MAGA Voters Deserve All The Horrors Trump & Musk Will Inflict On Them—But What About The Rest Of Us!

Democrats Need More Aggressive Leaders In Congress

Yesterday, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy e-mailed his followers that “This week a judge ruled that the Trump administration is failing to comply with their court order. While the White House disputes that, we appear to be on a collision course with what I have been sounding the alarm about. Trump and Vance are laying the groundwork to ignore the courts— democracy's last line of defense against unchecked executive power. Long before he was ever chosen as Vice President, JD Vance suggested this should be the plan. He quoted Andrew Jackson saying, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’ He doubled down this week saying, ‘Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.’ For those of us who believe we are in the middle of a constitutional crisis, this is the meat of it. This isn’t hyperbole to say we’re staring the death of democracy in the eyes. The centerpiece of our democracy is that we observe court rulings. No one is above the law. Whether you like it or not, the courts interpret the law. They have throughout the history of the United States ruled whether or not the executive was exceeding their power. The courts are exactly designed to decide what is and what is not a legitimate use of executive power.”

Murphy warned that “If the president says, ‘I don’t care what the courts say’— that’s essentially the end of the rule of law. If the president isn’t bound by our laws and constitution, then why is anybody else bound? So far, they have been talking tough and largely complying— though there are questions of how well they’ve complied. If they outright ignore a court order, as Elon Musk and JD Vance are suggesting they should, then that would be perhaps the greatest challenge to democracy in any of our lifetimes. If the White House decides soon to openly defy a court order and tells the judiciary to try to enforce it, it will be a full five-alarm fire. This is what we need to be watching for and sounding the alarm about. We need as much visibility and public pressure on this issue as possible to preserve the rule of law and with it our democracy. They want to overwhelm us with chaos, so they can pull off a quiet coup and avoid scrutiny. I’m going to continue to use every lever of power available to fight back and keep the focus on the crises that really matter.”

Greisa Martínez Rosas is a DACA recipient and the executive director of United We Dream Action, the nation’s largest youth-led immigrant network. We should all say a prayer for her because yesterday the NY Times published a guest essay she penned, Democrats Need To Learn How To Throw A Punch. The Democrats, she warned have had no political strategy to win Latino votes, just old messaging that present the very real battle over immigration as “simply a fight against Republican cruelty, racism and xenophobia… By 2024, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris seemed to stop trying to win the debate. As border-state governments grappled with newcomers, Republican leaders saw a crisis they could seize and weaponize— while Democratic leaders offered no compelling case of their own.”

Trump and virtually all the Republicans “amplify and employ chaos at the border, casting Democrats as weak and deepening divisions along racial and economic lines for their political gain. Republican strategy is “to keep America’s immigration system in a state of permanent dysfunction” and blowing up the bipartisan immigration bill gave them “a tool in their path back to the White House.”

For years, immigrant rights advocates have anchored our politics in the power of personal narrative, believing that if people simply saw the humanity in immigrants, justice would follow. In an era of populist backlash, immigrants continuing to tell our stories is essential, but storytelling isn’t enough. Republicans have mastered the art of framing— binding immigration to fears of economic precarity, inflation and cultural displacement. Their claims are almost entirely false, but in the war for attention, where emotion shapes reason, they are winning.

Democrats are losing ground with Latino voters because they’re making the wrong pitch. Many Latinos don’t primarily see themselves through the lens of systemic racial oppression. Rather, they see themselves as strivers pursuing the American dream, akin to past waves of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants. That self-perception makes them more receptive to conservative messages on crime and immigration, especially when Democrats frame politics as a moral fight over racism rather than a populist argument about working families striving for about economic security.

Any moral argument about immigration has to be tethered to material self-interest. Trump’s promised wave of mass deportations would not just hit border towns— it would gut the national economy and disrupt essential industries. In 2022, undocumented workers paid an estimated $96.7 billion in taxes, helping fund services they can’t fully use. Removing a large number of undocumented workers would shrink the country’s G.D.P. by an estimated $4.7 trillion over 10 years, strain local budgets and spike inflation.

With undocumented migrants making up about a sixth of the construction industry and nearly a third of key trades such as drywall and roofing, removing even a portion of them would disrupt home-building at a time when high interest rates have already slowed supply, outweighing any potential drop in demand. Agriculture, where about 70 percent of all crop workers were born outside the United States and at least 40 percent are undocumented, would face supply chain breakdowns and soaring food prices. Past crackdowns haven’t created jobs for American-born workers— they’ve just made life more expensive for everyone.

Democrats need to show America that for decades, the Republican Party has blocked reform, preferring a two-tiered system that fuels resentment and division. But the party must also acknowledge how Biden’s approach— though more humane than Trump’s— struggled to offer clarity. His administration expanded legal pathways while increasing deportations and restricting asylum and creating a policy landscape that felt chaotic.

This is the “credulity chasm”— where public perception and reality diverge, and where Republicans thrive. The right tells a simple, visceral story: Immigrants are to blame for economic hardship, for crime. Democrats need their own story, one rooted in both moral clarity and material interest: A stable immigration system isn’t just about compassion; it’s also about economic security— lifting wages, countering corporate exploitation and creating economic prosperity for all. The GOP’s real immigration policy isn’t enforcement; it’s low wages and legal limbo, ensuring a precarious underclass that keeps workers— immigrant and native-born— divided. Democrats must expose that con and flip the frame: This isn’t a border crisis; it’s a labor crisis, and the real villains aren’t migrants— they’re the politicians and corporations who profit from instability.

…In the United States, undocumented workers pick the crops, build the houses, staff the hospitals and care for the oldest and youngest in our families— all work that is essential to the country’s prosperity, and yet such workers are locked out of its protections.  The solution isn’t border theatrics or mass deportations— it’s a path to citizenship and labor protections for many of the millions of undocumented workers already holding up the economy. Legalizing their status wouldn’t just protect them; it would also strengthen wages, expand worker power and stabilize the very economic foundation for all workers. Allowing millions of undocumented people a real path to citizenship offers an escape hatch from the enforced underclass status the current system imposes on them.

Democrats don’t need to overcomplicate this— they just need to throw a punch.

The fight ahead is about building a coalition disciplined enough to win. That means resisting the easy impulse to turn on one another, or to retreat into purity politics or performative outrage against politicians or activists. Instead, we need to channel our anger into real leverage: organizing, persuading, forcing the political system to respond to us on our terms. The real victory isn’t just surviving another fight; it’s changing the conditions so that we never have to fight like this again.

A few days ago, Michael Tomasky viewed the Democrats’ inability or unwillingness to throw a punch from a different perspective. In his essay for the New Republic— Democrats: This Is War. Isn’t It Time You Acted Like It?— he insisted that the weak, divided, easily steamrolled Democrats “should have found their sea legs by now... Millions of Americans have a foot— or a leg— caught in Trump’s ideological bear trap, and they need a political party that will fight this illegal and indiscriminate rampage with everything at its disposal to help people pry themselves loose.” 

He warned that “Far too many Democrats don’t want to think of themselves as fighters. This is a self-conception that has some deep historical roots; but far more importantly, it’s a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy of passivity that will have grave consequences for tens of millions of Americans, and for the Constitution and the republic, if they don’t get over this fast and come to terms with the reality they are in… [W]ho likes the existing order? Practically no one, at any time, ever. Trump and Elon Musk are the biggest disruptors arguably in the entire history of the country. Biden was about as conspicuous an order-defender as exists… [T]his dynamic had as much to do with Trump’s victory as border security or surgery for trans convicts. It’s why so many young men— and Latino and Black men especially— were drawn to Trump. It’s what made him interesting to Joe Rogan and others like him. In a system that feels broken and rigged, people want leaders who’ll break shit.”

That has a lot to do why, just a few months ago, no one outside of Connecticut and DC had any idea who Chris Murphy is. None of the political writers and operatives looking at the 2028 presidential race ever mentioned Murphy, even though he has every intention of running. It was just in the last couple of weeks that wikipedia started listing him— among 31 others— as a potential candidate, up their with ridiculous names like Rahm Emanuel, Gina Raimondo, Michael Bennett, Ruben Gallego, Phil Murphy, Maura Healey, Mark Kelly, Dean Phillips, Amy Klobuchar, Katie Hobbs, Jon Ossoff, Kathy Hochul and, among others, Julian Castro. But they are now finally including Murphy. 

And that’s because compared to his Senate colleagues he’s standing up and being loud— and disdainful of the way things are supposed to be, Schumer’s bible. “Democrats,” continued Tomasky, “rarely try to force a change in the way voters see an issue. They rarely play the role of disruptors. Well, folks, if ever history was grabbing you by the lapels and demanding that you do some disrupting, it’s now. RFK Jr. is evidently about to become health and human services secretary this week. They may not be able to stop that. But they can assign a couple senators and a couple House members and their staffs to be 24/7 pit bulls on RFK, monitoring every declaration and action that comes out of his department, holding weekly “RFK Watch” press conferences. Senate Democrats put up a good symbolic fight against Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought as they held the floor overnight to protest him. They couldn’t block his confirmation. But they signaled to the world that they’re in conflict with Vought. Now it’s a live issue. As such, they can fight to make sure that Vought becomes as close to a household name as an OMB director can be… And if the hearts and minds of the working class constitute the main front in our political battle, how about a weekly press conference by Democrats ticking off the ways in which the administration has made things worse for working-class people? Trump has stripped the National Labor Relations board of a quorum, meaning that it can’t defend workers’ rights. People don’t care? Nonsense. Choose a couple emotionally charged examples that will make them care. There are dozens of moves like this the Democrats could make. And locked out of lawmaking power, they’ve more time to spark and stoke these mini campaigns. But they have to change their mentality. They need to think of themselves as going to war, because it’s sure clear that their opponents think this is war. And not for the sake of scoring political points— they need to do it for the sake of the tens of millions of Americans upon whom Trump and MAGA actively want to impose suffering. They are counting on Democrats as never before to fight for their rights and defend our laws. If that can’t rouse them, they’ve forgotten what their job is.”

Forget about yesterday's tired establishmentarian leaders— Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Pete Aguilar, Jim Clyburn, Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi— Democrats need to pay more attention to AOC, Summer Lee, Greg Casar, Jamie Raskin, Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Jeff Merkley and, most of all… this guy, talking about the oligarchs’ end games (hint: "their greed has no end”):