With about four months still to go until the midterm elections, the Trump administration remains largely unchecked by Congress in its exercises and abuses of power—recently, the president has attempted to deal himself and his cronies billions in taxpayer dollars in a “settlement” with the IRS, and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin is floating a plan to remove customs officers from airports in “sanctuary” cities, effectively ending international flights to Democratic cities. The Democratic party, however, is bogged down in a debate over its long-delayed draft report analyzing the 2024 election losses.

This month I wrote to Joseph O’Neill—for the fourth entry of an ongoing conversation about what can be done to stop the devastations wrought by the president—to ask about the threats to the midterm elections and what he would do if he were Chuck Schumer.

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In our last conversation, you articulated a distinction between two kind of politics (or, more broadly, two kinds of power): “technical politics,” which you defined as “electoral politics centered on the economy, jobs, health care, immigration, crime, and ‘affordability,’” and “the politics of raw power,” which is the effort to tactically advance your party’s political power and agenda at the expense of the other party’s. In the intervening four months, we have seen extraordinary gambits of “raw power” from the Republican Party and its deranged executive: starting a war without Congressional authorization or even consultation, gerrymandering the electoral system to shreds, pursuing aggressive ICE and deportation operations despite majority opposition, gutting the US Forest Service, etc. These are, broadly, unpopular actions that weaken the public sector and help concentrate power under the president. What methods of raw power are available to the Democrats or to Americans, regardless of party, who want to stop the Republicans’ relentless drive toward domination and violence?

We’re in a deep political hole. The Republican Party is attacking and injuring the United States with malevolent kleptocratic determination. Technically, the courts have the power to stop or slow this down. Their technical power, however, is hardly designed to withstand the blitzkrieg you’ve described, which is supercharged by a corrupt Supreme Court exerting its own raw power to a historic degree. Deploying its self-created political tool, the shadow docket, and inventing facts and judicial principles, it has done its utmost to nullify the Voting Rights Act and to empower the Republican Party’s attempt to achieve something akin to one-party, one-race rule in red states. There is no recourse to the Department of Justice, itself transformed into an instrument of executive criminality in the realm of “homeland security,” certainly, but also in matters of antitrust, abuse of power, and profiteering from office. To take an absurdly brazen example, the Republican president has laid claim to $1.776 billion in a sham settlement with the IRS for nonexistent losses caused by a nonexistent tort.

So raw power has become very important. Raw power is somewhat indefinite, and it’s not only political parties who possess it. The putative fourth estate, wealthy autonomous institutions (corporations, universities, etc.), oligarchs, the citizenry—all can influence the distribution and effect of power in the US between elections. In very difficult circumstances, ordinary Americans have played their part admirably. The anti-ICE/CBP protests in Minnesota were extraordinarily brave and in many ways successful. The ActBlue coalition, with very little help from the national Democratic Party, has continued to organize, agitate, protest, and fundraise—and vote in great numbers in special elections. AIPAC’s decline as a corrupting influence on D.C. Democrats is largely down to pressure from the grassroots, as was the government shutdown over funding of the Department of Homeland Security (which, when it ended after more than ten weeks, was the longest shutdown in US history).

But it is in the nature of deep holes that they’re hard to dig out of, and for now there’s not much more that citizens can do about it except to keep pressuring Democrats to do the right thing. Things should improve in November, after the midterm elections, when Democrats will almost certainly capture the House (even allowing for the current spasm of gerrymandering) and quite possibly the Senate. We have a battle-hardened party base that knows how to donate and knows how to vote. The big question is whether the elections will go ahead normally.

That does seem to be the most important question: What is the nature of the threat facing free elections in this country? Now that the US Supreme Court has effectively destroyed the Voting Rights Act, how might Republicans attempt to obstruct the election, which by all accounts at this point will be a disaster for their party? What can be done to stop them beforehand?

There is a real risk—in my view, a probability—that the Republicans will try to undermine the midterm elections to prevent Democrats from taking control of Congress. It’s impossible to predict the exact form of the coup, but one can foresee a presidential declaration of a national emergency (based on bogus claims of election fraud or foreign interference); an illegal executive order commanding state authorities to suspend elections; and compliance with the illegal order by corrupt red-state authorities. All of this against the possible background of riots in the summer provoked by ICE and pro-GOP propaganda obscuring and normalizing the end of US democracy. In that kind of scenario, most judges would most likely order state authorities to proceed with the elections and/or to respect their results, but there are no guarantees. You’d be left with a showdown—a decisive contest between Republican and Democratic raw power. How that would turn out is anyone’s guess. On the one hand, coups are hard to pull off. On the other hand, we saw what happened in Bush v. Gore. In the end, a lot will depend on Democratic Party leaders being willing and able to act with adversarial intent and imagination.

What is to be done with these feckless Democrats? Rather than organizing a coherent opposition to the Republicans’ depredations, they spent the weeks after his illegal declaration of war issuing timorous statements that criticized Trump for not doing a good enough job weakening the Iranians, rather than opposing the war outright, then pivoted to fretting about the influence of Hasan Piker, a popular podcaster, on their party. There are any number of issues—the war, the genocide in Gaza, AI data centers, inflation, unemployment—that the Republicans are very unpopular on, but somehow the Democrats haven’t been able to build a coherent opposition (and are instead floating Kamala Harris as a possible presidential nominee). If you were Chuck Schumer, what would you do?

If I were Senator Schumer, I would take stock of the polls, which reveal an amazingly unpopular Democratic Party that is despised by its own base. I would take stock of the collapse of DNC and DSCC fundraising. I would ask myself if I was responsible for this disastrous state of affairs. I would answer this question in the affirmative. Because I, Chuck Schumer, and my network of politicians, consultants, and donors, have for decades controlled the Democratic Party—its policy platform, its brand management, its finances, its political strategy. I’d reflect that that I am indeed unequipped—temperamentally, ideologically, and (at seventy-five) physically—to engage in the politics that this moment calls for. And I’d finally accept that my loyalty to the interests of the Democratic Party conflicts with my loyalty to Israeli interests and, by extension, to the interests of Likud’s sister party in the US, the Republican Party. Then I’d resign as Senate minority leader.

This is precisely what will not happen. 

Your question about feckless Democrats has never been more urgent or exhausting. About a week ago, 144 House Democrats voted to give ICE, supposedly the government agency they’re very concerned about, new surveillance powers in the name of combating—wait for it—retail theft. Then Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, succumbed to pressure from Trump to commute the prison sentence of the corrupt elections clerk and would-be election saboteur Tina Peters. The structural challenge is that enormous investments have been made in the status quo. You and I might think that we need a principled, vigorously forward-looking, worker-aligned, and adversarial Democratic Party that’s free from the corrupting influence of foreign and corporate donors. But powerful factions—the Congressional Black Caucus, the Problem Solvers Caucus, the AIPAC brigade, etc.—are intensely suspicious of any change that might disturb the current distribution of machine power, especially if the change comes from the left. It isn’t neurosis that has disabled the party’s response to authoritarianism. It’s pathological careerism.

In short: defeating Republicans at the polls is not sustainable without fundamental changes to Democratic personnel and political strategy. There is some good news here. We’ve seen, in the party establishment’s rapid if pro forma adoption of Zohran Mamdami’s brand of politics (pro-worker, pro-affordability, antiwar, anti–AIPAC), that Democratic politicians can be responsive to intense pressure from the party base. And we should note a previously unthinkable good thing that’s happening: blue-state governments are retaliating against Republican maneuvers to further gerrymander the House in their favor. There’s good reason to hope that, by the time the 2028 elections come around, states such as New York, Colorado, New Jersey, and yes, Virginia will have eliminated the 2026 Republican gerrymandering advantage. But only if ordinary people insist on it. This is the great civic burden of our time. We wouldn’t be in a deep hole if we had a normal, healthy party of opposition. As I’ve said, we have no option but to keep pushing Democratic leaders to act effectively and proactively.

If, somehow, the Democrats are successfully induced to act, what options are available to them while they remain the minority party?

While their technical power (on things like committees and votes) may be formally limited, there’s a lot that Democrats can and must do now to penalize, exploit, and disincentivize Republican misdeeds and the people who enable them. By adopting an agenda of principled opposition to the forces of the far right—forces that are as corporate and oligarchical and technological as they are political—Democrats would perhaps start gain the trust of younger voters. This sort of prescription only works if Democrats finally treat the Republican Party as the Republicans treat the Democratic Party: not as a partner in “bipartisanship” but as an adversary—an adversary, in the case of the GOP, that will not respect the rules of democracy unless it is forced to by political defeat. Incredible as it may seem, it remains a huge problem that many senior Democrats are intensely reluctant to face this truth.

But in any case: what follows a noncomprehensive list I’ve devised of some concrete actions Democrats could take immediately. No doubt others will have further, better ideas.

1. Set up and empower a national political operations unit, nominally under the remit of the DNC, to coordinate and build on the counter-authoritarian efforts happening organically in discrete, disconnected parts of the country. It could be headed by Ben Wikler, the former DNC chair, and staffed by people from outside the network of consultants, donors, and politicians who’ve led the Democrats into their current predicament. The new unit would, first, transform the party’s messaging, branding, political tactics, and strategy; and second, push the Democrats’ DC cadre into political and cultural alignment with state parties and grassroots groups, with a special emphasis on the young.
2. To deter further collaboration with the GOP’s authoritarian project, make it very clear that Democrats, once returned to power, will apply the full measure of the criminal law to anyone (law firms, security contractors, oligarchs, corporations, government agents) who has collaborated with the Republicans’ abuses of power. Currently, there is nowhere near enough jeopardy on the horizon for the opportunists who have accepted Republican inducements to act unlawfully or corruptly. In the meantime, set up a national network of lawyers to issue professional misconduct complaints to state bar authorities against attorneys who have been involved in transparently oppressive or corrupt or meritless cases on behalf of the Trump administration. 
3. Be much, much, much more litigious. The political strategy of the US right is founded to a unique degree on bad-faith lies and dishonest personal attacks. The current liberal posture—accepting right-wing aggression as a kind of immovable feature of the political landscape—has played into the Republicans’ hands. A counteroffensive is needed, using one of the last democratic organs that is more or less intact: the civil courts, and the remedies provided by the law of torts against GOP officials and media entities who threaten or harm blameless persons. Bad actors must be made to think twice about their personal legal exposure if they are tempted to wrong people for profit or political advantage. When Trump libels Barack Obama by asserting that he “cooked up the Russia hoax to steal the 2016 election,” Obama should sue Trump personally. When the Southern Poverty Law Center succeeds in defeating the bogus money laundering prosecution it now faces, it should sue FBI Director Kash Patel and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche personally for malicious prosecution. If powerful liberals don’t hold Republicans accountable, what chance do ordinary citizens and officials have if they are maliciously accused of being Chinese agents or election fraudsters or domestic terrorists? 
4. Start articulating, in clear terms, the threat that the Supreme Court’s corrupt Republican supermajority poses to the US constitutional order, and prepare the country for the expansion of the Court that now seems unavoidable. 
5. Go after the dangerous and deeply unpopular oligarchy. It is not democratically tenable to allow a handful of businessmen to amass personal fortunes in the tens or even hundreds of billions, particularly when they actively align themselves with the forces of authoritarianism. Democrats must adopt aggressive antitrust policies and national security priorities that will have the effect of reducing the power of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Jeff Bezos et al. These extremists control corporations (among them Palantir, Starlink, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anduril Industries, Blue Origin) with previously unthinkable power in the technological-military realm. Fiscal measures—wealth taxes—are necessary but insufficient.
6. Develop nonfinancial alliances with liberal allies abroad. There is no good reason the EU and the Democrats should not make common cause in response to the Trump–Putin axis.

Republicans are not going to stop this administration. We’re going to have to do this ourselves, with whatever power we can muster. Then we’re going to have to hold the Republican Party accountable, politically and legally.