In August, Donald Trump threatened the Center for American Progress with a $5 billion defamation suit, over a report that concluded his deployments of the National Guard to cities across the country had made no difference on violent crime. Trump mocked CAP as the “Center for American Lack of Progress” and accused the Democratic Party’s unofficial think tank of publishing a fraudulent report. Neera Tanden, the organization’s CEO and president, was appropriately defiant. “There was no second in which I thought, or my board thought, or any of my executive leaders thought, that we wanted to retract,” Tanden told me. “It’s a factual report.” But she also had another political adversary on her mind: Hasan Piker, the controversial but massively popular socialist Twitch streamer whose association with Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, has become a major distraction on the campaign trail. As one X user pointed out to Tanden last month, “You have mentioned Hasan Piker 13 times in the last 48 hours btw.”

This was not unusual. Since returning to CAP after four years in the Biden White House, Tanden has reemerged as one of the Democratic center’s most enthusiastic combatants — against Trump and MAGA, yes, but also and perhaps primarily against the progressive left, the Democratic Socialists of America, Piker, and random accounts with only a few followers. Her pugilistic instinct has cost her before: In 2021, years of mean tweets about Republicans helped derail Biden’s nomination of Tanden to run the Office of Management and Budget. As a consolation prize, she was named director of the Domestic Policy Council, a job that didn’t require Senate confirmation. For very different reasons, both Trump and much of the left regard Tanden as representative of a liberal Washington elite that ought to be overthrown.

“Neera came back to CAP to make sure that CAP was a major player in the generational battle to build a big Democratic majority against the far right,” Jonathan Cowan, the president of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, which recently announced a $15 million effort to counter the rise of the DSA, told me. “That’s precisely what she’s done and she’s been a fearless fighter in that mission.”

CAP, notably, has not joined Third Way’s campaign against the DSA. Tanden recently argued on Tim Miller’s Bulwark podcast that Democrats should compete with socialists on ideas rather than organize against them. On social media, however, she is much less restrained. In June, when it emerged that DSA member and congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York had once posted disparaging remarks about Kamala Harris, Tanden responded, “I am definitely sympathetic to the adventures of shitposters but someone tweeting ‘F**k Kamala Harris’ should simply be disqualified from winning a Democratic primary. Run in another party primary.” Chevalier ended up winning one of the most shocking upsets of the primary season.

Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff, told me he suspects Tanden fights the DSA for much the same reason he does. “There’s a progressive wing and a pragmatic wing in our party. Those factions can have legitimate policy fights,” he said. But the DSA is “a separate party with a separate platform.”

“Neera often goes after the hard left online, but that seems personal, not institutional,” one Democratic strategist told me. “I have this gut feeling that she’s much further out than her institution. CAP itself is timid and mostly AWOL in the fight against the left.”

Tanden would agree with that distinction. She insisted to me that her posts represent her own politics, not CAP’s. “None of........

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