The Bulwark

Stephen Miller is in, Susie Wiles is out. Trump is promising even more shakeups in the days ahead. And we’re seeing new personnel scandals outside the government, too: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang seems to have had an affair with a Chinese spy.

Looks like the whole world’s back to running on Trump 1.0 rules. Happy Monday.

by Andrew Egger

With Democrats weeks away from assuming power in Congress, how is Trump adjusting to his post-trifecta future? Last week, he mostly coped and disassociated, tweeting vague lines about how it wasn’t his fault and spending lots of time on his ballroom. Now he’s trying to turn the corner. On Friday, he sat for a lengthy, revealing 60 Minutes interview with CBS News’s Ross Douthat—where he displayed a mind that seems to be struggling to grasp, even now, how much has changed in Washington since his extraordinary beatdown last week.

Take immigration. For two years, Trump’s immigration policy has been a nativist wet dream, featuring mass deportations, widespread ICE street violence, extraordinary clampdowns on even legal immigration from non-white countries, and an attack on basic constitutional protections like birthright citizenship. Over the weekend, the president promoted the architect of that policy, Stephen Miller, to be his new chief of staff.

But Trump also seems to feel some vague need to pivot. The results of the midterms, he suggested, confirmed to him that parts of his policy had gone too far: “I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out. But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs. . . . There’s a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or working in a hotel.”

You shouldn’t get the idea Trump has managed to develop any basic empathy for migrants here. Instead, he’s just decided to switch over to talking points from a different set of his advisers: Instead of the white nationalists and immigration hawks, he’s going with the big-business guys whose industries rely on immigrant labor. “There’s a group of people that I would say—on the pretty far right—that would like everybody taken out,” Trump said. “But let the people that are here, and in some cases here for ten or fifteen years, work a deal for them.”

After all the misery Trump’s immigration policy has caused over the last two years, his blaming it all on “the pretty far right” is a little hard to take. And the idea that Trump could strike a grand bargain on immigration with Democrats is fairly preposterous. Not only because he is elevating Miller—notably, he gave the 60 Minutes interview right before that was announced—but because he has made a few feeble moves in that direction before. During his first term, back in 2018, he nearly provoked a MAGA revolt over saying he’d sign DACA into law before he backed off and dropped it. It seems likely that the same thing would/will happen today.

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But Trump also seems to think that simply dangling the idea of such a bargain will be enough to keep Democrats off his case and playing nice. Why would they waste time investigating him when there are immigration deals to chase? He told Douthat that he “can’t imagine” Dems would impeach him again: “Look, what have I done? I’ve had the best two years in the history of the presidency.”

This seems like extraordinary wishful thinking—particularly considering how much stuff Dems are champing at the bit to investigate. The biggest issue is probably Trump’s own flagrant personal corruption. He has spent two years trading his influence to rake billions into his companies around the world, and his excuses for why it’s actually fine are getting, if anything, more feeble. “I devote almost no time to my net worth,” he told Douthat. “I have a son who’s a very straight, good guy. He watches over money. I don’t even talk to him about it.”

“Do you think,” Douthat asked, “the people who are investing in the company that you co-own with your sons, who are coming from foreign countries who want things from your government, don’t you think that they are buying influence?”

“I don’t know. But that’s true,” Trump replied. “Look, every president has a problem. . . . This is true for every president going back to George Washington. They own something, whatever crypto was at the time, okay?” Okay!

Once again: If Trump thinks Democrats are going to buy that sort of line in exchange for some supposed bipartisan negotiations on immigration or whatever, he’s due for yet another very rude awakening. But the biggest indicator we got that Trump is unlikely to try to really change—and the most fascinating exchange of the night—came when Trump was asked directly about his views on his enemies. He had said he could “very easily” squash his desire to say mean things about them for six months if that’s what it took to strike a deal. But what about a deeper reconciliation? When he dies, Douthat asked, what if the only thing standing between him and paradise is a requirement that he let go of his hatred for his political opponents, and feel love and forgiveness for them instead?

“Well, then I wouldn’t be real, would I?” Trump replied. “I mean, if I said to you, sure, the easy answer to that is, ‘Oh, yes, I could forgive.’ I found them to be extremely dishonest people, very bad people, very bad for our country. . . . The answer is no. I want to be honest, no.”

“Before the judgment throne of God?” Douthat persisted.

“Honestly, Ross, can I be honest?” Trump replied. “I probably cannot do that, no, because I do hate some of my enemies, and I always will.”

Hey, you never know. Maybe he’ll convince some Democrats to go easy on him. And maybe he’ll convince God he was perfectly justified in hating them all along. Or maybe not. Maybe Trump will discover that there are some holes too deep to dig yourself out of on spin alone.

by William Kristol

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

Thus the famous Mississipian William Faulkner, speaking through his protagonist, Gavin Stevens, in Requiem for a Nun.

Those of us with some conservative inclinations will be likely to nod solemnly and agree. And there is truth in Faulker’s bow to the past. But this is also true: The past is not immutable, the present is contingent, and the future will be shaped by our choices.

Last Tuesday, the voters of Mississippi chose the future over the past.

As the state’s counties continue to tally absentee and provisional ballots, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Scott Colom will be Mississippi’s next senator. Colom now leads the incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, by 2,574 votes, about 0.3 percent of the overall vote. The remaining ballots look very likely to continue breaking for Colom. The deadline for counties to certify their vote is at the end of this week.

Colom will be the first Democratic senator elected in Mississippi since 1982. He’ll be the first black senator elected in Mississippi since 1875, during Reconstruction.

Colom benefited from a strong black turnout last Tuesday. Those voters were surely motivated by the assault on black voting rights and political power enabled by the United States Supreme Court and carried out by the Mississippi state legislature. All honor to the black citizens of Mississippi for their response to this assault on them.

But of course Colom couldn’t have prevailed with black votes alone. He won about one quarter of the white vote in the state—including 40 percent of white voters between 18 and 29 years old, and 31 percent of whites between 30 and 44. Many younger white voters proved willing to overcome their past.

Last Tuesday, Colom also won Forrest County in south-central Mississippi by 11 points. Trump had carried it by 18 points in 2024. Forrest County is named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader and Confederate general who was the first grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan during Reconstruction. A huge monument to Forrest, erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910, still stands outside the federal courthouse in the county seat of Hattiesburg.

Colom also (narrowly) carried Lafayette County in north-central Mississippi, whose county seat is Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi—and Faulkner.

Colom chose to close his campaign with an ad shown statewide filmed at the Jackson home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader gunned down by a KKK member in 1963.

“It’s a powerful reminder of the sacrifice to gain the ballot, and nobody sacrificed more than Medgar Evers and his family,” Colom said on Friday. “What was important to me about that ad is we didn’t ask people to vote for me. We just talked about the sacrifice, talked about the story. We just wanted that to be the closing ad because I wanted that to be the last message that the people of Mississippi heard.”

The people of Mississippi heard the message, and cast their votes.

The past is never dead. But succumbing to the past was a choice. And overcoming the past is a choice.

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• To Rein In Trump, Pass a ‘No Kings Act’... Democrats should use their new congressional majorities to put enforceable limits on presidential powers ripe for authoritarian abuse, argues PHILIP ROTNER.

• Todd Blanche’s CNN Interview Could Come Back to Bite Him… Todd Blanche went on CNN to defend Trump’s threats to imprison Democrats, dismiss allegations against Susie Wiles, and promise to protect Stephen Miller from congressional scrutiny. WILL SALETAN and CATHERINE RAMPELL discuss on Bulwark Takes.

• Dems Won Big. Naturally, They’re Fighting About It… The party’s strongest candidates are finding common ground while its factions keep sniping across ideological divides, writes LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.

• Republicans Have a Choice to Make After Trump’s Crushing Defeat… On The Bulwark on Sunday, MIKE MURPHY joins BILL KRISTOL to examine the growing turmoil inside Trump’s White House.

• The Cornell Case Exposes Something Deeply Wrong With Our Culture… CHRISTINE EMBA joins MONA CHAREN on The Mona Charen Show to discuss the limits of consent as a moral standard, the decline of masculine responsibility, and why growing distrust between men and women may be contributing to America’s marriage and fertility crisis.

THE BABY AND THE KRAKEN: We’ve entered interesting times for the MAHA movement. Opposition in the White House to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s public health agenda—more vegetables and exercise, fewer food dyes and vaccines—has vexed many MAHA leaders. Calley Means, formerly one of Kennedy’s top advisers, quit the admin last month, and he told Face the Nation yesterday that the White House had been “catering to the ultra-processed food industry, catering to the pharmaceutical industry, catering to the pesticide industry and doing their bidding with an excuse that we need their money for the midterms.”

Many of Trump’s advisers, Means said, “treated him like a baby in many respects and used him. . . . They would block access to and information to him all the time.”

Kennedy himself, however, seems to be looking on the bright side. This weekend, he suggested that Trump’s promotion of Stephen Miller to chief of staff suggested Trump was back to full steam ahead on MAHA: “Next to me, Stephen Miller is the strongest MAHA supporter in the administration,” he tweeted. “It’s time to unleash the Kraken.”

FREE PRESS FAUX PAS: Unsurprisingly, the Free Press—Bari Weiss’s Substack, which CBS News swallowed—is no fan of Michigan’s new senator-elect, Abdul El-Sayed, a leftist and an aggressive critic of Israel. There are legitimate controversies about El-Sayed’s politics and past comments, though the outlet’s coverage of these controversies has been predictably biased (witness the softball interview with El-Sayed’s primary rival, Haley Stevens, after her surprise decision to endorse Republican Mike Rogers). Last Wednesday, though, the flagship website of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss committed an especially flagrant foul with a social media post by contributor Maya Sulkin falsely claiming that “Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed gave his victory speech in Arabic.” Actually, Sulkin’s own video clip showed El-Sayed speaking English, with a couple of Arabic phrases such as “inshallah” (“God willing”)—which accounted, according to a community note, for 0.27 percent of his speech.1

With even some FP contributors urging the removal of the misleading post, the site’s X and Facebook accounts added a mealy-mouthed “correction” almost 48 hours later but still kept the original posts up. (The correction also ignored Sulkin’s accompanying claim that Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar gave her victory speech in Somali when, in fact, she only briefly switched to Somali.) Finally, on Sunday, a new post announced the deletion of the earlier one which contained an unspecified “factual error” and promised that FP’s “rigorous editorial process” would be extended to its social media posts.

Errors happen, and it’s good that the Free Press at least partially corrected the original posts. But what an error to let through!

The FP’s 2022 declaration of values includes this pledge: “We seek and report the truth. We tell it plainly when we uncover it, even when it’s politically inconvenient.” Considering not only the original falsehood-riddled and inflammatory post but the way it was handled afterward, I’d say the site fell short.

–Cathy Young

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Joe Biden also used the word “inshallah” during one of his 2020 debates with Donald Trump. Do with that what you will.

DEMOCRATS HAVE SIGNALED a broad legislative agenda to turn their stunning midterm victory into policy and law. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—the presumptive speaker of the House when the Democrats take control in January—has said that the Democratic agenda will include, among other things, reinstating the enhanced Affordable Care Act premium subsidies, reversing Medicaid cuts, limiting the president’s ability to impose global tariffs, and restoring congressional power over trade policy.

Two glaring problems: First, of course, is the high likelihood that none of it will become law in the face of Donald Trump’s inevitable use of his veto power. Second, as ambitious as Jeffries’s legislative agenda may be, it would not significantly rein in a furious Trump who, having lost the ability to act through Congress, will have to rely almost exclusively on the exercise of unilateral presidential actions in order to do anything.

Trump, who is addicted to attention and being perceived as dominating the national (and world) narrative, has already signaled that he will double down on his promiscuous, norm-busting, and often illegal attempts to push the boundaries of presidential power. His appointment of Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff is a declaration of war, a middle finger to those who naïvely hope that Trump might have learned something from his midterm shellacking. Miller, the ultimate Trump loyalist, is, as the New York Times put it with considerable understatement, “in a prime position to continue his longtime pursuit of limiting checks on executive power.”

Congress must now act promptly to limit Trump’s abuse of presidential powers over the next two years, and to rein in future presidents as well. It is a problem largely of Congress’s own making. Over the course of decades, Congress has ceded many of its core powers to the executive branch by giving the president broad, undefined emergency powers that might be well suited for a “normal” president, but that give a president with an authoritarian streak arguably legal cover to wreak holy hell on the nation by doing, in Trump’s own words, “whatever I want.”

As I wrote a year ago, there oughta be a law. And now that the Democrats have won control of Congress, there can be.

The laws granting emergency authorities to the executive branch were intentionally written in broad, nonprescriptive language, to give presidents the flexibility to respond to unanticipated and unplanned-for events that a slow-moving Congress was not equipped to handle.

But a key lesson from the Trump era is that strategic ambiguity in the granting of emergency powers to the executive branch is dangerous. If ever there was a time for it, that time has passed: Trump has turned what once may have been a virtue into undeniably a vice. Granting presidents the power to declare an “emergency” without ever defining the term, and without being specific about what actions a president may or may not take when he declares an emergency, no longer works. And it has to be reversed by the new Congress—and fast—to put some boundaries on Trump during the next two years.

To be clear, the immediate problem here isn’t the gigantic vulnerability of our constitutional order. This isn’t just a matter of some high-concept concern about the decline of democracy, erosion of the balance of powers, and creeping authoritarianism, although it is certainly all of that. Trump’s exercises of questionable emergency and war-making powers—such as his arbitrary imposition of tariffs to settle scores and bully friends and enemies alike and his unilateral commencement of a war in Iran that shortly turned into a regional war with no end in sight—have had a direct impact on the everyday lives of Americans. They have created inflation and exacerbated an affordability crisis that was largely under control when Trump took office. They have made Americans less safe by undermining our nation’s soft power, giving license to bad actors like Putin, and alienating friends like Canada and virtually all of Europe. They have even led some allies to debate acquiring their own nuclear weapons, and to seek additional nuclear protection from European powers, because they no longer feel confident they can rely on the American nuclear umbrella.

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WHAT CONGRESS GAVE to the executive branch, it can—and must—take away. At the very least, Congress must place meaningful boundaries around the ambiguously defined emergency powers it has granted to the president.

First, it must place reasonable limits on the circumstances under which a president can declare a national emergency. Put simply, it must define what constitutes an “emergency” and what doesn’t.

Second, it must then be clear about what sorts of actions a president can—and cannot—take once an emergency has been declared. And for how long.

Congress can do all of that by passing a single law that I’ll call the Emergency Powers Reform Act (“EPRA”)—but you might think of it as the No Kings Act.1

The first order of business for the EPRA—clarifying the circumstances under which a president can and cannot declare a national emergency—can be accomplished by amending the National Emergencies Act.

The National Emergencies Act grants the president the authority to declare a national emergency to trigger the emergency powers granted by Congress in “any provisions of law conferring powers and authorities to be exercised during a national emergency.”

The problem with the existing act is that while it authorizes the president “to declare a national emergency,” it doesn’t define the term “emergency” or say anything at all about what kind of circumstances rise to the level of emergency. It leaves that entirely to the president without any apparent boundaries or guardrails. Would a perceived rise in distrust of election results (likely created systematically by the president himself) constitute a national emergency triggering extraordinary presidential powers? Most likely yes, if the president says so. Would a perceived national malaise that the president believes is inhibiting his agenda be a national emergency? Probably—who’s to say it’s not, given the lack of any definition of what constitutes an emergency and a president’s clear statutory authority to declare emergencies.

Trump has already used numerous national emergency declarations to justify hundreds of actions, including immigration measures, sweeping tariffs, and energy deregulation that, without emergency powers granted to him by Congress, would have required congressional approval or lengthy regulatory review. While the courts have blocked some of the actions Trump has purported to take in response to a declared national emergency, none of the cases were decided on the basis of a finding that Trump improperly declared an emergency.

It may be difficult to come up with a perfect working definition of a national emergency, but that’s why legislators get the big bucks. Start by making it clear that a persistent “condition” is not a national emergency, and that it is something that can and should be addressed by Congress, not the president. Include language requiring imminence and the need for immediate response. At least give the courts some ammunition to call out clearly pretextual, opportunistic power grabs. None of this is beyond the abilities of skilled, experienced drafters of legislation, and they can draw on the expertise of think tanks and academic centers that have been exploring precisely this matter for the last few years.

The termination provisions of the National Emergencies Act also need to be amended. As currently written, the act requires each chamber of Congress to meet to consider a vote on terminating an emergency within six months of its declaration, and every six months thereafter. That is far too long. Moreover, even if both chambers vote to terminate the emergency, the president can veto their resolution, forcing Congress to muster two-thirds majorities to end an emergency that a president declared unilaterally.

Simply put, the act puts the burden on the wrong party. It should not be on Congress to stop the president. The burden should be on the president to get affirmative confirmation from Congress within a reasonably short period of time. And the president should not have unilateral authority, as he does under the act, to continue an emergency indefinitely if it has not been affirmatively terminated.

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Once the EPRA amends the National Emergencies Act in a way that places some meaningful limitations on when a president can declare a national emergency, how long the emergency will stay in force, and how it can be terminated, it must clarify exactly what a president can and cannot do after an emergency has been properly declared.

The nature of the actions a president is authorized to take in the face of any given national emergency is not addressed in the National Emergencies Act. Rather, the scope of the authorized emergency actions is set out in the various statutes under which Congress has granted emergency authorities to the executive branch.

A comprehensive inventory of the laws currently on the books that grant emergency powers to the executive branch already exists. The Brennan Center’s A Guide to Emergency Powers and Their Use, updated last year, identified 137 statutory powers that may become available to the president when he declares a national emergency.

Congress doesn’t have to meticulously scrutinize every one of the 137 statutory powers (although it would be nice if Congress had some understanding of the extent to which it has ceded its power to the president). Only a handful of the statutes have been used by Trump to purportedly legitimatize his most destructive actions, and only a handful are clearly dangerous. Plus, no legislation should be saddled with the burden of trying to fix everything that could possibly go wrong.

Congress should concentrate on the emergency and other statutory authorities that Trump has used as a pretext to conduct undeclared wars, send uninvited and unwanted troops into American cities, impose sweeping tariffs on the entire world, and remove otherwise peaceful, productive noncitizens to random countries (and even entire continents) with which they have absolutely no connection. There are undoubtedly other statutes providing emergency powers that need to be amended, but the legislative process has to start somewhere.

Some of these authorities do not depend on a formal declaration of national emergency, so EPRA should reach beyond the National Emergencies Act to constrain other broad statutory powers presidents can invoke to act unilaterally, including those governing domestic military deployments and deportations, and to strengthen existing limits on presidential war-making.

I identified some of the specific statutes that need to be amended a year ago in an article for The Bulwark. They include:

• 10 U.S.C. § 12406, which authorizes a president to call National Guard members into federal service if the country “is invaded or is in danger of invasion” from a foreign country or if there is “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” internally—but neither of those “danger of” assessments is defined or limited anywhere in the statute.

• The International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which provides emergency authority to “regulate” “importation” to deal with “any unusual and extraordinary threat” to the economy, and which Trump used to purportedly justify broad, sweeping tariffs on the entire world, despite the fact that the words “tariff” and “tax” appear nowhere in the statute. The Supreme Court ruled in February that Trump was wrong to claim that some of his tariffs were authorized by this law, but the Court did not rule on the legality of other tariffs that Trump has imposed, and the relevant statutory language needs to be clarified.

• 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b), which requires noncitizens to be removed to the country from which they arrived in the United States unless doing so would be “impracticable, inadvisable, or impossible” (none of which is defined or bounded in any way), and which Trump has used to send nationals of Cuba, Mexico, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam to South Sudan in Africa.

• The War Powers Resolution of 1973 (not mentioned in my Bulwark piece last year because Trump had not yet commenced his war with Iran), which requires the president to consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or situations where imminent involvement is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and generally requires their withdrawal within sixty days absent congressional authorization. The act needs stronger enforcement mechanisms to prevent presidents from circumventing those limits by invoking broad claims of constitutional authority under Article II, as Trump has done.

Congress need not stop there, of course; there is no reason legislators could not identify other statutes that deserve revision, so long as doing so doesn’t endanger EPRA.

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SO MUCH FOR IMAGINING what a necessary reform bill might look like. Now a brief visit to where the real world currently stands.

Assuming the Democratic Congress accepts the challenge to rein in Trump and future presidents and to reclaim some of its constitutional authority by passing the EPRA or something like it, does it have a reasonable chance of success?

It can certainly pass in the House, where Democrats will have a commanding majority in January. And with 54, 55, or 56 Democratic senators, only a handful of Republicans would be needed to defeat a filibuster in the Senate. One can readily suppose that enough GOP senators who will be facing re-election in the next cycle can read the room following their devastating defeat in the midterms. More would be needed to override a presidential veto, but not that many more.

Bottom line: Although not guaranteed, it is more than reasonable to believe that such a law could make it through the Senate, especially if congressional Democrats have the wisdom to invite input from sympathetic (or frightened) Republican senators in drafting the bill. It is also possible that enough GOP votes could be obtained to override a veto. In other words, it’s not a fantasy, and it’s clearly worth the effort.

But what if the proposal fails to make it into law?

In that case, there would still be enormous benefits. Democratic candidates for president and Congress could use the issue against naysaying Republicans in the 2028 election, possibly to great effect. Following the 2026 midterms, there is every reason to believe that the American electorate punished the GOP not only for economic reasons and the war with Iran, but also because they are sick of Trump’s corruption, chaos, and cruelty. Candidates perceived as refusing to take reasonable steps to rein him in and restore the authority of Congress could be punished at the polls.

With Democratic control of Congress, it’s time to step up. Focus not only on managing the symptoms of the imperial disease Trump has inflicted on our country, but also on curing the disease.

And start by passing the EPRA or something like it.

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In 2024, the name “No Kings Act” was given to a bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) that sought to restrict the overbroad immunity that the Supreme Court granted to presidents in Trump v. United States. No serious action was taken on the bill, and Schumer did not reintroduce it in the 119th Congress.

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Todd Blanche went on CNN to defend Trump’s threats to imprison Democrats, dismiss allegations against Susie Wiles, and promise to protect Stephen Miller from congressional scrutiny. Will Saletan and Catherine Rampell break down the interview and explain how Blanche, in trying to head off investigations, may be giving Democrats even more reasons to investigate him.

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FOR A FLEETING MOMENT last week, Democratic leaders seemed like they were ready to put aside their factional fights.

Every corner of the party had something from the midterms to point to as proof their politics was ascendant. North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, the paradigmatic normie politician, won his Senate race by 20 points while progressive darling Abdul El-Sayed cruised home in Michigan. Blue Dog–style candidates like Jamie Ager flipped Republican-controlled House seats; so too did progressives like Randy Villegas.

“The whole coalition got elected. Everybody won, everybody had a victory,” Democratic strategist Joel Payne told me the morning after the election. “There was no ‘type’ of Democrat that won. The commonality was people who promise to fight and deliver.”

But the intraparty détente didn’t last long. By week’s end, Democratic operatives and officials were once again rehashing the same factional debates that have gripped the party since the 2016 presidential primary, pointing to everything from margins of victory to how loudly crowds cheered for specific candidates to make their point.

That the era of peace could be measured only in hours wasn’t necessarily shocking. There’s a segment of the professional Democratic party—mostly those with an addiction to X and in constant need of a dopamine hit—who clearly can’t quit the infighting and don’t want the long 2016 primary to end. The arguments have become core to their identity.

But what is striking to me is that these arguments seem increasingly contrived—almost like relics of a bygone era of Democratic party politics. Because the candidates who delivered some of the biggest wins last week were Democrats who are impossible to contain in neat ideological boxes. James Talarico led a populist crusade against billionaires and corruption while shedding his woke image by emphasizing his commitment to Texas’s oil and gas industry, his support for border security, and his qualified opposition to transgender student-athletes competing in girls’ sports. South Carolina’s Annie Andrews didn’t hide her frustration with the MAHA movement or the modern GOP, but she also opposed Medicare for All and ran an ad with her Republican-voting dad, who emphasized that his daughter was not a socialist. Although the Mississippi Senate race has not yet been called, Scott Colom talked about his Christian faith during his campaign and hewed to relatively conservative rhetoric on cultural issues, all while portraying his GOP rival as corrupt and only out for the rich. Jon Ossoff managed to build a coalition that included Hasan Piker at one end and Third Way Democrats at the other.

“The left did very well by advancing economic populism into the conversation. And if you also take the cultural moderation or deprioritization of cultural issues that the center did, then you get the best performers of the cycle,” Democratic pollster Adam Carlson told me.

That synthesis was so common on the campaign trail that many successful House candidates—like Sam Forstag in Montana and Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin—were embraced by both left and center, leading to unusual coalitions between Bernie Sanders and Blue Dog Democrats.

“I don’t think there’s just one way forward. I think you need to listen to what voters are saying because they want change, they want action,” Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist whose 2026 clients included El-Sayed and Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, told me. “Voters clearly don’t care about having this fight in the same way.”

“I think we spent ten years fighting, when if we had done a real autopsy after the 2016 election, we would know that people believed that the system was rigged and wanted folks in office who would do something about it,” she added.

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ALL OF WHICH IS NOT TO SAY that there are no real fissure points within the Democratic party. There are. The breaks are evident on issues like Israel and Medicare for All; on how much to push for major reforms to government institutions; and on whether to run campaigns designed to turn out progressives or reassure conservatives. The breaks are amplified by the fact that some of the country’s biggest cities—which are the media, political, and economic hubs—are undergoing a leftward drift as a result of the leadership they’re electing.

But on a national level, Tuesday’s results don’t suggest a movement of the party left or right so much as a dive back into the party’s history. There’s a return to some of the populist roots that Sanders emphasized in his 2016 campaign—heavy on economic messaging, light on cultural issues—and that defined many of the Midwestern Democrats in the Clinton era, too.

“David Bonior and Dick Gephardt and Paul Wellstone—that populist vein that used to run through the party wasn’t owned by the socialists or the liberals. It wasn’t owned by the neoliberals, or whatever people call them,” Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who served as senior adviser for both of Sanders’s presidential campaigns, told me. “People in America don’t see themselves as any of those [labels].”

Rocha said that throughout the dozens of House and Senate races he worked on this cycle, voters constantly told him, “shit costs too much, and I don’t make enough money.” Democrats did an effective job of listening to those concerns and campaigning on addressing those needs.

The rush to re-engage in the infighting after such a good election, Rocha argued, was a concerning sign of how easily Democrats could let themselves get distracted, even after a historic victory.

“We are positioning ourselves to have a debate about shit that nobody cares about,” he said. “That’s going to look like we’re really disconnected.”

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— Allies of Ro Khanna announced last week that they were launching the “Run Ro” draft committee to begin laying the groundwork for the progressive California congressman’s (potential) presidential bid. The committee is chaired by former New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman and progressive strategist Nomiki Konst.

“The centrists organize and strategize early,” Konst said in an interview with NBC News. “They have their donors, corporate consultants and leaders lined up for years. Building off the lessons of past primaries, our goal is to channel the progressive energy into a vessel for organizing and spreading our winning message early, as we can’t wait for the politics to line up.”

— If you’re looking for more 2028 tea leaves, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker spent the weekend in South Carolina and plans to return to the state again later this month. And at Crooked Media’s Crooked Con in D.C. over the weekend, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly said he was “thinking about” running for president and Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen said he’d make a decision in early January.

— In an interview with Bloomberg last week, Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, said he has met with 29 presidential hopefuls thus far. He said he expected to meet with even more potential candidates in the coming weeks, especially since he had yet to sit down with those, like Ossoff, who have been tied up with 2026 campaigns.

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— Democrats Won a Big Race in Montana. Why Do They Have Regrets?

— The Night Blue Texas Remembered How to Dream

— How a Mississippi election came down to the clerk’s office

There’s a difference between reacting to the latest headline and understanding how Washington actually works. Bill and Mike have been through enough political upheavals to recognize the warning signs, and that’s the kind of perspective we want to bring you at The Bulwark. Your membership makes these conversations possible.

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After Trump’s crushing midterm defeat, could Republicans finally decide they’re better off without him? Bill Kristol and veteran Republican strategist Mike Murphy examine the growing turmoil inside Trump’s White House, Stephen Miller’s rise to power, Pete Hegseth’s uncertain future, and the possibility of a Nixon-style collapse. They also look ahead to 2028 and explain why JD Vance may have a much tougher road than anyone expects.

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IT HAPPENED. America thoroughly repudiated Donald Trump and his spectacular failure of a presidency.

But the extent of the repudiation was as surprising as the fact that it happened at all. And it left me wondering where Republican voters were laying the blame. After all, they’ve long been devoted to the guy in the White House who made a series of catastrophic political and policy blunders. Were they faulting Trump at all for the loss? Did they want to see the Republican party do anything differently?

Last week we assembled a focus group of Republicans who voted for President Trump in both 2020 and 2024, and who, except for some local elections, voted straight-ticket Republican in this year’s midterms.

In my conversation with these voters, one thing became abundantly clear in their cacophony of cope: They were not blaming Trump. Instead, they were blaming

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There were so many spectacular Republican failures in 2026 that Tim Miller and Sam Stein decided to turn them into a fantasy draft. From Vivek Ramaswamy and Ken Paxton to the candidates who somehow managed to lose in deep-red states, Tim and Sam compete to assemble the ultimate roster of MAGA losers, reliving the terrible campaigns, astonishing defeats, and self-inflicted wounds along the way.

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The disturbing sexual assault allegations at Cornell have sparked outrage, but are we missing a larger conversation about what’s gone wrong with our sexual culture? Mona Charen and Christine Emba examine the limits of consent as a moral standard, the decline of masculine responsibility, and why growing distrust between men and women may be contributing to America’s marriage and fertility crisis.

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Bill Kristol served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush White Houses, while Sarah Matthews worked alongside Stephen Miller in Trump’s first administration. We’re bringing together people with deep experience to help you understand what’s really happening—not just chasing the algorithm. Become a Bulwark member to help us keep doing that work. And you’re in luck—we’re having a flash sale for 20% off.

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Trump’s response to a crushing midterm defeat? Putting Stephen Miller in charge of the White House. Bill Kristol and former Trump aide Sarah Matthews discuss why Miller could become the de facto president, how his appointment could reshape the balance of power inside the administration, and whether Pete Hegseth’s desperate displays of loyalty can save his job as the Iran war drags on.

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Almost nobody thought Jeff Van Drew’s seat was in play. But Zack Mullock pulled off one of the election’s biggest upsets, defeating the Trump loyalist in a supposedly safe Republican district. The congressman-elect joins Tim Miller to explain how he won over Republican voters, why Trump’s ICE crackdown and Iran war became political liabilities, and what Democrats need to do with their new majority.

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