The American constitutional system is built on the theory that the self-interest of lawmakers can be as much of a defense against tyranny as any given law or institution.

As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Our Constitution is nothing more than a “parchment barrier” if not backed by the self-interest and ambition of those tasked with leading the nation.

One of the most striking dynamics in these first months of the second Trump administration was the extent to which so many politicians seemed to lack the ambition to directly challenge the president. There was a sense that the smart path was to embrace the apparent “vibe shift” of the 2024 presidential election and accommodate oneself to the new order.

But events have moved the vibe in the other direction. Ambition is making a comeback.

Last week, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland traveled to El Salvador, where he met with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a victim of the Trump administration’s removal program under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.

Under their reading of the law, which allows the president to summarily detain or expel foreign nationals from the United States, the Trump administration has sent hundreds of alleged gang members, most of Venezuelan origin, to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

Abrego Garcia is one of the men trapped in this black zone. Despite his protected legal status, he was arrested, detained, accused of gang activity and removed from the United States. At no point did the government prove its case against Abrego Garcia, who has been moved to a lower-security prison, nor did he have a chance to defend himself in a court of law or before an immigration judge. As one of Abrego Garcia’s representatives in the United States Senate, Van Hollen met with him to both confirm his safety and highlight the injustice of his removal.

“This case is not just about one man,” Van Hollen said at a news conference following his visit. “It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States of America. If you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due process for everyone else in America.”

Later, in an interview with CNN, Van Hollen accused the Trump administration of ignoring the Supreme Court, which earlier this month told the White House to comply with a district court order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return: “Facilitate does not mean you do nothing.” As for the president’s claim that Abrego Garcia is actually a dangerous gang member and so he wasn’t actually removed in error (as the administration acknowledged in a court filing), “What Donald Trump is trying to do here is change the subject,” Van Hollen said. “The subject at hand is that he and his administration are defying a court order to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights.”

The goal of Van Hollen’s journey to El Salvador — during which he was stopped by Salvadoran soldiers and turned away from the prison itself — was to bring attention to Abrego Garcia and invite greater scrutiny of the administration’s removal program and its disregard for due process. It was a success. And that success has inspired other Democrats to make the same trip, in hopes of turning more attention to the administration’s removal program and putting more pressure on the White House to obey the law.

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is reportedly organizing a trip to El Salvador, and a group of House Democrats led by Representative Robert Garcia of California arrived on Monday. “While Donald Trump continues to defy the Supreme Court, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held illegally in El Salvador after being wrongfully deported,” Representative Garcia said in a statement. “That is why we’re here, to remind the American people that kidnapping immigrants and deporting them without due process is not how we do things in America.”

“We are demanding the Trump administration abide by the Supreme Court decision and give Kilmar and the other migrants mistakenly sent to El Salvador due process in the United States,” Garcia added.

All of this negative attention has had an effect. It’s not just that the president’s overall approval rating has dipped into the low 40s — although it has — but that he’s losing his strong advantage on immigration as well. Fifty percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, according to a recent poll from Quinnipiac University, and a new Reuters poll shows Trump slightly underwater on the issue with a 45 percent approval to 46 percent disapproval.

Americans are even negative on the specifics of the president’s handling of immigration. Most Americans, 82 percent, say the president should follow federal court rulings even when he disagrees with them. A smaller but still significant majority says the president should stop deporting people in defiance of court orders. And Americans are broadly opposed to the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have lived in America for long periods of time, or who have children who are U.S. citizens, or who are law-abiding except for breaking immigration law.

Americans may have liked to hear the president talk tough on immigration, but when it came to real actions affecting real people, they are much less supportive. And in traveling to El Salvador, dramatizing the plight of Abrego Garcia and attacking Trump on the most unpopular aspect of his immigration policies, Democrats like Van Hollen are creating the kinds of negative attention for Trump that could turn more Americans against the president’s immigration policies.

These Democrats are also highlighting the vital importance of political leadership after months during which it seemed to have vanished from liberal politics in the United States. Despite a narrow victory with one of the smallest popular vote margins on record, there was a real sense — as Trump began his second term — that his vision had won America over. The United States was Trump country, and the best anyone could do was to adjust to the new reality.

Many elites and institutions that took a posture of opposition to Trump in his first term looked to cooperate — and in the case of Silicon Valley, even assisted — in his second. Likewise, powerful Democrats abandoned resistance in favor of a more measured, supposedly realistic approach. “It’s just accepting the reality that Trump won. And us just saying he’s a chaotic guy goes nowhere. That’s just baked into people’s consciousness,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont said in January. “The fact is, people want change. So that means we have to be willing to change as well.” Or, as one unnamed Democratic adviser told Politico just after Trump’s inauguration, “The path to prominence is not in endless resistance headlines.”

Democrats would, in the words of a former administration, lead from behind. They would follow the public’s outrage if and when it materialized. Otherwise, they would work with the administration when it made sense. They might even hand him a little bipartisan success. As Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania put it in a January interview with ABC News, “the Republicans are going to drive the agenda, and I’m going to find a way to work together along on all of those kinds of priorities.”

This approach would make some kind of sense if Trump were a normal president in pursuit of a normal, albeit conservative, political agenda.

But Trump is not a normal president. And it’s hard to say that he aspires to be a president at all, if by president we mean an executive officer, bounded by the law, who serves ultimately at the pleasure of the American people. No, Trump wants to be a strongman. The undisputed leader of a personalist autocracy where no other institution — no other power — can meaningfully oppose him or his designs. Recall his promise to be “a dictator on day one.” Perhaps he means day 100 and beyond, too.

Cooperation with a leader of this ilk is little more than appeasement. It is little more than a license for him to go faster and push further — to sprint toward the consolidated authoritarian government of Trump’s dreams (and those, especially, of his most reactionary allies and advisers with their eyes on Hungary, Turkey and even Russia and China).

The individuals and institutions inclined to work with Trump thought they would stabilize the political situation. Instead, the main effect of going along to get along was to do the opposite — to give the White House the space it needed to pursue its most maximalist aims.

But all the while there was real weakness. There were the tens of millions of Americans who voted against Trump, still opposed him and remained dismayed by his lawless cruelty. There was the clear disorganization of the Trump administration, the fact that it was split between rival power centers and that Trump did not, in the four years between his first and second terms, become more able or adept at managing the executive branch. He looked exclusively for loyalty, and the result — following his initial blitz of executive orders — was haphazard incompetence across a number of different fronts.

For as much as Trump tried to project himself as an unstoppable force, the truth was that he was as vulnerable as he’s ever been. All it took was real political leadership to demonstrate the extent to which the Trump White House was more of a paper tiger than it may have looked at first glance.

It helped that the White House overplayed its hand again and again. When institutions like Columbia University effectively surrendered to the administration, they did not buy themselves grace as much as they were forced into Trump’s service as agents of his will. There would be no bargaining. There was no deal you could cut to save your Cloud City. You could either submit or resist.

It is in the last two months that we have finally begun to see resistance. Ordinary people began boycotts and took to the streets in large protests. Lawyers challenged the administration on virtually every one of the president’s illegal and unconstitutional executive orders. And Democrats began to tap into and amplify grass roots anti-Trump energy, from the anti-oligarchy rallies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Booker’s record-breaking speech on the Senate floor. The courts have clearly taken note of the shift in public sentiment, delivering major defeats and decrying the president’s attacks on cherished American liberties.

The Trump administration is still pushing to realize its vision — and high-profile prisoners like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk still face deportation — but the administration is no longer on a glide path to success. It could even careen toward failure. By exercising political leadership, by acting like an opposition, both lawmakers and ordinary citizens have turned smooth sailing into rough waters for the administration. And while there is still much to do — Abrego Garcia has not been released, there are reports that the administration has sent at least one detainee to Rwanda, and there is also at least one person who is missing from all records — it’s also true that Trump and his people are not an unstoppable force.

Trump wants us to be demoralized. He wants his despotic plans to be a fait accompli. They will be, if no one stands in the way. But every time we — and especially those with power and authority — make ourselves into obstacles, we also make it a little less likely that the administration’s authoritarian fantasy becomes our reality.