The People Are Leading. The Leaders Should Follow.
Congressional Democrats should take a page from the people of Minneapolis.
[Editor’s note: This newsletter was delayed by a technical malfunction at Substack. We appreciate your understanding.]
Who would’ve thought America’s greatest weapon against Donald Trump’s authoritarian campaign of legal revenge against enemies would turn out to be grand juries? This week, yet another grand jury refused to give federal prosecutors indictments Trump wanted against yet another set of political foes: the six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video last fall reminding spooks and troops they had an obligation not to obey unlawful orders. Here’s the New York Times:
It was remarkable that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington . . . authorized prosecutors to go into a grand jury and ask for an indictment of the six members of Congress, all of whom had served in the military or the nation’s spy agencies.
But it was even more remarkable that a group of ordinary citizens sitting on the grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington forcefully rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to label their expression of dissent as a criminal act warranting prosecution.
Ordinary citizens: What can’t they do? Happy Wednesday.
Public Sentiment Isn’t Everything
by William Kristol
“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” In yesterday’s newsletter I quoted this famous (if perhaps apocryphal) remark by Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, a French politician in the early days of the Revolution of 1848. I was commenting on a poll showing the public’s alarm about the possibility of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security interfering in this year’s elections. And I was struck by the relative silence of congressional Democratic leaders on that issue—even though they’re in the midst of a fight this week over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer emphasized again how much he hopes to work things out with Republicans: “There’s no reason we can’t get this [a deal with Republicans] done by Thursday.” And he didn’t rule out supporting a short-term DHS spending bill to buy more time for negotiations with the Trump administration.
Schumer and some of his colleagues remain strikingly unwilling to go on offense. Why not aggressively make the case for no new funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol (while making clear they’re willing to separate out funding for the unproblematic parts of DHS)? Why not take the position that ICE and the Border Patrol should have to draw down at least some of the massive five-year appropriation Republicans gave them in last year’s reconciliation bill? Why give those agencies additional money now?
There’s no reason to do so. You know who understands this? The citizens of Minneapolis. Their sustained and exemplary civic action, taken at real risk to themselves to help defend their neighbors against Trump’s paramilitary forces, is a rebuke to the timidity of our political leaders.
We see this kind of pattern across the board. The massive turnout at the No Kings demonstrations in June and October showed that many in the public were more energized than their ostensible leaders. The amazing courage and persistence of the Epstein survivors led Congress to pass legislation in November compelling the release of the Epstein files. It’s the continued refusal of the survivors to accept a massive coverup by Trump’s Justice Department, and their persistence in calling out the administration’s clear failure to comply with the legislation Congress passed, that is leading to further congressional resistance.
And last night, as mentioned above, ordinary citizens serving on a grand jury in Washington, D.C. rejected an attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to prosecute elected officials who had served in the military for exercising their First Amendment rights to remind service members to obey the law.
The public’s rallying to the cause of democracy and liberty is the most heartening development of the last twelve months. But there are limits to what the public can do. In one of his debates with Stephen Douglass in 1858, Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Public sentiment is everything.” But as Lincoln well knew, that’s an overstatement. Power matters. That’s why Lincoln ran for the Senate in 1858 and for the presidency in 1860. Public sentiment isn’t self-effectuating. Elected officials have to translate public sentiment into political action. They have to turn public opinion into political power.
So the public can register its sentiments. But it’s Democratic senators who have to refuse to further empower ICE and the Border Patrol. The public can make known its disgust at what Epstein and his associates did, and at the coverup. But it’s members of Congress who have to insist that the legislation they passed is enforced. Citizens on grand juries can resist Trump’s politicization of the Justice Department. But it’s Congress that can pass legislation clarifying or changing the laws the Justice Department claims to be enforcing, thereby making it far easier for judges and juries to resist the corruption of the legal system.
President Trump’s State of the Union address is scheduled for two weeks from now. Perhaps Democratic members of Congress should accept that we aren’t living in business-as-usual times? Perhaps they should choose not to attend the State of the Union as long as ICE continues its rampages and the Justice Department continues its Epstein coverup? Some of them could choose to travel to Minneapolis to show solidarity with the intrepid citizens there. Some could spend the evening meeting with hearing from the brave Epstein survivors. Some could meet and show solidarity with other citizens around the country who have courageously stood up to Trump’s authoritarianism.1
Protesters in Minneapolis. Survivors of Epstein’s sex crimes. A grand jury in Washington, D.C. These are the true leaders of the resistance to Trump’s authoritarian project. Surely it’s time for our elected officials to hurry to catch up.
Besides demonstrating, responding to polls, contacting our senators and representatives, and actually voting, what more can we do translate this overwhelming public sentiment into official policy? Share your ideas.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Lutnick Lied About Epstein. Why Don’t Republicans Care? On Bulwark+ Takes, CATHERINE RAMPELL joins SAM STEIN to talk about why Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick faces zero consequences for lying about his contact with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
A Day, and a Nation, at the Kennedy Center… From Tchaikovsky to redneck humor: the arts in Trump’s America. SONNY BUNCH has this dispatch from the Kennedy Center before it’s shuttered.
Why War Still Surprises… It’s as old as humankind and has been closely studied by great minds—yet it continues to defy predictions, writes GABRIEL SCHOENFELD.
Quick Hits
COME AGAIN? Yesterday evening, the House of Representatives voted down a rule championed by Speaker Mike Johnson that would have blocked future House votes to end President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The reason was a minor internal GOP revolt: Three whole Republicans joined the Democrats to defeat the measure, 214–217.
The measure’s failure was an embarrassment for Johnson, but Trump himself deserves some blame for this one. It’s bad enough for the president to erratically impose, change, threaten, remove, and reimpose tariffs—including against close allies. But he doesn’t help himself by “explaining” his decisions in the most flabbergasting possible ways. Take Trump’s conversation with Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow just hours before the House vote:
I had an incident with a very nice country, Switzerland. They were paying no tariffs, sending stuff over here like nobody could believe. And we had a $42 billion deficit. And we weren’t taking anything. I said, ‘Well we have to do something because we have to even that up a little bit.’ I didn’t have to get everything at one time. So I put on a 30 percent tariff, which is very low. Still, we were having a big deficit, but it was half the deficit.
And I got an emergency call from, I believe, the prime minister of Switzerland. And she was very aggressive, but nice, but very aggressive. ‘Sir, we are a small country. We can’t do this. We can’t do this.’ I couldn’t get her off the phone. ‘We were a small country.’
I said, ‘You may be a small country, but we have a $42 billion deficit with you.’
‘No, no, we are a small country,’ again and again and again. I couldn’t get her off the phone. So it was at 30 percent. And I didn’t really like the way she talked to us and so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39 percent. And then I got inundated by people from Switzerland. And I figured, you know what? We’ll do something that’s a little bit more palatable, at least now. But I realized that all these, you know, Switzerland, you think of as, you know, ultra chic, ultra perfect. They’re not. They’re only that way because we allow them to rip us off and make all this money. And I could say the same thing with another forty countries. You know better than I do. You and I could name them. Some are much more egregious.
The surprising thing is that 214 members of the House thought, Yeah, this guy doesn’t need any supervision.
THE ARMENIAN REALLY BAD THING: Tiptoeing around the feelings of allies abroad can be a challenge. Five years after Joe Biden became the first president to recognize the Armenian Genocide, Donald Trump—who considers Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a key ally—has gone back to the trusty ol’ policy of declining to use the G word to describe the mass murder and displacement of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. But yesterday, JD Vance ran afoul of the messaging change when his official X account posted that he and his wife Usha had attended a wreath-laying ceremony in Armenia “to honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide.”
The post was quickly deleted, and the vice president’s office blamed the phrasing on a staffer who had simply meant to share a photo of the event. In remarks to reporters outside the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial, Vance had called the genocide “a very terrible thing that happened a little over 100 years ago”; staff later told reporters that this phrasing accurately described the vice president’s views.
Still, it’s one thing to quietly decline to use the word “genocide,” and another to use it and then walk it back. The Armenian National Committee of America called the deletion “a denialist action consistent with President Trump’s shameful retreat from honest American remembrance of a crime recognized by all 50 states, the US Congress, the White House, and more than a dozen of our NATO allies.”
LOOK, WHO HASN’T LIED ABOUT HIS EPSTEIN TIES?: In his Press Pass newsletter yesterday, our Hill reporter, Joe Perticone, reported on House Republicans’ collective shrug about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was revealed in the latest Epstein-files drop to have maintained a relationship with the pedophile financier for years after he previously claimed he had cut off contact. Now, Politico reports that the revelations are landing with a thud in the administration too—so much so that not even Lutnick’s internal enemies are eager to use them against him, figuring that Trump’s ferocious antipathy toward any mention of the files means the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
“Oh, I think knives are out [for Lutnick]. He’s despised by nearly everyone,” one person close to the White House told Politico. “I doubt Trump would easily push him out, though. The president doesn’t wanna legitimize the Epstein issue too much.”
Cheap Shots
Just to give one example, Rich Ruohonen, a lawyer from Minnesota, is a member of the U.S. Olympic curling team. Yesterday, he used his platform to show real leadership:
I’m proud to be here to represent Team USA, and to represent our country. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention what’s going on in Minnesota and what a tough time it’s been for everybody. This stuff is happening right, right around where we live. . . . I am a lawyer, as you know, and we have a constitution, and it allows us to [have] freedom of press, freedom of speech, protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures, and makes it that we have to have probable cause to be pulled over. And what’s happening in Minnesota is wrong. There’s no shades of grey. It’s clear. . . . What the Olympics means is excellence, respect, friendship, and we all, I think, exemplify that. And we are playing for the people of Minnesota and the people around the country who share those same values. That compassion, that love and that respect.
Bravo, Mr. Ruohonen! I’ve got to say that his admirable and eloquent statement is enough to make me reconsider my doubts about his sport. If curlers are going to step up and tell the truth, I’m okay with curling.
I do like the idea of Congressional Democrats spending the State of the Union with Epstein survivors and the good citizens of Minneapolis.
We are all curlers now.