None of it worked, and Trump returned to the Oval Office in January 2025 with a stronger mandate. Now, if the polls prove correct and Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate, the question is whether they can finally achieve what they couldn’t pull off in those years. The answer is, likely, no: despite the unusually personal nature of his rule, Trump has, in fact, institutionalized his populist revolt.

An ambitious, energetic cadre of MAGA activists who’ve learned the ways of power stand between establishment Democrats and the dream of rolling back the revolution.

The desire for turning the clock back to 2014 is there, to be sure. Witness the recent remarks from Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.). Speaking earlier this month at the University of Chicago, the former CIA and Pentagon bureaucrat offered a revealing glimpse into the Democratic establishment’s plans for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. 

Asked how Democrats should use congressional power if they regain control after the midterms, Slotkin proposed pursuing a handful of high-profile investigations into Trump administration officials. The point, Slotkin explained, was not merely to hold officials accountable for alleged wrongdoing, but to send a stern message to the next generation of Trumpian staffers. She imagined a prospective staffer thinking to himself, as she put it, “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.” She concluded: “I want that deterrence message sent.”

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Following Republican backlash, Slotkin backtracked on her statement, insisting she meant investigations into corruption and illegal conduct. But her national-security background makes her explanation unconvincing. Deterrence has a specific meaning in her world. It involves convincing an adversary that the costs of an action outweigh its benefits. To operationalize this approach requires making painful examples of a handful of targets to influence a broader group. 

Slotkin’s comments ultimately underscored a growing sense of panic within the Democratic establishment, among its career politicians, unelected Washington bureaucrats, and networks of NGOs and corporate interests pushed out of power by the Trump administration. They fear that the MAGA revolution has the potential to become an enduring force in American politics that could outlast Trump himself. And, perhaps most sobering of all, Slotkin’s comments appear to indirectly acknowledge that establishment Democrats have no legitimate political means of stopping it.

And they aren’t wrong.

Trump and the MAGA movement represented a powerful rejection of the overgrowth and abuses associated with the postwar liberal order. The order’s large governing elite had grown increasingly detached from the American people as it consolidated more power across the federal bureaucracy, universities, media, and other major American institutions, using authority for purposes beyond the desires of the ordinary citizen. Undoing this order would require Trump to challenge the very institutions through which the center-Left, especially, had exercised power for decades. The center-Left establishment, in turn, understood the threat from the start of his first presidency.

Early on, Trump’s personality made it easy to cast him as a villain. Over the course of a decade, establishment forces built a powerful movement among Democratic voters, particularly older and college-educated female voters, centered on opposition to Trump’s crass and bombastic style. From this emerged a broader narrative portraying Trump as an authoritarian whose presidency threatened American democracy itself, increasingly conflating the establishment’s loss of political power with an attack on the nation’s democratic norms and institutions. 

To be sure, Trump at times went out of his way to vindicate this picture of him, most notably in his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election. Even so, the narrative failed to stop his movement. More importantly, the playbook is becoming increasingly unsuitable for a political struggle that must continue after he leaves office. 

With two years remaining in Trump’s presidency, establishment Democrats will need a new antagonist and a new pretext to continue clawing back institutional power. But the problem confronting them, as with much of the postwar Western liberal establishment, is twofold: they have lost their grasp on political reality, choosing instead to inhabit a powerful fiction of their own making; and consequently, they have become incapable of formulating a convincing strategy for returning to power through democratic means. The victories for Democrats expected in the upcoming midterms, after all, come not from the party’s establishment, but from insurgent forces in both its populist and radical Left. 

It is this dangerous combination of political desperation and an inability to accept her side’s dispossession by American voters that helps explain Slotkin’s apparent willingness to use the threat of investigations to intimidate and deter the next generation of conservatives from entering government.

Her desire to send a deterrence message may also reflect an understanding among Democrats that, unlike during his first administration, when Trump often found himself surrounded by officials who disagreed with his political goals, his second has brought into Washington a cohort of conservatives committed to translating MAGA’s ideological principles into government policy. Among them are Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, both of whom sharply criticized Trump during his first presidential campaign in 2016 but have since become leading figures in his administration and potential successors to his political movement. Their ambitions extend beyond serving the president. They are seeking to change how the federal government operates, who exercises authority within it, and how much power its agencies should possess. The significance of this development is not merely that Trump has found more loyal officials this time around, but that they are gaining the experience, building the networks, and developing the institutional knowledge necessary to continue the political project after he leaves office.

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Ultimately, what we are witnessing is not the crisis of American democracy feared by establishment Democrats, but the fading of the postwar liberal governing order and the administrative state that expanded under it for the better part of a century. Their unwillingness to recognize the distinction is perhaps understandable given how pervasive their authority became. For decades, the political and professional class operating within Washington’s institutions came to regard its own position as an essential feature of American government, rather than a temporary claim to political authority. The possibility that this arrangement might be challenged, or even permanently altered, is consequently difficult for them to separate from the idea of a constitutional or democratic crisis.

What makes their loss of power particularly painful for members of the establishment is that MAGA isn’t simply seeking to replace their class with another of equal size. Its ideological ambitions include reducing the federal bureaucracy, transferring authority away from administrative agencies back to the states, and concentrating greater federal decision-making power in the executive branch. 

The threat to the old establishment is therefore not simply another four or eight years out of power, but the possibility that many of the institutional mechanisms through which it exercised that power will no longer exist for it to reclaim. The Biden years offered a reminder of just how consequential control of that machinery could be. Having spent four years out of power, Democrats returned to Washington and pursued sweeping policies, from expansive Covid-era mandates and inflationary spending, to opening the southern border, and waging a proxy war against Russia through Ukraine. 

That same pattern appears to be repeating itself, with establishment Democrats showing an even greater urgency to return to power and a willingness to consider increasingly extraordinary measures to regain it. From Slotkin’s proposed “deterrence” campaign to calls to pack the Supreme Court and admit Puerto Rico as the 51st state, the lengths some Democrats are prepared to go to reclaim that authority are becoming increasingly apparent.

There is a final irony in the Democratic establishment’s predicament. It has become so consumed with recovering its former authority that it risks overlooking the socialist insurgency growing within its own party. The longer the old establishment goes on fighting for political order that is slipping further from its grasp, the more room it creates for a young generation of Democrats to remake the party in their own hard-Left image.

This is Laura Loomer we’re talking about, though, not some pundit across the aisle with whom Kristof simply “disagree[s].” She’s the 33-year-old self-styled investigative journalist who, through a combination of incendiary rhetoric and a close relationship with President Trump, successfully polices the MAGA movement. Understandably, she is — or at least, used to be —  a long-time enemy of the mainstream establishment.

Loomer has a history of rhetoric that should disqualify her from any favorable mention from Kristof. On Oct. 9, 2023, she tweeted: “The people in GAZA were given plenty of time to evacuate. Israel is going to burn it to the ground today and it will be uninhabitable, which is the way it should be. Watch today for jihadist sympathizers online who cry about ‘human rights violations’ and ‘genocide.’ Those people are terrorist enablers.… If all of the Islamic neighboring nations care about the people in Gaza so much, then they can open their borders and take them. But not even the neighboring Islamic nations want those people. That’s the elephant in the room, right? Nobody wants them because they behave like barbaric wild animals.”

Her posting habits haven’t changed much since. Last month, Loomer tweeted: “Ban Muslims from holding office in America.” Adding, “this time, make it a Muslim Ban as it was intended to be. Not an Islamic travel ban.” And last week, she suggested that she should become Secretary of Homeland Security. 

“I promise you I will actually make ICE the paramilitary force it should have always been to round up and forcefully remove jihadist invaders and Third World illegal aliens from our country. I will get the job done.” (The job’s current occupant, Markwayne Mullin, is apparently insufficiently anti-Muslim, having met with the Qataris.) DHS Secretary Loomer’s first order of business would be to send Leftist uncle-nephew commentator duo Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker “back to Turkey.” 

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Loomer warned that, should Kamala Harris become president, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Among those who rebuked her for her comment was the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who called Loomer “toxic.” (As it happens, Loomer has reportedly mused about taking up Graham’s role as national uber-hawk in the wake of the senator’s death.) Or take how, two years earlier, she attended a white-nationalist convention and attempted to appeal to them, notwithstanding their hatred for Jews like herself: “I consider myself to be a white advocate.” 

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Loomer used to be vehemently critical of Ukraine and its wartime president, Volodymyr Zelensky. But as the Trump administration has changed its position, Loomer has shifted, too — to enthusiastic endorsement of the war. And so, in the latter half of July, she went on a trip to Ukraine and later released a 45-minute, overwhelmingly softball interview with Zelensky. While she was there, a sequence of “respectable” liberals, center-Left and center-Right alike, forgot their misgivings to loudly celebrate her. 

On a CNN panel on July 23, a day before Loomer released the interview, the network’s anti-Trump but Right-tilting commentator S.E. Cupp argued: “If she’s gonna do propaganda, I’d rather it be Zelensky’s version of propaganda than Putin’s.” Cupp, praising Loomer, additionally intoned, “It’s one thing to be a keyboard warrior; it’s easy to say things from the safety of the patio at Mar-A-Lago. It’s much different when you go to a place.” 

Erin Burnett, who was moderating the panel (and who herself conducted a more-than-flattering interview with Zelensky back in 2023), then turned to former Obama adviser David Axelrod. Burnett noted that Loomer “had these opinions on Ukraine which were based on propaganda and a lack of any kind of experience there” — before rather quickly listing some of her more controversial comments. Axelrod, in response, opined on Zelensky sitting down with Loomer: “My goodness, the things one has to do to save their country.”  

Other prestigious outlets and personalities have also changed their tune on Loomer. Peter Harrell of the Carnegie Endowment said that her ideological shift and her interview with Zelensky were “a powerful reminder of the importance of being open to engaging with people you might profoundly disagree with.” The journalist Eli Lake, writing in The Free Press, hailed Laura Loomer as a “lifelong learner.” Batya Ungar-Sargon, the self-described “MAGA Lefty” who has attacked Trump World racism in the past, amicably interviewed Loomer following her return to the United States. And just this week, Neera Tanden — president of the Center for American Progress, the Clintonian think tank — retweeted Loomer.

Loomer is far from the only unhinged character feted by respectable liberals in recent months. Her coastal-cosmopolitan mirror is Masih Alinejad, another online activist and self-described journalist. Born in Iran but based in New York, Alinejad has made a career, partially bankrolled by the US government, in being an Iranian emigre who says precisely the right thing from a feminist perspective for Western hawks. 

Alinejad’s first New York Times op-ed appeared in July 2018. Bari Weiss, then an opinion editor at the paper, enthused on Twitter: “Her name should be known by anyone who describes herself as a feminist.” Alinejad returned to the paper of record in January 2026 — to make a human-rights case for war with Iran. Lamenting that Trump hadn’t yet bombed her home country, she concluded, “inaction has a body count.”

Regardless of what she’s talking about, Alinejad’s dominant mode is theatrical. We’ve seen her weep with joy on the city streets over the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We’ve also seen her in a bathing suit doing a cold plunge alongside a man to demonstrate that she couldn’t legally do the same in Iran. These are perfectly understandable reactions for a woman who has suffered under the Islamist tyranny of the mullahs. The problem is that her dramatic mode of expression is used to legitimize a massively unpopular war, which has plunged Washington into yet another Middle East quagmire. 

When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in February, she took to Weiss’s CBS News to sarcastically offer him a spot in one of her “safe houses” — she claims to have been targeted by the Iranian regime, and to be under constant threat of assassination. Recently, she threw a fit about her Citi Bike not working, because Mamdani would rather arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than see to basic services functioning. Never mind that the Citi Bike program is privately operated by Lyft and therefore doesn’t fall under the mayor’s purview. And she’s unabashed by her errors: she went on Persian-language media in the aftermath of the US attack on the Minab girls’ school that claimed 175 lives, to recant her support for the war. “It’s obvious I’ll sometimes be wrong,” she said in Persian. 

Despite such incoherencies, Alinejad gets invited to places like the Aspen Ideas Festival, where she broke into song (poorly), supposedly to test whether any men in the crowd would get “aroused.” Women in the Islamic Republic are not officially allowed to sing solo in public. This was intended to be a demonstration of the evil of the Iranian regime, which is understandable, but all Iranian men seemed to fall into the dragnet of her condemnation. “Men are the problem,” she said and pointed to her co-panelist, the Iranian-born Leftist essayist Arash Azizi (an UnHerd contributor). Azizi had suggested that Iran should not be kicked out of FIFA over the country’s restrictions on female spectators at sporting events. “These are the men in my country. My women go to stadium; they get killed,” Alinejad said. 

Both of these activists, Loomer and Alinejad, are often ridiculous in their self-presentation and sketchy on their facts, so why do respectable news organizations champion them, and what does it say about American liberal institutions’ claims to “respectability”?

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The mainstream is being especially kind to Loomer right now. The AP, which is supposed to be a neutral news wire, spoke to Loomer in a Kiev bomb shelter, a story that made its front page on July 26. “Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged,” was the most critical note in the AP’s report — referring to how, when Loomer initially arrived in Kiev, she posted, “One thing I really love about Ukraine is I haven’t seen a single Muslim here.” 

The AP should have also acknowledged that Loomer’s defense of Ukraine is at least partially on racial grounds: she believes in a “based” Aryan Ukraine in opposition to an Asiatic, Eastern Russia. Loomer’s original tweet about there not being “a single Muslim” in Ukraine made oppositional reference to an old Putin remark from 2015, that “Islam plays [an] important role in Russia.” But the AP left that out, only focusing on the comfortable pro-war-with-Russia crossover.

Ukraine does have a native, Muslim minority in its Tatars, and the drone factory Loomer visited there, pledging to “kill Russians” in honor of Sen. Graham, is owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. Akhmetov, in case his last name doesn’t give it away, is a Muslim. Loomer appeared to be unaware of the connection. 

One possibility is that the people who work for news organizations, all products of America’s liberal class, are either subconsciously or knowingly reinforcing Washington’s overarching view of the world. Loomer is now saying what we like, so let’s boost her. Take, once more, CNN. This was the network that, during Trump 1.0, ran ads about how “this is an apple,” no matter how many people “scream ‘banana, banana, banana’ over and over and over again.” The implication being that MAGA — those low-class news-questioners — wanted you to believe the apple was a banana. 

Nine years on, “banana screamers” who advance US geopolitical aims appear to be better than those who don’t.

The “centrist respectability” was always a lie. Because their interests now align, Loomer, like Alinejad before her, gains the endorsement, however uneasily or cheekily, of the US liberal establishment. It would be difficult to provide a better example of unquestioning adherence to dogma. Geopolitics trumps all.