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Quartz

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Stocks rose premarket — after entering a correction yesterday — as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer opted not to block an emergency funding bill last night. That made it likely that the U.S. government won’t shut down this Saturday, easing some of the uncertainty faced by investors.

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Is This a Crisis or Not?

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 03 › is-this-a-crisis-or-not › 682034

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“We will win!” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chanted at a rally last month protesting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service infiltrating Treasury Department payments systems. If Democrats want to win, though, they’ll have to fight first, and they don’t seem totally ready for that.

Schumer says that his caucus will refuse to vote for a short-term funding bill that would prevent the government from shutting down at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. (In the House, all but one Democrat—Jared Golden of Maine—voted against the funding patch, but Republicans were unexpectedly united and passed the bill.) But no one seems to completely believe that Democrats will keep up their unified opposition. Politico reports that Democrats may instead settle for a symbolic vote on a shorter-term bill that they know they’ll lose: A White House official told the publication, They’re 100 percent gonna swallow it. They’re totally screwed.”

Democratic leaders have been insisting that the nation is facing a serious crisis caused by President Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg demolition of the executive branch and rule of law. But they have also complained that they have few paths to stop Trump. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have?” Now Senate Democrats have leverage, and what they do with it will show whether they mean what they say.

This is a strange situation for Democrats: As the party that likes to keep government running, even entertaining the idea of a shutdown is novel. But they have reasons related to both policy and politics to take a hard line here. First, if they’re concerned with protecting government services that are essential for citizens, they need to find some way to slow Trump down, because he’s using his power to slash them already. If the government shuts down, some services will be briefly cut. If Democrats keep the government open, some services will be cut—perhaps permanently. The deadline gives them a chance to demand that the White House agree to limitations on DOGE or other Trump cuts in exchange for funding the government. (Complicating the calculus, the White House recently deleted guidance from its website on how a shutdown would work.)

Even if Congress passes the GOP’s short-term funding patch, there’s no guarantee that the administration will comply. Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, have argued that the president should be able to impound funds—in other words, to treat congressional appropriations as a ceiling rather than a requirement, and thus be able to cut funding for whatever they don’t like. (This is plainly illegal, but Vought and others believe that the law that bans it is unconstitutional, and they hope to challenge it in the courts.) This means that simply continuing to fund the government doesn’t guarantee that key programs will stay running, and that extracting concessions from the White House now is crucial.

Cautious Democrats worry that the party will be blamed if the government closes. But blamed by whom? Republicans have taken the political hit for previous shutdowns, because the GOP has openly clamored for them. Maybe Democrats would take the hit if they refused to help Republicans, and maybe they wouldn’t; voters surely understand that Democrats are the party of government. But in standing up to Trump’s GOP, they’d be taking the side of most of the public. One new CNN poll found that 56 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest mark of his career; another found that 55 percent believe that the cuts to federal programs, which Democrats want to stop, will hurt the economy.

Regardless of how independents and Republicans would react, the consequences of not putting up a fight now would be catastrophic for Democratic-voter morale. During Trump’s first two months in office, party leaders have seemed flat-footed and meek, subscribing to what I’ve called a “No We Can’t” strategy. Polling shows that approval of the party and its leaders among Democrats is awful, and the idea of a liberal Tea Party—furious about the Trump administration but nearly as disgusted with Democratic leaders—suddenly seems plausible.

Few Democrats envy the chaos and disorder of the post-2010 Republican Party, but they’ve also seen GOP leaders take risks while their own party avoids them. That’s gotten Republicans control of the White House, the House, and the Senate, while Democrats have little to show for their gingerly approach. If Democratic leaders abdicate the chance to take charge now, many in the voting rank and file may not give them another chance.

The biggest risk for Democrats is that they’ll try to take a hostage by shutting down the government and discover that they are the hostage: Trump continues to do whatever he wants, and they end up folding in a few days, having obtained no concessions. That’s how most shutdowns end. As a matter of policy, however, this wouldn’t change anything. As a matter of politics, Democrats would at least get caught trying.

And if Democrats do take a hit with voters as a whole, so what? If they keep their political standing but lose all of the substantive battles, they won’t have much use for that standing. The longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, last seen misjudging the 2024 election, now says his party should just get out of Trump’s way. “It’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” he wrote in The New York Times last month. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”

Carville might be right that this would be an effective electoral strategy; Trump seems determined to make unpopular cuts and tie himself ever closer to the ever-more-unpopular Elon Musk, and the more voters see of Trump, the less they tend to like him. But playing dead makes sense only if one’s opponent is making garden-variety bad policy moves. This is different: Democratic leaders have said that the nation faces a historic crisis prompted by unprecedented and unconstitutional actions from the president. Did they really mean it?

Related:

The conversation Democrats need to have The Democrats’ “No We Can’t” strategy

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Meet the strictest headmistress in Britain. Tesla needs a better story. Musk’s Madisonian insight—and its troubling consequences Radio Atlantic: Gaza is struggling to keep clean water flowing.

Today’s News

A federal judge ordered six federal agencies to reinstate the probationary employees they fired last month. He criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the mass layoffs, calling it a “sham.” The White House withdrew Dave Weldon’s nomination to be the director of the CDC. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to limit the scope of lower-court orders that largely blocked Donald Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship. If the Supreme Court rules in the administration’s favor, some restrictions on birthright citizenship could take effect.

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Time-Travel Thursdays: Throughout The Atlantic’s history, writers have interrogated their marriages (and divorces), Serena Dai writes: “By putting themselves in control of what others hear, they try to make meaning of the life they’ve chosen.”

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Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Kryssia Campos / Getty; Mimi Haddon / Getty; Tooga / Getty.

Academia Needs to Stick Up for Itself

By Nicholas B. Dirks

The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

Read the full article.

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Elissa Slotkin Didn’t Want Your Speech Advice

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 03 › elissa-slotkin-democratic-resistance › 681933

Right around the time that Donald Trump was arriving at the U.S. Capitol to address a joint session of Congress—the longest such speech, it would turn out, in the history of the presidency—Elissa Slotkin, the newly elected Michigan senator tasked with delivering the Democratic Party’s rebuttal, was telling me all the things she wouldn’t be talking about.

“You’ve gotta say this! You’ve gotta say that!” Slotkin said, mimicking the outside voices that began bombarding her office moments after her selection was announced last week. “I’m not gonna make my speech a Christmas tree of every single issue of the Democratic Party,” the senator added, shaking her head, “because that’s what helped get us in this position in the first place.”

I have known Slotkin since 2018, when she first ran for Congress as an ex-CIA officer attempting to flip a safe Republican seat in southeast Michigan. Having covered her rise in the years since—including embedding with her operation during the 2020 campaign—I knew she possessed fundamental, long-festering concerns about the Democratic Party’s brand. Slotkin feared that, to the extent that Democrats stood for anything in the eyes of the electorate, it was a blur of abstract, ideologically charged activism that was hopelessly detached from kitchen-table concerns.  

Last November, even as she won her own race for Michigan’s open Senate seat, Slotkin’s worst-case scenario came to pass. Trump reclaimed the White House—this time with wholly subservient Republican majorities in Congress—and Democrats were heading deep into a cold, dark political wilderness. A fight over the future of the party was imminent; when Slotkin, barely six weeks on the job, was chosen to deliver the Democratic response to Trump’s prime-time address, it seemed likely that the first shots would soon be fired. This is how I came to be chatting with Slotkin yesterday, in the hours before the biggest moment of her political career.

A week earlier, when she was summoned to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office, Slotkin wondered whether she was in trouble. She is one of several freshmen in the Democratic caucus who came over from the House, where intra-party politics are a comparative blood sport, and she thought maybe she’d already ruffled some feathers. If she had, Schumer approved: He wanted Slotkin to speak for the party in prime time. She recalls feeling stunned, then honored, and finally somewhat mortified. “It’s typically thought of,” she told me, “as a cursed speech.” Slotkin asked for the day to think it over before ultimately accepting Schumer’s offer.

Escaping quickly thereafter to her family’s farm in Holly, Michigan, the senator holed up with a few trusted staffers to begin preparations. Two decisions needed to be made: substance and setting. Slotkin had no shortage of metaphor-rich locations from which she could stage the event: her farm, representing everyman roots; nearby Detroit, with its diversity and manufacturing iconography; the Canadian border, to underscore the chaos being unleashed by Trump’s new tariffs. But the senator never truly entertained any of these possibilities. To her, the questions of substance and setting were one and the same. Slotkin wanted to showcase a message that was built to do one thing—win tough elections—and that meant going to a place where she’d done just that.

Driving the main drag of Wyandotte, Michigan (population: 24,057), yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice the bait shops and dive bars and white dudes with tattoos on their necks. This place would appear, to the typical Democratic consultant parachuting into its downtown, like a lost cause. One of several manufacturing villages clustered along the Detroit River just south of the city, Wyandotte is the kind of place—working class, culturally conservative, racially homogenous—that has turned new shades of red in the Trump era. And yet, this past November, both Trump and Slotkin won here: Each of the candidates carried seven of the city’s 10 precincts, a rare example of ticket splitting in one of the nation’s premier battleground states.

Slotkin’s formula has never been a secret. Her campaign for Senate last year—essentially a scaled-up version of her three heavily contested and tactically celebrated campaigns for the House—was built around one organizing theme: the middle class. Everything she talks about, be it health-care costs or the January 6 insurrection, comes back to the economic security of everyday Americans. Slotkin argues that the surest way to heal the country—to defuse identitarian struggles, pacify the culture wars, uncoil our hypertense politics—is by restoring the confidence of working families. When people feel assured of their financial welfare and of their children’s future, she insists, they become far less receptive to the type of strongman demagoguery that thrives on scapegoats and feasts on anxiety.

[Anne Applebaum: The Democrats’ patriotic vanguard]

This approach sets Slotkin apart from many of her fellow Democrats, though the difference is better measured by degree than kind. She is quite familiar—as a woman, as a Jew, as the daughter of a woman who came out late in life as a lesbian—with the plight of certain constituencies within her party’s coalition. It’s simply a matter of emphasis: Slotkin sees electoral success as the path to addressing America’s injustices, not the other way around.

This is what brought her to a sleepy event space in Wyandotte (the owners, fearing political retaliation, requested that I not reveal the name of the business). It’s also what brought Slotkin to reject all of the suggestions she received about her speech: that she should use it to take up the cause of USAID workers, of undocumented immigrants, of the transgender community, of the environment, of the Education Department, and so on. The problem isn’t with any of these particular causes, she said; the problem is that everyone seemed focused more on the people she might name in her remarks and less on the people who would be at home listening to them.

“There are a lot of people, including in this town, who will never scream on the internet, who will never go to a rally, who will never get involved in partisan politics, but just want their government to run,” Slotkin said. “I’m speaking to them—not to just the hardcore base of the party. And if they wanted someone to speak to the hardcore base of the party, they picked the wrong gal.”

There would be no performative shout-outs, no box-checking patronage. As the envoy for a party that has long operated as a syndicate of identity-based advocacy groups, Slotkin wanted to try something different. Charged with countering 100 minutes of Trump’s trademark fanfaronade, the senator aimed to use the fewest words possible to speak to the largest number of Americans she could. Slotkin would talk, for just 10 minutes, about bringing prices down, holding American values up, and remaining civically engaged.

[David A. Graham: The Democrats’ disjointed rebellion]

None of this would seem a revolutionary approach to rhetoric. Still, it was fraught with risk all the same: Democrats “have been on their heels since the election,” Slotkin told me, and the party faithful have been agitating since January 20 for someone, anyone, to stand up to Trump. The announcement of Slotkin had already been met with grumbling from progressives online; anything short of oratorical firebolts would confirm the complacent, feckless approach of the D.C. governing class.

Slotkin viewed the stakes somewhat differently: This speech could, at least symbolically, commence a new chapter of Democratic Party opposition to a president whose success is inextricable from the tone-deaf ineptitude of Democratic Party opposition. If her team’s resistance to Trump’s first term was marked by hysteria and hashtags—all the land acknowledgments and pronoun policing and intersectionality initiatives—Slotkin saw on Tuesday night the opportunity to set a different tone.

Naturally, not everyone was thrilled with what they heard. “Slotkin’s address suffered from the same half-heartedness that has seized the Democrats since last November,” my colleague Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, capturing some of the criticism online. “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.”

[Tom Nichols: Democrats are acting too normal]

I suspect that Slotkin might cringe at being lumped in with “Democrats in general.” In truth, I’ve noticed a certain unease she feels with her partisan identity. She struggles to mask her contempt for far-left organizations; she has little patience for colleagues who, she once told me, run Very Online campaigns in safely blue districts that blind them to the reality of what it takes to earn a ticket split from Republicans.

Watching Tuesday evening as she rehearsed in front of staffers, I noticed that only once did she identify herself as a Democrat—in the final line of the speech. As we spoke a few minutes later, in a cramped corridor just beyond the set, I asked whether that was intentional.  

“I think, at least in this part of the world, there’s real skepticism about Democrats. That they’re weak—” she paused, perhaps noticing her usage of the third-person plural.

Slotkin continued: “That we’re too careful … That we’re …” She trailed off.

“Weird?” I asked.

Weird,” she confirmed. Slotkin rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m just trying to be the opposite of that. You know, my campaign motto was ‘Team Normal.’ And I think that’s still what I’m trying to do. And I think that that represents a bigger part of the country than people actually know.”

The president’s speech would not begin for nearly an hour, but already I could detect a certain angst in Slotkin’s voice. It had nothing to do with her own speech; she had run through it half a dozen times that day, pausing and tinkering and restarting until she knew it was fully cooked. Instead, like a family member preemptively contrite for what their relatives might say or do at the Thanksgiving table, Slotkin betrayed an apprehension about how her fellow Democrats might respond to Trump.

As it turned out, she was right to worry. Between all the awkward and impotent demonstrations—Representative Al Green of Texas angrily waving his cane at the president; some pink-clad lawmakers protesting silently with popsicle-stick signs; others staging a disordered walkout during the speech—verdicts were rendered about the party’s pitiable state before its messenger could even say her piece.

Not that Slotkin paid that verdict much mind. After her speech, the senator and her team were headed down the street to a Teamster bar, and Slotkin told me the highest praise they hoped to hear from the owner and his patrons was: “That sounded pretty normal.”

Perceptions of her party were never going to shift in one night. Slotkin came into Tuesday accepting, if not explicitly addressing, the realities of the brutal two-front war in which she is now a high-profile combatant: opposing Trump’s executive and legislative blitzkrieg while simultaneously battling with other Democrats who have their own visions for returning the party to power.

Slotkin insists that she isn’t “one of the 100 people” preparing to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2028. She was chosen to speak Tuesday night for a more compelling reason: She wins, time after time, in places where other members of her party simply cannot. If they want to model her success at the ballot box, Slotkin told me, they should stop ignoring half the country.

“It doesn’t win elections to just speak to the base of the party,” Slotkin said. “If it did, Kamala Harris would be president.”

The Democrats’ ‘No We Can’t’ Strategy

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 03 › the-democrats-disjointed-rebellion › 681932

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

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.

Related:

Democrats are acting too normal. Democrats wonder where their leaders are.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

David Frum: Trump, by any means necessary Anne Applebaum: The rise of the brutal American Russia is not winning. What ketamine does to the human brain

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.

Read the full article.

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The Democrats’ Working-Class Problem Gets Its Close-Up

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 02 › democrats-working-class-voters-trump › 681849

The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by.

Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?” They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the “phony” and “corrupt” Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.

“It was for the people and everything, and now it is just lies,” one man said when asked how the Democratic Party has changed.

Trump, another man said, was the only one inhabiting the political center these days. But some expressed concern about how much they were benefiting from the early days of Trump’s second administration, about the potential cost of new tariffs, and about the president’s embrace of “distracting” issues such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico and planning to redevelop Gaza.

“I feel like the administration is going for things that grab headlines, like trans rights, wars, things that people pay attention to, rather than actual inflation and pricing,” one of the men told the group. “So that is part of the negativity of politics that I don’t really enjoy.”

The February 18 focus group, in a state that saw deep Democratic erosion last year and will elect a new governor this fall, was the first stop of a new $4.5 million research project centered on working-class voters in 20 states that could hold the key to Democratic revival. American Bridge 21st Century, an independent group that spent about $100 million in 2024 trying to defeat Trump, has decided to invest now in figuring out what went wrong, how Trump’s second term is being received, and how to win back voters who used to be Democratic mainstays but now find themselves in the Republican column.

“We want to understand what are the very specific barriers for these working-class voters when it comes to supporting Democrats,” Molly Murphy, one of the pollsters on the project, told me. “I think we want to have a better answer on: Do we have a message problem? Do we have a messenger problem? Or do we have a reach problem?”

Mitch Landrieu, a former New Orleans mayor and senior adviser to the Joe Biden White House, said the Democratic Party needs to think beyond the swing voters that were the subject of billions in spending last year and give attention to the people of all races and ethnicities who have firmly shifted away from Democrats to embrace the politics of Trump.

“The first thing you got to do is learn what you can learn, ask what you can ask, and know what you can know,” Landrieu told me last week, before the New Jersey focus group. “When you see it through a number of different lenses, it should help you figure out how you got it wrong.”

Since losing last fall, Democrats have railed against the price of eggs, denounced “President Elon Musk,” and promised to defend the “rule of law.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer even led a chant of “We will win” outside the U.S. Treasury building. But there is still little Democratic agreement about the reasons for Trump’s victory or how Democrats can make their way back to power.

The Bridge plan is to launch a series of interviews with party leaders, tracking polls and meetings with voters around the country to try to figure out how best to fix the party after an election that saw Democrats lose the popular vote for the first time since 2004. Former Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez and former Representative Colin Allred of Texas, who lost a bid for Senate last year, have signed up to work with Landrieu on the project.

Several other parts of the Democratic power structure are searching for answers as well. The new chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, has promised his own “postelection review” by the party. “Not an autopsy, because we’re not dead as a party,” he said late last year. The details have not yet been announced.

Third Way, a moderate Democratic group, ran a recent Democratic strategist retreat outside Washington to begin the conversation about how to create a new economic agenda and how to extricate the party from unpopular positions on issues such as transgender athletes and immigration enforcement. Future Forward, the largest Democratic independent spender in the 2024 campaign, has continued to circulate “Doppler memos” to Democratic decision makers, offering them real-time updates about how Americans are digesting Trump’s actions and the most promising avenues for pushing back.

The Bridge effort emerged from a four-day Palm Beach donor retreat this month, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. Top Democratic donors gathered for days of closed-door panels with titles such as “What Went Wrong?,” “What’s Going on With Men?,” “How to Stop Losing the Culture Wars,” and “Sending the Right Message: Reviving the Democratic Brand.” A Saturday-night panel at the conference with Landrieu, Allred, and others laid out how much was still unknown. The title: “It’s All About Listening: How Can We Reconnect With the Voters We Have Lost?”

“I just really believe you have to start from scratch. You have to throw out all of your assumptions,” Landrieu told me. “Whatever happened in the past is the past, and that is the last campaign. Joe Biden isn’t president anymore, and they don’t have Joe Biden as a foil.”

Even though the answers remain unclear, donors came away from the retreat saying they were eager to keep spending. Bridge has planned another donor conference in San Francisco for early next month. “At a time when some Democrats are in retreat, I saw a large group of donors at Democracy Matters in Palm Beach spoiling to re-engage in the fight,” John Driscoll, a health-care executive and an American Bridge donor, said in a statement.

The early after-action autopsy of Bridge’s own spending in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania last year echoed the early findings of other groups: Advertising for Kamala Harris and against Trump had a clear marginal impact where it was targeted, but it was unable to hold back the much greater Trump gains, including significant erosion among longtime Democratic voting blocs. A Bridge analysis conducted by the Democratic data firm BlueLabs of voters in the three states found that Democratic support overall dropped 3.9 percentage points in urban counties, 2.5 points in Hispanic-dominant counties, and 2.1 in Black-dominant counties. At the same time, counties where Trump received 60 percent or more of the vote saw their vote totals rise by about 5 percent.

Landrieu hopes to share early results before this year’s fall elections so that new tactics and messages get a test run before next year’s midterm elections.

After the focus group of white men, Bridge gathered a similar group of eight New Jersey Latino men—Trump-supporting members of the working class who had previously voted for Democrats. One voter said that the Democratic Party has walked away from representing the working class, given rising costs. Another expressed concern about the “woke” rules of Democratic governance. “People were getting hurt for any little comment, so you had to be politically correct for everything,” he said.

Democrats have spent years trying to convince nonwhite voters that Trump’s racial insensitivity should be a redline. These voters did not try to defend Trump’s racial views or argue that he is not racist. But even in that was a warning for the next iteration of the Democratic Party.

“Whether he is or not, I don’t care,” one voter said. “I vote with my pocket.”

There Are Still Guardrails

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › trump-opposition-litigation-congress › 681691

During his first term in office, Donald Trump loved to complain about judges on social media. Reliably, whenever his agenda was held up in court or his allies faced legal consequences, he would snipe online about “so-called judges” and a “broken and unfair” legal system. Now, in Trump’s second term, this genre of cranky presidential post has returned. A judge who blocked the administration’s mass freeze of federal-grant funding is “highly political” and an “activist,” according to the president.  

Read alongside Elon Musk’s and Vice President J. D. Vance’s apparent willingness to defy the courts, Trump’s rhetoric is a concerning sign about where this administration might be headed. But there is significance to the fact that the administration already has a hefty stack of court orders it might want to defy. Despite Trump’s effort to present himself as an agent of overwhelming force, he is encountering persistent and growing opposition, both from courts and from other pockets of civic life.

Litigants have sued the administration over the seemingly unlawful freezing of federal funds, the deferred-resignation program for civil servants, the destruction of USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the handling of sensitive government data by Musk’s aides, the removal of scientific data from government websites, the attempt to write birthright citizenship out of the Constitution, the barring of transgender people from military service, the transfer of undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo Bay, and more.

[Read: The tasks of an anti-Trump coalition]

And now the court orders are coming, blocking the administration from pushing forward, or at the very least slowing its speed.

Courts have prevented Trump from dismissing a government watchdog without explanation and granted restraining orders barring the administration from slashing funds for crucial scientific research. They have prevented Musk’s team from meddling with Treasury Department systems and insisted that the government halt its transfer of an incarcerated transgender woman to a men’s prison. Four separate judges have issued orders requiring the government to stand down on its effort to dismantle birthright citizenship.

Litigation has also proved to be a valuable tool for prying loose key information from the administration, like the specifics of just what access Musk’s aides were given to the Treasury Department, and as a means of making legible to the public what Trump is trying to get away with. “It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals,” Judge John Coughenour commented when issuing an injunction against the birthright-citizenship order. But, he went on, “in this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow.”

So far, there’s no indication that Trump has attempted to ignore Judge Coughenour’s injunction. In other cases, though, troubling signs have emerged of the administration’s laxity in following court orders, including multiple instances in which judges have found agencies to be in defiance of the court’s instructions and attempts by the government to find work-arounds. It’s not yet clear how much of this stems from chaos and incompetence and how much is a strategy by Trump and Musk, however clumsy, to force a confrontation with the judiciary. Either way, this approach endangers the health of the constitutional order—which may well be the point.

If the administration decides to launch an assault against the judiciary, it will be all the more important that a strong response comes not only from the courts themselves, but from Congress and the public. Trump is skilled at presenting himself as the indomitable voice of a true American majority, creating a facade of consensus aided by the startling quiescence of congressional Republicans. Dissent, both loud and quiet, can crack that facade and make an illegitimate power grab apparent for what it is.

Some of that dissent is already coming from inside the executive branch. Over the course of a bizarre three weeks, the administration encouraged federal workers who had not yet been fired to depart their posts under a “deferred resignation” program clearly modeled on the buyouts Musk offered to Twitter employees after his takeover of that company. (The program closed on Wednesday after it was briefly frozen, and then unfrozen, by a federal judge.) But if the goal was to persuade federal workers to depart on their own, the slipshod rollout and smarmy, dismissive tone—one FAQ provided by the Office of Personnel Management encouraged federal employees to find “higher productivity jobs in the private sector”—may have backfired. The Subreddit r/fednews is buzzing with government employees expressing defiance. “Before the ‘buyout’ memo, I was ready to go job hunting, but then a revelation hit,” wrote one user. “I took an oath under this position to the American people.” In reference to OPM’s description of the program as a “fork in the road,” some federal employees adopted the spoon as a symbol of their opposition. Earlier this week, federal workers rallied at a protest outside the Capitol holding signs that read Public Service is a Badge of Honor!

In Congress, the Democratic minority, which entered this second Trump era cautiously, seems to be waking up. “We’re not going to go after every single issue,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told The New York Times in an interview published on February 2. Just two days later, though, Schumer was standing outside the Treasury Department leading a rally to protest Musk’s apparent takeover of the department’s sensitive payment systems. Democrats held the Senate floor for 30 hours to drag out the confirmation of Russ Vought, the architect of many of Trump’s most aggressive schemes, to head the Office of Management and Budget, and senators such as Brian Schatz of Hawaii have hinted at plans to escalate to even more dramatic procedural measures. “The roots of democracy are still strong,” Schatz told The New Yorker recently. “It depends on not just members of the legislative branch fighting back but there being a mass movement to back us up.”

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

This opposition movement will try to build on itself. The Democratic Party is taking more aggressive action in part because of an outraged constituency demanding that it speak up; that, in turn, may encourage Americans to push the party further. Spoon emoji, court orders, protests—all of these serve as indications that those who dissent are not alone. True, courageous leadership can emerge unexpectedly. Within the FBI, Acting Director Brian Driscoll has become a folk hero of sorts for his refusal to provide Justice Department leadership with the names of FBI agents to potentially be fired. Six Justice Department officials resigned yesterday rather than follow orders to dismiss the criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams: Granting the mayor a political favor would constitute “a breathtaking and dangerous precedent,” the acting leader of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York argued in a letter to Justice Department leadership, writing, “I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor” as an attorney. During a visit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to a U.S. military installation in Germany, an eighth grader organized a walkout at her middle school to protest Hegseth’s attacks on diversity efforts within the military.

The fact is that Trump is an unpopular president who eked out a razor-thin plurality of the popular vote and whose party holds the slimmest of majorities in the House. So far, he has been able to avoid that inconvenient reality by relying on executive orders. But March 14 is approaching, when the federal government will run out of money and House Republicans—never a compliant group at the best of times—will need to organize to pass a funding bill in order to avoid a shutdown. The limitations of Trump’s attempts to rule by decree, and the inability of his party to govern, may then become unavoidably apparent.

The World’s Most Powerful Unelected Bureaucrat

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 02 › the-worlds-most-powerful-unelected-bureaucrat › 681659

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

During his most recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to “put unelected bureaucrats back in their place.” Apparently, that place is in the federal government, doing what they want with little accountability.

The most powerful unelected bureaucrat in the United States today—and perhaps ever—is Elon Musk. The social-media troll and tech mogul is currently a “special government employee” leading something called the Department of Government Efficiency, though it is neither a department nor, as far as can be ascertained, all that interested in improving efficiency. DOGE’s clearest goal seems to be getting rid of as many civil servants as possible, by whatever means possible—including cajoling, buyouts, and firings, some of which have drawn reproach from courts.

The assault on government workers has been a long time coming. In 2017, during his first term, Trump began referring to federal employees as the “deep state,” and he often accused them of undermining him or slow-walking his ideas. It didn’t help that he often asked for impossible or illegal things, though the most prominent examples of defiance came from Cabinet-level, Senate-confirmed officials whom Trump himself had appointed. While campaigning as a quasi-populist, Trump railed against unelected officials who he argued treated ordinary citizens with disdain, assuming they knew best, or who were deeply enmeshed in conflicts of interest and lining their own pockets. Trump and his allies repeatedly suggested that Joe Biden’s aides were running the government because the president was too checked out to manage.

Now an unelected aide, beset with conflicts of interest, seems to be effectively running the government. He’s barreling through carefully constructed guardrails, acting as though he knows better than anyone else how the government ought to run, while a passive president looks on. No one’s pretending that Trump is particularly interested in the software systems of the government, and he’s made clear that he’s pretty detached from it all. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go,” he said of Musk’s role recently. In short, Trump has set a broad direction and tasked Musk with executing the details. That’s what bureaucrats do.

Because this is exactly what Trump campaigned against, justifying it is challenging, though apologists like Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk are game to try. “The American people quite literally voted for Elon Musk and DOGE when they elected Donald Trump with a historic mandate,” Kirk posted on X. But that’s absurd. Trump said on the trail that Musk would help him, but he didn’t outline this. The DOGE idea wasn’t formally announced until after the election, and Trump didn’t run on dismantling USAID or selling off half the government’s real-estate portfolio. Musk wasn’t elected, hasn’t been vetted or confirmed by the Senate, and didn’t even have to go through the standard hiring process. This is probably just as well; his admitted use of controlled substances might pose some challenges. He will reportedly not release a financial disclosure, and the White House says he’ll police his own conflicts of interest. Unfortunately, he has a long track record of questionable ethical decisions.

Democrats, otherwise reeling in the first weeks of the Trump administration, have picked up on the fact that Musk may be a useful target. Although most Democratic attacks on Trump’s populist persona have fallen short, this one seems more promising. Firing thousands of federal workers for nothing more than doing their job, while clinging to a self-described racist and a teenager nicknamed “Big Balls,” may not go over well with voters who just wanted inflation fixed. Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat from a red district in Maine, reported that he was getting a flood of constituent calls about Musk.

Focusing on Musk’s outrageous abuse of power may not be as effective as Democrats hope. Musk obviously hates many of the same people whom Trump’s fans hate, and that’s a powerful bonding force. What sinks Musk may ultimately be not populist resentment but court rulings against him, Trump’s need to remain the center of attention, or backlash when the cuts he’s pursuing start affecting voters’ lives directly.

“An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X last week. “Congress must take action to restore the rule of law.” (If only Schumer knew anyone in Congress!) Musk quickly replied: “This is the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people. We’re never going to get another chance like this. It’s now or never. Your support is crucial to the success of the revolution of the people.”

The most striking thing about this response—other than the world’s richest man adopting Leninist rhetoric about “the revolution of the people”—is its reversal of reality. Schumer won an election; Musk is just a bureaucrat.

Related:

Elon Musk is president. Elon Musk’s bureaucratic coup is under way.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Is this what cancel culture achieved? Trump says the corrupt part out loud. DOGE is failing on its own terms. What happens when bird flu gets worse?

Today’s News

Trump hosted Jordanian King Abdullah II at the White House, where they discussed the president’s plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Gaza cease-fire would end if Hamas did not go through with the hostage release scheduled for Saturday. The Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors yesterday to withdraw the corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

What an ‘America First’ Diet Would Really Look Like

By Yasmin Tayag

Trump’s stance on agriculture is the same as his stance on everything else: “America First.”

The notion that the country could produce all of its food domestically is nice—even admirable. An America First food system would promote eating seasonally and locally, supporting more small farmers in the process. But that is not how most people eat now.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The cruel attack on USAID Good on Paper: The great political sort is happening at the office. Blame Gerald Ford for Trump’s unaccountability. It’s time to worry about DOGE’s AI plans.

Culture Break

Illustration by Panayiotis Terzis

Read. Mood Machine will make you marvel at how much effort Spotify puts into recommending a song that sounds like a different song you liked three months ago, Brad Shoup writes.

Ponder. “Should I leave my American partner?” one reader asks James Parker in the latest edition of “Dear James.” “I love him, but I don’t know if I can live in the U.S. forever.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

To me, Kendrick Lamar’s use of American-flag and Uncle Sam imagery at Sunday’s Super Bowl was fairly clearly political—and subversive. What it was not, however, was blunt. Perhaps the overly literal protest gestures of the first Trump administration have somewhat numbed viewers to anything more subtle. Regardless, I was amused and perplexed to see some commentators taking the flag’s presence as a signal of alignment with the president. “When backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political,” wrote The Free Press’s River Page, as though patriotism can ever be apolitical.

All of this reminded me of George Will’s review of a 1984 Bruce Springsteen show. “For the initiated, which included most of the 20,000 the night I experienced him, the lyrics, believe it or not, are most important,” Will observed. But apparently the famously erudite columnist’s insights failed him, as he badly misunderstood one of the sharpest critiques (and critics) of the Reagan era. “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’” So close, and yet so far.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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A Win for MAGA’s Nationalist Wing

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › technology › archive › 2025 › 02 › darren-beattie-state-department › 681582

Darren Beattie may not be a household name, but you are almost certainly familiar with his long-standing ideas and preoccupations. Beattie, a speechwriter whom Trump fired in 2018 and appointed to a top State Department job this week, is a fixture in far-right conspiracist circles.

Over the years, Beattie has reportedly spoken alongside white nationalists, alleged that the FBI orchestrated January 6—his preferred term is Fedsurrection—and repeatedly posted online that various Black personalities and politicians should “take a KNEE to MAGA.” In his new role as under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, he will help shape the tone of America’s public messaging abroad, oversee “the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Global Public Affairs,” and participate “in foreign policy development,” according to the State Department’s website.

Beattie’s ascent is another sign that the new administration has no interest in catering to norms established by its critics or perceived political foes. What was a scandal in Trump’s first term is grounds for a promotion in his second. Beattie’s 2018 firing came after CNN reported that he had spoken at the 2016 H. L. Mencken Club, an event whose attendees have included prominent white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Peter Brimelow. Beattie then launched Revolver News, a right-wing website that trumpeted his appointment and described him as “a relentless force in exposing the left’s DEI agenda, their censorship schemes, and the J6 entrapment operation.”

Many of the site’s articles are standard conservative fare: attacks on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats alongside criticism of powerful technology companies that purportedly censor the right, including Revolver itself. Other content on the site veers sharply into conspiracism: It often posts external links to content from the likes of Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonym of the pro-authoritarianism writer Costin Alamariu, who has posited that “Black Africans” are so genetically ”divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries,” and Steve Sailer, another prominent booster of pseudoscientific racism. Beattie has also used Revolver as a platform to advance his nationalist views, including pushing for mass deportation and “America-first trade policy.”

[From the September 2023 issue: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

Beattie is a “well-regarded” and “beloved” figure in Trump world, as Semafor and Politico describe him, respectively. (Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson both praised Beattie in text messages to Semafor’s Ben Smith.) His appointment will likely be seen as a win for the nationalist wing of the Republican Party, which has been fighting against tech-right figures including Elon Musk and the venture capitalist David Sacks for influence in the Trump administration. While the tech-right and nationalists have been aligned in many areas, they vocally diverged on H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants in a very public internet fight in December. More recently, as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer reported, Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE, the team he leads within the Trump administration. Bannon, who sits squarely in the populist-nationalist camp and is friends with Beattie, has aggressively criticized Musk and other tech elites and said publicly that he wants to impede their influence.

True adherents to the nationalist-populist wing of MAGA are almost nonexistent in Trump’s Cabinet. For as long as he is in his acting role in the State Department, however, Beattie joins a small but powerful group of nationalist Trump appointees. The immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller, who is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and his fellow conservative intellectual Michael Anton, who is also at the State Department, are among this cohort.

The ascendant intellectual wing of the nationalist right will be particularly pleased with Beattie’s appointment. Prior to his time in the Trump administration, Beattie received a Ph.D. in political theory from Duke University, where he wrote his dissertation on the prominent German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and he has contributed to The New Atlantis, a publication with a reputation among the right for its rigorous critiques of technology.

If nothing else, Beattie’s eccentricities—buttoned-up intellectualism on one hand, crude and offensive polemic on the other—demonstrate one underlying truth of Trump world: It’s a big tent. Kiss the ring, and you may just be welcomed back.

Trump Advisers Stopped Musk From Hiring a Noncitizen at DOGE

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 02 › elon-musk-doge-green-card-trump › 681575

As Elon Musk set out to upend the federal bureaucracy on behalf of Donald Trump, he reached out to Trump’s team with an unusual request: U.S. law generally prohibits noncitizens from working for the federal government, but Musk was hoping to make an exception for Baris Akis, a Turkish-born venture capitalist with a green card who had become a close ally.

The answer, delivered privately by Trump’s advisers, was an unequivocal no, two people familiar with the decision told us.

Trump’s White House is in the business of deporting people, and bringing in a foreign national to help shrink the government’s American workforce would send a confusing message, one of these people said. (Neither Akis nor the White House responded to a request for comment.)

Musk and his team accepted the rejection and moved on, but the previously unreported exchange offers a glimpse into the complex dynamics of the Musk-Trump relationship, arguably the most consequential partnership in Washington. This story is based on interviews with six people who have worked closely with Trump or Musk or are directly familiar with their relationship, all of whom requested anonymity to describe private interactions.

The world’s richest man has established himself as a singular force in the administration’s effort to slash government programs, agencies, and federal employees. Yet as an unelected “special government employee,” Musk still relies on the president for his authority. Since sweeping into Washington alongside Trump, Musk has wielded enormous power. He has pressured federal employees into deferred resignations; dug into government data and financial systems; used his massive social-media platform, X, to pick fights and bully opponents; and fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the woodchipper,” as he boasted yesterday on X, or at least helped get the agency folded into the State Department. He believes that understanding and mastering the government’s computer systems is the key to overhauling and fixing the government. But he does so at Trump’s behest, at least for as long as he has the president’s blessing.

Trump has made a point in recent days of making clear his supremacy over Musk, and Musk, for all his influence, has found himself bending to the strictures of the White House. Musk’s private security team, for instance, must wait in the parking lot at the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue campus when he goes to work in a conference room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building because of the building’s own security protocols, one of the people familiar with the arrangement told us.  

“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we will give him the approval where appropriate, and where not appropriate we won’t,” Trump said yesterday during a signing event in the Oval Office. “Where we think there is a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it.”

On Sunday, Trump exited Air Force One after arriving in Washington from Palm Beach, and praised Musk as a “cost-cutter” who was “doing a good job,” before establishing the hierarchy: “Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go.”

Trump’s somewhat pointed comments on Musk “are important,” a longtime Trump confidant told us, explaining that “there’s one president.” This person said that Trump had learned about how to work within the government during his first term, but “that’s not true of Elon.”

But Musk nonetheless has threatened to steal the spotlight from Trump in recent days, becoming the public face of the administration’s most disruptive moves, including an effort to force thousands of voluntary resignations from the federal workforce. Inside the West Wing, he has found many allies, having ingratiated himself with mid-tier Trump aides early in the transition, when he moved down to Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club and established himself as an accessible, if quirky, presence. He regularly shared his cellphone number, including with younger staff, and spent his days sending around memes and ideas about overhauling the government, according to a person who saw the texts but who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Musk has a group of loyalists he often brings with him to each of his various government projects—a cadre Trump today praised as “smart people.” But, unlike many people with his net worth and renown, Musk “travels pretty light,” one person told us. Two people told us that, during the time he spent at Mar-a-Lago, they most regularly saw him with his young son X—“just that kid on his shoulders,” one of the people said—and sometimes X’s nanny.

Musk preempted Trump shortly after midnight Monday in a live broadcast on X with the announcement that the Trump administration would seek to shutter USAID based on his own team’s investigation of the agency. “As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it,” Musk said. “What we have here is just a ball of worms.”

And he has continued to pick public fights with Democratic leaders despite his new day job as a government employee. He accused House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of wanting to continue “waste fraud and abuse” after Jeffries attacked Musk’s leadership of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which operates as a part of the Executive Office of the President. Musk also wrote on X that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was mad about his work “dismantling the radical-left shadow government.”

Musk’s decision to seek a special dispensation for a noncitizen adviser came after the Tesla CEO’s views on immigration policy became a flash point inside the president’s circle late last year. When Musk defended the practice of giving H-1B visas to highly skilled foreign workers, Trump allies including Steve Bannon attacked Musk as part of a group of “techno-feudalists” undermining American workers. Trump had previously been critical of the H-1B visa system, but eventually sided with Musk in the dispute. Musk also moderated his stance, calling for “major reform” to how the visas are granted.

Democrats, who have struggled to respond effectively to Trump in the first weeks of his second term, have become more focused on Musk as a potential weak point for the president, as polling has shown significant public concern about Musk. A late-January poll by Quinnipiac University found that 53 percent of voters disapproved of him playing a prominent role in the Trump administration, compared with 39 percent who approved. About one in five Republican voters disapproved of Musk’s role.

Because of his special-government-employee status, Musk’s time in government is expected to be limited. Employees under this status, who do not have to divest from outside conflicts of interest, are permitted to work no more than 130 days in a single year. Other members of Musk’s team, including Katie Miller, a Department of Government Efficiency adviser, are also working for the government under the temporary designation. (Musk is also close to Miller’s husband, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.)

Musk’s preferred work habits before entering the federal bureaucracy could provide a window into how he might continue to feed “into the woodchipper” programs and spending that he views as Washington bloat. During his time in the private sector, Musk tended to burrow into each of his companies on different days, a person familiar with his routine told us. Monday was for SpaceX, Tuesday was for Tesla, and Wednesday was for X.

This week, Sunday and Monday were clearly for USAID. By tomorrow and Thursday, however, he might be ready to turn his buzz saw elsewhere.

Democrats Wonder Where Their Leaders Are

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 02 › democrat-leadership-vacuum › 681540

Updated on February 1 at 10:06 ET

The Democrats are angry. Well, at least some of them.

For months, party activists have felt bitter about Kamala Harris’s election loss, and incensed at the leaders who first went along with Joe Biden’s decision to run again. They feel fresh outrage each time a new detail is revealed about the then-81-year-old’s enfeeblement and its concealment by the advisers in charge. But right now, what’s making these Democrats angriest is that many of their elected leaders don’t seem angry at all.

“I assumed that we would be prepared to meet the moment, and I was wrong,” Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun-control group Moms Demand Action, told me. “It’s like they’ve shown up to a knife fight with a cheese stick.”

For all the people in Watts’s camp, the party’s response to Donald Trump’s first 12 days in office has been maddening at best and demoralizing at worst. After Trump issued pardons or commutations for the January 6 rioters last week, including the ones who attacked police officers, no immediate chorus of anger came from what is supposed to be the next generation of Democratic talent, including Maryland Governor Wes Moore, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another 2028 hopeful, who is on tour selling a young-adult version of her autobiography, has told interviewers, “I am not out looking for fights. I am always looking to collaborate.”

After Trump threatened Colombia with tariffs, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attempted to reassure the confused and fearful rank and file with the reminder that “God is still on the throne,” which seemed a little like saying, “Jesus, take the wheel.” And people were baffled after the Democratic National Committee responded on X to Trump’s first week in office by channeling a quainter time in American politics and dusting off an Obama-era slogan to accuse him of being “focused on Wall Street—not Main Street.” “Get new material!” one person suggested in the replies, a succinct summary of the other 1,700 comments.

[Will Freeman: Strong-arming Latin America will work until it doesn’t]

The limp messaging continued this week, after Trump’s administration on Monday issued a federal-funding freeze, including for cancer research and programs such as Meals on Wheels. The next day, Jeffries called for an emergency caucus meeting to hammer out a forceful “three-pronged counter-offensive.” But that emergency meeting would not actually take place until the following afternoon. (By the time lawmakers were dialing in, the White House had already rescinded the order.) Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, scowling over his glasses, offered his own sleepy—and slightly unsettling—assessment of the moment: “I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time.”

Some Democrats say they are hopeful that a new chair of the DNC, who will be elected today, will give the now-rudderless party a bit of direction—a way to harness all that arousal. The committee leads the party’s fundraising apparatus and coordinates with its sister organizations on Senate and House campaigns. But a chair can’t do much if the party’s own lawmakers aren’t willing to swap out the mozzarella for something a little sharper.

Part of the hurdle for Democrats is that they are afraid of sounding shrill. Few are eager for a return of the frantic and indiscriminate alarm-sounding that characterized the response to Trump 1.0, when Democrats clamored for the release of the supposed pee tapes and wore pink pussy hats in protest. There’s something cringey, these days, about reviving the capital-R Resistance—especially because Trump’s second win can’t be chalked up to some fluke; he won the popular vote, fair and square. Most Democrats acknowledge that, this time around, they should choose their targets carefully. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” Jeffries told reporters yesterday morning.

But Democrats can’t just stand idly by the plate, several frustrated progressive activists and movement leaders told me. They should be communicating to voters that Trump “is shutting down the government, and stripping it for parts to sell to billionaires,” April Glick Pulito, a progressive communications strategist, said. But Democrats aren’t getting it across, a reality that is disheartening, she told me, but also symbolic. “It’s part of why we fuckin’ lost,” she said. “It’s why people stayed home.” She and others I spoke with are demanding that Democrats be louder and more forceful—using resolutions and press conferences, sure, but also creative social-media campaigns and stunts for the cameras. “Speak like normal people, on platforms that normal people access,” Watts said. “I am not reading your press release. Get on every platform I’m on—talk to me on an Instagram reel, or a Substack live. Tweet things that explain what’s happening and how I can help or what you’re going to do to fix it.”

Some Democratic lawmakers have been doing this. People I talked with pointed to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has regularly gone live on Instagram to spell out the consequences of Trump’s actions. They also pointed to Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker’s vow to thwart unlawful deportation efforts and his new directive blocking any pardoned January 6 rioters from serving in the state government.

But Democrats across the ideological spectrum say they want more from their leaders. Dullness in political messaging is death, they say, and bland consultant-speak is plaguing the party, which right now seems totally incapable of grabbing any voter’s attention. A clear example of this was when Democratic leaders chose 74-year-old Gerry Connolly, who is not exactly a fiery communicator, to head up the House Oversight Committee over Ocasio-Cortez, Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the grassroots group Indivisible, told me. That choice indicates “a failure to recognize the political and media moment that we’re in.”

A party that is in the minority in both chambers of Congress usually doesn’t have a prayer of blocking legislation, but it can gum up the works. Dozens of Democratic senators have so far voted in support of Trump’s Cabinet nominees when they should be opposing them at every turn, these frustrated activists argue, along with rejecting unanimous consent agreements, voting against cloture, and requesting quorum calls. “They should be slowing everything to a halt,” Amanda Litman, a co-founder of the organization Run for Something, told me.

Glick Pulito compared the Democrats’ situation to a sketch from the Netflix comedy show I Think You Should Leave, in which a man wearing a hot-dog suit crashes a hot-dog-shaped car into a store and proceeds to look around wildly for the culprit. “I don’t want to see Chuck Schumer saying Congress should act,” Glick Pulito said. “Bro, you are Congress!”

Some signs have emerged that Democrats are developing a wartime footing. A group of 23 attorneys general from across the country sued the Trump administration this week over its funding freeze. The former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz came out of election-loss-induced retirement to go on a cable-news rampage about it. (“They defrosted him!” Glick Pulito said.) And when the White House rescinded its funding block, Democrats claimed a grassroots victory. “FAFO,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “I am more optimistic now than I was 48 hours ago,” Levin told me. “I am seeing some green shoots. I would like those to bloom into full-fledged flowers.”

[Elaine Godfrey: The resistance almost missed impeachment]

A new DNC chair, activists and progressives leaders hope, could at least be the Miracle-Gro for that process. Since Harris lost and Biden left, Democrats have been leaderless and agenda-free. Any conversations about the party’s brand troubles or its plan for handling the next four years have been haphazard and localized. Ken Martin and Ben Wikler, the two top candidates for the DNC chair job, both have the confidence of the activists I spoke with, not least because both have led political operations from outside the D.C. Beltway. Both men say they understand that people are frustrated. “If we don’t stand up now,” Martin, head of the Minnesota Democrats, told me, “then how in the hell are people going to believe that we’re going to fight for them and their families when we’re back in power?” This is a period of transition, Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin state party, told me: “Very soon, the battle will be well and truly joined.”

But the cavalry’s arrival may not mean much. The DNC has always occupied an amorphous role in the Democratic Party; it holds little sway with congressional leadership, and won't exactly shape the party's ideological future. That reality was on display this week during a chaotic DNC candidate forum characterized by a fixation on diversity issues, constant interruptions from climate-change activists, and frustrated outbursts from the audience.

The scene was indicative of a party not only struggling to fill a leadership vacuum but also stumbling beneath the weight of a tarnished brand, an unhappy base, and a growing reputation for fecklessness.

This article originally misstated the DNC's role in the Democratic Party.