Progressive voters finally being heard because we are enraged by Donald John Trump's draconian policies

Of the three New York City congressional candidates endorsed by Zohran Mamdani in Tuesday’s primary, Darializa Avila Chevalier was the weakest.

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Michelle Goldberg: Democrats Are Done With Caution

A sociology Ph.D. student and doctrinaire leftist who has never held elected office, she was running against Adriano Espaillat, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He’d built an uptown political machine known as the “squadriano” in New York’s 13th District, which includes Washington Heights, Harlem and parts of the Bronx. Many of the area’s neighborhoods are reliably progressive but not known for their radicalism. After all, in the last presidential election, Donald Trump improved his margin in the Bronx by double digits, one of the largest swings in the country, in part because of voter angst about crime and migration.

Last week, in an interview with the New York Editorial Board, a group of veteran journalists who question local political and civic leaders, Avila Chevalier said she opposed all deportations, even those of violent criminals. A prison abolitionist, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t answer repeated questions about whether murderers should be incarcerated. Both she and Espaillat are Dominican, and on the morning of the election, she walked off a popular Spanish-language radio show after she was asked about old tweets, including some that seemed to disdain Dominican nationalism. (In other since-deleted tweets, Avila Chevalier cursed at Kamala Harris, called Joe Biden a “rapist” and derided his support for Ukraine as “bullying Russia.”) Her name was notably absent from a get-out-the-vote message that Bernie Sanders posted for other progressives on Tuesday.

But in the end, Avila Chevalier won, carried to a narrow victory by the left-wing tsunami that created landslides for the other congressional candidates Mamdani endorsed, Brad Lander and Claire Valdez. She will almost certainly become the most left-wing member of Congress, and Republicans are sure to try to make her the face of the Democratic Party.

New York’s primary demonstrated the astonishing political power of the mayor and of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization that he, Avila Chevalier and Valdez are all members of. It suggests that Democratic voters have been radicalized by the horrors of Donald Trump’s second presidency and infuriated ❗by their leaders’ failure to contain him. And, it’s a sign that after the savagery of the war on Gaza, support for Israel has become toxic among large parts of the party’s base. 

Avila Chevalier was an organizer of the anti-Israel protest encampments at Columbia, whereas the American Israel Public Affairs Committee poured money into a super PAC supporting Espaillat.

The city, of course, is not particularly representative of the rest of the country. New York’s electorate is more progressive, and Mamdani, who has brought a joyful, dynamic energy to the city’s governance, has a unique clout. The same night that his slate dominated in New York, AIPAC’s preferred candidate, Adrian Boafo, won a congressional primary in Maryland.

Still, progressive outsider candidates are surging in many parts of America. There’s now a democratic socialist mayor in Seattle, and a democratic socialist just won the primary to become mayor of Washington. 

In Maine, Graham Platner — who, like Avila Chevalier, had a vituperative social media history — easily defeated the state’s governor, Janet Mills, for the Senate nomination. Voters in Maine’s rural Second District, which Trump won by nine points, chose a progressive, Matt Dunlap, to run for the House seat of an outgoing moderate Democrat, Jared Golden, defeating Joe Baldacci, the candidate endorsed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

This leftist momentum is a bullish sign for progressives in other Democratic primaries, like Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate in Michigan, and Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, running for governor in Wisconsin. Both are either ahead or competitive in recent polls.

That means the 2026, midterms could end up being a giant national experiment that tests the populist left’s theory of victory. 

For years, it has argued that Democrats have failed because, in thrall to corporate interests, they let themselves become the party of the status quo. Unable or unwilling to galvanize voters with an economically progressive alternative to the right, they’ve offered only timid, business-friendly incrementalism. Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited Avila Chevalier to run for Congress, told me that too often, the Democratic Party “tries to stymie big and bold ideas” in favor of technocratic pragmatism. “I think what voters have really made clear, particularly this past year, is that they are desperate for bold, visionary leadership,” he said.

This spring, I met Hong, a member of the Wisconsin Assembly from Madison, when she was visiting New York. She argued that winning the general election would require motivating voters who feel “disenfranchised or angry at the Democratic Party” with an anti-establishment, working-class campaign. 

Electability, said Hong, is subjective. “We have to take a step back and look at the current political moment and where voters are at and what they care about,” she said. “Who is the candidate that actually responds with a solution that they believe Who is the candidate that presents a vision that they will see themselves in❓”

Hong is right that many voters can’t be mapped onto a neat left-right spectrum. They judge candidates on a whole range of axes — whether they seem like normal people or career politicians, insiders or outsiders, populists or elitists. That’s why there are voters who went from Sanders to Trump, or Trump to Mamdani.

Still, as someone who desperately wants to see Republicans beaten, I’ll admit I’m anxious watching Democrats stake so much on a strategy of left-wing audacity. After all, progressive overreach has backfired in the past.

The D.S.A., remember, also surged during Trump’s first presidency. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a D.S.A. member recruited by Justice Democrats, stunned the political world with her upset victory over the longtime Democratic congressman Joseph Crowley, and was joined in the House by a fellow D.S.A. member, Rashida Tlaib, and the like-minded progressive Ilhan Omar. Other D.S.A. members won local offices nationwide.

Mainstream Democrats rushed to ally themselves with the left’s insurgent energy. Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker signed onto Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill. 

When the Black Lives Matter protests exploded in the summer of 2020, Harris sent out a fund-raising appeal to bail out people who were arrested protesting in Minnesota. Though Joe Biden beat out Sanders for the presidential nomination, once elected, he worked closely with progressives, adopting ambitious climate policies, expanding the safety net and welcoming migrants. Before the war in Gaza made him a villain to many on the left, he was hailed as the most progressive president in a generation.

All that gives the left a renewed opportunity to wield power. The question is what lessons leftists have learned from the past dismal decade. As both candidate and mayor, Mamdani has usually embodied a practical, optimistic sort of left politics — a sewer socialism — laser focused on New Yorkers’ material concerns. Avila Chevalier represents something different, an academic leftism rigid in its refusal to accept trade-offs or make concessions to ordinary people’s moral intuitions. One approach is a recipe for building, the other for backlash. The danger is that a movement flush with success may think it doesn’t have to choose.

Then came collapse. During the Biden administration, the D.S.A. hemorrhaged members amid sectarian infighting, especially over Palestine. In 2021, some factions tried to expel the recently elected representative Jamaal Bowman for being insufficiently anti-Israel, and the national D.S.A. unendorsed Ocasio-Cortez.

At the same time, centrists swung against a left that had indulged its purist tendencies. Bowman would go on to lose a primary fight to a more moderate challenger, as would Representative Cori Bush, the former Black Lives Matter activist who’d been endorsed by the D.S.A. In the 2024, election, the vast majority of American counties shifted right.

Andrabi attributes Democratic failure to Harris’s uninspiring centrism, and there were certainly people who declined to vote for her out of disgust with Biden’s unstinting support for Israel. But as Blueprint Research has found, swing voters who backed Trump overwhelmingly saw Harris as soft on crime and the border, and “too focused on identity politics.” She was weighed down in part by positions she took amid the frothy left-wing ascendance of 2020.

Maybe this time will be different. The electorate is furious, and now it’s the right that represents a hated status quo. 

Much of the Democratic establishment has proved itself feckless; a candidate as flawed as Avila Chevalier could win only against a complacent political machine that’s lost touch with the people it’s supposed to represent. Calls to abolish ICE were once seen as fringe, but since Trump has turned the agency into something akin to a personal militia, in most recent surveys, a plurality of voters want to scrap it. (Maine Writer- Does Senator Susan Collins know this❓)

All that gives the left a renewed opportunity to wield power. The question is what lessons leftists have learned from the past dismal decade. As both candidate and mayor, Mamdani has usually embodied a practical, optimistic sort of left politics — a sewer socialism — laser focused on New Yorkers’ material concerns. Avila Chevalier represents something different, an academic leftism rigid in its refusal to accept trade-offs or make concessions to ordinary people’s moral intuitions. One approach is a recipe for building, the other for backlash. The danger is that a movement flush with success may think it doesn’t have to choose.

Donald Trump and Republicans creating terror among innocent immigrants but humanitarian activists are resiting ICE raids

Elizabeth Castillo wasn’t an activist until Immigration and Customs Enforcement started taking away her neighbors.

Echo essay published in The New York Times by Michelle Goldberg

Elizabeth Castillo -They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan.

It all began in June, after Donald Trump directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to sweep Los Angeles, then used scattered violence at protests of ICE’s tactics as a pretext to send in the military. Castillo felt her working-class neighborhood in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, was under siege. Six people, she said, were seized at a Winchell’s doughnut shop. Two people were taken when ICE raided her apartment complex.

“It was just chaos,” she said. “And you can see, you can hear, you could feel the fear, the intimidation. You could feel the terror.”

A small woman with long dark hair, Castillo, the American-born daughter of Mexican immigrants, looks younger than her 38 years. She has five children, two of them grown but three still at home. Before the ICE crackdown she’d followed the news and always voted, but her kids and her job in health care administration took up most of her time. “You know, it’s practices here, practices there,” she said. “‘Mom, pick me up.’ ‘Mom, drop me off.’”

But she’s someone who knows firsthand what deportation can do to families. In 2012, she said, when her kids were all under 10, her husband, who was born in Mexico but grew up in the United States, was thrown out of the country. She’d been a full-time student; he was the family’s sole provider. Castillo had to drop out of college and explain to her children why their father could no longer live with them. “I can relate to what it does to a family,” she said. So this summer, when ICE started grabbing people from her community off the streets, she felt she had to act.

At first, Castillo was on her own with a megaphone. When she saw ICE vehicles in the streets she followed them in her car, honking and shouting to warn people that they were coming. 

She started getting up before dawn to patrol her apartment complex. Then she contacted the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which runs a nearby job center. Through them, she was plugged into a citywide network of people who are constantly tracking ICE’s activities.

Among those doing amateur anti-ICE reconnaissance in Los Angeles are people from established nonprofits that work closely with the mayor’s office. Then there are more militant groups that, beyond simply documenting ICE’s operations, try to actively disrupt them.

Ready to warn about ICE raids

“We have people patrolling all over the city starting at 5:30 in the morning,” said Ron Gochez, a high school teacher and spokesman for one of the more radical organizations, Unión del Barrio. When they find agents, he told me, “We get on the megaphone. We denounce the terrorists for being there, and then we inform the community in the immediate area that they are present. And then we say to the people, ‘If you are documented, come out. Come outside. Join us. Help us to defend your neighbor.’”

The widespread raids that have upended life in Los Angeles may soon spread to other cities, especially now that Republicans in

Congress have increased ICE’s budget to $27.7 billion, up from about $8 billion. (That’s more than that of most militaries. 😟😠) “We are a petri dish,” Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles told me. “They’re experimenting with us. If they come and make this stand in Los Angeles, then they can scare all the other cities, just like the universities have been scared, just like the legal firms have been scared.”

Yet if Los Angeles is a testing ground for mass deportation, it’s also a place to see how the resistance is evolving. Though there have been some big anti-Trump marches this year, many of those most horrified by this administration are looking for more immediate, tangible ways to thwart it. The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root, in different forms, in cities like New York — is part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action.

It may be no match for the Trumpian leviathan. But it can protect a few people who might otherwise get swept into the black hole of the administration’s deportation machine. And in the most optimistic scenario, it could be a foundation for a new, nationwide opposition movement.

“We have been abandoned by the courts, by the business community,” and, with few exceptions, “by the political class in Washington, D.C.,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-founder of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “All we have are our friends, our allies and ourselves.” One of his group’s slogans is, “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo.” It means, “Only the people can save the people.”

These days, when Castillo isn’t working, she’s usually in the parking lot of a small, run-down shopping plaza on Orange Grove Boulevard and Garfield Avenue. There, with N.D.L.O.N.’s help, she and a few others who live nearby have set up a sort of command post that they call the community defense corner. They have a canopy tent and literature tables. Each day, volunteers meet there from 6:30 a.m. until around 10 at night. Some of them are new to activism. Others have been protesting Trump since he was first inaugurated. They half-jokingly call Castillo their C.E.O. It stands, she says, for “controllo everything over here.”

The volunteers distribute know-your-rights fliers and pictures of ICE agents and vehicles that have been spotted in the area, along with the number of a hotline to report sightings. “Meet the Clown Squad fascists in your hood,” says one handout. There’s a pile of orange whistles to blow if you see something suspicious, and beaded friendship bracelets with the phone numbers of local immigrant rights groups.

When the volunteers get word of a raid, they rush over to make a commotion. Wearing a custom black “Grupo Auto Defensa” T-shirt, Jesus Simental, a middle-aged man who works delivering industrial equipment, told me, “They don’t want noise, and we bring the thunder.”

In the first Trump presidency, the resistance announced itself with the Women’s March, a gargantuan display of feminist fury at Trump’s improbable victory. No similar spectacle greeted his return. For those who abhor him, Trump’s re-election was devastating, but it wasn’t shocking. He’d won the popular vote, giving him a democratic legitimacy he didn’t have the first time around. The dominant mood in many blue precincts was despair rather than outrage. Organized opposition to Trump seemed, at least to some observers, to be dormant. A Politico headline shortly after the election announced, “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.”

While the exhaustion was real, it wasn’t the whole story. Anti-Trump forces may have been quieter than they were before, but they never stopped meeting and planning. As the administration exceeds many of its opponents’ worst fears, they’re becoming more visible.

Resistance in the second Trump term, however, looks a bit different than it did in the first. There’s less focus on big marches and rallies, and more on trying to make a concrete difference, often close to home. Think of the doctors sending abortion medication into states with prohibitions, or the protests in front of Tesla dealerships that helped push down the company’s stock price. “Resistance 2.0 is much more locally grounded and community embedded,” said Dana Fisher, an American University sociologist who studies protest movements.

The shift in tactics derives, in part, from a changing understanding of the crisis we face. During Trump’s first term, the resistance often put its trust in existing institutions. Indivisible, founded by two former Hill staffers, organized people by congressional district and taught them how to lobby their representatives. Some liberals made heroes of establishment figures like Robert Mueller, the special counsel who led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Newly awakened citizens showered the Democratic Party and big nonprofits like the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood with donations.

The assumption underlying the resistance then, said Fisher, was “that Trump was a blip,” elected by a freakish confluence of unlucky circumstances. His victory was seen as a mistake that future elections could fix. The resistance, she said, “was all about getting us to 2018, and all about trying to create the capacity to push back using the political system.”

This is, of course, a generalization; there was plenty of civil disobedience and left-wing radicalism during Trump’s first term, especially in the febrile summer of 2020. But looking back from the bleak vantage of 2025, it’s striking how optimistic many people were that some established power in American life — be it Congress, law enforcement, government bureaucrats or the media — could stop Trump from doing his worst.

As such faith has withered, the character of the resistance has changed. “We recognize that in a period of authoritarian breakthrough where there is a very rapid sprint to consolidate power, you cannot focus purely on the formal political avenues of representation,” said Leah Greenberg, one of Indivisible’s founders. “Getting out of this is going to require a symphony of defiance.”

Indivisible is running a campaign called “One Million Rising” aimed at training a million people in strategies of protest, noncooperation and civil disobedience, especially around mass deportation. The emphasis on ICE is in part simply a response to the sheer cruelty of Trump’s immigration regime. Far from prioritizing criminals, ICE, under pressure from Trump’s fanatical deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, seems desperate to round up as many people as possible. That includes people with American spouses and children who’ve been here for decades, those who’ve followed all the rules in seeking asylum, and even those with green cards.

In recent months viral videos have shown ICE agents breaking car windows, throwing people to the ground, and ripping parents away from their kids. Human Rights Watch has reported on the degrading treatment of immigrants in federal detention; at one Florida facility, men described being forced to eat “like dogs” with their hands shackled behind their backs. Venezuelan migrants sent by the United States to a megaprison in El Salvador have reportedly faced even worse conditions; Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist later freed as part of a prisoner exchange, described being tortured and sexually assaulted by guards.

Yet the campaign against ICE isn’t only about immigrants, because to many on the left, the agency is understood as the tip of the authoritarian spear. Trump and those close to him, after all, are openly fantasizing about stripping Americans of citizenship or sending them to the same El Salvador gulag that held Hernández Romero. Americans are being forced to acclimate to the once-unthinkable sight of masked men, wearing civilian clothes and refusing to show identification, grabbing people off the streets and throwing them in the back of vehicles. There have been reports of ICE assaulting and detaining U.S. citizens. 

At a Home Depot in Hollywood last month, agents reportedly tackled an American photographer who was recording a raid; he was held for more than 24 hours. (He’s now seeking $1 million in damages.)

“They have made a calculation that they can get away with a bunch of things as long as it’s framed as immigration enforcement,” said Greenberg. “That will then allow them to ratchet up authoritarian conditions for the rest of us.”

With ICE increasingly seen as the front line of a growing police state, people all over the country are looking for ways to stand up to it. In New York, ICE arrests seem to be concentrated in immigration courts, where agents have been snatching people after their asylum hearings, even when judges ask them to come back for further proceedings. Activists, in turn, are showing up at the courts to try to provide whatever support to immigrants they can. They hand out fliers — languages include Spanish, French, Urdu, Punjabi and Mandarin — informing immigrants of the few rights they have. They collect emergency contacts and immigration ID numbers so that when people are arrested, someone can inform their loved ones and track them through the detention system.

When the hearings are over, the volunteers try, often in vain, to escort the immigrants past intimidating groups of masked, armed ICE agents to the elevators and onto the street. That’s what New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, was doing when he was arrested in June.

A week after that arrest, Lander was back in immigration court with his wife and daughter. After shouting ICE agents took the husband of a very pregnant woman from Ecuador, Lander’s wife, Meg Barnette, spent an hour consoling her, then connected her to an immigrant rights nonprofit. When a woman from Liberia collapsed, panicked and sobbing, after hours of watching other immigrants being dragged away, Lander’s daughter held her baby girl.

The Liberian woman said she had a lawyer, but he didn’t show up, so Lander found one in the building to accompany her to her hearing. It’s hard to say if that’s the reason the woman was able to walk out of the court freely; at least to outsiders, there’s very little rhyme or reason as to who gets detained. “It’s like an awful game of roulette,” said Lander.

At a news conference later that day, Lander confessed to feeling he hadn’t done enough, and called on other New Yorkers to come to the courts, bear witness, and maybe engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. “We have to find ways to gum up the works of this hideous system,” he said.

Because ICE’s efforts in New York have largely revolved around the courts, that hideous system has been hidden from much of the public. It’s more conspicuous in Los Angeles, where Trump has treated the entire city like a hostile colony to be subdued.

This month, armed ICE agents backed by National Guard troops, some on horseback or in armored vehicles, stormed into the city’s MacArthur Park, forcing kids at a nearby summer camp to shelter inside. Bass was livid, but the administration made clear that she had little authority. “I don’t work for Karen Bass,” the Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, told Fox News. “Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News that roving ICE patrols had the right to stop people because of what they look like. “They don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them,” he said, based on “their location, their occupation, their physical appearance.” On July 11, a judge issued a temporary restraining order enjoining such racial profiling, but a widespread sense of dread and anxiety remained, especially in immigrant strongholds. With frightened people staying inside, several Angelenos told me that the eerie emptiness in their neighborhoods reminded them of the pandemic.

One thing Los Angeles has going for it, however, is a deep, established immigrant rights ecosystem. These groups, said Bass, “have prepared for this type of stuff in the past, though not as massive, not as egregious as this.” Indeed, she told me her office relies on activist networks to keep abreast of ICE activity in the city. “That’s how I learn about where raids are happening,” she said. “It’s not like we’re notified of anything.”

It’s a jarring statement about the relative impotence of city government, but also a testament to what an important role the activists are playing.

Since Castillo and her neighbors started their community defense corner, a few others have popped up around Pasadena, including outside a Home Depot on East Walnut Street. The stores have become a central site in the battle over mass deportations; day laborers often gather there to look for work, making Home Depots a common target for ICE. In response, groups of activists have, as they put it, “adopted” Home Depot locations, showing up in shifts to look out for immigration agents. On East Walnut Street, several of the day laborers told me they feel safer with the activists around. “There’s fear, but now we feel protected,” said one, knowing there will at least be a warning if ICE arrives.

While the community defense corner on East Walnut Street operates every day, extra people show up on Wednesdays, part of a weekly demonstration organized by a local librarian. Several of the protesters, mostly middle-aged and older women, told me they were part of local Indivisible chapters.

Alvarado, from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, was grateful for their presence. “The way we view it is that you stop fascism, you stop authoritarianism by protecting those that are at the end of the whip,” he said. “If you want to protect democracy, you protect the most vulnerable. That’s what we want people from all walks of life to understand. That’s why it’s beautiful to see the soccer moms, the teachers, getting it.”

Recently, said Alvarado, a woman from Van Nuys, a neighborhood about a half-hour away, visited the community defense corner on East Walnut Street, with plans to start something similar in her own area. He expects the model to spread further. In late October or early November, N.D.L.O.N. is planning a conference in Los Angeles to train people from all over the country in its strategies.

“Los Angeles was used as an experiment, and we want to share the things that we’ve done right, the things that we’ve done wrong,” he said. With ICE’s new cash infusion, said Alvarado, he expects similar crackdowns all over the country. People “need to know what to do, how to resist, how to fight back,” he said. “Peacefully, lawfully, orderly, but resist.”

There is, of course, only so much such resistance can accomplish in the face of a heavily armed, spectacularly well-funded and politically powerful deportation machine. More than 2,000 immigrants have been arrested in Los Angeles over the past month. Gochez, from Unión del Barrio, believes many more would have been taken without the work of groups like his, but there’s no way to quantify it.

Clearly, however, it matters that people are watching what ICE is doing. As Alvarado points out, a major reason public opinion is turning against Trump’s mass deportation campaign is the viral videos showing what it looks like in practice. Activist groups train people to record ICE activities wherever they see them, helping to capture both arrests and agents’ aggression toward civilian observers. “Men in masks, wearing civilian clothes, pulling guns against people who are exercising their rights while filming, that’s exactly what Americans don’t like to see,” he said.

Alvarado is a citizen now, but he grew up in El Salvador, fleeing the civil war with his brother when he was 22. The sight of masked men taking people away to sites unknown feels to him familiar. “This is a word I don’t take lightly, but people talk about disappearances,” he said of the situation in Los Angeles. “For now, it’s a stretch, I will say, but that’s how it starts. No right to due process. People just snatch you and put you in the vans. It’s something I’ve seen, and I know where that leads.”

To fight what’s coming, he believes, people will have to depend on each other. “Not by being violent and responding with more violence, but by building community and understanding,” he said.

If nothing else, neighbors banding together to weather an emergency is an antidote to helplessness and isolation. The three people volunteering at Orange Grove and Garfield when I was there — Castillo, Simental and Karen Skelly, who works as a personal and administrative assistant — hadn’t known one another before June. Now, said Simental, they’re intertwined like shoelaces: “We just all tied up together.” As we spoke, people kept walking up to take signs, fliers or bracelets, or just to say thank you. Passing drivers honked in appreciation. Simental told me about a local man who checks with him to make sure the coast is clear before he goes to the laundromat or the market.

“Everyone is protecting each other right now, and we can see it, we can feel it,” said Castillo. “I don’t know — we feel like the sheriffs in town.”

No Kings peaceful protests reawakened American Resistance to oppose cruel Donald Trump and Republican extremism

Opinion published in the Seattle Times by Michelle Goldberg

Trump reawakens the resistance

Before this Saturday’s enormous nationwide No Kings protests, 

Leah Greenberg, a founder of Indivisible, one of the groups behind the demonstrations, worried that too many people had lost faith in their collective ability to stop President Donald Trump from remaking America in his tawdry autocratic image. 

Her group realized that they needed “to reverse the sense that Trump is inevitable, that he’s going to win,” she told me.

When Trump first took office in 2017, it seemed to much of the country a shocking fluke caused by the democratically dubious Electoral College, and his stunned opponents rose up in furious rejection. Trump’s inauguration weekend set the tone for the years to follow: Turnout at the event itself was underwhelming, while millions of impassioned people attended the Women’s March, at the time the biggest single-day protest in American history. The energy of the resistance was so strong it reached into Trump’s own administration, where several officials devoted themselves to trying to curb his worst excesses.

This time around, there’s less hope and more resignation. In the last election Trump won the popular vote, and most demographics shifted rightward. The resistance has seemed exhausted and demoralized, and leaders in business, law and academia have adjusted accordingly. “One of the dominant differences between 2017, and 2025 is the degree of elite collapse in particular,” Greenberg said. “People who have power in different institutions that have some role in upholding democracy overwhelmingly, from November on, have been operating to secure their own safety and position under the Trump administration.”

Tech barons lined up to kiss the ring at Trump’s swearing-in. In response to Trump’s flimsy lawsuits, media conglomerates offered millions in what seemed like protection money. Law firms and college presidents buckled.

Such acquiescence, Greenberg thought, was rational if people assumed that Trumpism would triumph. The No Kings protests, held on the same day that Trump was hosting a military parade in Washington, were meant to challenge that assumption. They succeeded, with Trump’s help.

There were protests in more than 2,100 cities and towns, from New York and Los Angeles to tiny hamlets in Alaska. Trump almost certainly helped juice attendance by sending the military into Los Angeles; as Greenberg told me, about 500 of the events were organized just in the last week. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris estimated that 4 million to 6 million people turned out, which would make No Kings the largest day of protest America has ever seen. Even if his figures are inflated, the day left little question that the resistance to Trump has been reawakened.

The crowds in big cities were, unsurprisingly, huge, but local news outlets also reported thousands of people protesting in places like Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and in The Villages, the famously conservative Florida retirement community.

But what really made No Kings feel like a potential turning point was the juxtaposition with Trump’s anemic parade in Washington, which fell on his birthday, though it was ostensibly held to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary. Videos showed tanks squeaking down the street in front of viewing stands that were more than half empty. The Wall Street Journal, no left-wing rag, described the crowd as “sparse” and “subdued.” A display that was meant to be bombastic and menacing instead looked pathetic.

The contrast between the protests and the parade reflects a larger political reality. Trump returned to office much stronger than he’d been in his first term, but Americans seem to be remembering why they disliked him. A Quinnipiac poll from last week had his approval rating at 38%. In a survey conducted last Tuesday by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School, only 37% of respondents approved of the president’s handling of immigration enforcement. Some politicians and pundits assumed that Trump would benefit from deploying soldiers to Los Angeles, imagining that voters would see him as tough and decisive. So far, there’s little evidence of that.

Now Trump seems determined to heighten the cruelty and chaos that are repelling so many Americans. In response to complaints from farmers and owners of hotels and restaurants, his administration ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement  (ICE)to suspend many workplace raids. But to keep his mass deportation project alive — while punishing his political enemies — he’s ordered ICE to redouble its focus on big American cities, calling them, on his website Truth Social, the “core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State.” He’s seeking a nakedly political crackdown on urban America, designed to create more furious confrontations like those in Los Angeles.

Indeed, the more he feels his position weakening, the more he’s likely to lash out. This dynamic is terrible for the country, but it might also end up being bad for him. Trump will keep trying to tear this increasingly fragile and beleaguered nation apart. But as Saturday showed, if and when he does so, he may not end up with the biggest piece.

Michelle Goldberg has been a New York Times Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018, for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

Antisemitism is the world's oldest discrimination against Jews but criminalizing Palestinians will not eradicate this evil

I Can’t Believe Anyone Thinks Trump Actually Cares About Antisemitism: "It seems clear to me that if your presuppositions about Israel lead you to sanctify Trump, they bear rethinking."

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Michelle Goldberg. 

Why Don’t More Non-Jews Stand Up Against Antisemitism?

About a decade ago, conservatives would often denounce Muslim immigration on the grounds that it threatened Western progress on gay rights. This posture, sometimes called homonationalism, got its start in Europe, then made its way into American politics with Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign.

In his acceptance speech at the 2016, Republican National Convention, Trump decried the murder of 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., by the Islamist Omar Mateen. “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T. citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” he said. A month later he unveiled his proposal for the “extreme vetting” of Muslim immigrants, which would exclude anyone who failed to “embrace a tolerant American society.”

It should have been clear at the time that Trump’s putative concern for the safety of sexual minorities was simply a convenient wedge to try to divide the Democratic coalition. During his first term, he stacked the courts with judges who had opposed the rights of gay and transgender people and rolled back some of their workplace protections. Last year he used a growing backlash to trans rights to propel himself back to power, where his administration has been on a crusade to strip federal funding from almost anything with “L.G.B.T.” in it.

Trump’s treatment of L.G.B.T. people should have been a lesson to anyone tempted to take his campaign against antisemitism seriously, when it is screamingly obvious that it’s just a pretext to attack liberal institutions. Trump and his allies, after all, have mainstreamed antisemitism to an astonishing degree. Elon Musk, to whom Trump has outsourced the remaking of the federal government, is perhaps the world’s largest purveyor of antisemitic propaganda, thanks to his website X. (My “for you” feed recently served me a post of a winsome young woman speaking adoringly of “the H man,” or Hitler.) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, once said the unvaccinated had it worse than Anne Frank. Just last month Leo Terrell, the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force, shared a social media post by a prominent neo-Nazi gloating that Trump had the power to take away Senator Chuck Schumer’s “Jew card.” Trump himself, of course, dined with the Hitler-loving rapper Kanye West and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
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Yet I’ve been astonished to learn that some people believe that when the administration attacks academia for its purported antisemitism, it’s acting in good faith. Speaking on CNBC last week, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, cheered Trump’s attempt to exercise political control over Harvard, saying, “It is a good thing that President Trump is leaning in.” 

In a shocking interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, who served as a special envoy to combat antisemitism under Joe Biden, praised Trump’s assaults on academia and its attempts to deport some pro-Palestinian activists. While in some cases she thinks the administration has gone overboard, she suggested that those who don’t give the president credit for standing up for Jews suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome.”

It seems to me that there’s another sort of derangement at play here, rooted in the way Israel’s defenders conflate all but the mildest criticism of Israel with antisemitism. There have certainly been incidents of crude anti-Jewish bigotry in the protests that followed Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But too many backers of Israel can’t seem to imagine a reason besides antisemitic animus for impassioned opposition to Israel’s merciless war on Gaza. 

(Read the horrific descriptive first person report, "Hospitals in Ruins: A doctor witnesses what remains of a ravaged health0care system", by Clayton Dalton, in the April 28, 2025, The New Yorker. 

This leads them to vastly overstate the scale of antisemitism on the left and, in turn, to rationalize away Trump’s authoritarianism as he attempts to crush progressive redoubts.

As I write this, Israel has been blocking food, medicine and fuel from entering Gaza for more than 50 days. The U.N. World Food Program has delivered its last stocks of food to Gaza’s soup kitchens, which will shortly run out of supplies. “As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have reopened,” Secretary General António Guterres said this month. “Gaza is a killing field — and civilians are in an endless death loop.”

There are a couple of ways to interpret his words. One is that they’re true. The other is that, as a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign minister said, Guterres is “spreading slander against Israel,” just like all the protesters, many of them Jewish, now being punished at the administration’s behest. 

In this view, escalating opposition to Israel can be understood only as the product of a kind of antisemitic conspiracy, one so vast and entrenched that extreme measures might be needed to thwart it. Many Jews, said Lipstadt, “disappointed by how universities have behaved since Oct. 7,” are relieved to see “a strong — to use Passover terminology — a strong hand being used.” In the Exodus narrative, the “strong hand” belongs to God. In Lipstadt’s analogy, then, Trump is an agent of the divine. (IDTS ❗ If Trump really cared about the Jews, he would not have allowed the autobiography of Adolf Hitler to remain in the U.S. Naval Academy library while he purged many other books.)

It seems clear to me that if your presuppositions about Israel lead you to sanctify Trump, they bear rethinking. But even Jews who continue to delight in Trump’s animosity toward the Palestinians should be aware of the bargain they’re making (with the devil 😈. 

In the right-wing nationalist movement that Trump leads, gutter antisemitism is often considered a cheeky transgression and a sign of in-group belonging. Holocaust denial has started cropping up on major podcasts like Tucker Carlson’s and Joe Rogan’s. 

A decade ago, it served Trump to align himself with gay rights; now his administration either bans or discourages the mere use of the word “gay” or the abbreviation “L.G.B.T.” I’m not sure why anyone, let alone a scholar of the Holocaust, thinks Jews will fare better.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

P.S. Maine Writer opinion:  Benjamin Netanyahu is the person  responsible for the rise in antisemitism.  He was sleeping on October 7 when the Hamas brutally attacked Isreal and now his inability to stop the torture of genertions of Palistinians has passed the point of no moral return, thereby creating a new Holocaust. 

Grieving the DonOLD Trump election

We Can Fight Later. But, now is the time to mourn

Echo editoral opinion published by Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. 

When Donald Trump won the first time, I spoke to a journalist friend in Turkey to commiserate. 

At the time, I told her about all the protests that were planned, and she gently tried to prepare me for disappointment.

She and her friends had protested Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he was prime minister, she said. But in time, the protests subsided, and life within a country of diminishing freedoms ground on. This conversation stayed in my mind throughout the Trump presidency as a warning against letting down our guard. When Trump was finally ejected from the White House, I felt patriotic pride in the endurance of the anti-Trump resistance, which had never for a moment accepted his authoritarian grotesquerie as our new normal.

It won’t be that way this time. Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.

So I expect the next few months to be a period of mourning rather than defiance. My own instinct — which conflicts with the demands of my job — is to retreat into my family, to look for solace in time with friends, in theater and in novels, to block out the humiliating truth about what my country has decided to become. 

On Wednesday morning I returned to an essay from The New York Review of Books published in 2019, about the Russian term “vnutrennaya emigratsia,” or internal emigration, a deliberate embrace of one’s own alienation. 

“For many Russian authors and artists for centuries, the idea of ‘turning inward’ and living oblivious of the political concerns of the moment has been a vital skill and even an art form,” wrote Viv Groskop. It’s a skill, I suspect, that many of us will at least temporarily try to cultivate to avoid going completely insane.

But, eventually, mourning either starts to fade or curdles into depression and despair. When and if it does, whatever resistance emerges to the new MAGA will differ from what came before.

Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism, of rendering him an aberration. What’s left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us. There’s no point in protesting his inauguration, as millions did in 2017. But hopefully we will take to the streets if his forces come into our neighborhoods to drag migrant families away. We will need to strengthen the networks that help women in red states get abortions, especially if Trump’s Justice Department cracks down on the mailing of abortion pills or his F.D.A. withdraws approval of them. In state and local elections, I’ll want to know how candidates promise to protect us from the MAGA movement’s threats to reshape our public health systems and our schools.

In the longer term, we’ll need liberal politics that are about more than just fending off the right. Trump, after all, is a particularly ghastly manifestation of historical forces that are reshaping politics all over the Western world, elevating nationalist leaders such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and powering the growth of parties like the right-wing Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally. You can blame Kamala Harris for spending too much time courting moderate Republican women, or for the vagueness of her “opportunity economy” rhetoric. But few politicians anywhere have figured out how to hold together a coalition that includes both affluent, educated, cosmopolitan elites and blue-collar voters who prize tradition and social stability. Maybe doing so is no longer possible, but at the very least, it will require a plausible vision of what a thriving progressive society looks like.

Ultimately, Trump’s one consistent feature is his incompetence. 

If history is any guide, many of those incompetencies he brings into government will come to despise him. Trump will not give people the economic relief they’re craving. If he follows through on his plans for universal tariffs, economists expect higher inflation. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, dreaming of imposing aggressive austerity on the federal government, has said that Americans will have to endure “some temporary hardship.” We saw, with the COVID pandemic, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it. He could even end up discrediting bombastic right-wing nationalism the way George W. Bush — whose re-election also broke my heart — discredited neoconservatism.

The question, if and when that happens, is how much of our system will still be standing, and whether Trump’s opponents have built an alternative that can restore to people a sense of dignity and optimism. That will be the work of the next four years — saving what we can ad trying to imagine a tolerable future. For now, though, all I can do is grieve. 

Donald Trump and the evangelicals personality cult

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Michelle Goldberg*:

Tim Alberta’s recent book about the Christian nationalist takeover of American evangelicalism, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” is full of preachers and activists on the religious right expressing sheepish second thoughts about their prostration before Donald Trump. 

Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement.

Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor at First Baptist Dallas — whom Texas Monthly once called “Trump’s apostle” 👿 for his slavish Trump boosterism — admitted to Alberta in 2021, that turning himself into a politician’s theological hype man may have compromised his spiritual mission. “I had that internal conversation with myself — and I guess with God, too — about, you know, when do you cross the line?” he said, allowing that the line had, “perhaps,” been crossed.

Militant Christian Nationalists are victims of the Trump personality cult.

Such qualms grew more vocal after voter revulsion toward MAGA candidates cost Republicans their prophesied red wave in 2022. 

Mike Evans, a former member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, described, in an essay he sent to The Washington Post, leaving a Trump rally “in tears because I saw Bible believers glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, enthused to Alberta about the way Trump had punched “the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around,” by which he presumably meant American liberals. But, Perkins said, “The challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge sometimes.” Perkins was clearly rooting for Ron DeSantis, who represented the shining hope of a post-Trump religious right.

But there’s not going to be a post-Trump religious right — at least, not anytime soon. Evangelical leaders who started their alliance with Trump on a transactional basis, then grew giddy with their proximity to power, have now seen MAGA devour their movement whole.

Absent the sort of miracle that would make me reconsider my own lifelong atheism, Trump is going to win Iowa’s caucuses on Monday; the only real question is by how much. 

Iowa tends to give its imprimatur to the Republican candidate who most connects with religious conservatives: George W. Bush in 2000, and 2004, Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, Ted Cruz in 2016. 

But this year, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, Trump leads his nearest Republican rivals by more than 30 points.

“People think it’s all a good-and-evil election,” and therefore “we need a strongman — that it’s so serious we can’t play around anymore with a nice guy,” Tim Lubinus, executive director of Iowa’s Baptist convention, told The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

Like many influential evangelicals in Iowa, Lubinus wants to see an alternative to Trump. So does Bob Vander Plaats, the head of a Christian activist group called the Family Leader, who until recently was seen as a kingmaker in the state. He’s endorsed DeSantis, as has the evangelical Iowa talk show host Steve Deace. (Iowa’s culture-warring governor, Kim Reynolds, has also endorsed DeSantis; she recently used a private social media account to contrast a photo of him and his wholesome family with a picture of Trump surrounded by glamorous women at a New Year’s Eve party.) Vander Plaats has been particularly critical of Trump for suggesting that Florida’s six-week abortion ban is “too harsh.”

But if the polls are right, Iowa’s evangelicals don’t care what their ostensible leaders think. Trump’s rise has been accompanied by a collapse in trust in many American institutions once valued by the right, including the F.B.I. and the military, and that loss of faith extends to many religious authorities. As Alberta, the son of a conservative evangelical pastor, documented, preachers who’ve balked at parts of the MAGA agenda have been abandoned by many of their congregants.

“The forces of political identity and nationalist idolatry — long latent, now fully unleashed in the form of Trumpism — were destroying the evangelical church,” wrote Alberta in his book. All over the country, he reported, “pastors had walked away from the ministry. Congregations had been shattered by infighting. 

Collective faith communities and individual relationships had been wrecked.”

From this wreckage has emerged a version of evangelicalism that sometimes seems like a brand-new religion, with Trump at the center of it. As Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported in The New York Times this week, in Iowa, the percentage of people tied to a congregation fell by almost 13 percent from 2010 to 2020, one of the sharpest declines in the country. “As ties to church communities have weakened, the church leaders who once rallied the faithful behind causes and candidates have lost influence,” they wrote. “A new class of thought leaders has filled the gap: social media personalities and podcasters, once-fringe prophetic preachers and politicians.” 

Trump captured the spirit of this movement when he shared a video on his Truth Social site titled, “God Made Trump.” 😢😟😕

There’s no way to know if evangelical leaders could have prevented this devolution of their faith by joining together to stand up to Trump before he became such a mythic figure. But now, more than seven years into their deal with the devil, it’s probably too late.

The power of Christian-right operatives like Vander Plaats came from their ability to move their followers, but Trump has taken that power away from them, absorbing it into himself. Vander Plaats has been reduced to arguing, as he did in a Des Moines Register essay this week, that Iowans should choose DeSantis because it would position him to protect Trump from his persecutors. “A DeSantis presidency ensures justice for Trump,” Vander Plaats wrote.

Those convinced that Trump is touched by divinity, however, are unlikely to think he needs another politician to shield him. “I think they are doing the same thing they did to Jesus on the cross,” one Christian voter told The Associated Press, speaking of Trump’s manifold legal troubles. It doesn’t matter what evangelical elites say. Trump’s acolytes want to see him rise again.

*Michelle Goldberg has been a NYTimes Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018, for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

Ukraine and Turkey - Trump's failed foreign policy in stereo

Maine Writer - Where is the Secretary of State Pompeo, who is a West Point Army graduate, when the US Military is now sickened by Trump's failed foreign policy?  

Echo opinion column published in The New York Times, by Michelle Goldberg

‘The Beacon Has Gone Out’: What Trump and Giuliani Have Wrought:  Once upon a time, we spread ideals of democracy and rule of law. Now? We send (crazy!) Rudy.

KIEV, Ukraine — In 2014, Ukraine’s wildly corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia after mass protests on the Maidan, Kiev’s central square. During what Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity, police snipers killed dozens of demonstrators. 

In the revolution’s aftermath, a number of young idealists decided to plunge into politics, hoping to reform their troubled country from the inside. One of them was Serhiy Leshchenko, at the time perhaps the country’s most famous investigative journalist.

The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama had encouraged Leshchenko and some of his friends to run for Parliament. He’d met Leshchenko in 2013, when the journalist took part in a three-week summer course run by Fukuyama at Stanford that aims to teach activists from around the world about building democratic institutions. “After the Maidan revolution, I thought that it was particularly important that all these people in civil society actually go into the government,” Fukuyama said.

Many of them did. That October, Leshchenko, a lanky, bearded hipster with a passion for rave culture, became part of a cadre of Western-oriented newcomers elected to Parliament, even as he continued to work as a journalist exposing corruption. This year, after Volodymyr Zelensky won the presidential election, Leshchenko advised him during the transition.

Then Rudy Giuliani began attacking Leshchenko as a conspirator against America.

In 2016, Leshchenko had helped expose the “black ledger,” an accounting book of hundreds of pages found in Yanukovych’s former party headquarters. Among its many entries, it showed $12.7 million in secret payments to Paul Manafort. At the time, Manafort was running Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but before that, he was one of Yanukovych’s most important advisers.

One of the reasons Manafort is in federal prison is that he failed to disclose or pay taxes on millions of dollars from Ukraine. But if you believe Giuliani, the black ledger was part of a plot to damage Trump.

Paul Manafort was Donald Trump's campaign manager.

During a Fox News appearance on May 10, Giuliani described the ledger as a “falsely created book” and Leshchenko as part of a group of “enemies of the president, in some cases enemies of the United States.” Last month, in an epic, ranting interview on CNN, he accused Ukraine’s leading anti-corruption organization, the Anti-Corruption Action Center, or AntAC, of developing “all of the dirty information that ended up being a false document that was created in order to incriminate Manafort.”

A tour guide at the opulent former home of Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president who fled to Russia after the Maidan protests. CreditLena Mucha for The New York Times

In Giuliani’s fevered alternative reality, Ukraine’s most stalwart foes of corruption are actually corruption’s embodiment. Deeply compromised figures with vendettas against the activists — particularly the ex-prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko

This addled, through-the-looking glass fantasy came to drive American foreign policy in Ukraine. Trump withdrew the American ambassador to the country, Marie Yovanovitch, whom reformers saw as their champion. He withheld military aid that Ukraine desperately needed, while asking Zelensky to do him a “favor” and investigate deranged fictions about Ukrainian interference in American elections, as well as Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Given how much Ukraine depends on American support, Giuliani’s smears made it politically impossible for Leshchenko, who left Parliament in August, to continue advising Zelensky. 

Now, with Ukraine at the center of a world-historical international scandal, he is stupefied to find himself defamed by powerful forces in the United States, once the world’s strongest backer of those fighting for democracy in his country.

“I could imagine that maybe some Ukrainian prosecutors will create a fake case against me, or some criminals will attack me, or I could be attacked by trolls on social media,” Leshchenko told me when I met him in a Kiev cafe. “But I never imagined before that my real problems will appear because of the statement of the personal attorney of the American president.”

If America can be said to have a foreign policy at this debased stage of the Trump administration, it mostly consists of sucking up to strongmen while betraying everyone who ever believed in America’s putative ideals. Trump has given Turkey his blessing to assault the Syrian Kurds, America’s crucial allies against ISIS. In June, he reportedly promised China that he wouldn’t speak out in favor of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, some of whom have been carrying American flags, as long as trade talks progressed.

Here in Ukraine, a country locked in a proxy war with Russia, coping with a deluge of disinformation and propaganda and struggling to transcend a history of corruption, reformers are trying to figure out what it means when the American president sides against them.

Pro-Western reformers, the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko told me, had seen the United States as a “a perfect democracy functioning very well,” with an admirable system of checks and balances. “And now this image is crumbling and that’s very dangerous.”

Ukrainians understand that America, like any other country, generally acts from self-interest rather than high principle. They are not naive. But, there was a time when America at least viewed the projection of democratic values as being in its self-interest. That gave liberals in countries like Ukraine leverage against recalcitrant officials.

“The majority of the reforms, especially on anti-corruption, were passed because there was a very strong demand from civil society, and there was the I.M.F. and the U.S. Embassy pushing it hard,” said Oleksandra Ustinova, a former board member of AntAC who was elected to Parliament this year.

The U.S. also provided a degree of protection to local activists and journalists. When Lutsenko was prosecutor general in Ukraine — a position roughly equivalent to our attorney general — he would, said Ustinova, harass anti-corruption campaigners with spurious criminal investigations. “The U.S. ambassador and the E.U. ambassador were going out publicly saying you cannot do this,” Ustinova said.

Now, that’s all changed. As The New York Times reported, after Trump recalled the U.S. ambassador, Lutsenko gloated to the head of AntAC that he had “eliminated your roof,” using Russian mafia slang for guardian.

“We’ve been exporting our corruption to them, rather than trying to export good governance,” said Fukuyama.

When he said that, Fukuyama may not have known how right he was. A few hours after I met Leshchenko, news broke that two Ukrainian-born clients of Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, had been arrested on charges of campaign finance crimes as they were preparing to leave the United States with one-way tickets.

According to an indictment, the two “sought to advance their personal financial interests and the political interests of at least one Ukrainian government official with whom they were working.” (In one of those preposterously on-the-nose details that make the Trump era feel like a computer simulation on the fritz, Parnas had a company called Fraud Guarantee.)

As soon as news of the indictment broke, I messaged Leshchenko, who guessed that the unnamed Ukrainian official was Lutsenko. It was a natural assumption; it had already been reported that Parnas and Fruman connected Giuliani with Lutsenko, who had been feeding Trump’s lawyer conspiracy theories about the journalist, the former American ambassador and Joe Biden.

Sure enough, on Saturday NBC News reported that Lutsenko was the official in the indictment. Yovanovitch might have been referring to Lutsenko when she said, in her Friday congressional testimony, that “individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”

Thanks to Giuliani’s escapades, the domestic grudges of a crooked Ukrainian prosecutor have blossomed into a scandal that’s likely to lead to the impeachment of an American president. Federal prosecutors are now investigating whether Giuliani himself broke the law.

Lutsenko has since left Ukraine for London, and Ukrainian authorities have opened a criminal case against him for allegedly abusing his authority in an unrelated matter. In a recent interview, he told reporters for The Times that in speaking to Giuliani, he sought to tell Trump’s lawyer what he wanted to hear. “I understood very well what would interest them,” Lutsenko said, adding, “I have 23 years in politics.”

He should be seen as wholly discredited, but in our polarized, frenzied media environment, lies never really go away. Trump’s defenders will continue to take Lutsenko’s stories at face value. Worse, long after America has forgotten them, these slanders, which Trump and Giuliani magnified to gargantuan scale, will linger in Ukraine, undermining the people our country once sought to help.

“This smear campaign circulates everywhere: in American media, then in Ukrainian media,” said Leshchenko. Those in Ukraine who want impunity for corruption, he said, can now say, “Look at these anti-corruption activists and journalists and members of Parliament. They are not welcome in the U.S., so don’t listen to them. So it suppresses our reputation here in Ukraine as well.”

Ukrainians are no strangers to post-truth politics. The first time I ever heard the term “fake news” was in 2015, when I learned about the Ukrainian fact-checking organization StopFake. It was created by a group of journalists to push back against the torrents of Russian disinformation sowing chaos in the country’s politics. At the time, it would have been hard to imagine that the United States would soon join Russia as a source of weaponized untruth in Ukraine.
“This is very new, because now it seems it’s not only Russia influencing Ukrainian politics, but Ukraine is also influencing the U.S., and things happening in the U.S. are greatly influencing Ukraine,” Yevhen Fedchenko, one of StopFake’s founders, told me. “So it becomes much more complicated.”

Here’s what’s not complicated. Throughout our history, America has committed many sins against democracy around the world, but we used to be on the right side in Ukraine. Not anymore. As one former U.S. diplomat said to me recently, “The beacon has gone out.” We’re with the oligarchs now.