A reeling Democratic establishment watched as the results rolled in on Tuesday night. One of New York’s strongest machines had collapsed in a seeming instant, bested by the rising power of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) and popular New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

In echoes of the improbable rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was visibly shocked upon learning she had defeated Rep. Joe Crowley, the election was called for Mamdani-endorsed activist Darializa Avila Chevalier on the night of the election. She even has a three-letter acronym: DAC. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, pro-Israel chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was defeated.

The Squadriano, City & State editor-in-chief Jeff Coltin’s viral moniker for the allies and machine of soon-to-be former Rep. Adriano Espaillat, couldn’t save him from Avila Chevalier, who has never previously held elected office and faced sustained criticism from opponents for her activism against Israel, including the day after the October 7th attack by Hamas, along with her opposition to former Vice President Kamala Harris. A prominent anti-Avila Chevalier mailer even had her infamous “Fuck Kamala Harris” quote plastered in giant letters. Voters were unmoved. Or perhaps they were moved, just not in the intended direction.

While Avila Chevalier’s was the night’s most notable win, NYC-DSA also picked up NY-7 with the expected success of Assemblymember Claire Valdez against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. The organization could credibly count the defeat of Rep. Dan Goldman as a success even if it didn’t officially endorse former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander as Mamdani did. (NYC-DSA managed to have its cake and eat it too by not ideologically compromising to endorse Lander while many of its members worked tirelessly to take out the pro-Israel Goldman.)

This wasn’t a successful night for traditional progressives and unions, but specifically NYC-DSA and the pro-Palestine Left.

Assemblymember Alex Bores ran a progressive-except-Palestine campaign backed by a litany of unions and progressive organizations. He was defeated by Assemblymember Micah Lasher, who used a traditional establishment model to succeed. Where did the votes go that Bores needed to prevail? Some of the votes were available to his left, including among voters drawn to Nina Schwalbe, the only candidate to explicitly acknowledge Israel’s genocide, and Jack Schlossberg, who positioned himself to the left of both Bores and Lasher on Israel.

What about a situation where NYC-DSA is pitted against the traditional progressive machine in a race where the candidates run on nearly identical platforms? Reynoso proved to be such a test case: NYC-DSA’s Valdez handily bested Reynoso’s Working Families Party coalition.

Results followed the same pattern at the state level, where NYC-DSA candidates won race after race. The only conceded loss came against an incumbent in a race where Mamdani stayed out, presumably for complicated political reasons that would’ve impacted Avila Chevalier.

Tonight’s results may shock an establishment accustomed to permanent rule, but they aren’t a surprise to those who have watched the trend lines among voters over the past few cycles, both in New York City and around the nation. The Democratic Party is deep in the throes of a Tea Party overthrow I identified last year.

Traditional partisan trust among both parties’ own voters has collapsed into a populist revolt, supercharged by massive wealth disparity and revulsion about both major parties’ support for Israel as it engages in an internationally recognized campaign of genocide.

Both Mamdani and NYC-DSA’s winning candidates used commitment to opposing genocide and fighting oligarchy as electoral motivators. If a single story is to be written about the results in New York City, it should be about the collapse of the pro-Israel consensus and establishment Democratic politics.

As goes New York, so goes the nation?

In March 2026, one of the world’s leading democracy monitors reported a democratic catastrophe in the United States. But three months later, you’re probably hearing about it for the first time right now.

V-Dem, among the most respected global democracy monitors, stripped the U.S. of the “liberal democracy” title for the first time in 50 years in its 2026 Democracy Report. American democracy is collapsing at an unprecedented rate, with the rate of political autocratization outpacing even the most prominent world autocrats.

Most notably, the U.S. autocratization assessed in the report sees these declines without factoring in electoral components, such as voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the like. The reason is that the report analyzes data from the past year, and the midterms haven’t happened yet. So the downgrade from “liberal democracy” to “electoral democracy” represents the non-electoral parts of Trump’s second term. If election indicators decline after the midterms, the next report could move the U.S. even further toward autocracy.

One should expect such a horrific collapse in a major U.S. democracy ranking to be front-page news across the country, but most Americans are unaware it even happened. And that’s not their fault. The finding received coverage, but not the sustained, front-page, civic-emergency treatment it warranted.

Cable news still metabolizes democratic collapse as a sequence of discrete scandals, clashes, and daily controversies rather than as a broader regime-change process. Sometimes this is driven by revenue generation, other times by intentional complicity, and often a mix of both. Media consolidation makes the problem even worse, especially as key figures in that consolidation strategically align with America’s autocrats.

This happens alongside American newspapers that continue to see budgetary cuts squeezing newsrooms to the point that even covering all breaking stories is a heavy lift. Important coverage is being missed, not because journalists lack integrity, but because they lack resources.

All of this is symptomatic of democratic collapse itself.

The Republican Party works as the primary vehicle of autocratization in the U.S., especially as Trump continues to succeed at purging the party of his enemies to create an apparatus of total fealty. But the Democratic Party ranges from ineffective to complicit in combatting autocratization, with Democratic states like New York passing protest bans and national party leaders attempting to undercut their own voters when they stray too far to the Left, which is to mean at all to the Left.

The autocratization of the U.S. is not cause for nihilism, but serves as a wake-up call to its citizenry to engage robustly with civic life and exercise rights regularly.

Restoration of democracy has precedent, despite the doomerism of public discourse. Eighteen countries saw an increase in democratization this year, with 3 new democratizers representing “U-turns,” in which countries that were marching toward autocracy reversed direction. The success rate is also high for autocracies that start a democratization process: 70 percent.

The restoration of democracy in America will not come from its feckless national Democratic political leaders, but from everyday citizens engaging in civic life together across demographic lines - through the exercise of speech, ousting complicit leaders, marching in protest, and engaging in targeted civil disobedience.

Without such civic action, the slide into outright autocracy will only escalate.

UPDATE [June 6, 2026]

Peter Sterne of City & State provided the following quote:

“After speaking with you, I heard from some sources I trust that it really was an explicit agreement. I know, I know – more anonymous sources! Until Espaillat or Mamdani go on the record to confirm or deny an agreement, we won’t know for sure. But here’s my current understanding of what happened, based on what’s been reported and what I’ve been told: Espaillat insisted Mamdani commit to endorse him in the primary in exchange for a general election endorsement, and Mamdani agreed. At the time, he had no reason to think a viable DSA candidate was going to challenge Espaillat, so it didn’t seem like a major sacrifice. But when the circumstances changed, and Mamdani saw that Darializa had a real shot of winning, he let Espaillat know that he had to withdraw from his earlier commitment.”

The central tension about public sourcing and documentary evidence remains. What comes into greater focus is the Espaillat camp’s rejection of any notion of misunderstanding, alongside continued silence from the mayor and his team.

At the end of May, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed Darializa Avila Chevalier in her race to oust Rep. Adriano Espaillat from New York’s 13th congressional district seat. The move was, by turns, predictable and controversial. Chevalier is supported by NYC-DSA, and the mayor is expected by his base to endorse NYC-DSA congressional candidates.

Mamdani has also played it safe on a handful of occasions, notably discouraging Chi Ossé from challenging House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and urging NYC-DSA members against endorsing Ossé in that race. He’s also stayed out of a handful of state races.

I won’t get into the dynamics and implications of the NY-13 race itself. Michael Lange has that covered.

I want to explore whether the widely circulating claim that Mamdani broke a promise to endorse Rep. Espaillat is factual, inconclusive, or inaccurate.

After Mamdani endorsed Chevalier, the incumbent Espaillat responded in measured ways, allowing his allies to do the talking for him. Notably, Espaillat is not on the record claiming the mayor broke a promise.

Fiercest among the sources claiming a promise was broken is outgoing Rep. Nydia Velázquez, whose earlier support for Mamdani has given way to a series of endorsements against NYC-DSA candidates and condemnations of his perceived lack of loyalty.

“It’s very difficult to say about someone that you don’t trust that person,” Rep. Velázquez told Politico. “But your actions are raising serious concerns about taking you at your word — and that is very, very, very problematic in this business.”

Politico further reports:

“Last summer, Mamdani privately promised Espaillat he would support his reelection run, according to Velázquez and a person with direct knowledge of the conversation who was granted anonymity to discuss it. Mamdani made that behind-the-scenes commitment in conjunction with Espaillat endorsing him in the general election for mayor shortly after he defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in last June’s Democratic primary (Espaillat had supported Cuomo in the primary).”

That leaves readers with a reported private commitment sourced to one named public critic and unnamed people described as familiar with the conversation or pledge, but not with documentary evidence, contemporaneous notes, or on-the-record confirmation from either Mamdani or Espaillat. That’s not to suggest dishonesty, but rather that misremembering, missing context, or misunderstanding shared events could leave the claim reflecting a subjective interpretation rather than an objective account.

Rep. Velázquez also told Politico’s Chris Sommerfeldt that “Mamdani’s commitment to back Rep. Adriano Espaillat for reelection was at first so ironclad they shook hands on it last summer.”

Next, we have an even more amorphous claim in the New York Times:

“Mr. Mamdani had committed to supporting Mr. Espaillat last year, according to three people familiar with the pledge. It came after the congressman dropped his support for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral bid and got behind Mr. Mamdani after he won the Democratic primary.”

This language is vague within the context that Rep. Espaillat backed former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary and switched to Mamdani after he won the primary. The claim doesn’t specify if “supporting Mr. Espaillat” specifically means backing him if he secures the party’s nomination or in the primary.

While the claim has appeared in other outlets, the sourcing reliably leads back to the Politico and New York Times reporting.

Readers who have gotten this far will notice what we don’t have: any documentary evidence that Mamdani made a promise to back Rep. Espaillat in his primary.

I didn’t encounter a single journalist, even on background, who expressed full confidence about what the mayor explicitly said to Rep. Espaillat.

City & State’s Peter Sterne offered an analysis that summarized the reality of the situation:

“Only Mamdani and Espaillat know what was actually said – and neither of them are talking on the record. It’s possible that Mamdani actually said, ‘I’m so grateful to you for endorsing me for the general election now that I’m the Democratic nominee that I’ll oppose any primary challenge against you, even if they’re a democratic socialist,’ but I doubt it was so explicit.

More likely, this is a Rashomon situation. There’s a lot of gray area, especially given how charming the mayor can be. I can easily see Mamdani indicating his support for Espaillat in a way that led Espaillat to think a primary endorsement was in the bag, but which Mamdani didn’t see as an explicit quid pro quo—in contrast to his conversations with Hochul.”

Despite the certainty readers might infer from various media reports and headlines, we do not know what the mayor said. What the public record supports is that Rep. Espaillat’s allies experienced the mayor’s decision as a betrayal of a commitment they believed he had made.

Unless clear evidence emerges, the mayor’s defenders will hold that his alleged promise-breaking was a misinterpretation of a commitment to support the Democratic nominee, and Rep. Espaillat’s supporters will continue to say the mayor is untrustworthy.

The only verdict available today: inconclusive.

Consider just a handful of claims pulsing through public discourse today: President Donald Trump is dying of dementia with only days to live. Elon Musk altered vote totals to elect Trump in 2024. The government has in its possession extraterrestrial bodies. The assassination attempts on Trump’s life are false-flag events. A secret cabal of Jewish billionaires controls global events. COVID-19 was intentionally released on an unsuspecting public from a biolab.

I’ve seen most of these claims circulating through liberal and left-wing online spaces, some explicitly and others through insinuation. But is there reliable evidence for a single one of the above claims, which range from silly to outright bigoted? Nope.

I’m not going to link to the irresponsible claims because elevating them further is dangerous and readers have already seen them ad nauseam. The QAnon-ification of American politics has escaped right-wing containment. The Republican Party may remain its primary home, but the same conspiratorial logic is rapidly growing on the Left. We’re headed toward a critical mass of paranoia.

To be clear, real conspiracies exist. Corporations and billionaires wield oligarchic power. Governments abuse power. Politicians lie with abandon. But allowing those truths to override critical thinking and foster the embrace of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories is dangerous.

Institutional trust has collapsed with such force, and understandably so, that the American people are engaged in a giant game of 24/7 social media telephone, leading to partisan misinformation echo chambers. Each side, correctly, looks at the other’s misinformation with disdain, then carries right along with its own.

The consequence of this vast conspiracy infrastructure is that many Americans trust nothing at all, denying everything from multiple active genocides to basic health facts, while collapsing legitimate scrutiny of new technologies into fantasies of inevitable dystopia. The sense of despair is palpable.

In short: conspiracy theories are making us miserable, confused, and afraid. The irony of it all is that information has never been more accessible. While critical thinking is essential to navigating the onslaught, we exist in an age of both remarkable information availability and mass disinformation.

But instead of empowering ourselves to wade through and become the best-informed generation of humans ever to live, many Americans are giving up. We’re retreating into nihilism, techno-dystopianism, and self-infantilization. And the existing power centers benefit from this fearful populace with little reason to change the tide.

The American Left remains far less institutionally captured by conspiracism than the MAGA Right, but too many liberal and left-wing voters and online surrogates now respond to Trump with the same totalizing logic: the election must have been rigged, assassination attempts must be be staged, and unanswered questions are proof of a plot.

What can we do? Stop outsourcing our judgment to politicians, influencers, and media personalities whose power depends on keeping us frightened. Take the time to learn each day, especially through reading well-researched books (whether print or audio). Verify information before sharing. Engage in community. Stop financing charlatans who ride fear into power.

Cynicism is not critical thinking. The person who assumes institutions lie by default and events are most likely rigged, regardless of evidence, is demonstrating gullibility rather than intelligence. Critical thinking requires enough hope to keep investigating, discipline to follow facts, and humility to change one’s mind when the evidence dictates.

In the many conversations I have with people across the political spectrum each week, a common thread emerges: a desire for trust and human connection. When I demonstrate care and trustworthiness, even amid serious political disagreement, tension gives way to connection.

Conspiratorial thinking thrives in a world experienced as hostile and rigged beyond repair. Evidence matters, but evidence is difficult to receive when institutions appear corrupt and disagreement feels like a personal betrayal. Acts of kindness and humility cannot disprove a false claim, but they can help restore the trust required to confront it.

We need to recognize that misinformation isn’t just something done to us. Every unverified claim we repost, every fear merchant we reward, and every retreat into fear-based isolation makes the problem worse. The best defense against misinformation and fear is a reassertion of our own social agency. We have the choice to build lives rooted in trust, care, and reality.

NY-12 is not a test of whether the Left can win a Manhattan congressional primary. The Left has already failed to field a financially competitive candidate. The real test is whether an energized Left that ushered Mayor Zohran Mamdani into NY-12’s most famous residence can breach the heart of Democratic elite politics: a district of donors, media professionals, institutional liberals, and voters exhausted by a race in which nearly everyone sounds more distinct in style than substance.

As of this writing, the race appears to be a two-way fight between Upper East Side Assemblymember Alex Bores and Upper West Side Assemblymember Micah Lasher, with Kennedy heir Jack Schlossberg and lawyer George Conway both seeing the narrowest of paths to a win.

The only candidate in the race running explicitly on the Left is Nina Schwalbe. Her campaign has struggled to catch fire in a post-Citizens United world in which no level playing field exists, and competition requires huge sums of cash. The resulting competitive race between only white men feels almost too on-the-nose as a representation of Trump-era social regression.

The fault lines between these leading candidates aren’t as clear as in the race happening just south of the district, where former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander is clobbering Rep. Dan Goldman in the polls.

But lines do exist in NY-12, and voters are doing their best to make sense of the fissures.

Institutional favorite Lasher has made domestic anti-authoritarianism and fighting Trumpism the hallmark issues of his campaign. Union and progressive organizational favorite Bores has become a national face in the conversation about how to regulate AI, in part because of OpenAI-world’s stalwart opposition to his regulatory framework and Anthropic-world’s support for it.

Jack Schlossberg has little institutional backing but polls alongside George Conway as the only alternative to the leading candidates with any theoretical path, framing himself as an unbought outsider to legislative politics ready to bring a clean slate to the office. The notion that a Kennedy could even try to frame himself as an outsider is a signal about, or perhaps an indictment of, the level of wealth and insider politics at play in this district.

On the local side, Bores and Lasher can count East and West Side Democratic clubs among their coalition, respectively, with citywide LGBTQ+ clubs lined up behind Bores.

The leading candidates agree on domestic policy to a degree that makes them almost interchangeable to the majority of voters, although each candidate would bristle at such an assessment. To live inside a political system is to feel every fault line deeply. But given a lack of major ideological difference, each candidate instead faces character attacks with varying degrees of truth and hyperbole.

The median Democratic primary voter in NY-12, if such a thing exists, might be called a traditional liberal: affluent, highly educated, reflexively anti-Trump, and broadly comfortable with the institutions that have defined the district for decades. It is also the most Jewish congressional district in the country, making Israel a distinctly local political fault line. Jewish voters are not a monolith on this issue, but candidates must navigate an older, more institutionally connected Jewish electorate alongside younger voters, including many younger Jews, whose politics on Israel and Palestine diverge from their elders’. Do they reassure the district’s institutional liberal and pro-Israel constituencies, or signal alignment with its growing left-wing bloc?

Bores and Lasher have settled into a rhetorical dance to navigate the issue that makes both sound like a step backward from Nadler. One could be forgiven for losing count of how many times these candidates have used their go-to Leahy Law dodge to avoid taking a direct position on stopping the genocide by any legislative means necessary.

It cannot be overstated how sharply Democratic voters have moved on this issue. Gallup found 65% now sympathize more with Palestinians, compared with 17% who sympathize more with Israelis.

Schlossberg has taken a position to Bores and Lasher’s left, making clear his support for conditioning aid and blocking certain arms sales to Israel while continuing Iron Dome funding. It’s not a left-wing position, just left of the other leading candidates. That might be enough to pull voters who cast ballots for Mayor Zohran Mamdani in a race where no candidate with the fundraising necessary to be competitive represents their perspective.

On domestic issues, Bores supporters portray Lasher as a shapeshifter, while Lasher supporters echo the same sentiment in the other direction. The race is a bit of a Rorschach test for voters on the domestic front who will point to Lasher’s movement on issues from his previous government service to his legislative work, but conversely point to Bores moving right during his congressional run, such as dropping sponsorship for a sex work decriminalization bill and speaking in a pro-Israel cadence that either wasn’t happening before or escaped notice.

The issue for Schlossberg is the same on both domestic and international issues: voters have to take him at his word because he would be a first-time legislator, doesn’t have a legislative record to evaluate against his statements and maintains a bizarre online persona. Left voters using international policy as a litmus test might make that gamble.

The overwhelming sentiment from voters I’ve spoken to throughout the district about the race is exhaustion. “I know who I’m not voting for,” an exasperated resident told me at a recent dinner after receiving one too many pieces of direct mail. But this voter was still struggling to navigate between the similar candidates.

I asked Ellen Bender, NY-12 voter and co-founder of activist group Markers For Democracy, how she was navigating the race as a voter on the Left.

“The race is really dividing our progressive groups. We have some die-hard Upper East Side Bores supporters, some die-hard Upper West Side Micah supporters, and then a bunch of us who are disappointed with their positions on Israel and Palestine who are supporting Nina or Jack. No one I know is supporting George Conway,” Bender told me. “The whole country is moving to the left on Israel and Palestine. Judging by the positions of two of the three leading candidates in the primary, this district is moving to the right. I don’t know if that is actually true - if the two front-runners are running cautious campaigns or if they themselves are genuinely to the right of Jerry Nadler.”

Indeed, the unwillingness of leading candidates to engage clearly on Israel has become par for the course in a race marked by obfuscation. These candidates seem unwilling to stand for anything that could be considered a risk in the district, even if the issue is among the greatest moral challenges of our time. The only candidate who doesn’t channel an obvious sense of risk aversion is anti-Trump conservative Conway, whose loose-cannon style straddles a line somewhere between charming and unnerving. In a race defined by calculated dullness, it’s downright invigorating, even if his politics are an absolute nonstarter for progressive and Left voters.

“This district is in many ways the epicenter of the Democratic Party elite. This is where our media apparatus is located. This is where candidates from across the country solicit high-dollar donations,” political analyst and NY-12 voter Eli Miller told me. “What this race tells me is that the Democratic Party elite is so blindingly focused on strategy and figuring out how to win again that they have become completely indifferent to debates about actual policy issues. The candidates are desperate not to talk about Israel if they don’t have to. They’re not fighting with each other over tax policy or any other class politics issue. The only thing any of them really want to communicate is: I know how Democrats can win again, and it’s by electing people with my particular aesthetic.”

Michael Lange, a political analyst born and raised in the district, explained to me the ambivalence experienced by voters who see themselves in none of the leading candidates:

“The Left, broadly, feels somewhat adrift in NY-12. On Israel-Palestine, a top issue to leftists under-50, Lasher and Bores appear indistinguishable. Schlossberg has changed his tune on offensive weapon aid recently, but it is hard to gauge what is sincerity versus politicking. The differences between the top contenders are far more stylistic and aesthetic than they are ideological. There was a time and a lane for one of them to emerge as the true progressive standard bearer. Mamdani’s +46 approval rating proves it. But no one seized it.”

Lange’s point about Mamdani is important: Emerson/PIX11 found Mamdani with 66 percent approval among likely Democratic primary voters in NY-12, contradicting the notion that he is toxic in the district.

Many voters in the district wish to see a leading NY-12 candidate bring the substance and style of politics that Mamdani brought to his own campaign.

Paloma Naderi, co-founder of Moms for Mamdani, offered a conflicted perspective on the race:

“For many lefty New Yorkers like myself, it’s been sobering to pivot focus to NY-12 after experiencing the hope injected by Zohran Mamdani’s election: a campaign that put human rights and structural inequality at its center. This forced focus-shift is a stark reminder for me that my NYC apartment sits in multiple jurisdictions, and this race highlights the distinct political climate of the Upper East Side; my neighborhood did not decide the Mayor’s race, but it may very well decide this one. This is an urgent moment in national politics, especially on two particular issues: Israel-Palestine and AI.”

Naderi continued:

“Unfortunately, I don’t believe any of the NY-12 frontrunners’ views on Israel-Palestine are meeting most Americans where they are, as the majority move toward recognition of US and Israel’s action in Gaza as a genocide. On the second issue, we desperately need AI regulation. Alex Bores is the only candidate who has shown dogged commitment to winning sorely needed, common sense AI safeguards, despite plenty of dark money trying to prevent him from doing so. Bores has also demonstrated a willingness to listen to critique and possibly embrace a Left that’s not fully on board with him. That’s why most folks I speak with are quietly supporting him.”

What left-wing voters understand is that the race in NY-12 will not be a data point for the national party about the viability of left-wing politics represented by candidates like Schwalbe in more conservative or moderate Democratic districts. The wealth of this district is so high that it isn’t representative. But the three leading candidates do represent different levels of institutional ownership.

A decade after Republicans surrendered to an insurgency, Democrats are now facing one of their own. NY-12 will demonstrate how much of the populism at the gates has breached the party’s upper echelons and whether it can be held back any longer.

Democrats’ revolt may be more humanity-affirming and democratic than its GOP counterpart, but it’s still a hostile takeover. In a district as wildly privileged as NY-12, the closest possible outcome to rejecting the institutions might somehow be the election of a Kennedy.

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(Authorial disclosure: Due to the nature of my work, I am a member of multiple organizations that make endorsements in NY-12. I am not personally affiliated with any active campaign in this race, and my views are strictly my own.)

The primary elections of May 19 tell a story about the direction of both the Democratic and Republican Parties, along with a signal of what’s to come. Two races in safe red and blue districts serve as key markers as we head toward the midterm elections in November.

The stunning ouster of Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky’s 4th congressional district by President Donald Trump-backed Ed Gallrein is further evidence of GOP contraction as Trump tightens his grip. Massie repeatedly demonstrated independence from the vengeful president and maintained unusual cross-party alliances, including personal friendship with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California’s 17th congressional district. Massie opposed Trump on a host of issues, including the Epstein files disclosures, Iran war, and support for Israel.

More than $32 million in ad dollars made this race the most expensive congressional primary in United States history. An Al Jazeera analysis of FEC data found that $15.5 million of that spending came from three PACs linked to pro-Israel donors.

While pro-Israel interests have held onto the Republican Party for today, warning signs are flashing in the GOP as isolationist voters look at their own wallets and wonder why money is flowing outward from the nation into conflicts and nations they view as unconnected to their own interests.

Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL and farmer, has never held elected office. His campaign materials, which include phrases like “End the Woke Agenda,” function as a shrine to Trump. “This is Trump Country. It’s time we had a Congressman who acts like it,” a section of his website reads.

The Trump candidate was rewarded for his fealty and will be headed to Congress.

As the GOP continues to consolidate into something between a personal party of the sitting president and a purchasable entity by major super PACs, a populist revolt continues in the Democratic Party.

Democratic socialist Chris Rabb won the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s 3rd congressional district. Rabb had broad support from the American Left, including Squad members, Philadelphia DSA, the Working Families Party, and activist groups.

In rhetoric that might have seemed stunning just a few years ago from a candidate who also held endorsements from mainstream elected officials, organizations and even The Philadelphia Inquirer, Rabb’s foreign policy platform reads in part:

“American leadership for too long has been defined by the violent impact we have on other nations. We must immediately dismantle the military industrial complex, cease all imperialist foreign policy, and end all U.S. led efforts for regime-change.

We must stop funding violations of human rights. The genocide in Gaza must end. The genocide in the Sudan must end. Every person deserves to be safe, no matter where their home is. Every state’s right to exist obligates it to extend equal rights to all people.”

Rabb’s win is yet another example of how the pro-Israel consensus on the Democratic side has collapsed amid the Gaza genocide and is unlikely to rebound. However, the sentiment that animates this collapse is rooted in broader value shifts: a growing sense of global community among Democratic voters, who have become more ardently anti-war across the board, more concerned about global human rights and more aware of how systems of power impact their own daily lives.

As the Democratic result demonstrates organic realignment among the party’s own base, the Republican result demonstrates personal fealty to the president’s cult of personality without a clear path toward long-term success under a democratic system.

The president himself is remarkably unpopular, Democrats are favored in the generic ballot for this midterm cycle (despite gerrymandering), and it seems increasingly clear that the Republican Party’s plan for continued success is directly tied to eroding the democratic system further and further to ensure disapproval cannot interrupt its own rule.

It remains to be seen whether an angry public will comply. The movement within the Democratic Party suggests it may not.

To watch President Donald Trump in 2026 is to witness a man in stark decline. The Trump of 2015 was an energetic and boisterous force for right-wing populism, savaging his opponents with glee and nastiness. The reality TV king could reduce a person into a caricature with a single word. Who can forget his crude “Pocahontas” epithet against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, designed to both denigrate her as a fraud and delight his racist supporters?

Trump’s first administration was a barrage of TV-ready chaos. Attacks on journalists, morning tweets that upended global relations, lengthy press conferences designed as cage matches, and ugly episodes that Trump would treat as though we were living through a TV miniseries. Unsatisfied to leave the COVID-19 pandemic as the crescendo of a grim first term, Trump went out with a bang, staging an insurrection that pushed American democracy past the brink.

The presidency of Joe Biden was rendered in the American consciousness as little more than an underwhelming season with a bad guest star in the ongoing Trump show. The affectless, hollow leader appeared to be wasting away in front of our eyes as his administration armed a genocide committed by Israel that came to define his entire tenure, alongside the horrific collapse of national abortion rights. The best parts of Biden’s legacy could be quickly undone by a conservative Congress.

Trump laid waste to the diminished Biden, whose faculties seemed so far behind the former president’s own that the American public was ready to re-elect an openly unhinged leader rather than entrust itself to a figure who looked ready to collapse at a stiff breeze. That the would-be “transitional” President Biden refused to exit stage left until the last possible moment only made America resent him more, seeing his character as less distinct from Trump’s than they were led to believe.

Dispensing with replacement Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris would prove easy work, especially after an assassination attempt that created not only the most iconic image of Trump ever captured, but among the most iconic images in the history of American presidents. A bloodied Trump stands triumphant after dodging a would-be fatal bullet, where his response was a confrontational “Fight! Fight! Fight!” The race was over. Trump transitioned from insurrectionist to fearless leader.

Time to start the next season.

Something was immediately off, and the emerging second Trump administration wasn’t the product Americans believed they were buying. This new President Trump seemed diminished. His boisterous rallies wound down. His energy level dropped as he struggled to stay awake in meetings. His ever-ready vocal projection was replaced by a sort of whisper-speak that demonstrated nothing of the authority Americans were accustomed to seeing from the president.

Worst of all for Trump, the myth of an unbreakable base has begun to crack. Trump was never wildly popular with the American public, but could rely on a base with such fanatic devotion that some would describe it as a cult. To them, Trump was a religious figure. Without the magic of performance he’d mastered for decades, the con was obvious.

Trump was not a real isolationist, but a militarist willing to sell restraint while pursuing regime-change war. Trump wasn’t going to end Israel’s genocide, but continue to arm the rogue state. Trump wasn’t going to push prices down, and couldn’t be bothered to take the affordability crisis seriously because it had no impact on him. The political act he performed to win the presidency was now exposed as artifice.

Talk about a dreaded Trump third term was replaced as even the president himself seemed too tired to keep up the charade. Stalwart former defenders from media mogul Tucker Carlson to former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene turned viciously on Trump, making the American Right clear it had been swindled. Carlson went so far as to apologize for misleading the public. (A likely cynical move to advance his own ambitions.)

The Trump show we’ve watched for over a decade is reaching the final act, but there is no relief in sight.

American democracy remains in freefall as each branch of government continues to erode. Trump’s lackeys continue to push on every restraint remaining in the now competitive-authoritarian U.S. system. Oligarchy has run so amok that Americans can’t even conduct local-level democracy without outside money seeking to poison the bench that leads to federal office. Opportunistic politicians across the spectrum take advantage as faith in the two-party system spirals into freefall.

The average American has little ability to influence their own government, as extreme partisan gerrymandering locks in party control of Congress and politicians answer to dark money interests that spend more than everyday Americans ever could. Americans have become tangential to their own government.

We may be reaching the finale of the Trump show, but we’ve passed another finale, whether or not we realize it: the end of the democratic era.

The U.S. is no longer a liberal democracy, and it was only so for a brief period of time during the 20th and 21st centuries. That doesn’t mean we can’t write a brand new chapter of democracy, but we must begin by acknowledging the former’s close.

President Donald Trump didn’t destroy democracy, even if that narrative is most convenient. He pried open the holes we’d been ignoring for decades. He sped up a process already in place. Former President Biden did the same, albeit to a lesser degree, as did President Barack Obama before. As did President George W. Bush. Executive power expanded presidency over presidency in ways big and small.

The American story of democratic decline represents a system failure beyond the reaches of any political party, even if one party sprints down the road to fascism while the other walks more slowly.

Our new chapter could be one of American fascism. But it could also be a chapter of renewal, whereby an engaged population wrests control of its government and rebuilds a better politics.

The Trump show may be ending, but the machinery behind it is only getting stronger. If Americans want a democratic future, they will have to build one sturdier than the fragile foundation both parties pretended not to see collapsing beneath them.

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