Where Should the Democrats Go from Here?

On Sunday, MAGA’s great and good travelled to Arizona to pay tribute to Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist who was assassinated this month. Much was remarkable about the event—the huge turnout, the alternating notes of forgiveness and retribution, the generally messianic atmosphere—but something that Pete Hegseth, the Fox host turned Pentagon chief, said onstage stood out to me. Hegseth recalled meeting Kirk more than a decade ago, when Kirk was building his youth movement, Turning Point USA. “I still have the sticker: ‘Big government sucks,’ ” Hegseth said. Kirk “pursued that truth with more vigor than anyone I’ve ever met,” he added. “We always did need less government. But what Charlie understood and infused into his movement is, we also needed a lot more God. Charlie had big plans, but God had even bigger plans.”

There was that messianism again—but what caught my ear was the stated disavowal of big government. In May, when I started writing Fault Lines in the absence of Jay Caspian Kang (who will return next week), my first column explored the apparent contradiction between the Trump Administration preaching a fairly classic vision of small government, not least via the supposedly cost-slashing work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and simultaneously expanding the power of the state over civil society in radical new ways. In the end, I concluded that, actually, this wasn’t much of a contradiction because the cuts often doubled as assertions of leverage, or intimidation. Since then, even the pretense of pursuing limited government has become all but impossible to sustain. Musk crashed out of D.C. without making a serious dent in spending. President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” has been projected to add some three trillion dollars to the federal deficit. Hegseth’s Department of Defense was (sort of) renamed the Department of War, at least symbolically trading a reactive principle for an aggressive one (while claiming an expansive new remit to execute supposed drug smugglers in the Caribbean). Most significantly, Trump and his Administration ratcheted up their use of state power to go after independent institutions, critics, and inconvenient bureaucrats. After Kirk was killed, Trump quite openly declared war on some vaguely-defined radical left and threatened to punish speech that he deems hostile to his cause. Jimmy Kimmel—whose late-night talk show was briefly taken off air by ABC after Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, criticized remarks that Kimmel had made about Kirk’s killing and hinted darkly at regulatory consequences—was one casualty. (His show continues to be preëmpted on certain network affiliates.) There will be others.

These latest attacks on free expression in general, and on Kimmel in particular, have been denounced even by some of Trump’s allies, suggesting that some on the right do still believe that “big government sucks,” at least in this context. (Ted Cruz pungently likened Carr’s behavior to that of a Mob boss.) In the past few months, I’ve written about other intra-MAGA tensions, over questions related to the proper role of the state—on spending and strikes on Iran, for instance—and more lurid plotlines, not least the ongoing controversy surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein files. Such splits have illuminated not only the unwieldy ideological breadth of the MAGA coalition but also the fraying bonds linking the Trump diehards to the podcast hosts and comedians—often collected under the “manosphere” rubric—who were perceived as crucial to Trump’s reëlection but who were never unwavering true believers. Some of the latter were highly disapproving of the Iran strikes, as I wrote about in June, and have more recently expressed concern about Kimmelgate, among other issues. This week, the Department of Homeland Security took down a video showing Theo Von appearing to celebrate the act of deportation after Von said that it didn’t reflect the nuance of his “thoughts and heart.”

Squint, and these controversies may even point to durable trouble for MAGA, at least once Trump is no longer on the scene. At Kirk’s memorial last weekend, a MAGA rapper told my colleague Antonia Hitchens that “they think we’re praising Trump like our God,” but “Charlie showed me there’s more to life than this movement.” For now, though, Trump continues to sit athwart both the Republican Party—acting simultaneously, as I wrote in the aftermath of the Iran strikes, as the “charismatic glue holding an otherwise disparate movement together and its wrathful enforcer”—and the federal government. His recent, blatantly authoritarian rhetoric and behavior—suggesting that critical media reporting is “illegal”; openly advocating for the indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey—have further raised the stakes of other questions to which I’ve returned repeatedly this summer: What shape is the Democratic resistance (or #Resistance) to Trump taking? And is it working? At what feels like yet another inflection point, the contours of a dual imperative for the Democratic Party are becoming clearer—oppose Trump with one strong voice while starting to build a new broad church of its own. The Party is still not doing enough on either count.

In part, the resistance to Trump continues to feel fragmented, as I wrote in my second Fault Lines column, because it must coalesce within an increasingly splintered media ecosystem. As far as the institutional Democratic Party is concerned, it’s not all that surprising that it has failed to cohere around a winning message, let alone a singular messenger, so soon after such a crushing defeat. And some prominent figures are already projecting strength in the face of Trump’s abuses. I wrote in June about Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker becoming a particularly strident anti-Trump voice, California Governor Gavin Newsom (who initially sought to play MAGA whisperer on his podcast) punching back after Trump dispatched the military to Los Angeles, and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander getting arrested while accompanying a migrant in immigration court. Since then, Pritzker has furiously opposed Trump sending troops to Chicago (and, seemingly, succeeded in forestalling that outcome for now); Newsom is leading a redistricting charge after Republicans in Texas egregiously gerrymandered maps on Trump’s orders; and Lander was arrested again, last week, following a sit-in at an immigration holding area, alongside ten other elected Democrats. (It’s perhaps a sign of the times that Lander’s second arrest caused barely a ripple in the national discourse.)

But other Democratic leaders are not meeting this dangerous moment with the focus it requires, and, if the Party as a whole is still widely perceived as feckless, that is in no small part self-inflicted. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, was asked on MSNBC this week if he shares his predecessor Nancy Pelosi’s relish for going toe-to-toe with Trump. Jeffries described sending the President a letter laying out the Party’s position on funding the government. Prominent Democratic-aligned thinkers have continued to wring their hands regarding the precise words that the Party’s leaders should and shouldn’t use, pointlessly self-flagellating over the term “microaggression” while Washington burns. And many of the more direct attempts to fight Trump come across as stale. Last month, we were treated to the miserable spectacle of Newsom tweeting IN UNHINGED ALL CAPS, like Trump does. Various lawmakers have since imitated this tactic even less convincingly. After ABC suspended Kimmel, Chuck Schumer, the flailing Senate Minority Leader, wrote, “IS EPSTEIN THE REAL REASON TRUMP HAD KIMMEL CANCELED?!”

In fact, this post was a reflection of two separate failures of Democratic communication, the other one being many Democrats’ baffling insistence that almost everything Trump does is a distraction from the Epstein controversy—perhaps the closest thing this summer has had to a singular narrative through line, even as vastly more consequential stories have come and gone—and attendant demand that his Administration publish the investigative files from the case, without actually knowing what is in them. This failure strikes me as one of strategy; yes, the Epstein story has stuck to Trump with unusual persistence given the President’s penchant for shrugging off negative press, but increasingly it seems closer to an irritation than a fatal political wound. More important, it’s a failure of morals. There may well be additional damaging information about Epstein and his associates that has yet to come out. But in the absence of much fresh substance—this controversy, remember, was sparked by Trump officials promising to release the files themselves, then under-delivering, sparking the fury of the MAGA base—Democrats have gleefully joined in what amounts to a right-wing witch hunt that has cheapened a real tragedy, and undercut the Party’s standing as one that defends evidence-based inquiry and due process. Ro Khanna, a leading Democratic proponent of releasing the files, said in July that he trusts the American people not to tag any innocent parties whose names appear therein with guilt by association—a confidence that I do not share and that, in this of all moments, might actually be dangerous.