In the annals of American politics, few figures have reshaped the landscape as profoundly as President Donald Trump. His bombastic style, unfiltered rhetoric, and policy disruptions galvanized the Republican base while triggering a seismic reaction among Democrats.

As Trump’s second term approaches its end in 2029, the GOP will stand at a crossroads. Far from being doomed by his polarizing legacy, Republicans are poised to emerge as the party of the sensible center, representing the non-polarized public, while Democrats, mired in anti-Trump fervor, risk alienating the masses with diminished appeal.

Trump’s polarization is undeniable. Following his 2016 ascent, he transformed the GOP into a vehicle for populist grievances, emphasizing immigration crackdowns, trade protectionism, and a combative foreign policy. This alienated moderates within his party but electrified disaffected voters. The actual ripple effect, however, was on the opposition.

Democrats viewed Trump as an existential threat to democratic norms, responding with unprecedented unity and ideological hardening. Late 2024 polling showed Democrats’ pessimism about their party’s future spiking after Trump’s victory, with many labeling leadership as “weak” or “ineffective.”

This wasn’t just emotional; it drove policy shifts. Under Trump’s shadow, Democrats accelerated their leftward drift, embracing progressive stances on climate extremism, identity politics, and expansive government intervention that often outpaced public sentiment.

A Brookings Institution analysis revealed how elected Democrats shifted further left during the Trump era, even as voters polarized: Republicans rightward, but Democrats more dramatically so.

His immigration policies forced Democrats into a defensive posture, amplifying calls for open borders and sanctuary cities that polled poorly among independents. By 2025, Gallup reported Democrats regaining a slight edge in party affiliation, but this masked deeper fractures as internal polls showed growing liberal extremism, with bases demanding purity tests on social issues that repelled moderates.

This dynamic exemplifies a boomerang effect: Trump’s outsized persona not only rallied Republicans but radicalized Democrats into a mirror-image opposition. Polarization under Trump fueled political violence and division, with Democrats seeing Republicans as enemies rather than opponents. The result? By 2025, Democrats were more ideologically cohesive but less broadly appealing.

Post-election analyses highlighted how they lost working-class voters, especially non-white men, to Trump’s economic messaging, leaving the party reliant on urban elites and progressive activists. Trump’s win solidified his grip on the GOP, but it also set an expiration date: Jan. 20, 2029.

Here lies the opportunity for the post-Trump GOP. Without Trump’s personal baggage, legal entanglements, inflammatory tweets, and cultlike following, the party can pivot toward moderation. Discussions on Reddit and in think tanks like Brookings suggest a return to “normal” conservatism, characterized by fiscal responsibility, limited government, and pragmatic foreign policy, reminiscent of pre-Trump figures.

Trump’s successors could shed MAGA extremes while retaining its populist energy on trade and immigration, resonating with the “forgotten” middle class.

Democrats, conversely, face a steeper climb. Their anti-Trump entrenchment has calcified into left-wing orthodoxy that’s difficult to unwind. Pew noted Democrats’ views grew more negative toward Republicans, fostering hostility that alienates swing voters.

In 2025, with Trump in office, Democratic leaders grappled with internal divisions: progressives pushed for radical reforms, while centrists warned of electoral peril. The Hill reported that Democrats are struggling with identity amid Trump’s return, torn between base appeals and reclaiming the center. This polarization means even post-Trump, Democrats may cling to divisive issues like defund-the-police echoes or aggressive cultural wars, repelling the non-ideological public weary of extremes.

The non-polarized majority, independents and moderates prioritizing kitchen-table issues over partisan theater will likely gravitate toward a GOP unburdened by Trump’s shadow. AP-NORC polls in 2025 showed Democrats view their party as “weak,” with voters pessimistic about its future. Republicans could position themselves as the pragmatic alternative, focusing on economic growth and security without the drama.

Of course, this isn’t inevitable. The GOP must actively court the center, rejecting isolationism and embracing inclusivity. But the asymmetry is apparent: Trump’s polarization was a gift to Republicans in disguise, forcing Democrats into a corner from which escape is arduous. By 2029, as Trump fades, the GOP could reclaim the mantle of the people’s party through default.

The public, exhausted by strife, will reward normalcy. For Democrats, the lesson is stark: opposition to a man can define you, but surviving his absence requires reinvention they may be too polarized to achieve.

Nafees Alam is a professor in social work at Boise (Idaho) State University. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

A recent Fox News poll found that 38% of Jewish New Yorkers intend to vote for Zohran Mamdani for mayor, setting aside whatever reservations they might have about the candidate’s views on Israel. At least a few of those voters will support the 34-year-old state Assembly member not despite those views, but because of them.

That’s their right as Americans and as Jews. But I feel sure that for almost any Jew among the 42% who plan to vote for Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor, or the 13% who support Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, Mamdani’s views are more than disturbing.

Readers of this column, particularly those inclined to vote for Mamdani, should at least pause to consider the reasons.

A good place to start is to concede that nothing in the public record suggests Mamdani is antisemitic — taking the narrowest view of what the word implies. He has spoken of the “crisis of antisemitism” in New York as “something that we have to tackle.” He has condemned the hate crimes this year in Washington and in Boulder, Colorado. And he’s reached out to Jewish communities of various stripes, promising that Zionists would be welcome in his administration.

But Mamdani is also a longtime anti-Zionist of a peculiarly obsessed sort. Three lesser-known points of his biography stand out.

First, as an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, where he helped found the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the student arm of the left-wing Jewish group J Street, which supports Palestinian statehood, opposes Israeli settlements, and is roundly critical of the Israeli government.

Why? Because J Street supports Israel as “a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.” This was too much for Mamdani and his comrades in SJP, for whom working with J Street was a form of normalization. Mamdani, who to this day does not support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, also called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Bowdoin’s president rightly dismissed that notion for “stifling discussion and the free exchange of ideas.”

The second was a rap song Mamdani wrote in 2017, called “Salaam.” “My love to the Holy Land Five, you better look ’em up,” he crooned.

His critics did: The Holy Land Foundation was an ostensible charity convicted in 2008 of funneling $12 million to Hamas; the five defendants in the case received prison sentences of 15 to 65 years for crimes including money laundering, tax fraud and support of terrorism.

Finally, a few months before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, Mamdani introduced a bill in the state Assembly that could have jeopardized the tax-exempt status of virtually every pro-Israel charity. The bill, noted Alex Bores, a fellow Assembly member and a Democrat, “is not aimed at improving regulations of nonprofits broadly, or even applying standards which would apply across the board,” Rather, it “singularly applies to organizations providing aid to a specific country and its people. This is immediately suspicious.”

What stands out about this list is the affinity for extremists, the double standards, and the monomania. Especially the monomania.

One of the ways anti-Zionists tend to give themselves away as something darker is that the only human-rights abuses they seem to notice are Israel’s; the only state among dozens of religious states whose legitimacy they challenge is Israel; the only group whose suffering they are prepared to turn into their personal crusade is that of the Palestinians. What gives? Has Mamdani sponsored bills to oppose, say, the persecution of Uyghurs in China or Kurds in Turkey or gays in his native Uganda, where he was photographed in July with a notoriously homophobic official? Did he ever rap his “love” for the people of Iran fighting their regime?

This is not the only thing that scares so many Jewish voters. An article of faith among many self-professed anti-Zionists is that they are not antisemitic. But Jews don’t live in a world of fine-grained semantic distinctions. The man accused of killing Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, the young couple fatally shot in May outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, yelled “Free Palestine.” Many of the thousands of antisemitic incidents nationwide since the Oct. 7 attacks also have had at least a patina of anti-Zionism. The homes and businesses of prominent Jews have been attacked or vandalized, some by pro-Palestinian protesters, adding to the sense of threat.

What does it mean for Jewish New Yorkers that a mayoral candidate who pledges to fight antisemitism also proudly avows the very ideology that is the source of so much of the hatred Jews now face? Why, right after Oct. 7, could he do no better than to issue a mealy-mouthed acknowledgment that Jews had died the day before? Why couldn’t he even denounce the perpetrators of the most murderous antisemitic rampage in the past 80 years?

Even that’s not the deepest worry. “The painful truth,” Elliot Cosgrove, the rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue, observed in his Saturday sermon, is that “Mamdani’s anti-Zionist rhetoric not only appeals to his base but seems to come with no downside breakage. What business does an American mayoral candidate have weighing in on foreign policy unless it scores points at the ballot box? I don’t doubt that Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is heartfelt and sincere, but its instrumentalization as an election talking point should frighten you in that it says more about the sensibilities of our fellow New Yorkers than it does about Mamdani himself.”

In the long, sorry tale of anti-Jewish politics, it hasn’t just been the prejudice of a few that’s led Jews to grief. It’s been the supine indifference of the many. That’s what frightens Jews like me.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

CHICAGO — Thanks to U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis, we’ve finally learned something about what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol are doing in the Chicago area from the perspective of ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol, which is helpful even if you don’t like what’s going on.

Todd Lyons, acting director, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Greg Bovino, chief patrol agent, El Centro Sector, U.S. Border Patrol, did write to this newspaper last month to take issue with one of our editorials and offer their view of events, which we duly published, but beyond that ICE has said little or nothing to reporters as it upends life as we knew it in Chicago. Local officials also tell us they are being kept in the dark.

To say that both ICE and the Border Patrol lack a commitment to transparency is to understate.

But Ellis, a persistent jurist, has managed to extract the information that the Border Patrol has 232 agents in the area, working on “Operation Midway Blitz,” all of whom are equipped with cameras. She also heard from Deputy Field Office Director Shawn Byers that there are approximately 300 ICE agents assigned to the Midwest, with only about 75-80 total in the Chicago area, somewhat fewer than many people think. Apparently ICE agents mostly are not equipped with cameras; a lack of funding was cited as a reason in court. That should be corrected.

If there is a viable argument against the use of cameras by federal agents enforcing immigration law in our communities, we have not heard it. And we’re not sympathetic to the line that the use of cameras takes a ton of training. In essence, agents attach a camera to their bodies and turn it on. Chicago’s police officers have been doing it for years in compliance with both departmental policy and state law.

Federal agents have claimed in court and elsewhere that some citizens aren’t just peacefully protesting but are interfering with their duties. Cameras, surely, would be helpful in sorting out what really has been happening. If ICE and the Border Patrol are telling the truth about these incidents, they should have nothing to fear from making the footage available to the American public, ideally under the supervision of a court, not as a judiciously edited propaganda tool.

These agents are acting with the authority of the U.S. government and their actions should be recorded and viewed in the clear light of day, albeit with all of the appropriate safeguards and protections that go into the release of video from other law enforcement agencies whose work routinely involves conflict. It is not “judicial activism” to insist that ICE and the Border Patrol be subject to the same levels of transparency as the Chicago police.

— The Chicago Tribune

By JENNIFER PELTZ and JAKE OFFENHARTZ, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — A day after a mass of federal agents questioned street vendors and sparked protests on Manhattan’s Canal Street, sellers were noticeably scarce Wednesday on the busy strip. Some who did venture out, though, were disheartened or riled by a sweep in which they said people including U.S. citizens were pressed to show their papers.

Federal authorities said 14 people, including immigrants and demonstrators, were arrested in Tuesday’s operation. The Department of Homeland Security called the operation “a targeted, intelligence-driven” operation “focused on criminal activity relating to selling counterfeit goods.”

But some vendors saw it as an indiscriminate and heavy-handed crackdown by masked agents who queried a wide swath of sellers.

Awa Ngam was selling sweaters Wednesday from a table at a Canal Street intersection where at least one of her fellow vendors was taken away the previous afternoon.

She said she also was asked for ID, showed it, and then for her passport, which she doesn’t carry around. Agents quizzed her about how she had come to the U.S., but they eventually backed off after her husband explained that she’s an American citizen, she said.

“They asked every African that was here for their status,” Ngam said.

She returned to the spot Wednesday unafraid but upset.

“I’m saddened because they should not walk around and ask people for their passport in America,” said Ngam, who said she came to the U.S. from Mauritania in 2009. She added that if not for her legal immigration status, she would be fearful: “What if they took me? What would happen to my kids?”

Some other sellers decried the sweep as harassment. Others were keeping a low-profile and shied from speaking with journalists.

Signs freshly posted on streetlights mentioned Tuesday’s sweep and urged people at risk of detention to call an immigration law group’s helpline.

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Law enforcement raids aimed at combating counterfeiting are relatively frequent on Canal Street, which is known for its stalls and shops where some vendors hawk knock-off designer goods and bootlegged wares. Federal authorities often team up with the New York Police Department and luxury brands on crackdowns aimed at shutting down illicit trade.

But the sight of dozens of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents making arrests drew instant protests.

Bystanders and activists converged at the scene and shouted at the agents, at one point blocking their vehicle. ICE, Border Patrol and other federal agents tried to clear the streets, sometimes shoving protesters to the ground and threatening them with stun guns or pepper spray before detaining them.

Nine people were arrested in the initial immigration sweep, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said. Four more people were arrested on charges of assaulting federal law enforcement officers, she said, adding that a fifth was arrested and accused of obstructing law enforcement by blocking a driveway.

McLaughlin said some of the people arrested had previously been accused of crimes, including robbery, domestic violence, assaulting law enforcement, counterfeiting and drug offenses.

The sweep came after at least two conservative influencers shared video on X of men selling bags on Canal Street’s sidewalks.

While clashes between immigration authorities and protesters have played out in Los Angeles and other cities, such scenes have been rarer on New York City streets, which Mayor Eric Adams has attributed in part to his working relationship with President Donald Trump’s administration.

Adams, a Democrat, said city police had no involvement in Tuesday’s immigration sweep.

“Our administration has been clear that undocumented New Yorkers trying to pursue their American Dreams should not be the target of law enforcement, and resources should instead be focused on violent criminals,” he said.