IT’S TOUGH TO CHOOSE WHAT TO PANIC ABOUT most as Elon Musk, America’s first unelected president—who has so many foreign contacts and so much China business that the U.S. government has denied him several sensitive security clearances—unilaterally shuts down agencies, fires thousands of federal employees, accesses and does who knows what with the personal data of millions of people, and takes over the $6 trillion federal payment system. All while Donald Trump was playing golf in Florida.
The handwringing over what to do about clearly illegal and unconstitutional actions, and who should do it, is understandable and consuming. But the next couple of weeks offer at least some people a chance to matter in very specific and crucial ways.
I’m talking about senators.
They’ll be voting on a series of Trump nominees who pose existential threats to health, life, rule of law, and American values like self-determination and freedom of religion. This is not an exaggeration. It is brutal realism, especially against the backdrop of Musk’s brazen slash-and-burn expedition through a bureaucracy he doesn’t comprehend or care about.
Three nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and Kash Patel as FBI director—have tried to move away from records that should be disqualifying on their face. Russ Vought, nominated for a second round as Office of Management and Budget director, is still intent on letting Trump unconstitutionally override congressional spending decisions. He hasn’t moved away from anything—which is in some ways even more frightening.
Kennedy reinforced at his confirmation hearings last week that he is uniquely dangerous: a prodigious disinformation superspreader who makes money off attacking vaccines. He has petitioned to get the lifesaving COVID vaccine revoked, promoted COVID “treatments” that do nothing, and continues to claim vaccines cause autism.
At his hearings he said he’d follow the science on COVID and autism, but then argued against and dismissed the definitive studies he was shown. His cousin, Caroline, sent senators a message calling him a disturbed predator and drug addict who led other relatives into addiction. And history has already shown that “wellness farms”—RFK Jr.’s plan to ease the opioid epidemic—don’t work.
Patel told senators Trump should not have pardoned January 6th Capitol rioters who assaulted police, deflected previous threats to investigate the media and government officials, and said there would be no political retribution. That was just before the Trump Justice Department forced out eight senior FBI officials and demanded a list of thousands of employees who had worked on January 6th prosecutions.
On the other hand: Patel produced and promoted a J6 Prison Choir recording that included inmates convicted of such assaults. He has suggested the FBI might have planned the riot and planted a pipe bomb at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington that day. He wrote a children’s book attacking the FBI investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s Russia connections. And he refused to acknowledge at his hearing that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Gabbard has been unusually receptive to Russian propaganda, three former aides told ABC News. She’s also been unusually—and publicly—sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin, ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and classified-secrets leaker Edward Snowden. At her hearing, she repeatedly refused to call him a traitor. She did state clearly that “Putin started the war” in Ukraine—a shift from her earlier view that Russia invaded Ukraine because Biden and NATO had ignored Putin’s “legitimate security concerns.”
Vought, an architect of Project 2025, is so objectionable to Democrats that they boycotted his confirmation hearing. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer did meet with him and “when I asked him what part of Project 2025 he would disagree with, he couldn’t point to one.” Trump disavowed the highly controversial blueprint during his campaign, but it was always the playbook and his team has been running with it.
Hand it to Vought, you can’t accuse him of currying favor. Remember the conservative, anti-abortion Supreme Court nominees who assured senators they considered Roe v. Wade a precedent, even a settled precedent? How’d all that work out? People are who they are, and it’s wishful thinking to hope that, for instance, RFK Jr. will suddenly renounce his destructive anti-vax past and Gabbard will become a champion of Ukraine.
It’s painful to watch someone like Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, a sexual-assault survivor and the first female combat veteran to serve in Congress, fall in line behind now-Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after getting him to say he supports women serving “at any level” for which they qualify, and will name a senior official focused on sexual assault prevention and response. Her vote for him also came after a sustained MAGA pressure campaign, including primary threats.
And yet, some things are worth doing. No matter how much money Musk or Meghan McCain or anyone else pledges to pour into primary opponents with one job: to defeat you.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Listen to the lawmakers who lost their jobs over tough votes. Way back in 1993, freshman Rep. Marjorie Margolies—then Margolies-Mezvinsky—lost her suburban Philadelphia seat after supporting Bill Clinton’s balanced budget. “You were the deciding vote in Congress on Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget, and, well, it involved a tax increase on the rich,” NPR host Neal Conan said to her a decade later. “It did, and they all lived in my district,” Margolies responded, and they broke up laughing.
She said she warned Clinton the Democrats would lose her heavily GOP district if she supported his budget, and told him: “I will only be your last vote if you need me. I think that it has to pass.” He needed her, she voted yes, and told NPR she had no regrets.
In 2008, with a possibly global financial collapse imminent, came the test of George W. Bush’s Troubled Assets Relief Program—the “TARP” bank bailout. The most shocking casualty may have been GOP moderate Mike Castle, a former Delaware governor and nine-term House fixture, who lost his primary to Tea Party backed Christine O’Donnell. He later said, correctly, that history would deem TARP necessary, beneficial, and not even that expensive in the end.
Third-term Utah Sen. Bob Bennett lost a Republican primary to Mike Lee after supporting the bipartisan bailout, but in December 2010 called it the institution’s “finest hour.” Texas Democrat Chet Edwards, at the same event, said his TARP vote was “one of the proudest” of his two-decade House career. He had just lost to a Republican in the 2010 general election.
That was a wipeout year for Democrats, as the Tea Party mobilized against President Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act that Democrats passed with no Republican votes in either chamber. The health care law was under attack from birth and went into the 2010 election with more adults viewing it unfavorably than favorably.
That’s even though it protected people with pre-existing conditions and created an insurance market for entrepreneurs, the self-employed, workers without employer coverage, and those who lost jobs—as so many did in the pandemic. Nearly 24 million people have bought 2025 coverage in the ACA marketplaces, and nearly two-thirds of adults now approve of the law.
Was the wipeout worth it? Some of the many who lost in 2010 say yes. It would have been “immoral” to vote against it, former Rep. Patrick J. Murphy wrote in 2013. Rep. Tom Perriello—son of a pediatrician—wrote four years later that he knew he’d probably lose his red Virginia district in 2010, after one term, but had no regrets: “In voting to pass the ACA, I made a long-term bet that it would save lives well worth the short-term political costs.”
The same long-term calculations could be made about a health secretary who opposes vaccines, an intelligence director who may or may not care about Ukraine or U.S. secrets, an FBI director who doesn’t trust the FBI, and an OMB director whose project is a wholesale revamping of America in the image of Trump, MAGA, and Christian nationalism.
To Democrats considering a vote for one or more of these nominees, consider the country’s future as well as your own electoral prospects. To Republicans considering a break from Trump, and the high political price of disloyalty, and maybe even the physical threat, consider also the price of letting all this happen to America without trying to stop it.
It’s up to you. And though there are many fatalists and nihilists out there who scoff at anyone who still believes politicians might make the right choice, the brave choice, I think it’s worth asking. And setting the bar a bit higher.
After all, what’s the worst that can happen?
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