There’s Only One Way to Eradicate Trumpism for Good

If accountability isn’t a central pillar of a post-Trump future, we will doom ourselves.

One of the weirder journalistic spectacles of the Trump era has been watching mainstream news organizations parachute into the hinterlands to try to understand the voters who ushered in, and continue to support, this age of cruelty in America. A recent classic was The New York Times’ herculean effort to find one Minnesota diner whose patrons were willing to talk shit about the ICE resistance in Minneapolis. There has not, however, been an equivalent effort to reveal the everyday people who saw the dangers of Trumpism coming. But this week, TNR contributor Toby Buckle returned to these pages to do just that.

I’m petty enough to enjoy a good round of “I told you so.” One of the better value propositions of your TNR subscription is that you’ll more frequently find yourself in the company of writers who recognized the dangers of Trumpism from several miles off and unflinchingly told the truth about it. That’s why Buckle’s warning that a mere election victory won’t be sufficient to right this ship has stuck in my mind: “We must undertake an ambitious program of accountability and reform in order to create liberal democracy in America again.” So here’s something else I’m going to be right about in advance: The failure to hold the malefactors of Trumpist fascism to account will only ensure its return.

This isn’t some loose theory. Perhaps the best proof of this fundamental fact can be found in recent history, as both Trump’s rise and his return were preceded by Democratic administrations that showed little regard for civic accountability. The Obama administration made the conscious decision to make “looking forward, not backward” the order of the day, to the great relief of Wall Street crooks and war-on-terror torturers. Obama extended grace to those who capsized the economy, and kept showing extreme deference to them throughout his administration.

As The American Prospect’s David Dayen reported this week, an email from recently disgraced Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathy Ruemmler to pedo-oligarch Jeffrey Epstein—in which she seeks advice on how to defend Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who’d been stoking outrage about White’s constant granting of deferred prosecution agreements to corporate criminals—is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the Obama administration’s laxity. This vacuum of accountability was filled by Trump’s right-wing faux-populism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Much of this could have been headed off.

And while there were some significant areas in which Joe Biden seemed to learn from his former boss’s mistakes, the need for a more robust campaign of accountability was not one of them. Despite the ample reasons to launch investigations and obtain redress for past corruption, Attorney General Merrick Garland did little more than attempt to radiate an ambient virtue, perpetually endeavoring to shield his agency and the Biden administration from the perception that they were seeking purely political prosecutions. Not that this ever stopped Trump from crying foul about witch hunts! Garland’s first major investigation into Trump’s misconduct wasn’t launched until three days after Trump announced his reelection campaign—the very thing that the Biden administration should have been trying in earnest to prevent after the Senate failed in its duty to impeach him. Once Trump entered the safe harbor of a presidential candidacy, efforts to hold him responsible fizzled—and the Supreme Court all but crowned him king.

As I’ve argued before, these “look the other way and cross your fingers” ways of the past aren’t going to cut it anymore. There shouldn’t be Democrats running for election anywhere who aren’t fully committed to using their regained power to take Trumpism down. That means large-scale investigations and hearings. That means pursuing criminal charges and jail sentences. Yes, that means everyone currently employed by ICE gets a pink slip. And that means doling out punishments to the corporate scofflaws and institutional enablers that allowed Trumpian misrule to flourish.

Axios reported this week that corporate America is being warned that the “subpoenas are coming.” I want that to be true; if we end up with political leaders on the left who are too timid to do what needs to be done, we will fall short. The Beltway-brained are perennially concerned with “political capital,” the allegedly short supply of which creates the perpetual demand for scaling back Democratic ambitions. Future party leaders need to shed these phantasmal fears. And they need to be ready for the political press to lobby hard against these efforts. After all, the sight of so many people being held accountable will raise serious questions of how much went wrong on their watch.

All that said, I continue to be buoyed by the sense that Democratic voters are bent on elevating real fighters—and cheered by the sight of those whom they’ve been elevating repaying that faith. There is already ample material to fuel the ambitions of would-be warriors. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that massive swaths of Americans are using brutal terminology to describe the Trump administration: 47 percent of respondents say they would describe Trump as “racist,” 49 percent would characterize him as “corrupt,” and 46 percent would describe him as “cruel.”

These numbers indicate a very favorable environment for Democrats to attack Trump on these fronts—to explicitly say that Trump is a cruel and corrupt racist who’s enriched himself in office at the expense of the American people while egging on a secret police force that is increasingly evil in the purest sense of the word. It will take effort and commitment to provide real accountability, but the prize at the end of the quest is a democracy with restored resilience and a repellent right-wing movement beaten back into irrelevance. If it’s done correctly, the next time anyone goes looking for the point of view of Trump voters, they won’t be able to find anyone willing to admit they ever supported him.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Bad Bunny’s Neighborliness Is the Antidote to Ring’s Dystopian Vision

More and more Americans are turning against the surveillance state—and embracing each other.

Sunday’s Super Bowl was mostly an exercise in foregone conclusions: Bad Bunny’s halftime show would show off his talent and creativity, the Seahawks would grimly dominate the pitiable Patriots, and I would shout “Get fucked!” at the television when the inevitable commercial for ICE aired. But there was one surprise discussion that sprang to life the morning after the big game—involving lost dogs, the all-encompassing surveillance state into which we’ve gotten locked, and what it means to be a neighbor.

The proximate cause of all this agita was the commercial for Ring, whose doorbell cameras are among the most popular in the country. In their Super Bowl spot, Ring touted a feature called Search Party, a new(ish) AI-enabled “familiar faces” tool that the Amazon-owned company has billed as a way for lost pets to be easily recovered: Just upload a picture of the missing pet into Ring’s database, and it will deploy all the Ring cameras in the area as a dragnet to search for the wayward animal. As Mashable’s Chance Townsend reported in July 2025, these AI tools were the brainchild of recently returned founder Jamie Siminoff—who, perhaps not coincidentally, reversed the company’s previous decision to back away from working hand in glove with law enforcement.

Against that backdrop, it was perhaps inevitable that Ring’s commercial went over so badly with viewers. In fact, one of the few nice things I can say about the ad was that it was the first thing in a long while to invite unified criticism from voices all across the political spectrum. That included Matt Nelson, of WeRateDogs fame, who published a blistering video critique of the ad: “Neither Ring’s products nor its business model are built around finding lost pets,” and even if they were, it’s a job that Ring does very badly: “Ring claims that the ‘Search Party’ feature finds one dog a day,” Nelson said. “This would equate to roughly .03 percent of the over one million lost or found pet reports posted to the Ring app annually.” If this is something Ring is touting as a core competency, it could be that they’re pulling the wool over your eyes.

What Ring is, Nelson observed, is “a lucrative mass surveillance network” that turns “private homes into surveillance outposts and well-meaning neighbors into informants.” Jason Koebler of 404 Media concurs:

With Ring’s recent partnership with Flock, which will further facilitate the sharing of video footage with police, and its new Search Party feature, the message is clear: Ring is still, again, and always will be in the business of leveraging its network of luxury surveillance consumers as a law enforcement tool. After years of saying it wasn’t doing facial recognition and that it was focused more on “object recognition,” it has now explicitly launched “friendly” versions of facial recognition and facial recognition-adjacent technologies.

With Ring’s recent partnership with Flock, which will further facilitate the sharing of video footage with police, and its new Search Party feature, the message is clear: Ring is still, again, and always will be in the business of leveraging its network of luxury surveillance consumers as a law enforcement tool. After years of saying it wasn’t doing facial recognition and that it was focused more on “object recognition,” it has now explicitly launched “friendly” versions of facial recognition and facial recognition-adjacent technologies.

CNBC reported on Thursday that Ring canceled its partnership with Flock because of the public backlash over this Super Bowl advertisement. The report noted further friction building at other tech companies, with Salesforce employees pressuring company CEO Marc Benioff to “cancel ICE opportunities,” and employees at Google making similar demands that the firm “divest itself from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

The transformation of “friendly” tech into tools for the police state has been something of a trend lately. Flock security cameras deployed at schools across the country, ostensibly for the purpose of keeping kids safe, have been used to “assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign,” according to a recent report from The Guardian. And while firms like Ring and TikTok go to extravagant lengths to say that they do not directly feed your data to law enforcement agencies, the fact is that data originating from these firms can frequently find its way into the hands of partners, data brokers, and other third parties who’ve made no such commitment. From there, as TNR contributor Logan McMillen pointed out this week, the government can simply purchase that data, circumventing your constitutional rights. It’s always best to assume that any technology firm not explicitly against the surveillance state will eventually become a tool of it.

With more and more of us reading stories about ICE’s predations—or experiencing them firsthand—it’s not a surprise that Ring’s happy puppy commercial landed the way it did. As I’ve said before, ICE and Customs and Border Protection aren’t actually doing immigration enforcement. They are a tentacle of the war on terror that’s been turned against the American people, armed with cutting-edge technology. People are slowly waking up to the dystopian nature of these arrangements.

But there’s another awakening happening in the cities and towns currently facing down the threat of state violence and terror. People are rediscovering what it means to be a neighbor and to live in a community. In places like Springfield, Ohio, faith communities are banding together to protect those targeted by Trump’s mass deportation machine. In Minneapolis, neighbors are assisting one another in keeping their kids safe, bringing food to those who fear venturing out, and raising rent money for people who can’t go to work with federal agents lurking around. Here’s a fun fact: This sort of neighborliness is how we used to find lost dogs.

We talk all the time about how Trump and his minions are shredding the fabric of democracy and tearing apart the civic institutions that have served us in good stead. But wherever Trump’s hammer has fallen the hardest, good people have responded by working together as neighbors, to reknit what has been torn asunder and reinforce their bonds to one another and their commitment to our patriotic values. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer observed: “Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about ‘Western civilization,’ while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.”

It’s an auspicious coincidence that Sunday’s Super Bowl offered a counterargument to Ring’s dystopian vision in the form of Bad Bunny’s halftime spectacle, which featured the “La Casita” concept that made his recent San Juan residency so critically acclaimed. In his vision, the front porch isn’t some fortress ringed by fear and suspicion; it’s a window to a wider world of neighbors, community, and joy, all washing up on one’s doorstep, inviting us out.* I know which neighborhood I’d rather live in—and I know which one I’d trust to find my dog, as well.

* This article previously misstated the location of Bad Bunny’s residency.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

When Will Democrats Decide to Join the Resistance?

The party needs to forge a closer connection with the people fighting for democracy in the streets. Here’s how to do it.

Lately I’ve been wondering what it might be like for the residents of the embattled Twin Cities to receive one of those trademark email solicitations from the Democratic Party. You know the ones: The sender is Chuck Schumer, the subject line reads “THIS IS THE END,” and the body of the email explains how the gyre is widening and the falcon can’t hear the falconer and it’s up to you to send $5 to hold back the blood-dimmed tide. These are annoying during whatever times we might have once considered to be “normal.” With federal agents wilding on the streets and kidnapping children, to hear our problems reframed as something that we can fix by handing the nearest Democrat the change in our couch cushions is anger-inducing.

I’ve heard and read enough accounts from Minneapolitans to know that they’re feeling little connection to Beltway lawmakers, and that by and large they feel abandoned by most Democrats in Washington. This can only go on so long before something breaks: Ordinary people are showing remarkable valor protecting their communities from a corrupt and violent federal presence, egged on by a senescent and (allegedly) incontinent president and his ghoulish hangers-on. Democrats have the power to recognize this effort to protect democracy, provide it with material support and media cover, and thus knit up the fabric between themselves and these brave Americans. 

Let us acknowledge that the answer will not come with a legislative fix. Senate Democrats held the funding of several executive branch agencies hostage over demands to reform the Department of Homeland Security, precipitating a partial government shutdown, but earlier this week a deal was struck to fully fund those other agencies while only keeping the lights on at DHS for another two weeks as lawmakers negotiate reforms.

One Democratic lawmaker to whom Axios granted the veil of anonymity suggested that Democrats expect the base to “get upset” but believes the discontent will wash away because “then you’re going to have the real fight in two weeks.” Whether or not that period ends with any meaningful change in the status quo remains to be seen. Much of what Democrats seek would merely require various federal agents to obey rules and regulations that they’re already supposed to follow as a matter of agency directive—though enshrining these policies as laws would be a step in the right direction.  

That said, there’s still the thorny matter of enforcing any new constraints that are imposed on ICE and Border Patrol. I hope I’m wrong about this, but by the time all is said and done, I don’t expect much in the way of material change where the president’s paramilitaries are concerned. At best, perhaps, people will see the faces of the thugs who are beating them—though not always, if Schumer has his way. 

I think people, by and large, can accept that when it comes to enacting policies, Democrats have little room to maneuver given their minority power. Moreover, the revival of arguments over the party’s unwillingness to use what leverage it has out of fear that closing the government on a long-term basis will lead to larger downside liabilities is, by now, parlor-room talk. Looking toward the future, Democrats must pivot to combat an even greater danger, which Senator Chris Murphy articulated on the podcast of TNR’s Greg Sargent: “I think if people don’t see us fighting on something as existential as whether we condone the federal government murdering our own citizens, then there will be a mass withdrawal from politics altogether.”

I do think this is a critical moment. The whole country is seized by what they have seen—the statistics suggest that 80 to 90 percent of Americans have seen these videos—and they desperately want somebody to stand up for the rule of law. So, yes, if we do not make a fight right now, I think it could result in just a massive withdrawal of participation in our civic life. And that is how democracies die. Democracies die not often simply by force—it would be totalitarian—but by citizens deciding that there’s no one that is willing to stand up and save them.

I do think this is a critical moment. The whole country is seized by what they have seen—the statistics suggest that 80 to 90 percent of Americans have seen these videos—and they desperately want somebody to stand up for the rule of law. So, yes, if we do not make a fight right now, I think it could result in just a massive withdrawal of participation in our civic life. 

And that is how democracies die. Democracies die not often simply by force—it would be totalitarian—but by citizens deciding that there’s no one that is willing to stand up and save them.

Democrats, stymied as they are on Capitol Hill, have a freer........

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