The Other Resistance

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, August 10, 2026

 

Political statistician Nate Silver spotted a strange trend in Tuesday’s primary election results. Despite the left’s seemingly ravenous appetite for leaders who will fight fight fight the president’s autocratic schemes, Democratic candidates who fought fought fought him during his first term keep losing their races.

 

The latest was Alex Vindman, the retired Army officer and former National Security Council member who famously testified before Congress in 2019 about the president’s “quid pro quo” phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019. Vindman parlayed that notoriety into a run for Senate this year in Florida, raking in gobs of money in the process. His opponent in the Democratic primary, progressive state lawmaker Angie Nixon, raised so little by comparison—just one-sixteenth of Vindman’s haul—that she couldn’t afford to run ads on television.

 

Last night she smoked him by double digits. Vindman even lost his home county.

 

Explanations abound. Nixon is an experienced organizer who used her skill to build an effective ground game. She was running in a cycle in which enthusiasm for far-left candidates is conspicuously high. And Vindman was a carpetbagger who grew up in New York City and didn’t move to Florida until 2023.  

 

Silver had his own theory, though. “It’s kind of been a rough set of primaries for Heroes of the Resistance 1.0 between Vindman losing tonight, Dan Goldman losing his seat (although there were other issues there) and George Conway getting only 6% of the vote in NY-12. People want to move on,” he wrote.

 

Conway was a bigshot Republican lawyer for decades before becoming a strident critic of Donald Trump, building a large left-wing social media following in the process. Goldman served as lead counsel for Democrats during the president’s first impeachment trial and rode that credential to winning a House seat of his own in 2022. Both were rejected by Democratic primary voters this year, as Silver notes.

 

But that’s not all. Rep. Diana DeGette served as a manager during Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021 yet was ousted by a far-left challenger in her own Colorado primary earlier this summer, ending a 29-year run in Congress. And although Rep. Jasmine Crockett didn’t enter the House until 2023, she ran for Senate in Texas this year as a “Hero of the Resistance 1.0” in spirit. Her first ad consisted of nothing more than audio of Trump insulting her while she stood silently before the camera, basking in his contempt.

 

She went on to lose the Democratic Senate primary by 8 points.

 

It’s a curious trend at a moment when the president is approximately as popular as cyclospora—and ironic, as Resistance 1.0 happens to be losing altitude in Democratic primaries at the same time as Trump is losing altitude in Republican ones.

 

The president took three more L’s in GOP primaries last night, with his preferred candidates falling short in Wyoming’s gubernatorial race and in two House districts in Florida. (One of those House candidates, Rep. Cory Mills, was carrying a metric ton of scandal baggage.) “10 Trump-endorsed candidates have now lost this primary season—including six in the last two weeks,” CNN’s Aaron Blake noted. By Blake’s count, that’s as many losses as the president’s endorsees suffered in Republican races in 2018, 2020, and 2024 combined.

 

And considering how horribly Trump-backed Darline Graham did at Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary debate in South Carolina, another L looms on the horizon.

 

The president’s influence over the right is waning and Resistance 1.0’s influence over the left is waning, seemingly in tandem. Why?

 

Resistance 2.0.

 

Democratic voters still want to fight fight fight Trump, obviously. I think the ambivalence they’ve demonstrated toward Resistance figures from his first term has more to do with what they want to fight fight fight about in 2026.

 

Ask yourself this: What was the core critique of the president offered by Resistance 1.0? If you had to summarize it in a sentence, what would you say?

 

It wasn’t a policy critique. There were stances Trump took that the left despised, certainly; separating immigrant families at the border is a glaring example. But the economy was strong, there were no major wars, and the administration was being run by people like John Kelly and James Mattis. Compared to the president’s second term, his first was a golden age of American stability.

 

Resistance anxiety back then focused on the person of Trump himself. He fired the FBI director for not being “loyal” enough. He squeezed Zelensky for dirt on his likely Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential election. He embarrassed the country hourly with his childish social media ranting and idiotic riffs during COVID press conferences. He strained against constitutional checks on presidential power and acted like a buffoon doing it, culminating in the equal-parts-evil-and-stupid spectacle of “Stop the Steal.”

 

“Orange man bad” is how a right-winger would sarcastically summarize the ethos of Resistance 1.0—and that’s not far off the mark, honestly. I’d be more generous and summarize it as, “This isn’t who we are, and this isn’t what America should be.”

 

But it is who we are, it turns out. That’s the lesson of 2024. Voters had a different opinion of what America should be, or at least of what they were willing to let America become, provided that the transformation came packaged with airy promises about cheaper groceries.

 

The orange man is bad. Resistance 1.0 was correct. But it failed to prevent an orange restoration at the polls, and so its critique—accurate as it was—now seems not just stale but feeble. Fine, yes, the orange man is bad. That didn’t stop him from getting reelected. What else do you have to offer?

 

It’s worse than that, actually. Insofar as Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 seemed to vindicate the belief that “this isn’t who we are,” that Americans yearned for a return to normalcy after years of Trump’s chaos, it was a triumph for the Resistance. And then that triumph fell to ashes as inflation soared, ensuring that normalcy wouldn’t be returning after all. Democrats failed to deliver what the Resistance had promised—so badly that desperate swing voters decided to roll the dice on the bad orange man again. Defeat doesn’t get much more total than that.

 

Why would Democratic voters want to risk rerunning that cycle by populating their leadership in Washington with Resistance 1.0 figures?

 

The dream of “normalcy” in America died on Election Day 2024. And so now the left is onto Resistance 2.0, which is something like the opposite of the original version: Only radical change, not a “return to normalcy,” can vanquish right-wing postliberalism. Going forward, politics will be a kill-or-be-killed struggle between activists on both sides to try to disempower the other semi-permanently through outré structural reforms—ending the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, gerrymandering House districts along ruthless partisan lines.

 

That’s what fight fight fight means now. Not “impeach and remove Trump,” a hopeless exercise given the utter civic degeneracy of Senate Republicans.

 

That’s how Angie Nixon “fought,” not coincidentally. As a state representative, she endeared herself to Florida Democrats by protesting the GOP’s redistricting scheme in splashy ways, in one case organizing a sit-in at the governor’s office in the Florida Capitol and in another shouting her protests through a pink megaphone on the state House floor. She’s moved past the badness of the orange man, which is all Alex Vindman really stood for, and onto more urgent challenges.

 

But Nixon also “campaigned on progressive policies like free childcare and freezing rent nationally,” per Politico, reflecting another key difference between Resistance 1.0 and 2.0. In Trump’s second term, there are major policy failures for the left to drill down on. ICE’s abuses, still-expensive groceries and increasingly expensive gasoline, and of course an aimless, endless war on Iran: Even if it were true that “this is not who we are” (which it isn’t), that critique would be woefully unequal to a moment of multiple metastasizing crises.

 

Nixon seems to have understood that. Vindman did not.

 

Two kinds of weakness.

 

I wrote a newsletter a few weeks ago about “non-MAGA Republicans” turning against Trump. Who those voters are is an interesting and debatable question, but why they’ve gone sour on him really isn’t. Obviously it’s the war and its various knock-on effects, starting with gas prices.

 

Thinking about it further this morning, though, after the president’s latest losses in primaries, I wonder if I’ve actually underestimated how badly the conflict has hurt him.

 

I’ve seen it firsthand, anecdotally, with a Trump-supporting relative. This person rarely criticized the president before, but our conversations about Iran lately have reliably opened with some variation of “This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.” (My relative’s words, not mine.) I warned him after the peace deal fell apart that the standoff over Hormuz would probably end with Trump acceding to Iranian control of the strait in some form, as letting oil tankers be extorted for “fees” might be the least costly way out of this mess at this point.

 

Never going to happen, my relative said. The president would never allow himself to lose face that way. Either he would “go in”—meaning, send in ground troops—or he would “bomb the s--t out of them.” Surrender wasn’t an option.

 

I think it is an option, though, as do people who are in a much better position to know than I am. Consider that the U.S. has stopped retaliating against Iranian strikes on ships in the strait, presumably afraid to trigger an escalation that the Pentagon is no longer equipped to contain. And reports are circulating that the White House might reduce America’s footprint in the Middle East permanently after the war rather than rebuild damaged or destroyed bases that it was unable to protect from Iranian attack.

 

Withdrawing U.S. forces from the Persian Gulf region is one of Iran’s six core demands for a peace deal, as it happens.

 

Any president would be facing a political calamity if he lost a war, never mind losing it and then exiting with his tail between his legs. But Trump’s image depends so heavily on dominance and combativeness—on fight fight fight, to quote his famous line after escaping death in Pennsylvania—that it’s hard to foresee what politics looks like if he’s forced to capitulate to a longtime American enemy. It would turn his persona upside down.

 

Remember, the Iran war was supposed to demonstrate his dominance and pugnacity. It would wrap up in four to six weeks, he assured Americans, although he reportedly believed it might end much sooner than that, with a Venezuela-style “we give up!” after the regime’s leadership was killed. Other presidents may have lacked the nerve to fight fight fight and the strength to win, but not this president: That was the implied warranty of government by Trump. Six months later, what’s left of it?

 

Normally I would descend into cynicism at this point and predict that he’ll easily BS his way out of this jam among supporters, spoon-feeding them lies about the “fake news” not wanting them to know how amazing our victory over Iran was. But my relative clearly won’t be buying it. And as the president’s endorsed candidates continue to lose competitive primaries, I suspect a meaningful share of hawkishly inclined Republican voters isn’t buying it anymore either.

 

The left-wing Resistance never caused Trump much real difficulty, but persistent military resistance by one of the world’s worst terrorist regimes is destroying the strongman credibility on which his popularity was built. And don’t think the regime doesn’t know it.

 

There’s another factor that might be contributing to Trump’s declining fortunes in primaries, and it’s not inconsistent with the first. What if the far right has reached the point of radicalization at which it’s not only no longer listening to the president but opposing his endorsees to signal its discontent? This too would be a response to “weakness,” but not the weakness he’s supposedly guilty of by declining to “bomb the s--t” out of Iran again.

 

More like the opposite. To the far right, Trump’s essential weakness was letting dastardly Zionists manipulate him into attacking Iran in the first place.

 

I mentioned the right’s Lindberghian “America First” postliberals in my earlier column as part of the coalition of “non-MAGA Republicans” who disapprove of the president. But how many of them are there, realistically? Tucker Carlson’s audience is big, but it ain’t that big, right? Last night’s Republican primaries provided a clue. James Fishback’s groyper pandering earned him more than 10 percent statewide in the Florida GOP’s gubernatorial race against Trump-backed Byron Donalds, while outspoken antisemite Dan Bilzerian took nearly 19 percent in a Florida House primary from Trump-endorsed Rep. Randy Fine.

 

That’s a lotta chuds. Not a majority, thank goodness, but enough to make a dent if they’re withholding their votes en masse from Trump-endorsed candidates in primaries.

 

If a big chunk of normies in the party have grown disillusioned with the president for being an incompetent wimp and another 10 to 15 percent have grown disillusioned with him for not having gone full Nazi, then a sizable coalition of Republican voters is now less prone to being swayed by him and his endorsements than they used to be. A really weird and unlikely coalition, to be sure. But still.

 

Pair that disillusionment with the disillusionment Democratic voters are likely feeling about the failure of Resistance 1.0 to avert our current national nightmare and we have a reasonably good explanation for why Trump and old-school anti-Trumpers are deflating in primaries. The people on both sides who led us to this miserable moment are losing influence. Go figure.