Democratic voters reject Resistance stars

DEMOCRATIC VOTERS REJECT RESISTANCE STARS. There has been a lot of commentary on the differences between Resistance 1.0, the effort by anti-Trump activists to bring down President Donald Trump in his first term, and Resistance 2.0, the effort by anti-Trump activists to bring down Trump in his second term. There are some tactical contrasts, but the simple fact is, they’re still at it.This year’s election season has featured two much-lauded figures of Resistance 1.0 as they tried to use their anti-Trump agitation as a springboard to public office. Alex Vindman, the former National Security Council staffer who in 2019 set off the first Trump impeachment, ran for Senate in Florida, and George Conway, the lawyer who talked E. Jean Carroll into suing Trump, ran for the House in New York. Both suffered crushing defeats in Democratic primaries. Conway ran in New York’s 12th Congressional District, in Manhattan, the seat vacated by the retirement of Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler. There were a lot of candidates. Conway finished fifth, with 6.1% of the vote. A wealthy lawyer, Conway loaned his campaign $2 million for the run. In all, he spent $5.7 million.The money allowed Conway to mount a vanity campaign, to publicly fantasize about getting Trump, and to pound his chest about the massive damage judgment against Trump in the Carroll trial. “Hi, Donald! It’s me, George Conway,” began one ad. “I cost you $88 million f***ing dollars, and I’ve only just gotten started.” For his next act, Conway promised to put Trump in jail.Conway obviously thought the theme might work in New York’s 12th, in which Kamala Harris beat Trump 81% to 17% in the 2024 presidential election. But of course all Democrats in the race promised to oppose Trump. The Democratic voters’ job was to choose the best. Conway was not their first, or their second, or their third, or their fourth choice. Instead, the primary winner was a member of the New York state Assembly named Micah C. Lasher, who pledged to stand up to Trump.The other Resistance star to face-plant was Alexander Vindman, who in 2019, as an active-duty Army lieutenant colonel on the staff of the National Security Council, set in motion the first impeachment of Trump. Vindman, who was privy to some of the president’s calls with world leaders, felt that Trump had committed some sort of unspecified violation in a conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Vindman relayed secret information to a friend in the CIA, who came up with a “whistleblower” complaint against the president.The idea of a whistleblower complaint was preposterous because “there was no scenario in which the president, as head of the executive branch, was covered by any whistleblower law.” (The line is from my book Obsession, which delved into the first-term efforts to remove Trump.) There was simply no provision in the law that would allow it. But Congress can do what it wants, and Democrats, who controlled the House and were frustrated by the recent collapse of the Russia investigation, adopted Vindman’s cause. The impeachment went on.Vindman testified in private and in public but refused to detail precisely how he got the impeachment ball rolling. Democrats defended him and pushed back against Republicans who sought to know to whom Vindman had given the story of the Trump-Zelensky call. “All the facts point that Vindman here is the coefficient, that he sparked this whole thing,” said a senior Republican aide involved in the impeachment. “For all intents and purposes, Vindman is the whistleblower here, but he was able to get somebody else to do his dirty work for him.”The impeachment failed, of course. Under pressure from the Trump administration, Vindman retired from the military and began trading on his notoriety. He wrote a memoir called Here, Right Matters, with the title based on his congressional testimony. He started a company called Here Right Matters LLC. It did well; in a financial disclosure form this year, Vindman listed around $1.5 million in income from that and other ventures. The Alexander Vindman business did pretty well.The next step would be politics. Vindman moved to Florida and ran for the Senate as a Democrat. When he jumped into the race in January, his announcement video began with news clips from his role in the Trump impeachment. A moment later, Vindman said, as pictures of his congressional testimony played: “The last time you saw me was here, swearing an oath to tell the truth about a president who broke his. See, my family came to America as refugees to escape tyranny. And I sure as hell was not going to bow down to some wannabe tyrant. This president unleashed a reign of terror and retribution, not just against me and my family, but against all of us.”No subtlety there; the Hero of the Resistance had arrived to take on Donald Trump! Vindman raised $16 million for his campaign, while his socialist opponent, Angie Nixon, raised a little less than $1 million. Vindman immediately became a heavy favorite to win the Democratic nomination. He remained the favorite until Election Day, when Nixon shocked the political world by trouncing Vindman, 56% to 44%.Once again, the Resistance 1.0 magic did not work. As it had been in Manhattan, only on a far larger scale, Florida Democratic voters just didn’t care that a candidate had led one of the many unsuccessful efforts to drive Trump out of office from 2017 to 2021. That doesn’t mean they like or support Trump; they absolutely don’t. But it does mean that all the excitement that George Conway and Alexander Vindman and their allies stirred up in the wayback time of Trump I truly came to nothing.