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      Cryptocurrency will not save the Democratic party | Alex Bronzini-Vender

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      Twice rejected by American voters in favor of Donald Trump, the Democratic party now faces its most severe crisis of identity in four decades. Nowhere is the party’s search for relevance in Trump’s America more desperate than in its embrace of cryptocurrency, a sector whose existence depends upon its ability to circumvent the financial regulatory state the Democrats spent a century constructing. How else to explain the Democratic representative Ritchie Torres – whose South Bronx district is the poorest in the United States – joining forces with the Republican Tom Emmer to champion cryptocurrency through their newly formed congressional Crypto caucus.Congressional Republicans have always been uniform in their support for cryptocurrency: in May 2024, just three Republican House members voted against a bill to significantly relax regulations on digital tokens. But since 2016, the cryptocurrency industry has made steady inroads into the Democratic party. That convergence, if it continues, will represent a return to the pre-New Deal financial politics that the party spent a century rejecting.Throughout American history, the politics of money and financial risk have been central to party coalitions. Not since the election of 1896, however, have the Democrats been the party of deflationary, restrictive “hard money”. As the historians Anton Jäger and Noam Maggor explain, the de-facto fusion of the Populist party with the Democratic party transformed it into a vehicle for those who saw money not as a neutral store of value, but as a political instrument that could serve developmental ends – in this case, directing investment to credit-starved regions of the country.William Jennings Bryan’s defeat drove the party to moderate its more radical monetary positions. But notwithstanding the occasional inconsistencies, Democrats generally maintained the anti-deflationary stance established in 1896. Thirty years later, the Great Depression provided Franklin D Roosevelt with the mandate and the crisis necessary to complete this transformation: the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1933.“Consumer protection” in its contemporary form only truly entered the American political lexicon in the 1960s, but this period established the contours of America’s politics of financial risk. The Banking Act of 1933 (often referred to as Glass-Steagall) separated commercial and investment banking to protect ordinary depositors from speculative excesses. The Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 imposed disclosure requirements on financial markets and established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Most critically, the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) ended the era of devastating bank runs by insuring deposits.Collectively, these measures represented a fundamentally new relationship between citizens, banks and financial risk: the state would actively shape financial markets rather than simply enforcing contracts within them.The post-war era saw the Democratic party further articulate that approach to “market-making”. The Employment Act of 1946 declared it the government’s responsibility to maintain “maximum employment”, while the Federal Reserve, treasury, SEC and FDIC enforced financial stability through interest rate caps, capital controls and heavy regulation of financial institutions. While occasionally inefficient, these policies contributed to remarkable stability. As the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have documented, the period from 1945 to 1971 saw virtually no banking crises in advanced economies.The Clinton administration’s financial deregulation – culminating in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and the deregulation of derivatives in 2000 – represented a significant retreat from these principles, and ended in the catastrophe of 2008. But, if only to offset the mounting risk they allowed the private sector to assume, the Clinton administration frequently sought to expand the FDIC’s responsibilities.Pro-crypto Democrats, from Torres to the disgraced New York City mayor Eric Adams, argue that cryptocurrency aligns with progressive principles. “Blockchain technology can liberate the lowest income communities from the high fees of the traditional financial system,” Torres said at an industry-organized summit last year. Kamala Harris herself appealed to cryptocurrency as an opportunity for Black men. But cryptocurrency, at its core, subverts the tools for economic management Democrats have championed for decades.The FDIC was created precisely because uninsured deposits catalyzed routine bank runs; cryptocurrency exchanges offer no comparable protection. The Federal Reserve’s sovereignty over the American monetary base enables it to expand the money supply during downturns to maintain employment; Bitcoin’s fixed supply explicitly rejects this responsibility. The SEC was established because unregulated securities markets harmed ordinary investors; cryptocurrency’s decentralization enables exchanges like Uniswap to operate outside its protective frameworks.The industry’s “political investments” – to borrow the political scientist Thomas Ferguson’s terminology – are an undeniably defining force in American politics. By some counts, nearly half of all corporate campaign contributions in 2024 came from the crypto sector. But despite Kamala Harris’s substantial concessions to the industry, the top three crypto PACs leaned red by a margin of nearly 2:1. Harris’s promises to the industry were never enough to outweigh the Trump campaign’s proposal, running since late July, to enshrine crypto as a “permanent national asset” through a national bitcoin “stockpile”.Modest deregulation is simply not what crypto is in the political game for. It requires nothing less than the seizure of the American state. And until Democrats can outmatch Trump’s handouts to the sector, crypto will stay with the Republican party.Volatility is the basic roadblock to crypto’s further adoption. It is simply too risky for most people. No amount of regulatory tweaks will change that fundamental affliction: as long as cryptocurrencies are predominantly held as investments rather than used for transactions, their prices will remain highly sensitive to investor demand fluctuations. And the absence of traditional stabilization mechanisms, like central banks or reserve assets, contributes to the high volatility of crypto tokens. Put simply: if crypto is to grow, it’ll need both state backstopping and displacement of the traditional banking system altogether.Trump has set about doing exactly this. His administration’s recently established “strategic bitcoin reserve” is, in effect, a state backstop for cryptocurrency. But the Trump administration’s designs extend far beyond “de-risking” crypto: their goal, as the political economist Martijn Konings observes, appears to be the destabilization of the traditional banking system itself.At the behest of Elon Musk’s s0-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) – itself named after Dogecoin, Musk’s cryptocurrency of choice – the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” packages and layoffs have already reduced the FDIC’s workforce by 10%. And Trump issued an executive order in mid-February requiring that the formerly independent agency submit to White House oversight.The Trump team has floated replacing the already enervated FDIC with a gutted insurance scheme housed in the treasury, merging it with the office of the comptroller of the currency, or simply defanging it through mass layoffs and employee transfers. In either case, tighter executive control over banks’ balance sheets will render the financial system’s solvency contingent upon whether a particular bank is favored or disfavored by the president. It’s easy to imagine a resulting loss of confidence in the traditional banking system – an outcome that crypto advocates believe would work to their advantage.If the Democrats wish to outcompete the Republican party for crypto dollars, then, they’ll need to offer the “industry” much more than deregulation. They’ll have to become active participants in engineering a return to the pre-New Deal politics of money and financial risk – the very positions against which the modern Democratic party defined itself. That would be a capitulation unprecedented even in the Democratic party’s long history of betraying the American working class.

      Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York More

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      What is ‘abundance’ liberalism, and why are people arguing about it?

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      Is progressive public policy in America broken? Do many left-leaning laws actually make life more expensive for struggling people? Is regulatory red tape hindering growth and innovation? Have Democratic-run cities, such as New York and San Francisco, become giant billboards against liberal governance?These arguments wouldn’t sound out of place in a policy paper from a conservative thinktank. Yet their newest champions are two of America’s best-known left-leaning journalists, the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson – and they believe the left is overdue for a reckoning of sorts.Klein and Thompson make their case in a new book simply called, with no subtitle, Abundance. The authors put forward a positive pitch for “abundance liberalism”: a vision of the US where policymakers spend less time fighting over how to apportion scarce resources and more time making sure there’s no scarcity to start with.View image in fullscreenAbundance has received a mostly positive reception so far, but also sparked debate, with critics arguing that the book ignores the effect of corporate power, downplays Republicans’ role in the crises that the US faces or overstates the effectiveness of its policy prescriptions. A writer in the left-leaning magazine American Prospect accused the “abundance agenda” of being “neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world”.The book opens with a striking image of a US, in the year 2050, that is close to utopia. Americans’ electrical needs are powered by sustainable energy “so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill”. AI breakthroughs, labor rights and economic reforms mean that most people can do their jobs in a shorter workweek. Vertical farms provide cheap and fresh vegetables, desalinated water from the ocean is used as drinking water, and lab-grown meat has replaced animal slaughter.This near-future America – less the gritty neon smog of Blade Runner than a hi-tech Copenhagen – is entirely achievable, the authors argue. It just requires political vision and a willingness to reconsider certain assumptions.Despite being the richest country in the world, the US has a problem of scarcity, particularly in Democratic-run metropolitan areas, where the costs of housing and other basic needs have spiraled out of control. This is exacerbated by the traditional progressive solution of giving people money or vouchers to help them pay for finite resources such as housing, healthcare and food, the book argues, which increases demand and merely makes those things even more expensive.“The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing,” Klein has said. He and Thompson have described themselves as “supply-side” progressives, borrowing a term usually associated with conservative economic theories.What the US badly needs to do is build, they argue – build more houses, public transportation, power plants and other infrastructure – but that isn’t happening.One obstacle is nimbyism, the tendency of people to support public works and development in the abstract but fight them when they affect their own neighborhoods. Another is “everything bagel” logrolling that complicates what should be narrowly focused legislation by layering it with other social and political objectives, such as diverse hiring requirements or climate crisis goals, in order to appease interest groups or political constituencies.In an example Thompson recently discussed on a podcast, then president Joe Biden signed legislation in 2021 providing $42bn of funding to expand access to broadband internet in rural America. As of this December, according to Politico, the program had “yet to connect a single household”. Critics told Politico that this was partly because of a “suite of federal conditions” that required states “accepting the money to make sure providers plan for climate change, reach out to unionized workforces and hire locally”, as well as guarantee affordable broadband plans for people with low incomes.“I don’t want the state of Virginia taking, say, federal money to build broadband internet and then charging poor rural folks, like, $200 a month to go online,” Thompson said. “But by holding those values so closely … we accidentally built just about nothing.” A “confusion of process versus outcomes” meant that “very little was actually done on behalf of the Americans for whom we wanted to raise their living standards”.Another example is California, which in 1982 began studying the idea of implementing a high-speed rail system across the state. The idea was, and is, extremely popular with voters, and billions of dollars were budgeted for the project. Four decades later, almost none of it has been built. A “vetocracy” of regulatory, legal, environmental and political considerations have caused endless delays and continually narrowed the project’s ambition.“In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system,” Thompson and Klein write, “China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.”The solution to these problems, Abundance argues, is a combination of techno-optimism, ambitious and clearly defined policy goals, and political leadership that is willing at times to say no to progressive pressure groups.Klein and Thompson favorably cite what happened when a bridge collapsed in Pennsylvania in 2023, crippling an essential highway. To fix it would typically take months of planning, consultation and reviews; Governor Josh Shapiro instead declared a state of emergency that allowed the reconstruction of the bridge with union labor but free from many normal processes. The highway reopened in 12 days, instead of the 12 to 24 months that it might have taken.Abundance makes clear that it is a book written for the left, and isn’t really interested in elaborating the ways that Republicans and conservatives have contributed to these problems, though Klein and Thompson acknowledge that they have. Yet within the left the book has proved controversial.“[I]t would be a huge mistake,” Matt Bruenig, a policy analyst, wrote in Jacobin, “to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction.”He continued: “Indeed, we have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform and then the government.”While agreeing with some of Abundance’s aims, the journalists Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, writing in the Washington Monthly, argued that the book’s prescriptions wouldn’t necessarily bring the kind of sweeping changes that Klein and Thompson believe. For example, according to examples they cite, areas of the US that have reformed zoning laws to make it easier to build apartment buildings and multifamily homes have seen only modest reductions in the cost of housing.Thompson and Klein have argued that the abundance agenda is bigger than any individual policy proposal, and more about the Democratic party and other left-leaning institutions rethinking their own ambitions and how they conceive of success and failure.“Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California!” they write. “Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! … What has gone wrong?” More

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      Republican senators call for investigation into Signal leak as intelligence chiefs deny breaking law – US politics live

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      The US supreme court upheld on Wednesday a federal regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns” imposed by Joe Biden’s administration in a crackdown on firearms whose use has proliferated in crimes nationwide.The justices, in a 7-2 ruling authored by conservative justice Neil Gorsuch, overturned a lower court’s decision that the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had exceeded its authority in issuing the 2022 rule targeting parts and kits for ghost guns.Conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Gorsuch was joined in the majority by conservative justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh as well as the court’s three liberal members.Ghost gun products are typically bought online and may be quickly assembled at home, without the serial numbers ordinarily used to trace guns or background checks on purchasers required for other firearms.Plaintiffs including parts manufacturers, various gun owners and two gun rights groups – the Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation – sued to block the ATF rule in federal court in Texas.The regulation required manufacturers of firearms kits and parts, such as partly complete frames or receivers, to mark their products with serial numbers, obtain licenses and conduct background checks on purchasers, as already required for other commercially made firearms.The rule clarified that these kits and components are covered by the definition of “firearm” under a 1968 federal law called the Gun Control Act and that commercial manufacturers of such kits must become licensed.The UK does not want to escalate trade wars, finance minister Rachel Reeves said on Thursday after US president Donald Trump announced import tariffs on cars and auto parts. The response came with London locked in talks with Washington over potentially securing a post-Brexit trade deal.“We’re not at the moment in a position where we want to do anything to escalate these trade wars,” Reeves told Sky News, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).“We are looking to secure a better trading relationship with the United States,” she told the broadcaster, adding that the Labour government was “in extensive talks” with the Trump administration over securing a trade deal.Trump on Wednesday announced steep tariffs on the auto sector, provoking threats of retaliation from trading partners ahead of further promised trade levies next week.“What we’re going to be doing is a 25% tariff on all cars that are not made in the United States,” Trump said, as he signed the order in the Oval Office. The duties take effect at 12.01 am (04.01 GMT) on 3 April and impact foreign-made cars and light trucks. Key automobile parts will also be hit within the month.The UK trade body for the auto sector urged the US and the UK to strike a deal that avoids Trump’s “disappointing” tariffs on foreign-made cars, reports AFP.“The industry urges both sides to come together immediately and strike a deal that works for all,” Mike Hawes, chief executive at the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said in a statement late Wednesday.“The UK and US auto industries have a longstanding and productive relationship, with US consumers enjoying vehicles built in Britain by some iconic brands, while thousands of UK motorists buy cars made in America,” Hawes noted.He said that “rather than imposing additional tariffs, we should explore ways in which opportunities for both British and American manufacturers can be created as part of a mutually beneficial relationship, benefiting consumers and creating jobs and growth across the Atlantic.”Speaking at the end of January, Hawes said the Us was “an important market” for UK-produced luxury brands such as Bentley and Rolls-Royce, adding that this allowed for “a greater opportunity to absorb” tariffs.President Donald Trump’s plan to impose a 25% tariff on imported cars and light trucks starting next week is “very bad news” and the only solution for now is for the European Union to raise its own tariffs, French finance minister Eric Lombard said on Thursday.Lombard, who was speaking on France Inter radio, said he hoped be able to discuss soon with his US counterparts in view of lowering those tariffs, adding a trade war would lead “to nothing”, reports Reuters.Trump, who sees tariffs as a tool to raise revenue to offset his promised tax cuts and to revive a long-declining US industrial base, said collections would begin on 3 April.The private data of top security advisers to US President Donald Trump can be accessed online, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Wednesday, adding to the fallout from the officials’ use of a Signal group chat to plan airstrikes on Yemen.Mobile phone numbers, email addresses and in some cases passwords used by national security adviser Mike Waltz, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard can be found via commercial data-search services and hacked data dumped online, it reported. It is not clear in all cases how recent the details are.The Trump administration has been facing calls for the resignation of senior officials amid bipartisan criticism after Monday’s embarrassing revelations. The chat group, which included vice-president JD Vance, Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and others, discussed sensitive plans to carry out strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen via the Signal app, potentially threatening the safety of US servicemen and women taking part in the operation.On Wednesday evening, Trump backed Hegseth, saying “He had nothing to do with this” and calling the scandal a “witch-hunt”.The phone numbers and email addresses – mostly current – were in some cases used for Instagram and LinkedIn profiles, cloud-storage service Dropbox, and apps that track a user’s location.Der Spiegel reported it was “particularly easy” to discover Hegseth’s mobile number and email address, using a commercial provider of contact information. It found that the email address, and in some cases even the password associated with it, could be found in more than 20 data leaks. It reported that it was possible to verify that the email address was used just a few days ago.It said the mobile number led to a WhatsApp account that Hegseth appeared to have only recently deleted.In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators are calling for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly.“This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together,” the Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski told the Hill.The Trump administration has been facing criticism from Democrats – and now Republicans – after Monday’s embarrassing revelation that a team of senior national security officials accidentally added a journalist to a private group chat on Signal, an encrypted messaging app. The group, which included JD Vance, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and others, discussed sensitive plans to engage in military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.On Wednesday, morning the Atlantic posted another tranche of messages that contained details of the attack on Yemen, including descriptions of targets, launch times and even the details of weather during the assault.Senior national security officials testified before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday, where the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA director, John Ratcliffe, were grilled by lawmakers over the scandal. The national security officials said “no classified material” had been shared in the chat. Republicans are now calling for investigations, as well.According to reporting from the Hill, top Republican senators are calling for various committees to investigate the leak, including the Senate armed services committee and the Senate intelligence committee. The Mississippi senator Roger Wicker, who chairs the armed services committee, told the Hill he would be asking the defense department’s inspector general to investigate the scandal.Messages, released on Wednesday, from the Signal group chat discussing an attack on Yemen revealed details of US bombings, drone launches and other information about the assault, including descriptions of weather conditions and specific weapons.“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” the Atlantic wrote.It reproduced numerous messages from the text chat between the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth – who said on Tuesday that “nobody was texting war plans” – and top intelligence officials.US intelligence chiefs on Wednesday denied breaking the law or revealing classified information in a group chat where they discussed details of airstrikes on Yemen in the presence of a journalist, despite allegations from Democrats that the leak was reckless and possibly illegal.Democrats used an intelligence committee hearing on Wednesday to demand an explanation of how operational military plans are not classified information.In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators called for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly.More on that in a moment, but first, here are some other developments:

      The private data of top security advisers to US President Donald Trump can be accessed online, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported, adding to the fallout from the Signal group chat scandal.

      Trump announced plans to impose sweeping 25% tariffs on cars from overseas on Wednesday, days before the president is expected to announce wide-ranging levies on other goods from around the world. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney called the move a “direct attack” on Canadian workers.

      The US supreme court upheld a federal regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns” imposed by Joe Biden’s administration in a crackdown on firearms whose use has proliferated in crimes nationwide.

      The heads of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service testified in a heated congressional subcommittee hearing, helmed by conservative Marjorie Taylor Greene, amid a renewed Republican effort to defund US public media.

      Republican House speaker Mike Johnson suggested potentially defunding, restructuring or eliminating US federal courts as a means of pushing back against judicial decisions that have challenged Donald Trump’s policies.

      The Trump administration has paused the processing of certain green card applications as the US government continues to implement a hardline immigration agenda.

      Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student in Boston detained on Tuesday by federal immigration agents in response to her pro-Palestinian activism, was on Wednesday evening being detained at the South Louisiana Ice processing center, according to the government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainee locator page. More

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      Trump announces 25% tariffs on all cars not made in US amid scrutiny over Signal leak – live

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      “This is the beginning of liberation day in America,” Donald Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office now for his remarks on new tariffs on cars made outside the United States. At the start of remarks being streamed live on the White House YouTube channel, the president said that tariffs of 25% will be imposed on all imported cars.The tariffs will apply to finished cars and trucks that are shipped into the United States, including those made by US auto companies whose automobiles that are made overseas.Asked by a reporter if the tariffs could be lifted before the end of his term of office, Trump said that the new 25% rate on foreign-made cars are “permanent, 100%”.The president just signed an executive order to put 25% tariffs on cars imported into the United States which, he says, will take effect on 2 April.Asked by a reporter how he will ensure that a car made largely outside the country is not completed in the US to avoid tariffs, Trump claims that there will be “strong policing” to prevent automakers from dodging tariffs.The president called the current system, in which cars are made in multiple countries, “ridiculous”.“This is the beginning of liberation day in America,” Donald Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office now for his remarks on new tariffs on cars made outside the United States. At the start of remarks being streamed live on the White House YouTube channel, the president said that tariffs of 25% will be imposed on all imported cars.The tariffs will apply to finished cars and trucks that are shipped into the United States, including those made by US auto companies whose automobiles that are made overseas.While fears have been raised about the possibility that Steve Witkoff, the president’s envoy to Russia, was vulnerable to hacking because he was in Moscow when he was added to the Signal messaging chat about attacking Yemen (a concern Witkoff dismissed by saying he did not use his personal device on that trip), it has been somewhat overlooked that Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who created the group, was in Saudi Arabia on the day he accidentally invited the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to connect with him on the messaging app.In his first report on the incident for the Atlantic, Goldberg wrote: “On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz.”Since Goldberg did not specify the time of day that the invitation was sent, it is not certain where Waltz was when he sent the request, which was almost certainly sent from his nonsecure, personal phone. (It has been previously reported that the open-source Signal app cannot be downloaded on to secure government devices, although recent statements from the CIA director suggest that might no longer be true.)But we do know that Waltz spent much or all of that day in the Saudi city of Jeddah, where he and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, engaged in talks with senior Ukrainian officials over a plan for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine’s war to repel the full-scale Russian invasion that began in 2022.Since Waltz and Rubio spoke to reporters after 9pm local time in Jeddah that night, to announce that Ukraine had accepted the proposal, we know that Waltz was in a Saudi government-secured facility for most of that day, when, presumably, his personal phone would have been vulnerable to hacking by US adversaries, like Russia or China, and even US allies, including Saudi Arabia and Ukraine.It is not clear when Waltz left Saudi Arabia, but he was certainly there for most, if not all, of 11 March. Waltz and Rubio met with the Saudi crown prince, Mohamed bin Salman, in Jeddah on the evening 10 March, and Rubio’s itinerary on the state department’s website indicates that the secretary of state did not leave Saudi Arabia until 12 March, when he flew to Ireland and then to Canada.Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois released a statement calling for defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s resignation.“Pete Hegseth is a f*cking liar. This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately,” reads the statement.“Hegseth and every other official who was included in this group chat must be subject to an independent investigation. If Republicans won’t join us in holding the Trump Administration accountable, then they are complicit in this dangerous and likely criminal breach of our national security.”Secretary of defense Pete Hegseth denied claims that the information he texted other Trump officials in a group chat earlier this month discussed classified war plans.“Nobody’s texting war plans,” he told reporters in Hawaii. “As a matter of fact, they even changed the title to attack plans, because they know it’s not war plans,” he said.Canada’s former spy chief says White House response to Signal leak threatens ‘Five Eyes’ securityCanada’s former spy chief has said the Trump administration’s attempts to downplay the leak of top-secret attack plans is a “very worrying” development, with implications for broader intelligence sharing among US allies.On Wednesday, the Atlantic magazine published new and detailed messages from a group chat, including plans for US bombings, drone launches and targeting information of the assault, including descriptions of weather conditions. Among the recipients of the messages was a prominent journalist, who was inadvertently added to the group.“This is very worrying. Canada needs to think about what this means in practical terms: is the United States prepared to protect our secrets, as we are bound to protect theirs?” said Richard Fadden, the former head of Canada’s intelligence agency. “Every country has experienced leaks, of varying severity. The problem with this one is that it’s being generated at the highest levels of the US government – and they haven’t admitted that it’s a problem.”Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand have for decades shared intelligence in a pact informally known as the Five Eyes. But the leak of classified information is likely to put further strain on the group as it weighs how seriously the current American administration takes the handling of top secret information.“When we have intelligence leaks, we admit it, we try to sort out what’s happened and we try to fix it. One doesn’t get the impression today that the US cabinet members will admit there’s a problem,” said Fadden, who also served as national security adviser to Canada’s Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. “They’re just trying to clean it up from a political perspective. That worries me.”Despite a far more detailed picture of the information leaked to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, the White House and key figures in the message thread have redoubled efforts to claimed none of the information was classified.Read the full story by The Guardian’s Leyland Cecco:Secretary of state Marco Rubio said the accidental inclusion of the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in the Signal group chat was a “big mistake” but said that that “none of the information on there at any point threatened the operation or the lives of our service members.”Speaking to reporters from Jamaica, Rubio said:
      Obviously someone made a mistake, someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists but you ain’t supposed to be on that … I contributed to it twice. I identified my point of contact … and then later on, I think 3 hours after the White House’s official announcements have been made, I congratulated the members of the team.
      Rubio went on to add:
      I’ve been assured by the Pentagon and everyone involved that none of the information that was on there … at any point threatened the operation of the lives of our servicemen and in fact it was a very successful operation … I want everybody to understand why this thing was even set up in the first place and also understand very clearly the mission was successful and at no point was it in danger and that’s coming from the highest ranking officials…
      Another Democrat, the Florida representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost, has criticized the contents of the Signal group chat to which the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added.Writing on X in response to a screenshot that featured JD Vance’s reply to the US’s bombing in Yemen, Frost said:“Another disgusting part of all this is the proof of a blatant war crime to which the vice president of the United States responded: Excellent.”During a press briefing in Warsaw, Poland, Nato secretary general Mark Rutte was asked if Europeans could still trust the Americans after the Signal leaks.“Absolutely. Can we trust the Americans? Yes, they are our biggest partner, the biggest allies in Nato. They have freed my country together with Poland and Canada after the Second World War. Yes, absolutely. We can trust the Americans.”He was later asked about some of the comments made about “free-loading” Europeans.Rutte said he would not want to offer running commentary as that “would not be appropriate,” but acknowledged two main irritants in the new US administration’s relations with European Nato allies, on fair burden sharing and some caveats in “collective endeavours.”“We are addressing them because we are spending much more and we are working on, as I said, on the lethality of Nato, which is crucial,” he said.Here’s a look at where the day stands:

      Democrats are calling on defense secretary Pete Hegseth to resign following the Signal group chat scandal. One Democrat, Illinois’s representative Raja Krishnamoorthi said: “Classified information is classified for a reason. Sec. Hegseth was openly sharing classified materials on an insecure channel that potentially endangered service members. And then he lied about it. He should resign.”

      White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Elon Musk’s team is investigating how the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was added to the group chat discussing a military strike in Yemen. “As for your original question about who’s leading, looking into the messaging thread: the national security council, the White House counsel’s office, and also, yes, Elon Musk’s team,” she said during a press briefing.

      In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators are calling for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly. “This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together,” the Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski told the Hill.

      The US district court judge James Boasberg, whom the government has argued cannot be trusted with sensitive information in the Alien Enemies Act case, has been assigned to oversee a lawsuit alleging that government officials violated federal record-keeping laws when they used a group chat to discuss a planned military strike in Yemen, Politico reports. “Messages in the Signal chat about official government actions, including, but not limited to, national security deliberations, are federal records and must be preserved in accordance with federal statutes, and agency directives, rules, and regulations,” the plaintiffs argue.

      Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who grilled top security officials during Tuesday’s Senate intelligence committee briefing, appeared on Morning Joe this morning to discuss the recently released text messages published by the Atlantic on Wednesday. “Well it sure answers that the two witnesses I believe lied when they said, ‘Oh, nothing to see here, nothing classified,’” he said.
      Republican senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate armed services committee, said he and the senator Jack Reed, the committee’s top Democrat, will request an inspector general investigation into the use of Signal by top national security officials to discuss military plans, The Associated Press reports.Wicker is also calling for a classified Senate briefing from a top national security official and verification that the Atlantic published an accurate transcript of the Signal chat.This move is notable given the Trump administration’s defiance that no classified information was posted to the Signal chat.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Elon Musk’s team is investigating how the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was added to the group chat discussing a military strike in Yemen.“As for your original question about who’s leading, looking into the messaging thread: the national security council, the White House counsel’s office, and also, yes, Elon Musk’s team,” she said during a press briefing.“Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat again to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” Leavitt added.She also said that the Signal messaging app, where senior Trump administration officials accidentally shared military plans in a group containing a journalist, is an approved app.Leavitt said it is loaded on to government phones at the Pentagon, Department of State and Central Intelligence Agency.Donald Trump will hold a press conference to announce tariffs on the auto industry today at 4pm, according to the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.Wednesday’s press conference will be in the Oval Office.National security adviser Michael Waltz said on Fox News that a staffer wasn’t responsible for adding the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief to the group chat and that he “takes full responsibility” for building the group and maintaining coordination.“Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number?,” Waltz said.“You have somebody else’s number on someone else’s contact, so of course I didn’t see this loser in the group,” he added, referring to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont offers an analysis of what the latest Signal leak revelations expose:The disclosure by the Atlantic of further devastating messages from the Signal chat group used by the Trump administration’s most senior security officials has nailed the lie that nothing that threatened the safety of US servicemen and women was shared on the group.After the vague and evasive assertions by Trump officials at Monday’s Senate intelligence committee hearing, from the White House, and from the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, that no war plans or classified material was shared, readers can make up their own minds.Despite Hegseth’s angry denial, the exchanges in the leaked group chat did contain details of war planning, shared recklessly by him in advance of the attack on 15 March, on a messaging system and perhaps devices which he and others in the chat could not have been certain were secure.Most damning is the fact that Hegseth sent details in advance of the F-18s and other aircraft that would take part in the attack, including the timing of their arrival at targets, and other assets that would be deployed.As Ryan Goodman, a law professor who formerly worked at the Pentagon, put it after the latest release: “The Atlantic has now published the Signal texts with attack plans in response to administration denials. I worked at the Pentagon. If information like this is not classified, nothing is. If Hegseth is claiming he declassified this information, he should be shown the door for having done so.”In attempting to cover up and diminish their culpability for a shocking breach of operational security – including the fact that two participants in the chat were overseas (including one in Moscow at the time) – the Trump administration has made the scandal immeasurably more serious than it was already.At the most simple level, the pilots who flew on those strikes should rightly be furious that the most senior civilian defence official placed them in harm’s way.Read the full analysis here:In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators are calling for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly.“This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together,” the Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski told the Hill.The Trump administration has been facing criticism from Democrats – and now Republicans – after Monday’s embarrassing revelation that a team of senior national security officials accidentally added a journalist to a private group chat on Signal, an encrypted messaging app. The group, which included the vice-president, JD Vance; the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; and others, discussed sensitive plans to engage in military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.On Wednesday morning the Atlantic posted another tranche of messages that contained details of the attack on Yemen, including descriptions of targets, launch times and even the details of weather during the assault.Senior national security officials testified before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday, where the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA director, John Ratcliffe, were grilled by lawmakers over the scandal. The national security officials said “no classified material” was shared in the chat. Republicans are now calling for investigations as well.Read the full story by José Olivares here: More

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      For the sake of US democracy, it’s time for Chuck Schumer to step down | Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin

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      In just two months, Donald Trump has launched an assault of staggering ferocity on America’s values, laws and people. The Democratic party faces a choice: does it lead the fight against authoritarianism and billionaire capture, or does it hunker down and hope the president implodes on his own? After last week’s legislative debacle, we’ve concluded that if Democrats want to fight, they need to replace the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, with someone who understands the stakes.Since November, our grassroots movement, Indivisible – led by regular people organizing nationwide – has been fighting back. Indivisible groups have pushed members of Congress, attended town halls, protested Elon Musk, and organized locally against Trump’s agenda. Everywhere we go – red, blue or purple – people ask why Democratic leadership doesn’t share their urgency.For months, we urged Senate Democratic leadership to use every tool at their disposal to fight back and raise the alarm. We asked them to stay unified against Trump’s nominees – a cabinet of billionaires and extremists who openly flout the law. We asked them to organize against Maga bills such as the Laken Riley Act, which expands Trump’s mass deportation powers. We asked them to use every procedural tool to halt business as usual. All too often the response has been: “We’re in the minority, we don’t have the votes.”This argument collapsed with the passage of a funding bill packed with Maga priorities. The funding bill required 60 votes to pass, giving Democrats rare leverage. They could have demanded safeguards against Musk’s raid of the government or at least stopped Republicans from making things worse. This was perhaps their only real chance to take a stand this year.Under Hakeem Jeffries’ leadership, House Democrats overwhelmingly united to oppose the bill, forcing the House speaker, Mike Johnson, to pass it with Republican votes. Then it reached the US Senate, where Schumer initially vowed to block it – but reversed course within 24 hours and gave Republicans the votes they needed.This was bad policy and worse politics. History shows that the party demanding new concessions in a funding fight loses public support – and Republicans were the ones making demands. Republican leaders and Trump himself were openly thrilled with Schumer. House Democrats felt betrayed. Nancy Pelosi, a master legislative strategist, put it bluntly: “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing. I think that’s what happened.”Schumer’s defense was that avoiding a shutdown would prevent further damage and stop Trump’s rise. But those with the most at stake disagreed. Litigators fighting Trump’s legal battles said passing the continuing resolution hurt their cases more than a shutdown. The federal employees’ union acknowledged that while a shutdown would be painful, a blank check for Trump to continue his rampage was worse. Yes, a shutdown would be an opportunity for Trump to wreak havoc on federal agencies – but he is doing precisely that already while all the lights are on. From the Center for American Progress to House Democrats to Never Trumpers, a broad coalition agreed: Democrats needed to take a stand.Even if one accepted Schumer’s rationale, his lack of strategy was indefensible. He knew for months this would be the Democrats’ only leverage point. There was no excuse for entering the week without a plan or for undercutting House Democrats after they took a tough vote.The real reason for Schumer’s surrender was a mystery until this week. In an interview with Chris Hayes following the backlash, he was asked if we were facing a constitutional crisis. His response: “We’re not there yet.”It was a stunning admission. The problem isn’t just Schumer’s strategy – it’s his perception of reality. He is conducting business as usual while the country burns.After the Senate Democratic collapse, we called an emergency meeting with over 1,300 Indivisible leaders across the country. The reaction was near-universal: shock, despair and rage. Our leaders – who are holding “empty chair” town halls to pressure Republican lawmakers hiding from constituents – couldn’t understand why Schumer wouldn’t fight as hard as they are. They felt betrayed. Ultimately, 91% of local leaders across blue, red and purple states voted for Indivisible to call on Schumer to step down.We made this call in sorrow, not anger. We’ve worked closely with Schumer over the years. We appreciate his achievements. We like him personally. But the events of the last four months have made painfully clear that the Democratic party is not going to climb out of this hole by relying on the same people who led us into it. We need a leader who understands we’re in an emergency and acts like it. We need our leaders to match the fervor of the people rising up in defense of America.That leader can emerge if we create the opening. Schumer’s fate is no longer in his hands. The Democratic senators who can demand a new leadership election answer to us – their constituents. They will act if we speak up. We get the party we demand – and for the sake of our democracy, we must demand more.

      Leah Greenberg is the co-executive director of Indivisible

      Ezra Levin is the co-executive director of Indivisible More

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      ‘They chose the billionaire’: Tim Walz returns to Minnesota as part of redemption tour

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      Tim Walz is trying to regroup to help Democrats fight the Trump administration, but he’s still trying to figure out why he and his party lost in November.“I knew it was my job to try and pick off those other swing states, and we didn’t,” he said about the 2024 election. “I come back home to lick my wounds and say, goddamn, at least we won here.”Walz was speaking on Saturday in Rochester, Minnesota – in the district he once represented in Congress, as part of his soul-searching tour around the country after the Democrats’ bruising 2024 defeat.Walz’s tour is part brand redemption, part Democratic catharsis, part rally. He hasn’t ruled out a 2028 run for president, though neither have most 2028 hopefuls.“I thought it was a flex that I was the poorest person and the only public school teacher to ever run for vice-president of the United States,” Walz told a crowd of roughly 1,500 people that filled an auditorium and spilled into an overflow room on a Saturday morning. “They chose the billionaire. We gotta do better.”Many in the crowd remembered when Walz represented them in Congress, and asked him how he would fight against the dismantling of the Department of Education, defend the rights of trans people and build a bigger tent for Democrats.Walz’s town hall was one of many large Democratic events in recent days, proving there’s growing energy for a forceful resistance to the US president. Much bigger crowds have turned up to see Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a “stop oligarchy” tour. People have also filled town halls around the country to tell their elected officials how they’re affected by government cuts and policy changes. But where the energy goes remains to be seen.It’s clear Walz still captures the attention of a rightwing outrage machine. He chided Fox News and other pundits during an appearance on Gavin Newsom’s podcast, saying they made fun of him for drinking from a straw and don’t think he’s masculine enough, but he could “kick their ass”. Fox host Jesse Watters then railed against the clip and detailed things men shouldn’t do, like eat soup in public.Trump called Walz a “loser” on Friday. “He lost an election. He played a part. You know, usually a vice-president doesn’t play a part … I think he was so bad that he hurt her.”At a prior rally in Wisconsin, Walz mocked Tesla, saying he watches the falling stock to get a “little boost” each day, leading to condemnation on the right. “Sometimes when I need a little boost, I look at the @JDVance portrait in the White House and thank the Lord,” Musk wrote on Twitter/X.At the Saturday town hall, Walz took aim at Musk. “This guy bugs me in a way that’s probably unhealthy,” he said.“They’re all butthurt about the Tesla thing, but they don’t care about the disrespect they have shown to employees at the Minneapolis VA who care for our veterans, and they fire them. They don’t care,” Walz said.Walz held the rally in a region of Minnesota where the congressman, Brad Finstad, is one of many Republicans who haven’t held in-person town halls. Republicans who have hosted events in recent weeks have experienced heated pushback. Signs outside the venue, John Marshall high school, showed Finstad’s face in black and white and said “Missing Congressman”. Finstad told the Rochester Post-Bulletin he wouldn’t commit to hosting an in-person event, but had held tele-town halls.“I find it funny because Governor Walz, in the seven years of being governor, has not held one town hall, and now he’s claiming to be the king of town hall,” Finstad said. “This is a Democrat-hosted political comeback for Governor Walz. Well, let him scream at the bully pulpit.”During the rally, Walz said Finstad should take notice. “If you’re a sitting member of Congress in the biggest city in your district, and you see 1,300 people on a nice Saturday coming out here, it catches your attention, trust me,” he said.Thinking about the path forward for Democrats, Walz acknowledges he doesn’t have a solid answer, but said Democrats need to do better at articulating their values and the ways their policies would improve people’s lives. He likes the idea of a “shadow cabinet”, borrowing a UK tradition where opposition parties have their own versions of cabinet members to speak out against the ones in power.He also said Democrats shouldn’t let Republicans capture the narrative on issues like trans rights.“To be honest with you, there’s a lot of people who are squishy about this and are willing to say, look, it’s a pretty small number of people,” Walz said. “That’s a dangerous road to go down, because pretty soon you’re part of the group that’s a pretty small number of people.”He sees the Trump administration as an “existential threat” that will chip away at programs such as social security, but wonders how Democrats aren’t able to message these popular, middle-class issues against oligarchs. “How did this happen?” he pondered.Once Democrats get back in office, it’s time to shore up the programs they want to protect, he said.“Donald Trump is on his revenge and retribution tour,” he said. “Well, I said I’ll be on one, too. I’m going to bring revenge just raining down on their heads with their neighbors getting healthcare. They’re gonna rue the day when we got re-elected because our kids with special needs are going to get the care that they need.” More

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      ‘I’m not stepping down’: Chuck Schumer defies Democrats’ calls over funding bill

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      Chuck Schumer defied calls to give up the top Democratic position in the Senate after he voted for Republicans’ funding bill to avoid a government shutdown, saying on Sunday: “I’m not stepping down.”Schumer has faced a wave of backlash from Democrats over his decision to support the Republican-led bill, with many Democrats alleging that the party leader isn’t doing enough to stand up to Donald Trump’s agenda.Explaining his decision during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Schumer said: “I knew when I cast my vote against … the government shutdown … that there would be a lot of controversy.” He said that the funding bill “was certainly bad”, but maintained that a shutdown would have been 15 or 20 times worse.Schumer has argued that billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) would have used a shutdown to “eviscerate the federal government”, which he said would have been “devastating”.Schumer, describing his decision as a “vote of principle”, went on to say that as a leader: “You have to do things to avoid a real danger that might come down the curve. And I did it out of pure conviction as to what a leader should do and what the right thing for America and my party was. People disagree.”In response to whether he believes he is making the same mistake as Joe Biden did last year when he refused to move aside to allow for new Democratic leadership, Schumer said: “No, absolutely not,” adding, “Our caucus is united in fighting Donald Trump every step of the way. Our goal, our plan, which we’re united on, is to make Donald Trump the quickest lame duck in modern history by showing how bad his policies are.”Schumer’s latest pushback against calls for his resignation comes after Maryland representative Glenn Ivey became the first Democratic lawmaker this week to publicly call for Schumer’s resignation.Speaking to constituents at a town hall earlier this week, Ivey said: “I respect Chuck Schumer. I think he had a great career … But it may be time for Senate Democrats to get a new leader.”Meanwhile, the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized what she called an “acquiesce” by Schumer to the Republican-led bill after almost every single Democrat in the House voted against the Republican spending bill.“There are members of Congress who have won Trump-held districts in some of the most difficult territory in the United States who walked the plank and took innumerable risks in order to defend the American people,” she said.” Just to see Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk, I think, is a huge slap in the face.” More

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      Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the courage to brawl for the working class

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      Bernie Sanders is not running for president. But he is drawing larger crowds now than he did when he was campaigning for the White House.The message has hardly changed. Nor has the messenger, with his shock of white hair and booming delivery. What’s different now, the senator says, is that his fears – a government captured by billionaires who exploit working people – have become an undeniable reality and people are angry.“For years, I’ve talked about the concept of oligarchy as an abstraction,” Sanders, an independent who votes with Democrats and twice sought the party’s presidential nomination, said in an interview after a joint rally in Tempe, Arizona, with the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Vermont senator recalled Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the three wealthiest people on the planet – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – were seated in front of his cabinet nominees in what many viewed as a shocking display of power and influence.“You gotta be kind of blind not to understand that you have a government of the billionaire class, for the billionaire class, by the billionaire class,” he said. “And then, on top of all that, you’ve got Trump moving very rapidly toward an authoritarian form of society.”Two months after Trump was sworn in for a second term, Democratic activists and an increasingly vocal chorus of voters say they are terrified, angry and desperate for leadership. In something of a third act, the 83-year-old democratic socialist is stepping in to fill the void.But his aim is not only to revive the anti-Trump resistance movement – he wants a bottom-up overhaul of the American political system.“It’s not just oligarchy that we are going to fight. It’s not just authoritarianism that we’re going to fight,” Sanders told an arena full of supporters at Arizona State University on Thursday night. “We will not accept a society today in which we have massive income and wealth inequality, where the very rich have never done better while working families are struggling to put food on the table.”For weeks, voters have been showing up at town halls to vent their alarm and rage over the president’s aggressive power grabs and the Musk-led mass firings of federal workers. But they are also furious at the Democratic leadership, charging that their party spent an entire election season warning of the threat Trump posed to US democracy, and yet now appeared either unable or unwilling to stand up to him.At the rally in Tempe, several attendees demanded more defiance.“Them just holding paddle boards up and staying quiet or wearing pink blazers is not enough,” said Alexandra Rodriguez, 20, of Mesa, referring to the Democrats’ acts of protest during Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month. “I think they do need to be willing to go to extremes.”They also expressed outrage at the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, who, faced with what he called a “Hobson’s choice” between supporting a Republican-authored funding bill or inciting a government shutdown, wrangled a coalition of Democrats to pass the spending measure. The decision has unleashed a torrent of anger from his party’s base, forcing him to postpone a book tour as he defends himself against calls to step down as leader. On Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s western tour, the New York representative was interrupted by intermittent calls to “Primary Chuck!”“This isn’t just about Republicans, either. We need a Democratic party that fights harder for us, too,” Ocasio-Cortez said in Arizona, drawing some of the loudest, most sustained applause of the evening. She urged the crowd to help elect candidates “with the courage to brawl for the working class”.Democrats “absolutely need to get stronger”, Audree Castro, 52, said as she waited with her mother and aunt to enter the venue on Thursday night. “I want my democracy back.”In recent weeks, Democrats have sought to capitalize on the bubbling backlash to the disorienting opening months of Trump’s second term. Following Sanders’ lead, many Democrats are hosting town halls in Republican-held districts to draw attention to Musk’s slash-and-burn cost-cutting project and Republican proposals that would almost certainly result in cuts to social safety net programs.Robbie Lambert, 70, a retired special education teacher, said keeping up with the turmoil in Washington was beginning to feel like a full-time job. Just that afternoon, Trump had signed an executive order aimed at dismantling the Department of Education.“You feel helpless. It’s like, what can we do?” said Lambert, who was on vacation in Arizona and decided she had to attend the Tempe rally. “Coming together, talking with people here, makes you feel like you’re doing something.”The Arizona representative Yassamin Ansari, who attended Thursday’s rally, said she had been hearing similar calls for action from constituents across her district this week, including at an event with LGBTQ+ business leaders and an at-capacity town hall, where several people shared that it was the first political event they had ever attended.“People are really fed up,” Ansari said in an interview.For now, at least, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are the most prominent Democrats offering both a strategy to confront Trump and an alternative vision for the party.In 2024, Democrats lost support among young people and Latino voters – core constituencies – and recent polling found that the party’s popularity is at an all-time low. Few Democrats disagree that their party needs to course-correct, but how and to what degree remains a topic of intense debate.Supporters say the success of Sanders’ tour, which began last month in Omaha, Nebraska, is a clear sign that Democrats want the party to aggressivelyfight what they view as Trump’s encroaching authoritarianism – not “roll over and play dead”, as veteran strategist James Carville suggested in an op-ed. They also view it as an endorsement of Sanders’ policy agenda, arguing that his brand of economic populism is the right match for this turbulent political moment.According to a memo by Sanders’ longtime adviser, Faiz Shakir, the senator has raised more than $7m from more than 200,000 donors since February, and is drawing crowds 25% to 100% larger than at the height of his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. On Friday, more than 30,000 people attended a rally in Denver – the largest audience Sanders has ever drawn, his team said.“We’re living in an intensely populist moment right now,” Shakir wrote. “It’s not ‘left versus right’. It’s ‘very top versus everyone else’.” The title of his memo: “It’s a populist revolt, stupid.”The joint appearance by the 35-year-old New York representative and the Vermont senator who she has said inspired her to run for office naturally raised the question: is Ocasio-Cortez the heir to the progressive movement Sanders has been building since before she was born? Several rally-goers in Tempe believed she had the potential to lead the party – and perhaps even the country.“When AOC has something to say, I listen,” said Jonas Prado, 32, a first responder.“I hope she’s the first woman president,” said Norman Ellison, 60, a mechanical engineer.There was also a tinge of wistfulness in the arena. Supporters dressed in old campaign t-shirts and hats and one person sported a pin that said, “Bernie was right.”Sanders, who has all but ruled out a third run for president, was in vintage form, delivering a blistering, 50-minute critique of the “top 1%” with the moral ferocity that has long endeared him to legions of politically disaffected supporters.The senator named names, accusing executives from the fossil fuel, insurance and pharmaceutical industries of being “major criminals”, while sharing stark statistics on wealth inequality in the US that elicited boos and gasps from the audience. At one point, Sanders cited an analysis released by his Senate committee that found the wealthiest Americans live an average of seven years longer than poorer Americans.“In other words, being working class in America is a death sentence,” he bellowed.Ocasio-Cortez’s opening remarks were no less visceral. She charged that Trump and Musk, his billionaire lieutenant, were “taking a wrecking ball to our country” and “screwing over” working people. “We’re gonna throw these bums out,” she declared.While both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez share a political vision, their double act showcased the distinct styles of two progressive leaders at opposite ends of their career arcs.Ocasio-Cortez offered a more personal touch, weaving elements of her biography into her speech – something Sanders is typically loath to do. She spoke of her mother, who cleaned homes, and her father, whose death from a rare form of cancer plunged the family into economic uncertainty.“I don’t believe in healthcare, labor and human dignity because I’m an extremist,” she said, pushing back on the rightwing caricature of her. “I believe in these things because I was a waitress.”She said she empathized with Americans who felt overwhelmed and demoralized, and encouraged them not to give in to despair. “We won’t do that,” someone in the crowd yelled.When the event concluded, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez left the arena to address an overflow crowd that hadn’t been able to get in.“This is where the future is,” said Sebastian Santamaria, 25, gesturing toward the empty podium adorned with a “Fight Oligarchy” placard. “As a person who has supported Democrats in the past, I don’t want to keep supporting you if it doesn’t look more like this.” More