These are anxious times for our country. We are assailed hourly by a belligerent president who treats America’s laws, courts and civil liberties with utter contempt and imagines he can rule a free people by royal decree.

Are Democrats fighting hard enough against President Trump’s malicious policies and rampant abuses of power? Progressive activists say no, and they’re even threatening to unseat Democrats they claim are afraid to mix it up.

This is asinine — a return to the politics of subtraction that has locked the party out of power, effectively disarming it in the struggle with a rogue president.

The party’s left turn in reaction to Trump’s rise since 2016 has been a fiasco. It’s identified Democrats with soaring prices and living costs, sclerotic federal bureaucracies that can’t get things done, unrestricted illegal immigration, permissive attitudes toward crime and an illiberal politics of race and gender essentialism.

That has left the Democratic brand badly tarnished. Only 27 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the party.

Keep reading in The Hill.

President Trump is having a grand time playing chicken with the U.S. economy, risking our prosperity to force other countries to submit to his protectionist diktats. It’s put him right where he wants to be — at the center of world attention.

But his vendetta against trade is alarming U.S. consumers, businesses and investors, and reawakening public doubts that he knows what he’s doing.

Most Americans don’t see the point in picking fights with friendly trade partners like Canada. Private sector leaders are aghast at Trump’s on-again, off-again threats to impose suffocating “reciprocal” duties on all imported goods.

While pausing those tariffs to stop the U.S. bond market from melting down, Trump has imposed an equally arbitrary 10 percent tariff on most of our trading partners. He’s also gone nuclear on China, raising tariffs to an absurd 245 percent and goading Beijing into levying massive retaliatory duties on U.S. exports.

Read the full piece in The Hill. 

Most Democratic operatives will tell you today that the Democratic Party thrives as a “big tent.” And truth be told, ours remains a remarkably diverse institution, with constituent elements from every part of the country that span a broad swath of ideological viewpoints.

In many cases, that diversity is the key to Democrats winning in conservative-leaning districts. For example, this past cycle, we saw 13 Democratic congressional candidates, nearly all of whom were backed by New Dems or Blue Dogs, elected in districts that supported Trump at the presidential level. Without being able to field candidates who differ ideologically from their more progressive peers, those seats would almost certainly have been lost.

But you wouldn’t necessarily know this listening to Democrats talk at the national level, including those enamored of the large crowds drawn by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). That’s because, in Washington, Democrats often cede too much political ground to the loudest and most organized fringes of our large coalition.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Move over, Smoot and Hawley. President Trump has anointed himself America’s greatest protectionist, and he’s launching a global trade war to prove it.

On Wednesday, Trump slapped a minimum 10 percent tariff on all imports, plus additional “reciprocal” tariffs on 60 other countries that have the temerity to sell us things we want to buy. He dubbed it “Liberation Day” to mark the freeing of Americans from the supposedly oppressive burden of trading with others.

Steeped in nostalgia for America’s industrial heyday, Trump imagines he can unilaterally restructure the world’s economy. The president can sign all the executive orders he pleases, but he can’t throw history into reverse or repeal basic economics.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Centre-left governments around the world are facing challenging re-elections as populist right-wing candidates and political parties make ground with a discontented electorate. This article draws on research for a project I direct on centre-left renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), offering some preliminary insights into the forces at play in the recent presidential election in the United States and learning points for the Labour government in the United Kingdom. The research finds that the Democrats lost the presidential election largely owing to the loss of working class voters amongst the ethnically White, Hispanic and Black American population, who turned away from a Democratic Party they felt was not offering the country the change of direction they were seeking. In particular, the failure of former President Biden’s extensive economic programme to win support amongst the voters it was aimed at holds important lessons for centre-left parties aiming to replicate similar approaches.

Read the full essay.

Last month’s federal election in Germany, which took place at a moment of significant global tension, has attracted international attention. What the new German government, under the leadership of Chancellor Frederich Merz, says and does now on Ukraine, and on the changing relationship between the United States and its oldest allies, will have immediate and long-term repercussions for the global geopolitical picture. Merz’s early comments that Europe will have to have “independence” from the U.S. as the Trump administration increasingly abandons its historic allies, and his willingness to loosen Germany’s “debt brake” to fund ramping up defense spending, have made headlines over the world.

The election was also significant because of the electoral swing from left to right, a result that has important insights for the global center-left, including U.S. Democrats, at this critical juncture as they continue to suffer declines with working-class voters.

Read more in The Liberal Patriot.

President Trump is off to a manic start, carpet bombing Washington with executive orders of dubious legality, firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and souring relations with America’s neighbors and allies.

I get that Trump was elected to shake up a status quo that working-class voters believe stacks the odds against them. But Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) was right: Trump has no mandate to inflict ruinous trade wars on America’s friends, disable the federal government rather than reform it and throw Ukraine to the Russian wolves.

Green’s protest got him ejected from the president’s stemwinder in Congress Tuesday night, during which Trump served up his usual smorgasbord of self-congratulatory fantasies to rapt Republicans and dejected Democrats.

We shouldn’t forget that half the country didn’t vote for Trump and endorses neither his brazen power grabs nor his embrace of old ideas — high trade barriers and isolationism — that failed our country badly in the past. At 45 percent, Trump’s personal approval rating is the lowest for any newly elected president since he set the record low of 44 percent in 2017.

Republicans no doubt are thrilled their hero is “owning the libs.” But what matters now is whether Trump can deliver tangible benefits to the swing voters who put him narrowly over the top — independents, moderate Republicans and Democratic defectors, especially noncollege Blacks and Latinos.

Continue reading in The Hill.

For almost a half century, Republican presidents consistently attacked racial preference programs rhetorically but did little to roll them back. That was true of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and even Donald Trump in his first term. Trump’s second term is different. The new administration has unleashed a flurry of executive orders and a “Dear Colleague Letter” upending racial preferences and associated trainings and bureaucracies that constitute modern diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

How should Democrats respond? Championing existing DEI programs, some of which are completely indefensible, is a political trap that must be avoided. At the same time, Donald Trump has overreached by attacking not only racial preferences (which are unpopular) but also race-neutral efforts, such as class-based affirmative action programs to promote racial diversity (which are broadly supported).

To thread the needle, Democrats would be smart to jettison unpopular and divisive DEI programs in favor of something better—a policy of “integration, equal opportunity, and belonging” that restores the original values of the civil rights movement including judging people based on merit, not race, emphasizing what we have common across racial divides, and championing free speech and dialogue rather than indoctrination.

Such a policy would embrace racial integration without racial preferences—which is precisely what the public wants.

Keep reading in The Liberal Patriot.