Democrats Can Defend the Vulnerable without Taking the Bait

Republicans are using a familiar playbook to attack NYC's Zohran Mamdani

It’s a cycle Democrats know all too well: Republicans single out a figure — often someone vulnerable, marginalized, or politically inconvenient — and spin them into a national spectacle. The GOP targets the person, frames the issue, and dares Democrats and others who value inclusion to either disown them or defend them with no caveats.

We’re seeing it again right now with New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, a democratic socialist and one of the few Muslim elected officials in the country, has become the right’s latest target. His leftist positions, particularly around Palestinian rights, have been seized upon in a coordinated effort to paint him (and by extension, the Democratic Party) as extreme, dangerous, and un-American.

And the attacks haven’t stopped at his ideology. Republicans like Rep. Andy Ogles have gone so far as to call for Mamdani’s denaturalization and deportation. Trump went after the mayoral hopeful’s appearance and falsely claimed he was in the country “illegally.” Marjorie Taylor Green posted an image of the Statue of Liberty in a burqa following Mamdani’s NYC primary win. Republican lawmaker Brandon Gill targeted Mamdani over a video of him eating with his hands, a custom familiar to many South Asian, Middle Eastern, and African households and posted that Mamdani should “go back to the Third World.” As an Indian American myself, I recognize the strategy here: this isn’t just political disagreement. It’s an effort to mark someone as foreign, out of place, and less American. As a New Yorker who did not rank Mamdani in the recent primary over policy disagreements, I also still expect Democrats to speak out and defend him against these blatantly bigoted attacks.

Unfortunately, rather than seeing these attacks for what they are — cynical bait meant to fracture coalitions committed to justice — too many Democratic leaders are still falling for the setup and responding on the GOP’s terms. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand publicly criticized Mamdani, echoing Republican efforts to equate his political rhetoric with extremism, and without acknowledging the Islamophobic campaign being waged against him. Others rushed to defend him in ways that treated every criticism as illegitimate, reinforcing the idea that solidarity requires total alignment. Both modes of response miss the point. Defending someone’s right to participate in public life without being subjected to bigotry does not require embracing every aspect of their politics and treating it that way plays directly into the GOP’s hands.

This same pattern played out earlier this year in the case of Kilmar Abrego-García, an undocumented immigrant arrested in a high-profile sweep of suspected gang members. Though he had not been convicted, and much of the case against him was thin and circumstantial, Democratic officials who defended his right to due process found themselves swept into a manufactured scandal. The GOP quickly reframed those defenses as an embrace of violence or criminality. Rather than keeping the focus on fairness and constitutional rights, some Democrats tried to defend Abrego-García the individual, rather than the principle. That shift allowed Republicans to change the subject from due process to public safety — on their terms.

Democrats have seen this play out before. Republicans spotlight imperfect victims (and to be clear, nobody’s perfect) and then demand Democrats either embrace them entirely or disown them. The individual becomes secondary to the narrative: a means to portray the values of inclusion, fairness, and protecting civil rights as fringe or dangerous. The goal is always to create division, bait overreaction, and shift the conversation away from substantive issues and toward performative outrage that drives Fox News chyrons.

The challenge for Democrats is not to pretend every person targeted by Republicans is beyond critique. It’s to refuse the false binary that says you must either endorse someone’s entire worldview or treat them as a liability. That framing forces Democrats to fight culture wars instead of governing. Defending Mamdani against blatant racism does not mean cosigning every sentence he has uttered on every podcast he has done.

Diverse coalitions include difference. That’s not a weakness; it’s the foundation of democratic politics. The GOP thrives on forcing moral panic and loyalty tests around individuals they can caricature. Democrats can be clear that defending someone’s basic dignity or rights does not mean elevating them to be party spokesperson. It means holding the line on shared values without getting dragged into reactionary posturing.

Republicans will keep choosing new characters to vilify. The question is whether Democrats will continue to let those choices set the terms of national debate, or whether they will finally respond with clarity, principle, and purpose.