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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The anti-Democrat]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Legal filings submitted by James Comey this week argue that the Trump administration has subjected the former FBI director to a vindictive and meritless prosecution. What stands out is how little effort the president put into pretending this is not the case.

President Trump first branded Comey a criminal more than eight years ago. In 2017, he took the then-shocking step of firing Comey before the expiration of his 10-year term. The following year, Trump wrote a Twitter post claiming, “James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did—until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted.”

Hampered by career public servants and political appointees who followed traditional democratic norms (refusing to prosecute people merely because the president hates them), Trump was unable to make good on this threat and settled mostly for tweeting out demands that Comey be imprisoned. During his second term, however, Trump has sought to bring criminal charges against apparently anybody who defies or displeases him. He has flexed this power by repeating his claims that Comey was a “dirty cop” who deserved prison, ordering the Justice Department to charge him with crimes, and orchestrating the entire plot in public view.

[Quinta Jurecic: The Comey indictment is an embarrassment]

Last year, Trump reportedly pressured the Justice Department to charge Comey. When the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, resigned rather than bring a meritless case, Trump’s Justice Department replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, an inexperienced Trump loyalist, who brought an indictment for lying to Congress (an allegation that was different from his first-term claims that Comey had leaked classified material). It was shortly dismissed when a judge found that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed.

Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring new charges and fired her for, among other reasons, failing to accomplish the task. He then replaced Bondi with another loyalist, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who duly produced another indictment, this time for the “crime” of threatening the president’s life by posting an Instagram photo of seashells on the beach spelling out “86 47.” Trump showed Blanche the man, and Blanche found the crime.

When Comey’s message appeared, Trump’s supporters depicted it as an endorsement of his murder, rather than his removal. Comey immediately removed the post and clarified his intentions, stating he opposed political violence. Trump has nevertheless insisted that “86,” a restaurant shorthand for canceling an order or ejecting a customer that has taken on a general meaning “to get rid of or discard,” must imply a call for presidential assassination.

Even if this implausible interpretation were correct, Comey’s message would not be a crime. Under the Supreme Court’s long-standing interpretation of the First Amendment, advocating violence against a public official, though morally reprehensible, is protected speech, as long as it does not constitute a specific incitement to immediate action. That is one reason that Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech urging an angry and armed crowd to “fight like hell” to overturn the election result could not be prosecuted.

The current charge against Comey, in short, relies on a tendentious interpretation of an innocuous term combined with a disregard for the First Amendment in order to gin up charges against a man Trump has been targeting openly for nearly a decade.

Although Trump has done little to disguise his intentions, it would be untrue to say he put zero effort into the pretense. He did attempt to keep one of his instructions to Bondi private—a September 20, 2025, message on Truth Social to his then–attorney general stating, “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,’” and concluding, “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

However, Trump mistakenly posted this direct message to his public account, making it visible to all of his followers.

[Quinta Jurecic: The ‘presumption of regularity’ is evaporating]

Trump’s incompetence throughout this vendetta against Comey is perhaps its most welcome aspect. The episode reveals the formidable powers available to a president to target his enemies. Comey’s filing alleges that, in addition to Trump’s previously known directives to the Justice Department to prosecute his target, the president used the Secret Service to investigate him.

The agency, which is charged with protecting the president, not only began following Comey, but tracked his location through his phone. This step legally requires law enforcement to believe there is “an imminent threat to life or limb,” which Comey’s retracted seashell message obviously did not constitute.

One Secret Service official wrote in a memo, MS NOW reports, “At the time we did not believe anyone’s life was in danger and legally it was a bad idea.” But after a top Justice Department official demanded this action, the Secret Service relented. The difference between security agencies in democracies and secret-police forces is that the former have to obey laws and not just follow the whims of the head of state. The Secret Service’s actual procedures turn out to be more like guidelines that can be discarded if the president is sufficiently angry—which, from the standpoint of safeguarding democracy, constitutes a fairly concerning loophole.

Not for the first time, the president’s clumsiness is likely to negate his malevolence, though not without considerable cost, in time and money, to Comey. Yet Trump’s incompetence is also unsettling. This president may be succeeded by someone who equals Trump in his eagerness to wield the office’s powers and in his lack of scruples, but exceeds him in intelligence and discipline. Future plots to imprison a critic of the MAGA movement might not be undermined by a loudmouth president who can’t help but give away the scheme.

Abdul El-Sayed is running for Senate as a Democrat in Michigan, where he is waging a close and bitter contest against Representative Haley Stevens in a primary that will be held on Tuesday. Were he to win, and then go on to defeat Mike Rogers, the presumed Republican candidate, El-Sayed would become the most fervently anti-Zionist senator. “If you want your politics dictated to you by AIPAC or Chuck Schumer, then I’m not your guy,” he said during a debate with Stevens.

El-Sayed depicts Israel and its American supporters as the primary authors of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. He also blames Israel and AIPAC for a wide array of domestic social problems. “We should be using our tax dollars here to invest in health care here and education here, rather than sending it over there to buy bombs and tanks that get used to drive apartheid and genocide there,” he said to WDET, Detroit’s public-radio station. El-Sayed has barely acknowledged the possibility that Stevens is a sentient being with individual agency, describing her as “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.”

Asked recently on CNN if he thought there were any reasons other than money that someone might have a different view on Israel, he said, “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights.” Asked if a progressive could also be a Zionist, he replied, “Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.”

The magnitude of the shift in Democratic politics that El-Sayed’s election would create has not quite registered with the party’s voters. In part this is because New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also a fervent anti-Zionist, attracted so much attention and controversy in his campaign last year that El-Sayed’s run feels like a tamer sequel. In reality, however, not only was Mamdani running in a far different locale (an overwhelmingly Democratic city rather than a purple state), but he also, with rare exceptions, focused on affordability, not on Israel. It was his opponents who sounded obsessed with Israel.

[Listen: A battle for the future of the Democratic Party]

El-Sayed’s campaign is currently the left’s preeminent cause, held up as key proof that an obsessively anti-Zionist left-wing politics can win outside of blue enclaves. Michigan voted twice for Donald Trump. Should El-Sayed prevail, he would immediately open the door for a new wave of like-minded candidates to follow behind him. “You put one ogre on a pike,” El-Sayed told donors in a Zoom call, according to Politico, apparently referring to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, “and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different.”

But if El-Sayed’s anti-Zionism is obsessive, it is not a singular obsession. He talks about the Israel lobby the way he talks on the stump about nearly any other political issue. The El-Sayed formula is to describe just about any policy as a conspiracy by a corporate entity or wealthy cabal to enrich itself at the expense of the people. The villains in his stories are motivated by pure greed, and trade-offs do not exist.

This is a rhetorical style that has long existed on the populist left. The trouble is that, when you apply it to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and especially to the question of why some Americans do not share El-Sayed’s position on it, his approach grows paranoid and menacing.

Populists believe, almost as an article of faith, that Democrats can win working-class voters by moving left on economic policy. El-Sayed has aligned himself with the Democratic Party’s Bernie Sanders–and–Elizabeth Warren wing, endorsing Medicare for All, promising to end Citizens United, supporting targeted tariffs, emphasizing the evils of corporate monopolies, and generally making the answer to every political question a blunt attack on billionaire greed. When applied to ordinary problems, this rhetorical mode yields oversimplistic but crowd-pleasing answers. “Why don’t our schools get the funding that they deserve? Well, because there’s not a lobby for schools. Kids don’t have a corporate PAC,” El-Sayed says, in a typical piece of campaign rhetoric. In truth, there is a powerful lobby for school funding: teachers’ unions. The main barrier to more spending on schools is not the absence of lobbying; it’s that people don’t like paying taxes.

After Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s popular Democratic governor, endorsed Stevens last week, El-Sayed explained the choice as the inevitable product of the two women’s benefactors. “Those who have taken corporate money for most of their careers tend to stick together,” he said.

When this populist analysis is extended to Israel, it takes on an even more conspiratorial edge. El-Sayed’s efforts to weave a seamless narrative connecting AIPAC to his struggle against wealthy interests has built the Israel lobby into an almost-supernatural force controlling American politics behind the scenes.

Graham Platner—who was running competitively in polls against Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, before scandals overtook him—preceded El-Sayed as the movement’s cause célèbre. He similarly depicted himself as the tribune of the people fighting a twilight struggle against oligarchs. When reporters began to unearth evidence of questionable behavior, his supporters quickly concluded that his twin struggles against oligarchy and Zionism—perhaps it was a single struggle—had made him a target.

“The thing about this smear campaign is that it’s obvious,” wrote the American Economic Liberties Project researcher Matt Stoller on X. “Graham Platner wants to eliminate the power of billionaires, and wants to end our alliance with Israel. That’s all these slurs are about, not what he did or who he is.” The podcaster Krystal Ball posited a “clear double standard at play with Platner reporting because he is anti-zionist and anti-oligarch.” Sam Haselby, a historian and an author, wrote on X, “Let’s be serious. They don’t like Platner because he’s an economic populist. They have no trouble with vastly worse sexual ethics as long as one is pro-billionaire and pro Israel.”

The basis for these charges is a bit cracked. But it follows logically from the populist analysis of the situation. If all resistance that left-wing candidates face is the work of a shadowy moneyed interest, and fighting Israel is the left’s most deeply felt cause, then it stands to reason that Israel, or its lobbyists, are behind every setback the movement encounters. Earlier this month, El-Sayed casually dismissed a poll showing Stevens leading him by a point by telling MS NOW, “That poll seems to be funded by AIPAC,” which is not true.

Pro-Israel lobbying does play an important role in domestic politics, and it does often include spurious charges of anti-Semitism to discredit legitimate critiques of Israel. Aid to Israel is not, however, a meaningful constraint on American domestic spending, given that aid to Israel accounts for less than one tenth of 1 percent of the federal budget. The populists are not imagining that they are fighting a well-funded lobby. What they are imagining is that this lobby is the hidden force behind all of the opposition they face.

I received a small taste of this political style earlier this spring, when I wrote an article criticizing El-Sayed’s claim that he can adopt unpopular left-wing positions without jeopardizing his ability to win a general election. The small left-wing magazine Current Affairs asked him to respond the next month, and he said, “I really appreciate the question, because I really want us to step back and ask a couple of very basic points about how politics actually work, not from the Atlantic desk where you have a vested interest in sustaining a system that whitewashes neoliberal ideas and continues to tell us the best use of our money is to subsidize big corporations or a foreign government.”

[Jonathan Chait: What Abdul El-Sayed doesn’t get about Trump]

The “foreign government” he refers to is presumably Israel. El-Sayed was not merely disputing the merits of my beliefs (which he mischaracterized—I have argued against aid to Israel, and I have no idea which big corporations he thinks I wish to subsidize). He accused me of representing a “vested interest” in these policies. His campaign declined to respond to multiple emails requesting clarification as to the nature of this alleged vested interest.

The combination of populism and anti-Zionism has introduced a strain of political rhetoric that heretofore has had little place within the Democratic Party. Anybody who has observed the Republican Party in the Trump era, however, would recognize the combination of populist demagoguery and edgelord bullying. Informing your supporters that their problems are the result of a shadowy cabal of billionaire conspirators tends to unleash passions that can be difficult to control. El-Sayed and Trump share a gleeful lack of concern for the consequences.

Although the comparison may sound like an insult, it’s one El-Sayed has invited himself. Earlier this year, he held a campaign event with Hasan Piker, a popular streamer and enthusiast for left-wing authoritarian regimes. When reporters questioned his choice of allies, El-Sayed replied, “If perfectly inoffensive won elections, then Donald Trump would never have been President.” Democrats now have to decide whether they think they can win elections this way, and whether they want to.