The Tea Party Is Back (Maybe)

The Atlantic

13 hours ago

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Signs were all around, but the clinching evidence that the Tea Party is back came this week in New Hampshire, where the Republican Scott Brown announced that he'd be running for U.S. Senate.
Fifteen years ago, in January 2010, Brown, a state senator in Massachusetts, defeated the Democrat Martha Coakley in a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the late liberal icon Ted Kennedy. Brown's victory was a landmark for conservative opposition to Barack Obama's administration, and in particular to his attempt to overhaul health insurance.
Protests in the streets and angry crowds at legislators' town-hall meetings had given a taste of the brewing voter anger, but Democratic leaders dismissed demonstrators as rabble-rousers or astroturfers. Brown's victory in deep-blue Massachusetts proved that the Tea Party was a real force in politics. Brown turned out to be somewhat moderate—he was, after all, representing the Bay State—and his time in the Senate was short because Elizabeth Warren defeated him in 2012. But in the midterm elections months after his win, a big group of fiscally conservative politicians were elected to Congress as anti-establishment critics of the go-along-to-get-along GOP, which they felt wasn't doing enough to stand up to Obama.
Led by Tea Party activists and elected officials, Republicans managed to narrow but not stop the Affordable Care Act, which Obama signed in March 2010; they briefly but only fleetingly reduced federal spending and budget deficits. By 2016, the Tea Party was a spent force. Its anti-establishment energy became the basis for Donald Trump's political movement, with which it shared a strong element of racial backlash. Trump provided the pugilistic approach that many Republican voters had demanded, but without any of the commitment to fiscal discipline: He pledged to protect Medicare and Social Security, and in his first term hugely expanded the deficit.
But now there's a revival of Tea Party ideas in Washington, driven by some of the same elected officials. Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act follows the long-running Republican principle of reducing taxes, especially on the wealthy, but it doesn't even pretend to cut spending commensurate with the reductions in revenue those tax cuts would produce. This is standard for Republican presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Trump all ran for office railing against deficits, and then increased them while in office. They were eager to lower taxes, but not to make the politically unpopular choices necessary to actually reduce federal spending. In theory, at least, the Tea Party represented a more purist approach that insisted on cutting budgets, even if that meant taking on politically dangerous tasks such as slashing entitlements. (Republicans could also produce a more balanced budget by increasing revenue through taxes, but they refuse to seriously consider that.)
Some of the Tea Party OGs are striking the same tones today. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, elected in the 2010 wave, has emerged as the foremost Republican critic of the GOP bill. 'The math doesn't really add up,' he said on Face the Nation earlier this month. Trump called Paul's ideas 'crazy' and, according to Paul, briefly uninvited him from an annual congressional picnic at the White House.
Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, another member of the class of 2010, has also demanded more spending cuts and described the bill's approach as ' completely unsustainable.' 'I'm saying things that people know need to be said,' he told The Wall Street Journal. 'The kid who just exposed that the king is butt-naked may not be real popular, because he kind of made everybody else look like fools, but they all recognize he was right.' (The White House has lately been working to court Johnson.)
Standing alongside these senators are representatives such as Andy Harris of Maryland, who was elected in 2010; Paul's fellow Kentuckian (and fellow Trump target) Thomas Massie, who arrived in the House in 2012; and Chip Roy, a Texan who first came to Washington in 2013 as chief of staff for Tea Party–aligned Senator Ted Cruz. Staring them down is Speaker Mike Johnson. Like Paul Ryan, who was a role model for many Tea Partiers but clashed with the hard right once he became speaker of the House, Johnson has frustrated former comrades by backing off his former fiscal conservatism in the name of passing legislation. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has written, this has led Johnson and his allies to brazenly lie about what the bill would do.
The neo–Tea Partiers are not the only challenge for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. More mainstream and moderate GOP members are skittish about a bill that is deeply unpopular and will cut services that their constituents favor or depend on. Nor is fiscal conservatism the only revival of Tea Party rhetoric. Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has elicited a new burst of bigotry, sometimes from the same exact people. Meanwhile, Democrats are experiencing their own echoes of 2010, as voters demand more from elected officials, and anti-establishment candidates such as Mamdani win.
The 2025 Tea Party wave faces difficulties the first wave didn't. Rather than being able to organize Republicans against a Democratic president, Paul, Johnson, and company are opposing a Republican president who is deeply popular with members of Congress and primary voters. Roy threatened to vote against the bill in the House but then backed down. Now he says he might vote against the Senate bill when the two are reconciled. 'Chip Roy says he means it this time,' snickered Politico this week, noting that he and his allies have 'drawn and re-drawn their fiscal red lines several times over now.' Then again, how better to honor their predecessors than to back down from a demand for real fiscal discipline?
President Donald Trump said that he had cut off trade negotiations with Canada because of Canada's tax on tech companies that would also affect those based in America.
The Supreme Court limited federal courts' ability to implement nationwide injunctions in a decision that left unclear the fate of Trump's executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
The Supreme Court ruled that parents can withdraw their children from public-school classes on days that storybooks with LGBTQ themes are discussed if they have religious objections.
Dispatches
Atlantic Intelligence: Damon Beres interviews Rose Horowitch about her latest story on why the computer-science bubble is bursting.
The Books Briefing: As a writer and an editor, Toni Morrison put humanity plainly on the page, where it would outlast her and her critics alike, Boris Kachka writes.
Evening Read
The Three Marine Brothers Who Feel 'Betrayed' by America
By Xochitl Gonzalez
The four men in jeans and tactical vests labeled Police: U.S. Border Patrol had Narciso Barranco surrounded. Their masks and hats concealed their faces, so that only their eyes were visible. When they'd approached him, he was doing landscape work outside of an IHOP in Santa Ana, California. Frightened, Barranco attempted to run away. By the time a bystander started filming, the agents had caught him and pinned him, face down, on the road. One crouches and begins to pummel him, repeatedly, in the head. You can hear Barranco moaning in pain. Eventually, the masked men drag him to his feet and try to shove him into an SUV. When Barranco resists, one agent takes a rod and wedges it under his neck, attempting to steer him into the vehicle as if prodding livestock.
Barranco is the father of three sons, all of them United States Marines. The eldest brother is a veteran, and the younger men are on active duty. At any moment, the same president who sent an emboldened ICE after their father could also command them into battle.
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P.S.
Tuesday was a red-letter day for blue language in the Gray Lady. The New York Times is famously shy about four-letter words; the journalist Blake Eskin noted in 2022 that the paper had published three separate articles about the satirical children's book Go the Fuck to Sleep, all without ever printing the actual name of the book. An article about Emil Bove III, which I wrote about yesterday, was tricky for the Times: The notable thing about the story was the language allegedly used. In its second paragraph, the Times used one of its standard circumlocutions: 'In Mr. Reuveni's telling, Mr. Bove discussed disregarding court orders, adding an expletive for emphasis.' It printed the word itself in the 16th paragraph, perhaps because any children reading would have gotten bored and moved on by then. The same day, the Times reported, unexpurgated, on Trump's anger at Iran and Israel: 'We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing,' the president told reporters.
I was curious about the discussions behind these choices. In a suitably Times -y email, the newspaper spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told me: 'Editors decided it was newsworthy that the president of the United States used a curse word to make a point on one of the biggest issues of the day, and did so in openly showing frustration with an ally as well as an adversary.' It's another Trumpian innovation: expanding the definition of news fit to print.