Chris Van Hollen fought when no one else would. Make him Dems’ leader.

It’s been nearly a week since the political earthquake of Tuesday’s historic midterm election that rebuked Donald Trump by flipping Congress to the Democrats by huge margins, and my friends and neighbors out here in the Trump-resisting Philly suburbs are still giddy, like an inversion cloud of laughing gas has settled over the region.

But if the Democratic Party wants to keep this era of good feeling going, it’s important to remember a much darker time just 19 months ago, in the spring of 2025 as Trump accelerated America’s slide into authoritarianism.

Stunned rank-and-file Democrats watched as the institutions once counted on to help defend democracy — corporate CEOs, media owners, law firms — bowed down to the 47th president as he twisted the rule of law. Many Democrats, including their leaders on Capitol Hill — New Yorkers Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House — acted like Trump’s 49.8% of the 2024 vote was a mandate for strongman rule.

On March 15, 2025, the Trump regime tested the outer limits of autocracy when federal immigration agents arrested a then-29-year-old Maryland laborer named Kilmar Ábrego García and swiftly deported him to El Salvador — a move that even a Justice Department lawyer conceded was an error because of a judge’s earlier ruling that Ábrego García would face danger back in his native country.

But the empire — in the style we’d see again and again over the next 19 months — doubled down. Not only did the Trump regime refuse to seek Ábrego García’s return from one of the world’s most notorious hellhole prisons, El Salvador’s CECOT, but its media lackeys and online influencers slandered a Maryland dad and essential worker as a dangerous gang member, despite little supporting evidence.

From many Democrats, the initial silence over this crime against humanity was deafening. California Gov. Gavin Newsom— who’s been creating a roadmap for how NOT to run for president in 2028 — brushed aside a question about the Ábrego García case, calling it “the distraction of the day” to avoid a debate about tariffs. The Hill, a bible of the lamest Beltway conventional wisdom, published an op-ed begging Democrats not to fall into “the narrative trap” of backing this undocumented immigrant.

One senator ignored the pundit claptrap and followed his conscience.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland — Ábrego García’s adopted state — threw himself into the fight for Ábrego García’s freedom. In mid-April 2025, Maryland’s senior senator flew to El Salvador and demanded to meet with the detained immigrant, who was being held incommunicado at CECOT. He drove to the prison, only to be turned away by soldiers.

At the same time, the Trump’s regime’s efforts to slime Van Hollen as a dangerously out-of-touch left-wing lunatic were already underway. The president labeled the Democrat on social media and in news conferences as “a fool” and a “grandstander,” while then-White House press secretary Karolyn Leavitt brought a Maryland woman whose husband had been killed by a Salvadoran immigrant to her daily press briefing, to amp up the condemnation.

Nevertheless, Van Hollen persisted. Shortly after his initial rebuff, Salvadoran officials allowed the senator to meet with Ábrego García in a restaurant — the world’s first proof he was alive and healthy — and despite a clumsy effort to sabotage the moment by bringing margaritas to their table, things started to change.

Other Democrats followed Van Hollen’s lead and traveled to El Salvador. Authorities there moved Ábrego García to a better prison, the first step in a months-long fight for the freedom of a wrongly imprisoned man with too many twists and turns to recap here.

The bottom line is that today Ábrego García is a free man reunited with his wife and children in Maryland, although still fighting civil deportation. On Capitol Hill, more and more Democrats — following Van Hollen’s lead, and egged on by everyday people’s massive No Kings protests and the resistance to immigration raids in Minneapolis and elsewhere — abandoned the idea of capitulation. The momentum reached a crescendo with Tuesday’s rejection of Trump at the ballot box.

When Van Hollen returned from El Salvador that April, he was greeted at Dulles International Airport by a gaggle of grateful supporters, including one who held aloft a sign: “THIS IS WHAT LEADERSHIP LOOKS LIKE.”

Hold that thought.

The Democratic landslide on Tuesday happened not because of the party elites — as epitomized by Schumer and Jeffries — but in spite of them. This revolution was bottom-up, thanks to the angry masses and a handful of renegades like Van Hollen.

It had to overcome top-down resistance from the likes of Schumer — whose failure to grasp the threat from American fascism was epitomized by last November’s cave-in on a government shutdown that failed to save healthcare subsidies for millions of struggling families — and Jeffries, who notoriously held a meeting seeking common ground with Trump’s greed-soaked son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The evidence is overwhelming that the base of the Democratic Party that powered last week’s “blue tsunami” desperately wants a change at the top to lead the Trump resistance going forward. “NO SCHUMER CORONATION’ was the headline on a post from the anti-Trump group Indivisible, the lead organizer of the No Kings protests, that went out to its massive following on Wednesday.

“Yesterday, voters made it very clear that they want a new generation of Democratic fighters,” Indivisible posted. “We need a leader in the Senate who is capable of leading that fight. It’s time for Senate Democrats to choose new leadership.”

Those sentiments were quickly echoed by none other than Van Hollen, who last week called for “a discussion” on who should lead Senate Democrats in January. He noted that voters wanted more than just a change, but also “an economy that’s not rigged in favor of the very wealthy and big corporations and stacked against working people.”

Van Hollen is clearly not alone among his colleagues in wanting turnover at the top. Several newcomers, including Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, South Carolina’s Annie Andrews and Kansas’ Adam Hamilton have said they want Schumer replaced, while a so-called “Fight Club” of returning incumbents such as Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Chris Murphy of Connecticut have also urged radical change.

Nothing stirs this lifelong politics lover’s soul more than that scene in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington when Jimmy Stewart’s Sen. Jefferson Smith declares that lost causes “are the only causes worth fighting for,” and “for the only reason anyone fights for them, because of just one simple truth — love thy neighbor.”

That’s a fitting description of Van Hollen’s courageous stand for Ábrego García — but also for this column.

For starters, the Beltway crowd — not just the Democratic establishment, but the “savvy” political journalists at places like the New York Times — seem determined to ram the return of Schumer and Jeffries down the throats of voters as a done deal, like it or not.

“Schumer, Once Besieged, Is on Track to Remain Leader After Election Blowout,” the Paper of Record declared this weekend, in a story that read like it was written by the senator’s staff, with no comments from his critics and an overhyping of his very mixed role in recruiting Senate candidates for the midterms.

Jeffries has benefitted from an even more forceful coronation campaign, with the media racing to anoint him as the first Black House speaker, pretending there isn’t widespread dissatisfaction with him among the Democratic base. The Rev. Al Sharpton hopped on MS Now to insist that progressives would be making a big mistake if they opposed Jeffries. It looks like fighting the ascension of this milquetoast corporate Democrat might, unfortunately, be a bridge too far.

Not so with Schumer.

Still, there’s a second reason why this is a lost-cause column. For now, Van Hollen is saying he’s not the one to challenge Schumer — even after El-Sayed endorsed him last week. He appears to be eying a presidential run in 2028. That’s understandable, but my reading of the Democratic base is that they want real leadership on Capitol Hill right now, while they are looking for youth and charisma (cough, cough...Sen. Jon Ossoff) for the next White House contest.

There’s still time to fight for a cause that isn’t lost until the Democratic caucus actually votes on a leader later this month. First, call Van Hollen’s office and urge him to run for the job. But more importantly, call your own Democratic member of the Senate and tell them that Schumer cannot return as leader, and that if they support the status quo you will work for their primary opponent at the next opportunity.

The next two years are not going to be easy. Democrats’ good vibes won’t last if the party doesn’t fight for democracy with the same level of courage with which Van Hollen fought for the life of the neighbor that he did not know. Now is the time to pay it forward.

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