Americana

1. Democrats fight for city halls
2. Q1 fundraising
3. Sanders makes a Michigan play
4. GOPers vs. the Ivy League
5. An ex-Rep’s resistance tour

Also: A gruesome, funny look inside the House.

On February 20, a few weeks before ICE agents apprehended Kilmar Ábrego García and deported him to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, Marco Rubio signed the paperwork that would designate him a terrorist.

Donald Trump started his presidency by declaring an emergency to fight Central American gangs and cartels, which “threaten[ed] the stability of the international order.” The State Department, citing an executive order from the days after 9/11, designated eight gangs and cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations,” including MS-13. The case against Ábrego García, made at every level of the new government, was that he had been credibly accused of MS-13 membership. And when Democrats began to protest Ábrego García’s deportation, the administration knew what to say.

“He’s part of a foreign terrorist organization,” Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi told Fox News. “Aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute,” said Sebastian Gorka, the White House’s counter-terrorism director, on Newsmax. On Thursday night, after Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen met with Ábrego García, the spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security accused him of “sipping margaritas with a terrorist.”

The prisoner had never actually been accused of terrorism — just alleged membership in a gang that became “terrorist” a few weeks ago. The cherry-garnished “margaritas,” according to reporters covering Van Hollen, were put on the table mid-meeting to embarrass the senator. But there was a story, and the presidents of the United States and El Salvador were sticking to it.

One of the Trump-led GOP’s strengths was a rejection of the old Bush-led GOP, particularly its “war on terror” and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. But when they were riding high, Bush’s Republicans got a lot of mileage from accusing political opponents of being objectively pro-terrorism if they defied them — if they opposed creating a Department of Homeland Security, if they doubted that Saddam Hussein was trying to enrich uranium.

Democrats have stumbled toward a new and more restrictionist position on immigration, abandoning ideas like a deportation moratorium and providing enough votes to pass the Laken Riley Act. “I have no reservations whatsoever weighing into that debate,” Colorado Rep. Jason Crow told me at a roundtable last week. Democrats could support “border security and targeted enforcement against violent offenders,” which wasn’t their universal position in Trump’s first term, while opposing chaotic deportations that didn’t seem to make anyone safer. Democrats who talked about “abolishing” ICE in 2018 don’t even mention it anymore.

The administration is demanding more from the opposition party. There’s a new war on terror; critics of how it’s conducted, or who it ensnares, are part of a new fifth column. Democrats haven’t acted particularly worried about this during the Ábrego García saga; the administration hasn’t convinced skeptics that MS-13 is as dangerous now as ISIS was 10 years ago, or al-Qaeda was after 9/11. But you can read ahead in the script.

A progressive incumbent fights for survival

PITTSBURGH — On Thursday morning, after he’d announced a new affordable housing tracker and before he headed to a debate with his opponent, Mayor Ed Gainey contemplated why so many people didn’t want him to have a second term.

“We’ve never had a city that was extremely open to all people,” said Gainey, sitting in his city hall office, across from portraits of Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King, Jr. “What I’ve learned about politics through the years is that it’s about control.”

Gainey, who in 2021 became the first black mayor of Pittsburgh, was supported by a local progressive movement that took down incumbents. He was the first candidate in nearly 90 years to oust a mayor, Bill Peduto, who faced Black Lives Matter protests and struggled to turn out his base.

One month out from the next Democratic primary, Gainey is now trying to avoid Peduto’s fate. He has been out-fundraised by Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor, whose polling puts him 18 points ahead of the mayor.

Inside the first fundraising quarter

House Republicans had a strong fundraising quarter, with most of the incumbents targeted by Democrats next year piling up money. According to FEC reports, filed this week, nine of the Republicans on Democrats’ front line list raised $1 million or more, including two of the three in districts won by Kamala Harris. (The third, Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, raised a bit more than $910,000.) Its campaign committee announced its best quarter ever, with “unstoppable momentum” bringing in $36.7 million, during a period where it passed little legislation but advanced the president’s top priorities.

Democrats in GOP-targeted seats raised less; their strongest fundraisers, in the House and Senate, were safe seat members who had taken high-profile roles opposing Trump. New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised $9.6 million, more than she’d raised for entire House re-election bids in the past, and by far the most of any Democratic incumbent. (The strongest Democratic fundraiser in a swing seat was Virginia Rep. Eugene Vindman, who is famous for his role in Trump’s first impeachment.)

Republicans didn’t have the same advantage in Senate fundraising — even though both parties see the House as more likely to flip if Democrats have a strong midterm. North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, a perennial target who has never won more than 49% of the vote, raised $2.3 million for the quarter and ended it with $4 million on hand. Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who faces a MAGA primary challenge from Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton, raised just $1.6 million for his campaign and a bit less than $1 million more for his other campaign committees. Maine’s Susan Collins, whose 2020 win defied every poll and dispirited Democrats, raised just $842,000, with $3.2 million on hand.

A progressive runs for Senate in Michigan

Bernie Sanders made his first primary endorsement of the cycle on Thursday, backing physician Abdul El-Sayed for Michigan’s open US Senate seat. “We need candidates who will stand up to Trump’s authoritarianism and protect our democratic way of life,” Sanders said in a statement provided first to Semafor, and shared widely as El-Sayed entered the race.

State Sen. Mallory McMorrow launched her own campaign for the seat two weeks ago, and at least two other Democrats are expected to jump in: Rep. Haley Stevens and former state House Speaker Joe Tate. El-Sayed, who has led the Detroit and Wayne County health departments, lost a 2018 bid for governor. But he stayed active in progressive politics, writing two books and hosting a podcast, and told Semafor that this was the year for an outsider to win with an anti-corruption, anti-establishment campaign.

“I think we need to lead on a very clear affirmative vision that guarantees health insurance for every single American, and that addresses the vise grip that corporations have had on our politics,” he said. Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, he said, amounted to a genocide; the president’s deportation regime was turning ICE agents into “brownshirts.”

At stops on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour — El-Sayed spoke at one rally near Detroit — Sanders encouraged progressive candidates to run for office, as Democrats where it made sense, as independents where it didn’t. Democrats largely held off left-wing challengers in the last few Senate cycles, rallying around incumbents or centrists like Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who narrowly beat GOP nominee Mike Rogers last year. Rogers is running again, hoping to face the winner of a real ideological contest between Democrats, and hoping that it weakens them.

Republicans rally behind Trump on colleges

Republicans relished the Trump administration’s attack on Ivy League schools this week, endorsing and expanding on the idea of punishing universities for their politics and their handling of anti-Israel protests.

“If Harvard continues refusing to create a safe environment for their Jewish students, I fully support their tax-exempt status being revoked,” House Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast, who holds a degree from Harvard’s extension school, told Semafor’s Kadia Goba.

Conservative criticism of elite universities is far from new, and the Trump administration has adopted ideas and tactics from activists who want to do serious damage to the liberal institutions. In the House, the key Republican in the effort to investigate and cut funding for universities has been Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard graduate who was removed from the Institute of Politics’ advisory committee after voting to overturn the 2020 election.

“We need to defund across the board,” Stefanik told Fox News after launching yet another investigation of the school’s handling of antisemitism. The risk of this: Trump’s repeated statements that he is punishing schools for hiring liberals he doesn’t like may make it easier for the school’s attorneys to win in court, arguing that the funding fight is not about civil rights or discrimination policies.

Tina Brown has shaped the culture and captured the zeitgeist since she reinvented Vanity Fair and The New Yorker in the 1980s and 1990s. But now, she’s moved on to the digital media space with her Substack, Fresh Hell. This week, Ben and Max ask the magazine icon about what she makes of the state of print media today, whether we still need editors in a world filled with influencers, and what she thinks the future holds for her former employer, Condé Nast. They also talk about her gripes with our current “uncouth” culture, how we’ve all become “scavengers of info,” and the stories she would assign today if she could.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Conor Lamb’s non-campaign return to politics

PITTSBURGH — Conor Lamb is not running for anything. Three years after the former congressman lost a primary to Sen. John Fetterman, he is practicing law here, raising a family, and accepting invitations to talk to worried Democrats.

On Wednesday night, Lamb took a seat onstage at a Mennonite church here for what the progressive group Indivisible calls “empty chair town halls” — public gatherings where elected leaders are invited, but not expected to show up, as other guests discuss how to organize against the Trump administration. Some attendees brought milk cartons with Fetterman’s face on them; some, either accidentally or meaningfully, called Lamb “senator.” Again: He was not actually running.

“You see the most powerful people in our country using their power to get access to Trump, to please him — not to challenge him,” Lamb said. He repeatedly called El Salvador’s CECOT prison a “gulag,” and warned that “if Trump defies the Supreme Court in a visible enough way, what happened last week with tariffs is going to happen all over again.”

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