Donald Trump celebrated the defeat of one of his first impeachment nemeses—retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman, who lost the Democratic Senate primary in Florida on Tuesday—in typical form. “SleazeBag Vindman loses tonight to a Radical Left Lunatic. How cool is that???” Trump exulted on Truth Social.

Vindman served as a witness in Trump’s first impeachment. Whatever currency this once gave him with Democratic voters has long since expired. In this, he is not unique. Democrats such as Dan Goldman, George Conway, and Tom Steyer, all of whom pushed for or played prominent roles in Trump’s first impeachment, have discovered in primaries this year that this credential means little to their party’s voters. Diana DeGette, a House manager during Trump’s second impeachment trial, and Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who battled insurrectionists, have also lost primaries.

The rout of the Democratic Party’s impeachment stars has been interpreted, generally, as a sign of the end of resistance politics. “The string of losses for resistance candidates from the first Trump term illustrates a new era for the restive Democratic base, where vocal opposition to the president through official channels and public remonstrations no longer guarantees success,” Politico reports.

[David Frum: The ‘resistance’ is over]

The “resistance,” once a dominant mode of Democratic politics during the first Trump administration, was never cool. But in the second term, the “resistance liberal” has fallen out of favor so completely that the phrase has become a derisive punch line across the political spectrum. Which is a shame, because the resistance was, broadly speaking, correct. It was right about Trump’s nature, and also right about how to defeat him.

Resistance politics depicted Trump as a crook and an aspiring authoritarian with a troubling fondness for dictators, especially Vladimir Putin. He was a con man, unfit for office, and had broken faith with the best traditions of American politics. The Robert Mueller investigation found, among other things, that Putin had dangled a lucrative no-risk deal to Trump during the 2016 campaign. The Senate Intelligence Committee, found, in a bipartisan report, that the campaign’s links to Russia posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” The first impeachment charged Trump with having “placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security.”

These much-derided processes turned out to supply an accurate, almost banal, description of how Trump has operated during his second term. His corruption and abuses of power have been let loose at a scale that was previously only imagined. Trump has all but severed America’s system of alliances, mocked and bullied Ukraine’s president, and showered praise upon Kim Jong Un.

What discredited resistance politics in liberal eyes is that it was closely associated with institutional procedures that were deemed to have ultimately failed to restrain Trump. Mueller’s investigation ended anticlimactically. Neither impeachment drew enough Republican support to remove Trump from office. Somewhat similarly, conservatives have sometimes claimed that the Russia investigation and first impeachment helped Trump politically by drawing to his side Republicans who resented the overreach.

One Republican who doesn’t seem to believe either of these arguments is Trump. The president has worked hard to ensure that no such humiliations recur during his second term, by stacking the Justice Department with loyalists, firing inspectors general en masse, purging the armed forces of “woke” officers, and generally eliminating any potential source of independence within the federal government.

Trump himself does not seem to think that the investigations that were avidly followed by resistance liberals did nothing to restrain his actions during his first term, or that they helped him shore up partisan support. And the absence of any such processes in his second term has not made Republicans in Congress feel freer to criticize the president. To the contrary, their fealty is more absolute than ever.

Even in the first term, resistance Democrats were dogged by their populist left-wing critics. This split first appeared in the spring of 2017, when Jon Ossoff ran to fill a special election for a House seat in Georgia, in a previously Republican district. Ossoff’s campaign, which attacked Trump’s corruption but declined to articulate a sharp progressive alternative, fell short.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders blamed Ossoff, and the party, for not taking up the Sanders message. “Ossoff’s campaign has failed to support or address any progressive issues. He embraces a centrist—not progressive—message, that both political parties waste taxpayer money, rather than politicians being corrupt by outside money,” the progressive writer Michael Sainato complained in the Observer. Winnie Wong, a co-founder of People for Bernie, told The Guardian of Ossoff, “He didn’t have a core progressive message and that ultimately is why he lost.” (Ossoff won a Senate race in 2020 and is leading the polls again this year, making slashing attacks on Trump’s personal corruption while steering clear of controversial left-wing policy stances.)

[Jonathan Chait: Liberals are now fighting a two-front war]

Like the Republican critics of resistance politics, progressive ones depicted it as substituting legal tactics for electoral victories. Yet the resistance was never limited to cheering on Mueller or hoping to persuade Republicans to convict the president of high crimes and misdemeanors. Resistance themes inspired the Democrats’ political message during Trump’s first term. And that message landed. Democrats retook the House in the 2018 midterms, despite a hot economy, and then defeated Trump’s reelection effort. Joe Biden, a link to a bygone era of civility and bipartisanship, ran in 2020 on a message of restoring the soul of America. He won.

Once in office, however, Biden ceded his domestic agenda to progressives who believed in Sanders’s vision of transformational change. They believed that only overturning the neoliberal order, handing control of domestic policy to neo-Brandeisians and climate hawks, and giving unions almost every policy they demanded would allow Democrats to regain the trust of working-class voters. This theory, not the resistance, failed. Biden’s support collapsed within his first year, and Kamala Harris’s half-hearted efforts to distance herself from her unpopular boss were too little, too late.

Trump’s return to office has left Democrats casting about for a stronger and more effective response. Perhaps the most obvious solution is the one they hit upon when Trump was first elected nearly a decade ago: Rather than promise to change everything about American politics, focus relentlessly on Trump’s unfitness. The crisis in the United States is not the general corruption of both parties; it is the specific corruption of Trump and his enablers. And the solution is simply to replace the corrupt, racist authoritarian with a governing party that respects the rule of law, equality, and basic decency.

Attorney General Todd Blanche has made abundantly clear that he will not act independently of President Trump’s desires. So yesterday, NBC’s Kristen Welker posed an obvious question to Blanche on Meet the Press: “If the president asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?” Blanche replied confidently, “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”

This particular formulation—never has, never will—has become a new mantra for the administration. Last month, in response to reports that Trump had personally gained $2 billion in the previous year, the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest.” When ProPublica reported in December that Trump had personally used the same mortgage-application fraud that he has called an imprisonable offense for various political targets, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”

This is an epistemic frontier of impunity that can be understood only in the context of Trump’s disregard for legal or normative guardrails against his abuses of power.

[Read: Does Todd Blanche have a red line?]

In some circumstances, to state that you never have and never will do something bad might be unremarkable, and perhaps reassuring. But when the category of behavior is something you engage in constantly and with little disguise, the effect is quite different, akin to a company accountant solemnly promising that he would never dip into the kitty as he boards a helicopter to his private island.

To begin with, we know that giving an improper order to the attorney general is something Trump would do, because he has more or less done it. Last year, for instance, in a social-media post that was intended as a private message for her but was mistakenly posted on Truth Social, he pressured then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge several people that Trump wished to punish for political reasons. Blanche has personal experience with Trump’s obsessive habit of demanding federal investigations of his enemies, having been asked to bring new charges against David Hearn for his alleged defacement of the Reflecting Pool, even after the Justice Department conceded in a court filing that it had no evidence that Hearn had done such a thing, and that the damage to the floor lining had been caused by faulty installation.

Likewise, Trump’s conflicts of interest are of the most flagrant variety. Since the 1970s, previous occupants of his office have placed their investments in blind trusts. Jimmy Carter gave up control of his peanut farm to avoid the appearance of even the subtlest pro-peanut bias creeping into his decision making. Yet Trump has controlled a business empire and made numerous decisions that benefited it directly.

The same holds true for the assertion that he has never violated the law. Trump’s first brush with fame occurred in a lawbreaking context—he and his father were charged with excluding Black tenants from their apartments. They settled with the Justice Department without admitting wrongdoing but also agreed to abide by the Fair Housing Act. Trump was also convicted of falsifying business records in New York in 2024 and escaped more criminal charges (for stealing classified material, storing boxes of it in his home, and refusing to return it while lying to federal officials about it) through delaying tactics and questionable decisions by a sympathetic judge he’d appointed.

The power of the “never has, never will” defense lies in its brazenness. The administration is not attempting to defend the specifics of any particular acts. Instead, it broadly declares that all of its actions are outside the realm of plausible scrutiny.

During the first Trump term, the president pushed against or sought to flout long-standing norms. His first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation because he was a potential subject of it, a standard application of traditional ethics for which the president has never forgiven him. Another attorney general, William Barr, begged Trump not to publicly direct his work for fear that doing so would taint the process. Trump scaled back some of his business activity, taking comparatively small profits (for instance, foreign countries could book blocks of rooms in his hotels).

[Quinta Jurecic: DOJ enters a new, even more aggressive phase]

During his second term, he has abandoned all restraint. He won’t bother trying to argue that the Justice Department is not a personal weapon of vengeance or that his business interests do not overlap with his public conduct. Instead, his appointees declare that such behavior will continue and is perfectly legal.

Just as Trump took the term fake news, which originally described deliberately falsified stories on social media, and applied it to news outlets that attempt to report objectively, his administration now casts his own unethical conduct as being ethical. Any Trump demand upon the justice system is, by definition, proper. Any Trump business activity is, by definition, not a conflict of interest. Any action Trump takes is, by definition, legal. This latter doctrine is one Trump arrived at early in his presidency, when he wrote on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Blanche is saying, as clearly as he can, that this administration deems the very concept of Trump doing something unethical to be self-evidently absurd. When he says that Trump never has and never will make an immoral demand, he is actually telling us that he himself never has and never will resist such a demand.

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When left-wing insurgents defeated a trio of progressive House members in New York, the House Democratic leadership suffered merely an embarrassment. Last night’s primary election in Michigan, by comparison, is an outright catastrophe for the party’s leaders. The Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, who defeated the four-term Representative Haley Stevens, has attacked the party as corrupt, offends some of its heretofore-cherished principles, and is currently trailing the Republican candidate in a race to hold a Democratic seat that ought to have been safe this year.

Parties generally follow bitter primaries with talk of coming together and moving forward. But the center-left liberals who have run the Democratic Party for decades need to be honest with themselves: They just suffered a crushing blow, and more will come unless they quickly absorb bracing lessons from this debacle.

[Read: The anti-Democrat]

Some of the fixes are obvious. AIPAC has become a poisoned brand among Democratic voters. Fending off a leftist insurgency will be all but impossible unless Democrats reject AIPAC’s endorsements and stop supporting unconditional aid for an Israel that no longer works toward a two-state solution. Democrats also have to stop passively allowing multiple candidates to split the mainstream vote while the leftist vote consolidates behind a single candidate, as occurred in Michigan’s Seventh District and the Wisconsin governor’s race.

But the greatest challenge for mainstream liberals is to find a way to engage in and win the substantive argument with the left. This is inherently difficult, because within any political party, the extreme faction can appeal to ideological purity without concern for the opinions of voters outside the party. Democratic socialism, for instance, is unpopular with the American public as a whole, yet it wins the approval of three-quarters of Democrats. As a result, Democratic Party moderates who have good reason to oppose socialism have a hard time convincing partisans who show up to vote in primaries to feel the same way.

A similar dynamic has played out in Republican primaries for years on end. Conservatives have lost winnable Senate races because hard-right candidates such as Herschel Walker, Kari Lake, and Todd Akin won their primaries by emphasizing positions that appealed to most of their party’s voters but repelled a majority of the electorate. Political consultants use the term wedge issues for positions that separate a candidate’s views from those of a majority of voters. But in primaries, the wedge can work the opposite way: It can discredit a broadly popular stance in favor of a narrowly base-pleasing one. El-Sayed does not endorse socialism, but he does support abolishing ICE, providing health insurance for undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, and making private health insurance “redundant and unnecessary.”

Policy is only part of the disagreement between the factions. Left-wing insurgents have won support less by appealing to ideological disagreements within their party and more by expressing a broad frustration with its failures.

The Democratic Party establishment lost credibility by standing behind a wan, ineffective president who failed in his fundamental goal of burying Trumpism. Democratic voters, writes the former Barack Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, “just don’t trust Democratic politicians to tell them who can really win. This is a very understandable impulse after 2024 and every Democratic leader backing Biden when he clearly shouldn’t have run.”

What makes the Democratic revolt so perverse, however, is that the party’s left provided Joe Biden with his longest-lasting and most enthusiastic base of support. Biden gave progressives a free hand to shape his domestic policies. Elizabeth Warren had more influence than anybody, perhaps even Biden himself, over the administration’s personnel. And even after Biden’s catastrophic debate performance laid bare his unfitness to run for a second term, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood behind his candidacy. It was the dread party establishment, including Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, that was trying to push Biden out of the race, while Ocasio-Cortez was attacking the efforts to replace Biden as a putsch by “a bunch of rich people.” Amazingly, however, the left has turned this history on its head. The establishment now bears the brunt of Biden’s failure, whereas the left positions itself as an untried alternative.

And the deeper you wade into the left’s view of the Democratic Party and its legacy, the more bizarre and counterfactual that belief system becomes. Left-wing activists and intellectuals have settled on a historical account that blames the Democratic Party for everything that has gone wrong in America, including Donald Trump’s rise. Under Jimmy Carter or perhaps Bill Clinton, the theory holds, Democrats adopted “neoliberalism”—a pro-capitalist ideology only marginally preferable to the Republican platform—and stubbornly adhered to it through the Obama era. In fact, the left rallied around Biden precisely because he adopted its theory that the key to restoring the trust of the working class is to reject neoliberalism.

El-Sayed, for instance, expressed this view to Hasan Piker in response to the left-wing streamer’s mockery of the former Clinton adviser James Carville. “You think about James Carville. I’m like, Bro, you architected the complete right-wing, like, ascent to neoliberalism in ’96,” he said. Piker, nodding along, replied, “This state is a swing state because of the machinations of the Clinton era of politics.”

These claims don’t stand up to casual scrutiny. Even if you hold Carville responsible for everything Clinton did, and hold Clinton responsible for everything that happened in Michigan over the past 30 years, the fact is that Clinton made the state more, not less, Democratic. Republicans won Michigan for five straight elections before Clinton ran in 1992. His campaign began a streak of six straight presidential-election victories in the state. Republicans haven’t won a Senate election in Michigan since 1994.

Ahistorical beliefs such as those held by El-Sayed and Piker have circulated in part because the left has relentlessly waged factional warfare against the leadership of the party. It is normal for political parties to experience a mix of winning and losing. The left has played down every success by the establishment while forcing it to own every failure, including those for which the left shares responsibility.

This dynamic points to a broader asymmetry between the two factions. The mainstream liberals of the Democratic Party have focused their energies on defeating Republicans. The left-wing faction has focused on defeating them.

[Jonathan Chait: Abdul El-Sayed fuses together two toxic ideologies]

El-Sayed has suggested that he will beat Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate, by seven points. Piker, during a rally he held for Francesca Hong, the socialist candidate who is leading in polls to be the Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin, repeated his claim that her state and Michigan had become swing states only because of the bungling of the party’s establishment. He promised that they would turn permanently Democratic under left-wing leadership. “We are going to bring back the working class to both Wisconsin and to Michigan,” he declared, without mentioning that El-Sayed and the Democratic Socialists of America have performed poorly among voters who lack a college degree. “A Republican will never be elected in this state ever again once our movement is done.”

Carville recently said that he would leave the party rather than share it with the likes of Piker. That is an understandable impulse, given Piker’s oft-expressed admiration for terrorist groups and authoritarian regimes (he has, for example, called Communist China the state he most wishes the United States would emulate). But it is also a prospect that fills Piker and other leftists with glee.

Piker appeared alongside El-Sayed on Monday at a pool party for content creators. “You got John Fetterman, James Carville fantasizing about leaving the party. I’m like, You’re sweetening the deal!” Piker gloated.

What left-wing insurgents such as El-Sayed and Piker want is to take over the Democratic Party, a goal that gets easier when traditional liberals flee it. Carville’s wing of the party is being out-strategized by an insurgent faction that has shrewdly exploited the weaknesses of the party’s leadership. The soundest course of action for mainstream liberals is to recognize how and why they have been losing, and learn how to fight smarter and harder.

Speaking to reporters today about the war with Iran, President Trump delivered an inspiring pep talk praising the courage and resilience of a brave nation retaining its fighting spirit in the face of adversity. Alas, the subject of his praise was the Iranians.

“Their entire navy is laying at the bottom of the sea,” he said. “They had 200 airplanes—they’re all gone. Every one. They don’t have one airplane. They had anti-aircraft weaponry, very good, but it didn’t work, and it’s all gone. Their radar is all gone. Their leaders are all gone. Everything is all gone! But they’ll fight onward.”

It was probably the most Churchillian rhetoric Trump has managed to muster throughout the entire conflict. Iran shall fight on the beaches, they shall fight on the landing grounds, they shall fight in the fields and in the streets, they shall fight in the hills; they shall never surrender.

This is not just a mystifying rhetorical move, but also a peculiar analysis of the military situation. If Iran’s military is gone, how exactly is it continuing to fight? An extant military of some kind is generally seen as a precondition for waging war.

[Read: This may be Trump’s biggest error in the Iran war]

Trump’s comments might be chalked up to spin or confusion. But his contradictory appraisal of Iran’s capabilities turns out to be very similar to the doctrinaire assessment of leading Iran-war hawks.

Marc Thiessen, the former Bush-administration speechwriter and frequent Trump adviser, recently wrote a Washington Post column that, having been published the evening before the president’s remarks, seemed to anticipate Trump’s case for why the war has been a success and must continue.

“After the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile attack on U.S. troops in Jordan, the time has come for President Donald Trump to take a good, hard look at the advice he is getting on Iran—what has worked, what has failed and who is responsible for those successes and failures,” he begins. This is an audacious way to frame the question, given that Thiessen’s own advice helped bring Trump to the current impasse. But his argument is that the hawks’ strategy in Iran has actually worked, and needs only to be followed a bit longer to produce victory. Thiessen praises the military’s “stunning success on the battlefield—entombing Iran’s nuclear material, destroying more than 85 percent of its defense industrial base, sinking its navy, grounding its air force, decimating its ballistic missile capability, annihilating its conventional military forces and imposing a crippling blockade on its ports.”

Alas, Trump tried to turn this victory into a negotiated deal. Big mistake: “Result? Iran fired five ballistic missiles at a U.S. military base in Jordan,” Thiessen writes. The same Iranian military that Trump had already destroyed took advantage of his cessation of hostilities to attack us.

This seems to suggest that destroying Iran’s military does not mean that it will stay destroyed. Indeed, a recent Wall Street Journal report found that Iran has quickly rebuilt much of its infrastructure and military capability. The same principle would imply that “entombing Iran’s nuclear material” is useful only if Iran cannot dig it back out again, which it likely can. The natural conclusion is that bombing Iranian military installations has limited, reversible effects, and requires endless application.

No, no, no, Thiessen counters. “No one is advocating indefinite war,” he proceeds to argue. “What many are advocating is completing the military plan that was paused in April when the ceasefire took effect—executing the final few weeks of the campaign the U.S.-Israeli combined force was carrying out.” Just a few more weeks of bombing will finish the job permanently.

Those of us who closely study Thiessen’s columns for clues as to what Trump is likely to say next will notice something familiar here. After the April cease-fire, Thiessen wrote, “U.S. military commanders had about two weeks’ worth of targets left,” and allowing just two more weeks of strikes would leave Iran “fully crippled militarily.” He repeated this claim at the end of that month. “If he decides to resume major combat operations and finish the job, Trump is just 14 days away from a decisive victory in Iran,” he wrote.

[Read: A tragedy in Iran might persuade Hegseth to change course]

The cease-fire has since crumbled, and Trump has had more than three weeks to attack remaining targets. Yet now the final destruction of Iran’s military is “a few weeks” away.

One barrier to once again finally re-destroying the Iranian military is that the United States’ capacity to sustain combat operations is finite. A week ago, journalists reported that Trump held back from carrying out bigger strikes owing to a shortage of munitions, especially interceptors to defend against the inevitable Iranian counterattack. United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz went on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday to insist that this was untrue. The military “has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” he insisted. Also, he added, “the people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”

Threatening prison time for people who leak information that he claims isn’t even real about the American military seems like overkill. But when you are as passionate about operational security as Waltz, no measure is excessive. And he seems to have transposed upon our military the Schrödinger’s-cat state of military preparedness that we have projected onto our adversary, depleted yet dangerous. The two combatants, in their paradoxical states, appear to be well matched.

Later in Trump’s remarks, a reporter asked him if Americans should expect Iranian attacks to continue. Called upon to inspire his countrymen to endure ongoing sacrifice, he replied: “They’ll get weaker. They’ll get a little stronger, maybe, now. But they’ll get weaker, and then they peter out. Uh, yeah, sure. I think so.” Churchill could not have put it better.