Feckless Dems need ‘a Navalny, not a Newsom’ | Will Bunch Newsletter

Plus, the Kafkaesque ‘disappearing’ of Mahmoud Khalil

by Will Bunch | Columnist

Published March 11, 2025, 9:11 a.m. ET

One thing about surviving under an authoritarian oligarchy is that the circle of life doesn’t change much from how things go down under a democratic republic. My schedule has been erratic this winter while I deal with some of that real-world stuff, which I’ll have some more to say about it in a near-future newsletter or column. Meanwhile, the fight for a better America and a better world never stops, no matter what.

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There’s no future for Dem appeasers like Newsom, Houlahan

One thing that amazes me as I get older is the lame “dad jokes” you heard decades ago as a kid that you still somehow remember. I can still recall, from when I was barely 14, a line that Sen. George McGovern delivered in 1973 at one of those D.C. gala dinners, just a few months after the liberal Democrat had suffered one of the ugliest landslide defeats ever. “All my life I wanted to run for president in the worst way,” the South Dakotan quipped. “And I just did.”

But McGovern, who lost every state except Massachusetts and D.C., had nothing over slick-backed California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose unofficial launch last week as a 2028 Democratic White House hopeful was about as disastrous as an Elon Musk Starship liftoff, sending its white-hot debris across the political skies.

It wasn’t just that Newsom, known for “central casting” handsome looks and middle-of-the-road governance of America’s largest state, decided that the route to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. involves a bumper-car slam into more than 1 million transgender citizens already under assault from the political right. The California governor, in the first episode of his new podcast, asserted that he agrees with the political far right that transgender women competing in women’s school sports is “deeply unfair.”

It was arguably as problematic, maybe more so, just who Newsom welcomed to his first podcast — in what felt like a clear effort to reveal the governor’s inner Joe Rogan to young white dude-bros who voted for Donald Trump in 2024. That guest was Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder who never met a conspiracy theory about COVID-19 or stolen elections that he didn’t like, who believes our universities are “islands of totalitarianism” and recently called the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “not a good person,” tied to the “big mistake” of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Newsom even released a picture of him smiling with Kirk, like the two men had just shot an endangered rhino or something.

Newsom’s apparent belief that the race to the White House is like a backwards Daytona 500, with only right turns, sparked the predictable reactions of fury from the online left and mild disagreement from the burnt milquetoast establishment of the Democratic Party. It also seemed very much of a piece with what was happening at roughly the same time 3,000 miles east in Washington, where 10 Democrats joined with Republicans to censure their Texas colleague, Rep. Al Green. This after Green stood up, yelled and brandished his cane at Donald Trump to rebut the 47th president’s lies about his 2024 election, while addressing a joint session of Congress.

One local Congress member, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, joined the nine other Dems in feeling it wasn’t time to praise their Houston-area colleague for his moral courage in standing up to a tyrant, but it was critical to condemn his lack of decorum in doing so. The Chester County rep explained her vote to my Inquirer colleague Julia Terruso in an all-over-the-map interview in which she said “we all need to agree to those standards” — of decorum — “so we can get the work for the people done and so we can not be a banana republic.”

What a choice of words! The only people who need to be censured for making America into a banana republic — emptying the jails containing their violent thugs, going after their political enemies, a free press and the right to dissent, and leading a Mao-flavored cultural revolution against bureaucrats and academics — are Trump, his billionaire copresident Elon Musk, and their MAGA minions. In seeking some sort of bipartisan kumbaya with their enemies instead of praising the courage of the resisters, feckless Democrats like Newsom and Houlahan are completely misreading the room.

One online comedian posted that when it comes to the fate of the republic, the Republicans might be the mass shooters but the Democrats are the hapless Uvalde cops, standing around and doing nothing. Democracy may or may not survive these next 46 months, but these sellouts on the left side of the aisle have no future, either way.

In today’s fractured America, you have the 49.8%-and-probably-shrinking-base of Trump’s MAGA world, and then two separate groups staring into the abyss. One is the soulless, empty husk of the formal Democratic Party and its past-expiration-date “leaders” like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi — holding up their little signs like Wile E. Coyote waving “Help!” as a two-ton boulder falls on his head.

The enfeebled Democratic establishment forms a Venn diagram with a very small, shaded overlap — inside it are a handful of bold Democrats like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamie Raskin, and Jasmine Crockett, Sen. Chris Murphy, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and maybe a dozen or two others — with the circle of folks who are actually fighting, the Opposition.

Rep. Houlahan would have seen some of them this Saturday if she’d driven down her district’s main drag, Route 30, past the local Tesla showroom in Devon. There, a weekly protest against owner Musk’s influence and chainsaw budget cuts in the Trump White House that started with less than a dozen demonstrators on a snowy day has bloomed into more than 100 folks carrying signs like “Honk for Freedom” — dozens of motorists did exactly that — or “Stop the Coup!”

They were everywhere this weekend, waving their placards at dozens of Tesla showrooms from coast to coast and playing a key role in driving down the electric-vehicle maker’s stock price — and Musk’s personal wealth — by tens of billions of dollars. They were joined in spirit by thousands of scientists who rallied Friday, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, for academic freedom and research, and by Saturday’s huge celebration of International Women’s Day.

“We need a Navalny, not a Newsom,” the Never-Trumper attorney George Conway posted this weekend, invoking the fearless Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny who returned to his homeland to face certain arrest, leading to his 2024 death, to show his resolve against dictator Vladimir Putin. Conway explained that he wasn’t really attacking mainstream Democrats but “it’s just that at this point we are way beyond the realm of normal [baloney] politics.”

Every day, more and more everyday people are at the point where they get it, and they get the urgency, even if the conventional politicians with their consultants and their focus groups and their big-ticket donors do not. Any leaders who join them on the Tesla protest lines are the ones who will be rewarded in the coming elections, and not the cowards who troll hopelessly for right-wing votes. The Democrats like Newsom or Houlahan who didn’t speak out for those being marginalized by the forces of autocracy will be remembered at the ballot box, but not in a good way.

Yo, do this!

David Enrich, the New York Times journalist who has thrown a bright light on the murky world of Donald Trump’s finances, is out today with his newest book, and in football parlance, he threw the ball to where the receiver was going to be. Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, looks at the growing threat to press freedom in America, and specifically a decades-long drive to undo the 1964 Supreme Court decision, Sullivan vs. New York Times, that protects investigative journalists from libel-suit harassment. Please read this important book while we still have the liberty to publish and enjoy such tomes.
Also in the good timing department, HBO and its streaming partner Max finally — and far too quietly — released the overly-long-awaited Part III of the groundbreaking film history of the American civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize. The first two installments, filmed and released in the late 1980s, when most heroes (and villains) of the 1950s and ‘60s were still around to interview, conveyed the importance of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and their contemporaries to those already too young to remember. The new episodes, covering 1977 to the present, come at the unthinkable moment when those gains are unraveling, and as a result could not be more relevant.

Ask me anything

Question: What can we do about Senator [Dave] McCormick not even acknowledging emails from constituents? — Dee (@shoegrl.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Dee, this is hardly a new problem. In 2017, I wrote extensively about then-Sen. Pat Toomey’s refusal to hold a town hall in Philadelphia or any other part of Pennsylvania where constituents who might question him actually lived. In 2025, GOP senators and Congress members have been working even harder to avoid confronting the often-angry people they allegedly represent. One smart solution took place last week in little Escanaba, Mich., where frustrated voters held a “town hall” for their Republican Rep. Jack Bergman without Bergman’s presence, airing their grievances and bonding in resistance over his empty chair. I’d urge similar treatment for McCormick, an empty suit to begin with.

What you’re saying about...

I received a lot of good responses about who is the REAL leader of the fractured Democratic Party (hint: neither Sen. Chuck Schumer nor Rep. Hakeem Jeffries) but two names clearly led the pack: Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC. On the next level stood Rep. Jasmine Crockett and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Joe Zucchero wrote that AOC and Crockett “are everything MAGA fears: Smart, articulate women of color. They are both firebrands that will rally the Dems and strikes some fears in the GOP.” Murphy, wrote Ray Landis, “has been loud and forceful in the last month and was warning us what to expect while many Democrats were twiddling their thumbs in the months before the inauguration.”

📮 This week’s question: Some activists believe the best way to fight back against American oligarchy is with our wallets. Some have called for a boycott of retailer Target for dropping its diversity initiatives; meanwhile, pickets outside Tesla showrooms have hurt its sales and the stock price. Do you agree this is an effective way to protest? Please email me your answer and put the specific words “Trump boycotts” in the subject line.

Backstory on the government’s abduction of a Palestinian protester

Paging Franz Kafka, the 20th century literary master of bizarre paranoia. In 1991, a Kafka biographer, Frederick R. Karl, told the New York Times: “”What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world." On Saturday night, that surreal force in an authoritarian 2025 America “disappeared” a young Palestinian scholar named Mahmoud Khalil off the streets of New York City.

Last spring, the 24-year-old Khalil — a Palestinian, born in a refugee camp in Syria, who was successfully earning his master’s degree in international affairs at Columbia University — served as a lead negotiator between the Ivy League school and the pro-Palestinian protest encampment. Just this week, as the Trump administration moved to sanction Columbia for what it claims is antisemitism on campus, Khalil was quoted in a Reuters article criticizing the government. “Clearly Trump is using the protesters as a scapegoat for his wider agenda fighting and attacking higher education and the Ivy League education system,” he said.

At 8:30 p.m., federal agents who said they were with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, knocked on the door of the Columbia-owned Manhattan apartment where Khalil lived with his wife, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant. They announced that Khalil’s student visa had been revoked and that he was slated for deportation. When Khalil and his wife protested that he actually holds a green card, or permanent residency, the agents took him away anyway.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” The unprecedented action sparked an immediate debate among legal scholars over whether Rubio truly has the authority to revoke Khalil’s green card, or whether he used proper legal procedures — not to mention the lack of immediate evidence that Khalil is “pro-Hamas.” Getting back to Kafka, efforts by his wife and lawyer to see Khalil at a nearby ICE facility in New Jersey were foiled before the government admitted he’d already been flown to Louisiana.

Needless to say, the disappearing of a legal U.S. resident over his political activities is a shockingly dangerous escalation of the government’s dual wars against both legitimate dissent and also higher education generally — exactly as Khalil alleged to Reuters rights before his arrest. His high-profile seizure is clearly intended to send a chilling message to anyone who protests the Trump regime. The warning for America’s college administrators is even more stark. Columbia called in city cops to clear the 2024 encampment and imposed a harsh crackdown on new protests, only for Team Trump to still accuse the school of antisemitism, cancel $400 million in grants, and watch ICE arrive to intimidate the student body. The curious case of Mahmoud Khalil isn’t so much a test of America’s immigration laws as much as a barometer of how far we’ve moved toward dictatorship.

What I wrote on this date in 2021

I’m old enough to remember a time when the election of a new president meant hope for the future of organized labor, which is so critical to the comeback of the American middle class. Those halcyon days were four years ago, when the still-new Joe Biden administration was already signaling he’d be the most pro-union president ever — which he was. “Raised in post-war America,” I wrote, “Biden has a better sense than most of what the pro-labor policies of Franklin Roosevelt did for prosperity in the mid-20th century.” Read the rest, and weep: “Biden, Dems make big bet that labor unions can bring back America’s middle class.”