Trump’s personalist rule over the MAGA GOP, meanwhile, is increasingly bound up with the pro-Israel cause. And indeed, it was just these two forces — MAGA and pro-Israel hard-liners — that came for Massie, a principled libertarian in the Ron and Rand Paul mold, who opposes the war with Iran and has called for cutting all foreign aid, including to the Jewish state.

The GOP under Trump has ideological underpinnings, but fealty to Trump comes first. That is the only tangible reality. As Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) put it on X, “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party. The rest of us get the privilege of living in it.” Fine — who combines such utter servility to Trump with grossly anti-Muslim rhetoric (“the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one”) — fits in much better with the second Trump term than the independent-minded Massie ever could.

And Massie realized what he was up against. It wasn’t only that Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL, was personally recruited by Trump to run against him. It was the money: more than $34 million poured into the primary, much of it funding anti-Massie attack ads by pro-Israel groups, making this the most expensive House primary in US history. Combined with Trump’s frothing opposition, and anti-Massie messaging from the likes of Pete Hegseth, it was enough to easily sink him.

Rarely has a House primary been about one person (rather than an opposition between two of them). Several months ago, Trump said publicly that he just wanted a “warm body to beat Massie.” Gallrein made it clear he would happily serve in that role, promising to back Trump 100% of the time. That was all there was to it. He granted almost no interviews, and declined numerous debate invitations from Massie. Here was a foot soldier for Trump, going against a Republican who was willing, time after time, to go his own way.

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The Zohran Mamdani I know

By ross barkan

Trump reviled the Kentucky libertarian for holding up a Covid relief bill in 2020; for voting against the “Big, Beautiful Bill” tax-and-spending package; and for leading the bipartisan fight to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein Files. For Trump, that last was the point of no return. Massie would have to suffer for linking up with Democrats like Rep. Ro Khanna of California in a bid to seek the truth about the late convicted sex offender.

If, for the president, Epstein was the breaking point, Massie’s greatest political challenge was defying the traditional American foreign-policy consensus. Unlike most Republican politicians, Massie was willing to be a principled isolationist. His conservatism on domestic matters translated to a deep skepticism of foreign entanglements, and he was the rare Republican to criticize Benjamin Netanyahu. He voted against a House resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel and also opposed Iron Dome funding. Hence why AIPAC and Republican Jewish groups made it their priority to wipe out Massie. AIPAC gloated over his defeat: “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!”

Why, exactly, were they so motivated? For Israel hawks, the Republican Party is their true last stand. The Democratic Party isn’t totally lost to them, but they can read enough polling data: in five or 10 years, there may not be any politicians like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer left: powerful Democrats who offer unstinting support for the Jewish state. Not very long ago, almost every top Democrat attended the AIPAC conference and delighted in landing a speaking slot. In 2016, when Bernie Sanders refused, his decision was considered mildly scandalous. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, had been a proud attendee.

Those days are over. Several potential presidential candidates have said already that they’d refuse AIPAC donations. Democrats have turned on the organization for its backing of Republicans and its willingness to bludgeon Democrats who deviate from the Netanyahu orthodoxy in any fashion and even to the mildest degree. Even more centrist-minded Democrats, like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have called for limiting military aid; California Gov. Gavin Newsom described Israel as an apartheid state before walking it back (sort of).

Many Democrats, too, see the triumph of Zohran Mamdani, a pro-Palestine mayor who supports BDS, as a watershed moment, and evidence that it’s possible to win elections while defying the Israel lobby. Mamdani won in New York, the most Jewish city in America.

With Republicans under age 50 turning against the Jewish state, the possible proliferation of Massie-esque Republicans is an existential threat to the Israel hawks, and they will continue to pummel politicians to ensure the GOP will keep sounding like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz. The defeat of Massie promises, at the minimum, that Republicans will think twice before breaking with Israel in any fashion. It’s not that regular voters care all that much — it’s the money, so much of it, ready to deployed at a moment’s notice to annihilate any Republican who steps out of line.

How long that lasts is the real question. For now, Israel hawks unquestionably dominate the Republican Party. What about 2036? 2046?

The hawks have proved, in Kentucky, that they can overwhelm a House primary with unprecedented amounts of cash. But they haven’t yet shifted the attitudes of young conservatives, many of whom are either isolationist — they take the slogan “America First” seriously — or veer into anti-Semitism, like the Groypers who follow Nick Fuentes. Anti-Israel or Israel-skeptical conservative commentators including Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson are undoubtedly on the ascent, while traditional hawks like Ben Shapiro are seeing their enterprises shrink. The conservative grassroots, whether animated by old-fashioned hatred of Jews or straightforward opposition to foreign-policy entanglements, is not supporting the Shapiro-style Republican. If they still, largely, back Trump, they’re weary of the Iran war and don’t understand how America benefits.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s purity trap

By Sohrab Ahmari

It’s not obvious, yet, what the post-Trump Republican Party looks like. Neoconservatives and hawks have had a resurgence in Trump’s second term. Led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, they’ve emerged as true power brokers, while JD Vance, who used to represent the party’s isolationist wing, has been forced to accept a war in Iran he might not have backed were he president. Massie has, for the most part, been the outlier, playing the gadfly role occupied by the likes of Ron Paul in past decades.

But it’s Massie’s vision, as marginal as it is, that may point to the future of the Republican Party — or a future, at least. Not all GOP voters are as strongly libertarian as he is, but as the current cohort of Gen-Z ages, more will probably be receptive to his message in the coming years. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that while a vast majority of Republicans still back Trump, 37% want to see the party’s next nominee “move in a different direction.” Notably, 45% of Republicans believe “it is best for the United States to be active in world affairs to maintain security and prosperity,” while half say that “they want the country to pay less attention to problems overseas.”

When Trump exits the scene, those viewpoints will remain. Trump won his first election, after all, excoriating the Republicans who’d championed the Iraq War. If he broke his campaign promises, he still retained control of the base thanks to his magnetism. But future Republicans won’t have the same power. One day, a vacuum will open up. Unfortunately for Massie, that day isn’t here yet. It’s Trump’s Republican Party. MAGA apostates don’t have a place in it. For now.

The answer, at least as of Chavez-DeRemer’s hearing, appears to be yes. Senate Republicans on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee are poised to send her nomination to the floor of the upper chamber, where Chavez-DeRemer will likely be confirmed with some measure of bipartisan support.

This, of course, could all go sideways. Republicans are planning to ask Chavez-DeRemer some serious questions about her intentions for the department today. GOP Sen. Rand Paul, a longtime skeptic of labor unions, will decline to move Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination out of the HELP committee. That means she’ll need votes from the Left. Sources say the labor movement is itself making a powerful case to Democratic committee members like Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin: It’s Chavez-DeRemer or someone much, much worse.

How did a Republican president’s nominee to lead the Labor Department end up receiving an assist from unions? The story of Lori Chavez-DeRemer is the story of how the GOP became MAGA. Trump’s singular, personal ideology of “America First” transactional pragmatism is the operating software of the Republican Party right now. That means different things at different moments. At this moment, even while an anti-union figure like Elon Musk slashes the federal bureaucracy, the GOP is backing the same candidate for Labor as unions themselves. With opposition to Musk quickly becoming a new cultural litmus test on the Left, Democrats are thrown by the nomination too.

Thirty-six years ago this month, a 20-year-old Lori Chavez-DeRemer started working part-time at the front desk of a Planned Parenthood clinic in California. Now in her mid-fifties, Chavez-DeRemer told NBC News: “I personally do not support abortion, and if confirmed, I would not use my position as Secretary to facilitate abortion access in Labor Department programs. My job will be to implement President Trump’s agenda.”

It’s not uncommon for moderate Republicans to disagree with the party’s platform on abortion, and her long career in politics reflects a standard record for GOP politicians on the West Coast. In a 2023 interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Chavez-DeRemer mused about her time as a suburban mayor: “For the longest time, people probably didn’t even know what my party was, because I just wanted to represent the people and the concerns that they had for things that happened in front of their noses.”

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Trump's plan to drain the swamp

By Emily Jashinsky

This makes Chavez-DeRemer an interesting character. Before serving a single term in Congress, she enjoyed a long career in local politics. After marrying her “high school sweetheart”, supporting him through medical school with odd jobs, and a stint on the local parks committee, in 2004 Chavez-DeRemer joined the city council of Happy Valley, a community outside Portland, Oregon. A mother of twins, she would go on to serve as mayor of Happy Valley from 2010 to 2018.

Chavez-DeRemer took a “break” from holding office until 2022, when she flipped Oregon’s 5th Congressional District red in a razor-tight race for the seat she then lost last November following another close election. But by Thanksgiving, Trump announced he would nominate Chavez-DeRemer to serve as Labor Secretary, elevating the former mayor of Happy Valley to the executive branch.

At the time, the Washington Post reported that the pick “surprised” Beltway insiders and described the nominee as a “moderate Republican who has served on bipartisan congressional caucuses and supported pro-union legislation”. So how did she end up on Trump’s list? It’s widely understood in D.C. that Teamsters president Sean O’Brien pushed for Chavez-DeRemer after agreeing to speak at the Republican National Convention last summer, a place no labor leader in recent history would have been caught dead until Trump came along. O’Brien also declined to endorse Kamala Harris, bucking a trend.

As a New Yorker story recently observed, Chavez-DeRemer “was raised in California by a Mexican American Teamster”, adding: “Her father, Richard Chavez, who worked at a Safeway milk plant in the Central Valley, reportedly leaned on his union card to help his daughter last year, when she was seeking labor endorsements in a bid for reelection.” While she lost that race, Chavez-DeRemer became the first Republican endorsed by the local Teamsters in two decades. Why? Her support for the PRO Act, a bill strongly associated with Joe Biden and the Democrats, which would make it much easier to form a union, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would guarantee the right to organize for state employees.

These are not merely bills strongly associated with Biden and the Democrats, but also bills strongly opposed by high-profile Republicans, with the very notable exception of Josh Hawley in the case of the PRO Act. That’s why, according to Politico, anti-union groups tried to prevent Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination in the first place. That she is even up for nomination, let alone confirmation, is a major victory for Trumpism in and of itself.

Theoretically, a win for Trump on this could be a victory for the Left too, though Chavez-DeRemer only has a lifetime rating of 10% on the AFL-CIO’s scorecard that seeks to rate a politicians’ friendliness to organized labor. “Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination is perhaps the best-case scenario for worker advocates and labor unions, relative to the other names in the mix, such as former fast-food CEO Andy Puzder,” Politico continued. If Democrats were to block her, then a conventional anti-union Republican would almost certainly take her place.

First, though, Chavez-DeRemer needs to be voted out of committee, a normally mundane part of the confirmation process that in this case could be imperiled by GOP Sen. Rand Paul who confirmed on Tuesday that he would vote against Chavez-DeRemer. Paul’s decision comes as no surprise. “I’m the national spokesman and lead author of the right-to-work bill,” he posted on X back in January. “Her support for the PRO Act, which would not only oppose national right to work but would preempt state law on right to work — I think it’s not a good thing.” This means Trump will need Democrats to advance his nominee out of HELP to a full floor vote: Sen. John Fetterman says he’s a yes, as does Jeff Merkley. But that won’t matter if Chavez-DeRemer gets stuck in committee.

Chavez-DeRemer’s support for the PRO Act is a big sticking point for many Republicans. According to one senior GOP House source, “she is a Leftist in moderate’s clothing”, while the president of the National Right to Work Committee warned in a New York Post op-ed: “Teamsters don’t deserve a Cabinet pick — like Labor nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer”. The evening before today’s hearing, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board came out swinging. “Republicans are enjoying increasing support from low-income workers, but too many think unions are the key to that support,” the paper asserted. “It isn’t.”

Several weeks ago, Paul warned that Chavez-DeRemer could lose as many as 15 Republicans if she even advances out of the committee. For decades, the conservative movement’s “fusionist” agreement against communism held libertarians, social conservatives and neoconservatives together. Labor unions were distrusted, not merely as disruptors of the free market, but as potential breeding grounds for dangerous ideological infiltration. This consensus seemed to fall apart after 2016, leading many on the Right to reconsider their reflexive rejection of organized labor.

Daniel Kishi is a policy advisor at American Compass, where conservatives interested in building out a Right-of-center lane for ordinary workers try to put ideological meat on the cultural bones of MAGA (myself included). Asked about the confirmation, he told me: “President Trump has transformed the Republican Party into the party of the working class. Selecting Lori Chavez-DeRemer to serve as his Labor Secretary reflects his desire to deliver on the promise of this realignment”. He added: “Senate Republicans should see this as an opportunity to cement the party’s gains with working Americans and make them a permanent part of their coalition.”

Heading into the hearing, Trump allies feel good about her odds, but nobody quite knows what the math will look like. That will depend on how Chavez-DeRemer performs today.

Republicans roughly know what to expect from Chavez-DeRemer’s realignment-friendly warmth towards organized labor. Democrats, on the other hand, now face the prospect of confirming someone who seems increasingly likely to answer to Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency as he pivots to Labor, leaving any potential department head responsive to the President’s mandate for sweeping reform. Musk is a bitter opponent of unions and DOGE is already making headlines over its early moves to reform the Labor Department. Greenlighting Chavez-DeRemer’s confirmation could come back to haunt Democrats should the nominee be confirmed and start rubber-stamping attacks on organized labor from DOGE, especially if they appear to benefit Musk’s businesses.

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Democratic Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey told Semafor he had a “good conversation” with Chavez-DeRemer but seemingly referenced DOGE and said: “I’m not supporting nominees as long as the lawlessness continues.” Meanwhile, Chris Murphy of Connecticut came out strong in the same article. “I’m a hard no on her,” he explained. “And it’s not a protest vote. It’s about her character and commitment to the Constitution.”

That’s a good preview of where Democrats’ questions will go, and from where the pressures on them are coming. If, however, you’re Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from swing-state Wisconsin, voting Chavez-DeRemer out of committee — and even into office — is pretty clearly an easy opportunity to look like a common-sense Democrat who calls balls and strikes. (Baldwin ran ads highlighting her bipartisan work with Trump to win a close reelection in November.) If Merkley and Fetterman are backing Chavez-DeRemer, it’s easy to imagine Sanders helping her out of committee as well.

Indeed, the aforementioned senior labor movement source believes Chavez-DeRemer’s biggest battle will be with her own party, where opposition to unions is deeply rooted in decades of practical and ideological machinations.

It’s remarkable that a Teamsters-endorsed backer of legislation despised by anti-union forces in the GOP ended up as the Labor Department nominee of a Republican president. It’s remarkable she could lose dozens of votes from Democrats, despite union backing. It’s most remarkable, however, that Chavez-DeRemer is actually poised to join Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard in Trump’s realignment cabinet.

One well-placed GOP source explained the dynamic like this. “Republicans are not thrilled about her,” they said. “But they’re going to vote for her.” Donald Trump gets what he wants from the party he remade.

The pundits have been left scratching their heads, but really, they shouldn’t be surprised. After all, the story of the last eleven years is of one effing crisis after another — and the Tories clearly thrive on it. Don’t forget that their decade of dominance began with a crisis, not a victory. In 2010 the general election produced a hung parliament. Yet in the space of five days, the Tories negotiated the first coalition government since the war and carried on regardless. 

Since then, there have been many more crises, from austerity and the Scottish referendum, to Brexit and the pandemic. These are crises in the medical sense of the word — the point at which things could go either way for the patient. Any one of them could have sunk the Tories, but didn’t. Indeed, it was a case of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. At each election since 2010, the Conservative share of the vote has gone up.

Of course, it’s not that Conservative governments haven’t taken damage over the last eleven years — just ask David Cameron, George Osborne and Theresa May. But the other parties have always come off worse — as Nick Clegg or Jeremy Corbyn could confirm.

Conservatives aren’t supposed to like change — and especially not disruptive change. As Lord Salisbury put it, “whatever happens will be for the worse, therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.” But that pessimistic, mistrustful worldview is perhaps why the Tories are better prepared to cope with disruption than their opponents.

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Serfs don't vote Tory

By Peter Franklin

In her 2007 polemic, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein came up with the concept of “disaster capitalism.” It’s an answer to an awkward question for the Left: why does capitalism keep on winning? It’s not despite the damage it does, she argued, but because of it: whether a disaster is natural or manmade, there’s always some corporation ready and willing to exploit the situation.

It’s a self-serving narrative — a universal cop-out for the failures of the Left, but it does contain a grain of truth. Whether in economics or any other sphere, there are those who are temperamentally suited to succeed through disaster. Perhaps we need a similar concept — let’s call it “crisis conservatism” — to explain the last eleven years of British politics.

Of course, the EFFing crisis isn’t over yet. It might have only just begun. The Conservative Party Chairman, Oliver Dowden, has promised that there’ll be turkey on the table this Christmas. But if there isn’t, Boris’s luck might just turn. The Prime Minister’s enemies are salivating at the prospect. Andrew Neil can barely contain himself: “big government requires big competence, something Johnson and his lacklustre Cabinet clearly lack. That is likely to become even more apparent during a winter of scarcity, disruption and rising prices…”

But in their impatience to see “BoJo the Clown” get his comeuppance, his critics are missing a more subtle threat to his grip on power. If the shelves stay full, the lights stay on and Covid is contained, then the political agenda will shift to this country’s long-term problems instead.

For a government used to short-term crisis management, that could prove fatal. Indeed, it is when a country emerges from a period of upheaval — and can finally see beyond the next emergency — that voters are most likely to demand a new direction. The three elections that defined Britain’s post-war history took place in 1945, 1979 and 1997 — after the Second World War, the Winter of Discontent and Black Wednesday respectively. In each case, victory went to the leader offering the surest promise of change: Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair. 

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By James Kirkup

Unfortunately for the Tories, their leader now and for the foreseeable future is Boris Johnson. In his recent profile of Angela Merkel, Jeremy Cliffe describes the two basic kinds of leader: the gestalter who shapes the course of events and the verwalter who merely manages them. For the most part, Merkel is an archetypical verwalter. The trouble with Boris is that he’s neither. He needs a category of his own. I’d suggest strassenmusiker — because he’s the consummate busker. He turns up, improvises and moves on. It’s a skill-set ideally suited to the politics (if not the governance) of crisis. But what this government needs now is a gestalter — a Thatcher or a Blair who can both articulate and implement a serious, long-term vision. 

Boris would argue that he already has one: the levelling-up agenda. His government is committed to tackling the overlapping issues of regional inequality and stagnant wages. But, so far, he’s only defined the problem, not the solution.

The Prime Minister needs to plug that gap in his big speech tomorrow, because if he doesn’t then others will try to do it for him. Neil O’Brien, a minister in the Department for Levelling Up, defines the agenda as “boosting living standards”, “improving public services” and “restoring local pride”. His boss — Michael Gove — has been talking about a “high value, free enterprise, low tax economy”. Is that the same thing? It doesn’t sound like it — at least not without proper explanation.

More dangerous than these attempts to be helpful is the threat posed by the free market Right of the party — who don’t believe in Boris’s agenda at all. We’ve already had Cabinet members like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng banging the drum for free trade and low taxes. They don’t have much to offer apart from re-heated Thatcherism, but nature abhors a vacuum. All the more reason for Boris to fill it before somebody else does.

Potentially, the biggest threat of all is from Rishi Sunak. Judging by his conference speech yesterday, the Chancellor is triangulating between the Prime Minister and the free marketeers. He’s still on board with the PM’s agenda, but if he feels the need to compete with Truss for the Thatcherite mantle, then that will change. As Sunak made clear in his speech, tax cuts have to be paid for — which would mean less money for levelling-up.

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Why I'll never vote Tory again

By Giles Fraser

Boris Johnson is in danger of losing the initiative. Not to Labour, but to his own colleagues. He must therefore dial back the crisis conservatism and fight for the long-term solutions to this country’s long-term problems. Indeed, he must confront the economic libertarians in his party over the failure of their agenda. After all, they’ve had their chance. They’ve had almost everything they could have wished for — from a globalised economy to the mass migration of cheap labour. Corporate taxation is low, the unions are weak, credit is inexpensive and executive pay unrestrained. 

So given all that supply-side goodness, where’s the growth they promised us? Where’s the prosperity? Far from stimulating enterprise, the uncontrolled flow of labour and capital has undermined it. Investment and productivity have tanked — and no wonder. If there’s not enough consumer demand in the economy because workers aren’t paid enough, then why would companies risk their money on developing better products and services?

What levelling-up really means is fixing a broken economic model — and Boris should not be afraid to say so. The time to deal with root causes of our national malaise has come. He cannot rely on another crisis to distract our attention.