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For a few years, Democrats were so regimented that one could almost forget Will Rogers’s well-worn quip that he was not a member of any organized political party but rather a Democrat. After Hillary Clinton’s ignominious loss in 2016, the congressional team of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer quickly took charge. They were mostly able to keep a fractious coalition together through Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term. Democrats won the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020. At the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, despite noisy complaints about the inconstancy of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the party managed to enact a huge legislative agenda.

That seems a long time ago now. The party was able to force Biden out of the 2024 race, but much too late. After Trump’s win, Democrats did a great deal of hand-wringing about what went wrong, but they don’t seem to have learned much. Their inability to find their footing was on painful display during last night’s non–State of the Union address. Not only could Democrats not figure out an effective response to Trump’s speech; they couldn’t even settle on one or two ineffective responses.

First-term Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan got the unenviable duty of giving the official Democratic Party response, and delivered a workmanlike, solid speech that, as my colleague Tom Nichols wrote, nonetheless “failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics” and thus felt a little irrelevant.

Ahead of Trump’s speech, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned his caucus not to become the story. It didn’t work. This morning, the bible of Washington conventional wisdom, Politico Playbook, declared that “the reaction in the chamber was the story.”

A few Democrats decided to skip the speech altogether, but not enough for the boycott to be apparent in footage or images from the House chamber. Dozens of women in Congress wore pink as some sort of protest, but the message was so vague as to be illegible as anything other than generic protest. Other members brandished little signs—I saw them variously mocked as church fans, auction paddles, or table-tennis paddles—with text including “FALSE,” “MUSK STEALS,” and “SAVE MEDICAID.” (They at least opted against brandishing egg cartons as a comment on inflation.) A group of Democrats invited laid-off federal workers to join them, but without the microphone, they didn’t have much way to draw attention to their guests. Representative Jasmine Crockett posted a lip-synch to “Not Like Us,” for some reason. The scene-stealer was Representative Al Green, a veteran showman who got himself ejected for heckling Trump a few minutes in.

None of this matters a great deal in the specifics. The State of the Union (and its off-year sibling) don’t tend to have much lasting political or policy import. But the image of Democrats sitting glumly in the chamber—a mostly passive audience for Trump, neither supporting him nor meaningfully resisting him—felt like a metaphor for their broader messaging struggle. If Green’s act, complete with a cane waved at the president, was a bit buffoonish, at least he looked like he cared.

My social-media feeds were flooded last night, as they have been over the past few weeks, with progressives wincing, groaning, and gnashing their teeth about Democratic fecklessness. This is not merely an online phenomenon, as MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem recently reported. Only one in five voters approves of the party’s leadership, and they’re underwater even among Democrats (40 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove).

Part of the problem may be that Democrats respond to each new crisis slowly. Jeffries seems to be eyeing the coming budget battle as his moment to flex power. Republicans are unlikely to be able to pass a bill that satisfies both far-right lawmakers and vulnerable moderates, which means they will need House Democrats’ help to pass a bill. As a matter of tactics, Jeffries may be right, but it’s a very old-school, procedural approach to a moment that Democrats are simultaneously trying to convince voters is chaotic and unprecedented.

During his speech last night, Trump claimed a historic electoral mandate, despite one of the narrowest wins in recent memory. Democratic leaders speak like they have accepted that as true. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have? Republicans have repeatedly lectured America—they control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government.”

Even insofar as Jeffries is technically right, Democrats’ best leverage is in motivating the roughly half of the country that voted against Trump. “No We Can’t” is a bad way to do that. That’s one reason that, as I wrote last week, the odds of a progressive equivalent to the Tea Party—a large grassroots movement that furiously opposes Republicans but also has little use for the Democratic establishment—are higher than ever.

If anything good comes from last night’s speech, perhaps it will be the hastening of the end of the State of the Union, a bloated, obsolete ritual. The president is required under the Constitution to report to Congress annually, but that has taken the form of a speech only since 1913. When I was a kid, the State of the Union felt majestic: a moment of comity and decorum, where the president and Congress sat on a mostly equal footing and the focus was on policy.

Those days are long gone. Hectoring—both by and directed at—the president is now standard. In a funny hot-mic moment before Trump started last night, Vice President J. D. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson were caught joking about how hard it is to sit through a long speech on the dais. “The hardest thing was doing it during Biden, when the speech was a stupid campaign speech,” Johnson said.

This is an ironic remark, given the strident, partisan speech that followed, but he’s not wrong: The State of the Union has become just another political rally. Several Supreme Court justices have already concluded that it’s not productive, seemly, or fun to be there, and they skip. Picking a low point of Trump’s speech last night is challenging—elevating himself above George Washington? Telling a debunked lie about Social Security beneficiaries? Reprised threats against Greenland and Panama?—but some of the most uncomfortable moments were a showdown between Trump and Senator Elizabeth Warren, whom he called “Pocahontas,” as well as Trump’s repeated, needless attacks on Biden.

It’s hard to think of any reason most Democrats would want to attend Trump’s State of the Union next year, where they will surely be browbeaten and used as partisan props but are unlikely to learn anything new about his policy agenda. That would be a much stronger and clearer message than anything Democrats tried this year. But then again, we haven’t seen the party unite much around its best interests lately.

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Today’s News

Donald Trump paused auto tariffs for Mexico and Canada for a month, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. A divided Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s foreign-aid freeze, kicking the issue back to lower courts. The Trump administration paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine in an effort to pressure Ukraine’s government to cooperate with America’s plans for peace negotiations.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Coaching Is the New ‘Asking Your Friends for Help’

By Olga Khazan

These days, if a problem exists, there seems to be a coach for it. Having trouble focusing? An “executive function” coach might be right for you. Undecided about having kids? There’s a coach for that too. Too burned out to plan a “transformative” vacation? A travel coach can help you for $597 (a price that does not include the actual booking of the trip).

Discovering all these types of coaches made me wonder: Whatever happened to asking people you know for advice? So I set out to try to understand why people hire coaches and what they get from the experience.

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Congratulations, American taxpayer: You are going all in on crypto.

This weekend, President Donald Trump announced that he is moving forward with a plan to create a strategic cryptocurrency reserve, purchasing bitcoin and ether, as well as the more esoteric instruments XRP, solana, and cardano. The reserve will “elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks,” Trump wrote on his social-media site, Truth Social. “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World.”

For the taxpayer, the purpose of such an initiative is obscure. The crypto industry is a hyper-speculative casino. It is not essential to the American financial system, nor are cryptocurrencies essential to the American public. Workers cannot put bitcoin in their gas tanks; parents cannot feed XRP to their kids; businesses do not need cardano to build roads, light cities, produce vaccines, or provide loans to homeowners and entrepreneurs.

Yet for the White House, the purpose is obvious. Trump’s commerce secretary, his AI and crypto czar, and several of his most influential policy advisers are crypto investors, and the president launched his own memecoin. Establishing a reserve would boost prices, enriching these public officials and the crypto magnates donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican campaigns. It would not be a public investment, but a private giveaway—one of a mounting number in the Trump era.

The White House has put out few details on how a federal crypto reserve would work. But a stalled Senate bill would order the government to purchase 100 million bitcoins, hold the assets for two decades or longer, and sell them to retire the national debt. The government could transfer the $19 billion in crypto it has seized from criminals to the stockpile; the Treasury could finance additional purchases by revaluing the gold reserve, Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming has proposed, so that “not a single U.S. taxpayer dollar” would be spent. Trump’s crypto czar has also indicated that the reserve would not involve new taxes or spending.

[Read: The crypto world is already mad at Trump]

Yet the reserve would use taxpayer resources, diverting them from other purposes. If crypto prices soar, the Treasury could retire a chunk of the debt. If crypto prices crater, the public would end up worse off. “I don’t think turning the government into a hedge fund is a viable solution” to the country’s fiscal challenges, Mark Zandi, of Moody’s Analytics, told me. He suggested addressing them the old-fashioned way, by cutting spending, raising taxes, and promoting growth.

Government experts see no strategic justification for the proposed reserve. The United States maintains stockpiles of crucial materials: vaccines and other pharmaceuticals, rare-earth minerals used in weapons manufacturing, crude oil. “There are important differences between reserves for real commodities, like petroleum, where a shortage may result in serious harm to the American people,” and the kind of speculative fund Trump is promoting, Bharat Ramamurti, an economic adviser to the Biden administration, told me. “Cryptocurrency does not meet any of those standard conditions.”

For the many, the reserve poses an unnecessary risk; for the few, it offers rich rewards. The mere prospect of the government speculating in the crypto market is already enriching the small share of Americans heavily invested in the assets. The price of bitcoin, ether, solana, XRP, and cardano jumped more than 10 percent when Trump published his Truth Social post. More broadly, the proposed reserve would mainstream a fringe industry and create public interest in high crypto prices—justifying later interventions in the market and nudging foreign governments and institutional investors to get in too.

The crypto fund is only the latest example of ascendant crony capitalism in Trump’s Washington. The president is strip-mining taxpayer resources and doling out contracts and favors to the politically connected. The risk is not just corruption, but higher interest rates and less competitive markets.

The tariffs that Trump has implemented on imports from China, Mexico, and Canada create a massive opportunity for favor-trading. In Trump’s first term, the White House imposed levies on $550 billion worth of Chinese goods, allowing American firms to apply for a tariff exemption if they could not find substitutes for imports or if the tariff would “impose significant harm on American interests.” An analysis found that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative disproportionately awarded exemptions to firms that made contributions to Republican candidates and disproportionately denied exemptions to firms supporting Democrats. The policy amounted to a “quid pro quo,” the economists concluded.

The Trump administration has pushed more blatant quid pro quos this time around. The advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group is attempting to merge with its rival Omnicom. Lawyers from Elon Musk’s X suggested that  Interpublic executives should boost advertising spending on the social-media platform “or else,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Or else, the Interpublic employees gathered, they run the risk of federal regulators scuttling or delaying the merger. Musk has also agitated for the Federal Aviation Administration to award a contract for air-traffic-control communications systems to SpaceX, his space-technology company. As a special government employee, Musk is supposed to be banned from influencing contracts in which he has a financial interest.

Threatening companies that decline to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Investigating firms that choose to maintain DEI policies. Proposing to privatize the United States Postal Service. Each is an example of the Trump administration trying to aid his supporters or damage his opponents, without regard for the public’s welfare. Each is an example of crony capitalism.

The strategic crypto reserve is a foolish idea, and the broader trend a dangerous one. Fifty years of studies on Russia, Hungary, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, and elsewhere have found that governments creating policies for and awarding contracts to politically aligned firms warps investment and damages markets. Connected firms flourish. Disfavored firms struggle. Corruption takes root. Taxpayers end up with degraded public services, and lose confidence in their elected representatives. In extreme cases, the practice heightens interest rates, slows down GDP growth, and makes countries vulnerable to financial collapse.

Trump fashions himself a swamp-draining, free-market-loving conservative, but there’s nothing conservative about this kind of intervention in the economy. “I’m against it! I’m against it all,” Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the right-of-center Mercatus Center, at George Mason University, told me. Trump “just announced: Farmers, prepare yourselves to sell all your products here; we’re going to tax exports. What is he talking about, really? Five percent of the consumers in the world are here. There’s only so much corn I can eat.” She told me she held out some hope for Trump’s deregulatory push and his plans to cut the budget. But she worried about the government being in hock to steel CEOs, crypto bros, Big Agriculture executives, military contractors, and anyone else who happens to have deep pockets and Trump’s ear, particularly given the president’s willingness to push his executive authority beyond the limits of American law.

“For us libertarians,” de Rugy said, “it feels like we’re being punched in the face with our own fist.”

When President Donald Trump said that he might try to take over the U.S. Postal Service, he suggested that he could dramatically improve how Americans send and receive mail. The beleaguered institution, Trump insisted last month, would “operate a lot better.”

Hardly anyone agrees.

The president is reportedly considering an executive order to fire the Postal Service’s board of governors and subsume the independent agency into the Commerce Department. I discussed the plan with lawmakers, union officials, and postal advocates in both parties; nearly all of them told me it would likely degrade America’s mail system and threaten the agency’s ability to provide universal service across the country.

Moving USPS into the executive branch would grant Trump tighter control over the service and could subject it to the indiscriminate cuts driven by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. “What I see happening in these other agencies is likely to happen to the Postal Service,” Philip Rubio, a historian who has written two books on the agency, told me. “And those results will be just as devastating.”

Like many of the president’s early proposals, this one is legally dubious and would surely prompt court challenges. Congress would almost certainly have to approve any change to the structure of the Postal Service, which is a year older than the United States.

[Philip F. Rubio: Save the Postal Service]

The agency is at once cherished by the public—polls show that it’s one of America’s most popular institutions—and pilloried by politicians, who regularly complain about the USPS’s budget deficits and slow service. But few people have attacked the Postal Service more viciously than Trump has. “The Post Office is a joke,” he said during his first term, when he briefly tried to block Congress from bailing out the agency during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. A presidential commission headed by Trump’s first-term treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, recommended privatization—a step that Trump said in December he was “looking at.” According to The Washington Post, he discussed the possibility with Howard Lutnick, the new secretary of commerce, who ran the president’s transition team.

Advocates of the Postal Service say that putting the agency under the Commerce Department would be just as misguided. For one thing, the department is less than one-tenth the size of the USPS, which has more than half a million employees. And although the Trump administration has promised to streamline bureaucracy, his USPS scheme would add another layer of it—one with virtually no relevant experience, John McHugh, a former Republican member of Congress, told me. “The likelihood would be that things would slow down even more,” said McHugh, who now runs the Package Coalition, a group representing some of the Postal Service’s biggest commercial customers. As Rubio told me, “You’re not just moving boxes across town. This would basically be stealing an agency.”

The president has encountered little resistance as he’s cut off foreign aid, kneecapped federal agencies, and attempted to fire thousands of civil servants. Republicans haven’t tried to stop him, and the courts have struggled to keep up. There’s good reason to think that will change, however, if Trump comes after the mail.

The sheer scale of the Postal Service can be difficult to comprehend. It delivers nearly half of the world’s mail and reaches a network that dwarfs those of FedEx and UPS, its main private-sector competitors: some 33,000 post offices and retail centers, and more than 160 million delivery points.

For much of its history, the USPS—originally known as the U.S. Post Office—operated as an extension of the presidency. The position of postmaster general was one of the most powerful jobs in government and usually belonged to a close ally of the president. (Benjamin Franklin was the first.) The thousands of lower-level posts in the agency went to party loyalists as patronage. That arrangement lasted nearly two centuries. Then, in 1970, Congress transformed the department into the independent U.S. Postal Service. Today, the president appoints its board of governors, who serve fixed terms and hire the postmaster general.

That structure has shielded the Postal Service from political influence but not from financial challenges. People have been using the mail less and less for decades. Annual losses have piled up, and Congress accelerated them in 2006 by requiring the agency to prepay billions every year into a health-care pension fund. The struggles of the modern Postal Service have made it a ripe target for reformers and politicians, including some conservatives who have long wanted to privatize it.

In an effort to turn the USPS around, the board in 2020 appointed as postmaster general Louis DeJoy, a logistics-company executive and Trump donor (who announced last month that he is preparing to step down). DeJoy’s connection to Trump initially alarmed Democrats and their allies in the postal unions, who accused DeJoy of sabotaging service during the pandemic to aid Trump’s reelection. But the Postal Service ably handled the high volume of mail ballots, and he later made peace with some Democrats by mustering Republican support for legislation that eased the agency’s pension burden and preserved six-day mail delivery.

In 2021, DeJoy unveiled a 10-year program for the Postal Service called Delivering for America, which tried to account for a national shift in demand from mail to packages. Prioritizing reliability over speed, he scrapped air transportation for mail and the agency’s promise that letters would reach their destination in three days or less.

[Read: America is drowning in packages]

Four years in, the project appears to be faltering, which Trump could use to try to justify a takeover. In January, the Postal Regulatory Commission issued a scathing assessment of DeJoy’s plan and urged the agency to reconsider it. “Unfortunately, the Delivering for America plan isn’t working. The numbers are frightening,” Art Sackler, who runs the advocacy group Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, told me. (A spokesperson for DeJoy did not respond to a request for comment. The USPS board of governors has reportedly hired a law firm in preparation to sue if Trump threatens its independence; its chair, Amber McReynolds, also did not return requests for comment.)

The political backlash to DeJoy’s plan could be a warning for Trump: It has come from parts of the country that overwhelmingly voted for him. To cut costs, DeJoy proposed reducing mail collection in many rural areas, a decision that infuriated some Republicans in Congress who represent them. “We have waited, and we have waited, and we have waited for better delivery,” GOP Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri told DeJoy during a hearing in December. “You’ve exhausted my patience on this.”

Hawley told a local TV station a couple of weeks later that he would oppose any plan to privatize the Postal Service, calling it “a very bad idea.” Yet that’s precisely what some postal-industry leaders think would result from subsuming the agency into the Commerce Department. With more control over the USPS, Trump would face fewer obstacles if he wanted to sell it off, in whole or in part. “It’s a massive step towards breaking up the post office and turning it over to the billionaires,” Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, told me.

Industry advocates are most worried about Trump’s plan because of its likely effect on rural areas. Unlike its private competitors, the agency delivers medications and other important packages to the country’s most remote areas no matter the cost; indeed, when UPS and FedEx take orders in rural areas, it is often USPS that carries packages on the final miles of their journey. Deeper cuts to the agency could endanger that guarantee of universal service, and rural Americans would probably suffer the most.

Democratic Senator Peter Welch of Vermont—by some measures the most rural state in the nation—told me that service is currently so bad that he is open to a reorganization plan, even one that returns the agency to the executive branch. But Trump would have to come to Congress for approval and present a much more specific proposal than anything he’s offered so far. “This is typical of how Trump operates,” Welch said. “There are literally no details here.”

The politicians whose rural constituents would stand to lose the most are the president’s Republican allies, such as Hawley. McHugh, who represented a right-leaning rural district in New York for 16 years, told me that the Postal Service tends to be the last thing lawmakers think about “unless something is going wrong.” Then the outcry is swift and comes from many corners—seniors who rely on the mail, businesses large and small.

“Try to close a post office,” McHugh said. “Your phones will be ringing. There’ll be pickets at your front door.” So far, he noted, GOP lawmakers are keeping quiet about Trump’s postal plan because it hasn’t taken shape and he’s issued no executive order: “Right now, it’s kind of business as usual.” But, McHugh added, “that can change really, really quickly.”

Eight years ago, President Donald Trump got generally good reviews for his first speech to a joint session of Congress. Back then, it would have seemed both incredible and churlish to suggest that the man who delivered that relatively conciliatory, relatively presidential speech, might within four years try to overturn an election by violence.

But that’s what happened. And that attempt remains the single most important fact about Trump’s first term as president.

Eight years later, not even Trump’s staunchest partisans would describe his 2025 address as conciliatory. He mocked, he insulted, he called names, he appealed only to a MAGA base that does not add up to even half the electorate. But in 2025, the big question hanging over the nation’s head is not one about oratory, but about democracy. In 2017, Americans did not yet know how far Trump might go. Now they do. They only flinch from believing it.

Second-term Trump has opened his administration with a round of actions likely to prove drastically unpopular: tariffs that raise prices, budget cuts that will reduce services for veterans, at national parks, for anyone who depends on weather services. Prices are rising, measles is spreading, airplanes are falling out of the sky. His effective co-president and chief policymaker, Elon Musk, is widely distrusted and disliked. Trump’s repeated claims of massive fraud within Social Security strongly suggest that he’s got something big and radical in mind for the most popular program in American life.

Trump knows he’s steering into political trouble. He alluded to “disruptions” ahead because of his policies. His party holds the narrowest of margins in the House of Representatives. Yet he’s governing without the slightest concession to majority opinion, even to a majority sense of decency. He talks of the Democrats as remorseless enemies. At the same time, he is making political choices that would normally seem certain to deliver those enemies a big majority in the House after the midterms. Is he delusional? Crazy reckless? Or is this a signal that the man who tried to overturn the election of 2020 has some scheme in mind for the 2026 midterms?

Maybe Trump has turned over a new leaf. There was, however, a tell in this speech that Trump’s attitude to other people’s consent remains as contemptuous as ever.

In his joint-session speech, Trump returned to his fancy of annexing Greenland to the United States. He read aloud from the teleprompter some perfunctory language about respecting Greenlanders’ right to decide their own future. But when he came to the end of the section, he apparently ad-libbed a thought of his own: “We’ll get it one way or another.” That’s not the language of a man who has learned his lesson about respecting democratic choice.

In the second term, unlike the first, Trump has swiftly and methodically installed do-anything loyalists at the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense. Given Trump’s 2021 record, that seems something to worry about now.

Had Trump lost the 2024 election, he would right now be facing sentencing for his criminal convictions in the state of New York. He would be facing criminal and civil trials in other states. He was rescued from legal troubles by political success. Now Trump’s acting in ways that seem certain to throw power away in the next round of elections–if those elections proceed as usual. If they are free and fair. If every legal voter is allowed to participate. If every legal vote is counted, whether cast in person or by mail. Those did not used to be hazardous “if’s.” But they may be hazardous in 2026.

Trump is keenly alert to his legal danger, deeply committed to keeping power by any means necessary. He also seems to be sleep-walking toward a stinging political loss that will expose him to all kinds of personal risk. He’s not trying to expand his coalition, to win any votes he does not already have. So what is his plan to preserve his immunity and his impunity? Trump’s behavior in 2021 showed that there were no limits to what he would do to keep power. What will 2026 show?

American politicians of both parties have always known that giving the response to a presidential address is one of the worst jobs in Washington. Presidents have the gravitas and grandeur of a joint session in the House chamber; the respondent gets a few minutes of video filmed in a studio or in front of a fake fireplace somewhere. If the president’s speech was good, a response can seem churlish or anti-climactic. If the president’s speech was poor or faltering, the opposition can only pile on for a few minutes.

So pity Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who got handed the task of a response to Donald Trump’s two hour carnival of lies and stunts. Slotkin gave a good, normal speech in which she laid out some of her party’s issues with Trump on the economy and national security.

It was so normal, in fact, that it was exactly the wrong speech to give.

But first, it’s important to note that it was a good speech. Slotkin wisely decided to forego any stagey settings, appearing in front of neatly placed flags instead of in her office or a kitchen. She gave a shout-out to her home state while managing to avoid folksy familiarity or posturing. She also stayed away from wonkery, speaking in the kind of clear language people use in daily conversation. (Okay, there was some thudding language about investment and “jobs of the future,” but these are minor speechwriting offenses.)

[Read: The Trump backers who have buyer’s remorse]

And to her credit, Slotkin reminded people that Elon Musk is an unaccountable uber-bureaucrat leading a “gang of 20 year olds” who are rummaging through the personal data of millions of Americans. As a senator from a state bordering Canada, she asked if Americans are comfortable kicking our sister nation in the teeth.

So what’s not to like? Slotkin—like so many in her party lately—failed to convey any sense of real urgency or alarm. Her speech could have been given in Trump’s first term, perhaps in 2017 or 2018, but we are no longer in that moment. The president’s address was so extreme, so full of bizarre claims and ideas, exaggerations and distortions and lies, that it should have called his fitness to serve into question. He preened about a cabinet that includes some of the strangest, and least qualified, members in American history. Although his speech went exceptionally long, he said almost nothing of substance, and the few plans he put forward were mostly applause bait for his Republican sycophants in the room and his base at home.

It’s easy for me to sit in my living room in Rhode Island and suggest what others should say. But in her response, Slotkin failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics. As a former Republican, I nodded when Slotkin said that Ronald Reagan would be rolling in his grave at what Slotkin called the “spectacle” of last week’s Oval Office attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But is that really the message of a fighting opposition? Is it an effective rallying cry either to older voters or to a new generation to say, in effect, that Reagan—even now a polarizing figure—would have hated Trump? (Of course he would have.) Isn’t the threat facing America far greater than that?

[Read: Lawful, but enormously destructive]

Slotkin’s best moment was when she pleaded with people to do more than be mere observers of politics, and said that doomscrolling on phones isn’t the same thing as genuine political engagement. And she issued her own Reaganesque call to remember that America is not just “a patch of land between two oceans,” that America is great because of its ideals. But her admonition to her fellow citizens not to fool themselves about the fragility of democracy, while admirable, was strangely detached from a specific attack on the source of that menace.

Did Americans vote for Kash Patel to lead the FBI, or RFK Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, or Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense? Trump took time to recognize and praise all three of those men in his speech. So why not ask that question—directly and without needless throat clearing about the importance and necessity of change?

Slotkin’s response reflected the fractured approach of the Democrats to Trump in general. Some of them refused to attend tonight’s address, some of them held up little ping-pong paddles with messages on them (a silly idea that looked even worse in its execution), and others meandered out. One, Representative Al Green of Texas, got himself thrown out within the first minutes, a stunt that only gave Speaker Mike Johnson a chance to look strong and decisive, if only for a moment.

I’m not a fan of performative protest, and initially I thought the Democrats who chose to attend the address made the right call. But when Trump referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as “Pocahontas,” they could have left en bloc, declaring once they were outside that they would take no part in any further demeaning of the House chamber—or, for that matter, of American democracy. Instead, they sat there and took it, their opposition to Trump a kind of hodgepodge of rage, bemusement, boredom, and irritation.

Slotkin’s address suffered from the same half-heartedness that has seized the Democrats since last November. Her response, and the behavior of the Democrats in general, showed that they still fear being a full-throated opposition party because they believe that they will alienate voters who will somehow be offended at them for taking a stand against Trump’s schemes.

Slotkin is a centrist—as she noted, she won in areas that also voted for Trump—and her victory in Michigan proved that centrism can be a powerful anchor against extremists. But centrism is not the same as meekness. America does not need a “resistance,” or stale slogans, or people putting those slogans on little paddles. It needs an opposition party that boldly defends the nation’s virtues, the rule of law, and the rights of its people.

The president declares "America is back" as he soaks up Republican ovations and spars with Democrats.