition 50, the ballot measure orchestrated by Governor Gavin Newsom that would redraw California’s district map to add as many as five Democratic seats to the party’s column in Congress. The outcome of the November 4 referendum could determine whether Democrats have a real shot at winning back the House in next year’s midterm elections.

Advocates and opponents of Prop 50 have already spent more than $200 million on ads starring political luminaries such as Barack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the “yes” side and Arnold Schwarzenegger on the “no” side. In an era of permanent campaigning, this race has become the closest thing America has to a snap election: At Newsom’s urging, the California legislature placed the initiative on this fall’s ballot in August as a response to Republican gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere, directed by Donald Trump and his allies.

The campaign’s final weeks have turned into a statewide scramble to persuade California voters to temporarily override the independent redistricting commission that they approved less than two decades ago. The Democratic Party’s organizers have found plenty of voters who are eager for the chance to stand against the president and, in Newsom’s words, “fight fire with fire” in the gerrymandering wars. “When you talk to people, it’s not nuanced. Democrats react really well to an anti-Trump message,” Florice Hoffman, the chair of the Democratic Party in Orange County, told me.

[Read: How Democrats tied their own hands on redistricting]

But organizers have also encountered a worrisome amount of confusion and apathy among Democrats who are not yet sold on matching the GOP’s ruthlessness, Smaaladen told me. “Democrats are a group that loves transparency and equity,” she explained. “And so lining things up in a way that’s nonequitable is difficult. It takes a few steps to get people to understand that it’s not just about California. It’s about the nation.”

The Democrats’ simplest message is to make the election about Trump, who is leaning on Republican lawmakers to aggressively gerrymander as many states as they can in the hopes of pushing the House majority out of reach for Democrats. In addition to remapping Texas, the GOP has already redrawn the lines in Missouri and North Carolina, and it could target seats in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, and Florida in the coming months. Democrats will try to redraw the map in Virginia and might try to squeeze additional seats out of their strongholds in Maryland and Illinois, but they have fewer opportunities to gerrymander than Republicans do.

California is by far the Democratic Party’s best chance to cut into the GOP’s nationwide advantage. In addition to targeting five seats that Republicans currently hold, the Democrats’ proposal would shore up several of the party’s incumbents in competitive districts. GOP lawmakers in Texas were able to redraw the state’s map on their own. Yet in California, because a 2010 referendum took redistricting power away from state legislators, Democrats have to put their plan to a vote. Prop 50 would implement a newly gerrymandered map that would hold until the next decennial census, in 2030, when an independent commission would again draw the lines. “There is no Plan B,” Representative Pete Aguilar, the third-highest-ranking House Democrat, whose district includes the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, told me. “We have to win this.” I asked Aguilar if Democrats could still win the House majority next year if the measure fails. He said they could, but “it would be incredibly, incredibly hard.”

Republicans have tried to counter the Democrats’ anti-Trump campaign by framing the ballot initiative as a power grab by Newsom and the opening shot to his all-but-certain 2028 bid for the presidency. But to win in such a heavily Democratic state, a partisan appeal won’t be sufficient. “The challenge for the opposition,” says Dan Schnur, a longtime GOP strategist in California who is now an independent, is convincing voters “that their belief in democratic reform is as strong as their feelings about Trump.”

As I traveled around Orange County—the state’s most closely divided political battleground—I heard a version of the same argument from critics of Prop 50. “I believe they’re wrong in allowing Texas to do what they’re doing,” Mary Kay McElmeel, a retired real-estate agent, told me in Mission Viejo. But, she added, “if somebody does wrong, you don’t try to do a bigger wrong.”

When Smaaladen hears this line while speaking with voters, she turns the conversation toward parenting. “I’ve always told my children never to hit people. But if somebody were to bully your child on the playground and assault them, that child has a right to hit back,” she told me. “I believe that Texas assaulted democracy and that California is allowed to hit back.”

“So sometimes,” Smaaladen concluded, “two wrongs do make a right.”

Will O’Neill, the 42-year-old former mayor of Newport Beach, was standing in the middle of a quiet street on a chilly morning earlier this month, complaining about all the evils of gerrymandering. “We need voters to have the ability to push back on their representatives when they get too far out of line,” he told me. “And congressional gerrymandering for partisan purposes tends to lead to more extreme outcomes. It’s not good for communities.”

If the argument sounds familiar, it’s because Democrats spent the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency making it, as part of their failed effort to ban gerrymandering across the country. But O’Neill is no Democrat: He’s the chair of the Republican Party of Orange County. O’Neill had brought me to this unusual meeting spot in Mission Viejo because the congressional map that Democrats have proposed for California includes a district line drawn down the center of the suburban street we were standing on. If the measure passes, the houses on one side of the street would fall into a Democratic district that’s currently represented by Dave Min, and the houses on the other side would stay with GOP Representative Young Kim. Other lines, O’Neill told me, cut through backyards.

It’s not actually all that unusual for a congressional district to bisect a street; map makers in both parties are notorious for drawing lines that split communities of interest, stretch hundreds of miles in one direction or another, and generally look silly on paper. Courts have repeatedly struck down Republican-drawn maps on the grounds that they constitute illegal racial gerrymanders designed to dilute the electoral power of Black voters, who overwhelmingly cast Democratic ballots. To O’Neill, the crude partitioning of Mission Viejo is evidence of the Democrats’ haste and hypocrisy. “You can’t say that you’re keeping communities of interest together at the same time you’re drawing maps like that,” he said.

O’Neill isn’t necessarily wrong. Democrats readily concede that they are betraying principles of good governance in trying to gerrymander California. But in the face of Trump’s naked aggression, they no longer care. “I support and love an independent redistricting commission. I want one in all 50 states,” Aguilar told me. But, he said, “I’m tired of Democrats disarming and doing the right thing while 42 other states play by a different set of rules. It’s just ridiculous.”

To motivate their base, Republicans are trying to make a distinction between what Texas did to its map and what Newsom has proposed for California. In Texas, they argue, Republican lawmakers were acting to avoid a lawsuit by the Trump administration, which wrote a letter to Governor Greg Abbott accusing the state of using a congressional map that violated the Voting Rights Act. California is facing no such threat.

“California and Texas are completely different scenarios,” Mark Meuser, a lawyer who plans to challenge California’s new map in court should voters approve it, told me. Meuser was in Laguna Hills to speak at a luncheon of the Southern California Area Republican Women, where he made an impassioned case that although Texas Republicans had been merely trying to fix unconstitutional districts, California Democrats would be taking a perfectly legal congressional map and rendering it unconstitutional.

The argument was a hit with his audience, a group of staunch Republicans who ate their salads in a hotel ballroom decorated with cardboard cutouts of Trump. And Meuser hopes that if the case makes it to the Supreme Court, the conservative majority will agree with him. But politically, it’s quite a stretch. Meuser works for the law firm founded by Harmeet Dhillon, a California Republican who left to become the Trump administration’s assistant attorney general for civil rights. In that role, Dhillon wrote the July letter that launched this year’s nationwide gerrymandering battle, informing Abbott that the Justice Department believed several Texas districts constituted “illegal racial gerrymanders” under the Voting Rights Act.

Dhillon’s objection was both creative and, to the administration’s critics, deeply cynical, considering that the Trump administration is urging the Supreme Court to weaken the same voting protections it accused Texas of violating. In the months since, Republicans in Texas and Washington, D.C., have acknowledged that the Dhillon letter is little more than legal pretext for a political power play. “I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, and we are entitled to five more seats,” Trump said in August.

[Listen: If the Voting Rights Act falls]

The president’s candor doesn’t help his party’s cause in California. After Meuser’s speech, I asked him whether Trump’s statements—and similar admissions by other Republicans—make his task harder. “It shouldn’t, but probably to some degree it does. Judges are human beings,” Meuser replied. “The political narrative—I can’t just wash it away.”

Meuser’s frustration is a familiar feeling for Republicans in California, who could end up suffering for the national party’s redistricting offensive. No Republican has won a statewide election in nearly 20 years; the state GOP’s most influential federal official, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, was booted after just nine months in 2023. After next year’s midterms, if Prop 50 passes, Republicans might hold just four of California’s 52 House seats.

In Washington, Republicans now wield more power than they have in more than a century. But as their statewide clout continues to diminish, California Republicans can celebrate only so much. Kira Davis, a GOP podcaster and member of the club Meuser spoke to, compared the awkward dynamic to “waking up with your dad’s new family on Christmas morning.”

“All of his new kids are opening their PlayStation 5 and their remote-control cars,” Davis told me afterward, “and you’re in the corner opening the lump of coal in your stocking. That’s what it feels like to be a Republican in California.”

Long a bastion of Reagan Republicanism, the sprawling suburbs south of Los Angeles have shifted leftward during the 21st century. Orange County’s population is now close to evenly split among white, Latino, and Asian residents, and beginning in 2018, Democrats narrowly overtook Republicans in registration advantage. Since then, its congressional races have been some of the hardest-fought—and most expensive—in the country. “Orange County has become the quintessential purple county in America,” Jon Gould, the dean of UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology, told me. “All of the trends that we have seen in American politics over the last 30 years show up, and in some cases, show up first in Orange County.”

Although Kamala Harris narrowly carried the county last year, the margin was much lower than Biden’s edge over Trump in 2020. In a rare point of pride for local Republicans, their Senate candidate, the former Dodgers and Padres star Steve Garvey, won more votes than Adam Schiff in Orange County, even as Schiff won in a rout statewide.

Democrats know that they can pass Prop 50 without carrying Orange County. But a win there would guarantee victory statewide, and the county party sees the campaign as an unexpected opportunity to reconnect with voters who soured on Democrats and stayed home in last year’s election. “This is an organizer’s dream,” Jeffrey Cárdenas, the Orange County Democrats’ organizing director, told me. “It’s exactly what we needed.”

[Jonathan Lemire: Fear of losing the midterms is driving Trump’s decisions]

We were speaking at the party’s county headquarters in Anaheim, where on a Wednesday night a small group of volunteers was phone banking. A half-eaten pizza sat on the table, and the volunteers rang a bell every time they secured another commitment of support. Louise Larsen was making calls to Democrats in her GOP-leaning community of Westminster, trying to recruit volunteers to knock on doors. She told me that she understood the unease over the initiative but that she didn’t want “to give Trump one more crumb of leverage” in Washington. “We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do” to win back power, Larsen told me. “And then we can play fair.”

Cárdenas told me that the number of no-shows at canvassing events—what organizers call the “flake rate”—was much lower than in the past. “Our base is fired up,” he said. Still, he wasn’t quite ready to predict victory.

Polling has trended in the “yes” side’s direction lately: A CBS News survey released last week found that 62 percent of California respondents were planning to vote for Prop 50, up from a slim majority in polls earlier in October. Historically, undecided voters tend to break against contentious ballot measures in California. Yet Prop 50 is different from most other referenda because its support is so tied to party lines. Californians also have to want to vote for the measure—it’s the only thing on the ballot this year.

Last week, the Department of Justice announced that it will monitor polling sites in five California locations, including Orange County, next month. Republicans have also been growing more pessimistic as the election nears. “Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop vote is!” Trump fumed on Truth Social over the weekend.

On the day I met Darshan Smaaladen, she had deployed canvassers to knock on doors on the streets surrounding the “No Kings” rally; their list included the houses of Republicans and independents. As we walked, the volunteers told me they had generally been encouraged by the support they’d found for Prop 50. But the compressed nature of the campaign was evident in the confusion they encountered among some voters—especially those who have not closely followed the news. One canvasser said she had swayed some Democrats who wrongly assumed the party wanted them to vote “no.” Faye Carroll, a retiree in her 80s, told the volunteers that she would definitely be voting but needed to read more about the issue. When I asked her what she thought about the Republican gerrymandering in Texas that had spawned the ballot initiative, Carroll replied, “I didn’t know about that.”

One of the canvassers, a 51-year-old history teacher named Heather Chapman, said the group has also met Democrats who don’t particularly like the referendum and the brass-knuckle politics it represents. These are the voters who could ultimately decide its fate and, with their choice, tip the balance of power in Congress. “They’re like, ‘In normal times, I would so not be for this. This is not how it’s supposed to work,’” Chapman told me. To that she simply replies: “Yeah, there is nothing about this that’s normal.”

Why Democrats Think They’re Winning the Shutdown Fight

2025-10-10T18:20:43-04:00

With the government shutdown well into its second week, President Donald Trump’s strategy to break Senate Democrats has become clear: Maximize the pain of the closure to force them into retreat. His administration is firing civil servants en masse, threatening to withhold back pay from furloughed federal employees, and canceling billions of dollars in funding for states that voted for his opponent last year.

Yet with only a couple of exceptions, the party’s senators are holding firm—to the unexpected delight of House Democrats worried that their counterparts across the Capitol, whose votes are needed to reopen the government, might cave in the face of Trump’s heavy-handed pressure campaign. “I’m surprised, but I’m happy,” Representative Eric Swalwell told us. Like many of his House colleagues, the California Democrat had been bitterly frustrated when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer surrendered the last spending fight in March, making the current shutdown nearly a forgone conclusion.

Far from folding, Senate Democrats appear to be unusually united and even more emboldened with each passing day the government remains closed. They haven’t budged from their insistence that, before they will vote to end the shutdown, Republicans first must agree to extend health-insurance subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year. “We know what we are fighting for. Folding is not an option right now,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington State, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, told us.

[Read: How are we still fighting about Obamacare? ]

Instead, it is Republicans who are showing signs of strain, questioning their leaders’ tactics and, in one high-profile defection, calling on them to essentially meet the Democrats’ demands. At the White House, Trump muddied the party’s message during the shutdown’s first days when he told reporters that he wanted to make a deal on health care and was “talking to Democrats about it.”

The comments were news to congressional leaders in both parties, given that Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune had each declared that no negotiations over health care would take place before Democrats agreed to reopen the government. Republicans were also startled by a memo from Trump’s budget office suggesting that furloughed workers might not receive back pay, since it conflicted with a federal law that Trump himself had signed during his first term and which both Johnson and Thune voted for. “We’re a little less on the same page than we should be,” a White House official told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment of the GOP’s approach.

Trump has allowed his budget director, Russell Vought, to serve as the administration’s “bad cop.” In the days leading up to the shutdown, Vought had issued a warning that a lapse in funding would prompt the administration not merely to furlough federal workers deemed nonessential—as is standard in a shutdown—but to lay many of them off entirely. Soon after the shutdown began, Vought announced that funding for key infrastructure projects in New York—home to both Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—would be canceled (to ensure contracts are not based on “unconstitutional DEI principles”), as would energy projects (“Green New Scam funding”) in a litany of states that all happened to vote Democratic last year.

[Read: The meme shutdown]

The administration initially made no moves to fire federal employees en masse, leading Democrats to believe they had effectively called the president’s bluff. (Some Republicans had also pushed back on the idea.) But this afternoon, after the Senate broke for the long weekend without reopening the government, Vought said the layoffs were starting. They “have begun and are substantial,” an official with the Office of Management and Budget told us, without offering details on exactly which agencies or how many people would be affected.

For Democrats, the administration’s escalation had already been baked in. “They want everybody to be afraid,” Murray told us. “Oh my gosh, he’s going to do this. Oh my gosh, he did that. Oh my gosh, he threatened that. But when you deny somebody that fear, you diminish their power. And that is what we think is absolutely critical.” The risk that Trump would use the shutdown to initiate widespread layoffs also carried less weight with Democrats because he had already cut the government deeply without congressional approval. “The threats would have been more powerful if he weren’t doing all of those things already,” Senator Adam Schiff of California told us before Vought’s announcement.

Although Democrats remain united at the moment, the party’s caucuses in the House and Senate could diverge. Jeffries has said Democrats in the House want to see a permanent extension of the health-care subsidies. Senate Democrats, however, might agree to a compromise short of that to end the shutdown, perhaps even one that relies on separate negotiations over health care. “I want show, not tell,” Swalwell told us, saying he wants a renewal to be written into legislation reopening the government.

An agreement that wins the support of most Senate Republicans would need only a handful of additional Democratic votes to defeat a filibuster. Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who is seen as a potential swing vote because she opposed a government shutdown in March, has been one of the few Democrats who has held informal talks with Republicans over the past week about a possible deal involving insurance relief. In an interview, she blamed both parties for a lack of real negotiations. “There are lots of ways to skin this cat,” Shaheen told us, “but you’re not going to do it unless you get people to sit down at the table and actually negotiate. And that’s not happening.”

Democrats have clearly succeeded, at minimum, in elevating the issue of health care. They have won an unlikely supporter in the ultra-MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has called on GOP leaders to extend federal insurance aid, in part because her family is one of millions across the country who would face a steep spike in costs if Congress fails to act. Republicans in swing House districts have also pushed to renew the subsidies, fearing an electoral backlash in next year’s midterm elections. And Trump, too, is now paying attention. The president has begun watching the polls, the White House official and an outside ally told us. And he is slowly growing leery of the impact of rising health-care costs, knowing that Republicans tend to be on the losing side of the issue.

In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the chamber out of session entirely, ostensibly as a means of continuing the pressure on Senate Democrats to approve a temporary funding bill House Republicans passed that could reopen the government. But as the shutdown has dragged on, some of his members have grown antsy. “The House needs to return to session,” GOP Representative Kevin Kiley of California posted on X. “It’s absurd to be cancelling weeks of legislative business when the government is shut down and Congress hasn’t enacted a budget in 19 months.”

If the two parties agree on anything, it’s that Trump—and perhaps Trump alone—can break the stalemate by instructing GOP leaders to cut a deal. He remains stung by coming out on the losing end of the lengthy shutdown in his first term. And aides wonder whether he’ll shift positions once he fully focuses on the shutdown; of late, he’s instead been fixated on a cease-fire deal in Gaza and National Guard deployments in American cities. Thune and Johnson have not moved off their positions, but both have deferred to the president’s wishes throughout the nine months of his second term. “They are afraid of him more than the policy they are fighting,” Murray said.

The political dynamic could easily shift. The fallout from Trump’s layoffs remains to be seen, and as our colleague Toluse Olorunnipa reported, other real-world effects of the shutdown will only escalate in the days ahead, ramping up pressure on both sides. But for now it is Democrats who are exuding confidence—in some cases to the point of bravado. “Every day gets better for us,” Schumer told Punchbowl News. Republicans said the boast displayed insensitivity to the many Americans negatively affected by the shutdown, and the Democrats we spoke with notably declined to echo Schumer’s sentiment. “There’s no glee in the government being shut down,” Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the House’s third-ranking Democrat, told us. “This isn’t about winning and losing.”

Gleeful or not, the impasse doesn’t appear close to a resolution. A party that averted a fight months ago is relishing its newfound resolve. When we asked Murray about the possibility that her Senate colleagues would tire of the standoff and reopen the government without a health-care deal, she replied instantly: “I absolutely do not see that happening.”

Illustration Sources: Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Annabelle Gordon / Bloomberg / Getty

How Democrats Backed Themselves Into a Shutdown

2025-10-01T06:55:20-04:00

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The government shutdown that began at 12:01 a.m. is the sixth such closure in the past three decades. It was easily the most foreseeable.

That congressional Democrats would force this confrontation became clear almost from the moment they ducked a clash over spending with Republicans in March. Back then, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer convinced just enough of his members that a government shutdown would empower President Donald Trump to govern even more heedlessly and punitively than he already was. The blowback was intense. Rank-and-file Democrats—and even some party leaders—accused Schumer of surrendering one of the party’s only remaining levers in Washington without a fight.

The springtime uproar ensured that Democrats would take a tougher stand this time, and now government offices across the country will close and federal employees will stay home without pay. Many could lose their jobs if the Trump administration carries out its threat to use a shutdown to supercharge its slashing of the workforce. But the political outcome for Democrats might be just as disappointing.

They have no more power to extract concessions from Trump than they did six months ago. Democrats find themselves in the same unenviable position that Republicans were in during the Obama years, when they routinely took the government’s funding (and, at times, its credit rating) hostage to pick fights that party leaders knew they could not win. The GOP provoked a shutdown in 2013 to deny funding to the Affordable Care Act; a dozen years later, Democrats have forced a shutdown to ensure that it continues. Schumer and his House counterpart, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are demanding that Republicans agree to extend enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of the year; without congressional action, insurance rates would rise for millions of people.

[Read: Trump’s grand plan for a government shutdown]

As an issue, focusing the spending debate on health care makes political sense for Democrats. This is favorable terrain for them, and they are trying to prevent a painful spike in costs for consumers across the country. “The fact of the matter is that if we don’t address this, people are going to lose their health insurance,” Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told me.

Some congressional Republicans also want to extend the subsidies, both to protect their constituents and because they fear the electoral blowback of a rate increase during next year’s midterms. But GOP leaders correctly point out that the deadline for the health-care funding is not for another three months; the stopgap spending bill they’ve proposed runs for just seven weeks and is designed to buy time for the parties to broker a broader budget deal that could include the ACA subsidies.

Democrats want to force Republicans into negotiating a health-care agreement now. (They also want the GOP to roll back the Medicaid cuts that it enacted in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” this summer, but those demands are considered even less likely to bring results.) “If the Republicans think that we will fold for any [spending bill], then Democrats will have no leverage in trying to push for any of our priorities in government funding,” a senior Senate aide told me, describing the party’s thinking on the condition of anonymity.

A final effort to avoid a shutdown yielded no breakthroughs and seemed to be largely for show. Trump convened the bipartisan congressional leadership at the White House on Monday, and afterward both parties retreated to their talking points. Democrats implored Republicans to address a health-care “crisis,” and Republicans, who themselves had voted repeatedly for government shutdowns, denounced Democrats for doing the same. A few hours later, Trump posted on Truth Social a vulgar AI-generated video depicting Jeffries, who is Black, wearing a mustache and sombrero, with fabricated audio of Schumer speaking.

[Read: How to end government shutdowns, forever]

Congressional Democrats are—for now—mostly unified. Just one of the party’s members in the House, Representative Jared Golden of Maine, broke ranks to vote for a continuing resolution that would have averted a shutdown. In a shift from earlier in the year, lawmakers say they’re done basing their decisions on the fear of how they might embolden or empower the president. “I don’t buy the argument that if the government shuts down, that allows Trump to be a dictator. I just don’t buy that,” Pallone told me.

Yet few in the Democratic Party are making confident predictions of success. For some, the decision to make a stand over health care is not so much a smart strategy as it is the only one available. When I asked Jim Manley, a former aide to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and a veteran of shutdown fights, to assess the Democrats’ chances, he asked if he could be quoted shrugging. “It is what it is,” he said rather glumly. “Sometimes you’ve got to play the card you’re dealt.”

How long a shutdown might last is unclear. The government closed twice during Trump’s first term. A shutdown instigated by the president over border-wall funding dragged on for 35 days; the one that Democrats provoked lasted just three. In the final days before this week’s deadline, Schumer reportedly floated a compromise that would have kept the government open for another week or 10 days—rather than the seven weeks proposed by Republicans—to allow for talks about health care.

Both Republicans and progressive Democrats quickly panned the idea, but it suggested that, once again, Schumer might not be as dug in as others in his party are. In the Senate, some Democrats seem willing to claim victory as long as Republicans agree to negotiate an extension of the ACA subsidies, but Jeffries and House Democrats are demanding that a renewal be written into legislation before they vote to reopen the government. In an indication of the lingering differences among the party’s caucuses, Democratic Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada, along with Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, sided with Republicans in a failed vote to keep the government open hours before the shutdown began last night. Of the three, only Fetterman had defected in an earlier vote on the same measure, and Republicans would need to pick up just five more votes to reach the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster and reopen the government.

Democrats face an inherent disadvantage in shutdown fights, Manley said. “We have a real problem here because Democrats believe in governing, and Republicans do not,” he said. Still, Manley urged party leaders not to be intimidated by Trump: “Every Democrat, including the squishes, needs to understand that this president is unpopular, becoming more unpopular by the day, and is pushing wildly unpopular proposals. This is not some 800-pound gorilla.”

In letting the government close and risking an even more aggressive assault by Trump on the federal workforce, Democrats have shown they’re ready for a fight they avoided in the spring. What’s less apparent, however, is whether they’ve started one they can win.

Trump’s Grand Plan for a Government Shutdown

2025-09-30T07:54:19-04:00

During the first eight months of his second presidency, Donald Trump has tried to hollow out the federal workforce by any means possible, including paying more than 200,000 people not to work, disassembling entire agencies via the Department of Government Efficiency, and fighting in court any effort by employees to hang on to their job. This week, Trump could try his most audacious move yet: using a government shutdown to conduct mass firings.

The congressional impasse over spending may now supercharge Trump’s efforts to slash the civil service—just as the bulk of those being paid not to work lose their job when the fiscal year ends. Should the government shut down tomorrow, it could lead to the dramatic winnowing of its size that conservatives have sought for decades. The complexities of collective-bargaining agreements and civil-service protections, not to mention the real-life impact of eliminating people who provide benefits to the public, have stalled past efforts to shrink the government. Trump has shown no inclination to slow down.

Voluntary-resignation programs were broadly available to most federal workers earlier this year. Now Trump is using the threat of permanent job cuts to specifically target jobs that don’t align with his priorities, aides told us. The president, who in recent weeks has been firing federal prosecutors who don’t bend to his will, has become bolder in his push to reshape the government to suit his preferences. And he’s empowered Russell Vought, the White House budget director who has long been an evangelist of slashing the government, to cut away.

Vought will do “what DOGE couldn’t do,” one senior White House official granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy told us. “He’s wanted to hurt the bureaucracy; he’s wanted to shrink the bureaucracy. This might be his chance.”

Trump’s efforts to cut the workforce have not always gone as expected. Even before the threat of a shutdown, the administration had started spending billions of dollars to pay some employees to not work—an experiment so bizarre and unprecedented that many of the federal workers who received the offer initially thought it was a hoax. The administration’s gambit to entice government workers to leave their job and take an extended paid vacation—with the strong implication that those who declined could later be fired—led to a wave of attrition larger than many officials expected. Some agencies, including the IRS and the Department of Labor, have recently tried to recruit departed employees to return to their old job at the end of their months-long leave, noting that core bureaucratic functions are collapsing after the mass exodus of top talent.

About 275,000 federal workers—more than a tenth of the workforce—will have voluntarily left the civil service by the end of December, a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management told us in an email. The official, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to disclose internal data, described the departures as “the largest and most effective workforce-reduction plan in history.” The official did not provide details on how much the government is paying people not to work.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, told us that he spent months trying to quantify the total amount taxpayers have shelled out for what he called the “waste, chaos, confusion, and recklessness” of the downsizing effort. He and other Democrats on a Senate investigative subcommittee scoured public data, coming up with a rough estimate of $21 billion. That includes about $15 billion for employees who participated in what is known as the “Deferred Resignation Program” buyouts and more than $6 billion for payments to employees involuntarily placed on paid administrative leave for months.

“What we have documented is simply the out-of-pocket costs, the immediate numerically verifiable costs from the public record,” Blumenthal told us. But that, he said, is only part of the toll: It doesn’t account for ways the cuts have made the government less efficient, with longer wait times and bureaucratic hiccups at agencies including the Department of Veterans Affairs and the IRS. “The impact is wide-ranging and pervasive, and it can’t be measured just in dollar terms immediately,” he said.

Although taxpayers have footed a steep bill for paying workers not to work, Trump-administration officials believe that the project will ultimately save far more than it costs. The OPM official estimated the long-term savings from the shrunken federal payroll, which will kick in once the deferred resignations become official tomorrow, to be $28 billion annually. In a letter responding to Blumenthal’s report and trying to prove “that we haven’t all lost our minds,” OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote last month that his critics did not understand “the simple difference between one-time severance costs and ongoing annual cost savings.”

Perhaps more important in the minds of some Trump-administration officials, the wave of voluntary departures has acclimated the public to the idea of dramatically downsizing the civil service. Trump gave the billionaire Elon Musk broad latitude shortly after taking office, allowing DOGE to fire thousands of probationary employees and gut USAID. There were about 2.4 million civilian federal workers at the beginning of the year. By the end of December, that number is expected to be closer to 2.1 million, Kupor has said. That estimate does not take into account any additional reductions from mass layoffs that the administration has threatened will occur if federal funding lapses this week.

In a memo last week, Vought, the OMB director, instructed federal agencies to prepare for significant “reduction-in-force” notices, or RIFs, to eliminate employees and projects that are not in line with Trump’s priorities. Some in the president’s orbit are encouraging him to take a hard-line stance. White House aides and allies believe that they will have the advantage as Washington careens toward tomorrow’s deadline. Some believe that a shutdown would give Trump fresh authority to fire civil servants en masse, including those who have been on paid administrative leave for months due to court rulings that prevented their termination.

[McKay Coppins: The visionary of Trump 2.0]

For some of the workers who accepted offers earlier this year to resign and continue receiving full pay and benefits through tomorrow, the threat of potentially being fired from their job during a mass reduction was a major factor in their decision, according to several we spoke with.

“I read Project 2025 from front to back far more times than I would like to admit to anybody,” said one former nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs, who, like others, spoke to us anonymously to avoid retaliation from the White House. “I tried to find slivers of silver linings; I tried to find them. And I didn’t. I did not think that this was going to be a regular 12-round fight. I saw this as a massacre.”

The nurse, who had worked at the VA for more than three decades, opted to retire early this spring and continue receiving pay through the end of the fiscal year.

If the goal of Vought’s memo was to scare Democrats into retreat, it failed. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer incited a mini revolt within his party by surrendering a springtime fight over spending, arguing at the time that a shutdown would be more damaging than agreeing to a GOP spending deal, because the administration would have the authority to decide the fate of programs and personnel.

But Schumer’s thinking has changed, prompted both by the realization that grassroots Democrats want their party to put up a tougher fight against Trump and by the president’s continued drive to usurp Congress’s authority over spending. In the intervening months, Trump employed a maneuver to cancel congressionally approved spending and received the Supreme Court’s blessing to reshape the federal bureaucracy by executive order. “The world’s a different place right now,” Schumer told reporters earlier this month.

For federal workers, Vought’s threat could transform the stakes of a shutdown from a forced paid vacation—Congress has always approved retroactive pay for furloughed employees—to a life-altering event. But as a negotiating tactic, the memo landed much differently among its intended audience. “Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare,” Schumer said in response. “This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government.”

Democrats believe that they are better prepared now for a spending showdown than they were in March. The party is largely unified around its demand that the GOP extend health-insurance subsidies in the Affordable Care Act; if they expire at the end of the year, prices will shoot up for millions of people.

But for the moment, Republicans have a simpler argument: They have proposed a mostly straightforward extension of federal spending for seven weeks to buy time for broader budget negotiations. The GOP is divided over the subsidies, but even if they are not addressed in this bill, lawmakers will still have time to act before they expire at the end of the year, Republicans in Congress have argued.

Trump has been more on message this time than he was during the previous government shutdown he presided over, in December 2018 and January 2019. At the time, he publicly accepted blame for an impending shutdown—“I’ll be the one to shut it down,” he told a grinning Schumer in the Oval Office as cameras rolled. The president later caved after 35 days of partial government closure. Furloughed workers received five weeks worth of back pay, the last time such a large number of employees were paid to sit at home.

On Friday, Trump pointed the finger at Democratic leaders. “These people are crazy, the Democrats,” he said. “So if it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down, but they’re the ones that are shutting down.”

Trump has also been trying to reframe the debate over the spending legislation by falling back on two issues that helped him triumph in last year’s election: immigration and transgender rights. He has sought to recast Democrats’ demand for more health-care spending as a ploy to give taxpayer-funded benefits to undocumented immigrants and has accused the party of supporting “transgender for everybody.”

Federal workers have become almost an afterthought and ultimately could become collateral damage in a lopsided partisan standoff, says Abby André, the executive director of the Impact Project, which has been tracking the fates of federal workers during Trump’s second term.

“Games of chicken are really common in the lead-up to shutdowns,” she told me. “But this administration has demonstrated a willingness to follow through on threats that previous administrations would have thought ill-advised for any number of reasons—chief among them having a functioning federal government.”

The lesson many Trump-administration officials have taken from eight months of paying federal workers to stay at home is that many functions of the government can be eliminated without massive public backlash. Most of Voice of America’s programming, for example, was shut down after Trump signed an executive order in March calling for the U.S. Agency for Global Media to be eliminated.

Patsy Widakuswara, the White House bureau chief for VOA, is among hundreds of journalists who have been on paid administrative leave since then. She is leading a lawsuit to get her job back and force VOA to restart operations in much of the world. But many of the broadcaster’s workers, who now face imminent risk of being terminated, are “paralyzed by fear” that Trump could close an agency that has been in place since World War II, she told us. Collecting her salary as a GS-14 employee—which amounts to $142,000 to $185,000 a year—while not being allowed to cover the Trump administration’s actions has been demoralizing, she said.

“I feel terrible as a VOA journalist, and I also feel horrified as an American taxpayer, because this is all waste,” she said. “The intention is not to improve anything. The intention is to just dismantle.”

The Blue State That’s Now a Bellwether

2025-09-29T08:00:00-04:00

Mikie Sherrill is not prone to hyperbole. The Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey is measured and mainstream—even “milquetoast,” in the words of one progressive activist. But when I asked Sherrill what message a victory for her this November would send nationally, she made a rather bold declaration.

“As New Jersey goes, so goes the nation,” she told me. This is a stretch. But maybe not by all that much.

New Jersey is no one’s idea of a swing state; it hasn’t voted Republican for president in nearly four decades, and it last elected a GOP senator during the Nixon administration. But the Garden State has been moving rightward these past few years—Donald Trump came within six points of winning its electoral votes last year—and the governor’s office has historically toggled between the parties.

This fall’s election holds outsize importance for Democrats, who want both to keep a Trump ally out of a key state office and to give their base some hope heading into the 2026 midterm elections. A win, Sherrill said, would represent the party’s “shot across the bow” against Trump’s second term. The off-year governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia are closely scrutinized for signs of voter backlash to whichever party controls Washington. Usually Virginia, until recently a presidential battleground, provides the best clues about the national mood. This year, however, operatives in both parties believe that New Jersey might be the closer race and the more accurate barometer of how voters are reacting to Trump’s return tour in the White House.

In a shift from previous elections, national Democrats have spent far more money trying to hold the governorship of New Jersey than they have in the Virginia governor’s race. They’ve placed their hopes in Sherrill, a 53-year-old former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor, who in 2018 captured a House seat long held by Republicans. In June, she won a crowded party primary by defeating candidates to her left and to her right. Sherrill is now facing the former Republican state legislator Jack Ciattarelli, a self-proclaimed “Jersey guy” running a loose and energetic campaign built around lowering property taxes, combatting crime, and making a crowd-pleasing appeal to bring plastic bags back to grocery stores. He has run for governor twice before and came within three points of upsetting the heavily favored Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy’s reelection bid in 2021. Although Sherrill has leaned on her military service, Ciattarelli has mocked her as a predictable and occasionally ham-fisted Democrat; one of his most frequently aired ads shows her fumbling the answer to a seemingly straightforward question about what her first piece of legislation would be.

[Marc Novicoff: Democrats don’t seem willing to follow their own advice]

Sherrill and I spoke shortly after she addressed some 200 mostly nonwhite supporters at a restaurant in Newark, in an area where she wants to run up Democratic margins that have shrunk in recent elections as some Black and Hispanic voters either stayed home or voted Republican. The crowd was filled with local party officials and volunteers who were about to spend the afternoon knocking on doors for Sherrill and the rest of the Democratic ticket. Nearly everyone I spoke with, however, said they had friends or neighbors who cast their ballot for Trump last year. “Some minorities believe they were taken for granted” by Democrats, Carlos Gonzalez, an at-large member of Newark’s city council, told me. Trump won their votes by promising to lower their cost of living, he said, but the president hasn’t delivered. “I am certain that they are going to come back to the Democratic Party because they feel that they were cheated,” Gonzalez said.

Sherrill was one of the only speakers who did not switch between English and Spanish, but in either language, the themes were the same: affordability and Trump. “We have an out-of-control president who’s attacking the people we care about, and he’s attacking the economy of our state,” Sherrill said, presenting herself as a bulwark against threats to New Jersey from the Trump administration.

She painted Ciattarelli, who secured the president’s endorsement in the GOP primary, as a Trump lackey. Her local surrogates made the same connection in more colorful terms. “He is going to support the agenda of the orange man, and we don’t want the orange man to control the politics of New Jersey,” Gonzalez told them, and the audience cheered.

Ciattarelli’s actual history with Trump is more complicated than Democrats like to let on. A decade ago, while supporting then-Governor Chris Christie’s presidential bid, Ciattarelli called Trump a “charlatan” who was “not fit to be president of the United States.” He did not seek Trump’s endorsement during either of his first two runs for governor—a snub the president remembered when Ciattarelli finally sought Trump’s support earlier this year to fend off a more MAGA-friendly GOP competitor.

On the stump, Ciattarelli is neither obsequious nor critical toward the president. Instead, he plays Sherrill’s frequent criticism of Trump for laughs. He tells audiences that if they took a drink every time the Democrat blamed something on the president, they’d be “drunk off their ass.” At a packed bar in Fair Lawn, a Democratic-leaning suburb about 20 miles northwest of New York City, Ciattarelli joked: “On your way home tonight, if you get a flat tire, she’s going to blame President Trump.”

The line went over well with a crowd that, judging by its large number of MAGA hats and Trump shirts, would have been fine with more effusive praise of the president. Several people cited Ciattarelli’s better-than-expected showing in 2021 and Trump’s relatively narrow loss in the state last year as reasons for optimism, as they did with the strong turnout for a Monday-evening campaign rally. Well over 100 people stood shoulder to shoulder to hear Ciattarelli deliver a brief speech. “This is the best chance we’re going to have to turn New Jersey red,” Mike Messina, a 60-year-old retired police officer, told me.

Ciattarelli is a 63-year-old accountant with a deep tan that makes him look like he’s just come from the golf course or the beach. He’s had more freedom to barnstorm the state than Sherrill, whose day job as a House Democrat in the closely divided Congress has occasionally kept her off the campaign trail. Some of Ciattarelli’s biggest applause lines—keeping wind farms “off our Jersey Shore” and bringing plastic bags back to the grocery store—sit at the very edge of the culture wars. “I could say I’m going to lower taxes, and I get a nice round of applause,” he observed in Fair Lawn. “I say I’m bringing back the plastic bags, and it brings down the house.”

On the topic of Trump, he’s a bit more careful, and conventional. When I asked him after the event whether he’d like the president to campaign for him, Ciattarelli replied: “I appreciate the president’s willingness to do whatever we think he can do to help us win this election, but at the end of the day, the candidate has to win the election.” He predicted that the Democrats would bring in the party’s biggest stars, including former President Barack Obama, to help Sherrill in the campaign’s closing weeks. “I’m going to bring in Jack Ciattarelli.”

Trump, himself a New Jersey property owner with a golf club in Bedminster, is keeping a close watch. A Quinnipiac University poll in mid-September showed Sherrill leading Ciattarelli by nine points. But when an Emerson College survey had the race tied last week, Trump seized on the finding to tout Ciattarelli and attack Sherrill.

Later that same day, the Sherrill campaign accused Trump’s administration of aiding Ciattarelli in a far more nefarious way: by releasing Sherrill’s full military records to an ally of the Republican in order to plant a negative story about her. CBS News discovered the breach while investigating claims pushed by Republicans that Sherrill was barred from walking in her 1994 Naval Academy commencement because she had been implicated in a cheating scandal that involved more than 130 students. (Sherrill has said that she was punished for not reporting on her classmates.) A branch of the National Archives acknowledged that a “technician” released too many of her records, including documents that contained her Social Security number and other sensitive information. Sherrill’s campaign claimed that the disclosure violated federal law. “This is an illegal and dangerous weaponization of the federal government,” Sherrill wrote on X.

Republicans and Democrats can each draw hope from history. The New Jersey governor’s race typically swings away from whichever party won the presidency in the year before—a trend that would favor Sherrill. (Christie won the governorship during Obama’s first year in the White House, and Murphy grabbed it back for Democrats after Trump’s victory in 2016.) Ciattarelli is banking on voters’ tendency to get tired of the Democrats holding power in Trenton, the state capital: For more than half a century, neither party has won three governor’s races in a row.

Sherrill and Ciattarelli both see an electorate that’s frustrated with the status quo and rising prices—particularly a spike in electricity bills. Sherrill has vowed to declare a state of emergency to freeze utility rates on her first day in office if she wins. Ciattarelli is trying to localize the race, calling Sherrill “Murphy 2.0” and, though she has never served in state government, accusing her of backing policies that have contributed to high energy costs and property taxes.

“It’s a smart strategy,” Mike DuHaime, a New Jersey–based former top aide to Christie, told me. The challenge for Ciattarelli, and a reason both parties believe that Sherrill retains a small edge, is that Republicans have struggled over the past decade to win elections when Trump isn’t on the ballot. (The dynamic was the same for Democrats when Obama was in the White House.) Democrats cleaned up in lower-turnout elections during Trump’s first term, and they have done the same so far this year. “Can somebody who’s not Donald Trump turn out Donald Trump’s voters?” DuHaime asked. “It didn’t happen in 2017 or 2018. Is there something different in 2025? That’s what this election is a test of.”

The outcome in November could also help determine whether Democrats desperate for a path back to federal power gravitate toward candidates such as Sherrill and her House colleague Abigail Spanberger, the party’s nominee in Virginia. Both women have a background in national security—Spanberger was a CIA agent—and moderate voting records. They’re both waging campaigns devoted to kitchen-table economic issues such as affordability. (Another amusing biographical twist: Sherrill grew up in Virginia, and Spanberger was born in New Jersey.) Victories this fall could put one or both women in the conversation for a spot on the Democrats’ national ticket in 2028.

Polls have given Spanberger a wider edge in Virginia than Sherrill in New Jersey, a dynamic that political strategists attribute to a weaker GOP opponent, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, and the disproportionate impact that the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce have had on the state. Democratic leaders in New Jersey, however, are confident about Sherrill’s chances. Senator Cory Booker, who is up for reelection next year, told me that the Trump administration’s cuts to health-care programs and its aggressive deportation raids have turned the Latino community against him—a shift that polling has also captured. The president’s low approval, Booker argued, would drag Ciattarelli down. “It is stunning to me that he’s not trying to distance himself from somebody who’s wildly unpopular in New Jersey,” Booker said.

[Read: Fear of losing the midterms is driving Trump’s decisions]

Sherrill made clear that she was aware that, as much as voters might disapprove of Trump right now, they’re not falling back in love with Democrats, either. “What I’m largely hearing from people is that they’re disappointed with both parties. They’re sort of in a nonpartisan place,” Sherrill told me. “They felt unheard by the Democratic Party, and now they feel swindled by the Republican Party.”

Sherrill had not served in elected office before winning her House seat in the Democrats’ 2018 wave. Her military and law-enforcement background helps her appeal to voters who pay little attention to politics, Senator Andy Kim told me. “She’s not somebody that looks and sounds like somebody who came up through politics their entire life,” he said. Kim, who served alongside Sherrill in the House before winning a Senate seat last year, told me that the two bonded over their shared experiences as parents of young children—Sherrill has four kids—in Congress. After Sherrill won the primary for governor in June, they talked at length about the state and pored over data gleaned from his 2024 campaign. “She’s a general-election juggernaut,” Kim said.

Not all Democrats find Sherrill that impressive or exciting, Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and a former spokesperson for New Jersey’s Democratic Party, is the one who called Sherrill “milquetoast,” and he endorsed two of her opponents during the primary. He’s warning Democrats not to see her as a model for 2026 and beyond, urging the party instead to embrace candidates willing to campaign more boldly and aggressively against corporate greed. “Mikie Sherrill will likely win because of the blue color of her team jersey,” Green told me, “but it will not be because of anything new or inspiring [she offered], or because she tapped into an outsider economic-populist zeitgeist that this moment calls for nationally.”

What Sherrill does have that some Democrats do not, however, is a record of electoral success: She has prevailed in every campaign she’s entered so far. When I asked her about Green’s critique, she pointed to that winning record. “I’m presenting a vision of New Jersey that the people of New Jersey want to see, for their kids, for their costs,” Sherrill said. “That’s been pretty compelling so far, and I think it will be in November as well.”

What If This Is a Turning Point?

2025-09-13T08:00:00-04:00

When Tyler Bowyer logged on to Benny Johnson’s X livestream on Thursday morning, pieces of tissue were stuck to the stubble on his unshaven face. Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, had clearly been crying. Just a few hours before, he’d seen a video of his close friend and colleague Charlie Kirk being fatally shot in the neck.

“What he would want more than anything is for people to channel their anger into proper activism,” Bowyer told Johnson, a few minutes later advising viewers: “Consider yesterday that moment—that turning point for you—of thinking about getting involved in your local community or running for office.” Later, Andrew Kolvet, a longtime spokesperson for Kirk, joined the stream and echoed Bowyer. “Charlie was not a revolutionary,” Kolvet said. “He does not want to see the rage we’re all feeling be misdirected to evil” and would want “more speech, more freedom, less violence.”

This was not a gathering of individuals known for levelheadedness. Johnson is widely regarded as a far-right provocateur, and Bowyer was one of 11 people charged in the 2020 fake-elector plot in Arizona (the case remains active but was sent back to a grand jury in May). But the explicit calls for nonviolence coming from some of those who were particularly close to Kirk is noteworthy and meaningful in a moment when others on the political right, including elected officials, are not being equally careful with their words. Asked on Fox News yesterday morning how to address political violence, President Donald Trump did not seize the chance to lower the temperature. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime,” he said. “The radicals on the left are the problem.” “Democrats own what happened today,” Representative Nancy Mace told reporters on Wednesday after the news of Kirk’s shooting broke. On X, Elon Musk wrote, “The Left is the party of murder.”

Other Kirk allies have similarly characterized this as a crucial moment for the country. “America now has a turning point,” Jack Posobiec, the right-wing influencer and Turning Point contributor, said yesterday on The Charlie Kirk Show, which has been rechristened The Charlie Kirk Memorial Show. He did not explain exactly what he meant. But how and who defines the phrase turning point will determine whether the next few weeks bring confrontation, de-escalation, or something in between.

Kirk, who was assassinated on Wednesday at an event in Utah, launched Turning Point in 2012 to create a conservative youth movement in the United States. Following his death, figures from across his movement have called for greater political involvement. Students at Vanderbilt announced on Thursday that they’re forming a new chapter of Turning Point. “Rest assured that TPUSA and the entire conservative movement just got bolder, stronger, and more effective than ever,” Alex Clark, a Turning Point contributor and the host of the podcast Culture Apothecary, wrote on X. She later shared a link for starting a new chapter. “Charlie would want a million Charlie Kirks to run for office over the course of what would have been his normal lifetime,” Bowyer told Johnson yesterday. “And if we can do that, then we’ve lived up to Charlie Kirk’s name and his passion and his desire to save this republic.”

[Read: Leading Democrats Are Condemning Charlie Kirk’s Murder]

Some of Kirk’s allies are seeking to portray him as a Martin Luther King Jr.–like avatar of nonviolence. Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, herself a former Turning Point organizer, has written a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson requesting that a statue of Kirk be installed in the U.S. Capitol. On social media, mourners, including Kolvet, have shared an illustration of Kirk standing alongside Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus. “Stop calling Charlie Kirk a ‘conservative activist,’” the conservative commentator Glenn Beck wrote on X. “He was a civil rights leader.”

Yesterday, with Posobiec hosting, The Charlie Kirk Memorial Show opened with the kind of tribute usually afforded to former presidents and statesmen by major networks. It aired videos of impromptu vigils for Kirk held on college campuses across the country. Mike Johnson, who joined Posobiec on the show, said that members of Congress were already discussing ideas for memorializing him. Johnson seemed to be trying to avoid inflaming the calls for retribution that emerged quickly from some on the right, urging conservatives to carry on Kirk’s fight “not timidly, but boldly,” before quickly adding, “But in love.”

Still, other Kirk allies have occasionally taken a more vengeful posture—one that seems to support, if not violent reprisal, then some kind of crackdown on Kirk’s ideological opponents. On Johnson’s show on Thursday, Luna warned that “there are going to be examples made of people” and added, “Everyone who has been responsible for coordinating this, you basically just took on the entire U.S. government.” In the Bible, Luna noted, “it says you don’t make peace with evil; you destroy it.” Later, in an interview on Fox News, Posobiec suggested that action should be taken “at the national and the federal level” to “stop the perpetuation” of this violence.

[Read: One of Utah’s Own]

“God, please heal this nation. Our society is sick,” Riley Gaines, a Turning Point contributor, wrote Thursday on X. Yesterday morning, she sounded different. “Publications like @nytimes,” she wrote, “are the reason Charlie is dead.” She followed up a few hours later with “Wednesday: disbelief. Thursday: sadness. Friday: anger.”

As time passes, more news will emerge, and rhetoric may shift. So, too, might interpretations of this moment. Kirk’s allies—and especially Trump—will play an outsize role in determining what happens next. In a press briefing yesterday in Salt Lake City, Utah Governor Spencer Cox appeared to understand the stakes quite well. “History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country, but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us,” he said. “I desperately call on every American—Republican, Democrat, liberal, progressive, conservative, MAGA, all of us—to please, please follow what Charlie taught me."

The Democrats’ Biggest Senate Recruits Have One Thing in Common

2025-08-16T08:00:00-04:00

When news broke this week that Sherrod Brown would run next year to reclaim a Senate seat in Ohio, Democrats cheered the reports as a huge coup. Before losing a reelection bid last year, Brown had been the last Democrat to win statewide office in a state that has veered sharply to the right over the past decade. His entry instantly transforms the Ohio race from a distant dream to a plausible pickup opportunity for the party.

If most Democrats were ecstatic about Brown’s planned comeback bid, Amanda Litman was a bit less jazzed. To be sure, she’s a big fan of Brown, the gravelly-voiced populist who was once seen as a formidable presidential contender. (He never did run for the White House.) But Brown is now 72, and Litman, the founder of a group that encourages and trains first-time candidates, has been among the loudest voices calling for Democrats to ditch their gerontocracy once and for all. “In a year like this, if Sherrod Brown is really the best and only person that can make Ohio competitive, that’s who we should run,” Litman told me. But, she quickly added, “it is a damning indictment” of the Democratic Party in states such as Ohio that a just-defeated septuagenarian is its most viable choice.

Litman has called for every Democrat over the age of 70 to retire at the end of their current term in office. A few have heeded that message: Earlier this year, Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois (80), Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire (78), Tina Smith of Minnesota (67), and Gary Peters of Michigan (66) all announced that they would not seek reelection next year. But in some of the nation’s biggest Senate races, Democrats are relying on an old strategy of recruiting—and then clearing the field for—long-serving party leaders with whom voters are already familiar.

[Helen Lewis: The Democrats must confront their gerontocracy]

In North Carolina, top Democrats aggressively lobbied former Governor Roy Cooper (68) to run for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Republican senator, Thom Tillis. And in Maine, the party is waiting to see if Governor Janet Mills (77) will challenge five-term Senator Susan Collins, the GOP’s most vulnerable incumbent, who is 72. If they run and win, Brown would be 80, Cooper would be 75, and Mills would be 85 at the end of their first Senate terms.

Democratic strategists and advocates I spoke with acknowledged the tension between the party’s broadly shared desire to elevate a new generation of leaders and its embrace of older candidates in these key Senate races. But they said the decision was easy in the states they most need to win next year. “The frustration of voters, donors, and younger elected officials is real,” Martha McKenna, a former political director of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, told me. But Cooper and Brown (and potentially Mills) “are brave patriots who have already shown they know how to run and win, which is thrilling to the Democratic grassroots base.” Any Democrats unhappy with their candidacies, McKenna added, “are defeatist bed wetters who would rather complain from the sidelines than get into the fight.”

Winning the Senate is a long shot for Democrats in 2026. They would need to flip at least four Republican-held seats without losing any of their own, and the only blue state where a Senate race is up for grabs is Maine. But even a gain of two or three seats could put Democrats in position to take the majority in 2028, and they hope that a voter backlash to President Donald Trump’s second term, combined with the recruitment of strong candidates, could put states such as North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska in play next year. Republicans have also tried to woo popular governors to mount Senate campaigns, with less success: Governors Chris Sununu of New Hampshire (50) and Brian Kemp of Georgia (61) each passed on the opportunity.

Brown lost to Bernie Moreno by three and a half points in a state that Trump carried by 11 points. He will likely start as an underdog against Senator Jon Husted, who was appointed by Governor Mike DeWine to fill the seat that J. D. Vance vacated when he became vice president. But even if Brown falls short, Democrats argue, his strength as a candidate could force Republicans to spend millions of dollars they would otherwise have directed elsewhere. No other Democrat in Ohio can make the same case.

[Read: Retirement is the new resistance]

The push for Democrats to get younger has been driven not only by the party’s panic over former President Joe Biden’s age and performance last summer, but by the more recent deaths of three House Democrats during the first five months of 2025. The activist David Hogg sparked an internal feud by declaring, soon after becoming the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, that he would back primary challengers to some party incumbents in safe House seats.

Younger Democrats did win key Senate seats last year in Arizona, New Jersey, and Michigan. And the party’s leading Senate contenders for 2026 in Texas, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota are in their 40s and early 50s. “We are in the fight of our lives, and that requires a truly multigenerational front,” Santiago Mayer, the founder of the youth-oriented progressive group Voters of Tomorrow, told me. “Of course we need young people running. We need young leaders who are vocal and visible around the country.” But Mayer said he had no problem with older Democrats such as Brown, Cooper, and (possibly) Mills leading the way in crucial races. “We need to be supporting the candidates who are proven winners,” he told me.

Nowhere are Democrats more desperate to win than Maine, where Collins’s resilience has both frustrated the party and scared off some of its rising stars. In 2020, Collins defeated a well-funded Democratic opponent by nearly nine points even as Biden carried the state by the same margin. Her approval ratings are even lower than they were at this time six years ago, and Democrats consider the state a must-win in the battle for the Senate. Yet hardly any Democrats have stepped up to take her on. (Jordan Wood, a onetime aide to former Representative Katie Porter of California, is the best-known declared candidate so far.) Representative Jared Golden, who holds a rural House district that Trump carried three times, decided to seek reelection rather than higher office. And several up-and-coming Democrats have opted to run for governor instead of challenging Collins.

To a large extent, everyone is waiting on Mills, who trounced her predecessor, Paul LePage, in his 2022 comeback bid and then drew national attention by telling Trump, “See you in court” during a confrontation at the White House earlier this year. The governor, however, is in no rush to make a decision and has evinced little excitement about becoming a freshman senator in her late 70s. “I mean, look, I wasn’t born with a burning desire to be in Washington, D.C.—any month of the year,” Mills told a local radio station last month even as she acknowledged that she was seriously considering a Senate campaign. One national Democratic strategist told me that the odds of Mills entering the race are about 50–50; another put the chances lower. The strategists showed little concern about Mills’s age, noting that she doesn’t appear any older than Collins (even though she is by five years). The issue may not resonate as much in Maine anyway, which has the oldest population of any state in the country.

Democrats have had mixed success relying on former governors to harness their cross-party popularity as state leaders in competitive Senate races. In 2020, then–Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper defeated GOP Senator Cory Gardner to help Democrats recapture the majority. And the four Democratic senators from Virginia and New Hampshire all previously served as their state’s governors. But in 2016, former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland lost by more than 20 points in his bid to oust a Republican senator. Two years later in Tennessee, former Governor Phil Bredesen met a similar fate.

Litman argues that part of the Democrats’ problem is a fear of competitive primaries, which both parties try to avoid in Senate races because of their expense and the risk that the winner will emerge damaged for the general election. Some believe the lack of a presidential primary in 2024 hurt Kamala Harris’s chances against Trump. “That is how you keep Democratic voters engaged,” Litman said. “If we’ve learned anything from 2024, it’s that primaries are good.” She’s optimistic that as younger Democrats run and win at the local level, the party’s bench in red and purple states will get deeper, and the elections where its hopes hinge on aging former stars will become more rare. “It’s not like in one election cycle, everyone over the age of 70 is going to be thrown out,” she said. “This is the first big generational-change election for the Democratic Party. It’s not going to be the last.”