What the Trump administration's latest outrages have done for its opponents

The regime's escalating excesses seem to have imbued Democrats such as California's Sen. Alex Padilla and Gov. Gavin Newsom with something new and needed.

The Trump regime’s latest arrest of a Democratic official opposing its immigration crackdown, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, has yielded no charges against him while breathing new life into his third-place primary campaign for mayor. That extends the administration’s inadvertent but remarkable string of successes in sharpening, elevating and glorifying its opponents, which is not normally considered great politics.

This week’s ham-fisted manhandling of Lander echoed that of Sen. Alex Padilla the week before. So did its disastrously backfiring aftermath.

When Padilla became a U.S. senator four years ago, the California Democrat didn’t exactly seem poised to take the Capitol by storm — which was, after all, much more the other party’s thing at that point. He didn’t even win his seat in any conventional sense: Gov. Gavin Newsom, his longtime political ally, anointed him to fill the coveted vacancy left by then-Vice President Kamala Harris, rapturing Padilla from the backwaters of the California secretary of state’s office, where he had amassed a record of moderate achievement marred by minor scandal. In the Senate, he has plugged away at such important but low-profile causes as emergency preparedness.

But now, of course, California’s first Latino senator is exponentially better known as the victim of one of the second Trump administration’s most disturbing excesses — a crowded category indeed. By tackling and cuffing Padilla as he tried to interrupt a press conference in Los Angeles, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s over-amped minions turned what could have been a fruitless political spectacle into a certified outrage while making an obscure Democratic politician famous.

Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., pauses during remarks on the Senate floor this week.

Padilla’s original one-man electorate, Newsom, has likewise emerged from the crackdown with a new sense of purpose.

The governor spent the first few months of Donald Trump’s second term desperately grasping for relevance. He launched a podcast that found him consorting with prominent reactionaries and joining the right-wing panic over trans athletes, vowed to get serious about housing and homelessness seven years after he ran on the issue, and reversed some of his own progressive policies on the environment, health care and immigration.

Then Trump decided to order a military invasion of (checks notes) the second-largest city in the United States, and all of a sudden, Gavin was back, baby.

The governor strenuously and correctly objected to the president’s pointless, provocative deployment of thousands of California National Guard troops to Los Angeles, setting up a legal contest with echoes of those heady days when both he and Trump were callow first-termers and fast frenemies. He stood up for peaceful protesters and undocumented immigrants. He became approximately the last person in the universe to acknowledge his own presidential ambitions. He even started a Substack, which as everyone knows is incontrovertible proof of a career on the upswing!

The governor went so far as to tell The Atlantic he had become a “different guy” last weekend — a claim whose impact is diminished only by how often such transformations seem to have befallen him.

In any case, the Newsom who stood up for the “dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers and seamstresses” who are “least able to defend themselves” from the regime’s callous, careless dragnet is a vast improvement over the one who, just a month earlier, retreated from his own humane extension of Medi-Cal coverage to undocumented Californians.

In the same address, Newsom took pointed note of Trump’s overtly antidemocratic threat to have him arrested for having run for office. As it happens, Noem, the homeland security secretary and noted cosmetic dentistry spokeswoman, was also in the midst of a ridiculous diatribe about the administration’s intent to “liberate” L.A. and California from its duly elected leaders when Padilla tried to make his fateful point of order.

Was the senator engaged in an indecorous publicity stunt, as the administration and others have since charged as part of their thoroughly unconvincing defense? Of course he was. But Noem, Trump and company have done nothing to deserve decorum from anyone, least of all their political opposition.

More important, no mere lapse of etiquette justifies official violence against or forcible detention of anyone exercising his constitutional right to petition the government. That federal forces were so willing and quick to deploy such tactics against an elected official portends far worse, as Padilla noted, for those lacking his station and resources. It was evident from his reaction that the senator expected nothing like the jackbooted response he got — nor should he have.

Besides Padilla and Lander, at least three other elected Democratic officials have been roughed up, restrained or criminally charged for daring to stand athwart the administration’s racially and politically targeted purge.

In his powerful remarks on the Senate floor this week, Padilla, a temperamentally cautious politician, really did sound like a different guy.

“No one’s going to liberate Los Angeles but Angelenos,” he said. “No one will redeem America but Americans. No one is coming to save us but us. … But if this administration is this afraid of just one senator with a question, colleagues, imagine what the voices of tens of millions of Americans peacefully protesting can do.”

In the moments when he was being “pushed and pulled,” “forced to the ground” and “handcuffed and marched” he knew not where, Padilla acknowledged, he wondered whether his speaking up was “really worth it.” If he and other leaders of his party continue to oppose this regime so forcefully and eloquently, it will have been.