The Democrats have taken a lot of heat from their voters lately, and rightly so. The party was miserably unprepared for the authoritarian abuses and destruction of Donald Trump’s second administration, even though he was crystal clear on the campaign trail about what he would do with another term in the White House. With few exceptions, Democratic leaders have responded to Trump’s existential threats to American democracy exactly how you would expect from a party of cautious institutionalists: Writing stern letters. Giving long speeches. Holding large press conferences. And so on.
So it was a breath of fresh air, even a revelation, to see California Senator Alex Padilla on Thursday confront one of Trump’s worst apparatchiks to the point that law enforcement threw him to the floor and handcuffed him. Now, Democratic senators and representatives need to follow his lead. Get angry. Take the fight to the administration. Go after Trump’s minions while they’re spouting vicious lies on live TV. And yes, even get arrested.
It’s important to understand what set Padilla off, especially since the media coverage has almost exclusively focused on what happened after he interrupted Kristi Noem. The Homeland Security secretary was giving a press conference in Los Angeles about the government’s efforts to snatch as many law-abiding undocumented immigrants off the street as possible, while also violently suppressing anyone who takes to the streets in protest. Of course, that’s not how she characterized it. She painted a picture of a united, government-wide collaboration to bring peace to a supposedly terrorized city, protecting citizens and small businesses from violent leftists.
This operation was “setting an example,” she said, “putting together a model and a blueprint for how we can continue to work to make every other community great again and safe again for our kids and our grandkids far into the future.” She even noted that the Internal Revenue Service was involved, “helping us track how these violent protesters are funded—what NGOs out there, what unions, what other individuals may be funding these violent perpetuators that are in these protests.”
Up to this point, Padilla had been calmly listening (though likely inwardly fuming). But then Noem stated that the government “will continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city. We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country.” It was at this point that Padilla decided to confront her.
It took about two seconds for FBI and Secret Service agents to set upon the senator and push him from the room, taking him to the floor in the hallway and handcuffing him, despite the fact that he can be heard clearly identifying himself as a U.S senator. (Padilla later said that he had been escorted to the room by the FBI and a National Guard member.) As TNR editor Michael Tomasky wrote on Friday, this roughing-up of a sitting U.S. senator crossed a red line, though one we may look back on months from now as “as a moment of comparative innocence.”
That is, if we don’t fight back. In a video posted by Padilla on X not long after he was assaulted, the senator noted just how unusual a time we’re living in, emphasizing that “what we’ve seen here cannot be normalized. It is not normal and we shouldn’t act normal.” He called on viewers to speak up and demonstrate. “[Trump] wants us to be quiet. He wants us to look away. And we’re not going to let him.”
Trump represents the gravest direct threat to American civil liberties since the Civil War. And just as what we’re seeing is not normal, stopping the massive tide of outright corruption, militarism, and fascism we’re witnessing cannot be done through the normal democratic procedures. We need to move beyond them. Now is the time for direct action—to take to the streets in our communities and confront the regime wherever its leaders dare to show their faces.
Because this isn’t just about L.A. or even California. “California may be first, but it clearly will not end here,” Governor Gavin Newsom said in an impassioned speech on Wednesday. “Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes.” Like Padilla, he too noted the unprecedented nature of the president’s incursion into the state. “What’s happening right now,” he said, “is very different than anything we’ve seen before.”
It’s not yet clear that this truth has sunk in among leading Democrats. The response to the Padilla incident on Capitol Hill was fairly underwhelming. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, speaking on the steps of Capitol Hill with California’s junior senator, Adam Schiff, promised the Democrats would seek “accountability.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called for “a full investigation.” But he knows that Republicans would never agree to that; only one GOP senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, expressed genuine shock at Padilla’s treatment. Other GOP senators attacked Padilla with barbed remarks: John Barrasso of Wyoming criticized him for making a “spectacle of himself.” And while Senate Majority Leader Jim Thune of South Dakota said he is seeking to “gather all the relevant information” on the incident, his colleague Bernie Moreno of Ohio suggested a prosecution of Padilla could be in the offing. , “The important facts are, was he committing a crime? Right?” the senator said—before even seeing the video.
The closest Democrats came to really confronting the ruling party over Padilla’s treatment was when dozens of them marched on both Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s offices. But Thune wasn’t there and Johnson evidently wasn’t interested. Earlier in the day, Johnson had said that Padilla should be censured for interrupting Noem—and was heckled by Democrats as he spoke.
These Democrats had the right idea, at least —but let’s see that confrontational spirit outside the cloistered halls of Congress, too. Noem, surely, has other press conferences planned, where she will probably rant, as she did on Thursday, about “un-American” protesters who are “waving foreign flags on American soil while burning American flags” and undocumented immigrants who are “peddling our children. And they have human slavery going on, child trafficking, pedophilia.” (Was she saying that immigrants are stealing other people’s children? It was hard to know; these were perhaps the most unhinged part of her rambling remarks.)
This is the standard Trump playbook: You need us to rule with an iron fist, otherwise you’ll suffer an invasion of barbarians. It’s why Trump, too, has been spreading the false narrative that all of Los Angeles is burning, saying it’s been taken over by “criminal invaders.” This is a threat of occupation, using claims of an invasion as a pretext for an invasion by the government itself.
Senator Lindsey Graham accused Padilla of being intentionally “disruptive”: “He got what he wanted.” There may be truth to this (though it’s unlikely Padilla expected to be attacked by officers in such a brutal way). But even if this was calculated political theater, so what? The Democrats need to develop a taste for the dramatic. It’s the only way to break through a news cycle over which Trump largely has a stranglehold.
A few Democrats, to their credit, have acted accordingly. Representative Al Green got himself ejected from Trump’s congressional address in March when he confronted the president about his proposed Medicaid cuts. (Alas, his Democratic colleagues stayed in their seats—and ten of them later joined a call for his censure.) Representative LaMonica McIver was indicted on a nonsense charge for attempting to inspect an ICE facility in May (which she is legally allowed to do). Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, also a Democrat, was arrested that same day, though his charges were dropped.
More Democrats should get arrested, and ejected, and be disorderly. Democrats cannot take a stand sitting at their desks in the Capitol. More red lines are will be crossed. And if they don’t get up, get out, and take action, we’ll all be seeing the military rolling into our cities soon. By then, it might be too late to do anything about it.
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