The Republican Party was founded in 1854 in a little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, a community that has remained Republican for the vast majority of the ensuing 172 years. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in Ripon in 2024—even after Harris campaigned there—by a comfortable 55–45 margin.

But, as in a growing number of historically Republican red areas that have begun turning purple or even blue since Trump’s disastrous second term began, Ripon took a sharp turn last Tuesday—as part of a now indisputable national shift toward progressive and Democratic candidates. The city voted by around 58 percent to send Chris Taylor, a very progressive former Democratic state legislator and jurist, to the state Supreme Court. The rest of Wisconsin had a similar idea. Taylor was elected Tuesday in a landslide, flipping a previously conservative seat and giving progressives a 5–2 majority on a powerful state court that, less than a decade ago, was a bastion of right-wing judicial activism. That matters for Wisconsinites, of course, but it also has significance for the whole country.

Wisconsin is the ultimate presidential battleground state, having backed Donald Trump in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Trump once more in 2024, all by margins of under 1 percent. Yet Taylor, a former lawyer and policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin who currently serves as a state appeals court judge, won the seat by a 20-point margin over fellow Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, a prominent and well-connected conservative who, as an assistant state attorney general, defended former Republican Governor Scott Walker’s assaults on organized labor, public employees, and fair elections.

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Taylor ran a significantly smarter and better-funded campaign than Lazar. But this margin of victory was unprecedented in recent major elections in Wisconsin. In an election where Democrats voted enthusiastically while a lot of Republicans apparently stayed at home, Taylor carried urban, suburban, and rural regions across the state.

The scale of Taylor’s win drew national attention, as observers at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics noted that she “became the first Democratic-aligned candidate since 2015 to carry a majority of the state’s counties—42 of 72.” Twenty-nine Wisconsin counties that backed Trump in the fall of 2024 backed Taylor in the spring of 2026. Historically Republican strongholds in the suburbs of Milwaukee and Madison favored the progressive in the officially nonpartisan contest, as did rural counties across western Wisconsin and into the north, where many regions saw shifts of 20 points or more from right to left.

So, what does this tell us about the midterm elections this fall, when control of the Republican-led US House and Senate chambers, as well as statehouses in places like Wisconsin, will be up for grabs?

A spring election for a technically nonpartisan Supreme Court seat is different from a partisan contest for a US House seat or a governorship. But just as the big wins for Democrats in 2025 off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia were indicative, and just as the overwhelming pattern of Democratic wins in special elections for state legislative seats nationwide revealed Republican vulnerabilities, so the Wisconsin results are relevant for the 2026 midterms—especially when it comes to US House races.

Currently, Republicans have a razor-thin 217–214 majority in the House (three seats are vacant). Democrats need to flip just a handful of districts nationwide to take control of the chamber. While a great deal of attention has been paid to whether Democrats can win additional seats in states such as California, New York, and Virginia, their majority could also run through Wisconsin and a handful of other Midwestern states, like Iowa.

Because of the radical gerrymandering of state congressional district lines that was initiated by Walker and baked in by Republican legislators and cautious courts, six of Wisconsin’s eight House seats are currently held by the GOP.

The VoteHub election mapping website determined that Taylor won the most votes in seven of the eight districts—including those of Republican representatives Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Tony Weid, Glenn Grothman, and Tom Tiffany (the party’s hapless candidate for governor).

In Van Orden’s western Wisconsin third district, Taylor won by double digits—running up astronomical percentages of the vote in more urban counties such as La Crosse (69 percent) and Eau Claire (68 percent) but also gaining roughly 60 percent in largely rural Grant, Crawford and Vernon counties. As Democratic US Representative Mark Pocan, D–Town of Vermont, a longtime Van Orden critic, noted, the third “sure showed a beautiful shade of blue in Tuesday’s election.”

That’s bad news for the Republican incumbent, who was already looking vulnerable in what’s likely to be a repeat race this fall with Democrat Rebecca Cooke.

Democrats also noted that Steil’s southeastern Wisconsin first district gave overwhelming support to Taylor. Racine and Kenosha counties, both of which backed Trump in 2024, went big for the progressive on April 7.

And what of Republican Glenn Grothman’s sixth district, where Ripon is located? Aaron Wojciechowski, a former local elected official from the university town of Oshkosh who is bidding for the Democratic nomination to take on Grothman, hailed Taylor’s win as a signal that “Wisconsin voters are fired up, rejecting extremism and demanding a court that protects our rights, our votes, and our democracy.”

Pointing to “double-digit blue swings across the board in Grothman’s home turf,” Wojciechowski said, “These are significant, district-wide blue shifts in every county that makes up the 6th. This is proof that the entire 6th District—from Sheboygan to Ozaukee to Fond du Lac, Manitowoc, Green Lake, and beyond—is moving our way. Voters are done with the chaos, the divisive rhetoric, and a do-nothing Congress. The same energy that flipped the Supreme Court can flip this congressional seat in November. The momentum is here, and the data proves we can win.”

That’s an ambitious claim. Grothman’s district hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1964, when a union machinist from Fond du Lac named John Abner Race upset longtime Republican incumbent William Van Pelt, an absurdly conservative Republican—in a result that surprised Race himself. Of course, 1964 was the ultimate “blue wave” year—as a ticket headed by President Lyndon Johnson won 61 percent of the national vote, carried 44 states, and swept Democrats into office even in historically Republican districts.

Could 2026 really see a big enough blue wave to unseat not just vulnerable Republican incumbents like Van Orden but entrenched ones like Grothman? That’s a very tall order. But, then again, Chris Taylor just carried the birthplace of the Republican Party. So, perhaps, everything is up for grabs.

With the war in Iran growing ever more chaotic, and with violence spreading throughout the Middle East, there was no mistaking the urgency of the message that Pope Leo XIV delivered to the world’s Catholics on Easter Sunday.

“Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace!” announced the pontiff, who has emerged as the world’s most prominent advocate for an end to the crisis that Donald Trump sparked with his late February decision to attack Iran. “Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!”

The pope’s Easter statement, coming in a time of mounting global uncertainty and trepidation, was an appeal to reason in the face of military madness. “From without, death is always lurking,” he warned. “We see it present in injustices, in partisan selfishness, in the oppression of the poor, in the lack of attention given to the most vulnerable. We see it in violence, in the wounds of the world, in the cry of pain that rises from every corner because of the abuses that crush the weakest among us, because of the idolatry of profit that plunders the earth’s resources, because of the violence of war that kills and destroys.”

This was the latest in a series of powerful statements from the American-born pope, who in recent months has provided the steadiest counterpoint to Trump’s ranting and raving. For his part, the president chose to mark Easter by profanely threatening the Iranian people with oblivion. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” he wrote. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

The pope and the president—arguably the most high-profile Americans on the global stage at this critical juncture in the debate over war and peace—stand on opposite sides of a disputation that has rapidly intensified since the beginning of Trump’s war with Iran. Their differences are now so out in the open that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders found himself discussing each man’s statements regarding the Iran war. Of the president’s wild-eyed Easter statement, the senator said, “These are the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual.” Of the papal homily, Sanders said, “I agree with what Pope Leo XIV stated [Sunday] in his first Easter speech.”

There is much to agree with in the pope’s increasingly blunt pronouncements about the Trump administration’s illegal and unconstitutional war. When crowds gathered at the Vatican in mid-March, Leo observed, “For two weeks, the peoples of the Middle East have been suffering the atrocious violence of war,” and appealed to all sides, “Cease fire so that avenues for dialogue may be reopened.” He has expressed frustration with US and Israeli bombing raids that “have hit schools, hospitals, and residential centers”—killing thousands of Iranians in a conflict that has also claimed more than a dozen US lives—and argued, “Violence can never lead to the justice, the stability, and the peace that people are awaiting.”

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The pope is right about the desire for peace. Trump’s war of whim with Iran has never been popular with the American people, and a new IPSOS poll finds that 66 percent of them want the conflict to end quickly—even if Trump’s ill-defined and frequently incoherent goals are not achieved. “Two in three Americans want the war in Iran to end. We are tired of our tax dollars being wasted on an unnecessary war and ready for change!” says US Representative Mark Pocan, the Wisconsin Democrat who co-chairs the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus. “Trump’s war in Iran costs American taxpayers billions of dollars every day. Instead of pouring money into an illegal and unnecessary war, those resources could be used to actually help Americans at home, like lowering healthcare costs, building affordable housing, or making everyday goods more affordable.”

Faced with widespread opposition, Trump’s administration has tried to present the war as a moral and religious crusade. In a March 26 prayer session at the Pentagon, self-described “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth read a prayer that spoke of directing “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” and said, “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.”

In what was widely heard as a rebuke of Hegseth and others who pray for divine intervention on behalf of their war making, Pope Leo greeted crowds gathered at the St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican on Palm Sunday with a stark rejection of those who mix faith and militarism: “We turn our gaze to Jesus, who reveals himself as King of Peace, even as war looms abounds him.”“Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” declared the pope. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders became the first federal legislator to seriously challenge the lurch by Big Tech oligarchs into the uncharted territories of artificial intelligence when he issued a call in December for a “moratorium on the construction of data centers that are powering the unregulated sprint to develop and deploy AI.” His reasoned argument—that a moratorium is necessary “to slow it down” and “give democracy a chance to catch up”—echoes the sentiments of a growing number of Americans who have come to see AI less as a promise than a threat. Yet Sanders was hit with immediate, and strikingly vitriolic, pushback from the tribunes of the billionaire class.

Dismissing the concerns that he raised—and despite the fact that many of the defining figures in the development of AI have expressed similar sentiments—Fox News’s Stuart Varney rushed to label Sanders as “economically illiterate,” while other corporate-friendly conservatives tagged him as “the nation’s foremost avatar of reactionary socialism,” accused him of engaging in “AI doomerism” and “NIMBY-type” reasoning, and concluded that he might just be peddling “the most poisonously stupid idea of the year.” Then they hurled the ultimate insult that contemporary elites can muster when the American people and their elected representatives start to question tech-bro definitions of “progress.” Sanders, they announced, was “a Luddite.”

In an editorial headlined “Bernie Sanders’s Worst Idea Yet.” The Washington Post fumed that “a national ban on new AI data centers would make the Luddites look good.” This was not the first time that the label had been attached to him. A few months earlier, after Sanders and Democratic staffers on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had issued a report warning that AI could eliminate 100 million US jobs, the notion was savaged by an American Enterprise Institute commentator as an example of “Luddite legerdemain.”

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Never mind that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had already speculated, in May of 2025, that the rise of AI could eliminate half of all white-collar entry-level jobs and lead to unemployment rates as high as 20 percent, and would explain that “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” Or that Bill Gates had predicted in March of 2025 that humans “won’t be needed for most things.” Social-media critics ripped Sanders on mega-billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform, declaring that “socialists are the new Luddites” and claiming that Sanders was bent on “cornering the Luddite vote.”

With so much vitriol coming his way, it was perhaps understandable that the senator would announce, “I am not a Luddite.”

But there’s no shame in being a Luddite—or, to be more precise, in being an heir to the Luddite tradition of refusing to accept the adoption of new technologies simply because capitalists decide to impose them on workers.

Elite opinion writers may still dismiss the Luddites as unthinking reactionaries who sought to wreck the machinery of the dawning Industrial Revolution. But many of the most tech-savvy observers of the dawning AI era are expressing admiration for the 19th-century weavers and mechanics of northern England, who fought to prevent the dislocation and wage cuts that the factory-owning oligarchs of their day called “progress.” On campuses across the country, New Luddite and Neo-Luddite clubs have been formed by students who have grown up with smartphones and are justifiably concerned about what’s coming their way. After the Writers Guild of America waged a prescient struggle in 2023 to prevent media conglomerates from using AI technologies to capture their creativity and then toss them into the dustbin of history—a fight that anticipated The Hollywood Reporter’s blunt declaration in 2024 that “generative artificial intelligence is killing jobs in Hollywood, with little relief on the horizon,” and the more recent reports linking AI consolidation and cost cutting to tens of thousands of layoffs in the media and entertainment industry—the actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter wrote, “The term Luddite is often used incorrectly to describe an exhausted and embittered populace that wants technology to go away. But the actual Luddites were highly engaged with technology and skilled at using it in their work in the textile industry. They weren’t an anti-tech movement but a pro-labor movement, fighting to prevent the exploitation and devaluation of their work by rapacious company overlords. If you want to know how to fix the problems we face from AI and other technology, become genuinely and deeply involved. Become a Luddite.” The artist and activist Molly Crabapple, who in 2023 helped organize an open letter urging publishers to restrict their use of AI-generated illustrations, adopted a similar view, explaining: “That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” The year before, the writer Cory Doctorow argued, “The Luddites did what every science fiction writer does: they took a technology and imagined all the different ways it could be used—who it could be used for and whom it could be used against. They demanded the creation of a parallel universe in which the left fork was taken, rather than the right. That is many things, but it is not technophobic. Using ‘Luddite’ as a synonym for technophobe is an historically insupportable libel.”

Today’s Luddite renaissance comes as little surprise, given the anxiety over AI. But this is not the first time that people have looked to the leather-aproned croppers who resisted the power looms of another era. Going back to the 1950s, activists have looked to the Luddites’ example in times when new technologies—from nuclear weapons to the Internet—have upended our lives. The bosses have done their best to portray the Luddites as ignorant and self-serving laborers who clung to a dying past—and much of the media still does. But that mischaracterization was always an example of the “enormous condescension of posterity” that the great historians of the English working class E.P. and Dorothy Thompson, who were partners in life and in scholarship, long ago upended. In the middle of the last century, the Thompsons shined a new light on the Luddite uprisings that swept Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire from 1811 to 1816. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, textile workers who had used their own machines—working in their homes and in small shops—to clothe England and the world were suddenly confronted with a future in which they would be crowded into a new kind of workplace: the factory. Inside the new textile mills, they, and frequently their children, would toil long hours for reduced pay on the mechanized shearing machines and automated power looms that were their era’s technological wonders. The Luddites were no fools; they correctly anticipated the future that William King described in 1829 in his newspaper The Co-operator: “If then the machine which I work produces as much as a thousand men, I ought to enjoy the produce of a thousand men. But no such thing. I am working a machine which I know will starve me.”

The weavers and mechanics who gathered by moonlight atop the West Pennine Moors near Bolton and in the upstairs rooms of the Shears Inn at Liversedge in the West Riding of Yorkshire were unwilling to cede their futures to the oligarchs of a nascent Industrial Revolution. Amid an economic depression that had already slashed their wages and impoverished their families, they were determined to fight against the denial of their rights—and their humanity—by industrialists who adopted new technologies without the slightest care for the disruption of society. Their uprising followed mass protests and petition campaigns demanding that the government and employers provide living wages and protections for the workers who were being exploited in what William Blake aptly described as “dark Satanic Mills.” After their petitions were rejected, the Luddites gathered by the thousands and marched on the mills to break the new machines, smashing them in riotous agitations that terrified industrialists and parliamentarians.

Those sledgehammer blows against the Industrial Revolution earned the Luddites a place in history. But their struggle was always about more than a simplistic rejection of the new. Rather, it was a movement of engaged and informed skilled workers who opposed an economic and social transformation that promised to enrich the wealthiest men of their time while dispossessing an entire class of handloom weavers and their families. They organized demonstrations and petitioned government officials for increased wages, an end to child-labor abuses, and the right to form “combinations” (unions) of workers. Their anti-oligarchical energy and penchant for direct action led one of their champions, a young Lord Byron, to compare the Luddites to “the Liberty lads o’er the sea”—the revolutionary Americans who had overturned British colonialism—and to argue that British workers “will die fighting, or live free,” under the banner of “down with all kings but King Ludd!”

There was, it should be added, no such person: The first Luddites concocted the story of a young textile maker named Ned Ludd who, when ordered to speed up his work and sacrifice its quality by a boss, instead smashed the mechanical knitting machines to which he was assigned. As the tactic spread during the Luddites’ five years of industrial unrest, they adopted the name along with elaborate disguises and a strategy of stealthy nighttime raids. They did so to cloak the identities of the leaders and members of a labor movement that faced brutal repression, including laws that were enacted to punish their activism with the death penalty or forced expulsion to Australian prison colonies; an elaborate spy network that offered rewards to bounty hunters; and an ever-expanding military presence that would eventually see 12,000 troops stationed in the textile towns of northern England. Like the earlier Sons of Liberty in what would become the United States, the Luddites organized secretly and targeted the economic interests of their overlords. As the Americans had dumped the British East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, the Luddites broke the gig mills and shearing frames in factories from Marsden to Lancashire. What the historian Eric Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot” was not an example of a working-class movement that “did not know what it was doing, but merely reacted, blindly and gropingly, to the pressure of misery.” On the contrary, Hobsbawm explained, it was a response to the imposition of a new technology that workers rightly foresaw would make their lives worse by sacrificing them to cross a certain “threshold of profit.”

The Luddites’ decision to destroy machines was much debated and decried in their time, though it arguably has scant relevance to our own. As Richard Conniff observed some years ago in his seminal Smithsonian essay “What the Luddites Really Fought Against,” “Our uneasy protests against technology almost inevitably take technological form. We worry about whether violent computer games are warping our children, then decry them by tweet, text or Facebook post. We try to simplify our lives by shopping at the local farmers market—then haul our organic arugula home in a Prius. College students take out their earbuds to discuss how technology dominates their lives. But when a class ends, Loyola University of Chicago professor Steven E. Jones notes, their cellphones all come to life, screens glowing in front of their faces, ‘and they migrate across the lawns like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish.’”

If destroying the machine itself is not in our future, what can we learn from the Luddites that is relevant for today? Start with the notion that the Luddite resistance to “progress for the sake of progress” was defined by a longing to remain human in a machine age. That premise makes them a touchstone for 21st-century bank clerks and delivery drivers, actors and architects, autoworkers and nurses, who all fret about whether they’ll have a place in an AI-generated future. “We should be Luddites,” Brian Merchant, a tech journalist, columnist, critic, and the author of the 2023 book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, argued in an article in Time. “The Luddites were making a powerful complaint. If we reclaim what they were actually trying to say, we can apply the lessons of their story to today, and prevent a lot of misery.”

The great value of the Luddites for the purposes of our contemporary discourse is that they mounted an informed resistance to a warped definition of progress that threatened not just their livelihoods but their humanity. That is the same recognition that today animates tech-savvy advocates for placing guardrails on AI. Gavin Mueller, a scholar of digital media and culture who teaches at the University of Amsterdam and has written extensively about the Luddites, is right to remind us that “behind AI skepticism is a larger question. What kind of future do we want to have?”

We are all under pressure to accept the inevitability of an AI-generated future. This year’s Super Bowl advertising was a parade of paeans to artificial intelligence. The billboards that light up Times Square in New York City offer larger-than-life, brighter-than-the-sun, 24/7 promotions for this new technology: AI companions will give you “someone who listens, responds, and supports you.” Global leaders are “scaling with AI.” Employers will soon “Stop Hiring Humans” because “The Era of AI Employees Is Here.”

Yet Americans aren’t buying it.

A December 2025 YouGov poll found that 77 percent of Americans view AI as a possible threat to humanity; a YouGov/Economist survey from February found that 74 percent of respondents think AI will hurt the economy, and 63 percent think it will eliminate jobs. A poll by Bentley-Gallup found that an overwhelming majority of Americans (79 percent) have no faith in private companies to use AI responsibly.

That’s a lot of people that The Washington Post’seditorial page would disparage as “Luddites.” Or maybe, if we’re willing to put aside the Post and consider the actual history of the Industrial Revolution, that’s a lot of reason for hope that if we embrace our skepticism, we might build a mass movement to get this technological revolution right.

The story of the Luddites offers an intellectual antidote to the anxiety of an age when our experience of the digital and social-media revolutions has given us reason to doubt the promise that every new technology will make our lives better. There is now broad acceptance that the disinformation streaming from our screens has coarsened our politics and “mainstreamed” racism and xenophobia. As studies tell us that social-media addictions threaten our mental health, and as schools ban smartphones in a desperate attempt to regain the attention of our children, millions of Americans have come to the realization—through bitter experience—that new technologies should be greeted with skepticism and regulation. Instead of bending to the dictates of Silicon Valley’s trillionaires-in-waiting, an emerging consensus suggests that we just might want to consider the wisdom of slowing down the headlong rush toward an AI-dominated future with dramatically fewer jobs, more surveillance, and a military-industrial complex that cranks out autonomous killing machines.

For the Luddites’ story to be useful, however, it is necessary to toss aside the stereotypes that were on display in the reaction to Sanders’s advocacy for a perfectly reasonable slowdown in data-center construction. There’s a compelling argument to be made that to be a modern Luddite is to be on the right side of history—even if history has not been particularly kind to the Luddites. “History is written by the winners,” George Orwell reminded us, and rarely has there been a more successful smearing of a movement than the one that targeted the Luddites, who were decried in their day by the British authorities as “evil minded persons…assembled together in riotous manner” who had created a “Spirit of Disorder.”

The Luddites did create their share of disorder with those midnight raids on the dark satanic mills. But what matters for our own day is the disorder that the Luddites were opposing, which Lord Byron encapsulated when he declared, “We must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in Mechanism.”

Artificial intelligence is already generating technological change that, on its own and in combination with advanced robotics, will design and define much of our future. But who will design and define AI—tech-bro billionaires whose primary mission is to become trillionaires, or citizens and elected representatives who seek to harness technology in the interest of humanity? Donald Trump has made his choice, signaling at a Pittsburgh “energy and innovation summit” last summer that he would willingly sacrifice the public interest and let the tech industry call the shots. “Regulation be damned” was the message from the president; let the chips fall where they may. Trump formalized his subservience in December, when he issued an executive order that The New York Times reported “grants broad authority to the attorney general to sue states and overturn laws that do not support the ‘United States’ global A.I. dominance,’ putting dozens of A.I. safety and consumer protection laws at risk. If states keep their laws in place,” the report continued, “Mr. Trump directed federal regulators to withhold funds for broadband and other projects.”

In March, Trump baked his agenda into a “National AI Legislative Framework” that emphasizes deregulation and federal preemption of the states. “Preemption is the real story,” Zephyr Teachout, the scholar of monopoly power, wrote on X. “We do not need a national framework for AI. Of any kind. We need state and federal laws but we will be crushed if we block local power to protect kids, workers, consumers, journalism, everything. Congress should do its job, not stop states from doing theirs with common law, liability, antitrust, and more.”

So far, however, Congress has tended to sideline itself, while the president and his administration rush to embrace the financial overlords during this transformative moment. That embrace is so shameless, so transparent, that messages and images emanating from the White House seem like dystopian cinema. “The future of AI is ‘personified,’” first lady Melania Trump declared at a March 25 White House event where she appeared with robots and asked Americans to “imagine a humanoid educator named Plato” replacing teachers.

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“Call me a radical, but no!” responded Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who has emerged—along with a growing number of the scientific pioneers of artificial intelligence—as a thoughtful AI skeptic. “We should not be replacing teachers in America with robots. We should attract the best and brightest in our country to become teachers and pay them the decent wages that they deserve.”

Sanders is right, of course. But, as has too often been the case when it comes to industrial and technological revolutions, their influence on society, and the resulting policy disputes, being right in the early stages of a transformation can be a lonely mission.

The good news is that the people get it. A February Economist/YouGov survey found that 63 percent of Americans think jobs will be lost in an AI transition that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has acknowledged “isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed who expressed an opinion on the question said they believed AI will hurt the economy.

That’s backed up by polls in states where the issues have been framed by fights over the development of AI data centers. A December letter from more than 230 environmental groups, including Food & Water Watch, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth, argued, “The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate, and water security.” Voters see what’s happening in states like Wisconsin, where a Marquette Law School Poll in March found that 69 percent of those surveyed agreed that “the costs of the data centers outweigh the benefits.” That’s the same percentage that said AI is developing too fast.

Smart Democrats and a few Republicans are seizing on these concerns. But there are not enough of them. “Sadly,” Sanders says, “Congress has done virtually nothing.” This disconnect has added urgency to a moment of enormous importance for people whose jobs are threatened, whose children’s brains are already marinating in AI slop, and whose privacy is being invaded by an ever-tightening surveillance state and an industry that’s determined to barter off personal data to the highest bidder.

To be sure, AI has huge potential to benefit humanity: by assisting responsible scientific innovation, helping medical researchers identify new strategies for diagnosing and treating disease, and (in ethical hands) increasing cybersecurity and other protections. But that potential will turn to peril if Trump and his allies—in both political parties—simply serve an industry that is already pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into manipulating the results of the 2026 elections. The urgency of the moment inspires this issue of The Nation, which affirms that skepticism about AI is well-founded and necessary. The articles in our special section examine the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of tech billionaires, along with concerns about job losses and surveillance, questions about military and police uses of new technologies, and smart strategies for regulating and governing AI.

At a point when everyone must take a side, The Nation is siding with humanity. We want the best that AI has to offer for the people. But we know that won’t happen if the citizens are locked out of the decision-making process, as Trump and his allies seek to do with their preemption scheme.

That scheme threatens to upend a burgeoning popular revolt that has already emerged at the grassroots, as communities all over the country reject the construction of behemoth data centers that are designed to meet the astronomical energy demands of the AI and cryptocurrency industries.

This is where Sanders proposes to intervene. In late March, with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), he proposed legislation to establish a national moratorium on the construction of data centers.

But this is about much more than data centers. “Bottom line: We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy, and the future of humanity,” the senator says, arguing that a federal moratorium—along with state and local interventions and the growing movement for international regulatory treaties—can slow down the self-serving rush of AI fabulists and profiteers.

“Congress has a moral obligation,” AOC says, “to stand with the American people and stop the expansion of these data centers until we have a framework to adequately address the existential harm AI poses to our society. We must choose humanity over profit.”

Yes, we must!

St. Paul—Bruce Springsteen closed his remarkable performance at the No Kings rally on the steps of the Minnesota state Capitol Saturday with a bold cry of “No kings! No war!”

He was not alone.

The Minnesota rally, like so many of the more than 3,300 No Kings events that drew at least 8 million Americans nationwide to pickets, marches, and demonstrations Saturday, featured loud and clear opposition to Donald Trump’s wars in general—and, in particular, to the president’s disastrous assault on Iran.

Public Citizen president Rob Weissman set the tone for the day, telling the cheering rallygoers, “We have to persist to end this illegal, unconstitutional, and devastating war on Iran—and make sure that Congress does not give a penny more to pay for or extend this war.” When he chanted, “No kings! No ICE! No war! Democracy is what we’re fighting for!,” there came a thunderous echo from the crowd. (The Minnesota State Patrol estimated a turnout of 100,000, while organizers with Indivisible Twin Cities said it was closer to 200,000. Whatever the precise number, it was widely described as the largest protest rally in Minnesota history.)

Those who attended the St. Paul rally and others like it nationwide had plenty to protest, from the abuses of Operation Metro Surge—the Trump administration’s assault on civil society that saw armed and masked federal agents flood into Minneapolis and other Minnesota cities—to Trump’s broader anti-immigrant, anti-workers, anti–civil rights, anti–civil liberties agenda. But the war with Iran, which has metastasized into a deadly regional conflict with daunting international economic implications, became a vital theme of the latest No Kings Day rallies.

In St. Paul, signs with the message “Healthcare Not Warfare”—distributed by Social Security Works to highlight the administration’s warped priorities—were ubiquitous. Homemade signs announced: “Fund Education, Not War,” “No More War, Dump Trump,” and “The Epstein Files Aren’t in Iran.” Speaker after speaker, performer after performer, expressed opposition to Trump’s misguided militarism.

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“Under the so-called ‘anti-war president,’ we have now seen the launching of military operations in Iran and Venezuela, and in Ecuador. They are floating an illegal takeover of places like Cuba and Greenland—like it is some kind of real-estate deal,” said US Representative Ilhan Omar. The Minnesota Democrat invoked the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ School in Minab, Iran, which left at least 175 dead on the first day of the war, and said, “Trump’s idea [of] liberating women in Iran is to bomb and murder school children.”

Saturday’s most detailed comments on the war came from the main speaker in St. Paul, US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

The two-time presidential candidate ripped apart Trump’s agenda, saying, “It is an Orwellian vision which says that we must live in a constant state of fear, that we must always have an enemy and that we must always be at war. It is a vision which says that we have unlimited amounts of money for bombs and guns and killing, but never enough money to feed our children, provide affordable housing or enable our parents to retire with dignity.”

Sanders was scathing in his analysis of US militarism. “Let’s be honest,” he declared. “The American people were lied to about the war in Vietnam. We were lied to about the war in Iraq. And we are being lied to today about the war in Iran. This war must end immediately.”

Sanders’s fierce denunciations of the war were interrupted, repeatedly, by thunderous applause.

“One month ago, Trump and his partner, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, started a war with Iran. This war is unconstitutional. Trump did not seek or receive authorization from Congress. This war is in violation of international law. One sovereign nation cannot simply go about attacking another sovereign nation for any reason it chooses,” said Sanders, who continued:

Since this war began, 13 American soldiers have been killed and hundreds have been wounded—including another 12 yesterday. In Iran, nearly 2,000 civilians have been killed and many more wounded, and 498 schools have been attacked by American and Israeli missiles.

In Lebanon, more than 1,000 people are dead and more than one million Lebanese people—15% of their population—have been displaced from their homes. In Israel, 20 people have been killed and over 5,000 have been wounded.

In the West Bank, Israeli vigilantes are burning down homes and killing Palestinians.

At a time when gas prices are soaring, when many Americans cannot afford the basic necessities of life, it is estimated that this war has already cost us a trillion dollars.

At a time when the American people are politically divided, there is one issue that is bringing us together. Conservatives, moderates and progressives are speaking out in unison: End This War!

“End This War! End This War!” chanted the crowd, as Sanders promised to fight Trump administration demands for another $200 billion to fund the war and said that “supplemental appropriation for the war in Iran must be defeated.”

The chants and the cheers grew even louder as the senator joined his critique of Trump to a critique of Netanyahu. “I will be forcing a vote on legislation to block the sale of nearly a billion dollars in weapons to the Israeli military for bombs and bulldozers,” said Sanders. “A nation that has committed genocide in Gaza does not need more military support from American taxpayers. We must block the bombs and block the bulldozers.”

The abuses of Donald Trump’s second term inspired the rise of the No Kings movement, which this Saturday will return to the streets of these United States, from Key West at the end of the Florida Keys to Kotzebue Sound above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. In more than 3,000 cities, villages, and towns, millions of people will be protesting a president who organizers decry for “sending masked agents into our streets, terrorizing our communities” and “spending billions of our tax dollars on missile strikes abroad all while driving up the cost of living and handing out massive giveaways to billionaire allies.”

The No Kings movement has, from its beginnings, recognized the ways in which Trump’s authoritarian overreach mirrors what the authors of the Declaration of Independence identified as King George III’s “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.”

But after Trump launched a regionally destabilizing war in the Middle East, with neither the approval of Congress nor the support of the American people, those echoes grew louder. They grew louder still after the administration asked for another $200 billion to fund it.

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US Representative Mark Pocan, the Wisconsin Democrat who cofounded the House’s Defense Spending Reduction Caucus, has correctly identified Trump’s attack on Iran as a “war of choice” rather than necessity. And No Kings organizers are reminding Americans that, in addition to their objections to the domestic chaos unleashed by this administration, they are now called to protest against an “illegal, catastrophic war putting us in danger and driving up our costs.”

This is precisely the circumstance the founders of the American experiment feared, based on their bitter experience with King George III and the British Empire.

In 1776, as the king’s more rebellious subjects were pursuing independence from the United Kingdom a delegate from Virginia to the Second Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson, led a committee charged with detailing grievances against the king and his imperial enterprise. The committee—which also included John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Robert R. Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman from Connecticut—produced a document that began to shape a new nation.

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world,” read the document, which was approved by the Congress, dated July 4, 1776, and titled the Declaration of Independence.

Among its 27 grievances, the Declaration complained that the king and his cabal were “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments” and “suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.”

The signers of the Declaration said the king was literally “waging War against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”

The most profound grievance, however, had to do with the reality that “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”

The authors of the Declaration, and of the US Constitution, were not merely concerned about the war that King George III and the United Kingdom were waging against the Americans. They were, more broadly, concerned about the prospect that an imperial president could lead the country they were creating into wars of whim.

The founders recognized that any system that concentrated power in a king, or an executive with monarchical instincts, could leave ordinary citizens at the mercy of a megalomaniac whose choices might casually launch wars that threatened lives, property, and freedom. It was Thomas Paine who wrote in Common Sense, the seminal call for American independence from England, “Thirty kings and two minors have reigned in that distracted kingdom since the conquest, in which time there has been (including the Revolution) no less than eight civil wars and nineteen rebellions. Wherefore instead of making for peace, it makes against it, and destroys the very foundation it seems to stand upon.”

Paine warned that “so uncertain is the fate of war and the temper of a nation, when nothing but personal matters are the ground of a quarrel” and observed: “In short, monarchy and succession have laid (not this or that kingdom only) but the world in blood and ashes.”

When America finally broke the bonds of colonial oppression, a Constitution was written with the express goal of chaining the dogs of war. To that end, the power to wage war was lodged not with one man—be he identified as a king or a president—but with the people, through their elected congressional representatives.

“In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers: the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man,” explained James Madison, who oversaw the drafting of the document. Madison observed,

War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honours and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

Now, when domestic programs have been attacked and starved, and when the executive proposes to unlock the public treasures to further fund military adventures and a career of empire, it is no wonder that the patriots of our time cry out: “No Kings!”

Zohran Mamdani memorably began his election-night victory speech by announcing, “The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”

That reference to Debs—the heroic railroad union leader, socialist icon, and five-time presidential candidate—drew cheers from Mamdani’s supporters. They understood it as a signal that the newly elected mayor of New York City was serious about his democratic socialist politics. They also understood it as a sign that, like Deb’s Socialist Party, which elected members of Congress, mayors, and legislators in states across the country, Mamdani was serious about putting government on the side of the working class.

Mamdani, who, like many of those who were cheering, is a member of New York City’s surging Democratic Socialists of America movement, chose the right quote at the right moment on that November night. And he did so, again, shortly before St. Patrick’s Day, when he attended a luncheon hosted by the James Connolly Irish American Labor Coalition—a group named for the radical labor leader who is remembered 110 years after his execution by the British as an unflinching champion of Irish independence and a proud socialist campaigner for overturning the rule of “capitalists, landlords and financiers.”

The mayor spoke in the language of the group he was addressing, quoting Connolly’s epic declaration: “The cause of labor is the cause of Ireland and the cause of Ireland is that cause of labor.”

Several days later, Mamdani took some hits for replying cautiously to a question about whether he embraced Connolly’s vision of a united Ireland. “I gotta be honest,” he said, I haven’t thought enough on that question.”

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But the mayor came back on St. Patrick’s Day itself with a more robust response, explaining that “as someone who believes deeply in the principle of self-determination…I think that should also be extended to the Irish.” Most people took that to mean that Mamdani supports the push to hold a referendum on whether the six counties of Northern Ireland should be taken out of the hands of the British and reunited with the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland. That’s not some far-off prospect; the leader of Ireland’s Sinn Féin party, Mary Lou McDonald, has been calling for “proposals for delivering legal, fair and decisive referenda and a negotiated timeframe by the end of this decade.”

Mamdani then issued a St. Patrick’s Day video in which he hailed Irish solidarity with anti-colonial struggles in Africa, the fight against apartheid in South Africa, and the cause of Palestinian freedom.

“Irish solidarity is no coincidence, as it was on Irish soil that the British Empire developed their colonial project. So much of the exploitation later imposed elsewhere across the world was honed first in the plantations in Ireland,” explained the mayor. “Who can better understand those who weep than those who have wept for so long? And yet, the story of the Irish is not merely one of violent oppression, of subjugation, of attempted domination. It is one of resistance, too. For centuries, generation after generation waged a lonely effort for independence, year after year, uprising after uprising, they were brutally beaten back, and still they kept coming.”

Decrying Britain’s “imperial callousness,” Mamdani name-checked Connolly (along with Patrick Pearse), “who roused hundreds of thousands with demands of political freedom and economic self-determination.”

A statue in Dublin recalls how Connolly organized, fought, and died for Irish liberation, a cause he championed as a signer of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Captured and executed in Dublin by a British colonial authorities because of his role in the April 1916 Easter Rising, he is an epic figure in the island’s long history.

Yet Connolly was also, for a number of years, a leading figure in the labor union and socialist circles of New York City, where he edited the newspaper The Harp. That history was recalled on St. Patrick’s Day by Claire Valdez, a longtime United Auto Workers local union organizer, New York state legislator, and NYC-DSA activist, who this year is running as a Mamdani-backed candidate for Congress in New York’s Seventh Congressional District.

“Just six years before the Easter Rising—and his execution by the British—Irish republican and socialist James Connolly gave a speech right here in NY-7, at an open-air meeting on the corner of Manhattan Ave and Huron Street in Greenpoint,” Valdez said. “Connolly emigrated to New York in 1903 and organized with the IWW, a revolutionary movement built around bringing the entire working class into ‘one big union.’”

Highlighting clippings from The New York Call, the city’s socialist daily newspaper in the era, Valdez noted, “His Greenpoint talk in July 1910 was titled ‘Socialism in Ireland and the United States.’ Over 1,000 workers showed up. But it almost didn’t happen. The NYPD had arrested a Socialist Party leader on that same corner the week before. This time, the rally went off without a hitch. ‘Long before the meeting opened there were hundreds of people waiting on the corner to hear what the Socialists had to say to them,’ reported socialist newspaper The New York Call. The police behaved well and every disturbance by the hired thugs was suppressed by them.”

Said Valdez: “Connolly understood that Irish liberation and working-class liberation were the same struggle. The British Empire exploited Ireland the same way capital exploited workers in the factories and docks of Brooklyn and Manhattan. You couldn’t win one fight without winning the other. That tradition lives in NY-7 every time the people stand against the powerful.”

Connolly did not just fight for independence. He also sought “a reorganization of society,” writing, “As a Socialist I am prepared to do all one man can do to achieve for our motherland her rightful heritage—independence, but if you ask me to abate one jot or tittle of the claims of social justice, in order to conciliate the privileged classes, then I must decline.”

That clarity inspired Debs, who in mourning Connolly’s death declared, “The seed that James Connolly sowed in the brains and hearts of his enslaved countrymen will germinate now that his precious blood has fertilized the soil and in due time the social revolution will accomplish what the Irish rebellion failed in, and sweep landlordism and capitalism and every other form of oppression from the Emerald Isle and from the face of the earth.”

One hundred and ten years on, James Connolly still inspires enthusiasm among campaigners for economic and social justice, in Ireland, and in New York City.

Russ Feingold has seen the headlines about how the Trump administration is abandoning the struggle to save the planet. Each one is more dire than the last: “Trump’s Latest Plan to Undo the ‘Holy Grail’ of Climate Rules: Never Mind the Science”; “Trump’s Anti-Green Agenda Could Lead to 1.3 Million More Climate Deaths”; and “One Year After Trump’s Inauguration, the Damage to Environmental Policy Is Unprecedented.” The former US senator from Wisconsin, who served for almost two decades as one of the chamber’s most ardent advocates for climate action, publicly rebuked Trump’s January 7 withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): “Nothing in the Constitution grants the president any such power.” That cry of frustration echoes the sentiments of many environmentalists in a moment when the Trump administration seems to be reversing all the progress that Feingold and others fought to achieve after the awakening that Americans experienced on the first Earth Day in 1970. Not only has the president distanced the country from global initiatives to battle climate change and other forms of environmental degradation, but politically and economically powerful figures, such as Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, have been sending mixed signals about existential environmental issues. Feingold refers to the current state of affairs as “this horrible nightmare that we’re going through.”

Yet he has not given up on the prospect of building international coalitions to save the planet. In fact, he is actively forging them as a globe-trotting citizen diplomat on behalf of one of the most underreported yet strikingly successful environmental initiatives of our time. As the chair of the global steering committee of the Campaign for Nature—an international effort based on the tenet that “the rapid loss of biodiversity threaten[s] the very existence of humanity on Earth”—Feingold has emerged as a high-profile advocate for the ambitious agenda outlined in the somewhat clumsily named yet vital Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). This framework was agreed to in 2022 at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The GBF, which aims to formally protect at least 30 percent of the world’s land and water by 2030, has been described as the “Paris Agreement for nature”—a reference to the better-known 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, the landmark international treaty that pledges “to limit the [global] temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

The history on all this goes back a long way, to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where 108 heads of state and government laid the groundwork for what they hoped would be sustainable environmental development. That meeting outlined the UNFCCC and the Convention on Biological Diversity, and it began the discussions that led to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), proposals that were designed to address the interconnected concerns of what has been described as a “triple planetary crisis” of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. These agreements did not represent the end of the fight for sustainability, but rather the beginning of processes that would seek the formal ratification of treaties and the international buy-in to implement them. In the wake of the Paris Agreement and the work that extended from it, progress on climate change would grab headlines for many years. But now the headlines announce, as The New York Times did on February 9 of this year, “Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation.”

While many climate activists despair at how Trump and his international allies are stymieing serious responses to the climate crisis, the Campaign for Nature and its allies have had considerable, if far from complete, success in pursuing the GBF’s global target.

The campaign was founded in 2018 in partnership with the Wyss Campaign for Nature, a $1.5 billion conservation project under the umbrella of the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss’s eponymous foundation. (Wyss is one of the world’s most prolific donors to environmental causes.) The Campaign for Nature has focused squarely on efforts to get world leaders to support and fund the “30 by 30” goal—an ambitious target at a time when only 16 percent of the world’s land and 8 percent of its seas are under formal protection. It has also emphasized the importance of including Indigenous peoples and local communities in these initiatives, a longtime concern of Feingold’s. The campaign’s organizers and allies are not naïve. “If we are to meet the 30 by 30 goal,” the group explains on its website, “world leaders need to dramatically increase and expand protected and conserved areas, ramp up funding and ensure the full inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in conservation measures in order to protect the natural world.”

And yet they must continue to advance toward the goal by attracting support not just from more historically progressive nations with records of leading on environmental issues but from countries that—even if they do not embrace Trump’s most extreme stances—have been uneven in their commitment to address the climate crisis.

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How can the cause of nature be advanced at a time when efforts to address interconnected environmental crises are being so aggressively blocked by right-wing politicians and fossil-fuel-industry apologists? “Somehow nature still has not become a dirty word, believe it or not,” Feingold told me. “They managed to turn climate into a dirty word. And, of course, they are interrelated, and they are both essential. But there is an interesting way in which a lot of people feel comfortable working on the nature issue who may be edgy about the climate issues. So our goal is to link the two.”

To that end, Feingold is doing what he used to do in the Senate, where he became well-known for his rapprochement with conservatives despite his progressive bona fides. Capitalizing on the fact that “nature is still something that crosses not just party lines but ideological lines,” Feingold leads a steering committee that includes progressives such as former Irish president Mary Robinson along with Iván Duque, who served as the president of Colombia from 2018 to 2022 and whom Feingold rightly describes as “very conservative.” Malcolm Turnbull, the former prime minister of Australia, is another, moderately conservative member of the committee, along with Lord Zac Goldsmith, who served in the cabinets of British Conservative Party governments led by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak—not exactly the credentials of a “woke” internationalist.

Feingold has worked with the Campaign for Nature since 2019, but he stepped up his involvement, and his global travels, after leaving his previous position as president of the American Constitution Society (a progressive counterpart to the Federalist Society) in the spring of 2025. As a roving ambassador for the campaign over the past year, he has maintained a grueling schedule of meetings with world leaders to persuade them to sign on to the efforts to achieve the GBF’s 30-by-30 goal. And it’s working.

At a moment when Trump has shocked world leaders with talk of grabbing Greenland and annexing Canada as part of his scheming to dominate mineral-rich lands and the Arctic waters adjoining them, Feingold and his allies are working to ratify and sustain an agreement that could “counter, potentially, what Trump wants to do in terms of scooping up the oceans.”

That agreement, known as the High Seas Treaty, outlines a groundbreaking strategy to protect ocean life in international waters. The plan was finalized under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea by an intergovernmental conference at the UN in 2023. It was part of a broader global effort to protect marine biodiversity and maintain the integrity of ocean ecosystems in an era of overfishing, climate change, and ever-expanding resource demands. Greenpeace hailed the initiative as “the biggest conservation victory ever.” But to seal the deal, the treaty needed to be formally ratified by 60 countries in order to come into force. The process moved slowly, and by February 2025, only 18 of the 60 countries required had signed on.

That’s where Feingold and his colleagues on the global steering committee stepped up, along with other members of the High Seas Alliance, an international coalition of environmental groups (including Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Defense Fund) that focuses on protecting what it calls “the 50 percent of the planet that is the High Seas—the global ocean beyond national jurisdiction.”

The former senator traveled exhaustively to capitals and conferences around the world in 2025, visiting South Korea, Singapore, Guyana, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and other locales. It was an exercise in international diplomacy that was designed to jump-start the work of getting governments to sign on. In country after country, on continent after continent, his simple yet direct message was “OK, let’s get this thing ratified.”

Feingold goes out of his way to emphasize that he was part of a broader initiative, one that relied on the many networks built over many years by conservation and environmental groups. Unlike other political figures, he does not suggest that he was the only force for progress. Yet he brought something powerful to his conversations with the elected and appointed officials who needed to be brought on board. He wasn’t meeting with them as an environmental expert or a scientist, but as a former legislator and diplomat who spoke the language of geopolitics and used humor and even references to the historical and cultural ties between particular countries and his home state of Wisconsin to build relationships. At the heart of every conversation, though, was an emphasis on how essential the treaty was to those countries whose support was needed to ratify it: “Two-thirds of the surface of the earth wasn’t regulated at all by international law. There was no treaty. There was the Law of the Sea, which we [the United States] are not a party to, unbelievably, but that really only has to do with extraterritorial waters around the country, about 200 miles.”

Feingold brought this sense of urgency to every one of his meetings with environmental and finance ministers, spelling out how, after two decades of negotiations and piecemeal progress, it was time to get cracking. “And sure enough, we went from 21 countries ratified when I went to Korea [in the spring of 2025] to getting to the 60 needed to ratify [the treaty] at [the UN General Assembly] in September.”

Four months later, on January 17, in what UN Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed as a “historic achievement for the ocean and for multilateralism,” the High Seas Treaty became a legally binding international agreement. When Feingold and I spoke a few days later, he was enthusiastic about the news that the treaty had gone into force. But he was not taking a victory lap. In fact, he was headed for New Zealand and Australia—still working, with his allies in the Campaign for Nature and the High Seas Alliance, to broaden the international coalition. “In the last few months,” he said, “we’ve been working together and managed to get up to 83 countries, and we think we can get to over 100 before the first conference of the parties, COP. It’ll be COP1 for the High Seas Treaty.”

Getting broad buy-in for the treaty, and for other components of the GBF, is vital, Feingold adds, pointing to the need for increased financing to support the GBF’s ambitious targets—which include mobilizing at least $30 billion annually for developing countries by 2030. These efforts need to accelerate because, as Tom Dillon, the senior vice president for environment and crosscutting initiatives at the Pew Charitable Trusts, explains, “Achieving the global 30-by-30 goal requires not just ambition but equally bold investment in nature.”

The United States is unlikely to help with the financing or to ratify the High Seas Treaty anytime soon. But many countries whose leaders have often allied with Trump, such as Hungary and the Philippines, have signed on, which Feingold sees as a critical accomplishment.

After all, he knows a thing or two about unexpected political and policy breakthroughs. Feingold made a name for himself during three terms in the Senate as the rare politician who understood how to overcome partisan and ideological divisions. Born into a progressive Wisconsin family, the Rhodes Scholar and Harvard-educated lawyer was elected to the state Legislature at age 29. Ten years later, he defeated an incumbent Republican to win a US Senate seat in 1992. Over the next 18 years, he developed a reputation as an ardent defender of civil liberties (he was the only senator to oppose the Patriot Act in the days following the September 11 attacks) and a stickler for ethics. Often regarded as a maverick, Feingold formed a cross-party alliance with the Arizona Republican Senator John McCain in the 1990s and led a national movement to regulate money in politics that culminated in the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (better known as the McCain-Feingold Act).

As his efforts to reach across the aisle grabbed headlines, Feingold gained a reputation within the chamber, and among environmental groups, as a champion for clean air, clean water, and conservation who was determined to take on the fossil-fuel industry. Proud to hold the seat once occupied by Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, Feingold brought Nelson’s conservation ethic into the 21st century. He took a leading role in Senate efforts to prevent oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness and championed the protection of pristine regions in the Lower 48, such as Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands, and Utah’s wilderness. Feingold eventually organized the Senate Wilderness and Public Lands Caucus, drawing both Democrats and Republicans into the conservation fight—often appealing to senators based on their personal and regional attachment to endangered lands. “I’ve had the good fortune to sea kayak the Apostle Islands, to canoe the Boundary Waters, and to hike in Utah wilderness,” he once told Grist magazine. “My interest was always there.” And as his work as a legislator and a diplomat took him to more remarkable natural places, Feingold recalled in our own conversation, nature “became an enormous passion for me. I always think of that line in [John Denver’s] ‘Rocky Mountain High’: ‘He was born in the summer of his 27th year, comin’ home to a place he’d never been before.’ And that’s what it felt like—it felt like home, but I had not been there. And to me, it’s about the most positive thing you could be doing right now at this very, very horrible time. So it does fit in with what I consider to be some of the favorite parts of my career that I was lucky enough to have.” It also gave him a perspective on how to build unexpected alliances with his more conservative colleagues, at least some of whom shared his passion for protecting these places. That’s a lesson he would eventually carry into his work with the Campaign for Nature.

After Feingold lost his bid for reelection to the Senate in 2010, he went on to teach and lecture on law at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, serving for a time as a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and for five years as president of the American Constitution Society. But it was Feingold’s diplomatic service that drew the attention of the Campaign for Nature. Then–Secretary of State John Kerry, who had noticed Feingold’s work on the African-affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee while he was in the Senate, tapped the Wisconsinite to serve as US special envoy for the Great Lakes region of Africa during the later years of Barack Obama’s presidency. The connections Feingold made on the continent interested strategists looking to forge genuinely global and grassroots-focused networks for the protection of unspoiled wilderness and oceans.

“It was a combination of having had a high profile in Africa as a senator and then doing this work as an envoy,” Feingold says. “And that’s why this Campaign for Nature contacted me, because they said, ‘OK, we don’t really know enough people in Africa. We understand you can help us.’ So the first thing I did was get them through to people like [former president] Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and [former president Oluṣẹgun] Ọbasanjọ of Nigeria and [former prime minister] Hailemariam [Desalegn] of Ethiopia. It started with me trying to help get those folks on board. And that worked out. And then they asked me to do a more global assignment, which is what I’ve been doing ever since, and it’s what I’m doing now.”

Brian O’Donnell, who previously worked with the Wilderness Society and the Conservation Lands Fund and now serves as the director of the Campaign for Nature, says, “Russ has made a real difference in helping us broaden our reach and message beyond scientists and environmental advocates to the decision makers who can make land and water protection a reality.”

That will be even more important in the months and years to come, as Fein- 
gold works to get more countries to ratify and support agreements. Noting that “much of the world’s remaining biodiversity is located in developing countries who will bear a disproportionate share of the responsibility and costs of saving precious biomes,” the Campaign for Nature is pushing developed countries to contribute “their fair share of an internationally agreed commitment to provide $20 billion per year in biodiversity finance to developing countries.”

As Mary Robinson, Feingold’s colleague on the steering committee, has said, “The world is already spending $1.8 trillion each year on subsidizing industries that are destroying nature. The pledge of $20 billion a year is equivalent to only 1.1 percent, or about four days, of those subsidies. Wealthy governments have no excuse but to act with greater urgency.”

Feingold shares this view, even as he recognizes that the United States is very much on the sidelines at this point. He maintains contact with many current and former US officials, such as Kerry and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who are enthusiastic supporters of environmental causes. But he knows that’s not where the powers that be in Washington are currently at; he acknowledges that getting US buy-in for nature or the climate is “still obviously a great struggle.” At the same time, he holds out hope that progress on the international front—and perhaps US election results—could influence even some Republicans to come to the “commonsensical” conclusion that Trump’s approach is not just shortsighted but isolating—and dangerous—for the United States.

“I’m not a scientist [or a] leading environmentalist. But what I do know how to do is connect people [despite their] different philosophies—especially when they come together on something like nature,” Feingold says. “Pope Francis had an encyclical—Laudato si’—10 years ago, where he referred to nature and the planet as our common home. And that’s sort of my byword for this work: I’m appealing to people of all kinds who think of this as our common home.”

Chicago—The most compelling message to be delivered during last week’s memorial services for the late Rev. Jesse Jackson came from the firstborn son of the veteran civil rights leader, who ushered in a new era of American politics with his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns.

During two remarkable days of eulogies, prayers and gospel music—beginning with Friday’s “People’s Celebration” at the 10,000-seat arena of the House of Hope church on Chicago’s South Side, and concluding with a more intimate gathering on Saturday at the headquarters of Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition—crowds listened to extensive remarks by former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, heard heartfelt reflections from pastors who had preached with the reverend for decades, and greeted visionary statements from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and international leaders such as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with warm and sustained applause. Yet it was former representative Jesse Jackson Jr. who went to a deeper place and captured his father’s legacy with a message that will linger.

Jackson Jr. recognized the full scope and character of his father’s mission as the country preacher who brought “a consistent prophetic voice” to struggles for economic, social, racial justice, and peace, over the course of more than six decades in the public eye. In a pair of addresses that were deeply rooted in his own Christian faith, and in his sense of urgency regarding the challenges facing forgotten people in both the United States and places such as Gaza, the younger Jackson spoke of his father as a transformative figure not merely in politics but in the daily lives of the Rainbow Coalition of humanity that he sought to raise up.

“He took the ministry from Sunday morning, and he delivered it to the people,” Jackson Jr. said of his father, a Baptist minister who urged millions of disenchanted and disenfranchised Americans to recognize that “I am somebody!”

“‘I am somebody’-ness is what Jesse Jackson is known for, not the ‘84 and ‘88 campaign and voter registration,” he said on Friday. “Jesse Jackson’s greatest contribution is not political. It is psychological.”

To illustrate the profound psychological impact of his father’s “Keep Hope Alive!” ministry, Jesse Jackson Jr. recalled the writings of philosopher and theologian Howard Thurman about his life in the segregated South of the early 20th century. The great thinker’s autobiography, With Head and Heart, is dedicated to an older Black man in overalls who encountered the young Thurman in a moment of desperation at a Southern train station. Thurman had been told that he needed a second ticket, which he could not afford, to bring along a case filled with his belongings—“the broken pieces of his life”—on the journey that was supposed to take him from Jim Crow Florida toward all the possibilities that extended from higher education. The older man pulled coins from his own pocket, bought the second ticket, and sent Thurman off to college and a distinguished career as a minister, academic, and author who profoundly influenced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the civil rights movement. The theologian never got the man’s name, so his dedication read, “To the stranger in the railroad station in Daytona Beach, who restored my broken dream 65 years ago.”

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For millions of Americans, and millions more around the world, said Jackson Jr., “the stranger came in the form and in the embodiment of Jesse Jackson…who restored our hope and changed the trajectory of our lives.”

That was a beautiful statement.

But the younger Jackson, who spoke movingly on Saturday about his own struggles in life, including health challenges and a federal investigation that derailed his political career and led to his incarceration over a decade ago, did not stop there.

Even as he is mounting a strong campaign to return to Congress–in a March 17 Democratic primary for his old Second Congressional District representing Chicago’s South Side and suburban and rural communities that extend beyond it—Jackson Jr. rejected the politically cautious path. Instead, he recalled how his father had pressured presidents and senators, CEOs and billionaires, to do more for the people, at home and abroad, who did not share the power and wealth of the elites.

“To the political class that took up most of his time, Dad was a stranger awaiting a return phone call, reminding the political class of the urgency of the hour. That’s who my daddy was,” the younger Jackson said on Friday. “To the economic class…on Wall Street…he was the stranger.”

On Saturday, Jesse Jackson Jr. was even blunter.

While he gave warm and appropriate praise to a brilliant reflection on the life and legacy of their father by his younger brother, US Representative Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), Jackson Jr. offered a sharper review of the long-winded remarks from the former presidents who had spoken the day before.

“Yesterday I listened for several hours of three United States presidents who do not know Jesse Jackson,” he said, to knowing applause from the hundreds of civil rights movement veterans and Rainbow Coalition allies of the reverend who had gathered at the Rainbow Push headquarters. Speaking of his father, Jackson Jr. added, “He maintained a tense relationship with the political order, not because the presidents were white or Black, but the demands of our message, the demands of speaking for the least of these—those who are disinherited, the damned, the dispossessed, the disrespected—demanded not Democratic or Republican solutions, but demanded a consistent, prophetic voice that at no point in time sold us out as a people.”

That was not a narrow, politically calculated statement. Rather, it was a broad declaration of human truths—the truths that the Rev. Jesse Jackson made central to a long and generous mission that uplifted the lives of those who needed him most.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson never stopped campaigning. Even in the last years of his life, when he was suffering from the progressive neurological disorder that slowed his steps and his speech before his death on February 17, at age 84, the reverend kept calling his Rainbow PUSH Coalition together for one more mission, one more crusade for justice. He did so with an urgency that belied his condition and drew old allies and young protégés into fights that were righteous and necessary and, frequently, prescient.

Such was the case in January of 2024, at a point when few political figures were prepared to call out the Israeli assault on Gaza that has now claimed more than 75,000 Palestinian lives and has been identified as a genocide by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. In the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israeli kibbutzim and a music festival, there was a tentativeness to the discourse about how to break the cycle of violence. Yet here was Jesse Jackson, on a frigid morning after a winter storm swept through Chicago, pulling together Muslims, Christians, and Jews, grassroots activists and faith leaders, scholars and members of Congress, to pursue “immediate action to bring an end to the crisis,” preaching about the need to “build upon the historical legacy and current global movements for peace, justice, and liberation.”

His voice may have been halting, but it still rang out with moral clarity, as it had for the better part of 70 years, from the days when Jackson was an essential aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to when this son of South Carolina built street-level movements to tackle poverty and corruption in his adopted city of Chicago, began to travel the world as a strikingly successful citizen-diplomat, and, eventually, ran twice for the presidency as the leader of a multiracial, multiethnic “rainbow” insurgency that would forever transform the Democratic Party—clearing the way for the candidacies of Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and so many others who were inspired by his courage.

The Nation was one of the few publications that endorsed Jackson’s 1988 campaign, embracing his offer of “hope against cynicism, power against prejudice and solidarity against division.”

“The Jackson campaign is not a single shot at higher office by an already elevated politician,” the editors wrote. “Rather, it is a continuing, expanding, open-ended project to organize a movement for the political empowerment of all those who participate.”

The reverend appreciated that description of his campaign as more than just a candidacy, even if the Democratic Party struggled to wrap its head around the concept. After he delivered one of the greatest addresses in the history of American politics at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Jackson’s formal bids for the presidency were done. Yet as his longtime aide Robert Borosage observes, “His greatest legacy is that the mission, strategy, message, and agenda of those [1984 and 1988] campaigns remain directly relevant four decades later.”

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That didn’t just happen. Jackson kept that vision relevant by mounting new campaigns—not for high office, but for higher ideals. To a greater extent than even his friend and longtime supporter Bernie Sanders, Jackson leveraged the status he’d earned as a contender for the presidency to champion causes on which presidents (and most candidates for the job) were unwilling to spend their political capital. He raced across the country at a moment’s notice to join union picket lines, stood with farmers to save their homesteads, and rallied with Black Americans who knew the civil-rights struggle was unfinished, with women seeking gender equity, with LGBTQ+ couples who wanted to marry, with peace advocates in the far and forgotten corners of the world, and with Palestinians who sought a homeland.

When Jesse Jackson looked at America—and at the world—he saw a gorgeous mosaic of humanity. He wanted the rest of us to see it as well. So he kept campaigning for the day when the storms of cynicism, prejudice, and division would begin to pass, and we might all recognize the promise and the power of the Rainbow.

On Saturday morning, after President Trump launched an unnecessary, unauthorized, and unconstitutional attack on Iran, US Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie did their jobs as members of Congress.

The California Democrat and the Kentucky Republican had already cosponsored a War Powers Act resolution in hopes of thwarting a rush to war with Iran. Now the war was on. Bombs were dropping, missiles flying, and people dying. So the bipartisan team demanded that Congress step up. Khanna immediately announced, “Trump has launched an illegal regime change war in Iran with American lives at risk. Congress must convene on Monday to vote on US Rep. Thomas Massie[’s] & my [War Powers Resolution] to stop this.”

Seeking to force a congressional debate about the war—as Khanna and Massie are doing in the House, and as Tim Kaine (D-VA) has proposed in the Senate—is a vital first step in pushing back against Trump.

It won’t be easy. Despite a notable level of congressional opposition to Trump’s new war, efforts to establish even the most basic counterbalances to presidential war making will face overwhelming odds. House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who serves as Trump’s enforcer in the chamber, will do everything in his power to thwart any meaningful effort to renew the constitutionally mandated role of Congress as the arbiter of matters of war and peace. The same goes for the president.

Yet that does not change the fact that Khanna, Massie, and Kaine are doing their constitutional duty.

Like all members of the House, Khanna and Massie took office only after swearing oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” By reasserting the role of Congress as a check and balance on presidential war making, they are honoring that oath.

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The question at this point is whether a sufficient number of House members, and their Senate colleagues, will join them and use their authority under the Constitution to object to Trump’s open-ended attack before it metastasizes into a broader war that could engulf the Middle East.

Even as apologists for executive overreach in general—and this president in particular—spin their self-serving arguments regarding war powers, the constitutional primacy of Congress when it comes to war and peace is not up for debate. Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution plainly reads, “The Congress shall have Power…to declare War.”

No mention is made of the president in that essential statement by the initiators of the American experiment. And in case you need even more evidence that this is what the drafters of the Constitution intended, just look at the notes from the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

Roger Sherman, a delegate from Connecticut, moved to establish that nothing in their exposition of the powers of the executive branch of the federal government they were establishing should be conceived as authorizing the president to “make war.”

“The executive should be able to repel and not to commence war,” explained Sherman. The resolution was resoundingly approved by the convention.

Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson confirmed that assessment, explaining, “This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress.”

That should have settled it: An executive might assume the mantle of commander in chief, but only to defend the country; never to wage a kingly war of whim—as Trump has done in Iran.

But what of the War Powers Act of 1973? Tortured readings of the act by successive Democratic and Republican administrations have tried to suggest that the measure gives presidents flexibility with regard to war-making. But that flexibility is explicitly limited. According to an assessment of the act by the Congressional Research Service, “the powers of the President as Commander in Chief to introduce US Armed Forces into hostilities are limited, ‘exercised only pursuant to’ a declaration of war or other specific statutory authorization from Congress, or a ‘national emergency created by attack on’ the United States or its Armed Forces.”

It’s stating the obvious to say that Trump’s war on Iran does not meet these criteria. When announcing the attack, Trump claimed, “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.” But instead of discussing “imminent threats,” he recalled complaints that were, in some cases, decades old.

As CNN explained, “The US and Israel launched this attack without obvious provocation.” Even after the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was confirmed on Saturday, the president was still struggling to articulate a mission statement.

So where does that leave us? When asked by Time magazine to explain whether Trump’s strikes on Iran were legally justified, David Janovsky, of the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, answered,

The short answer is no. There’s no indication that there’s any sort of circumstance that would give the President the unilateral authority to order military action. It’s true that presidents have some inherent authority to deploy the military as Commander in Chief, but that’s really limited to true emergency circumstances where there is an attack underway that needs to be repelled, or maybe an extremely clear imminent attack. But there’s no suggestion that that’s the case today—that would make the strikes illegal.

Bottom line: This is an illegitimate and illegal war in which Iranian civilians—many of them schoolchildren—and US troops have already been killed, and in which more deaths are tragically predictable.

“There’s nothing in the Constitution that authorizes the president to do this,” Massie says of Trump’s war. “If we’re going to put lives at risk, we need to say what the boundaries are for the engagement and what success looks like so that they can come home when it’s over, when we’ve reached our objectives.”

That is the sworn duty of Congress.

Speaker Johnson may refuse to recognize that fact. So, too, may Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD).

But Massie is right when he says, “This is not our war. Even if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution.”

President Donald Trump will deliver his annual State of the Union address Tuesday night, and the vast majority of Americans already know how it will go, because we’ve seen it all, and heard it all, before. Trump will try to stick to his script. He will fail. He will say outrageous, irresponsible, and dangerous things. He will drive even more wedges of division into a nation that is already divided because of his decade-long assault on the basic premises of the American experiment. The only real question is how quickly and how completely the speech will go off the rails. 

What may distinguish this year’s address is the desperation Trump feels about how dramatically his approval ratings have tanked. A new American Research Group survey finds 62 percent of voters disapprove of how he is handling his job. A new CNN/SSRS poll puts the disapproval number at 63 percent. If that weren’t enough, results from special elections across the country suggest that independent voters are swinging toward Democratic candidates. Stock markets are in turmoil. Americans are in open revolt against the data centers that are the most easily targeted face of the tech-bro AI grift that the White House has so enthusiastically endorsed. International relations are in crisis, and wars that the people absolutely do not want appear to be looming on Trump’s horizon. And then there’s the devastating blow that the normally Trump-friendly Supreme Court dealt to the tariffs at the heart of the president’s miserable excuse for an economic plan.

Amid all of this turmoil and decline, Americans could be excused for looking away from the State of the Union. But this is not a time for apathy. This is a time for clarity, and US Representative Summer Lee (D-PA) intends to provide it.

In one of several responses to the SOTU address—including an official Democratic rebuttal from newly elected Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger—Lee says she plans to use her remarks on behalf of the Working Families Party to go to the heart of the matters facing this country.

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Well aware of the violent chaos that resulted from the administration’s decision to surge masked and armed ICE agents into Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities, and equally aware of threats from the administration and its allies to employ even more chaotic strategies as the 2026 election season proceeds, Lee, a progressive member of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Committee on Education and the Workforce, says that mounting concerns about Trump’s autocratic approach “can’t go unaddressed because we are in a moment of authoritarianism.”

“I think that the way some of our American exceptionalism works, it kind of shields us from really reconciling with what we’re actually dealing with in real time,” says Lee. “I think that there are still a lot of people here [in Washington], a lot of people in our governing bodies, who are hesitant to acknowledge this moment—to acknowledge his governance as an act of authoritarianism, which it is. I think that any response to Trump, any response to the state of the nation that doesn’t acknowledge this, falls short. It does a disservice to Americans who deserve honesty right now.”

Lee relishes the chance to deliver that honesty in her speech. “I think we can all agree that these are really scary times,” she says. “Even before we get to what ICE has been doing in Chicago and Minnesota, the things that [Trump] has been doing are scary to those who have paid attention.” She points to “The cuts at the NIH.… The cuts to USAID, at a time where diplomacy is so important. What does it mean for the United States to no longer have allies who trust our nation? Really, all those things have created a dangerous situation for the United States, and that’s before we even get into the physical acts of violence that he’s inflicted on Americans, on people who are who have come to America to seek refuge. So, yes, absolutely, absolutely we have to address it.”

But Democratic elected officials cannot just discuss the crisis once a year, on the night of the State of the Union, says Lee. “Those of us who are in office, who are in Congress, the statehouses, we have to address that every single day because, if we’re ignoring what we’re dealing with, then how can we actually counter it? How can we navigate our country through it?”

That’s one of the reasons the Pennsylvanian — who on Tuesday night will also attend a People’s State of the Union event featuring almost two dozen fellow Democratic members of Congress—is excited to be speaking for the Working Families Party. The WFP works closely with many Democrats, but it is also aligned with unions and grassroots movements that seek to pull the party to the left.

Lee likes the determination with which the WFP raises issues that challenge both parties, along with the emphasis it places on striving for economic, social, and racial justice.

“Whatever it is that Trump is going to say about the State of the Union, it is going to be filled with disinformation. It is going to be delusional in the sense that it is not going to take into account what the lived realities are for so many people in this country—just like his policies,” says Lee. “I think that people right now are looking for [representatives] who can call it what it is, who are going to be clear and articulating what we actually want to see —what direction we want to see our country going in—and I think that this is a good opportunity to do that, to state it plainly.”

Lee will be speaking amid great concern about Trump’s talk of attacking Iran. She is prepared to declare that “the president, the executive branch, does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally declare war. That is still reserved to the Congress.” She is equally unequivocal in warning about the threat Trump and his allies pose to democracy.

“When Donald Trump says something, I believe him,” says Lee. “He’s always been stress-testing the system—seeing what he can get away with. And in the earlier days…he was stepping a toe over the line in a way that was maybe not as egregious. But every single time he’s done it, he’s doing it to see how far he can actually push the line, until you can’t see that line anymore.”

Lee will be calling out Trump on Tuesday night. But she argues that the threats we face extend beyond one man. The president has exposed flaws in the system, says Lee, who reminds us, “When you can see the fissures in your democracy, your democracy is already failing.”

To address that vulnerability, says Lee, there must be a “stronger opposition” that is prepared to absolutely defend democracy, to boldly oppose wars and speak truth to power in a louder and clearer voice. Tonight, that is precisely what Summer Lee is prepared to do.

Readers can view Lee’s response to Trump here.

Almost a quarter of a century ago, in the second year of George W. Bush’s miserable presidency, a campaign was launched to draft Bruce Springsteen as a candidate for one of New Jersey’s US Senate seats. Polls showed that Springsteen would be a viable contender, and volunteers were ready to circulate the petitions, put his name on the ballot and send the Boss to Washington.

But the musician thwarted the drive, announcing, “If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.”

That ended the 2002 bid to draw the Boss into electoral politics. But Springsteen did not relegate himself to the political sidelines. He’s since been one of the highest-profile advocates for Democratic presidential candidates, from John Kerry to Barack Obama to Kamala Harris. And Springsteen’s songs in recent decades have maintained his career-long commitment to address the fundamental issues of our times, with impassioned lyrics about everything from the failed response to Hurricane Katrina (“We Take Care of Our Own”) to the economic pain that extends from after deindustrialization (“Death to My Hometown”).

Donald Trump’s second presidential term has made Springsteen more outspoken than ever—and given his interventions a new urgency. He has often emerged as a more clear-eyed and impactful critic of the president’s dangerous abuses of power than the Democratic Party leaders who are supposed to be running an opposition party.

Now the rocker is hitting the road for the Land of Hopes and Dreams American Tour, which is likely to be the most politically charged show of his 50-plus-year career.

Even if Springsteen was saying nothing about the purpose of the tour he will launch on March 31, the schedule sends an explicit message. The tour kicks off in Minneapolis, where a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed poet and mother Renee Good before Customs and Border Protection agents gunned down intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. (Springsteen responded in January to the deadly violence of ICE’s surge into Minnesota with the bestselling song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” which is all but certain to feature in his shows.) The tour’s next stops will be in Portland and Los Angeles, two other communities that have been targeted by surges of armed and masked agents from Secretary Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security.

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But Springsteen is saying something. Leaning against a parked car in a video released this week, Springsteen announced the tour with a full-throated call to action:

“Brothers and sisters, fans, friends and good folk from coast to coast. We are living through dark, disturbing and dangerous times, but do not despair—the cavalry is coming! Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will be taking the stage this spring from Minneapolis to California to Texas to Washington, DC, for the Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour. We will be rocking your town in celebration and in defense of America—American democracy, American freedom, our American Constitution, and our sacred American dream—all of which are under attack by our wannabe king and his rogue government in Washington, DC. Everyone, regardless of where you stand or what you believe in, is welcome—so come on out and join the United Free Republic of E Street Nation for an American spring of Rock ’n’ Rebellion! I’ll see you there!”

Springsteen has long written about the anguish and abandonment of Americans in hard times, once explaining, “There ain’t no help, the cavalry stayed home. There ain’t no one hearing the bugle blown.
We take care of our own…” But this time he says, “Do not despair, the cavalry is coming!”—and he’s leading it all the way to Washington, where the tour will finish on May 27 with a huge outdoor concert at Nationals Park.

That doesn’t sit well with the Trump White House, which issued a statement suggesting that the tour by “this loser Springsteen” would go nowhere. But Springsteen fans who know a thing or two about politics were secure in their faith that the Boss will draw a crowd—for his music, and his politics.

Predicting that Springsteen would bring “a Rock-and-Roll Exorcism to Washington, D.C.,” US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said, “America has no kings, but we’ve got one Boss and his name is Bruce Springsteen. Unlike our faux-King, the Boss fights for freedom and democracy for everyone. I cannot wait to hear him sing ‘Streets of Minneapolis’ loud enough to rattle the walls of what’s left of the White House.”

US Representative Bob Menendez, a Democrat who represents Springsteen’s native New Jersey, simply announced, “An American spring of Rock ‘n’ Rebellion is what the country needs in this moment and I am here for it. “

The Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr., the iconic champion of racial, economic, and social justice whose work as a young aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began a public life that would eventually see him mount a pair of transformative presidential bids, died Tuesday morning at age 84.

Jackson’s legacy is so rich, and extends across so many generations and struggles, that it cannot be contained in one reflection. He was, as the Rev. Al Sharpton said Tuesday, “a movement unto himself.”

Over seven decades in the public arena, Jackson emerged as one of the most multifaceted figures in American history: a legendary civil rights leader, a knowing and caring defender of the disenfranchised, a vital advocate for voting rights and voter mobilization, a savvy media critic who recognized the importance of challenging narratives that promoted discrimination and division, an essential ally of labor unions, a reformer of the Democratic Party, a friend to struggling family farmers and urban workers alike, and a counselor to presidents and prime ministers. He was, as well, a man of deep faith, who expressed that faith in his ardent advocacy for peace.

That dedication to peace was central to both his 1984 and 1988 presidential bids, a fact that is too frequently neglected in cursory reflections on those seismic Rainbow Coalition campaigns.

Political historians recognize Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy as the great anti–Vietnam War candidates of the 1968 presidential campaign. George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, is often recalled as the most ardent foe of a US military intervention to be nominated by a major American political party since Democrats ran William Jennings Bryan in 1900. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean and former Ohio representative Dennis Kucinich are remembered for seeking the Democratic presidential nod in 2004 as sharp critics of the Iraq War. Barack Obama’s prescient opposition to the Bush-Cheney administration’s war of choice, which he voiced as early as 2002, did much to advance his successful bid for the presidency in 2008. And Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, whose 2020 presidential bid Jackson supported, reframed foreign policy debates by explicitly rejecting the elite consensus about the US role in the Middle East and so many other parts of the world.

Jackson’s two 1980s campaigns deserve a key place in this proud history—both because they were uniquely dynamic and because they had a profound and lasting impact on progressive thinking about foreign policy. That’s one of the many reasons, when veterans of the Jackson campaigns got together, we often reflected on this too-frequently-neglected aspect of his political legacy. His was a powerful and transformative message that resonates to this day.

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The campaigns are often recalled for their groundbreaking advocacy on behalf of economic, social, and racial justice at home, but Jackson also outlined what was then a fresh foreign policy vision, rooted in what has come to be known as progressive internationalism. He advanced a comprehensive—and morally coherent—argument for shifting American foreign policy away from military interventionism, nuclear brinksmanship, and Cold War posturing and toward diplomacy, cooperation, and dramatically reduced Pentagon spending.

Jackson understood precisely what was at stake, and he declared in a voice so resonant that it inspired a new generation of activists, “Peace is worth the risk!”

And he was taking a risk. It is important to recall how—as Ronald Reagan was ramping up the Cold War around the world and pouring US resources into heated conflicts in El Salvador and on the border of Nicaragua—Jackson boldly broke not just with the Republican president but also with many Democrats to make opposition to war a focal point of his bid.

After it was revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had mined three harbors in Central America, as part of an effort to destabilize the country’s left-wing government, Jackson declared in April 1984 that “the undeclared war against the people of Nicaragua…must be stopped.” In addition to criticizing the Reagan administration and the CIA, Jackson took issue with Walter Mondale and Gary Hart, the front-runners for the Democratic nomination that year, for failing to clearly deliver a message that the US must “stop our funding of terror in Nicaragua and El Salvador now and to withdraw all our troops from Central America.”

“It is not enough for Walter Mondale to call mining the harbors a clumsy and ill-conceived act,” argued Jackson. “It is not enough to imply that the main problem was not informing Congress adequately. Our foreign policy in Central America is wrong. We are standing on the wrong side of history. We are engaged in killing people, and starving people who are trying to work out their own destiny.”

Jackson’s 1984 Rainbow Coalition campaign shocked pundits by winning primaries and caucuses in key states, and by collecting roughly 20 percent of the Democratic primary vote. Jackson also made a historic trip to Central America and the Caribbean, where he met with regional leaders—including Cuban President Fidel Castro—and warned, “The signs of war are rising. We see the military buildup throughout the region. We see the United States taking sides instead of helping to reconcile the conflict. We cannot allow another Vietnam.”

The bitter legacy of the Vietnam War, which Jackson had opposed as a young aide to Dr. King, weighed heavily on his mind during the 1984 campaign. At the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, Jackson delivered a renowned, electrifying speech, in which he recalled,

Twenty years ago, our young people were dying in a war for which they could not even vote. Twenty years later, young America has the power to stop a war in Central America and the responsibility to vote in great numbers. Young America must be politically active in 1984. The choice is war or peace.

Jackson’s focus in 1984 and in 1988 extended beyond concerns about the “dirty wars” in Central America. He campaigned as an outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament, embracing the “nuclear freeze” movement to halt the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union. He called for a rethinking of US military and economic alliances in order to advance democracy and human rights, argued for an end to US aid to the violent apartheid regime in South Africa, and proposed a new approach to Middle East relations that respected the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians.

As a 42-year-old first-time candidate in the fall of 1983, Jackson met with Arab Americans, urged the US to use diplomacy so that the Middle East would no longer be a ”flashpoint for both hot and cold war,” and said that any path to peace had to include a ”homeland and a state for Palestine.”

”It is a tragedy to see the lack of talk and dialogue in the Middle East, but it is even worse not to see it here,” said Jackson. ”The first step for peace in the Middle East is for black Americans, Arab-Americans and Jewish-Americans to start talking here.”

A young James Zogby, then the director of the Arab-American Antidiscrimination Committee, cheered Jackson’s inclusion of Palestinian rights in his campaign platform. ”He challenged us on 50 issues and not just one,” said Zogby, who would go on to place Jackson’s name in nomination at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. ”He respected us as Arab-Americans and didn’t pander to us. This is the first time ever that a presidential candidate has come before an Arab-American audience, and we don’t feel disenfranchised anymore.”

At the end of 1983, Jackson traveled to the Middle East and visited the Jaramana refugee camp in Syria, where on New Year’s Day in 1984, he told a group of Palestinian children, “Keep your dreams high. Don’t let anyone break your spirit. You’ll be free one day.” It was on that same journey that he secured the release of US Navy airman Lt. Robert Goodman, whose plane had been shot down over Lebanon and who had been captured and held by Syrian forces.

Jackson remained actively engaged with Middle East peace issues through the rest of his life. Among the memorials posted on Tuesday was one from former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who wrote, “It was an honor to march alongside him against the Iraq War in 2003. May his legacy inspire us to strive for a world of dignity and peace for all.” More than two decades later, one of an ailing Jackson’s last great initiatives was an emergency conference—held at the headquarters of the Rainbow-Push Coalition in Chicago in early 2024—to demand a ceasefire in Gaza.

Jackson’s faith in diplomacy and negotiation was part of a broader commitment to creating the circumstances for peace to thrive. Just like his mentor King, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient who linked his nonviolent civil rights activism in the US to the global anti-war movement—and who took his own huge risk for peace by standing against the Vietnam War—Jackson recognized the political courage that was required to advance that commitment.

As a presidential candidate, he showed that courage by talking about cutting as much as 25 percent from the Pentagon budget. In response to critics who claimed his ideas were too radical, Jackson told New Hampshire primary voters in February of 1984, “We are so strong militarily that we can afford to take measures such as these in the pursuit of peace.… We must fight for peace and give peace a chance.”

At the close of his 1988 campaign, in which he was endorsed by The Nation and won more than a dozen statewide primary and caucus contests, securing 6.9 million votes, Jackson pulled all the threads together in an epic address to that year’s Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. He spoke movingly of tackling poverty and inequality within the United States, but he was just as compelling in his discussion of foreign policy, which included a stirring call for disarmament that is as relevant today as it was 35 years ago.

Jackson told the cheering delegates:

The nuclear war build-up is irrational. Strong leadership cannot desire to look tough and let that stand in the way of the pursuit of peace. Leadership must reverse the arms race. At least we should pledge no first use. Why? Because first use begets first retaliation. And that’s mutual annihilation. That’s not a rational way out.

No use at all. Let’s think it out and not fight it out because it’s an unwinnable fight. Why hold a card that you can never drop? Let’s give peace a chance.

The people of Minneapolis raised their voices in glorious opposition to the federal occupation of their city with such energy, and such beauty, that the whole world heard their cry for justice. And they never let up. Just days before Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan formally announced that the Department of Homeland Security’s deadly surge of thousands of armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into their city would end, 1,600 Minnesotans had filled the cavernous Central Lutheran Church in downtown Minneapolis with the chorus of their singing resistance:

Hold on
Hold on
My dear one
Here comes the dawn…

When the dawn came on Thursday, after more than two months of violence and cruelty—which included thousands of arrests, detentions and deportations, and the killing of poet and mother of three Renee Good and intensive care nurse Alex Pretti—Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey came as close as a Minnesotan can to declaring victory.

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“They thought they could break us, but a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation. These patriots of Minneapolis are showing that it’s not just about resistance—standing with our neighbors is deeply American,” said the mayor, who in January announced, “To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis!”

“This operation has been catastrophic for our neighbors and businesses, and now it’s time for a great comeback,” said Frey. “We will show the same commitment to our immigrant residents and endurance in this reopening, and I’m hopeful the whole country will stand with us as we move forward.”

Frey added, “The people that deserve the credit for this operation ending is the 435,000 residents that call Minneapolis home.” He’s right. The peaceful resistance to the Department of Homeland Security’s surge of 3,000 ill-trained and irresponsible ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents into the city—with mass marches, neighborhood watches, and mutual aid networks to support threatened neighbors—was as resilient as it was beautiful. And it forms a model for resistance in the cities that may next be targeted.

Yet Frey was also correct to describe the damage that had been done by more than two months of federal occupation as “catastrophic.”

In addition to the killings, the arrests and detentions, and the deportations of men, women and children, the economic impact of the DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s “Operation Metro Surge” was overwhelming. The fear that gripped the city was palpable. Workers and customers were afraid to come out of their homes, leaving restaurants and shops struggling to remain open. “The long road to recovery starts now,” said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on Thursday, as he announced a plan to provide “$10 million in direct relief to help businesses impacted by ‘Operation Metro Surge’ to stabilize, protect jobs and get back on solid footing.”

In a nation led by responsible adults with a modicum of interest in public service, that relief would be coupled with federal financial aid. But President Trump and the Republican Congress are still scheming to give Noem and her henchmen more money to expand ICE operations. Perhaps they have recognized their mistake in targeting Minneapolis, but they have not learned their lesson. And they have not been held to account.

“Operation Metro Surge is ending because Minnesotans fought back,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who added, “We still deserve transparency, and Renee Good and Alex Pretti deserve justice. I will continue to demand independent investigations into their deaths and every excessive use of force by federal agents.”

That’s a vital piece of the accountability equation. But it does not stop there, as US Representative Ilhan Omar explained.

“Two of my constituents, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal immigration enforcement agents. A third was shot under questionable circumstances. Thousands were tear-gassed and shot with less-lethal weapons and harassed by masked agents. What we witnessed was not law enforcement—it was militarized racial terror unleashed on the streets of Minnesota as a deliberate attempt to demonize the Somali community,” said Omar.

“‘Operation ‘Metro Surge’ has exposed just how far ICE is willing to go to intimidate and terrorize Black, Brown, and immigrant communities in our state. Nearly all Somalis in Minnesota are citizens, yet ICE agents harassed residents demanding proof of papers and, when citizens sought to document these unlawful stops, they were met with lethal force. Latino, Asian, and other communities of color were forced into hiding regardless of their status, and those who dared to live their lives, were often arrested with no cause. That was not public safety. That was an authoritarian abuse of power.”

Omar argues, “Nothing about what we witnessed was normal. Businesses are reeling from the economic devastation. Families are shattered. Children will carry the trauma of federal agents descending on their neighborhoods for the rest of their lives. The pain inflicted on this community will not fade—it will remain etched in their memory as the moment their own government turned against them.”

Accountability, the representative says, requires bold action. It is time, she explains, “to move to abolish this rogue agency so that no community in America is ever terrorized like this again.”

Omar has also backed House Resolution 996, which seeks to impeach the DHS secretary for high crimes and misdemeanors. As of this week, 187 members of the House have signed on as cosponsors of the resolution—making it one of the most widely supported impeachment initiatives in American history.

Declaring, “I won’t rest until we can ensure this abuse of power and terror can never happen again,” Omar says, “There must be justice and accountability. This administration must fully cooperate with independent investigations into the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Congress must withhold funding for unlawful actions and ensure federal dollars never bankroll civil-rights violations. We should be hauling cabinet secretaries and agency heads before congressional committees and demanding sworn testimony. They must explain who authorized these actions, what legal justifications were used, and why constitutional protections were ignored.”

Bruce Springsteen used the first great protest song of 2026, his “Streets of Minneapolis,” to deliver a blistering condemnation of the violent assault that a strike force of 3,000 masked and armed agents of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has waged on Minnesota’s largest city. The American bard describes how, during the first weeks of January, Minneapolis became “a city aflame…’neath an occupier’s boots” and recounts that “there were bloody footprints where mercy should have stood and two left to die on snow-filled streets: Alex Pretti and Renee Good.” Springsteen was not merely mourning; he was calling out the Trump administration’s propagandistic distortion of the truth about Pretti, an intensive-­care nurse with the Department of Veterans Affairs, gunned down by Border Patrol agents on January 24, and Good, a poet and mother of three, shot in the head by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on January 7. And the Boss excoriated “Noem’s dirty lies.”

The lies told by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, including wildly unfounded assertions that Good and Pretti committed acts of “domestic terrorism,” have inspired widespread demands for accountability for the most dangerously dishonest of Donald Trump’s miserable cast of cabinet appointees. There is plenty of competition for the “worst of the worst” title in Trump’s cabinet. But Noem’s attempts to defend the indefensible, her personal and official scandals, her mismanagement, and above all her outrageous and propagandistic lies about Good and Pretti are not merely shameful. They are impeachable.

Members of Congress, no matter their political affiliation, must recognize a constitutional duty to remove this gangster from the position of public trust that she has so flagrantly abused. The will of the people is already clear. Trump and Noem thought they could intimidate the public into quiescence. But tens of thousands of Americans have filled the streets of Minneapolis and cities across the country to demand the abolition of ICE because they have chosen to believe their own eyes, as opposed to Noem’s lies.

The arguments against Noem are now so stark that even senior Republicans are making the case for her removal, with North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis raging against “the incompetence of the leader of the [Department of] Homeland Security,” adding, “She doesn’t know how to lead, how to de-escalate. She’s exposing ICE officers to dangerous situations; she’s exposing US citizens to deadly situations.” Even as Trump tried to distance himself from some of Noem’s most extreme statements and policies in late January, the president’s response to Tillis and to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, another Republican who’s said the secretary should go, was to call the senators “losers” and announce that Noem would be staying because “she’s doing a very good job.”

With Trump digging in, it falls to members of Congress to act. Many Democrats have done just that, as part of the most significant accountability movement yet seen during the year of chaos that Trump and his noxious inner circle of aides, such as Stephen Miller, have unleashed. In addition to tentative calls from Republicans for Noem’s resignation or firing, a robust movement to impeach the cabinet secretary has attracted support from over 180 House Democrats as of February 2. Supporters of impeachment have rallied around a resolution sponsored by Representative Robin Kelly (D-IL) that indicts Noem for obstructing the congressional oversight of detention facilities operated by DHS; for “using her position for personal gain while inappropriately using taxpayer dollars”; for “using her position to circumvent the Federal contracting process and [funnel] Federal funds to her friends’ businesses”; and for “repeatedly [violating] the Immigration and Nationality Act, the First and Fourth Amendments of the United States Constitution, and due process rights of American citizens by directing [ICE] to make widespread warrantless arrests, forgo due process, and use violence against United States citizens, lawful residents, and other individuals.”

The resolution notes that, in the case of Renee Good, “despite video showing the officer on the side of the vehicle while firing and the vehicle was moving away from the officer on the second and third shots, Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem is claiming publicly that the officer was in danger and in front of the vehicle when he fired.” That lie points to the most compelling argument for Noem’s removal: She is a determined propagandist who seeks to distort the truth, undermine investigations, and divide Americans. And all the evidence suggests that she intends to keep lying to the American people, the media, and Congress.

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None of the House members who propose to impeach Noem are naïve. They know that the full constitutional promise of the impeachment power has been undermined by Senate Republicans who have refused to hold members of their own party—including Trump himself—to account. And they know that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will do everything in his power to thwart accountability for Trump and his appointees—just as he did during the fight over the release of files regarding the convicted child-sex offender and longtime Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein. But the anger over Noem’s reckless actions and scorching dishonesty has momentum, which could force congressional action in much the way that US Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) ultimately did in their fight for the release of the Epstein files.

Khanna has emerged as an ardent supporter of Noem’s impeachment because “she’s presided over agents who are killing American citizens.” The California representative includes Noem’s impeachment on a list of steps that, he says, must be taken to rein in ICE and DHS. “Congress is not powerless. Democrats must unify around an actual agenda,” argues Khanna, who urges opposition to future DHS funding, a repeal of the multiyear $75 billion in funding for ICE that Congress approved last year, investigations and prosecutions of ICE agents who have broken the law, and a strategy to “tear down and replace ICE with an agency that has oversight.”

To that list, we would add formal action by Congress to bar ICE agents from interfering with the 2026 midterms.

We understand that some will ask why Noem’s impeachment should be a priority with so many threats to be addressed and so many other members of the Trump administration who merit removal (including Trump himself). Our answer is that this is an accountability movement that has gained traction, has the potential to attract at least some Republican support, and above all will send a message to the whole administration that, to quote Springsteen, “We’ll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis”—and the lies that have been told about Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and all the others who have died on Kristi Noem’s watch.

One day after tens of thousands of Minnesotans marched in sub-zero weather to call for an end to the violent presence of federal forces on the streets of Minneapolis, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed another Minnesotan Saturday morning on the streets of the city where, on January 7, an ICE agent gunned down 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good.

President Trump, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials quickly issued unsubstantiated claims that the Minnesotan who died Saturday—a man identified as Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse who worked with the Veterans Administration and was an active member of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3669—was an armed “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement,” and that the federal agent fired in self-defense.

But the immediate responses from the administration, with their propagandistic and contradictory language (including an unwarranted DHS claim that Pretti, who was reportedly a 37-year-old licensed gun owner with no known criminal history beyond traffic citations, intended to “massacre law enforcement”), mirrored discredited and widely condemned statements made by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other officials following the Good shooting. Expressing deep skepticism about statements from DHS and ICE as a rush to judgment, and urging calm, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz promised a thorough investigation, while Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey issued a sober yet impassioned call to President Trump to end ICE’s mass surge into the city.

Back on January 7, Mayor Frey made international headlines when he challenged the validity of claims by Noem and her aides and associates, which contradicted the evidence from videos recorded as Good was killed. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: That is bullshit,” said Frey, who declared, “To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”

Frey’s statement following Saturday’s shooting employed different language. Yet it was no less powerful, and no less compelling. And it is worth considering in its entirety.

Here is what the mayor said:

I just saw a video of more than six masked agents pummeling one of our constituents and shooting him to death. How many more residents, how many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end? How many more lives need to be lost before this administration realizes that a political and partisan narrative is not as important as American values? How many times must local and national leaders plead with you, Donald Trump, to end this operation and recognize that this is not creating safety in our city?

As you’ll hear from [Minneapolis Emergency Management Department Rachel] Sayre in just a second, we have seen these kinds of operations in other places, in other countries, but not here in America—not in a way where a great American city is being invaded by its own federal government.

I’m done being told that our community members are responsible for the vitriol in our streets. I’m done being told that our local elected officials are solely responsible for turning down the temperature. Just yesterday, we saw 15,000 people peacefully protesting in the streets, speaking out, standing up for their neighbors. Not a single broken window, not a single injury. Those peaceful protests embody the very principles that both Minneapolis and America was founded upon.

Conversely, the mass militarized force and unidentified agents who are occupying our streets, that is what weakens our country. That is what erodes trust in both law enforcement and in democracy itself. So, to everyone listening, stand with Minneapolis. Stand up for America. Recognize that your children will ask you: What side you were on? Your grandchildren will ask you what you did to act to prevent this from happening again, to make sure that the foundational elements of our democracy were rock solid. What did you do to protect your city? What did you do to protect your nation?

This is not what America is about. This is not a partisan issue. This is an American issue. This administration, and everyone involved in this operation should be reflecting. They should be reflecting right now, and asking themselves, what exactly are you accomplishing? If the goal was to achieve peace and safety, this is doing exactly the opposite. If the goal was to achieve calm and prosperity, this is doing exactly the opposite. Are you standing up for American families right now or are we tearing them apart?

The invasion of these heavily armed masked agents roaming around on our streets of Minneapolis, emboldened with a sense of impunity, it has to end. This is not how it has to be.

So, to President Trump, this is a moment to act like a leader. Put Minneapolis, put America first in this moment. Let’s achieve peace. Let’s end this operation; and I’m telling you, our city will come back, safety will be restored. We’re asking for you to take action now to remove these federal agents.

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With that, the mayor called on Sayre, the director of the Emergency Management Department for the City of Minneapolis, to address the chaos that unfolded since the beginning of the Trump administration’s massive Operation Metro Surge, which is targeting the city’s immigrant communities.

Describing “the terror and the feeling of helplessness” of the people of Minneapolis, Sayre added, “My background is in international humanitarian response in conflict zones. In Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine. What I’ve seen here is what I’ve seen there. A powerful entity violently and intentionally terrorizing people, making them afraid to go outside so they can’t earn a living, so that kids are forced out of school. This has a lasting generational impact. People can’t plan a single day of their lives because they don’t know who is around the corner and if their family member or a neighbor is about to be taken away.”

Bruce Springsteen took a side against the Trump administration’s authoritarian abuses last May, when he launched his European tour with an impassioned denunciation of the president’s assault on basic civil liberties, and decried an ugly moment in which the United States “is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.” Now Springsteen has brought the complaint home, with a clarity that is all the more immediate and necessary.

Before launching into a fiery rendition of his 1978 classic “The Promised Land” during a Saturday night show in his home state of New Jersey, Springsteen turned the crowd’s attention to Minnesota, where, on January 7, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three who loved to sing, wrote poetry, and evidenced a concern for her neighbors that embodied the spirit of Springsteen’s epic paean to community and solidarity, “We Take Care of Our Own.”

“I wrote [‘The Promised Land’] as an ode to American possibility—both to the beautiful but flawed country that we are, and to the country that we could be,” Springsteen told the crowd. “Right now, we are living through incredibly critical times. The United States, the ideals and the values for which it stood for the past 250 years, is being tested as it has never been in modern times. Those values and those ideals have never been as endangered as they are right now.”

The crowd roared with approval as Springsteen continued:

“So, as we gather tonight in this beautiful display of love and care and thoughtfulness and community, if you believe in democracy and liberty, if you believe that truth still matters, it is worth speaking out. It is worth fighting for. If you believe in the power of the law and that no one stands above it, if you stand against heavily armed masked federal troops invading an American city, using Gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens, if you believe you don’t deserve to be murdered for exercising your American right to protest, then send a message to this president—as the mayor of that city has said—ICE should get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”

Above what had become thunderous applause, Springsteen announced, “This song is for you and the memory of a mother of three and American citizen, Renee Good.”

With that, Springsteen and his band broke into “The Promised Land,” a song that speaks of a storm that will “blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted” and “blow everything down that ain’t got the faith to stand its ground”—and about how, against the tempest and through it all, “I believe in a promised land.”

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Years ago, Springsteen summed up his mission as an artist when he said, “I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.” The honesty with which Springsteen has conducted this decades-long examination has earned the songwriter the greatest honors the entertainment industry and the nation can grant. In addition to 20 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, an Academy Award, and a Special Tony Award for his critically acclaimed Springsteen on Broadway shows, he is an inducted member of both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He has also been given the Kennedy Center Honor and, in 2016, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama, who hailed him for “carrying the rest of us on his journey: asking us all what is the work for us to do in our short time here.”

It was an appropriate honor for a singer who, like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger before him, refused to surrender the dream of a promised land to the crude machinations of billionaire investors and the crooked politicians who serve them. “There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music,” Springsteen once said, “but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.”

There are plenty of artists who soften as they age.

Not Springsteen.

With his denunciation of ICE violence in Minneapolis, he has once again proven himself to be as critical, questioning, angry, and, yes, patriotic as the times require.

The wisest condemnation of Donald Trump’s decision to send us troops to the sovereign nation of Venezuela to remove President Nicolás Maduro, as part of the administration’s plan to “run” Venezuela in collaboration with US oil companies, came 205 years before Trump announced his “Donroe” Doctrine.

In 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who played an essential role in crafting the Monroe Doctrine—the foreign-policy position that he and others hoped would guard the Western Hemisphere against the threat of European colonial expansion—explicitly rejected military interventions for the purpose of regime change and economic conquest. “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” Adams told Congress. “But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

Even where the United States might object to a foreign leader, Adams argued that the country must lead by example and with diplomacy, so that the fundamental maxims of US foreign policy would not change insensibly from liberty to force: “She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”

Trump, acting very much as a European king of old, attacked Venezuela as this edition of The Nation went to press. His move represents a brazen violation of international law that destabilizes global security and seizes Congress’s exclusive authority to declare war. Military force is justified only in response to a clear, credible, and imminent threat to 
the security of the US or its treaty allies. Venezuela, whatever its internal dysfunctions or its connections to drug trafficking, poses no such threat.

Trump’s scheming to forcibly determine the political leadership of another sovereign nation represents a grave departure from our best principles—as stated by Adams—and a return to the most discredited habits of American foreign policy. We are not naïve about American history. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, The Nation has decried presidential abuses of the Monroe Doctrine as a tool for the creation of corporate client states. But Trump’s self-styled Donroe Doctrine proposes a fresh bastardization of US foreign policy that is so extreme—and so dangerous—that it demands an urgent response from Democrats and those Republicans whose oath to the Constitution takes higher precedence than their loyalty to an authoritarian president and his fossil-fuel-industry donors.

While Trump and his allies tried to justify naked aggression as part of a convoluted strategy to target “narco-terrorism,” Representative Pat Ryan (D-NY), a former Army intelligence officer who served two combat tours during the Iraq War, declared, “No matter what they say, it’s always oil.” Ryan was not alone in recognizing echoes of the WMD claims of former president George W. Bush, and how that blood-for-oil war went so horribly awry. In his first bid for the presidency, Trump positioned himself as something of an anti-war Republican. That was always a cynical gambit, and Trump is now exposed as an economic imperialist who learned nothing from Iraq and who is willing, as Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) noted, to embark on a career of empire that risks the lives of US troops to make “oil companies (not Americans) more profitable.”

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No one in their right mind believes that the madness—and danger—of Trump’s Donroe Doctrine will halt at the borders of Venezuela. His State Department declared on social media: “This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.” The American people see through the lies. A Reuters-Ipsos poll found that only 33 percent of Americans approve of the US military action to remove Maduro, while 72 percent worry about further US involvement in Venezuela.

This popular rejection of Trump’s territorial ambitions should inspire members of Congress to stand up to the administration—recognizing, as John Quincy Adams did, that if a president seeks to make America “the dictatress of the world,” this country will “be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social on Saturday at 3:21 am, “The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow.”

Hours later, during a congratulatory press conference, Trump said that during a period of transition in Venezuela, “we’re going to run the country right.” But he gave only limited details of how the process would proceed, aside from saying, “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.” Trump dwelt more on talk of prosecuting Maduro and his wife in a New York City courtroom.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi had already taken to social media earlier on Saturday morning with a message :“Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been indicted in the Southern District of New York. Nicolas Maduro has been charged with Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices, and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States. They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

But in a brief predawn call with a New York Times reporter, Trump refused to discuss whether “he had sought congressional authority for the operation or what is next for Venezuela.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio later acknowledged that there had been no pre-attack consultation.

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As it became clear that leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services committees had not been consulted on the regime-change attack and as confusion mounted about what would happen next in Venezuela, key members of Congress—who have the constitutionally defined authority to declare wars and to oversee major military actions—reacted angrily to what had transpired in the name of the United States but without the consent of the legislative branch.

“A US invasion of Venezuela to depose its president and arrest him is illegal,” Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia, told NPR Saturday morning. Kaine promised to seek a Senate vote next week to declare that Trump should not be waging this “unilateral presidentially declared war against Venezuela” without congressional authorization.

Kaine, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a statement arguing, “President Trump’s unauthorized military attack on Venezuela to arrest Maduro—however terrible he is—is a return to a day when the United States asserted a right to dominate the internal affairs of all nations in the Western Hemisphere. The history is replete with failures, and doubling down on it makes it difficult to the claim with a straight face to other countries should respect the United States’ sovereignty when we do not do the same.”

“Where will this go next?” asked Kaine. “Will the President deploy our troops to protect Iranian protesters? To enforce the fragile ceasefire in Gaza? To battle terrorists in Nigeria? To seize Greenland or the Panama Canal? To suppress Americans peacefully assembling to protest his policies? Trump has threatened to do all this and more and sees no need to seek legal authorization from people’s elected legislature before putting servicemembers at risk.”

Representative Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat who has been one of the House’s most consistent critics of undeclared wars, warned that Trump has disregarded the Constitution. “President Trump has repeatedly been told he must consult with and get authorization from Congress to go to war, per US law. While we are only seeing early public accounts of what happened, it is clear he acted without doing that,” Pocan said. “Trump not notifying Democratic leadership, much less rank-and-file members, continues the degradation of the rule of law.”

Representative James Walkinshaw, a Virginia Democrat who serves on the Military and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs, said, “Trump’s regime change war in Venezuela is flat out illegal and yet another betrayal of the commitments he made to the American people. He said he’d lower prices. He’s driving prices up. He said no ‘new stupid wars.’ He’s starting new stupid wars.”

Republican Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) initially went on social media and wrote, “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.”

Later, after receiving a call from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Lee made feeble excuses for the administration, claiming that the assault “likely” was justified by fears of “an actual or imminent attack.” But Washington Post national security analyst Josh Rogan wrote, “The United States has just kidnapped a foreign head of state and bombed a foreign capital using the justification of protecting U.S. personnel from an ‘actual or imminent attack’ according to Senator Lee. Make no mistake, President Trump just committed an act of war against Venezuela.”

The New York Times adopted a similar view in an editorial headlined “Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise.”

And Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) dismissed claims by the president and the attorney general about the reasons for the regime change. “It’s not about drugs. If it was, Trump wouldn’t have pardoned one of the largest narco traffickers in the world [former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández] last month. It’s about oil and regime change. And they need a trial now to pretend that it isn’t. Especially to distract from Epstein + skyrocketing healthcare costs.”

Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) also expressed skepticism. “If this action were constitutionally sound,” Massie wrote on X, “the Attorney General wouldn’t be tweeting that they’ve arrested the President of a sovereign country and his wife for possessing guns in violation of a 1934 U.S. firearm law.”

Maduro, according to election observers, almost certainly lost the 2024 presidential election and then refused to step down. Yet he had recently signaled an openness to meeting with Trump to discuss US allegations about drug trafficking and other issues. Trump has now executed a secret plan to remove the Venezuelan leader, even after Trump’s aides had denied regime-change plans.

Senator Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat who served as a national security adviser under President Barack Obama, accused Trump’s secretaries of state and defense of lying to Congress about the administration’s intensions. “Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change,” Kim said in a statement amid the first reports of US air strikes on Caracas. “I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress. Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war.”

Kim explained, “This strike doesn’t represent strength. It’s not sound foreign policy. It puts Americans at risk in Venezuela and the region, and it sends a horrible and disturbing signal to other powerful leaders across the globe that targeting a head of state is an acceptable policy for the U.S. government. This will further damage our reputation—already hurt by Trump’s policies around the world—and only isolate us in a time when we need our friends and allies more than ever.”

Senator Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, “We have no vital national interests in Venezuela to justify war. We should have learned not to stumble into another stupid adventure by now.”

Senator Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat who served in the US Marines from 2002 to 2006 and was deployed during the war in Iraq, bluntly declared, “This war is illegal.” “There is no justification for the United States to be at war with Venezuela. I lived through the consequences of an illegal war sold to the American people with lies,” explained Gallego. “We swore we would never repeat those mistakes. Yet here we are again. The American people did not ask for this, Congress did not authorize this, and our service members should not be sent into harm’s way for another unnecessary conflict.”

The 250th anniversary of the American experiment, which is being celebrated this year, is sure to witness a struggle over the story—and future—of the United States.

On one side will stand advocates for capitalism without constraint, Christian nationalism, and colonial conquest. They will make ahistorical apologies for the bedraggled presidency of Donald Trump and for a subservient Republican Congress that is increasingly likely to be disempowered by the enraged electorate in November. These retro royalists will fail to recognize any irony in the fact that the America Revolution—in its best and most inspired form—rejected the monarchical abuses of a liege lord who arranged the affairs of state to steal from the poor and fill his own treasuries, presided over an empire that enforced its dominance with military might, and imagined that he ruled by “divine right” as the “supreme governor” of an established state church.

On the other side from the contemporary Tories will stand Americans who have actually read the Declaration of Independence, which opens with what in its day represented a radical embrace of democracy:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Today’s anti-royalists recognize that the promise of the Declaration—beginning with the premise that all human beings are created equal—has never been fully realized. They know that, across 25 decades, powerful elites have frequently maintained only the façade of representative democracy while permitting first human bondage and then economic oppression, savage inequality, and the corruption of governance warped by money, gerrymandering, and an Electoral College. The most cynical of this century’s oligarchs and authoritarians may swear allegiance to the Constitution. But their self-dealing mission has always been to manipulate the levers of government, economics, and religion to empower and enrich themselves.

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May 2026 Issue

In 2026, the oligarchs and their apologists will seek to use the celebration of America’s anniversary to strengthen their grip on the economy and government. They will insist that the United States was established as an über-capitalist state where billionaires can grift an AI bubble sufficiently to make themselves trillionaires. But as author and frequent commentator on US history Thom Hartmann has noted, “The word ‘capitalism’ appears nowhere in our founding documents, nowhere in our Constitution.” More significantly, the Constitutional Accountability Center reminds us, “The Constitution guarantees rights for ‘people’ and ‘citizens,’ never once referring to protections for ‘corporations.’” And constitutional lawyer John Bonifaz has explained that “the Framers understood that [corporations] were not to be treated as people under our Constitution. James Madison said corporations are ‘a necessary evil’ subject to ‘proper limitations and guards.’ Thomas Jefferson hoped to ‘crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.’”

The Christian nationalists and their political allies will tell us that the United States is a “Christian nation” and should be governed as such, even though the founders recognized religious diversity and disdained the notion of an established church. As Jefferson explained in a letter to the Danbury Baptists:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

The war hawks and their allies in the military-industrial complex will excuse the imperial ambitions of a president who has rejected international treaties, altered maps to rename the Gulf of Mexico, bombed Venezuelan boats without congressional authorization, and outlined his illicit claim on Greenland with a brutish declaration that “we have to have it.”

For years, Trump and his associates have been trying to prevent accurate teaching of US history. It does not serve their purposes to have people reminded that this country was founded with a popular rebellion that embraced the “No Kings!” message of Thomas Paine. The pamphleteer showed no respect for king, kaiser, or tsar, and decried every pretender who formally crowned his authoritarianism as “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers.”

Paine, the founder who best understood the point of the revolution, wrote, “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

That democratic impulse has always been a part of the American story, even as it has been suppressed by the oligarchs who would have us believe that a president—as the anti-constitutional majority on the current Supreme Court imagines—is a king for four years who cannot be held to account for “official acts.”

Trump and his apologists serve at least one purpose as the United States enters its semiquincentennial year. Their antidemocratic, anti-egalitarian extremism, cynicism, and hypocrisy expose them as fraudulent claimants to the most vital legacies of the American Revolution. While there have always been elites—including a good many of the founders—who choose to rewrite history in their own favor, there have also always been champions of liberty who know that Paine spoke the true language of American independence when he wrote 250 years ago: “O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!”

If ever there was a time to stand forth, it is now, in this anniversary year of America’s founding. This is the moment to use the rights outlined in the First Amendment—to speak, to write, to assemble, and to petition for the redress of grievances—to raise a Paine-inspired objection to imperialism, colonialism, and clericalism and to make an honest demand for liberty and for economic, social, and racial justice for all. This year we must seek to secure the next 250 years against the demands of the monarchical elites and for the needs of the great multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious mass of Americans.

Zohran Mamdani paused for a moment, after I asked what he thought his inauguration—on January 1, as the 34-year-old, immigrant, Muslim, democratic socialist mayor of the nation’s largest city—might tell us about what is possible in American politics.

“That it lives,” he finally said. “That the days of us constructing an ever-lowering ceiling of possibility must come to an end. That we have to finally usher in an era where the ambition of our vision matches the scale of the crisis in front of us.”

When we spoke, a few days before his official swearing in by New York Attorney General Letitia James—scheduled to take place at midnight on January 1 in the old, decommissioned City Hall subway station, out of respect for what the incoming mayor calls “a physical monument to a city that dared to be both beautiful and build great things that would transform working peoples’ lives”—Mamdani reflected on the deeper roots of his political evolution.

For Mamdani, Thursday’s inauguration finishes the first stage of a political journey that in its narrowest sense began a little more than a year ago, when the then–State Assembly member from Queens entered a crowded race for mayor of New York as a candidate who was, he said, “definitely” unknown by the vast majority of the city’s voters. Now he is an internationally recognized political figure, who has met with leading members of Congress and—considering their deep ideological and stylistic differences—an unexpectedly cordial Donald Trump. Mamdani’s campaign and eventual election has inspired progressive candidates across the United States and beyond its borders. And his mayoralty, with the many challenges it faces, will test the limits and the possibilities of urban politics in the 21st century.

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At the celebration of his inauguration on the steps of City Hall on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, the new mayor will be introduced by US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and ceremonially sworn in by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders, the former mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and a 2016 and 2020 contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, and who has reframed the modern understanding of democratic socialism in the United States, is delighted to be a part of the inaugural celebration. He was, alongside AOC,an enthusiastic supporter of Mamdani’s mayoral bid. “People want real change,” Sanders told me. “[Mamdani’s mayoralty] will inspire people across the country to fight for that change.”

For his part, Mamdani said, the senator’s presence on the steps of City Hall will offer a reminder of the role Sanders played in framing his understanding of electoral politics as a transformational pursuit.

“I would not be here, were it not for Bernie Sanders,” explained Mamdani. “He gave me the language with which to describe my own politics, a decade ago. It was his presidential campaign in 2016 that showed me and so many Americans across this country that we were not alone in in our belief in dignity as a necessity for each and every person who calls this country their home. And it’s frankly an honor for me that I will be on that stage with him as I begin this next chapter.”

Will Sanders’s presence also say something about their shared democratic socialism?

“I would hope so,” said Mamdani. “I’ve long been interested in politics, and yet it took his 2016 run for me to understand how to describe my own politics. And that was as a democratic socialist. In 2016, I was reading about Bernie. I was turning on the news to hear about Bernie. I was wishing, and willing in every which way, to see his success. In 2020, I knocked on doors for him in Iowa and took a photo with a cardboard cutout of him and shared that with friends. I thought that was probably the closest I would ever get to Bernie.”

Now he and Sanders have led rallies together. They frequently consult with each other. “To have been able to meet him, speak to him, and, frankly, more than all of that, be able to go to him for advice, for reflection, for guidance in a moment like this, it’s hard to describe how much it has meant to me,” Mamdani said.

Mamdani has long made it clear that the primary focus of his mayoralty will be the practical work of carrying out an ambitious agenda that makes the city more affordable and improves the lives of working-class New Yorkers. At the same time, he believes that his mayoralty can demonstrate how a democratic socialist vision could frame alternative policies for urban America. “I think it’s a beautiful part of our city, showing what politics can be in a time when it has become almost entirely associated with the language of darkness,” said Mamdani, who suggests that New York “could in fact be a showcase of light.”

“To be a democratic socialist leading our city,” he explained, “is an opportunity to lead with a vision that ensures that each and every New Yorker has whatever they need to live a dignified life—and to translate that belief into the day-to-day material realities of those who call the city home.”

The inaugural celebration will be a block party outside City Hall, where Mamdani plans to tell the crowd that “this is not my victory or my inauguration; rather, it’s all of ours.” For the many who gather, it will unite people under the shared vision of a New York City that could, indeed, serve as a light in the darkness of a political moment that, for the last year, has been profoundly influenced by the crude and frequently destructive social and economic policies of Trump’s MAGA Republicans in Washington.

“Life can never only be one thing,” said Mamdani. “It cannot simply be struggle; it cannot simply be laboring in the hopes of bread. You must also labor in the hopes of roses. January 1st is an opportunity for us to celebrate the immense amount of work it took from so many to usher in a new era in our city, and to also be honest about the challenges ahead of us. These are challenges that will be difficult, challenges that will require even more than what we have given thus far, and yet challenges that can still be approached with a joy of purpose—of delivering for the city that we all love and call home.”

As John Fugelsang, who runs the risk of becoming this era’s ablest political commentator, reminds us, “The Christmas economy depends on people buying possessions to celebrate the birthday of the man who renounced possessions.”

The author of this year’s best-selling objection to the abuses of religion and politics by right-wing Christian nationalists, Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds, Fugelsang is a decent and good-humored fellow who has no desire to snow on our Christmas fun. He simply wants to remind us of biblical entreaties that tend to be lost on right-wing zealots who claim—as President Donald Trump has—that “Christianity is under tremendous siege” by liberal do-gooders.

“Jesus consistently sided with the underdogs, not the privileged and powerful,” writes Fugelsang. “Broad-minded, tolerant, and way too inclusive for the ultraconservatives of his day, the Nazarene modeled generosity and selflessness, and told his followers to share their resources and prioritize the well-being of other people over personal gain.”

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Fugelsang further reminds us:

Jesus stood up to…the authoritarians among then religious leaders, drunk on their own eminence.

The wealthy, worshiping their own stature and possessions while denying the suffering of the poor.

The capitalists in the temple, greedily exploiting poor believers.

The imperial government of Rome, whose hunger for power led to its own collapse.

Those who imagine that this is too militant an interpretation of the gospels might consider the Gospel of Matthew, with its charge: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:”

Or they might turn to the messages of Pope Leo XIV, who has carried forward the work of his predecessor Pope Francis, by asserting the importance of the Catholic Church’s “preferential option for the poor.” Leo wrote in his first apostolic exhortation, “God has a special place in his heart for those who are discriminated against and oppressed, and he asks us, his church, to make a decisive and radical choice in favor of the weakest.”

The bluntness with which the new pope has challenged the excesses of capitalism has drawn global comment—not all of it favorable. The pope has argued:

A concrete commitment to the poor must also be accompanied by a change in mentality that can have an impact at the cultural level. In fact, the illusion of happiness derived from a comfortable life pushes many people towards a vision of life centered on the accumulation of wealth and social success at all costs, even at the expense of others and by taking advantage of unjust social ideals and political-economic systems that favor the strongest. Thus, in a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people. This means that a culture still persists—sometimes well disguised—that discards others without even realizing it and tolerates with indifference that millions of people die of hunger or survive in conditions unfit for human beings.

In September, Leo issued an exhortation to Christians on love for the poor. The document builds upon the writings of Francis, who died in April 2025 at age 88 and who also decried the excesses of capitalism with references to how “this economy kills.”

That is bold language, but it is also an honest assessment, as was Francis’s 2024 notation: “It is often precisely the wealthiest who oppose the realization of social justice or integral ecology out of sheer greed.”

In this season of light and charity, we have every reason to hope for the renewal of those instincts that Abraham Lincoln identified as “the better angels of our nature.” To do so, we must recognize the urgency of Pope Francis’s warning that “as long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.” When he repeated this observation shortly before his passing, Francis observed, “I know it bothers [people when I say that], but it is the truth.”

When Republican US Representative Elise Stefanik signaled in late June of this year that she would challenge Democratic incumbent Kathy Hochul for governor of New York, Republican operatives anticipated that the Stefanik-Hochul contest would be one of the premier contests of the 2026 election. A few months later, Stefanik formally launched her bid, with a combative video that tagged her as the “courageous leader ready for the fight” to raise New York from the “ashes of Kathy Hochul’s failed policies.”

Echoing the language of President Trump, with whom the formerly “moderate” Republican representative had closely aligned herself, as well as her MAGA Republican allies in Congress, Stefanik’s video hailed her as a candidate who was ready to “stand up to the woke mob” of liberals and Democrats.

But now Stefanik is standing down. She announced Friday that she will not run for governor. And, as part of a double blow to the GOP, she announced that she would not seek a new term representing a northern New York district that Democratic strategists think they might just be able to flip in 2026.

What gives? Stefanik offered the standard politician’s excuse that she just wanted to spend more time with her family. She indicated that she didn’t want to have to compete in a Republican primary for the governorship—even as she claimed that she “would have overwhelmingly won it.”

But savvy observers of New York and national politics had what sounded like a more plausible explanation.

She was, as Hochul spokesperson Ryan Radulovacki said, “going to lose.” And she’s not the only Republican faced with that daunting prospect. Stefanik’s announcement came just days after US Representative Dan Newhouse revealed that he would join the two dozen House Republican Caucus members—more than 10 percent of the current GOP majority—who have already signaled that they won’t run in 2026.

While some retirements were to be expected, analysts are now anticipating a GOP exodus that could be unprecedented in modern American political history.

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More and more Republicans, it appears, see a perilous new year on the horizon. How perilous? “Republican lawmakers grow alarmed over signs of 2026 election wipeout,” read a November headline in The Hill, a widely read DC-insider journal.

It’s not just that Trump’s approval ratings have collapsed, or that general approval ratings for Republicans have tanked—after a year in which the GOP has, with full control of the federal government, provided a stark illustration of how dangerously and destructively it wields power. It is the practical reality of how voters have been casting their ballots in 2025—and are increasingly likely to cast their ballots in 2026.

“In 2025 alone, Democrats won or overperformed in 227 out of 255 key elections—nearly 90 percent of races,” noted DNC deputy executive director Libby Schneider, in a memorandum shared with The Nation. “In nearly every major contest, Democrats swept, from the Wisconsin Supreme Court race to the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, to the Georgia Public Service Commissioner race, to the Miami mayoral election, where a Democrat won for the first time in nearly 30 years. In state legislative elections, Democrats flipped a whopping 25 seats to Republicans’ zero.”

The Democrats faced enormous challenges going into the 2025 election cycle, after losing the presidency and both houses of Congress following a 2024 campaign that saw the party struggling to deliver an effective message on economic issues and disappointing much of its own base by failing at its highest levels to take necessary steps to thwart the genocide in Gaza. Trump began his second presidency with a show of force, as billionaires surrounded him on Inauguration Day, media networks bent to his demands, and billionaire Elon Musk launched his slash-and-burn DOGE project as the new president’s “special government employee.” In short order, Trump got the cabinet he wanted, as well as massive tax cuts for the rich, dismissals of government employees, assaults on popular safety-net programs, and a hateful crackdown on immigrants.

From the start, however, there was evidence that Americans did not like what they were witnessing. US Senator Bernie Sanders drew huge crowds for “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies in deep-red states, and millions showed up for “No Kings” events nationwide.

But the steadiest measure of disgust with Trump and the Republicans came in election results from regular odd-year elections and special elections. And as the year advanced, the evidence of popular objection to the MAGA agenda became overwhelming. “Across red, purple, and blue states, Democrats have gotten off the mat and proven that when you organize everywhere, you can win anywhere—in every part of the country,” says Schneider, who argues, as the critical 2026 midterm election season kicks off, that Democrats should “feel buoyed by the strong results we’ve seen up and down the ballot all year long.”

Political operatives are prone to hyperbole. But the Democratic record in 2025 is compelling, as is illustrated by a month-by-month analysis of movement toward the Democrat column, which Schneider shared with The Nation.
 

January

Iowa: Democrat Mike Zimmer flipped Iowa State Senate District 35, a district Trump won by 21 points in 2024.

Virginia: Kannan Srinivasan won Virginia State Senate District 32, and J.J. Singh won Virginia House District 26.
 

February

Maine: Democrat Sean Faircloth won Maine House District 24 with an 18 percent outperformance of the top of the 2024 ticket.
 

March

Pennsylvania: Democrat James Malone flipped Pennsylvania Senate District 36, becoming the first Democrat to win this seat since the 1880s. And Democrat Dan Gougner won the open House District 35 seat, ensuring that Democrats retain the Pennsylvania House majority.

Iowa: Democrat Nanette Griffin over-performed by 24 percent in a deep-red district.
 

April

Wisconsin: Susan Crawford won the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat by double digits after Elon Musk spent over $20 million trying to buy the seat.

Florida: Democrats Josh Weiland’s and Gay Valimont’s congressional special election wins outperformed by 15+ points the baseline margin at the top of the 2024 ticket.
 

May

New York: Sam Sutton won NY State Senate District 22 by 35 points—a district that Trump won by 55 points in 2024.

Nebraska: John Ewing Jr. flipped the Omaha mayoral, formerly the sixth-largest city led by a Republican, by defeating one of the longest-serving Republican mayors in the country.
 

June

Texas: Gina Ortiz Jones won the San Antonio mayoral race.

South Carolina: Democrat Keishan Scott won a South Carolina House seat in a landslide, outperforming the top of the 2024 ticket by 36 percent.
 

August

Iowa: Democrat Catelin Drey flipped Iowa Senate District 1, breaking the GOP supermajority in the Iowa Senate.

Rhode Island: Democrat Stefano Famiglietti over-performed by a whopping 56 percent in Rhode Island’s Senate District 4 election—one of the biggest over-performances this year.
 

September

Arizona and Virginia: Democrats Adelita Grijalva and James Walkinshaw won in AZ-07 and VA-11, ensuring that US House Republicans have the slimmest majority since the Great Depression.
 

November

Virginia: Abigail Spanberger flipped the VA gubernatorial race, winning by the largest margin for a Democrat in 60 years. Democrats won down the ballot as well, securing every statewide race on the ticket and flipping 13 legislative seats.

New Jersey: Mikie Sherrill won the NJ gubernatorial, shifting every county in New Jersey more Democratic from 2024.

Georgia: Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard won Georgia Public Service Commission seats, the first Democrats to win a nonfederal statewide election in Georgia in nearly 20 years.

Pennsylvania: Supreme Court Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht overwhelmingly won retention despite millions in right-wing dark money opposing them.

Mississippi: Democrats broke the GOP supermajority in the Mississippi State Senate.
 

December

Tennessee: Despite millions of dollars spent against her in a Trump +22 district, Democrat Aftyn Behn over-performed in the Tennessee-07 special election by 13 points.

Florida: For the first time in nearly 30 years, a Democrat, Eilleen Higgins, prevailed in the Miami mayoral race. Higgins won this race by more than double-digits.

Georgia: Democrat Eric Gisler flipped a Trump+13 seat gerrymandered to try to rig the race in favor of Republicans.

That was 2025. What about 2026?

There are never guarantees for how upcoming elections will turn out. But there can be reasonable speculation based on patterns from recent elections. And as members of Congress and candidates from both parties are considering their prospects for 2026, more and more of them are taking note of what Schneider credibly describes as a “dominating trend of Democratic victories and over-performances.”

Ayear that began with the second inauguration of Donald Trump was always going to be suspect. But 2025 became overwhelming. The president’s cruelty and lawlessness, along with his aggressive determination to deconstruct both government and civil society, shocked Americans, whom polls now suggest are deeply dissatisfied with his reckless tenure. This year’s Nation Honor Roll recognizes activists and artists, pastors, and political leaders who have spoken truth to Trump’s destructive power and forged a resistance that is evident in mass demonstrations and election results—and in an emerging hope, as Patti Smith once counseled, “That the people have the power / To redeem the work of fools.” John Nichols

 

PROPHETIC VOICE
Mariann Budde

After a reinauguration day that saw him fêted by billionaires and right-wing ideologues who hailed the supposed triumph of his MAGA vision, Trump imagined that he would be celebrated once more at the traditional interfaith prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral. But he got something else altogether when the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the longtime Episcopal bishop of Washington, delivered a homily in which she informed the new president that “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now.” Describing groups that Trump had already smeared with hateful rhetoric and now was threatening from the Oval Office, Bishop Budde explained that transgender children “fear for their lives” and pleaded for immigrants who faced the threat of deportation. “I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.” Trump experienced the homily as a rare rebuke and dismissed Budde as a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.” He complained that “She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way.” In fact, Budde embraced the prophetic tradition of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and other faith leaders who have spoken truth to presidential power. “I am not,” said Budde, “going to apologize for asking for mercy for others.”

 

US HOUSE MEMBER
Delia Ramirez

“We are under attack by our own federal government,” declared Delia Ramirez, a Democratic US Representative from Illinois, as President Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” brought a violent and lawless federal immigration crackdown to Chicago. Ramirez was not the only official who spoke up; Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also called out the vile behavior of ICE and Border Patrol agents in the blue city—one of many targeted by Trump and his minions—with Johnson decrying ICE as Trump’s “private, militarized occupying force” and calling for a general strike. But Ramirez, the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, brought a dynamic combination of experience and passion to the fight.

“They want to normalize violence. They want to normalize cruelty. They want us to be OK with what they’re doing so that you won’t question what they do next,” she told 250,000 No Kings demonstrators on October 18. “But let me be very clear to Donald Trump and all those criminals: You will not break the city of Chicago. Ever!”

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What has stood out about the response from Ramirez—a bold advocate for defending the social-safety net, empowering workers and unions, taxing the rich, and cutting the Pentagon budget—has been her determination to bring the fight for her constituents to Washington. She used her position on the House Committee on Homeland Security to demand investigations into the administration’s “violent, middle of the night operations that traumatize entire communities and put innocent men, women and children, including U.S. citizens, at risk.” Then, in October, when more than a dozen House members joined Ramirez in Chicago to conduct on-the-ground oversight of the Department of Homeland Security’s lawless actions in Chicago, she detailed how “our residents have been surveilled, they’ve been threatened, they’ve been tear-gassed, they’ve been hit with pepper balls, they’ve been shot, they’ve been subjected to warrantless arrests and precision immobilization-technique maneuvers, and kidnapped and disappeared,” and declared, “We will hold them accountable.”

 

DEMOCRATIC SENATOR
Chris Van Hollen

When the senior Democratic senator from Maryland directed a mid-September “J’Accuse!” at top New York Democrats—including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer—for failing to embrace the mayoral candidacy of Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani as the “kind of spineless politics [that] people are sick of,” some observers were surprised that a Capitol Hill veteran would be so blunt in decrying his own party’s listlessness. But they obviously hadn’t been paying attention in recent years. Chris Van Hollen has rebuked both President Trump and former president Joe Biden for failing to break decisively with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Gaza; traveled to El Salvador to meet with deported migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia in an open challenge to the Trump administration’s lawless strategy of expelling immigrants without due process; joined colleagues in condemning “President Trump’s un-American, unconstitutional transgender military service ban for being a blatant violation of our brave servicemembers’ civil rights and weakening our national security”; and worked with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on legislation to tax the rich. In November, after Schumer botched the government-shutdown fight, Democratic Senate candidates called for new leadership in the chamber, and liberal groups dispatched a memo that pointed to the Marylander as a potential replacement for the minority leader, arguing that Van Hollen “represents the rare figure who combines experience, credibility, and a forward-leaning vision.” Van Hollen’s strength is his recognition that, as he put it, “This job is not worth it if you constantly have to be putting your finger to the wind.” At a time when Americans are desperate for principled leadership, that’s a mantra every Democrat should consider.

 

ATTORNEY GENERAL
Letitia James

New York State’s indefatigable attorney general has, since Trump returned to office, led almost two dozen Democratic attorneys general in fighting Trump 2.0’s lawless actions with dozens of lawsuits. This is an extension of the many years Letitia James has spent demanding accountability from the 45th and now 47th president. Vowing to get vengeance, Trump installed a woefully inexperienced US attorney, Lindsey Halligan, to indict James for mortgage fraud. James fought back against this vindictive prosecution, and in late November a federal judge dismissed the charges on the grounds that Halligan’s appointment was unlawful.

Through it all, New York’s AG has kept fighting for the people of the state and the country. A few days before the administration threatened to withdraw food-stamp benefits from almost 42 million Americans, James and her fellow AGs sued to stop it. A federal judge in Massachusetts sided with them, ruling that the government is “statutorily mandated to use the previously appropriated SNAP contingency reserve when necessary.”

At the same time, James and the able lawyers in her state office took on landlords in a rural New York county for discriminating against low-income tenants; won an order protecting teaching about gender identity and trans issues in schools; blocked a cutoff of funding to school-based mental-health services; and set up an election-protection hotline in advance of New York’s November election. Remarkably, she did all that in a single month: October. And she’s continued to defend abortion providers and transgender people in the face of the right’s deliberate attacks. No one can argue that James has taken her focus off of New York and national issues while she fights the man-baby who wants to be a tyrant-king. In fact, she’s working harder than ever. Joan Walsh

 

NEW POLITICS
Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign

It’s been said that Zohran Mamdani is a once-in-a-generation candidate, and there is no question that the 34-year-old democratic socialist’s successful mayoral campaign electrified the politics not just of New York City but the entire nation. But Mamdani is the first to say that as a little-known, Uganda-born, Muslim state legislator, he could not have broken through without the remarkable team that came together to help elect him. At a time when everyone recognized the need to stop listening to traditional consultants and pollsters, Mamdani’s campaign was guided by idealistic young activists: primary campaign manager Elle Bisgaard-Church (now his mayoral chief of staff), creative director Andrew Epstein, media strategist Morris Katz, and field director Tascha Van Auken, to name but a few. With support from the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, and key unions, Mamdani built a campaign that outworked and outsmarted the political establishment and inspired candidates nationwide. If you’re looking for the future of American politics, start here. Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Nichols

 

ACTIVIST GROUP
Free DC

It’s hard to think of an advocacy group with a more timely name than Free DC, as citizens of our nation’s capital continue to fight their occupation by ICE and associated federal and military forces. The organization was founded in 2023, as part of the backlash against Mayor Muriel Bowser’s veto of City Council–approved criminal-justice reforms that sought to reduce maximum sentences. The whole dismal episode culminated with President Joe Biden caving before a new GOP majority in the House as it demagogued the reforms as criminal-coddling threats to public safety. In reality, the crime fight highlighted the unjust federal strong-arming of local governance in DC, going back to the disenfranchisement of the city’s African American population during Reconstruction. The launch of Free DC revived the long-standing crusade to wrest full independence (and statehood) from the district’s overseers in Congress, who still have the power to quash policy initiatives while threatening the district with extortionate budget cuts. That shakedown dynamic allowed Congress to effectively steal $1 billion from DC’s budget during last spring’s vote on the Trump administration’s comprehensive tax-and-spending bill. With the multifront authoritarian MAGA putsch facing minimal resistance at the federal level, Free DC’s grassroots campaign to reclaim self-rule in our nation’s occupied and budget-captive capital represents a key path forward in the crusade to make democracy matter again. Chris Lehmann

 

GLOBAL ACTIVIST
David Adler

A political economist who has served on the foreign-policy advisory team of Bernie Sanders and as director of policy for Yanis Varoufakis and the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25), David Adler is now the co–general coordinator of Progressive International, which “seeks to unite, organize, and mobilize progressive forces around the world.” That, by any measure, is full-time work. Yet in September, Adler jumped aboard the lead vessel in the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet of civilian vessels that sailed to Gaza as “the largest convoy in history to traverse the Mediterranean Sea with a mission to establish a humanitarian corridor to reach the starving people of Palestine.” The flotilla’s participants—doctors and aid workers, parliamentarians and journalists, lawyers and grassroots activists from around the world—traveled with the “shared conviction that something must be done to halt the destruction of Gaza—and that if governments refuse to do it, then ordinary people will.” In a letter published by The Nation as the flotilla approached Gaza on the eve of Yom Kippur, Adler wrote, “I joined this flotilla just like any other delegate—to defend humanity, before it is too late. But on Yom Kippur, I am reminded that I am also here because my Jewish heritage demands it…. If Israeli forces intercept us on Yom Kippur, then let them see what true atonement looks like. Not fasting in comfort while starving their neighbors. Not praying in safety while dropping bombs over their heads. Atonement means action.” The flotilla was intercepted, and Adler reported being abused by Israelis and taunted by American diplomats. He counseled that his mistreatment “pales in comparison to the treatment that Palestinians endure every single day,” yet he argued that it illustrated “how rogue the state of Israel has become in its utter disregard for basic international humanitarian law.”

 

KNOW-YOUR-RIGHTS CAMPAIGN
Win Without War’s “Not What You Signed Up For” Project

With the Trump administration putting military personnel at legal, moral, and physical risk through reckless and unnecessary domestic deployments, Win Without War’s “Not What You Signed Up For” project has launched a campaign to reach out to National Guard members who have been deployed to DC, Chicago, Memphis, and other cities.

After the Trump administration deployed the Tennessee National Guard to Memphis in violation of state law and against the wishes of local officials, Win Without War posted a billboard advertising NotWhatYouSignedUpFor.org, awebsite connecting members of the military with information about their rights while in uniform, including how to respond to unlawful orders. (The billboard is visible on Memphis’s historic Beale Street, where National Guard troops have recently patrolled.)

The “Not What You Signed Up For” project highlights the work of principled organizations that are experienced in counseling service members, including About Face, the GI Rights Hotline, and the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force. They want troops to know that someone has their back—because the Trump administration doesn’t. Katrina vanden Heuvel

 

ONLINE ACTIVISM
Track AIPAC / AIPAC Tracker

When Israel’s assault on Gaza turned into what Casey Kennedy described as “a live-streamed genocide,” the anti-corruption campaigner started asking why so few people were “connecting these dots of why are our officials OK with being complicit in this? Why are we sending American tax dollars to be used for war crimes? Why are we sending American-made weapons to murder women and children and innocent civilians?” Kennedy and Cory Archibald, a veteran leader of the group Brand New Congress who’s campaigned for candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush, set out to “pull back the curtain” on the role played by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in influencing US policy. Their vehicle is the website Track AIPAC and the related X account AIPAC Tracker, which reveals the money that Democratic and Republican candidates have taken from the billionaire-funded organization that backs Netanyahu’s policies. Launched in April 2024, AIPAC Tracker now has almost 400,000 followers. Breaking Points host Krystal Ball credits it with playing a major role in making AIPAC “a lightning rod in American politics” and convincing even centrist Democrats to reject donations associated with the organization, while “more and more candidates,” Archibald notes, “are running on an anti-AIPAC platform.”

 

SUNDAY-MORNING RADIO
Keep Hope Alive

The Rev. Jesse Jackson has been ailing in recent years, yet his Rainbow Coalition vision echoes across the land each Sunday morning in the form of a two-hour radio show organized each week by Jackson in consultation with his daughter, Santita, a veteran broadcaster. Aired from Los Angeles to Washington, Phoenix to Chicago, St. Louis to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the program features members of Congress, state legislators, authors, academics, and activists. While there’s a sharp focus on domestic debates, the show’s great strength may well be its internationalism, as it maintains Jackson’s emphasis on diplomacy and peacemaking, with regular segments on the Middle East (featuring guests such as longtime Rainbow aide and activist Jim Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute) and Latin America. And, over many years, this is where listeners have heard thoughtful assessments of the outcry against Trump’s continued threats toward Venezuela.

 

PATRIOT
Bruce Springsteen

The rocker whose name is synonymous with the phrase “Born in the USA” toured Europe just months after Trump and his wrecking crew retook the White House. It could have been a respite from the chaos at home. Instead, Springsteen chose to speak to the world about the “tyranny” that gripped the nation that his songs have chronicled for more than five decades.

“In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death,” Springsteen told the crowd in Manchester, England. “And in my country, they are taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers, they are rolling back historic civil-rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society. They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom.”

Springsteen was attacked on Fox News and by an angry Trump, who dismissed him as a “dried out prune of a rocker” who “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back in the Country.” Springsteen, who recognizes that dissent is a true expression of patriotism, was not intimidated. Believing in the power of music, the heir to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger told the world—and Americans who were desperate for a resistance message—that “the mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll, in dangerous times. In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”

 

POLITICAL HISTORY
Juanita Tolliver’s A More Perfect Party

Shirley Chisholm’s influence on American politics keeps growing. In April, the voters of Oakland elected as their mayor former US representative Barbara Lee, who began her political journey as a Democratic delegate backing Chisholm’s groundbreaking 1972 presidential bid. Lee always recalls Chisholm’s immense contribution as the Black woman who broke down the barriers of American politics to advocate for economic, social, and racial justice—and peace. But Tolliver, an MSNBC political analyst and a contributor to TheGrio, recognized that more Americans need to know about Chisholm’s presidential bid. Tolliver tells that story in A More Perfect Party: The Night Shirley Chisholm and Diahann Carroll Reshaped Politics, which focuses on a remarkable Beverly Hills party in 1972 at which Carroll, then at the peak of her acting career, hosted Chisholm, Lee, Huey Newton, Berry Gordy, Flip Wilson, David Frost, Goldie Hawn, and dozens of other artists and activists. A brilliant examination of a time when politics and art combined to imagine a more perfect union, this is a book of engaging and necessary political history.

 

DOCUMENTARY
Steal This Story, Please!

Did you know that the intrepid independent journalist Amy Goodman dotes on her dog, Zazu, who is named for the historic youth movement in France during the German occupation? Or that Goodman’s grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi who taught her to “accept all questioning”? Or that she once asked former president George H.W. Bush, to his face, if he was a war criminal? It’s all in Steal This Story, Please!—an intimate, instructive, and often surprising documentary about Goodman and the power of independent media. Directors Tia Lesson and Carl Deal go behind the scenes at Democracy Now!, the independent news outlet Goodman cofounded. The program now airs on more than 1,500 public broadcasting stations worldwide, providing frontline reports on the most consequential stories of our time, from the global climate catastrophe to the war in Gaza. The documentary’s great power comes through its deployment of archival footage—from a young Goodman’s reporting on a 1991 massacre in East Timor to the days after 9/11 when she and her crew remained in Democracy Now!’s Chinatown office so they could give a full report from Ground Zero.

This is the dramatic story of a heroic journalist confronting and overtaking the forces that have sought to silence and even kill her. Also heroic are the featured members of her team, including the pathbreaking Juan Gonzalez, the charismatic Nermeen Shaikh, and the show’s correspondent and former Nation contributor Jeremy Scahill.

The documentary feels especially poignant and necessary in an era of increasingly profit-driven and consolidated corporate media, when press freedom is under authoritarian assault. Reflecting on media repression today in the closing scene of Steal This Story, Please!, Goodman refers to the White Rose, a group of German university students who fought Hitler’s regime by distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. One of the pamphlets declared, “We will not be silent.” Goodman concludes, “These words should be the Hippocratic oath of the media today.”

 

UNBOUGHT, UNBOSSED COMMENTARY
Joy Reid

Among the most prominent of the many journalists who’ve been forced out of their positions since Donald Trump retook the White House is Joy Reid. While all of these capitulations by media companies were unsettling, the decision by MSNBC (rebranded recently as MS NOW) to give Reid and her team pink slips, purportedly as part of a network-wide shake-up, was broadly recognized as a rebuke of Reid for doing what she does best: telling the truth, focusing on the communities most harmed by autocrats and uplifting the progressive voices and lawmakers who are working to bring us closer to a truly pluralist society. Reid’s removal came at the same time that we were witnessing mass firings in multiple industries, with Black women taking the hardest hits. Earlier in 2025, MS NOW reported on the stark reality that 300,000 Black women had left the workforce in three months. Ironically, just three months later, CBS News and then NBC News announced the end of their racial-justice teams, as well as the dismantling of sections covering issues centered on LGBTQ people, Asian Americans, and Latino communities. Amid this turmoil, Reid is carrying on with her own Joy Reid Show on YouTube, as well as a Substack and a podcast. “I think in this moment, not being a part of corporate media is actually a gift,” she told The Guardian. “Because from now, on the outside looking in, I don’t know that I could live with the kind of restrictions that people in corporate media are facing. So I think—it was a blessing.”

Joy Reid is not going anywhere. In the face of attacks from the right and capitulations on the part of corporate behemoths, she has emerged as an unbought and unbossed truth-teller. Regina Mahone

 

BEARING WITNESS
The Hind Rajab Foundation

Named for a 5-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces after she pleaded for emergency services to rescue her from a bullet-sprayed car in January 2024, the Hind Rajab Foundation pursueslitigation against those responsible for war crimes in Gaza. Israel and its armed forces have enjoyed international legal impunity for too long; that’s why this donation-based foundation is holding members of the Israel Defense Forces to account. Cofounded by Belgian Lebanese organizers and headquartered in Brussels, HRF would not be possible without the efforts of dozens of researchers and lawyers, some based in the United States. Through painstaking research and coordination, a network of volunteers builds cases against IDF soldiers who commit crimes that have no chance of being prosecuted in Israel.

When low-level members of the IDF, acting either on orders or on their own volition, kill civilians or commit other atrocities, they do so assuming they are all but guaranteed to evade justice. HRF’s goal is for these perpetrators to see justice not in international courts but in national ones. There’s a legal theory behind this strategy. The International Criminal Court, as a rule, intervenes only after measures in a local jurisdiction have been exhausted, and the ICC is hamstrung for a host of reasons. HRF brings ingenuity and a diligent work ethic to the project of encouraging countries to prosecute these criminals at the national level. The foundation has assembled an impressive team of researchers to track IDF activity on the ground, identifying where units are operating and which international laws they’ve violated. Soldiers often travel abroad after committing these crimes, and HRF is seeing to it that their breaches of the Geneva Convention are brought to the attention of their host countries. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! has compared the foundation’s work to that of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which famously hunted Nazi war criminals. No doubt, the foundation merits the plaudits, but it also needs monetary support, which can be provided at hindrajabfoundation.org/donate. Rose D’Amora

Zohran Mamdani won’t become New York City’s mayor until January 1, but there is already immense pressure on him to achieve great things. Yet the 34-year-old democratic socialist, who will be the city’s youngest mayor since Hugh John Grant served in the late 19th century, shows few signs of being overwhelmed. In fact, in a new conversation with The Nation, Mamdani spoke of his determination to make bold and unexpected moves both to protect New Yorkers from economic and political threats and to directly improve the circumstances of the people whose votes have given him a headline-grabbing mandate and turned him into something of a political superstar.

The boldness of Mamdani’s postelection approach has extended to talking with ideological opposites—as he did in his high-profile November meeting with Donald Trump at the White House, and in a less widely reported follow-up phone conversation between the two. Trump’s respectful response to the outreach from the incoming mayor who, just weeks before the two met, had referred to the president as “a despot,” shocked pundits and politicians—including a good many Republican candidates and strategists who had attacked the mayor’s left-wing policies and were suddenly hearing their party’s leader suggest that he “really would” be comfortable living in a city led by a proud democratic socialist.

Mamdani told me that he went into the White House meeting with a clear understanding of the differences he has with Trump, whom he decried throughout much of the 2025 campaign as “a fascist” and who, in turn, referred to Mamdani as a “100% Communist lunatic.”

The mayor-elect knew that a long string of political figures from the US and around the world had been dressed down, embarrassed, and attacked by the president during White House meetings. He also knew that, while he would be civil to Trump, he would not disavow his deeply held progressive beliefs, nor minimize their fundamental ideological differences.

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“I prepared for many different kinds of a meeting,” Mamdani explained. “I was hopeful through it all that it would be a productive one, but I knew that there were many different kinds of possibilities in what that meeting could hold. And, you know, a few months ago on the campaign trail, a reporter had asked me for three words to describe myself, and I told them ‘New York City.’ And I kept coming back to that as what the focus of the meeting [with the president] needed to be. Because, oftentimes, when politicians meet, the conversation rarely extends beyond either of them. And if you can in fact focus the meeting on a place of shared interest and love and purpose, then it has the potential to unlock what could be incredibly important for working-class New Yorkers across the five boroughs. And this is an importance that can be felt not only in their ability to afford to live in New York City, but also that they be safe in New York City. And that was much of what was guiding me as, as I was preparing for the meeting [with Trump] and thinking about it.”

To keep the focus of the meeting on New York City, specifically, and on affordability issues more broadly, Mamdani recalled, “I told the president that, while my campaign began on October 23rd of 2024, there were far more people who became aware of it after the president won [the 2024 election] because of a video where I went to interview New Yorkers in two of the neighborhoods that saw the most significant swings towards the right—Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens. I told the president that when I asked these New Yorkers who they voted for and why, I heard from them again and again that they voted for Donald Trump and they did so because of the cost-of-living crisis, and out of a desperation for relief, whether it be through the form of cheaper groceries, or a return to what they remember being able to afford four years prior; whether it be their rent or their childcare or their utilities.” The mayor-elect said he spoke of “finding that, amidst the strong and serious disagreements that [he and the president] have, there is a shared analysis on the way in which the cost of living crisis is pushing New Yorkers and Americans to the brink, and how the opportunity that we have in this moment is to address it—and in doing so, to deliver a new kind of politics.”

At the heart of this politics, for a tremendous number of voters, said Mamdani, is “a recognition that the system of politics as we know it is broken, and it is one that has left people behind.” That’s a message that he said he sought to impart when he talked with Trump.

The White House meeting was generally viewed as a significant and successful one, especially for Mamdani, who must use every opening to protect New Yorkers in a period that has seen the Trump administration threaten local officials (including the mayor-elect), propose to hold up financial aid to urban centers, and launch vile assaults on immigrant communities in many of America’s largest cities.

Mamdani has been a stark critic of Trump’s policies (especially on immigration issues, civil liberties, and foreign policy) and told The Nation that he will “absolutely” maintain that critique. Indeed, since the session with Trump, Mamdani has been as outspoken as ever in public appearances—and on social media with detailed “Know Your Rights, Protect Your Neighbors” messages for vulnerable New Yorkers. “Honesty has to be at the heart of every relationship,” he explained to The Nation, “and I will continue to always be honest about my principles, my beliefs, and at the heart of it is always thinking about the welfare of New Yorkers.”

Even as commentators continue to discuss the success of the White House session, Mamdani is making no assumptions about what any current cordiality with Trump will mean for the long term. “I am always hesitant to draw far-reaching conclusions,” the mayor-elect said. “What I will say is that [the meeting with Trump] leaves me hopeful of continuing a productive working relationship with the president that is honest about where we disagree and looking for the points of agreement in what could especially be transformative for New Yorkers who are being pushed out of the city that they love.”

That’s a statement rooted in the mayor-elect’s faith in the power of ongoing dialogue—especially with political rivals and critics—and in an understanding of how big-city mayors can and must operate on the national stage.

The governance of great American cities has been so frequently undermined by misguided (and in some cases deliberately destructive) federal and state budget priorities, disinvestment by manufacturing corporations, and neglect on the part of the media that it is easy to forget that America’s mayors were once recognized as heroic figures who inspired not just the cities they served but the entire nation and the world.

There was a time when mayors appeared regularly on the covers of Time , Newsweek, and Life magazines; they were featured in the newsreels that ran before movies; they addressed the people in scratchy radio addresses that were heard with the same enthusiasm as President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats.

That was certainly the case with New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a hero of Mamdani’s who, in the 1930s and ’40s, spoke of making the country’s largest city a platform for “a vital new type of government.” A longtime Republican member of Congress who had been swept from office in the 1932 landslide election that ushered in a period of Democratic dominance in Washington—and, many assumed, in the Tammany Hall machine’s New York City—La Guardia sought the mayoralty in 1933 with a promise to govern to the left of his rivals with “an administration tender hearted toward the weak and unfortunate and hardhearted toward the wrongdoer and the grafter.”

To succeed, La Guardia had to build partnerships with Democrats like Roosevelt, Republicans like crusading prosecutor and eventual New York Governor Thomas Dewey, and even Socialists like Norman Thomas. (The latter alliance was in many ways the easiest, as La Guardia had once mounted a successful congressional reelection bid on the Socialist Party ballot line, and remained close to its leaders.)

La Guardia once argued that “there is no Republican way of cleaning streets any more than there is a Democratic way of putting out a fire. There is no Republican way of building parks any more than there is a Democratic way of maintaining and administering hospitals.” Yet pushing beyond the boundaries of partisanship was risky in the 1930s, as it is now.

Mamdani says he is prepared to take risks if they hold out the promise of a better life for New Yorkers.

“I think La Guardia showed us the importance of meeting a crisis at its scale. And the only way you can do so is by understanding that it will take everyone in order to fulfill that [mission],” explained the mayor-elect. “I’ve often spoken about my belief that he was the greatest mayor in New York City history. And you cannot tell the story of La Guardia without telling the story of FDR—and the story of the relationship between municipal and federal government.

So it was that, while they were in the Oval Office, Mamdani steered the discussion to Roosevelt’s New Deal presidency—the legacy of which Trump has been attacking on so many fronts. “I actually asked the president that we take a photo in front of the portrait [of FDR] and I spoke about how transformative the New Deal had been for our country and how that is the legacy of politics that I seek to draw upon in the work that I’m doing in New York City.”

It is hard to imagine that Trump got the point. None of the president’s recent actions suggest that he has any inclination to transform from an autocratic billionaire to an FDR liberal.

Mamdani, however, took comfort from the fact that “the president said in the [press] pool that he would not be looking to hurt our city, but rather to help our city. I saw that reflected in his approach to any and all the questions that he was being asked [by reporters, many of them from conservative outlets, who questioned the pair after the Oval Office meeting].”

New York’s mayor-elect expects that the president has at least some “understanding of how this city is one that’s on the precipice of becoming a museum of where working people could once live, as opposed to a living, breathing embodiment of it.” And it bears repeating that Trump did tell the press pool that he could live in a city run by a mayor who everyone knows was elected as an unapologetic democratic socialist.

In fairness, Mamdani recalled, “We didn’t speak much about our differing political ideologies—of myself being a democratic socialist. But we did speak about what it looks like for New Yorkers to be crushed under the weight of this cost-of-living crisis. And so much of my description of myself as a democratic socialist is based on my belief in the importance of dignity for each and every New Yorker—and how that dignity is being stripped of so many across the city through the ever-increasing costs of rent, of childcare, of utilities, and even of public transit.”

That emphasis on dignity extends not only from democratic socialist values but from New York City’s mayoral history, notes Mamdani, who has been thinking a good deal about Fiorello La Guardia of late.

“I often think about his quote, ‘You cannot preach self-government and liberty to people in a starving land.” And I’ve often thought that only by feeding people can you free them,” said the mayor-elect. “The focus in my work is both of those things at once—and how to ensure that we embrace and explore any opportunity to so long as it stands to benefit New Yorkers themselves.”

In the fall of 2020, at a point when Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden were locked in their high-stakes competition for the presidency of the United States, Wisconsin ranked as the ultimate battleground state. It had backed Democrats in presidential elections from 1988 to 2012, and then—by just 22,748 votes—supported Trump in 2016. If the Republican president could be beaten in Wisconsin in 2020, state Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler argued, along with many others, there was a good chance that the national electoral balance would be tipped toward Biden.

Wikler pulled out all the stops to achieve this result, and he had help from an unexpected ally: filmmaker Rob Reiner. The Hollywood director became a central figure in what Wikler recalls as “the biggest state party fundraiser, as far as I know, in American history.” That event, a dramatic reading of the script from Reiner’s highly regarded film The Princess Bride, was streamed online, attracted 142,000 viewers, and stirred the energy of grassroots activists at a critical stage in an ultimately successful campaign.

Reiner, who was renowned for his work as a director, screenwriter, and actor, was found dead Sunday, along with his wife, Michele, in the couple’s Los Angeles home, after what police described as an apparent homicide.

Reiner was, of course, remembered for his remarkable accomplishments over six decades in Hollywood. But he was also recalled as a lifelong progressive activist. After decades of campaigning for liberal candidates and causes—particularly LGBTQ+ rights and access to education—he had emerged in recent years as an outspoken and consistent critic of Trump, describing the reality-TV star turned politician as an authoritarian who “wants to destroy the constitution, go after his political enemies and turn America into an autocracy.” While Reiner’s critique was well regarded by civil libertarians and historians of the American experiment, it drew the ire of Trump, who on Monday lashed out at the director—claiming that he had suffered from a “massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

The president’s crude attack was decried not just by Democrats but also by a number of Republicans. Trump’s self-absorbed assessment of a genuinely beloved figure in the entertainment industry was offensive. But so too was the fact that the embattled president overlooked Reiner’s decades-long history of advocating for the constitutional system of checks and balances and for democracy.

“I think Rob Reiner felt, to his core, that the light of democracy was the thing that made every other kind of progress possible. And he knew that it was in danger,” recalled Wikler on Monday. “He’d been involved in the fight for democracy throughout his life, but especially since Trump came in. That was the motivation for everyone he pulled into the Princess Bride event—a sense that if all of us didn’t do everything we could, then the light might go out. We needed to keep it alive.”

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Working with Reiner on the September 2020 event brought together the personal and political sides of Wikler’s life.

“The Princess Bride is my favorite movie in the world. It’s really affected my life,” explained the now-former party chair, who is currently writing a much-anticipated book on his political experiences. “And I think that what I loved about that movie, and about so much of Rob Reiner’s work, and his life, is that it had such a soul. The humor and warmth were there, but his work also had depth. Both his work and the spirit that informed his activism can teach us all something about how to live a life.”

Reiner directed and produced The Princess Bride in 1987, with a cast that included actors Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, Robin Wright, Carol Kane, and, in the scene-stealing role of Westley, Cary Elwes.

After Wikler and the Wisconsin Democrats pulled off a successful summer 2020 benefit that reunited cast members of the politically engaged TV drama The West Wing, Elwes reached out to the party chair through a mutual friend. That connection led to a discussion of whether a Princess Bride reunion might be organized to support Wisconsin Democrats.

Reiner’s commitment was essential. And, of course, he was all in. Wikler had met Reiner in the early 2000s, when the Wisconsinite worked with Al Franken, the comedian and author who would eventually serve as Minnesota’s US senator. In 2020, the director of This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Stand by Me (1986), When Harry Met Sally…. (1989), Misery (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), and The American President (1995), among other major motion pictures, threw himself into the Wisconsin project—working with Wikler to pull together original cast members for a live dramatic reading of the Princess Bride script.

“Rob Reiner’s genius for assembling people to do amazing things was on full display with the Princess Bride fundraiser,” said Wikler. “He got all these actors from all over the country—some of whom had no idea how to use Zoom—to get in front of the cameras and to play their roles with every bit of the vigor and energy that they brought to their original performances.”

On September 13, 2020, Reiner joined the crew for a Zoom performance that was covered by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and other media outlets as one of the major events of the campaign season. The performance raised in excess of $4.25 million for the state party. It also energized grassroots activists who, in November of that year, narrowly delivered the state and—with wins in other battlegrounds—the presidency to Biden.

For his part, Reiner remained politically engaged, especially after Trump returned to the White House this year.

“I actually had a couple calls with him over the last month. He was dreaming up a huge get-out-the-vote operation for the 2026 midterm elections,” Wikler said Monday. “Rob Reiner had serious politics. He was tuned into the details, as well as the big picture. He wasn’t just pontificating or writing a check. He was thinking about what he and his community could do to make a real difference in people’s lives.”

This article is part of a special Nation package devoted to LA’s bold stand against the Trump administration’s assaults on the city.

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The New York Nation, as some called this magazine in its early years, has always kept one eye on Los Angeles. Even if the magazine suggested in an 1869 essay on “The New West” that “not everything is lovely there,” our writers have over the past century and a half been drawn to the sprawling city—with all its energy and possibility, along with its share of sordid realities and inequalities—and the broader story of what would come to be known as the Left Coast.

We return again with this issue, which features a multifaceted examination of LA’s bold resistance to the Trump administration’s assault on the city itself, and on the rich diversity and democratic promise that Los Angeles represents. Bill Gallegos, a veteran Chicano activist who is a member of The Nation’s editorial board, sets the stage with his examination of the remarkable coalitions that pushed back against Trump’s decision to send federal troops to the city last spring. LA Mayor Karen Bass offers her perspectives on resisting Trump and Trumpism. And author and music-­industry veteran Danny Goldberg contributes a moving reflection on the linkages between the racial-justice protests of the past and our current struggles.

This package begins an expanded focus by The Nation on Donald Trump’s assault on the blue zones of a nation he is bent on tearing apart. Beginning with the resistance in California makes sense because The Nation has so frequently turned to the state for political inspiration.

In 1934, when the socialist novelist Upton Sinclair ran as the Democratic nominee for governor there—under the slogan “End Poverty in California,” or EPIC—The Nation’s editor and publisher, Oswald Garrison Villard, hailed him for building a grassroots movement of unemployed and working-class voters who were desperate for change during the Great Depression. Sinclair’s campaign fell short, but its advocacy for state-run cooperative industries and relief for the poor struck a chord in a state—and a nation—that was seething with labor unrest and economic discontent.

Two years later, the novelist John Steinbeck brought the conditions of California’s agriculture workers to national prominence in a Nation article. “It is fervently to be hoped,” wrote the author of The Grapes of Wrath, “that the great group of migrant workers so necessary to the harvesting of California’s crops may be given the right to live decently, that they may not be so badgered, tormented, and hurt that in the end they become avengers of the hundreds of thousands who have been tortured and starved before them.”

During World War II, the magazine denounced the internment of Japanese American citizens—who were overwhelmingly from California, as well as Oregon and Washington—as a national catastrophe. Portraying the detention of patriotic citizens as “mass hysteria,” The Nation observed: “Discrimination against citizens because of their racial lineage cuts straight across the American tradition.”

Carey McWilliams, the LA writer who published one of the first books decrying the mistreatment of Japanese American families during the war, edited The Nation from 1955 to 1975. One of California’s greatest historians, writing books like Factories in the Field and Southern California: An Island on the Land, McWilliams chronicled the state’s transformation from an agricultural frontier to an economic powerhouse, exposing the human cost of its sunshine image.

During the 1950s Red Scare, when loyalty oaths and blacklists rocked Hollywood and much of the rest of the country, McWilliams and The Nation defended LA writers, directors, and artists who’d been accused of subversion. The magazine’s exposés of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch hunts provided a platform for voices that would otherwise have been silenced, in a fight that another Nation editor, Victor Navasky, chronicled in his remarkable 1980 book Naming Names.

In 1965, Hunter S. Thompson told the story of California’s motorcycle gangs for The Nation and expanded that article into his bestselling book Hell’s Angels—ushering in the era of “gonzo journalism.” Mike Davis, the great California-based historian and social critic, also began to contribute groundbreaking essays to The Nation. Writing in the mid-1990s, Davis chronicled the dire effects of racial capitalism in Compton, called out California’s mass incarceration crisis, and explained the origins and consequences of the state’s “natural disasters”: the fires, earthquakes, and floods that raised profound questions about everything from overdevelopment to climate change. Davis, like so many other great Nation writers on the California experience (Robert Scheer, Amy Wilentz, Jon Wiener, and Rebecca Solnit among them) treated the state not as a sun-drenched exception, or as an American West of Eden, but as its truest self—a place where the nation’s inequalities, contradictions, and possibilities have been laid bare.

This month’s package of articles on resistance and coalition-building in our second-most-populous city continues in this great Nation tradition of looking west—of searching not only for the sources of this country’s turmoil but also for clues to how we might yet forge a progressive future in which another LA, another California, and another America are possible.

Democrats have developed an uncanny skill for seizing defeat from the jaws of victory in recent years. That didn’t happen, though, in the December 2 special election to fill a US House seat in Tennessee. While progressive Democrat Aftyn Behn fell short in her quest to flip a radically gerrymandered Republican district, she made up so much ground that smart Democrats have already begun to redo their calculations—and reconsider their strategies—regarding the midterm elections.

If they reconsider those strategies boldly enough, they could seize a national victory in 2026 from the jaws of Behn’s narrow defeat in 2025. By dramatically expanding the map of House and Senate races in which they invest resources, by recognizing the need not just to run against Donald Trump but to run for something, and by embracing the progressive economic policies that have boosted turnout for candidates as diverse as Behn and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Democrats could secure midterm victories that are about much more than partisan point-scoring. They could disempower Trump’s MAGA movement sufficiently to check and balance the corruption, economic plundering, cruelty, racism, xenophobia, and authoritarian overreach that has characterized the most dangerous administration in modern history.

The stakes are so high—and the threats to democracy so real—that many progressives still refuse to allow themselves to hope. Yet the spirit of resistance is alive in the land. And it is growing in a manner that tells us that 2026 can and should be seen as a critical juncture for a country that can no longer accept the backward politics of Trump and his MAGA satraps.

The past year, for all its frustrations and disappointments, drew the outlines of opposition. Courageous progressive activists and electeds stepped up from the start of Trump’s term with a boldness and clarity of vision—as this year’s Nation Honor Roll (page 46) illustrates. As the months went on, the reach of the resistance became ever more inspiring—and visible. Americans turned out by the millions for “No Kings” rallies in June and October, filling the streets of great urban centers as well as the town squares of rural communities to protest everything from ICE raids to assaults on science to Republican schemes to fund tax cuts for the rich by gutting Medicaid and anti-hunger programs. Then, on November 4, the resistance flooded polling places nationwide. Democrats swept gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey by far wider margins than predicted and secured overwhelming control of the legislative chambers in those states. They also won breakthrough victories for candidates in red states: flipping Georgia Public Service Commission seats and grabbing enough legislative posts to end Republican supermajority control of the Mississippi state Senate. And in Seattle and New York City, voters rejected right-wing demagoguery and centrist Democratic caution to choose dynamic young democratic socialists as their mayors.

The 2025 fightback against Trump, in the streets and at the polls, has been unprecedented. But will it be sufficiently powerful in 2026 to upend the Republican control of Congress that enables Trump, Stephen Miller, and their MAGA wrecking crew? An answer can be found in the results of Behn’s race and other 2025 campaigns that rallied a new generation of voters with an aggressively progressive affordability agenda.

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In a Tennessee district where the party’s national ticket was on the losing side of a 60–38 split in 2024, Behn narrowed the margin to 54–45 in a special election that saw surprisingly robust turnout. That result wasn’t an outlier: In every special election for open US House seats since Trump began his second term, emboldened Democrats have, on average, outrun the percentages for the party’s 2024 presidential ticket by roughly the same 13-point swing that Behn achieved. “Whether you go from the suburbs of Washington, DC, all the way to the Southwest in Arizona, whether you’re looking at Texas, whether you’re looking at Tennessee, whether you go down to Florida, we are seeing the Democratic out-performance of Kamala Harris happening across the political map,” said Harry Enten, CNN’s veteran number cruncher.

Republicans and their amen corner in the DC pundit class can claim that special-election results tell us nothing about how upcoming midterms will go. But they’re wrong. “We actually have history to show that what happens in special elections doesn’t just stay in special elections; it spills over to the midterm results,” explained Enten. “When a party outperformed in special elections since 2005, five out of five times they went on to win a majority in the US House of Representatives. What happened…in Tennessee is a very, very bad omen for Republicans and a very, very good omen for Democrats.”

How good? A 13-point swing from Trump in 2024 to the 2026 midterms could flip more than three dozen GOP-held seats to the Democrats—a swing similar to the 2018 “blue wave” that disempowered Trump two years into his first term. Even Republicans acknowledge that the narrow GOP advantage in the House is now exceptionally vulnerable. And some worry that the party’s three-seat Senate majority might suddenly be threatened, with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) describing the Tennessee results as a “dangerous” indicator that disdain for Trump has become “a powerful motivator” even in red states.

If Democrats are looking only for a confidence boost, then they can thank Behn and the party’s other 2025 special-election candidates—some of whom were elected, others of whom closed the partisan divide by as much as 28 points—for a collective bump to a party that currently lacks the ability to restrain or counter Trump, not least on Capitol Hill, where the Democrats have struggled with the basic demands of mounting a credible opposition to a president whose mismanagement of the economy, personal scandals, and chaotic and corrupt approach to governing has decimated approval ratings for both Trump and the GOP.

Americans are ready to give Democratic candidates enough support to get the party back into the fight politically. But the Democrats—whose own approval ratings are nothing to get excited about—should not be satisfied with merely offering an alternative to Trump. It is true that the president is unpopular and that his policy stances—even on issues like tariffs and immigration—have been massively discredited in the eyes of the electorate. But Trump hates to lose.

The president, who still refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election, has devoted his energy in recent months to rewriting the rules before the 2026 elections. In addition to schemes that gerrymander the House district lines of red states like Texas and Missouri, he’s calling for federal and state pressure to upend structures that make it easier to vote, declaring: “No mail-in or ‘Early’ Voting, Yes to Voter ID!” And he will not stop there. Count on the president to enter the new year with fresh “flood the zone” schemes to take back momentum from the Democrats. Expect him to keep targeting “blue cities” with violent immigration raids and federal occupation strategies—and to ramp up attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion and the trans community. Who knows how far he will take his lawless threats against Venezuela, his tariff adventurism, or his nuclear brinkmanship?

Ultimately, Trump’s desperation will lead him to try and compete with Democrats on the most compelling of domestic issues: the escalating affordability crisis. Democrats such as Mamdani, who promised to rein in the cost of living, won big in 2025. Trump will try to muddy the waters in 2026 with convoluted healthcare-pricing interventions, cynical pledges of targeted tax cuts, and dangerously ill-conceived proposals to deregulate AI. He’ll have a hard time getting proposals through a US House in which Republican Speaker Mike Johnson appears to have lost control of his caucus. But bet on the billionaire class, corporate interests—especially those for AI and crypto—and AIPAC to spend record amounts of money to try and save the GOP.

Against Trump’s willingness to abuse his authority obscenely and the willingness of his allies to spend just as obscenely, Democrats can’t afford to run cautiously. They need to recruit and support dynamic young and progressive candidates in purple and red states. And they can’t fear primary fights—as long as those fights nominate contenders who are prepared to go big in November.

What does going big look like? Democrats must offer voters an affordability agenda that:

• expands access to healthcare and offers a path to the Medicare for All reforms that polls show most Americans favor;

• replaces the minimum wage with a living wage;

• puts forward comprehensive strategies for affordable childcare that follow the lead of New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham;

• creates a Marshall Plan for the construction of affordable housing nationwide; and

• offers an AI regulatory agenda that addresses the real fears that Americans have for their jobs and the social costs of a technology that prioritizes tech-bro profits over humanity.

Democrats should also have the courage to acknowledge that Americans are horrified by the genocide in Gaza, the prospect of war in the Caribbean, and Trump’s nuclear brinkmanship.

Above all, the party must, as California Representative Ro Khanna argues, “understand the political moment we’re in.” That won’t be easy for party leaders who are addicted to caution. But the results from 2025 tell us that a Democratic Party that is prepared to fight everywhere—and not just against Trump, but for an inspired vision of an affordable and humane America—can win a mandate in 2026. If it does so, it will help pull our country back from the brink.

The last time a Democrat was elected as mayor of Miami, Bill Clinton was president.

Over the ensuing decades, Miami became such a consistently Republican town that outgoing Mayor Francis Suarez—who was reelected in 2021 with almost 80 percent of the vote—briefly sought the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

But on Tuesday, Miami voters replaced Suarez with Democrat Eileen Higgins,a Peace Corps alumnus, former foreign service officer in Latin America, and Miami-Dade County commissioner with a track record of championing affordable housing, mass transit expansion, and environmental initiatives.

It wasn’t even close. Higgins won 59.5 percent of the vote, to just 40.5 percent for Republican Emilio González, a former Miami city manager who served as President George W. Bush’s director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and also as director of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council.

Running with ardent support from President Trump—who declared before the vote, “Miami’s Mayor Race is Tuesday. It is a big and important race!!! Vote for Republican Gonzalez”—as well as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida Senator Rick Scott, González had all the pieces in place for a win. But he couldn’t overcome the fundamental reality of 2025.

Americans are now so soured on Trump (whose economic mismanagement, chaotic governance, and authoritarian overreach have dropped his approval rating as low as 36 percent in a late-November Gallup survey) and the GOP brand that they are turning out anywhere and everywhere to vote for Democrats.

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That was the case in Miami, a city with a large Latino population that not long ago was seen as an emerging base for the Republicans. Now CNN data analyst Harry Enten notes,“Latinos have shifted heavily against Trump (with a drop of 36 points in net approval).”

In a broader sense, says Enten, “Trump’s absolute kryptonite to the GOP in big cities.”

But this is about much more than big cities.

Democrats are breaking through all over, showing strength even in Republican regions where maps are gerrymandered to favor the GOP.

Last week’s returns from a Tennessee special election for an open US House seat show that Democrat Aftyn Behn’s strong run produced a 13-point shift away from the GOP in a normally safe Republican district. A 13-point shift nationally in 2026—or anything akin to that level of movement—would flip dozens of Republican House seats and give Democrats clear control of the chamber for the last two years of Trump’s presidency.

That prospect is not lost on the president.

Amid mounting discomfort on the part of congressional Republicans—many of whom are reportedly pondering standing down rather than risk getting wiped out in a blue wave next year—Trump has launched a desperate tour of battleground states. But if his often contradictory rambling about inflation and other economic challenges during a Pennsylvania stop on Tuesday night is anything to go by, his campaigning is unlikely to renew GOP fortunes.

Democrats have zeroed in on the cost-of-living challenges facing Americans across the country to considerable electoral success. Rather than counter with his own affordability agenda, Trump is resorting to his usual tactics, saying that the focus on the issue is a “hoax,” a “con job,” and a “scam.” He hit this theme repeatedly in Pennsylvania; as CBS News reported,“Mr. Trump criticized Democrats for focusing on affordability issues in Tuesday’s speech, though he said: ‘I can’t call it a hoax because they’ll misconstrue that.’” Then the network added, “Last week, the president called the affordability issue a ‘fake narrative”’ made up by Democrats to sway the public. But at the same time, he said he had inherited problems with affordability from his predecessor [former President Joe Biden].”

The prospect that Trump’s approval ratings could get even worse, and that disgust with a Republican-led Congress will do further damage to the GOP brand, has huge significance for the 2026 midterm elections, which will be the last significant chance voters have to place meaningful checks on Trump’s presidency. That’s what happened after the 2018 midterm elections during the president’s first term, when Democrats flipped control of the House and made major gains in the states.

At the close of an off-year election season that has seen Democrats steadily boost turnout and overperform in critical state and local contests, as well as special elections for legislative and congressional seats, the Miami result serves, in the words of Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin, as a “testament to what Democrats can accomplish when we organize and compete everywhere.”

Reflecting on Tuesday’s returns, in which a Democrat flip a heavily gerrymandered state legislative seat in Georgia—reversing a 22-point Republican advantage—and a scattering of end-of-the-year legislative contests from Iowa to Florida produced double-digit or higher swings to the Democratic candidates, Martin said, “Tonight’s result is yet another warning sign to Republicans that voters are fed up with their out-of-touch agenda that is raising costs for working families across the country.”

While partisans always put the best spin on election results—and while their rivals seek to discount them—the message from 2025 could not be clearer. The record of Trump and his administration, as well as that of the president’s allies in Congress, has become a massive burden for the Republican Party and is setting up a 2026 election cycle that could produce an epic smackdown for the GOP.

In 2025 alone, Democrats have won the governorships of Virginia (a flip from the GOP) and New Jersey, as well as overwhelming legislative majorities in those states. Along with their progressive allies, they have won critical state supreme court contests in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (officially a nonpartisan race, but with a clear partisan overlay). They have won mayoralties that had long been in Republican hands in red states across the country. They have scored groundbreaking wins in down-ballot state races—like November’s statewide contests in Georgia, where the Associated Press noted,

Two Democrats romped to wins over Republican incumbents in elections to the Georgia Public Service Commission on Tuesday, delivering the largest statewide margins of victory by Democrats in more than 20 years. Wins by Democrats Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson over Republicans Fitz Johnson and Tim Echols are the first time Democrats have won statewide elections to a state-level office in Georgia since 2006. The victories could juice Democratic fundraising and enthusiasm next year, when Georgia’s ballot will be topped by Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff’s reelection bid and an open governor’s race.

The Capitol Hill insider newspaper The Hill observed after it became clear that Higgins would secure a landslide in Miami, “The win is the latest boost for Democrats, who are coming out of better-than-expected elections in November and a strong showing in this month’s special House election in Tennessee. The party hopes an energized base and a focus on issues such as affordability will help flip the House and possibly even the Senate in next year’s midterms.”

The same is true in the fight for control of the states.

Results from legislative special elections and regular off-year contests in 2025 suggest that the Democrats are also securing significant gains in suburban and rural areas. “Democrats, buoyed by Trump’s unpopularity and a fired-up base, flipped 21 percent of all the GOP-held seats that were on the ballot throughout 2025,” reported The Bolts newsletter. Those results meant Democratic legislative caucuses expanded in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi and Pennsylvania. Were that pattern to repeat in 2026, it would remake the politics of states across the country—putting more legislative chambers in Democratic hands; giving Democratic governors the ability to advance bold agendas; and, by ending Republican supermajorities in red states, allowing Democrats to check and balance right-wing governors.

Even in 2025 legislative contests where Democrats were not winning outright majorities, they were advancing with such strength that 2026 candidates were excited by the numbers. Consider the case of an Iowa legislative special-election race on Tuesday in a historically Republican district. The GOP nominee finished ahead, but did so with a dramatically reduced advantage.

“Tonight, we’re seeing a 17-point over performance for Iowa Democrats,” explained Democratic US Senate candidate Zach Wahls, who hopes to be his party’s nominee next year in the race to replace Republican Senator Joni Ernst. “Our 2022 U.S. Senate race was decided by 12 points. Together, we can flip this seat next year and bring real change to the U.S. Senate.”

If the red state of Iowa could be in play in the competition for control of the Senate next year—along with more predictably winnable states such as Maine, Ohio and North Carolina—the prospect of a Democratic takeover becomes a real one. And if Democrats can win the Senate, along with the more easily flipped House, then Trump becomes as lame a duck as could be.

And the GOP could hit the skids in Washington—and in state capitals nationwide.

Indeed, the most consistent pattern of recent Democratic advances has been in legislative contests where, according to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee,“The DLCC’s data shows that state legislative Democrats overperformed 2025 elections in targeted districts by 4.5 points on average, which if replicated in 2026 elections would provide the most significant Democratic gains at this ballot level in two decades.”

With an eye toward putting 650 state legislative seats in play nationwide—as part of a plan to create majorities in states where the Democrats have not had advantages for years—the DLCC announced Wednesday that it will expand its target map to include at least 42 state legislative chambers. That’s the most targets ever for the committee. And the group’s plan to spend $50 million in 2026 races represents its largest single-year investment.

“2026 is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform state legislative power,” says DLCC president Heather Williams. “With multiple new majorities and trifectas in play next year, this isn’t a moment for modest gains—we are thinking more expansively than ever to sweep the landscape and create lasting power in statehouses. Beyond cementing Democratic state power, our 2026 wins will fundamentally shift power up and down the ticket and shape the future of Democratic power for years to come. The favorable political environment taking shape for Democrats is on a scale that only comes once in a generation, and the DLCC is poised to meet this moment through the largest target map and political budget ever. We aren’t wasting a moment to execute on our winning strategy.”

The possibility that Democrats could secure 2026 victories of a sort that come once in a generation—flipping the US House, the US Senate, governorships, and legislative chambers across the country—will no doubt produce mounting angst for Trump. He’ll keep lashing out, claiming that the Democratic focus on affordability is a “scam,” and that inflation concerns are a “hoax.” But the president’s angst is nothing compared to the frustration felt by the voters who have recognized that the economic failures and divisive politics of Trump and the GOP can be countered at the ballot box: in 2025 and 2026.

In the suburban and rural counties around Nashville, Tennessee, drivers passing under the bridges above area highways are witnessing a new phenomenon: “bridge brigades” holding aloft American flags, cheering, and pointing to brightly lit signs urging “Vote Aftyn.”

What’s striking is that “Aftyn” is a Democrat—State Representative Aftyn Behn—who is running what looks to be a competitive race for an open congressional seat in a historically Republican and, more recently, pro-Trump district.

Republicans have taken a beating recently, what with the sweeping rejection of Republican candidates in the November 4 off-year elections for the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, along with victories for Democrats in three Pennsylvania State Supreme Court seats, state and local posts in Georgia, legislative seats in Mississippi, and so many other contests around the country. But if Behn, a 36-year-old former community organizer, can win the special election in Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District on December 2, she might pull off the biggest upset of the year. That’s because, unlike Democrats in some of the other marquee 2025 contests, she’s fighting to flip a seat where the party has not been competitive for a long time.

And fresh data suggests she’s within range of a win. Emerson College Polling, one of the most respected survey research groups in the country, released a poll Wednesday morning that has Behn at 46 percent, versus 48 percent for corporate Republican Matt Van Epps.

With at least 5 percent of the voters in the Tennessee district undecided, this is now a “within-the-margin-of-error” race that Behn says she can win. “I woke up with the energy of a thousand Dolly Partons,” she said as she was canvassing Wednesday morning. To voters, especially the young people that her campaign has energized, Behn announced, “You have the opportunity of a lifetime to flip a congressional district.”

In a district that has been so Republican red for so long, this is still an uphill race. But national Democrats, activist groups such as Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), and a growing number of pundits share Behn’s view that something is big happening in Tennessee this fall. In addition to the encouraging poll numbers, her campaign notes that The Cook Political Report has moved the race from “Solid Republican” to “Lean Republican” and that early voting patterns have suggested that Democratic enthusiasm is surging.

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That’s got Republicans scared. On Tuesday, President Trump took to social media—employing urgent ALL-CAPS messaging—to try to pump up enthusiasm among Republicans in the district. And as national GOP committees and their conservative allies are mounting a last-minute ad blitz on Nashville TV, The New York Times reports: “Republicans have grown nervous about a House special election that could show whether the political environment continues to shift leftward.”

Even as the president and right-wing special interests try to stop her, however, Behn says frustration with Trump’s economic policies and erratic approach to governing have opened a rare pathway for her candidacy.

“With all the chaos of Washington, I think a lot of voters have the same sentiment of [asking]: Why would we send another Republican to go up to a government, a system, which they broke?” Behn explains in an interview with The Nation.

“I think a lot of people gave Trump a chance,” Behn says of the 2024 election, in which the Republican swept back into power with a GOP-led Congress. But “after nine months of absolute chaos, people’s bank accounts haven’t increased, the grocery costs haven’t decreased, and people are still struggling.”

With economic frustration mounting, Behn says, “we have built a coalition of the disenchanted, a coalition of the pissed off. I’ve always said on the campaign trail, ‘If you’re upset about the cost of living and the chaos of Washington, then I’m your candidate.’”

The question, of course, is whether that coalition can move the needle sufficiently to give Democrats a win in a district where they have failed to win even 40 percent of the vote in recent election cycles and where—before a redraw of Tennessee congressional lines following the 2020 Census—their candidates often struggled to win 25 percent of the vote. Trump won the district by 17 points in 2016, by 15 points in 2020, and by a staggering 22 points in 2024.

So what’s happening now? Behn argues that something of “a perfect storm” has developed in her race against Van Epps, a Republican insider who has spent much of his campaign time appearing on Fox News. While Republicans are dispirited—and, at least in some cases, giving up on their party—Democrats are fired up. That’s especially true in the multiracial section of Nashville that’s included in the seventh district, much of which Behn, one of the Tennessee House’s most progressive members, represents in the state legislature.

“I have a very progressive and engaged district, and I had the highest total voter turnout of any Democratic state representative in the 2024 cycle,” notes Behn, who has poured energy into organizing voters in her legislative district, along with other parts of Nashville and surrounding Davidson County. “I know how to mobilize Democrats,” she says, “and if I can mobilize the rest of Davidson County, we can win this.”

But Behn’s strategy does not stop at the county line. In more-Republican rural areas outside Davidson County, she is trying to reach voters who may not have cast a Democratic ballot in years. As someone who got her start as a community organizer in rural regions of the state, Behn has found allies among Tennesseans who are concerned that Medicaid cuts will lead to closures and cutbacks for small-town hospitals. She’s also found that her progressive stances—including calls for taxing billionaires, cracking down on corporate wrongdoing, supporting workers, and ending the assault on Gaza—have resonated with voters who are longing for moral courage. And for a voice in Washington.

“I received an e-mail from a Republican, a lifelong Republican, that lives in Clarksville [a city in Montgomery County, a former Democratic stronghold that backed Trump in 2024] that said, ‘I am a lifelong Republican, I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my life. But my family receives subsidies via the Affordable Care Act, and without them we won’t be able to afford health insurance.… I will vote for you if you commit to ensuring these subsidies [continue],’” recalls Behn. “I said, ‘Yes, of course. Of course.… I have a track record of fighting for the solvency of the ACA.”

Behn has made her advocacy for access to healthcare, along with her boldness in embracing affordability issues and criticizing the Republican-backed “Big Ugly Bill,” central to her message as the special election approaches. With support from labor unions and progressive groups like PDA, she has aired television ads that bluntly declare, “I’m Aftyn Behn. We all know the system is rigged in Washington. Here’s how it works: Politicians make it easy for their rich donors—tax cuts for billionaires, and burying the Epstein files. While hardworking Tennesseans get a rough ride by cutting healthcare for Tennessee families, doubling health insurance premiums and tariffs that hurt our economy.”

Behn appeal has caught the attention of national Democrats, who know that a win in Tennessee would be a huge breakthrough for them. It’s also got Republicans and their special-interest allies scared, and they have launched an expensive attack campaign against Behn in hopes of preventing an upset on December 2. The attacks have grown increasingly personal and intense as election day approaches.

But Behn says, “This race is winnable—not someday, not theoretically, but right now.” Referencing early voting patterns, she argues, “Voters are showing up because they’re hungry for leadership that will fight for affordable healthcare and hold corporate power accountable.”

When Zohran Mamdani met with President Trump on Friday, New York City’s mayor-elect did so as a proud democratic socialist.

And a winning one.

None of Trump’s hyperbolic commentary on the New York mayoral campaign, no absurd mischaracterization of Mamdani as a “communist,” no pressure tactic or threat regarding federal funding or ICE raids, could change the fact that the democratic socialism that Mamdani champions has gained traction with voters, in New York and nationally, who are looking anew at alternatives to status-quo politics and status-quo economics.

Trump—who, as he has often said, likes to be around winners—seemed to recognize that after the two men spoke in the Oval Office on Friday. The strikingly congenial tone of their post-meeting press conference felt like a sign that the Trumps of the world have begun to acknowledge—however grudgingly—that democratic socialism is here to stay in contemporary American politics.

Instead of the campaign-season vitriol that Trump aimed at the New York City Democrat, the president said Friday, “I feel very confident that he can do a very good job.”

Trump noted that “a lot of my voters voted for him” on November 4—an acknowledgement that New Yorkers who backed Trump in 2024 because of cost-of-living concerns went to Mamdani, who addressed those concerns with far more specificity, in 2025. And he said that he would be comfortable living in a Mamdani-run New York—a complete reversal of the apocalyptic rhetoric the president and his billionaire allies used during the campaign. He even laughed off a question about Mamdani referring to him as a “fascist,” patting the mayor-elect’s arm and cheerfully telling him he didn’t have to answer for his past statements.

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When it came to ideological differences. Trump went no further on Friday than to say of Mamdani, “He’s got views that are a little out there.”

However Trump describes them, those views proved to be popular in New York City in this year’s election—just as they have proven to be popular across a country where dozens of democratic socialists now serve in the US Senate, the US House, state legislatures, and city halls nationwide.

In his epic November 4 election night victory speech, Mamdani spoke to this reality in the triumphant language of a candidate who had scored a victory not just for himself but also for his democratic socialist ideals.

“For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands,” declared Mamdani. “Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery by handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns—these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight. Against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.”

By any measure of contemporary politics, and even by the limits of Trump’s understanding of America’s electoral heritage, that was true.

But it should be noted that democratic socialism has a great history in America, one that presidents before Trump frequently acknowledged. John Fitzgerald Kennedy recognized and responded to the vital message of Michael Harrington, the veteran socialist who authored the 1962 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States. (Harrington went on to cofound Democratic Socialists of America, the group that provided vital backing to Mamdani’s mayoral bid.) Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, whose robust 1932 election showing signaled a desire on the part of many voters to move to the left in response to the Great Depression, before FDR’s 1933 inauguration. Roosevelt also worked closely with many socialists during his presidency and gave broad expression to democratic socialist idealism with his 1944 Economic Bill of Rights speech. Republican Warren Harding pardoned labor leader and former Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs—who had been jailed on charges stemming from his outspoken opposition to World War I—and invited Debs for a what turned out to be a friendly White House chat on December 26, 1921. (“Good morning, Mr. President,” Debs is reported to have said, as Harding responded, “Well, I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now very glad to meet you personally.”)

Debs figured in Mamdani’s victory speech, when he quoted from the proudly radical labor leader who made socialism a household word—and became a significant force on the American electoral landscape—more than a century ago.

After results from across New York confirmed that the 34-year-old immigrant from Uganda would be the first Muslim mayor of the nation’s largest city, Mamdani declared, “The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”

The crowd that had packed Brooklyn’s historic Paramount theater for the celebration erupted with loud and knowing applause at the mention of Debs, a founder of America’s electorally potent Socialist Party who led its presidential ticket five times in the first decades of the 20th century.

As democratic socialism has swelled in popularity in recent years, especially with young voters, Debs has become an iconic figure. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 and 2020 presidential bids did much to renew interest in socialism—and whom Mamdani has credited with turning him into a socialist—has educated a new generation of activists about Debs. So it was no surprise that a reference to him by the newly elected socialist mayor of New York inspired cheers.

But just as Mamdani is not the first democratic socialist to meet with a president, so he is not the first mayor of a great American city to talk up Debs. Indeed, when Debs ran what was arguably his most successful presidential campaign—a 1912 bid that won 6 percent of the national vote and actually outperformed sitting Republican President William Howard Taft in seven states—his running mate was the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee: Emil Seidel.

Seidel was one of three Socialist Party mayors who governed Milwaukee across much of the 20th century, managing municipal affairs so ably that Milwaukee was regularly ranked as one of the nation’s most fiscally responsible, humane, and healthy cities. The healthiness of Milwaukee was a major priority for the Socialists, who focused on public health initiatives, housing, and neighborhood renewal, and programs to protect the safety of workers in the city’s vast factories. In fact, the Milwaukeeans invested so heavily, and so enthusiastically, in sanitation projects that they came to be known as “sewer socialists.”

Mamdani knows this history. When Katrina vanden Heuvel and I interviewed him in July, after he’d won the Democratic mayoral nomination, the candidate spoke at length about his socialist predecessors.

“The example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often,” he said. “What we have seen in recent years is that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: language of efficiency, of [fighting] waste, of quality of life. To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life. Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day: the sewers, the clean drinking water, the parks. You win someone’s trust through an outcome, and that is what I am working backward from: an outcome of an affordable city and a desire to show that government can, in fact, live up to its responsibilities to working residents.”

Mamdani’s quoting of Debs and referencing of the sewer socialists offers a reminder that the United States has a rich history of visionary, humane, and highly successful socialist governance—in Milwaukee and dozens of other cities. And that it can have a vibrant future in Mamdani’s New York.

Donald Trump tried to avert that future before the November 4 election. But he failed. And, now, it is the emerging reality of a nation that has a long history of electing socialists and—as the recent victories of Mamdani, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, and so many other democratic socialists indicate—is prepared to keep doing so.

Dean Fuleihan is absolutely confident that Zohran Mamdani can deliver on the ambitious agenda—addressing everything from transportation to rent stabilization and childcare—that inspired New Yorkers to give the mayor-elect a mandate to run the nation’s largest city.

And when Fuleihan, Mamdani’s pick to serve in the powerful position of first deputy mayor, speaks, it pays to listen. He’s one of the most experienced hands in New York City and state government.

After decades of service as the “budget guru” for Democrats in the New York State Legislature, he worked as director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. He then served as first deputy mayor—a position that plays a critical role in defining the scope and direction of municipal administrations—during de Blasio’s second term, before being appointed by New York Governor Kathy Hochul to the New York State Financial Control Board.

Now, at age 74, Fuleihan is back in city government, as Mamdani’s pick to help him guide the city in a moment of immense challenge. And immense opportunity.

The selection of Fuleihan—along with that of longtime Mamdani aide and primary campaign manager Elle Bisgaard-Church to serve as the new administration’s chief of staff—was hailed as a masterstroke by former Obama White House director of political affairs and US ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard. A savvy observer of New York City governance who has been a key member of the Mamdani camp, Gaspard says. “Mayor-elect Mamdani is pulling together an A team and this announcement is the perfect combo of a steady hand with a movement punch. Dean Fuleihan has been a shoulder-to-the wheel public servant who has always moved the levers of government with working families front of mind. Elle Bisgaard-Church is a policy innovator who had the audacity to build the biggest grassroots movement we’ve experienced in NYC in generations. This is brilliant.”

After Mandani’s announcement of the selection, Fuleihan went to work immediately in the new mayor’s transition office. It was there that he spoke exclusively with The Nation about why he began advising Mamdani last winter, why he remains so enthusiastic about the affordability agenda on which the new mayor ran and won, and why—unlike all the naysayers who tried to suggest during the bitter mayoral campaign that the 34-year-old Mamdani lacks the experience and wherewithal to govern the metropolis—he thinks New York’s 111th mayor is exactly what the city needs.

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(This interview has been lightly edited.)

—John Nichols

THE NATION: During the mayoral campaign, Zohran Mamdani’s critics constantly questioned whether he could deliver on the ambitious platform he outlined. You’re someone who is deeply experienced in government. Is your decision to take this job a signal that you believe that [Mamdani can] get the job done?

DEAN FULEIHAN: Yes, the answer is “yes.” It’s an unqualified “yes!”

It would be a shame if we were at a point where addressing the serious concerns of New Yorkers was not given the highest priority —recognizing that, OK, these are challenging things, but that affordability is a crisis, and he’s [determined] to address it. It was clear in the campaign, and it was clear from every conversation I had with him, well before the primary, that [Mamdani had] an ambitious agenda, an aggressive agenda. But he intended to achieve it, and that’s what was so appealing. That’s why I’m so happy to be joining this administration and to be part of a team that’s gonna deliver on this [program].

So my answer, my simple answer, is “yes. “ And I actually have a hard time understanding why people think that’s so complicated.

THE NATION: One of the frustrating things about our politics, in so many instances, is that it has become so constrained in its vision that it is hard for many people to imagine that someone could get elected on an affordability agenda, and actually—with a lot of hard work, with a lot of struggle—deliver on it. But it’s your sense, as someone with a great deal of experience in local and state government, that this administration can deliver on the promise of a visionary campaign.

FULEIHAN: My answer is that we have to deliver on it. He ran on a commitment [to do these things] and he received an incredible amount of support for that commitment—and really love and hope.

This is what we’re in government for. I mean, we’re in government to do difficult things.

There are people out there struggling, and they’re having a difficult life…. It should be our privilege to deliver on those commitments to them.

THE NATION: You mentioned that you started talking with Zohran Mandani before the primary. When did you get interested in his candidacy?

FULEIHAN: I was interested in him from the beginning. He was running a campaign that was certainly [unlike] anything I had seen before. We connected in late winter and started a dialogue that’s been pretty consistent since then. I’ve been helping and advising him—and advising the team.

His courage of conviction, his consistency of conviction, didn’t waver during the primary or after the primary. It is incredible and was more than admirable. From the very beginning, I said to him I would do anything I could to help him in any way that was possible. Now, I’m doing it, and I’m really excited about that opportunity.

THE NATION: I’m interested in your assessment of the most significant challenges the administration is going to face. Where do you see the biggest hurdles?

FULEIHAN: I see it as a whole. I don’t see it as one problem—and sometimes it gets portrayed as that: “Oh, what’s gonna happen with Washington?” “Is Albany gonna be cooperative?”

It’s much more than that. [Mamdani] is so defined on the affordability question, and every New Yorker you talk to knows exactly what that agenda is. We have to deliver that agenda. But we also have to make sure that everything operates; that everybody in New York City feels this is a government that’s making sure that we’re doing the day-to-day things that we’re supposed to do in managing a city. That’s a part of the job that I’m here to make sure happens.

At the same time, while we’re doing that, we have to be thinking about how we achieve that policy agenda. How do we negotiate that policy agenda in New York City and in Albany? And then—and New York is not alone in this—[we have to be looking at] what is happening with the federal government? What are the consequences, with regard to the federal government, for the city of New York, as well as the residents of the city?

So, I see this as many levels that have to be addressed at the same time.… We’re going to be building through this transition to make sure that, when we start, we are doing all those things.

THE NATION: You obviously know state government exceptionally well. Do you think that the relationship that Governor Hochul and the incoming mayor that was built during the late stages of the campaign can actually develop into a strong working relationship where the state backs the city up on critical issues?

FULEIHAN: Yes.

You were very gentle about the de Blasio relationship with Andrew Cuomo [who, as governor, frequently, and sometimes intensely, clashed with the former mayor].

I don’t think there’s any question that this [relationship with Hochul] has gotten off with the right kind of respect. We’re going to be able to work with that and use that. This will not mirror the relationship [with Cuomo], which I think was an unfair relationship on the part of the governor at the time. That is not going to happen here.

[Mamdani and Hochul] have many of the same interests. It’s interesting how much the governor has been out there on universal childcare. She did a tax credit last year in the budget. That sort of gets forgotten, and it shouldn’t be forgotten, because this is an area that she clearly cares about.

So, OK, here we have an area that everybody said, “Oh, it’s too much, it’s too expensive,” and all of a sudden you have the mayor-elect of New York City and the governor of New York State saying we have to do this. This is important. We have to address the problems of the pressures on families. We have to address child poverty.

THE NATION: It must help that the state of New Mexico is implementing universal childcare right now. That’s one example on childcare. But many of the things that Mandani talked about during the campaign are things that have been done elsewhere. So they are realistic initiatives.

FULEIHAN: Yes. Look, we’ve seen this before. With de Blasio, obviously, the very first thing he [set out to do] was universal pre-K, and everybody, everybody said that was not possible. The bureaucracy said it would take five years. The governor said there’s no way—you start with a pilot, and we won’t fund it.

And what happened? We did it in two years, and no one I know, literally no one, says that that wasn’t a good thing, that that wasn’t a positive thing. So government actually can do things quickly, can move quickly. It’s our obligation to make sure that we’re doing that.

THE NATION: But you do have a unique circumstance, however, when you are coming in with a mayor that the president of the United States has been starkly critical of. The president has made threats about withholding federal funds and doing all sorts of other things that could undermine the administration. How do you anticipate maneuvering through that challenge to build a relationship with the federal government?

FULEIHAN: Look, the mayor-elect has been very clear about this. We’re going to defend the rights of New Yorkers. And we’re going to look, in every way possible, [to see] if there’s things we can do with the federal government—he also said he would do that.

We’re gonna work with the governor. We’re not alone in this. We’re gonna ask a lot of those people who represent this city and this state, and we’re going to address it.

But what we’re not gonna do is let [threats from Republicans in DC] stop the commitments that we made, that the mayor-elect made to those who voted for him, and those who did not vote for him but still want this agenda.

THE NATION: So you’ve got 47 years of governing experience. That’s more than a dozen years longer than Zohran Mandani has been alive. What does his decision to choose you as first deputy mayor say? Obviously, there is a respect for experience. And then, also, on your part, there is a respect for the enthusiasm of somebody who is coming in trying to change things. Give me a sense of how we should wrap our heads around the fact that a guy with 47 years of experience is coming in to work for a guy who’s 34 years old?

FULEIHAN: I think you said it in asking the question, right? He is bringing vision, energy, hope, and he’s looking around and saying, I also need experience—but experience to get things done.

I’ll take it as a compliment that, from the very beginning, we talked about how you make government work to get an ambitious agenda done, and there are ways to do that. And, so, I’m attracted to every message that the mayor-elect has articulated, I believe in it, I believe it can be done. We need to make it happen. It’s that important that, at this point in my career, yes, it’s worth doing. It’s an obligation that we should be doing

THE NATION: The mayor-elect identifies as a democratic socialist. How do you identify your ideology, your partisanship?

FULEIHAN: I’m obviously a Democrat. I’ve worked my whole life with [Democrats]. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t feel complete alignment with his agenda. Complete! Whatever you call it.

THE NATION: What drew you to politics in the first place? What brought you to a lifetime of public service?

FULEIHAN: I come from an immigrant family, My father was an immigrant from Lebanon. My mother’s parents were immigrants from Lebanon, and her first language walking into school was Arabic, not English.

They did what we want to hear, right? They struggled, they succeeded. Part of that success was instilling in me, in my brothers, a commitment to public service, and a responsibility to make sure, whatever opportunities we were provided in this country, that other people get the very same opportunities. [Growing up], it was a constant politically active dinner table—always talking about politics and policies both in the US and around the world.

It’s been really a life calling: If you have the ability to have one of these positions [in government], it’s an incredible privilege. It can be hard, sure, but everybody out there is working hard. And the affordability crisis is just magnifying that pressure on them. We have to be able to give back and make that life better.

THE NATION: The announcement of your selection was made at Roosevelt House, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt made some of his transition announcements. That wasn’t a coincidence. It seems to suggest an ambition to do things at the scale that an FDR would have.

FULEIHAN: Absolutely. Look, it’s a wonderful place. It’s a wonderful institution. For me, it’s a wonderful institution because it’s part of the City University of New York, and I have now spent three years at the City University, at the Institute for State and Local Governance. It was a great opportunity for me to thank the leadership at both CUNY and the Institute, and to remind everybody of the importance of that institution to the fabric of New York. It really is part of it. It looks like New York City, it helps New York City, it’s incredible and it’s an amazing institution.

And, yes, being there at the Roosevelt House made multiple statements about the incoming administration.

THE NATION: Which will arrive with an ambitious agenda. And you’re not waiting until [Mamdani’s Inauguration Day] January 1 to get started.

FULEIHAN: I’m in the temporary transition office, and we’re already working.

Dick Cheney spent the last years of his long public life in open conflict with the Republican Party whose modern form he spent decades shaping. In a dramatic 2022 television ad that he recorded in support of his daughter Liz’s doomed congressional reelection bid as a lonely GOP critic of President Donald Trump, the former vice president, who died Monday at age 84, ripped into Trump as a dangerously irresponsible leader for the GOP that the Cheneys had once dominated.

“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” declared the elder Cheney. The 46th vice president of the United States complained that the man who had been the 45th president and would become the 47th “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it. He knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know.”

Perhaps there were Republicans who understood that Cheney was right. But they offered no evidence that they cared—and a good portion of the blame for that lay with Cheney himself. By 2022, the GOP had been acclimated to abuses of executive power not just by Trump but by Cheney and his associates during the years when the senior Republican manipulated world affairs as the most powerful—and secretive— vice president in American history.

Cheney’s unsuccessful attempt to pull his party back from the brink in 2022—along with his 2024 announcement that he’d vote for Democrat Kamala Harris—merely confirmed his marginalization by what had already become a fully Trumpian Republican Party—one that he had helped create.

Despite her father’s intervention, Liz Cheney was swept from office by Wyoming Republican primary voters who continued an evolution of the GOP that the elder Cheney had facilitated during the course of a half-century career characterized by the rejection of transparency, a refusal to respect the system of checks and balances and, ultimately, the creation of an super-empowered executive branch that was ripe for abuse.

Indeed, the arc of Cheney’s career offers a far more definitive measure of the GOP’s movement toward Trumpism than that of almost any other figure—save Trump himself.

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Dick Cheney craved power. From the mid-1960s onward, he positioned himself as a behind-the-scenes but invariably influential player in successive Republican White Houses, a right-wing congressman who longed to be speaker of the House, a hawkish secretary of defense who became obsessed with regime change in Iraq, a corporate CEO who occupied the dark intersection of oil power and the military-industrial complex, and, finally and most damagingly, a vice president who used false pretexts, inflated claims about weapons of mass destruction, and manipulated “intelligence” to steer the United States into a catastrophic Middle East war.

Cheney was a résumé Republican. He claimed positions of enormous authority, yet he did so for a rogue’s gallery of Republican presidents whose scandals often anticipated those of Trump’s.

Cheney’s first White House boss was Richard Nixon, who had to resign as Congress began impeachment proceedings that grew out of his political wrongdoing, and dishonest and disreputable stewardship of the presidency.

Cheney served in Congress as a fierce ally of Ronald Reagan, who was investigated by Congress and the courts for presiding over an administration where key players arranged—and then lied about—a secret plan to violate the law by directing resources to its Iran-Contra coconspirators in the Middle East and Latin America.

Cheney headed the Pentagon in the White House of George Herbert Walker Bush, who pardoned Caspar Weinberger, Robert C. McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, and others who had been indicted, and in some cases convicted, by Iran-Contra prosecutors.

Cheney then left the public sector in pursuit of corporate power. His work in the 1990s with Halliburton—at a time when he briefly considered making his own presidential bid—was the subject of frequent controversy, as were the close alliances he maintained with the scandal-plagued executives of Enron, a firm that imploded amid accusations of institutionalized and systematic accounting fraud.

Cheney stepped back into the public service in 2001, as the prince regent to a boy president whose administration stands accused of “fixing” intelligence in order to convince Congress and the American people to support an unnecessary—and ultimately disastrous—invasion and occupation of Iraq. As part of that initiative, Cheney was repeatedly accused of promoting inaccurate claims about the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and an illusory “connection” between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

Ultimately, Cheney found himself at the center of a multiyear investigation into how, on his watch as vice president, the Central Intelligence Agency employed tactics that the world understands as torture.

The 500-page summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 report into the global torture regime that Cheney and his allies facilitated during the early years of the so-called War on Terror described a “brutal” and “flawed” program that was “in violation of US law, treaty obligations, and our values.” The report revealed evidence that Cheney and his allies had acted with stark disregard for basic premises of the American experiment—in particular, respect for the rule of law and for the system of checks and balances.

Arizona Senator John McCain said, in championing the release of the committee report, that the CIA interrogation program as it operated during Cheney’s time as vice president, “stained our national honor, did much harm, and little practical good.”

Yet, with Cheney taking the lead, key figures in the former administration rejected the standards for transparency and accountability that are essential to maintaining not just national honor but meaningful democracy. Back in 2009, when a newly retired Cheney was making unsubstantiated and irresponsible claims about so-called “torture memos,” US Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) bluntly declared, “The former vice president is misleading the American people.”

And he kept doing so.

Refusing to face the facts—especially when they revealed the extent of his wrongdoing—Cheney decried the intelligence panel’s 2014 summary as “a bunch of hooey.”

He rejected what CNN described as “the central conclusion” of the study: “that CIA employees exceeded the guidelines set by Justice Department memos that authorized the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and that the agency misrepresented to Congress and the White House what it was doing.”

“The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program,” claimed Cheney, choosing, as he did throughout his vice presidency, to dismiss actual information in favor of a personal narrative where he was always right.

Doubling down in defense of waterboarding and other abuses as “absolutely, totally justified,” Cheney announced that those who had engaged in tactics that have long been identified as torture “ought to be decorated, not criticized.”

Presumably, Cheney included himself on the longer list of those deserving decoration, as he announced, “If I had to do it over again, I would do it.”

The American Civil Liberties Union concluded, “Cheney has no regrets, even though the very policies that he wants his legacy to rest upon have been recognized as illegal and even criminal by the public and policymakers alike.”

It was this arrogance of power that consistently put Cheney at odds with American ideals and values regarding transparency and accountability. Even with the passage of time, even in the face of evidence that his own past statements had been wrong, the former vice president rejected any questioning of his absolute authority.

Cheney expected congressional Republicans—and conservative pundits—to embrace not merely his dismissal of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s majority report but his broader approach as well. And many did—just as they now defend Trump.

To his credit, Cheney recognized from 2022 onward that Donald Trump posed a “threat to our republic.” But that threat, with its frequent rejection of the rule of law and constitutional principles, was built on a foundation of past abuses—including, it must be acknowledged, those of Dick Cheney.

Zohran Mamdani has no higher responsibility than to be a great mayor of New York City. It is, after all, his job, now that more than one million New Yorkers have overwhelmingly elected him to the highest office of America’s largest and most dynamic municipality. Yet, as he succeeds, Mamdani has the potential to transform not just a city but the politics of a nation that desperately needs a robust antidote to Donald Trump’s oppressions. As Mamdani told The Nation after his Democratic primary win in June, “You cannot defeat this attack on democracy unless you also prove its worth.”

What took Mamdani’s candidacy from impossible to inevitable was his fundamental understanding that to prove the worth of democracy, leaders must make the lives of the people who elect them measurably better. Trump has failed miserably in this regard. But so, too, have many Democrats. One of the primary reasons the Democratic Party lost in 2024 was that its technocratic response to the affordability crisis struck Americans as lacking in both urgency and ambition. So Mamdani, a democratic socialist who takes his inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, and Bernie Sanders, set a higher bar. “A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few,” he declared. “It should be one that city government guarantees for each and every New Yorker.” He coupled this vision with practical proposals for a rent freeze, fast and free buses, universal childcare, and city-owned grocery stores in food deserts. And he pledged to fund his plan by taxing the very billionaires that Trump has enriched and establishment Democrats have coddled.

Prominent pundits refused to accept the prospect that New Yorkers would elect a democratic socialist as mayor (hello, cable news commentators), as did newspaper editorial writers (hello, New York Times) and top Democrats (hello, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who refused to endorse his party’s nominee for mayor of his hometown). The elites were slow to catch on to the fact that this 34-year-old Muslim immigrant from Uganda, after serving three terms in the relative obscurity of the New York State Assembly, had captured the imagination of the city’s multiracial, multiethnic electorate. Of course, Mamdani’s mastery of social media helped. He presented himself with a confidence that belied his age, a calm that countered the hysterics of his critics, and a clarity that both inspired and reassured voters. Tens of thousands of young volunteers rallied around a candidate who was comfortable speaking truth to power. When he called out the genocide in Gaza, Mamdani was attacked by the New York Post and a billionaire-funded smear campaign. Yet he won a mandate from New Yorkers who demanded moral clarity amid Republican cruelty.

Mamdani framed his year-long campaign against the failed politics of the past—as exemplified by the increasingly desperate former governor Andrew Cuomo—and around an under­standing that, while democracy is surely under attack from authoritarians in Washington, “it is also under attack from the inside, [because of] the withering of the belief in its ability to deliver on any of the needs of working people.”

Mamdani’s determination to renew faith in democracy by delivering economic justice is not new: FDR made the connection with his “Economic Bill of Rights.” Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are doing the same with their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. But Mamdani’s relentless focus on putting government in the service of the working class captures the zeitgeist of 2025. So powerful is his vision that Trump pulled out every stop to derail Mamdani’s campaign: threatening to impound funding for the city, to send in federal troops, and to arrest the Democrat if he kept his promise to protect immigrants. While Mamdani relied on public funding and volunteers to carry his message, billionaire-funded political action committees directed $19 million into a bitterly divisive campaign against him.

With Mamdani’s election, the attacks from his avowed enemies in Washington and on Wall Street will only intensify. To counter them, he must surround himself with tough, experienced managers. In the face of hostile media and corporate lobbying, Mamdani’s determination to maintain his viral social media campaign will be essential to mobilizing his base, unifying New Yorkers, and keeping the pressure on cautious Democrats in Albany.

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State and national Democrats have an interest in Mamdani’s success. The party ran well November 4 in races nationwide. But to win big in 2026, its leaders must abandon their feckless resistance to the big ideas that inspire voters who seek alternatives to the false promises and dark machinations of Trumpism. That doesn’t mean every Democratic nominee in 2026 must mirror every position of Mamdani’s, but they need to channel his energy and boldness.

Mamdani will take office in daunting times for his city and his country—much as La Guardia did after his election in 1933 as the radical mayor of a city of immigrants and working-class families impoverished by the Great Depression. La Guardia captured the imagination of New York and the nation, becoming a beacon of hope at a time of chaotic economics and looming fascism. Mamdani’s campaign celebrated La Guardia’s legacy. He recalled when we interviewed him that his predecessor “took on these twin crises of anti-immigrant animus and the denial of dignity to working people, and did so with an understanding of what the fruition of democracy looked like—and even what the fulfillment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness looked like—understanding it in the language of the urban sphere: of more parks, more beauty, more light.”

Mamdani’s sweeping victory proves the political promise of democracy. And if he governs as he campaigned—as a courageous and deeply principled, yet always results-oriented, champion of economic justice and social uplift—he will prove, as La Guardia did before him, that the people have the power to shape their own future. This is what Trump and the billionaires truly fear, because Zohran Mamdani is right when he says, “They are the authoritarians who seek to keep us pressed beneath their thumbs, because they know that once we shake ourselves loose, we will never be held down again.”

Bernie Sanders knows that if Zohran Mamdani is elected as mayor of New York City on Tuesday, it will matter most profoundly for the people of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. But the Brooklyn-born senator from Vermont believes that a victory for his fellow democratic socialist will resonate far beyond America’s largest city.

A Mamdani win, says Sanders, could transform the politics of the entire country.

“I consider the New York City mayor’s race enormously important, not just for New York City but as a very profound statement in terms of what’s happening all over this country,” Sanders tells The Nation in an exclusive interview. “I think there is profound disgust at the political establishment. People want real change, and a strong victory on the part of Mamdani, I think, will inspire people all across our country to fight for that change.”

Sanders endorsed Mamdani before June’s Democratic mayoral primary, when the 34-year-old legislator stunned the political establishment by defeating former New York governor Andrew Cuomo and other prominent Democrats.

The billionaire class, which Sanders exposed and challenged in his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids, was stung by the primary result. But they have since doubled down on trying to defeat Mamdani in Tuesday’s general election matchup with Cuomo, who has repurposed himself as an independent and mounted an increasingly desperate and divisive fall bid.

“These billionaires are saying: ‘we’ve got to do everything we can to stop him,’” notes Sanders. “Usually, the money people sit in back rooms and figure out how to do it. These guys are on the front page of The New York Times saying, ‘We can’t have it. We can’t have a democratic socialist as mayor.’ They’re saying, ‘To hell with what the people want.’”

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But that opposition from the oligarchs, and the prominent Democrats who align with them, has not dissuaded Mamdani. Or Sanders. Indeed, the senator sees Mamdani’s candidacy as a model for grassroots progressives who recognize that the Democratic Party must change its approach to elections—and to governing.

“Look, there is little doubt in my mind that the Democratic leadership is way out of touch with where the American people are at,” Sanders tells The Nation. Of the top Democrats who refused to endorse Mamdani after the primary, or provided half-hearted support at best, the senator says, “Their allegiance primarily is to the money interest, to the consultant class, and not to working families all across this country who are struggling. And what I love about the Mamdani campaign, which is enormously impressive, is that he has some 80,000 volunteers knocking on doors and doing everything that has to be done to win, to get elected. That involvement is the kind of volunteer activity we need all over America. Yet this is something, a reality, that the Democratic establishment—who get their money from big-money interests at cocktail parties—don’t have a clue about.”

In contrast, says Sanders, who has spoken to “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies across the US this year, grassroots Democrats know precisely where Mamdani is coming from.

“Look, what is he talking about? He says, ‘I am prepared to take on the oligarchs.’ And I think, all across this country, people are sick and tired of seeing the billionaire class get richer and richer, and the billionaire class controlling to a significant degree both political parties. What Zohran Mamdani is showing is that a grassroots movement can take them on and defeat them,” explains Sanders. “I recognize that New York City is not the whole country. But I’ve been all over the country this year. I’ve been to West Virginia. I’ve been to Idaho. I’ve been to very, very conservative areas. And I think no matter where people live, no matter what their political point of view may be, there is growing disgust at income and wealth disparity. There is growing disgust at a healthcare system which is virtually collapsing. Growing disgust that our kids in the wealthiest nation on earth may well have a standard of living that is lower than their parents’. People are tired of the greed of the oligarchs. And Mamdani is a perfect manifestation of people beginning to say, ‘Enough is enough. Let’s elect somebody who’s going to represent us and not just the 1 percent.’”

Sanders is the first to acknowledge that if Mamdani wins, he will face enormous challenges from the billionaires who continue to oppose him—and from a billionaire president, Donald Trump, who has attacked and threatened the candidate who would be New York’s first Muslim mayor. But the senator says, “The importance of this race is not just being the mayor of New York City, which unto itself is obviously enormously important. This is the largest city in the country. But if Zohran Mamdani governs well, if he shows that a mayor that stands with the working class, a mayor that is prepared to take on the oligarchs, can in fact successfully govern and improve life for working-class people, the understanding will spread all over the country that working people can have representatives and mayors who stand for them. And that they can go beyond the old establishment politics.”

Ireland’s new president, Catherine Connolly, is a proud leftist who has served for almost a decade as an independent socialist member of the Irish parliament (Dáil Éireann), a blunt critic of the failures of neoliberalism and corporate globalization, and a visionary advocate for the sort of dramatic interventions that are needed to address the economic inequality that has made life increasingly unaffordable for working-class families.

Connolly, who was elected in a landslide on Saturday with 63.4 percent of the vote, also has an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sensibility rooted in her own country’s long struggle against the British Empire. As such, she campaigned as a defender of Ireland’s long-standing policy of military neutrality—decrying the international arms trade and “the warmongering military-industrial complex”—and a fierce supporter of Palestinian rights. She said that, when it comes to Israel’s assault on Gaza, she would not hesitate to tell Donald Trump to his face: “Genocide was enabled and resourced by American money.”

Elected as an independent who challenged candidates backed by Ireland’s two major center-right parties, Connolly will hold the largely ceremonial—but often influential—presidential post as an outspoken official who observers from across the political spectrum predict will serve as the most left-wing president in Irish history.

The result drew note from beyond the borders of Ireland—with former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn hailing “a landslide victory for humanity and for hope”—and offered at least a few lessons for progressives in the United States.

Connolly won the presidency after a whirlwind election campaign that united Ireland’s disparate leftist parties, attracted thousands of volunteers, and overcame determined efforts to “smear the bejaysus out of her” by establishment politicians and media outlets. And it wasn’t even close. She swept to victory, beating her nearest rival by nearly 35 points.

“It is the first time that the left has won a majority of votes in a national election,” declared Irish parliamentarian Paul Murphy, an anti-austerity campaigner and leading figure in the People Before Profit party that backed Connolly. “This was not a narrow victory either; Catherine won the largest percentage and largest total vote of any presidential candidate in history.”

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Murphy hailed the result as “a watershed moment” that saw unprecedented left unity and a dramatic decline in support for the major parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, that have historically dominated Irish politics. Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, whose party backed Connolly, described the result from Saturday’s election as a “game changer” for her party, for the left, and for supporters of the vision of a united Ireland that Connolly and Sinn Féin have championed. “When we come together, when we work collaboratively, when we show up for each other, we can win,” said McDonald.

Now that she has won, Connolly, a 68-year-old lawyer and clinical psychologist, feminist, and bicycling parliamentarian from Galway, is still being dismissed by the political elites who opposed her candidacy. They point to the fact that the Irish president has few official powers as compared to Ireland’s prime minister.

But Connolly, who has a long record of shaping debates from her position as an independent parliamentarian, and whose candidacy generated Bernie Sanders–style enthusiasm among young voters, says, “The Presidency, we are told, is largely symbolic. But symbols matter. And actions taken under those symbols matter even more. I believe the President should be a unifying presence—a steady hand, yes, but also a spark. A reminder of what is possible. A moral compass in a world increasingly driven by profit and spectacle. A voice for those too often silenced. That is the role I seek to play.”

Connolly’s determination to clear space for a politics based on moral values—“Not Left versus Right, but right vs wrong”—allowed her to appeal to the sort of disenfranchised voters who have surrendered to right-wing populism in many European countries and the United States

That appeal was rooted in her sincerity and her willingness to speak truth to power—both in Ireland and on a global stage, where Irish presidents such as Mary Robinson and outgoing President Michael D. Higgins have proven to be uniquely engaged and often influential figures.

Like Sanders in the US, Connolly leveraged her history of serving as an independent leftist—rather than a major-party insider—to build a coalition that had previously seemed impossible. While past elections had seen candidates of smaller parties on the left competing with one another, she won initial support from Ireland’s Social Democrats and Greens, from the People Before Profit–Solidarity movement and the Labour Party. Eventually, Sinn Féin, the largest party on the left, which many had expected to run its own candidate, got on board—providing a powerful boost to the surging campaign.

Ireland is a small country, but it often captures the international imagination. And when past presidents, such as Robinson and Higgins, have spoken, the world has listened. It is a good bet that Catherine Connolly will be heard too—as will her message that voters in Ireland, and around the world, are rightly fed up with politics as usual. “People are tired—tired of being unheard, unseen, uncertain. Tired of promises broken, of a social fabric fraying,” she says. People, argues Connolly, seek a politics not just focused on what is “but about what it could be,” a politics “not driven by fear, but by hope. Not shaped by division, but by shared dreams.”

In Lubec, Maine, the easternmost municipality of the United States, a good number of the community’s 1,237 residents will gather at 11 am Saturday to deliver a message from just this side of the border with Canada that, despite what an obsessive fan of the British monarchy named Donald Trump may think, “this country does not belong to kings, dictators, or tyrants.”

Multiple time zones away, activists from Saipan will raise a cry of protest from the Northern Marianas Islands in the western Pacific against the current administration’s abuses of power, joining their voices to a national declaration that says, “The president thinks his rule is absolute. But in America, we don’t have kings, and we won’t back down against chaos, corruption, and cruelty.”

Taking their cue from a Constitution that empowers the people of these United States to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances, Americans will also gather 26 miles above the Arctic Circle in Kotzebue, Alaska, and 90 miles from Cuba in Key West, Florida. They’ll rally in Massachusetts on the Lexington Battle Green, where the opening shots of the American Revolutionary War were fired, and just a short distance from the Civil War battlefields of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. They’ll be on the loop in the last frontier town of Polebridge, Montana, estimated population 31, and on the corner of Broadway and 47th Street in Manhattan.

From the reddest villages to the bluest cities, the true believers in the American experiment of Thomas Paine and Frederick Douglass, of Alice Paul and Rosa Parks, of Harvey Milk and Dolores Huerta, will on Saturday, October 18, raise the oldest and most patriotic of American cries: “No Kings!”

They will laugh at the pathetic attempts of the quisling Republicans of the Trump interregnum to label nonviolent dissenters as “unhinged” and “anti-American.” And they will embrace the message of a Republican president from another time, Teddy Roosevelt, who warned, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

In the spirit of the best of this country’s founders, above all Paine—who preached that “as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king”—millions of Americans will join Saturday’s national “No Kings Day of Action.” They will do so at a time when Trump and his accommodationists have attacked freedom of speech and freedom of the press; when they have sent masked men and armed troops into American cities; when they have threatened to jail political Democratic governors, mayors, and attorneys general; and when scholars of totalitarianism warn that American democracy is in peril.

“If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention,” Ezra Levin, a cofounder and co–executive director of Indivisible, a key convenor of the No Kings movement, says of the increasingly authoritarian tenor of Trump’s pronouncements. “These folks are serious. They are actively trying to take away your constitutional right to peaceful protest, and that is how authoritarian regimes work. They fear more than anything one thing, which is the mass, peaceful, organized population pushing back against their unpopular designs on the system.”

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With support from religious and civil rights groups, unions, and community organizations nationwide, organizers drew an estimated 3 million people nationwide to “Hands Off” protests in April, and an estimated 5 million to No Kings protests in June. On Saturday, with more than 2,500 rallies and marches planned for Saturday, Levin says, “The cavalry is coming in.… We are looking at the largest protest in modern American history on Oct. 18.”

The very prospect that farmers and factory workers, teachers and nurses, students and retirees, public employees and small business owners nationwide will gather in enormous numbers to echo the words of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in defense of the Constitution, and in support of the full promise of the American experiment, has unsettled the apologists for authoritarianism.

Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who keeps rejecting credible proposals to call Congress into action and end the federal government shutdown, tried to blame the No Kings movement for the delay. It was a bizarre claim, even by the warped standard that Johnson has established in his desperate efforts to protect Trump from accountability—and to shift blame for a shutdown that Republican congressional leaders have facilitated from day one.

The Louisiana Republican tried to dismiss the millions of Americans who will be waving flags and quoting from the Declaration of Independence on Saturday as the “rabid base” of the left gathering for “Hate America” rallies. Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy falsely asserts that the crowds will be made up of “paid protesters.”

Even from two of the most ridiculous men ever to join the presidential line of succession, these are comic claims—especially considering the fact that No Kings demonstrations will be held Saturday in Johnson’s hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, and on Democracy Corner in Duffy’s hometown of Hayward, Wisconsin. Members of the No Kings coalition, which includes groups such as well as the League of Women Voters, the Interfaith Alliance and Veterans for Responsible Leadership—as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Federation of Government Employees, MoveOn and groups such as 50501—took the wrongheaded Republican rants in stride. “Speaker Johnson is running out of excuses for keeping the government shut down,” declared the organizers. “Instead of reopening the government, preserving affordable health care, or lowering costs for working families, he’s attacking millions of Americans who are peacefully coming together to say that America belongs to its people, not to kings.”

Poll after poll in recent months has revealed that, while approval ratings for Donald Trump are tanking and are also down for congressional Republicans, attitudes toward the Democratic Party are even more negative. And, as The Christian Science Monitor has pointed out, “One subgroup driving the Democrats’ poor ratings [is] their own base. A recent CNN poll found that Democratic voters currently hold far more negative views of their own party than Republican voters do of theirs. At town hall events and in focus groups, frustrated Democrats say they want their representatives to push back harder against the Trump administration.” Surveys show a mounting anger on the part of grassroots Democrats with party leaders, who are seen as having failed to mount a coherent opposition to congressional Republicans or to articulate bold positions on the issues of the day.

Senator Bernie Sanders shares their frustration. The Vermont independent and two-time contender for the Democratic presidential nomination has spent recent months traveling the United States with a “Fighting Oligarchy” message that has drawn massive crowds at dozens of events, including in some of the bluest and reddest parts of the country. He has come away from the experience with a powerful sense that the party needs a new direction. To that end, Sanders has been endorsing insurgent Democratic primary candidates, and in states where the party organization has atrophied, he has said he’s open to endorsing independents. Among them is 34-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York. But even as the senator was enthusiastically campaigning for Mamdani, Democratic Party leaders from New York were refusing to do so.

Sanders spoke with The Nation about how his longtime concerns about the leadership of the Democratic Party have been amplified in recent months—and about what he believes it must do to reconnect with working-class voters, expand its base, and appeal to disenchanted independent and irregular voters.

—John Nichols

The Nation: You have never been a Democrat and have always served as an independent. But you’ve caucused with the House and Senate Democrats and worked with many Democratic presidents over the years. And, of course, you came close to being their nominee for president of the United States.

Sanders: [Laughs] Never been a Democrat—almost their nominee for president.

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The Nation: That gives you a unique perspective on the party. In fact, you’ve probably thought as much about the direction of the Democratic Party as anyone in American politics. So, at a point when a lot of people are wrestling with the question of what the party stands for and where it is headed, give me a sense of your current thinking about what ails the party.

Sanders: I think the obvious answer, which has been stated 5 million times, is that they’re way out of touch with where ordinary people are. By and large—with exceptions, and each state is a little bit different—the Democratic Party [at its top] is mostly made up of folks who have money and consultants, and politicians who work with folks who have money and consultants. And so, if you look at how many of the “leading Democrats” function, are they out holding electoral rallies, talking to ordinary people? They can’t, because people aren’t going to come out—there’s not much to see. They spend an enormous amount of time raising money…. They’re not about to take on the people who provide them with the money.

I was really surprised—and I didn’t really appreciate this until I ran for president—at how weak [the party is in much of the country]. I mean, they really had to go crazy to beat me. And we started at 1 percent [in the polls], with no money, no support, nothing.

I discovered that, to a large degree, the party is a paper tiger. There wasn’t anything there. We arranged our schedule, in 2016, to go to Democratic Party events, and we would schedule a rally on the same day. We’d be in the same community—kill two birds with one stone. So in the afternoon I’d go to a rally—it’d be 10,000 people out there. They’d be young, they’d be excited, they’d be really involved. Then in the evening I’d go to the official Democratic Party function. There’d be 200 people, mostly older—businesspeople, lawyers, politicians. It was day and night. It was two different worlds.

Obviously, the future is with young people, people of color, union people, etc., etc. But the party leadership doesn’t seem to recognize that. I was in West Virginia recently. I met with some of the best people. But they have one [full-time] staffer in the Democratic Party in West Virginia. So it’s almost nothing. And that’s probably true for, I don’t know, five, 10 states in the country, where Democrats have almost no representation in the legislature, don’t hold the governor’s office, have no representation in Washington. Democratic bodies completely folded in those areas. I think they’re also in a lot of trouble in [traditionally Democratic] states like New York, for example, where they have not much to say to ordinary people.

If you want to know where the Democratic Party is at, I would say Zohran Mamdani’s campaign [for mayor of New York] is a crystallization of that. You would think, if you had a candidate who generated, as I hear, some 50,000 volunteers, enormous enthusiasm, and then wins the Democratic primary despite being heavily outspent, that the Democratic leadership would be excited, enthusiastic. Here is a candidate who is tapping the energy of young people, of working people. Oh, my God—in a day of Trumpism, what a great moment!

But the party leadership is saying, “Oh, we can’t support him. We can’t support him, because he is saying what 75 percent of Democrats say about Israel: ‘No more money for Netanyahu.’ Oh, can’t support him.” I mean, this is beyond absurd. This is beyond laughable. It is pathetic. So you have the leading Democrats in New York State, as I understand it, who have not yet indicated their support for the guy who won an overwhelming victory for the Democratic nomination. That’s the crystallization of your Democratic Party. So who are they representing? Are they representing the 75 percent of people who don’t want to give Netanyahu any more money? I guess not. Are they representing a significant majority of the people who voted for Mamdani [in the primary]? I guess not.

The Nation: Why is there such a disconnect between the leadership and their own voters?

Sanders: They don’t want to open the door, and, in fact, they’re pretty firm about keeping that door shut.

So the door gets busted open: Don’t ask—tell them we’re in. And I think the Mamdani campaign is a crystallization of that. And if the Democratic leadership can’t support the Democratic nominee, what is the Democratic Party? Who’s the Democratic Party?

The Nation: There’s an interesting dynamic there, because it’s a very uneven, very unfair game when it comes to endorsements, right? If a moderate wins a primary, then the message from party leaders to the progressive community is: “You have got to get on board today. You’ve got to show support, prove to us you’re loyal to the party.”

Sanders: Yes, that is right. Again, you’re absolutely right. But that [pressure tactic] is no longer going to work. No one believes that anymore. That’s over with…. The Democratic Party no longer even can dream of saying to you, you know, “Mary Smith won. You may not like her politics, but she’s the Democratic nominee. You, as a progressive, have got to support her.” That’s over with. No one takes that seriously. If they can’t support Mamdani, then, of course, they can’t make that request of anybody.

Bottom line: A guy wins his primary with great enthusiasm, grassroots activism, and their response is: “We can’t support you.” Then who the hell can you support? What do you think the future of the Democratic Party is? Do you think AIPAC is the future of the Democratic Party? I don’t think so.

The Nation: Let’s dig deeper into several of the things you’ve said. You were talking about what you’ve seen around the country: Democratic parties in some states have virtually atrophied—they’re almost nonexistent. My sense is that this is even truer at the county level, the local level. But, in a sense, this is an opening for progressives, isn’t it? Because there are places where people could get on the Democratic Party ballot line and be the Democratic Party.

Sanders: Someone was telling me recently, I think from West Virginia, that in some local elections, Democrats had no candidates—zero candidates. So when you have nothing, when you don’t have a party, can anybody who’s interested become the candidate? Probably, yes. But it does speak to something else: When you think of a party—maybe I’m old-­fashioned and conservative—you think of thousands of people coming together at the grassroots level to nominate and support a candidate, energy coming from the bottom on up. That is not in any way, shape, or form what the Democratic Party is about.

If you want to know who the Democratic leadership listens to, think about this: I remember when Biden dropped out, or just before he dropped out, The New York Times was running front-page stories about all these people who are—now, literally, they say it—the donor class. “The donor class has decided that A, B, and C are the right candidates. The donor class says this; the donor class says that.” I mean, they don’t even hide it anymore. All right, so the money people decide who the candidates are, put in money, and [get a candidate]. Meanwhile, as I said, in five or 10 states, the party barely exists. How do you call yourself a national party if you barely exist in five or 10 states—states in the South, states in the West?

The Nation: So as we move toward 2026, you are encouraging candidates to run and campaigning for them. These are candidates who, more often than not, aren’t on the same page as the leadership. Some are actually running as independents. Do you think we’re at a critical juncture for the Democratic Party? What kind of moment should we see this as?

Sanders: You have got to understand that this is not just an American issue. Centrist parties like the Democratic Party are falling by the wayside all over the world. I was in the UK recently. You know what the leading party is right now in the UK? It’s the Reform Party—the right-wing extremist line.

The Nation: Nigel Farage, who is friends with Trump.

Sanders: Exactly. They’re winning. They’re way ahead. The Labour Party is like the Democratic Party: It stands for nothing. And, you know, [former Labour Party leader] Jeremy Corbyn is now starting a new party. You’ve got similar things happening all over the world.

The Nation: The traditional centrist parties, the traditional center-left parties, which have governed countries, are beaten down. People are rejecting them.

Sanders: So you’ve got the Democratic Party, the Labour Party in England; in Germany, the Social Democrats are in deep struggle. All these centrist-type parties that once had some attachment to the working classes of their country are in trouble. So there’s a question, you know, whether even the Democratic Party [will continue to exist as we know it]. It may fall by the wayside completely like the Whig Party. It’s possible. But the name doesn’t mean anything.

If your question is, “Is it conceivable that good people can take over the Democratic Party and make it a working-class party, a multigenerational party, welcoming diverse points of view?”—that’s a possibility. But I think people are now struggling with whether it is worth it. To take on Trump, do they want to take on AIPAC and the Democratic Party, or would you start a third party? That’s what they’re talking about in England right now. Corbyn is starting that. And I guess he has finally decided the Labour Party is useless. And I think a lot of people are thinking that about the Democratic Party right now. So the choice is whether you take over the Democratic Party, make it into a working-class party, or whether you start your own party.

The Nation: It’s very hard to start a viable third party in the United States.

Sanders: Very hard in this country, in this context. It’s easier in England, I think. [In the US,] you need an enormous amount of money and have to deal with 50 states’ rules and regulations, which are against third parties. So that’s the challenge.

But I think it goes without saying that the Democratic leadership is way out of touch with where the American people are, and it’s almost frightening to see the kind of anger and contempt that people feel toward the leadership of the Democratic Party.

The Nation: You’ve sensed that anger this year as you’ve been traveling around the country for your “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. Clearly, at one point early in Trump’s presidency, you decided that a substantial portion of your time was better spent in Omaha, Nebraska, or Iowa City, Iowa, than it was in Washington.

Sanders: That’s right.

The Nation: You went out there basically to talk to the people. In a way, it’s been a real-time experiment to find out where the American people are at with regard to Trump. They clearly showed up in huge numbers for these “Fighting Oligarchy” events. But they’re not coming out to say, “Yeah, we love the Democratic Party.”

Sanders: No, they’re not. For most Americans now, there is an understanding that the system, broadly described, is broken. Nobody but your most right-wing Republicans thinks that it’s OK for Musk to spend $270 million to elect a guy who offered billionaires more money. Everybody knows the campaign-finance system is broken, the political system is broken. They see what crypto does; they see what AIPAC does; they see what the AI people, their super PACs, are going to do. So I think everyone understands that reality. Everyone understands that there are massive and growing levels of income and wealth inequality. Everybody understands the healthcare system is absolutely broken. People understand the housing situation is broken.

A few years ago, the Pew Research people came out with a poll [that asked], “Do you think you are better off or worse off than somebody in your condition, your position, was 50 years ago?” You know what the results of the polling were? Almost 60 percent of the people said they thought that people were better off 50 years ago.

The Nation: Fascinating.

Sanders: It is fascinating, and I asked that question up in Newport, Vermont, recently. And one guy jumps up and says, “Affordability.” He said, “When I was growing up, my father owned a bar in Rhode Island. We served five-, 10-cent beers, draft beers, and we could afford things.” Another woman gets up there. She grabs the mic and says, “Look, my dad was a car salesman, and he didn’t make a lot of money, but my mom stayed home with the kids, and we had a decent standard of living.” And then somebody starts talking about the cost of housing. And I thought about this myself. You know, I grew up in a rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made any money. We were never poor. We ate well and we had a roof over our heads. And we [benefited from] rent control. I did a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation. You know how much my family was spending on rent in a small apartment—a three-and-a-half-room apartment with four people? Take a guess at what percentage of my dad’s income we were spending on housing.

The Nation: Thirty percent?

Sanders: Eighteen percent.

The Nation: Less than a fifth of the income.

Sanders: Right? And when you spend 18 percent, you have money left over to do things that allow the family to survive. If we were required to spend 30 percent or 40 percent or 50 percent, we would’ve been out on the streets—couldn’t have done it.

And here’s the insanity: How the hell, 50 years ago, before computers and cell phones, could one person not making a lot of money have at least a solid, lower-­middle-class lifestyle, and you can’t do it now?

The Nation: Do you think the Democratic Party leadership could fashion a platform around that?

Sanders: They don’t even understand it, John. It’s not their world.

The Nation: Let me ask you about another issue where Democratic leaders appear to be dramatically out of touch. As you’ve been out doing this real-time experiment, talking to people, hearing what they actually want to hear about, one of the fascinating things has been your discussion of Gaza. I saw you do it first, I think, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where you made a very strong statement on Gaza. The people responded with the loudest applause of the night.

Sanders: John, let me tell you. Let me be very clear. I mention Gaza in virtually every speech. And without exception, whether you’re doing it in Viroqua, Wisconsin; Los Angeles, California; Newport, Vermont—wherever you’re doing it—it is almost always a standing response. It is a very visceral issue. Now, when the idiots in the Democratic Party say, “Well, we’ve done a poll. The economy is the first, this is the second, and Gaza is only in 10th place. Yeah, people are worried about it, but it’s not really high up on people’s list”—they’re missing the point. The point is that, even if people don’t know much about politics, they are human beings, with strong instincts. And if you cannot trust your leadership to speak out about the unspeakable horrors that are taking place in Gaza today, funded by US taxpayer dollars—if your leadership can’t speak out on that, how do you trust them on anything?

But to your point, every place I go and I say, “You know, we’re leading the effort to try to end US military support for Israel,” people explode. That’s what they want to hear, because they’re disgusted—profoundly disgusted—by what’s going on.

And I’ll say this: I think one of the many reasons Mamdani is running a great campaign is precisely his views on Israel and Gaza. That is where the vast majority of people who tend to vote Democratic, and more and more Republicans, are at. The idea that [Democratic leaders] have to toe the AIPAC line—man, it’s not only horrible policy, unspeakable policy; it’s really bad politics as well.

After 160 years of suffering the slings and arrows of official objection to this publication’s mission of speaking truth to power, it’s easy to get jaded about attacks from politicians. Yet we were still surprised when Vice President JD Vance used a mid-September podcast from his vice-presidential office to go after The Nation.

We appreciated that Vance described The Nation as a “well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War.” We were less appreciative, however, of his clumsy critique of our coverage of the death of Charlie Kirk, which elided the fact that our columnists condemned the political violence that took the conservative activist’s life while pointedly criticizing his record. And we wish the vice president had gotten his facts straight before inaccurately painting The Nation as a tool of “George Soros’s Open Society Foundation…and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.” We respect Soros’s efforts on behalf of democracy, but he’s not funding our reporting and analysis of the Trump-Vance regime. The essential support for this magazine comes from readers who value our independent journalism, our commitment to economic and social and racial justice, our relentless advocacy for taxing “wealthy titans,” and our determination to expose and thwart this president’s crude authoritarianism.

If Vance’s attack were an isolated incident, or simply the latest expression of a prickly administration’s discomfort with a dissenting publication, we’d move on to the next issue. Unfortunately, destroying press freedom is a core focus of the Trump administration’s agenda. In the same week that Vance attacked The Nation, President Trump called The New York Times “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country,” while his lawyers filed a $15 billion suit against the newspaper for publishing articles that documented the president’s “lifetime of scandals” and inclination to “rule like a dictator.” A Florida federal judge immediately rejected the suit as “decidedly improper and impermissible”—not to mention “tedious and burdensome.”

But that was just the beginning. Enraged that ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel had dared to comment on the crude politicization of Kirk’s death by Republicans, FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC in language that was the stuff of Hollywood cliché: “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Unsettled by the prospect that the licenses of network affiliates could be revoked and that regulatory negotiations with the vindictive Trump administration could go awry, ABC opted for the “easy way”—announcing Kimmel’s indefinite suspension.

That made Kimmel the most public target of the astonishing assault on free expression that was carried out by Trump’s MAGA devotees in the days following Kirk’s murder. Journalists were fired, teachers dismissed, and students expelled, merely for exercising their First Amendment rights. Trump declared that news reports he considered “bad” were “no longer free speech” and advocated for the firing of late-night hosts whose comedy offended his delicate sensibilities.

Few Republicans dared challenge the authoritarian overreach—until Kimmel was actually knocked off the air. Suddenly, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was decrying Carr’s comments as “absolutely inappropriate,” while Texas Senator Ted Cruz compared them to something “right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

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Americans agreed with Cruz that the Trump administration’s attempts to silence Kimmel were “dangerous as hell.” Within days, Kimmel was back on the air. And as Trump presided over a shutdown of the federal government, Kimmel got the last laugh—telling his newly expanded TV audience, “I was recently the victim of a government shutdown. They are reversible.”

Kimmel won that round. But the First Amendment is still in danger, and it still needs defending—especially by those of us who know that a robust, free, and independent press forms the vital underpinning of democracy. Decades of media consolidation, cost cutting, and layoffs have obliterated much of this country’s local journalism. Social media delivers a slurry of disinformation. Cable-­channel talking heads offer scant insight and even less diversity of opinion—as has been agonizingly demonstrated by the failure of so many outlets to entertain even basic debates about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Once-bold news networks are now owned by multinational corporations that are inclined to cut backroom deals with a president who has a history of dismissing the press as “the enemy of the people.” No wonder Trump and Vance think they can make the American media amenable to autocracy.

But we’ve seen their kind before. During the anti-communist Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, American dissenters were blacklisted, fired, censored, and deported. The damage done by McCarthyism extends to this day. Victor Navasky, the longtime editor and publisher of The Nation, warned that “stigmatizing people with the red brush had deprived the rest of us of interaction with people…whose advocacy, intelligence, passion, and information might have brought us to an improved understanding of the political and cultural situation, and perhaps even have transformed it.”

It’s easy to feel despair about what looks like a new age of McCarthyism. But being around for 160 years gives you perspective. This magazine is old enough to have fought McCarthyism the first time, alongside great journalists such as the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, who counseled Americans not to be “driven by fear into an age of unreason.”

We were on the side that won that fight. We know from experience that America’s witch-hunt fever has been broken before—and we proudly take the side of muckraking journalists, constitutional lawyers, and undaunted jurists, of the artists and actors who are fighting for their creative freedom, and above all, of the Constitution-­defending citizens who will not yield until Trump, Vance, and Brendan Carr are consigned to the same dustbin of history that Joe McCarthy so ignobly occupies.

The most telling moment in The Candidate, the 1972 film that so accurately anticipated today’s money-corrupted and dumbed-down American politics, comes when California US Senate candidate Bill McKay and his staff watch a commentary from Howard K. Smith, the distinguished co-anchor of the ABC Evening News, assessing the degeneration of his campaign.

Playing himself in the film, yet at the same time speaking to its core premises, Smith rips into McKay. The son of a former governor who had begun the Senate bid as an idealistic public interest lawyer with a commitment to civil rights and environmentalism, and a sharp critique of the corporate power that his incumbent opponent served, McKay has, over the course of the campaign, bent to the pressure of consultants and donors to moderate his positions. Now, Smith is calling him out.

“A television commercial is a way of selling a product. A candidate’s bid for votes should be a higher order of expression…with moral implications for the kind of people we are…and the kind we want to become. But, increasingly, candidates are merging the two…selling themselves like an underarm deodorant… in commercials just long enough to pound in some mindless slogan…that cheapens candidate… and voter alike,” explains Smith. “But in the California Senate race, young Bill McKay was different. He rejected the machine-type politics, by which his father won office…and ran a campaign refreshing in frankness and directness. But now, with only a month to go (before the election), McKay’s ways have visibly changed. Those early hard statements of his are turning into mush. Specific policies dissolve into old generalities. The Madison Avenue commercial has become his means of persuasion. The voters are being asked to choose McKay… like they choose detergents. Socko salesmanship… no moral considerations involved.”

Smith concludes by declaring that, “Again, virtue seems too great a strain for the long haul of the campaign.”

A visibly agitated McKay hears the message loud and clear. He turns to his campaign manager and says, “I want to talk to you.”

“Don’t take it seriously,” replies the manager.

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“I do take it seriously,” says McKay.

But in a matter of seconds, he is swept into the next stage of a bid that has veered far from the values that initially animated him.

The exchange, and the film as a whole, still resonate today. That’s in large part because of its visionary content and because of who plays Bill McKay: Robert Redford, the actor, director, producer, and activist who died last week at the age of 89.

The portrayal of McKay is a classic Redford performance, with tension developed not just with words from the script but with a tightened fist, a grimace and the physically awkward transformation of an activist into a politician. When it comes to the pivotal scene, everything about Redford’s response to Howard K. Smith’s takedown feels real because, in this case, it is real. Redford, as candidate McKay, is precisely right when he says, “This is a society divided by fear, hatred and violence. And until we talk about just what this society really is, then I don’t know how we’re going to change it.” Yet, that essential message is overwhelmed by the slick-yet-insipid sloganeering of a campaign that presents its “product” as a nominee who “shoots from the hip and is hip when he shoots.” 

Redford always took politics, and the role that art can play in influencing the public discourse, seriously. He was a driving force behind some of the 20th century’s most intellectually inspired and politically influential films, most notably All the President’s Men, a ripped-from-the-headlines political thriller that examined the corruption that infused — and extended from — Richard Nixon’s presidency. 

Redford was, as well, one of the nation’s leading environmentalists and supporters of independent media. He generally backed Democrats: endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 as the candidate best prepared to “confront the existential challenge of our time and keep us free from climate hazards and harm” – and describing Donald Trump as “a president who degrades everything he touches, a person who does not understand (or care?) that his duty is to defend our democracy.”

There were even suggestions over the years that Redford might be a credible Democratic US Senate candidate for his adopted state of Utah.

Redford’s great strength as an activist and performer was that he recognized the flaws in both right-wing Republicans and compromising Democrats. A keen observer of American politics, he read widely and supported progressive media – including this magazine. The actor saw evidence that campaigns were taking a bad turn more than half a century ago, and he responded as he knew best.

It was Redford’s concern about the increasingly vapid nature of politics that led him to make The Candidate, with director Michael Ritchie and Academy Award–winning screenwriter Jeremy Larner, who had served as a speechwriter for Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy’s insurgent antiwar campaign for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination.

Ritchie and Redford had kept a close eye on the 1970 California US Senate race, in which a photogenic and wealthy Democratic member of the U.S. House, John Tunney, won a heated Democratic primary against a more liberal candidate, US Rep. George Brown. Brown had highlighted his determined opposition to the war in Vietnam, his support for farmworkers and organized labor, and his commitment to a burgeoning environmental movement. Tunney, who many saw as a California Kennedy, ran a softer, more media-focused campaign – expertly packaged by the great media strategist of the moment, David Garth — that critics saw as long on style and short on substance. In an ironic twist, the Democrat went on to defeat Republican incumbent George Murphy, an older actor-turned-politician, in the general election. 

But that was just one aspect of the film, which also featured an incumbent senator (Crocker Jarmon, played by veteran actor Don Porter), who mouthed lines that echoed both Murphy and another rising California Republican star, then-governor Ronald Reagan—not to mention a complex father-son relationship that many compared with that of California governors Pat and Jerry Brown. 

The Candidate explored an emerging American politics, with a skeptical eye and a warned about the dangers of electoral strategies are all about money and media. It got a mixed reception at the time of its release. But history has proven it to be one of the most visionary films of the era.

Unfortunately, not everyone got the point.

When Republicans nominated Indiana Senator Dan Quayle for vice president in 1988, it was frequently noted that the conservative senator bore a passing resemblance to Redford. When The Washington Post reported that — according to a law school classmate of Quayle, Frank Pope – the candidate had been inspired at least in part by The Candidate, writer Jeremy Larner, explained in The San Francisco Chronicle that the senator misunderstood the movie. “Sorry, Senator Quayle,” wrote Larner, “you thought we were telling you how-to, when we were trying to say ‘watch out.’”

Redford, who speculated about making a sequel to The Candidate in order to amplify its arguments, was more succinct. He let it be known that he would not be casting his ballot for Quayle, or for the politics of style-over-substance that he warned would warp our campaigns, elections and governance. Robert Redford saw the future coming. Now that he is gone, and the future is here, it is agonizing to recognize just how right he was to sound the alarm.

Federal budgets, we are told, should be read as moral statements that reflect the values of congressional majorities. So what was the statement this week from the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives? That the overwhelming majority of House Republicans, along with a handful of wrongheaded Democrats, are prepared to hand the military-industrial complex everything it demands, while denying hungry children the food that could so easily be provided to them.

On Wednesday, the same politicians who decided nearly two months ago to slash funding for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program voted to authorize a staggering $892.6 billion in military spending. Vast amounts of that money will go to politically connected corporate contractors that the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft accurately describes as reaping “the profits of war”—and they can count on even fatter paychecks down the line as the ever-expanding Pentagon budget barrels toward the $1 trillion mark.

“A small fraction of that money would keep every child out of poverty,” said US Representative Mark Pocan, the Wisconsin Democrat who, with former US Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), founded the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus and has been a leading advocate for cutting the Pentagon budget.

Pocan was one of 192 Democrats and four Republicans who voted against the House’s National Defense Authorization Act proposal—versus 214 Republicans and 17 Democrats who voted “yes.” (You can see the final 231–196 roll call here. Credit to the Republicans who voted “no,” even if they may not all have done so for the right reasons. Shame on the Democrats who voted “yes,” as united opposition might well have upended the process and permitted the real debate over defense spending that is so desperately needed.)

True, the new NDAA contains an amendment that seeks to end a pair of Authorizations of the Use of Military Force that, since the early 2000s, have been used as excuses for presidents to bypass Congress when launching military actions. That represents a commendable victory after decades of advocacy by Lee, Pocan, US Representative Jim McGovern, and others who have sought to curtail executive overreach.

But the bill also contains a litany of anti-LGBTQ+ initiatives and other bows toward the hard-right on social policy that Representative Mark Takano, the California Democrat who chairs the Congressional Equality Caucus, decried in a statement that declared:“The National Defense Authorization Act has traditionally received strong bipartisan support, yet for the second Congress in a row House Republicans have tainted a bill aimed at improving the lives of servicemembers with poison-pill riders that threaten our troops’ rights, their families’ stability, and our efforts to retain top talent. Republicans’ sacrifice of a strong bipartisan vote for a politicized NDAA to appease the Trump Administration and a small slice of their base cannot undo the sacrifice of the transgender servicemembers, cadets, or military dependents that will be hurt by this bill. Congress should be fighting for those who fight for us—but it’s clear the GOP has other priorities. I will keep fighting to prevent the harmful provisions in this bill from becoming law.”

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Some of the worst aspects of the NDAA may be removed after the measure is considered by the US Senate. But, at its core, this bad bill represents a blank check for unaccountable spending by the Pentagon, and it was authorized by a House majority that, as McGovern suggests, has lost both its sense of proportion and its moral compass.

“The excessive military spending, and in many cases just grossly wasteful military spending, has not improved the quality of life for the vast majority of people in this country,” says McGovern. “The fact that we have 40 million people who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, I find offensive. We need people to rise up and say: Your priorities are all screwed up, Congress!”

That call to action may be dismissed by pundits, political insiders, and corporate lobbyists as simply the outrage of a progressive Democrat. But McGovern’s sentiments were anticipated decades ago by a Republican president.

Dwight Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech to newspaper editors of “a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples.” A career military leader who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II, and as the chief of staff of the Army at the beginning of the Cold War, Eisenhower recognized that the United States faced military threats. Yet he refused to suggest that increased defense spending should be a singular priority. Rather, in his 1953 speech—one of the first major statements of his presidency—he spoke of the “dread road” of constant military escalation and warned about “a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.”

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” said Eisenhower, adding:

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” explained Eisenhower. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

The 34th president proposed a wiser balance that respected the need for investments in human uplift and social progress. “The monuments to this new kind of war would be these: roads and schools, hospitals and homes, food and health,” he concluded. “We are ready, in short, to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world.”

Eisenhower is long gone. But today’s United States could use more of his wisdom, in the White House and in Congress.

When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders took his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to rural Viroqua, Wisconsin, in late August, his speech featured a fervent call for ending military aid to Israel’s assault on Gaza. The crowd responded with a standing ovation. Viroqua, population 4,407, is far from New York City, where clueless pundits and political operatives keep telling us that Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s advocacy for an end to the genocide in Gaza is too extreme. But the news from Viroqua offers a reminder that Mamdani and candidates like him are not on the margin of the national debate. Nor do they threaten Democratic prospects in 2026. They’re pulling the party toward the people.

The people know that the United States must stop supplying arms and coordinating militarily with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as it pursues its criminal war against the Palestinian population of Gaza. The people know that the US should be leading in the organization of immediate emergency humanitarian relief to the Palestinians. The people know that to do anything less makes us complicit in the ongoing crime.

Yet, top DC Democrats—including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries— continue to stand obstinately, and horrifically, on the wrong side of history. They refuse to endorse candidates like Mamdani and fail to recognize that tens of millions of Americans see Gaza as a moral-compass measure of human decency.

The people know that Hamas launched a gruesome attack on Israeli kibbutzim on October 7, 2023. But they also know that the Israeli response has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians in Gaza—most of them women and children—and reduced the enclave to a wasteland. Close to half of all Americans, and 66 percent of Democrats, identify the slaughter in Gaza as a genocide, according to an August Data for Progress survey. Those numbers are from before an August 25 Israeli air strike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital killed at least 20 people, including five journalists. And from before a United Nations–backed panel declared that a famine is taking place in Gaza, warning that “over half a million people are facing the most devastating form of hunger.” One thousand rabbis signed a letter calling on Israel to lift blockades on humanitarian aid to Gaza, because “we cannot condone the mass killings of civilians…or the use of starvation as a weapon of war.”

Politicians supposedly take polling and public pressure seriously. Yet, for all the data, for all the organizing and demands by grassroots Democrats and progressives for coherent opposition to Trump’s support of Netanyahu’s murderous policies and territorial ambitions—which include the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and, if Netanyahu’s ministers prevail, from the occupied West Bank—top Democrats in Congress stubbornly stand on the wrong side of history. Their complicity is as glaring as it is indefensible. There are no excuses.

After looking the other way for the better part of two years, mainstream US media outlets are finally covering the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians. But among those who could actually end the horror, courage is in short supply.

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Most members of Congress employ empty language to describe what the world recognizes as an ongoing war crime. And when it comes to linking words to deeds, action is thwarted not just by right-wing Republicans but by many Democrats.

Senate Republicans rejected Sanders’s resolution to block key weapons sales to Israel, while nodding along as Trump mused about developing beachfront properties in Gaza. Yet, even as the Sanders resolution secured support from a majority of the Senate Democratic Caucus, Schumer opposed it, as did New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who styles himself as a voice for human rights.

This is no longer a policy debate. This is a moral test for every official, every candidate, every Democrat. When the famine in Gaza was formally recognized, Mamdani tweeted, “The U.S. government is not a bystander to this genocide. We can end it today.” In fact, it will end only when our elected leaders get a clear signal from the people. People in Viroqua sent their signal in August. People in New York can do so November 4, when they elect Zohran Mamdani.

Rebecca Solnit, the nimble and adventurous public intellectual who has written some of the most thought-provoking books of our times, has made no secret of her disdain for Donald Trump. And one of the things that really troubles her is that he has little inclination toward reading, let alone respect for the books that might provoke deeper thinking on the part of the most powerful man in the world. Solnit spoke with me in late August about Trump, books, and our disconcerting times. This portion of a longer conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
                       —John Nichols

John Nichols: You recently posted an image of Trump with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House in front of a display of hats with pro-Trump slogans such as “Four More Years.” They were displayed on what looked like a bookshelf. You wrote: “What to do with a bookshelf when you’re not up to books.” That’s a good place to start, because it does strike me that if we’ve ever had an administration that wasn’t about books—except, of course, when it’s banning them—Trump’s is the one.

Rebecca Solnit : He makes George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan look like, I don’t know, Plato and Aristotle. (Sorry, Plato and Aristotle—I don’t mean it!) But how many times can you say how profoundly stupid Trump is? So far as anyone can tell, he doesn’t read. He was once asked what his favorite verse from the Bible was—you know, the book that he held up in his anti–Black Lives Matter moment [in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington during the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd]—and he had to give one of those weird, evasive, jellified answers he gives, because he couldn’t [talk about] the Book of Job, or Matthew, or Leviticus, or anything fun like that, like normal people mostly can.

JN: “Weird, evasive, jellified answers” seem to be the norm.

RS: It feels like part of this horrible new culture where you can have any truth you want—as if history began and ended yesterday. Everything’s infinitely revisable, and there’s no accountability. [The Library of Congress website] even put up a version of the Constitution that was missing some crucial parts [which it blamed on a coding error].

JN: This spring, Trump was asked what the Declaration of Independence meant to him, and he said, “It’s a declaration of unity and love and respect,” when it’s actually an explanation of why the Continental Congress rejected British colonial rule.

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RS: King George’s reincarnation reads the Declaration! That document has been used against Trump, including by me and a friend right after the 2016 election, because he fits the description of [the monarch] who is imposing all the insults and injuries—taxation without representation, all of it. And listening to you makes me think that, with Trump, it’s almost as though television became an Antichrist and appeared on the earth. Everything wrong with TV and social media, all the fluid, gelatinous, dumbed-down, pandering, unreliable stuff, just pours out of him incessantly. And the fact that TV made him what he is—because TV portrayed him as a very successful and decisive businessman when he was actually a daddy’s boy, a serial bankrupt—he is TV, in a way.

JN: When he was doing reality TV, at the peak of his pre-political celebrity, he put out books [cowritten by a speechwriter] about how to get rich. They were not robust outlines of his political philosophy. They were get-rich-quick manuals.

RS: From a guy whose get-rich-quick scheme was to be born to a very rich father who would bail him out repeatedly.

JN: They were also “how to be like me” manuals.

RS: It was just another snake-oil-salesman product from a guy who was selling steaks. Snakes, steaks—somewhat different, but still being sold by Trump, along with all kinds of other ridiculous things. He’s television incarnate. He’s a carnival huckster. He always seems like something semiliquid to me, some kind of vomitous slime mold lurching along in his inanity and repulsiveness.

JN: But it’s not impossible to be a leader and a great reader, even a great author. Michael Foot, the British parliamentarian, cabinet member, and Labour Party leader, thought a lot about this. He served in powerful positions, led his party in opposition to Margaret Thatcher. But he was also a respected biographer and essayist, an obsessive reader and book collector. He wrote well-­regarded books on Byron and Swift and was one of the great commentators on the legacy of Tom Paine. Foot famously said, “Men of power have not time to read, yet men who do not read are not fit for power.” I am interested in your thinking on what it means to have a grounding in books, in literature.

RS: Most of us are so caught up in the moment, but I did spend the first 40 years of my life reading really intensely. And I think for people who get elected, who otherwise get really engaged in the moment, hopefully, the books are there as a foundation for some kind of breadth and depth in your understanding.

JN: For those in positions of power, elected leaders, even 
when they are caught up in the moment, I think there is a value in pausing to reflect. In the past, leaders recognized the need to read—and to write. And this was true across the ideological spectrum. We have had liberal and conservative leaders throughout history who have taken it on themselves to write books that matter. Churchill wrote constantly. Nixon wrote books that examined personal and political crises with insight and at least some self-awareness. Clearly, that’s not Trump.
 But I’m wondering if the speedup of society has taken too many of our most prominent political figures to a place where those who would lead are less inclined not merely to read books, but also to write them as vehicles for reflecting on and expressing their visions.

RS: It’s interesting because people like Elizabeth Warren [and] a lot of others have written good books. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t written a book yet, but I hope she does at some point, and I’m sure [New York City mayoral candidate] Zohran Mamdani will write a fabulous book when he slows down in about 30 years.

But, yes, we live in this accelerated world that often feels to me to be too fast for thoughtfulness, depth, full consideration, etc., and it produces a kind of shallowness and glibness. And I think a lot of that speedup came from Silicon Valley, and the triple crisis of this moment feels like it’s authoritarianism, climate, and Silicon Valley, and they’re not in any way separate. As you can see with someone like Elon Musk, who does things like build AI power stations that are polluting Black neighborhoods [as, for example,] in Memphis so that he can have Grok turn into Hitler for a week—that kind of gets all three at once.

These giant corporations have spent insane amounts of money getting experts to figure out how to make us spend all our time with the porn, the shopping, the social media, the infinite scroll, and we all know it’s damaged attention spans. This brings us back to reading and writing, which require the capacity to stick with something for extended periods, to have a kind of focus and ability to engage with relative complexity.

JN: Don’t you think Trump feeds on this chaos? He’s figured out that if you say the most extreme things, and keep pushing it out, that you can be heard above the rest of the discourse. I worry that that’s what our politics has become.

RS: Trump essentially had a 10-year infomercial called The Apprentice, which made him a highly public figure, and he had white male privilege. I wrote a piece for The Nation just before the 2016 election that I’m still really proud of, pretending that the genders were reversed. There was a very distinguished diplomat named Hilaire Rodham, who everyone respected. And there was this crazy, obese, chaotic sex-maniac loon named Donaldina Trump, who everyone laughed out of town.

You know, Trump has had every possible advantage. He has [relied on] outrage and the ability to say anything he wants and say something completely contradictory 10 minutes later. But it’s also built on top of so many kinds of luck and privilege that most of us don’t have.

Trump’s so lacking in self-discipline. He’s so stupid. He’s so ridiculous. No person of color, no woman, no queer person, could conduct themself in some of the ways he has and not go to jail, become an outcast, be generally despised, or at the very least not have a significant following—even if it’s a minority of the public—who continues to hang on his every word and really treats him like, you know, their redeemer.

JN: So the trends are not necessarily good. But you still believe in the power of the book.

RS: I do, I do. At the turn of the century, people had this messianic faith in the Internet…. It is a lot more now than it was then…. But I just always say, if it’s going to be the Dark Ages, I’ll be an Irish monk. You know, reading was not a universal human activity not that long ago. Maybe it won’t always be. But, in fact, there’s a resurgence of independent bookstores and a lot of enthusiasm for books. Turnout at readings is often quite huge. The readers are not disappearing.

JN: The independent bookstores that you just mentioned have, in many cases, become islands of resistance.

RS: Yes, yes. And public libraries! They really understand their mission in a very deep way, as supporting both a local community and freedom of thought and expression, that they are kind of First Amendment outposts: refusing censorship, supporting divergent ideas, and encouraging the depth of thought that you need for a democracy.

JN: And they have displays of books, not hats.

RS: We just walked a full circle right back to that damn bookcase… with Trump, the guy who’s showing off a shitty bookcase, showing he’s illiterate to two completely brilliant world leaders. He has no introspection, just this hungry-ghost, gnawing narcissism, this demand for attention. And I wonder if that narcissism is a sense of the shallowness of constantly needing other people to validate you and tell you you’re real, because you don’t have the inner life that, you know, luckier people do.

Donald Trump is no friend of organized labor.

Nor is Trump a friend of federal workers—or the unions that represent them. In fact, on March 27, the president issued an executive order demanding that most federal agencies terminate their union contracts. The president claimed he had the power to suspend collective bargaining for national security reasons—sparking ongoing legal and legislative battles.

No matter how these battles are resolved, there is no question that Trump—along with a wrecking crew that, for a time, included billionaire Elon Musk—is making the lives of hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers miserable.

That has put Everett Kelley, who heads the nation’s largest federal union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), at the center of the most far-reaching and consequential union struggle that is playing out on this contentious Labor Day.

Representing 820,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia, AFGE is battling to protect not just the jobs of its members, but services for the great mass of Americans whose health, safety and security are under threat from a privatization-scheming president and his Republican Congress.

As Labor Day approached, The Nation spoke with Kelley—an Army veteran and Baptist preacher who worked for decades at an Anniston, Alabama, Army depot, before becoming the president of his union and a national vice president of the AFL-CIO—about how workers are struggling to survive Trump’s war on the working class. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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The Nation: On this Labor Day, is it fair to say that working Americans and their unions are facing one of the most brutal assaults in the history of American labor.

Everett Kelley: I totally agree that that is what’s happening! I’ve been a member of the AFGE since 1981. I’ve never seen an assault like this. Employees have to come to work every day and face uncertainty, because this administration has told them they want them to go—they don’t want them to be government employees. They are sitting at home with a [reduction-in-force] letter, and they’ve got a stack of bills to be paid. They have been stripped of their ability to organize by saying, “We won’t allow them to be in the union, we won’t allow them to pay union dues out of their paychecks.” Employees are being demoralized by every stretch of the imagination.

The Nation: The people you represent took federal employment because they wanted to serve their fellow Americans. Many of them are veterans who chose federal employment because they wanted to continue to do something for their country, correct?

Kelley: You’re exactly right. I’m a veteran myself. Thirty percent of the people we represent are veterans. The people that I represent are very patriotic employees. They take an oath when they come to work for the federal government, and they take that oath seriously.

I retired myself from the federal government—after 31 and a half years—and I’m proud of that. When we are working, we’re not working just to get paid. We are working to provide services to the American people.

The Nation: Tell me about some of those services.

Kelley: Making sure that the food that Americans eat is safe food. Making sure that the air that Americans breathe is safe to breathe. Making sure that the water is safe. Making sure that veterans, once they go and serve this country, come back and have support mechanisms through the VA. Making sure that our elders, when they reach retirement age, are supported when they file claims with the different agencies, when they need something from the Social Security Administration. Making sure, with FEMA, that when there is a disaster that you’ve got federal employees there to address the catastrophe. You also have people at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, making sure that our communities are safe. Just about any kind of job you can think of, the people I represent are doing it. And they are doing it to provide services to, and for, the American people.

The Nation: Most Americans are, I suspect, unaware of all the things that federal workers do.

Kelley: Federal employees do their jobs so well that, most of the time, nobody notices. It would only be noticed if they were failing. And they are not failing.

The Nation: There are plenty of things that the private sector does, but a lot of the jobs that the people you represent do really can’t be done well by the private sector.

Kelley: Absolutely.

I do believe that what this administration is trying to do is to put the government in a mission-failure position so that they can contract out these jobs. That would be devastating because [with privatization] it would not be about providing service to the American people. It would be about making a profit.

The Nation: Trump and the Republicans get excited about privatization, but there’s a lot of evidence that privatization doesn’t work.

Kelley: It doesn’t work. When I was a federal employee, I worked for the Department of Defense. I’ve seen how the contractors hike up prices on things like a hammer. I remember the big story about contractors charging $600 for a hammer. That’s what you get when you contract out jobs and services.

The Nation: On this Labor Day, are there things you think that Americans who care about federal workers and federal unions should be focused on?

Kelley: We have a bill on the floor right now in Congress. It is HR 2550, the Protect America’s Workforce Act. That’s designed to restore collective bargaining rights back to federal employees. We’re asking every American to make a call to their member of Congress and to tell them to bring that bill to the floor. The bill is sitting there, but the speaker won’t let it come to the floor. We believe that, if there were a vote, we would win.

The Nation: While this is a fight for federal workers, it matters for private-sector workers, as well, doesn’t it?

Kelley: I hope that the American people will get behind workers and stand with them so that this administration does not beat out the unions. Although they are starting with AFGE, I believe that, if they are successful—and I don’t believe they will ultimately be successful—[the administration] will not stop there. I believe that they see us as the low-hanging fruit. I think that they will attack every organized worker in America if they are given the green light to do so.

The District of Columbia is not a state. It’s the legally enigmatic, underrepresented, and officially disempowered creation of a federal government that has a history of neglecting the needs and the potential of the nation’s capital city. Now Donald Trump has taken full advantage of this circumstance to flood Washington with heavily armed soldiers and masked federal agents.

Trump acknowledges that his move to militarize law enforcement in DC has unsettled Americans. “Already they’re saying, ‘He’s a dictator,’” Trump said last week, after the military surge began. The president claimed that he was just trying to fight an out-of-control crime wave. “The place is going to hell and we’ve got to stop it,” he announced. “So instead of saying ‘He’s a dictator,’ they should say, ‘We’re going to join him and make Washington safe.’”

But Trump’s crime claim is wrong. “There is not a crime crisis in DC,” Rosa Brooks, a former DC Metropolitan reserve police officer who now teaches at Georgetown Law School, told NPR. Brooks decried the president’s authoritarian overreach, saying, “This is police state territory, banana republic police state territory.”

Unfortunately, there is a considerable history of federal administrations and Republican congresses entering “banana republic police state territory” when it comes to DC.

Frederick Douglass recognized that there was a crisis of democracy in the nation’s capital 135 years ago. The great abolitionist and social reformer, who taught that “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will,” was as ahead of his time when it came to DC as he was in so many other areas. He spent the last years of his life working with a pioneering voting rights group, the District Suffrage Petition Association, to bring the promise and the protection of democracy to DC.

Douglass attended the group’s meetings and rallies, and asked, “What have the people of the district done that they should be excluded from the privileges of the ballot box?”

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Several of the democratic reforms that Douglass advocated for during the course of his remarkable lifetime were achieved in the century after his death. Washington today has an elected mayor and city council, as well as the ability to cast ballots (and choose electors) in presidential elections.

Yet, 130 years after Douglass died, the citizens of the District of Columbia are still blocked from electing voting members of Congress.

The denial of the full franchise to citizens of the nation’s capital city is just one example of the patchwork approach to suffrage in the United States, where Americans who live in commonwealths, territories, and possessions lack full representation rights in Congress and, in most instances, the right to vote for president. Even in the states, voting rights are ill-defined, and the Voting Rights Act, already so weakened by the Supreme Court, is under further legal assault—as the current gerrymandering push by Trump-aligned Texas Republicans so amply illustrates.

Yet the District of Columbia has perhaps the most complex relationship with voting rights of any US jurisdiction. While district residents can vote in presidential elections, they do not have the right to elect voting representatives to the House or Senate. DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the veteran civil rights activist who campaigned for many years for the placement of the seven-foot-tall Douglass statue that now stands in the US Capitol, recalled when it was dedicated a dozen years ago, “There has been too little recognition that as a District of Columbia resident, three Republican presidents appointed Douglass to three local posts: to what was then the upper chamber of the DC Council, part of the home-rule government given the district by the Republican Congress and president during Reconstruction, as DC recorder of deeds and as US marshal for the local and federal courts. Who knew that Douglass lost the Republican nomination for delegate to the US House of Representatives?”

Norton and others know that today, though DC has an elected local government, the power of that government—and, thus, of Washington residents to determine their own affairs—has often been constrained by Republican Congresses. And it is now being overridden by an authoritarian Republican president.

Citizens of the district—which has a population larger than Vermont’s and Wyoming’s—have organized, campaigned, and petitioned for statehood for decades.

But the cause of statehood—and basic democratic respect—has been thwarted since the days when members of Congress refused the request of the great radical senator from South Dakota, Richard F. Pettigrew, who urged after the death of Douglass in 1895 “that out of respect to his memory his remains be permitted to lie in state in the rotunda of the National Capitol between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on tomorrow.”

Today, congressional Republicans form the primary barrier to DC statehood. They like to note that Douglass was a Republican. But that was in the day when Douglass saw the GOP as a progressive force that demanded the expansion of the franchise.

In recent decades, the Democratic Party has made the demand a standard part of its platform. But, too frequently, Democrats have done so in an unfocused and halfhearted manner. What’s been missing is a sense of urgency.

Trump’s militarization of policing in the city establishes that urgency, now and into the future. While a Trump-aligned Republican Congress is not going to do the right thing, Democrats must make it clear that—as part of the broader voting rights renaissance that must follow the Trump years—DC statehood will top their agenda.

The dream of voting rights has been deferred since the days when Douglass wrote of the district as “the one spot where there is no government for the people, of the people and by the people. Its citizens submit to rulers whom they have no choice in selecting. They obey laws which they had no voice in making.”

If the long arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached in his lifetime, then surely the legacy of this awful moment for American democracy must be DC statehood.

Anyone who knows the epic history of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party will tell you that its internal politics have often been contentious. But out of that contention have come some of the most dynamic figures to ever grace the national political scene: from presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey to more contemporary leaders on the left, such as the late US Senator Paul Wellstone, former US representative and now Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and US Representative Ilhan Omar.

The DFL is also a party where grassroots activists have often lifted up political outsiders and activists and put them on paths to prominence. So it wasn’t all that surprising when, on July 19, the Minneapolis DFL endorsed the mayoral campaign of just such a rising star: state Senator Omar Fateh, a democratic socialist who has championed bold efforts to expand affordable housing and rent stabilization, supported a $20-an-hour minimum wage and taken up the cause of unionized and non-unionized workers.

Fateh’s focus on affordability issues and his energetic challenge to Democratic Party lethargy have garnered comparisons to New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani—another young, Muslim, democratic socialist anti-establishment candidate—with some calling Fateh “the Mamdani of Minneapolis.” Fateh has embraced those comparisons. After Mamdani’s landslide victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo in June’s New York City mayoral primary, Fateh declared, “Minneapolis Next!”

Initially, the Minneapolis DFL appeared to agree. In the final formal balloting at the July convention, more than 60 percent of delegates chose to back Fateh over incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey, a DFLer who last year issued a record number of vetoes of measures approved by the progressive majority on the city council, including a Gaza ceasefire resolution.

In addition, just before the convention adjourned, and at a point when a number of Frey backers had departed, Fateh won a show-of-hands vote where delegates held up badges to indicate whom they supported.

Fateh began campaigning, accurately, as the “DFL-endorsed” candidate.

But then the surprise came. Last week, a state DFL party committee revoked the endorsement after Frey and his allies complained that a “highly flawed and untested” electronic voting system produced a significant number of uncounted votes at the convention. Concerns were also raised about delays tied to slow Internet connections and a host of issues that frustrated backers of both leading endorsement contenders.

Frey celebrated the decision to revoke the endorsement, saying, “I am proud to be a member of a party that believes in correcting our mistakes.” State DFL leaders called for unity. But Fateh and his backers said the revocation—which was coupled with a decision barring the Minneapolis DFL from making another endorsement—represented an outrageous overreach by the state party.

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Minnesota DFL conventions have a long history of factional fights and conflicts, and this one was no different. But, as Amanda Otero, co–executive director of Take Action MN, said when Fateh backers rallied on Friday, “The will of the delegates was clear, and I need a party who cares more about building power with the people and upholding our will than a set of technicalities and rules that ultimately did not disrupt the ultimate outcome.”

Fateh objected to the revocation of his endorsement by announcing,

Twenty-eight party insiders voted to take away our endorsement behind closed doors. This group was comprised of non-Minneapolis residents, Mayor Frey supporters and even donors. This is exactly what Minneapolis voters are sick of. The insider games, the backroom decisions and feeling like our voice doesn’t matter in our own city. Frey’s team used every tactic they could, including delay and confusion on convention day, because they didn’t have the votes. We see this for what it is—disenfranchisement of thousands of Minneapolis caucus goers and the delegates who represented all of us on convention day. Let me be clear, we’re still in this fight. And we’re going to win.

The reaction of US Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was every bit as firm and focused as that of the candidate. “It is inexcusable to overturn the DFL endorsement from Omar Fateh,” she said. “A small group, a majority living outside Minneapolis, met privately to overturn the will of Minneapolis delegates who volunteered, organized, and participated in a months-long DFL process. Unacceptable.”

Omar, who represents Minneapolis in the House, told The Nation, “It is paramount that the Democratic Party does everything possible to bring in new voices and new communities into the coalition. I often say we are a big-tent party and we need to ensure we continue to uplift and celebrate progressive perspectives. At a time when people are hungry for bold change across the country, we need to support, not silence, progressive candidates. Zohran Mamdani’s incredible victory in New York was a testament to the people-powered campaign voters are craving. In order to win upcoming elections, we have to center the needs of working people and give voters clear reasons to support us.”

Notably, though Mamdani won the New York City primary, he has yet to be endorsed by prominent Democrats such as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Along with a group of DFL elected officials from Minneapolis—including three state senators, five state representatives, three Hennepin County commissioners, Minneapolis City Council president Elliott Payne and four other council members, and Minneapolis School Board member Greta Callahan—Representative Omar signed onto a statement that declared:

We strongly condemn the DFL’s Constitution, Bylaws & Rules Committee’s (CBRC) decision to revoke the DFL endorsement from Omar Fateh. Last month, thousands of caucus-goers and delegates across Minneapolis gathered to participate in the Minneapolis DFL Convention. Now, a month later, a small group of DFL board members, a majority living outside Minneapolis, met privately to overturn the will of Minneapolis delegates who volunteered, organized, and participated in a months-long DFL process. It is inexcusable to overturn the results weeks after the convention because board members did not like the outcome. Not only does this decision set an extremely dangerous precedent, it will undermine the DFL endorsing process going forward and fails to center the will of delegates.

Right now, there is a clear tension between the progressive democrats who are challenging the status quo and moderate democrats. It is extremely disheartening that Omar Fateh, the first Black mayoral candidate to be DFL-endorsed in the last three decades, will have his endorsement revoked. Chair Richard Carlbom campaigned on uniting the DFL; this decision directly runs counter to that effort, to which we are all committed. The DFL Party is a big-tent party and all factions should be fairly represented, not silenced. Minneapolis is the heart of the engine of Democratic turnout in our state. Undoubtedly, this appalling decision will leave many voters feeling discouraged and unwelcome from participating in our party.

Throughout this mayoral campaign, we have seen the influence of big money in our politics. This should not be how decisions are made in our party. Blatant corruption should be widely condemned, not tolerated. We know organized people beat organized money. Fateh’s campaign organized and won the endorsement. This decision will be a stain on our party for years to come and damage our ability to organize for Democratic wins this year, next year, and beyond.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary in June made the 33-year-old state legislator from Queens more than just the party’s nominee to lead the nation’s largest city. For a Democratic Party desperate to reclaim political momentum, Mamdani’s laser-like focus on affordability issues offered a clear path forward. The Ugandan-born immigrant who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor also managed to overcome many of the wrenching, personality-based pitfalls of New York politics by projecting an accessible, enthusiastic, and joyful determination to open up conversations and heal past electoral divisions—an approach that starkly contrasts with Donald Trump’s dark vision of an America at odds with the world and with itself. Mamdani still faces a tough November race, with his chief opponent in the primary, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, reentering the contest as a third-party contender alongside the scandal-plagued incumbent, Mayor Eric Adams. Perennial Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and independent Jim Walden round out the field.

On the day that Mamdani sat down with Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and executive editor John Nichols for one of his first extended post-primary interviews, he had just secured the endorsement of 1199SEIU, the largest healthcare union in the country and a historic force in New York politics. At the same time, he’s still looking to win the support of national Democratic figures—notably heavy hitters from his home state like Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries—who suggest that the proud democratic socialist is too progressive on both domestic and foreign-policy issues.

Seated at a small table in the Little Flower Cafe, an Afghan eatery that he frequents in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria, Mamdani sipped a pink sheer chai and spoke about the inspiration he takes from past New York progressives such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia. He also discussed how he came to highlight affordability as the essential political issue of the moment, the future direction of the Democratic Party, and the legacy of “sewer socialism”—the breakthroughs achieved by socialist municipal governments in the past. Along the way, Mamdani highlighted key challenges for New York governance, such as protecting the city from the depredations of ICE and the vendettas of the Trump White House and navigating relations with the city’s billionaire class. He also spoke about the punishing media landscape and his efforts to address “a caricature of myself that is a responsibility for me to correct,” as well as his earnest hope—in a time of so much cynicism and despair—that democracy might finally deliver for working people. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
 

The Nation: In your victory speech on primary night, you quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt, telling the crowd: “As FDR said, ‘Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations, not because the people dislike democracy but because they have grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and weakness…. In desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.’ New York, if we have made one thing clear over these past months, it is that we need not choose between the two.” How did you come to adopt that quote and to link it to your governing vision?

Mamdani: I was taken by this quote because it so eloquently speaks to the fact that for democracy to survive, it cannot be treated as simply an ideal or a value. It has to be something that has a resonance to the needs of working people’s lives. And in this moment especially, there’s a temptation to say that democracy is under attack from authoritarianism in Washington, DC, which it is. And it is also under attack from the inside, [because of] the withering of the belief in its ability to deliver on any of the needs of working people.

It’s not that we must convince people to believe in democracy as a notion or as a political aspiration; it’s that we have to convince them of its resonance in their lives. And it’s a joy to be here with you at Little Flower, because that’s the nickname of the greatest mayor in our history, Fiorello La Guardia, who took on these twin crises of anti-immigrant animus and the denial of dignity to working people, and did so with an understanding of what the fruition of democracy looked like—and even what the fulfillment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness looked like—understanding it in the language of the urban sphere: of more parks, more beauty, more light. You cannot defeat this attack on democracy unless you also prove its worth.

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The Nation: FDR and La Guardia campaigned in difficult times—during the Great Depression, with fascism rising in Europe. They each captured the imagination of the people and used it to build electoral and governing coalitions. Is that something you were thinking about when you picked that quote?

Mamdani: It is part of the inspiration for this campaign.
 

The Nation: Roosevelt had a huge agenda, and he was a masterful politician. Yet he couldn’t achieve all of it. The same with La Guardia. Today, as you seek to implement an equally bold agenda, there are people who say you’re too inexperienced, that you won’t be effective. That will, undoubtedly, be a theme of the fall election, in which your leading opponent is a former governor whose father, another former governor, famously said, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” Tell us how you see governing, and how you intend to deliver on your campaign’s promises.

Mamdani: I only promise that which I intend to deliver. I will be judged at the end of my tenure as mayor—after I win this general election—by my ability to deliver on this platform. Most especially, I’ll be held to account on the central planks of this platform: commitments to freeze the rent, to make the slowest buses in the country fast and free, to deliver universal childcare in a city where it costs $25,000 a year to provide that for a child. The challenge of politics is to meet each moment. What we’ve shown in this campaign is our ability to do so from the beginning, when I was managing two people, to this point where we now have more than 52,000 people [as campaign volunteers].

This is not to say that campaigning and governing are the same challenge, but it is to say that they both present you with an ever-developing landscape—one in which you can only succeed if you hire a team of the best, the brightest, and also the hungriest. What we did in this campaign was showcase our ability to do that, and what we’ll do in governing is the same: hire on the basis of expertise, and trust our convictions, our commitments, to also hire those who are not characterized by the speed with which they say yes to an idea I come up with, but rather by the track record they can show in fulfilling a mandate such as this.
 

The Nation: Might your administration include City Comptroller Brad Lander, one of your closest primary rivals, as deputy mayor or in some other key position?

Mamdani: I have yet to make any personnel commitments. But I would say that it has been a joy to run alongside Brad and to work alongside him, and to see his leadership as both a colleague for years prior but also amidst this race, in showcasing what a new kind of politics can be. I know that many others felt the same. At a moment when the language of politics is so dour and so dark, it’s important to understand that the tonic to the darkness is not imitating it, but rather to marshal the same lightness and joy that also characterizes our lives.
 

The Nation: In your victory speech, you seemed to be trying not merely to claim an election win but to give people a deeper sense of your governing philosophy and focus. It didn’t sound like you wrote it that night.

Mamdani: No, the foundation of the speech was written before that evening. But we wrote the conclusion on election night. There was a sense of “Things look good—but it’s too early.” And then once I got the phone call from Andrew Cuomo, we realized that this was actually a victory speech. It was not too early to declare. And so we had to bring that clarity to what we had written.

The Nation: You promised to “govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party, where we fight for working people with no apology.” That spoke to the circumstances of the Democratic Party, not just in New York City but nationally. Today there’s this debate over how the party should reconnect with working-class voters. If you’re elected mayor, your success or failure is primarily going to be measured by what you do for people in New York. But do you also see the potential for a model of a new politics in America?

Mamdani: It has often felt as if we in the Democratic Party are embarrassed by some of our convictions—that at the first sign of resistance, we may back away. And what I have found as a New Yorker is that the thing New Yorkers hate more than a politician they disagree with is one that they can’t trust. And so I have run a campaign that is unabashed about its commitments, its principles, its values—while always ensuring that that lack of apology never translates into a condescension, but rather a sincerity. It allows for an honest debate with New Yorkers, where even when I go and speak to hundreds of CEOs, we have a conversation all in the knowledge that my fiscal policy, as I state it in that room, is the same as I state it on the street: a desire to match the top corporate tax rate of New York to that of the top corporate tax rate of New Jersey, a desire to increase personal income taxes on the top 1 percent of New Yorkers by 2 percent. It’s an honest desire, and it is also one that doesn’t preclude me from sharing it with those who may be taxed by it.

There is a temptation, when you see how successful Republicans have been with their style of politics, to believe that we have to mimic it in order to compete with them. In fact, it is a challenge for us to showcase our alternate vision. It’s not just a vision with regard to commitments, it’s not just a vision with regard to ideals, but it comes across even with regard to the manner in which we share our politics with others. And I think sincerity is at the heart of that.

The Nation: There’s been a pressure—a good bit before the primary, more since—to get you to back off from things you’ve said on issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict and taxing the rich. You’ve responded by meeting with critics, explaining that these are the things you believe in and engaging in discussions of where you are coming from. That’s different from how many candidates operate.

Mamdani: If I’ve made policy commitments, I’ve made them because I intend to keep them. I want to be honest about them. That doesn’t stop me from continuing to learn how to be a leader for this entire city. But that learning is not something that can come at the expense of the core of what this campaign is, which is a commitment to the very same policies we began with on October 23, the very same values we ran with for eight months prior to the primary. That marriage of consistency and growth is what I hope to show as the leader of this city.
 

The Nation: If you are elected mayor, you will have to deal with political leaders in Albany and Washington. You’ve said that you want to use your power “to reject Donald Trump’s fascism.” How do you Trump-proof New York City? And how do you do that when the administration is directly attacking you? Just this morning, the White House spokesperson denounced you as “Zamdami.”

Mamdani: I hope they find that guy. [Laughs.]
 

The Nation: So how do you Trump-proof the city?

Mamdani: There are a number of ways: You raise revenue, such that you not only are able to protect the city against the worst of the federal cuts that are to come, but also that you are able to pursue an affirmative agenda at the same time. It is not enough to fight Trump’s vision in purely a defensive posture. We must also have our own vision that we are fighting for—and that we deliver on.

And New York City [can also push back against Trump’s White House] by enforcing and strengthening our city’s existing sanctuary-city policies. This is a contest, also, of values that concern the fabric of our city and our country. And when I was saying that too often it feels as if we Democrats are embarrassed, just think about these policies, which have been spoken of by Eric Adams as if they are an attack on what makes us New Yorkers, when in fact they’ve been in existence for decades and have been defended prior to him by Republicans and Democrats alike. We know that these are the very policies that can prevent so much of the horrors that we are seeing in our own city.

Finally, we can fight by instilling hope in New Yorkers who are living through despair in this moment—be it a despair over how expensive the city that they call home has become, or despair watching in anguish as their tax dollars are used to kill civilians in Gaza, as was recently reported by NBC News, where the Israeli military killed 10 children waiting in line for a health clinic, one of whom was a 1-year-old child who had just spoken his first words. It is incumbent upon us, as Democrats, to fight back against that, and to also lift New Yorkers out of that despair with an affirmative vision.

I am running to be the mayor of this city, and my focus will be on the welfare of New Yorkers across these five boroughs. I will lead with a vision of protecting these New Yorkers and ensuring that we do more than simply survive in this city—that there is also a language and a reality of aspiration in our city once again.
 

The Nation: The president recently questioned your citizenship and threatened to arrest you. Were you surprised by that? Do you have any capacity to be surprised by Donald Trump?

Mamdani: Very little. He has spoken about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, what I believe in, my naturalization status. I think much of it is to distract from who I fight for, because for all of the many differences between Donald Trump and me, we both ran campaigns on the cost of living, campaigns that spoke about the need for cheaper groceries. While he’s betrayed those same commitments—most obviously through this recent legislation that will throw millions of Americans off their healthcare, steal food from the hungry, continue in his now well-known tradition of wealth transfers of trillions of dollars from the working class to the 1 percent—we will actually deliver on those commitments. And our delivery on them will throw his betrayal into stark relief. That is a threat to his politics, and it motivates so much of this language and this focus that he has.

The Nation: Instead of referring to you as a democratic socialist, Trump has claimed that you are a communist. So let’s talk about what you are—a democratic socialist. How do you define the term?

Mamdani: I think of it often in the terms that Dr. King shared decades ago: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism. But there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.”

In a moment when income inequality is declining nationwide, it is increasing in New York City. And within the context of city government, I understand [democratic socialism as a way to honor] the responsibility to ensure that every New Yorker lives a dignified life. I often speak of Fiorello La Guardia—a Republican who once ran on the Socialist Party line and worked closely with the left—because he delivered that dignity through so much of what he did as the mayor of this city. This was a mayor who created the Parks Department, a mayor who built housing for 20,000 New Yorkers at a scale and pace which is considered unfeasible today, a mayor who understood what it meant to fight for working-class New Yorkers.

I am well aware of the immense responsibility that comes with this position, and I am also excited by the opportunity that it represents to deliver for those same New Yorkers for whom politics has seemed less and less relevant to the struggles of their lives.
 

The Nation: When you talk about democratic socialism, you put it in an American context, which a lot of our media never even imagines. But there is a long democratic socialist tradition in this country, and one of the best examples of it is the “sewer socialists” of Milwaukee. One of the interesting things about the sewer socialists was that they championed small business. They fought to protect small businesses, often against chain stores and big business. You’ve done something similar.

Mamdani: Yeah! And the extreme concentration of wealth and power hurts small businesses as well.

The example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often. What we have seen in recent years is that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: language of efficiency, of waste, of quality of life. To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life. Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day: the sewers, the clean drinking water, the parks. You win someone’s trust through an outcome, and that is what I am working backward from: an outcome of an affordable city and a desire to show that government can in fact live up to its responsibilities to working residents.
 

The Nation: So you’re not the candidate of the billionaires?

Mamdani: No. [Laughs.]
 

The Nation: Yet you met recently with leaders of the business community—some of whom are billionaires. As mayor, how are you going to navigate relations with the business community?

Mamdani: First, by showing that I see them as a part of this city, and that my vision for the city includes even the same corporations that I’m looking to increase taxes on. I know no matter what our disagreements are, there’s a shared interest in the success of this city.

There are points of disagreement, no doubt. But also, I enter into those rooms [for meetings with business leaders] having been preceded by a caricature of myself that it is a responsibility for me to correct. I do not blame many New Yorkers for having that caricature, for they were subject to more than $30 million in television commercials, mailers, and radio hits with those very examples of smear and slander. I, too, would have questions if that was the only way I understood someone. I also go into those meetings making clear that, though we may—and likely, for many, will—leave with the same disagreements about fiscal policy and the tools we must use to deliver that affordability, agreement on those issues is not the basis by which I will determine who I’m willing to speak to about other issues. There are many conversations I’ve had that begin and end with disagreement about that fiscal policy, but also include shared areas of interest with regard to our parks or our streetscape, or thoughts of what this city could be. That is why I speak so often of partnership. Politics, to me, must be an act of making the principle into the possible. And you do so by extending your hand to all who are interested, not all who agree on every single idea that you have.
 

The Nation: Do you think you’re opening up imaginations that have been shut down? There are people living here in New York who are surprised when they learn that city universities were once free. So there’s a tradition that has been lost in the past 40 or 50 years that you may be retrieving.

Mamdani: I leave it to you to make the judgment. I will say that we have been very inspired by the tradition, in this city especially, of the campaigns that came before us. One of the many reasons that I was so excited by the idea of walking the length of Manhattan when it was proposed by a team member of ours was that it reminded me of the video I had seen a few weeks earlier of David Dinkins walking through the streets of Harlem. It reminded me of the photo I had seen of John Lindsay being lifted into the air by a crowd, and of an understanding among New Yorkers of the necessity of politics to take place in public. Much of our sense of politics is grounded solely in the now—when in fact we have to continue to connect to that which has existed before, because even in the mere act of knowing our own history, we are reminded of our own possibilities.

While it’s tempting to think of the passage of time as innately meaning the arrival of progress, we know that in many ways we have had a fairer New York City in the past. That does not mean that we should engage purely in nostalgia, but that we are reminded of what we can accomplish and that, in doing so, we are honoring what this city has been.
 

The Nation: Your campaign has focused on the fact that the city has become harder and harder to afford—perhaps more so than at any time in its history. How did you come to that as the focal-point issue for your campaign?

Mamdani: If you speak to enough New Yorkers, you’ll come to this conclusion. It’s the difference in whether or not people can keep living in the city. People feel it in rent; people feel it in the job market; people feel it in groceries; they feel it in their MetroCard. One in five New Yorkers cannot afford a $2.90 subway fare in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. And it’s offensive that we have allowed this to continue and that we consider ourselves witnesses or bystanders to it, as opposed to those with the choice of exacerbating it or bringing it to an end. We’ve seen exacerbation under Adams, and now it’s time for a city government that actually uses the tools at its disposal to deliver a different kind of city.
 

The Nation: Since the primary, you’ve met with a lot of people who did not back you. There are still some Democratic Party leaders who remain resistant to your candidacy, and you’ve been meeting with them. You’ve also put a lot of effort into meetings and direct campaigning that seeks to expand your coalition: seeking to win over older Black voters, union members, and others who were with Cuomo in the primary. You’ve gone to the neighborhoods, to Little Haiti and elsewhere, talked with people—and won endorsements. You’ve met with and won over unions that backed Cuomo in the primary. Isn’t this what mayors need to do: to say to people who didn’t back you, “Let’s find our places to work together. Let’s find our common ground”?

Mamdani: You have a choice of what you want to do with your hand. Do you want to pat yourself on the back, or do you want to extend it to someone else? Your decision has to come from the question of “What is your goal?” My goal is to be the mayor of this entire city. It is not to settle scores and look to the past; it’s to look to the future. Looking to the future means continuing to welcome people into a coalition, and not asking them why or when they joined, but knowing that they have just as much of a place in this fight for an affordable city as those who helped come up with the idea of the campaign in the first place. It’s that same ethos that we practice as New Yorkers when we look to defend those who have been here for generations and those who got here the same day. It’s the way that this city has raised me.
 

The Nation: There’s a huge media story to this campaign. Some of New York City’s legacy media has not exactly rolled out the red carpet. The New York Times editorialized that “We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” At the same time, you’ve created your own media. How do you think about media and communications in New York City?

Mamdani: Oftentimes, the left is forced into a choice between the conventional and the creative, forced in part by financial realities when running a campaign. Thanks to the matching-funds system [which allows qualified candidates in New York mayoral races to get public funding], we were able to build a campaign that could do both. And we sought to do both throughout the entirety of the campaign, whether it meant our advertising strategy, our field strategy, but also as it pertained to our comms strategy. We wanted to engage and respect the longstanding institutions—newspapers and radio and television stations—and sought out opportunities to speak to them at every occasion, [while] knowing full well that more than 50 percent of Americans get their news from social media. So we wanted to both speak to those who tell the stories of this city each and every day and to tell our own story at the same time.
 

The Nation: Was it frustrating when, for instance, The New York Times editorialized so aggressively against you in the primary?

Mamdani: I took that editorial as the opinions of about a dozen New Yorkers—ones that they have a right to, and that I disagreed with, and ones that will not be a reason that I do not engage with them in the future. That’s how I’ll approach much of this, in telling the story of this campaign and in continuing to do so—and in ensuring that my disagreement with any piece of analysis will never extend into what too many politicians do today, which is seeking to clamp down on both the access they extend to the media and the media’s ability to continue to do their jobs.
 

The Nation: Will your focus on producing social media—which has gotten a lot of national notice—continue if you are elected mayor?

Mamdani: Yes. There is much of this campaign that will, and must, continue into governing, and the way in which we communicate is one of those things. It is a critical part of ensuring that New Yorkers see themselves in their own democracy: that they actually hear from those whom they have elected through a medium that they actually use.
 

The Nation: You could become mayor at a time when the president is openly attacking you and when politicians in Albany are saying there’s no money for you. As you struggle to deliver on the things you want to deliver on, is it important that you keep lines of communication open so that people can see how the process works—and what you are trying to accomplish?

Mamdani: The caricature of me will only grow, which means that our ability to reach New Yorkers must grow in the same manner. I take inspiration from many leaders who have sought to speak to their constituents directly, be it the examples I’ve seen of Senator [Bernie] Sanders and Congresswoman [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez through the use of digital media at a national scale, or [President] Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.

The use of digital tends to be described as if it is an optional part of our politics today. It is a necessity. [Mamdani campaign communications director Andrew Epstein’s] idea was to place our donation link under Andrew Cuomo’s relaunch video, and that raised more than $100,000. That is not an optional part of a campaign or of our politics. It is just as important and as necessary as so much of what we consider to be the building blocks of how we run a campaign and how we govern the city.
 

The Nation: You just mentioned Claudia Sheinbaum. The mayor of New York is a global figure. If you’re elected, how will you address national and international issues? How will you build those relationships?

Mamdani: You have to keep your focus on the city. This city is its own gateway to the world. Almost 40 percent of the people who live in this city were born outside this country, myself included. I will be the first immigrant mayor of this city in generations, and I take that both as an honor and as a responsibility. Yet my focus is on the five boroughs, and if there are lessons and models for what we achieve here elsewhere, so be it.

The Nation: You’ve acknowledged that people may have serious differences with you on particular issues, Middle East issues—Gaza, for instance. But you’ve made a point of talking about a commitment to make sure that everyone who lives in the city is safe.

Mamdani: Yes. This is a city that each and every New Yorker belongs to. They belong to it not on the basis of their political beliefs, or their religion, or their race, but because of the fact that they are a New Yorker. And I will be each of those New Yorkers’ mayor. Even amid a disagreement, there will always be an understanding of a shared sense of humanity and that shared sense of belonging.
 

The Nation: Do you ever get mad?

Mamdani: I do. I do get mad! You know, I was quite mad when I met [Trump border czar] Tom Homan in Albany. I am mad when I see the horrific consequences of this right-wing federal administration. It’s an anger that I know many feel, and yet it is not one that we can let corrode our spirit and our soul.
 

The Nation: Do you have a favorite film that captures the New York City ethos?

Mamdani: I’ve often said [Spike Lee’s] Do the Right Thing.
 

The Nation: You seem like a guy who reads a lot.

Mamdani: [Laughs.]
 

The Nation: As a candidate, do you still read books?

Mamdani: Not much.
 

The Nation: Do you listen to music?

Mamdani: I listen to music because it’s something that I can do as I do something else. I listen to music as I get ready in the morning; I listen to music as I take the train, as I’m walking. Some mornings I listen to a song called “O Sanam” by Lucky Ali; some mornings I listen to soca music to wake myself up and get ready for the day. And I don’t know that I could do this without that music. It either gives you that which you hoped you had already awakened with—the energy, the hope, the belief—or it takes you out of that which is consuming you.
 

The Nation: Do you have a book that shaped you?

Mamdani: You know, I read American War by Omar El Akkad many years ago, and there was a phrase within it: “What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?” And it has stayed with me for a long time and informed the way in which I not only see the world, but the world that I’m also trying to win.
 

The Nation: Do you think much these days about not just making this a great city for working people to live in, but maybe even about how a mayor might make the world better?

Mamdani: I try to keep my sights squarely focused. You know the New Yorker cartoon of a View of the World from 9th Avenue? That’s how I try and wake up every morning.

When John Lindsay ran for reelection as mayor of New York in 1969, he recognized the mood of both the city and the nation. He linked his outspoken opposition to the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War to his campaign’s critique of federal policies that diverted money from municipal needs into the coffers of the Pentagon. “The military-industrial complex,” Lindsay declared, was “opposed to the needs of the people.”

That did not sit well with his fellow Republicans, who just a year earlier had rated him highly enough to consider putting the young and dynamic New Yorker on their presidential ticket. The mayor narrowly lost 1969’s GOP primary to right-wing state Senator John Marchi, on the same day that Democrats nominated a reactionary of their own, City Comptroller Mario Procaccino.

Some prominent New York Republicans, such as US Senator Jacob Javits and Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz, stuck with Lindsay. Javits went so far as to warn that the defeat of the liberal incumbent would cause the city to “go downhill in terms of race relations” and create an opening for “the forces of oppression and repression.” But Republican President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew backed Marchi. Nixon did so out of party loyalty (and a measure of envious disdain for Lindsay’s charisma and national stature), while the increasingly bombastic Agnew relished the chance to attack a high-profile member of the party’s liberal wing. Positioning himself as a right-wing populist, the vice president was embarking on a crusade against war critics such as Lindsay and the urbane partisans of both parties Agnew dismissed as an “effete corps of intellectual snobs.”

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Marchi welcomed the support of Nixon and Agnew—but not as much as Lindsay.

The opposition of his party’s warmongering president and reactionary vice president proved to be a perfect selling point for Lindsay, as he set out to build a multiracial progressive coalition for his fall bid on the ballot line of the city’s small but influential Liberal Party. After all, the Nixon-Agnew ticket had won just 34 percent of New York City’s vote in the 1968 presidential election. The rejection by Nixon allowed Lindsay, a longtime Republican, to maintain the support of progressive Republicans while appealing to Democrats and independents. And it worked. Lindsay beat his closest rival (Procaccino) by 180,000 votes and trounced Nixon’s candidate by almost 500,000 votes.

Far from helping him, Marchi’s White House ties undoubtedly did damage—four in five New Yorkers rejected the GOP nominee in 1969.

Fast-forward 56 years to 2025. Another Republican White House has taken an interest in another New York City mayoral race. This year’s contest pits Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani against a number of rivals, including the man he beat in the June Democratic primary, former governor Andrew Cuomo; sitting Mayor Eric Adams; Republican Curtis Sliwa; and attorney Jim Walden.

This week, The New York Times reported that Republican President Donald Trump is weighing some kind of intervention in the New York contest to try to stop Mamdani, a democratic socialist and critic of the president. That wasn’t exactly a shocker, as Trump has made no secret of his disdain for Mamdani, whom the president has falsely called “a communist” and threatened to arrest and potentially deport (despite the fact that Mamdani is a US citizen). What was notable was the Times’ report that “in a previously undisclosed call in recent weeks, Mr. Trump spoke about the race directly with Mr. Cuomo, an old associate and foil, according to three people briefed on the call, who were not authorized to discuss it.” On Thursday, the Times reported that Cuomo told a group of business leaders, “I know, personally, he doesn’t want to fight with me. Personally, I don’t want to fight with him, right? So I don’t think he’s going to be eager to create a conflict.”

The reports sparked an immediate outcry in New York City. The Trump and Cuomo teams entered denial mode. Despite the three sources, and a Times statement to the effect that “we’re confident in the accuracy of our reporting,” the Cuomo camp endeavored to cast shade on the reports—with the candidate dismissing the news as “gossip.” No surprise there. Being tied to Trump in today’s New York City is even more politically disadvantageous than being associated with Nixon in 1969. Where Nixon won 34 percent in 1968, Trump pulled barely 30 percent in 2024—and his approval rating has tanked since he retook office.

Indeed, Mamdani’s primary win was seen by many as a rejection of Democratic caution and compromising in a moment of mounting concern with the Republican administration’s authoritarian excesses.

“Today we learned Andrew Cuomo is directly coordinating with Donald Trump, even as this President sends masked agents to rip our neighbors off the streets and guts the social services so many New Yorkers rely on. It’s disqualifying and a betrayal of our city,” declared Mamdani on Wednesday.

Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio said, “When Donald Trump wants you to be Mayor of NYC, you definitely shouldn’t get the job. Sorry, Andrew Cuomo.” Maintaining his withering critique of the former governor, de Blasio added, “The white flag of surrender has become the norm for Andrew Cuomo. He’s already conceding the fight for NYC’s future to Donald Trump. Not what New Yorkers are looking for, Andrew.”

US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat who was a key backer of Mamdani in the primary race against Cuomo and remains an enthusiastic Mamdani supporter even as several other top New York Democrats continue to resist his candidacy, said, “New Yorkers knew Andrew Cuomo was backed by Trump’s orbit. That’s why he lost the primary. Now we have confirmation. It’s time for Democratic leaders to unite behind Zohran K. Mamdani.”

The small-d democratic logic of an argument made by Texas state Representative Ann Johnson—who, with her Democratic colleagues in the state legislature, has left Texas in order to prevent Republican legislators from carrying out President Trump’s order to radically gerrymander its congressional maps—is beyond debate.

“If Republicans are scared of Texas voters, they should adjust their policies—not rig our maps,” says Johnson, a top Texas lawyer and three-term legislator, who flew out of the Lone Star State on Sunday as part of a tactical move intended to prevent Republican Governor Greg Abbott and Republican legislators from implementing a plan to redraw district maps in order to flip five of the 12 seats Democrats currently hold to the GOP.

Specifically, Texas Democratic legislators are breaking quorum—a tactic that effectively denies Republican legislative leaders the ability to proceed with Trump’s gerrymandering scheme. “I am asking everybody to remember that Quorum Break is a tool that the founding fathers of Texas put in place for when a minority party knows that the majority party has gone off the rails and is doing something against the interests and will of the voters,” explains Johnson. “Thousands of you have come out to say that you do want your seats stolen by Trump. The Big Ugly Bill passed by one vote—one vote—and he is afraid of you going to the polls in November of 2026. He has asked Governor Abbott to break the rules and get him five new Republican seats. You all spoke up [in opposition]. They pushed it. They put it on the floor. And, so, please know that this extraordinary step of a Quorum Break is so that your voices can be heard. If they are not going to be heard here in Texas, then we are breaking quorum to go to the nation and say: ‘This is it! You must stop Trump’s takeover!’”

Abbott is apoplectic. He has threatened to charge the Democrats with felonies and remove them from their elected positions. Savvy legal experts say he lacks the standing to do so. And the Democratic governors of several blue states have signaled that, if Abbott finds a way to override the Texas Democrats and go ahead with the new gerrymander, they may look to counter his moves by redrawing maps in their own states.

The increasingly chaotic wrangling over congressional district maps illustrates just how high the stakes are for Texas, and the whole of the United States.

The suddenly nationalized fight over gerrymandering in Texas goes to the basic premises of representative democracy, which the best of the founders of the American project understood as an experiment in giving power to the people. The experiment has never worked perfectly. But, at its best, it has provided a check and a balance on executive overreach and authoritarian abuses by DC elites.

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In the past, when American presidents and their parties experienced the sort of collapse in poll numbers that Trump and the GOP have been hit with since they decided to gut Medicaid and anti-hunger programs in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires, and at the same time sent the economy reeling with ill-conceived tariff policies, those leaders adjusted their policies.

Or they lost their positions, and their congressional majorities, at the next election.

This principle of electoral accountability has tended to be a powerful corrective in American politics. In its mildest form, it requires presidents and members of Congress to explain their choices and to try to win the American people over to their points of view. In more extreme circumstances, it has led to epic political shifts, as occurred in 1932, when Americans rejected the Wall Street–aligned Republicans whose policies had accelerated the Great Depression, and replaced them with Franklin Roosevelt and the coalition of Democrats and left-wing allies who would usher in the New Deal.

Now Trump wants to upend the accountability calculus by having his allies rework the already highly skewed maps of Texas in a way that could give Republicans a chance to hold on to the House, where they currently occupy 219 seats, just one more than is needed to claim a clear majority in the 435-seat chamber. But, as always, he also wants to test how much authoritarianism he can get away with. If the Texas gambit goes forward, other Republican-controlled states will surely follow the Lone Star GOP —and if the US Supreme Court allows them to do so, by gutting what remains of the Voting Rights Act—Trump and the GOP could retain full control of the federal government in 2026, even if voters in Texas and nationwide give a majority of their votes to Democrats.

That’s what makes what’s been happening in Austin more than just a Lone Star struggle. “Their fight is our fight!” explained Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, when he welcomed many of the Texas legislators to Chicago on Sunday. And it is not merely a fight over warped congressional district lines and rigged elections.

This is a life-and-death struggle for the future of representative democracy as Americans have understood it—and for the people-centered policies that, in the best of circumstances, have historically extended from at least reasonably free and fair elections. “People need to pay attention to what’s happening in Texas right now because Donald Trump wants to spread this kind of ploy across America,” says US Representative Greg Casar, the Texas Democrat who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Trump knows he can’t win the upcoming midterm elections, so he is trying to rig them. And the way he is trying to do it [Trump] is trying to do it is to dismantle the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as we know it. He is trying, for example to try and dismantle Hispanic and African-American opportunity districts. I represent a district overwhelmingly of Latinos here in the Austin area. If Donald Trump is able to suppress the votes of Latinos here in Austin, soon enough he wants to do that across America. And he could do that and, ultimately, try to get more complicit and corrupt Trump Republicans to defend his agenda even as it becomes less popular.”