So Trump blinked on the tariffs, and then behaved like an arsonist taking credit when the fire was put out. (The New Republic’s Timothy Noah compared it to a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.) Still, MAGA World continues to cling to the delusion that he’s some kind of genius, while the plutocracy humors him on that same front in hopes of preventing an encore. But let’s be clear: his megalomaniacal recklessness and ignorance briefly wiped out 12% of the market’s value in a single swoop and threatened even worse damage before those billionaire donors and others fired a dart into his neck and clawed back some semblance of common sense. (Jeff Bezos’s new MAGA-friendly WaPo offered this howlingly generous description: “From Tuesday evening to Wednesday afternoon, Trump and his trade advisers spoke to several Republican lawmakers and top foreign leaders who raised concerns about the faltering global markets.”) The long term damage of this intentional volatility remains to be seen, not to mention the possibility of Trump doing it again, or worse.

So all in all, just another example of why it’s a bad idea to have a deranged toddler with the morals of a rattlesnake as your head of state. Who knew?

Whether Democrats will be able to capitalize on the tariff debacle is another question, even though it would appear to be a slam dunk for them. But that party has a habit of smacking the ball against the rim and then falling to the floor and breaking its ankle. For example, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, oft mentioned as a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, gave a speech last week where she said:

I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and here’s where President Trump and I do agree. We do need to make more stuff in America….Let’s give more hardworking people a fair shot at a decent life. And let’s usher in, as President Trump says, a ‘Golden Age’ of American manufacturing.

As The Bulwark noted: “We are but humble newsletter writers. But we’re not totally convinced Democrats should be out here offering even nuanced, guarded praise for the trade philosophy that is about to turbo-crash the global economy.” Fortunately, other Democrats—including governors like Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Jared Polis of Colorado, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania—have taken a more aggressive stance. “Literally all we have to do is point to the fucking disaster Trump is causing. We don’t need an econ 101 lecture ‘well actually’-ing the usefulness of tariffs,” wrote Brian Tyler Cohen, the co-founder of Chorus, a Democratic digital group, in response to a similar equivocation by Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Penn.). “Why Democrats insist on squandering every moment is beyond me.”

But I don’t mean to be negative. Let’s rejoice in Trump’s humiliating own goal, even as we reckon with the damage, and spend this week’s essay on one of the handful Democratic politicians who clearly does recognize the clear and present danger we face, and has been boldly proclaiming we ought to respond accordingly.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DAYLIGHT, TOO

In the past twenty years, both of the two political parties in the United States have been destroyed. The Democratic Party, the only one of the two still committed to participatory democracy, is in complete disarray and totally dysfunctional. It may yet recover but, per above, at the moment it’s as useless as a lactating bull. Much worse, the Republican Party—whatever its flaws in the bad old days (and they were many)—has gone from being a center-right party that more or less deserved the label “conservative” to a radical, fascist party of theocratic white nationalism. And in case you missed it, that is the party that is currently in control of all three branches of the US government, although only one of them matters anymore.

As a result, at the moment the United States does not have a functional “small d” democratic party.

Among the Democrats, one of the few US Senators behaving like we’re really in an existential national emergency and not conducting  business as usual has been Chris Murphy of Connecticut. (I’d include Bernie and Booker in there as well, and Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, my Punahou homeboy, except for his vote with Schumer to rescue the GOP on its self-inflicted debt ceiling debacle.) Murphy has the bland white guy look of a background actor playing a senator in a movie, but he is a firebrand on the order of Sanders—a deceptively anodyne and familiar front that is actually quite useful for the broader public, I would like to think. Murphy has consistently called the Republican crusade out for what it is, insisted on confronting it with bold tactics, and been an increasingly public voice sounding the alarm for the rest of the country.

Murphy believes—as I do—that “we have months—not a year—before our democracy is rendered so damaged that it can’t be repaired.” But there is a bitter irony in play here. At a time when the Democrats’ internal chaos, demoralization, and general fecklessness has rendered them unfit to be a proper counter to the GOP, those very ills have also exacerbated public contempt for them among the very folks that the Party needs to rally to its side, like young people.

By contrast, Chris Murphy is a model of what the Party should be doing to combat the fascist threat.

Last week, in a powerhouse radio interview with The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick, Murphy said:

Long ago, the Republican Party decided that they cared more about power than they did democracy. That’s what January 6th was all about—regardless of who won the election, they wanted to make sure that their person was in charge. They believe, and have long believed, that the Democratic Party progressives are an existential threat to the country, and thus any means justifies the end—which is making sure that a Democrat never again wins a national election.

So, this seems pretty purposeful and transparent—this decision to rig the rules of democracy so that you still hold elections, but the minority party, the opposition party, is rendered just weak enough, and the rules are tilted toward the majority party just enough, so that Donald Trump and Republicans and the Trump family rule forever….And that is, I think, the very concrete, very transparent plan that Trump and his White House are implementing right now.

That is as clear and direct a statement of the current crisis as you are likely to find anywhere. That it is coming from a US Senator is even more surprising and grave.

Murphy told Remnick “that over the last four years, those surrounding Donald Trump put together a pretty thoughtful plan to destroy democracy and the rule of law, and you are seeing it being implemented.” He notes that Trump & Co. have trained their assault in particular on academia and the legal community, including judges and the biggest law firms, two institutions that “are, in many ways, the foundation that undergirds the rule of law…..where people think about the rule of law, protect it, warn when it is being undermined.”

And so it is not coincidental that Trump is trying to force both higher education and the legal profession to capitulate to him, and to commit….to essentially quelling protest. And, of course, what the Administration is doing by taking on these very high-profile institutions is sending a warning to other law firms and to other colleges: if you take us on—if you file lawsuits against the Administration, if you support Democrats, if you allow for campus-wide protests against our priorities—you’ll be next.

Without using this precise metaphor, what Murphy is describing is a Pacific war-style island-hopping strategy, one that has been used in many other autocracies, where “the Administration won’t have to go after every institution or every firm, because most of them will just decide in advance to stay out of the way.”

“This is how democracy dies. Everybody just gets scared. You make a few examples, and everyone else just decides to comply.”

PARTY OF ONE

Murphy describes the Democratic Party as divided between those who think “we should just engage in normal politics—try to become more popular than Republicans” and his own faction, which believes “it won’t matter if we’re more popular than them, because the rules won’t allow us to run a fair election.” To that end, Murphy believes that “everything we are doing right now, both inside the Capitol and outside the Capitol, should be geared toward trying to make Republicans stop this assault on the rule of law and democratic norms.”

The problem with opposing the Trump regime, as The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last recently wrote (as detailed in last week’s King’s Necktie), is that most of the Democratic Party is trying to use methods and a mindset from an earlier era that is woefully ill-suited to the current threat. Like Last, Murphy rejects the idea—common among the sclerotic Democratic leadership apparently—that the party can just keep on “pushing down (Trump’s) approval ratings, and eventually win the 2026 election, and set up a potential win in 2028.” On the contrary, Murphy believes that, “Every single day, I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.”

I’m not suggesting that there will be election officials out there stuffing ballots. What I’m talking about is that the opposition—the infrastructure necessary for an opposition to win—will have been destroyed. No lawyers will represent us. They will take down ActBlue, which is our primary means of raising small-dollar contributions. They will threaten activists with violence, so no one will show up to our rallies and to our door-knock events.

This is what happens in lots of democracies around the world; the opposition is just kept so weak that they can’t win. That’s what I worry about being the landscape as we approach 2026. And, if you believe that, then everything you do right now has to be in service of stopping that kind of weakening or destruction of democracy.

This is a crucial point, as it requires us to re-think how we conceive of a fair election. As I wrote in Resisting the Right:

(T)he jackbooted authoritarian regimes of the ’30s and ’40s are passé these days. In the postwar period, much more sophisticated forms of “soft” autocracy have arisen, carefully cultivated pantomimes of democracy that are no less brutal in many cases, and more treacherous for their veneer of legitimacy: what Moisés Naím, the longtime editor of Foreign Policy magazine, calls “stealthocracy.” These Potemkin republics feature the trappings of legitimacy—fair elections, a free press, commitment to civil rights, limits on the power of the head of state—but in truth employ them only as camouflage while the state maintains tight control of all the mechanisms that would otherwise serve as checks on its power.

That means kabuki elections, where there’s no need for the right wing ruling government to rig anything, because its rivals can’t raise money, can’t organize, and can’t effectively get their message out to inform and mobilize the electorate. As a mechanism of oppression, that approach is far better than hamfisted brutality, especially as it offers the useful excuse that, “Hey, the people voted and this is what they asked for.” Chief among the right wing state’s tools and deserving of special mention is control of the narrative—which is to say, supremacy in the media—which is already the case in the United States.

To that end, Murphy also thinks it’s all but a foregone conclusion that Trump will attempt to stay in office for a third term (and why not a fourth?), or a de facto one by passing the presidency off to a relative, thus keeping the Trump family in power. “If he breaks the Supreme Court and breaks the Constitution and pays no consequence for it, we could ultimately be living in a situation in which the President just declares that he will stay in office.”

ALTERNATIVE OUSTER

Maybe most important of all, Murphy believes that the Democrats’ 2024 argument that “democracy is in danger” failed to find purchase because the party was “shilling for the existing version of democracy—which is deeply corrupt, which does not work.”

Whoa: as noted above, Murphy looks like Charles Grodin, but he talks like AOC, stumping for once-frequently-discussed progressive policies, like campaign finance reform. “Somewhere along the line we stopped talking about reforming democracy, so it became easy for voters to just believe that we were all corrupt, and that neither Republicans nor Democrats were actually sincere in fixing what was wrong with democracy.”

Murphy notes that Trump is so open about his corruption that, maddeningly, he normalizes it: “It must not be corrupt if you’re doing it in public.” It’s a Bizarro World situation, where the absence of the usual secrecy and shame—replaced with boasting, no less—actually serves as a weird kind of absolution. He cites Trump’s “meme coin” as an example of Democratic failure—the idea of an item of merchandise that the President of the United States has for sale on his website that functions, in effect, as mechanism for wanton bribery:

I’m just shocked that the Trump meme coin isn’t, like, the only thing that we’re talking about. It’s probably the most massive corruption scandal in the history of the country. You literally have an—I guess—legal, open channel for private donations to the President and his family in exchange for favors. And we just think that it’s part of Trump’s right to do business in the White House. It’s gross. It’s disgusting. It’s deeply immoral. And the fact that we didn’t talk about that every hour of every day, once he released that coin, was kind of a signal to the country that we weren’t going to take the corruption seriously.

Yet Murphy argues that Trump’s shameless, world-beating levels of greed and lawbreaking (he calls this “the most corrupt White House in the history of the country”) gives the Democrats an opportunity to run on an anti-corruption platform. If they find the intestinal fortitude to exploit it. But it requires courage, and actions that back it up. You can’t tell the American people that the Republicans constitute an existential threat to democracy and then play ball with them as if they are garden variety politicians and good faith actors. Not if you want to maintain your credibility and have the public to take your warnings seriously.

So what does Murphy suggest we do that is different from politics as usual, beyond a fundamental shift of mindset, huge and necessary as that is? In short, he recommends treating a housefire like the emergency it is.

At the most basic level, Murphy supported a full-on Democratic boycott of the recent State of the Union address, arguing that while Trump is destroying every aspect of American democracy, we should not accord him the normal courtesies that normalize and legitimize his actions. Small symbols of defiance announce that “that is not OK.” On a far more extreme and concrete front, he advocated letting the Republicans shut down the federal government and then forcing them to take the blame, as they should, rather than rescuing them as Schumer & Co. did.

This is not just GOP-style infantile obstructionism for its own sake. There is a strategic reason for it:

If the public doesn’t see us taking risks—tactical risks, daily risks—then they are not going to take what will be a risk on their part, standing up to a repressive regime where it’s clear that the government is willing to make you pay a personal price if you exercise your voice.

He echoed that idea in a separate interview recently with Jon Stewart, saying: “I don’t think you can ask the people of this country to do these exceptional things that are going to be necessary to save our democracy if we”—meaning the Democratic leadership—”are not willing to take risks.”

He continues to advocate for Democrats bringing the Senate to a grinding halt by refusing to let the Republican majority bring any bills forward at all, which it is within the minority party’s power to do. (In a similar move, the aforementioned Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii is currently blocking some 300 Trump nominees, Tommy Tuberville-style….except that this is in the service of democracy and not madness.) “(W)e have regularly been providing the votes to the Republican majority to move forward legislation that they care about,” Murphy told Remnick. “We could choose not to do that. We could say to Republicans: Unless you work with us on some targeted measures to prevent the destruction of our democracy, we are not going to continue to pretend like it’s business as usual….If you think that democracy is the No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 story, then you have to act like it.”

So ICYMI, I would argue vociferously that the Democratic Party is in desperate need of more Chris Murphys and fewer Chuck Schumers and John Fettermans. The good Senator one last time:

We desperately want to believe that we can play politics as normal because it’s uncomfortable—really uncomfortable—to play politics as not normal. It involves taking really big risks. And, of course, you just want to wake up and believe that you live in a country where people wouldn’t make a conscious choice to move away from democratic norms. But while some people are being hoodwinked into being along for that ride, others are making the conscious choice because our democracy has been so broken for so long.

So, yes, I believe that there is a chance that we miss this moment. We just wake up one day and we are no longer in a democracy, which is why I think we have to start acting more urgently right now.

POSTSCRIPT: THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT I WISH WASN’T

In addition to the tariffs, this was also a week in which Congress moved forward with yet another tax cut for the rich—even as it cuts programs for poor children—a move  that is set to add between $4 and $9 trillion to the deficit, which Republicans perennially claim to care about with near-religious fervor when any Democrat is in the White House.

It was also a week in which the inevitable and long-awaited showdown between Trump and the Supreme Court toward which we have been hurtling appears to have arrived.

With two decisions earlier in the week, the Court seemed to indicate that it was going to continue giving cover to Trump’s neo-fascist project, including the gestapo-like campaign of deportation/rendition, behaving exactly as it did in his criminal cases before the election: stroking its collective chin thoughtfully in a charade of good faith, while using the procedural mechanisms of the system to aid Donald at every step. (On Friday a lower court did likewise in affirming the White House’s right to detain and deport Mahmoud Khalil just because it doesn’t like his politics.) But Thursday’s unanimous unsigned Supreme Court decision in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, marks a change and a potential turning point for Trumpian authoritarianism.

Mr. Garcia is the El Salvadoran-born US resident—in this country legally, with court-sanctioned political asylum because of his well-founded fear of violent persecution in his home country—who was mistakenly/not mistakenly deported as part of the administration’s zealous campaign of sadistic xenophobia. He is now sitting in El Sal’s notorious CECOT prison, from which no one has ever been released as a matter of bluntly stated national policy under the Bukele dictatorship. If the Trump administration defies the SCOTUS order to bring Garcia back—or more likely, drags it feet, or makes a half-assed gesture at compliance and then throws up its collective hands in mock helplessness—we will have taken a giant step toward open, undisguised fascism.

The right wing majority on the Court brought this crisis on itself, of course. After protecting Trump from criminal prosecution for his various crimes, and openly aiding his re-election, and telling him outright that he’s a king who can do anything he wants, it’s rich that that majority is now upset that he is behaving that way and treating them like shmucks. The Garcia case is the first real test of how far he will go.

Depending how it shakes out, maybe people will find that Chris Murphy’s warnings were right on the money after all.

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Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images