Jon Ossoff Is Kicking Off Georgia Race With a Blunt Message for Donald Trump

A couple days before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Health and Human Services secretary, Jon Ossoff received a harrowing email from a woman in Georgia. Amid the Trump administration’s slashing of federal departments, the woman, who has worked for decades at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is headquartered in Atlanta, was “doxxed and publicly targeted,” as Ossoff put it on the Senate floor at about 1 a.m on February 13. He read her chilling words: “The fear and uncertainty that have overtaken my daily life are not just a personal burden, but a dire warning about the dangers faced by those who commit themselves to the work of health equity and public service.”

The Georgia Democrat said it was “truly astounding” that someone as grossly unqualified as Kennedy could be put in charge of the nation’s health. He pointed out that Kennedy had said “some pretty wild stuff about public health,” like that COVID might be “ethnically targeted,” and that he’d compared the work of the CDC to “Nazi death camps.” Ossoff noted that his ancestors were “exterminated in Nazi death camps.” The grave concerns relayed by his Georgia constituent, Ossoff said, was “ugly and menacing stuff. And the license for it comes directly from the president of the United States.”

Ossoff’s scorched-earth speech couldn’t stop Kennedy’s confirmation in a GOP-controlled Senate, where Republicans “are in a state of total capitulation,” as he later told me. “They have suspended independent judgement,” he continued. “They are gripped in the vice of political fear and historians will fill books with the story of how my Republican colleagues have totally abdicated their governing responsibilities.”

Whatever future generations may think, Ossoff and his fellow Democrats still need to wrestle with the present. The Democratic brand is in a free fall at a moment in which Donald Trump and Elon Musk are ravaging the federal government with diabolical glee. The party’s favorability has reached a new low, according to a CNN poll published Sunday, though the findings did point to a direction forward: The majority of Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents want to see the party aggressively combat Trump’s agenda.

The idea of fighting back was evident on Capitol Hill as Democratic lawmakers revolted against Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer for backing a GOP-crafted bill to fund the government as Trump dismantles it. Ossoff was among the Democrats who opposed the bill, which he said “irresponsibly fails to impose any constraints on the reckless and out-of-control Trump administration.”

Ossoff’s blistering remarks aimed at the political scion turned MAHA warrior were reminiscent of his first, unsuccessful run for Congress in 2017, when he became an MSNBC darling and invited comparisons to another Kennedy. That cycle, he was a fundraising powerhouse, with a knack for energizing Democrats and a favorite Twitter target of Trump’s. He returned to the campaign trail in 2020, narrowly defeating Republican incumbent David Perdue to help usher in a Democratic Senate majority as Trump was knocked out of the White House.

Since then, however, the 38-year old senator has kept a fairly low profile in Washington. He carefully curates how and when he speaks; he doesn’t rush in front of a camera with a loud, zippy soundbite that might go viral and antagonize the right. One Democratic Party staffer for another senator tells me that Ossoff “thinks about committee and subcommittee stuff more seriously than some senators do,” which, of course, is admirable for a lawmaker, albeit not always ideal for breaking through in today’s fractured media environment. And in a moment in which Democrats are desperately looking for next-generation leaders to step up, it’s an open question if Ossoff will take on that resistance mantle and become a national opposition figure in a second Trump term.

It’s a challenging moment not only for Ossoff’s party, but for himself politically. In addition to operating in a much different Washington than he arrived, with Republicans now controlling the Senate and Trump back in power, he can’t lose sight of Georgia. Ossoff is looking down the barrel of a 2026 reelection fight in a purple state that shifted back into Trump’s column in November, a race all the more daunting if term-limited governor Brian Kemp enters it.

When Ossoff holds his first major campaign rally on Saturday, billed as a “Rally for Our Republic,” he plans to give Georgians a forum to express opposition to “Trump and his enablers” who “are determined to consolidate power, sow chaos, and entrench unprecedented corruption.” Among the speakers, I’m told, will be Georgians impacted by the Trump administration’s layoffs, including a former CDC employee.

Everything about Ossoff’s Senate office is meticulously, somewhat comically, choreographed. While I was waiting to meet him, a staffer offered Coca-Cola (which is based in Atlanta) and Georgia peanuts. The walls of Ossoff’s office are painted a deep Democratic blue.

Ossoff’s path to the Senate was characterized by a bipartisan outlook, and when we met in his office, just days after Trump’s rambling and very partisan address to Congress, he asserted, “I have always sought and continue to seek opportunities to deliver for my constituents” by working across the aisle. That said, Ossoff also pointed out how “the president’s political operation has cowed Senate Republicans to total submission,” making this “an extraordinarily dangerous moment in our country’s history.”

“We are right now on a national trajectory under this president’s radical effort to expand presidential power beyond any precedent in modern American history that it is shaking our constitutional order,” he added. “It is a radical challenge to the fundamental framework of three coequal branches of government. They are openly entertaining, brazenly disregarding judicial orders.”

Ossoff has voted against more than a dozen of Trump’s nominees, including highly controversial picks like Kennedy, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel, and has been fighting the administration’s mass detention of immigrants at Guantánamo Bay. He recently voted along the party line to block a GOP bill to bar transgender athletes from women’s sports, though he did vote with a small set of Democrats on the GOP’s Laken Riley Act.

Still, Ossoff tends not to get bogged down in culture war controversies, staying focused on his home state. He has tackled the Trump administration cutting hundreds of jobs at the CDC, and applied pressure to help restore a scholarship program for historically Black colleges and universities, several of which are in Georgia.

During the interview, Ossoff emphasized the importance of his constituents understanding how Trump’s radical agenda in Washington “impacts their daily lives,” a point he emphasized in referring back to the government agency most associated with Georgia. “When you gut and gag the CDC, Georgia’s crown jewel, the most important public health institution in the world, you don’t just ruin hundreds of promising careers of world-class epidemiologists and scientists, you are leaving the American public to tuberculosis, to malaria, to ebola, to the next pandemic,” he said.

He linked scaling back investments in biomedical research to the potential for “a child with stage IV brain cancer to die before the cure is developed.” And, he continued, “that means that somebody’s grandmother with Alzheimer’s will be denied a medicine that could add years of quality time with their family to their life. This stuff has real world consequences for the people of Georgia and people across the country.”

Ossoff said his “obligation is to make this argument and inform the public in Georgia about the risk to their health and well-being, relentlessly every single day, which is what I’ve been doing for the last six weeks.” Take a quick spin through his office’s X feed and you’ll find clips of Ossoff appearing on the local news or vertical video messages to address the concerns of Peach State residents.

That makes sense given the voters he’ll need in a year and a half to win reelection, but it feels out of step with the growing, post-2024-election consensus among Democrats that politicians need to be everywhere, from national outlets to popular podcasts to sports chat shows. In our interview, Ossoff notably avoided discussing what the party’s strategy would be going forward, even as many Democratic politicians, including other rising stars, appear more comfortable getting into specifics on podcasts and op-ed pages. Ossoff, meanwhile, is more sparing when he weighs in, stressing that he’s “got to inform the public in Georgia of what all of this means for them.”

Ossoff, his wife, and young daughter cut a Kennedyesque portrait of a Democratic family. His résumé has all the markings of the seeds of political royalty: His childhood in Georgia was followed by stints at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the London School of Economics, an internship under the late congressman John Lewis, time working as a staffer for Representative Hank Johnson, and then time as a documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist (he’s previously described how being a Hill staffer led him to being “so disgusted by how corrupt Washington is).

There’s a long line of red or purple state Democrats who have employed fiery language, bombastic behavior, and iconoclastic votes to cement their position in the Senate. This is not Ossoff. He fits the mold of an era where good looks, elite credentials, and elegant speeches were the key to national prominence and electoral success. Trump, instead, has shown that all of that is less important than feeding base voters what they want—and Democrats are wondering if they need their own version of that.

Depending on who you ask, Ossoff is either the heavy favorite or screwed in his 2026 reelection campaign. A veteran Democratic campaign operative told me if Kemp runs, the race will be “tough” for Ossoff. They said Ossoff can be a little too cocky sometimes. But a veteran Republican operative told me the opposite, noting that Ossoff has been “everywhere” in Georgia: “Jon Ossoff is a very good candidate. I am not underestimating him.”