Jon Ossoff

Kicking off his re-election campaign at a rally in Atlanta last week, Senator Jon Ossoff barely mentioned the two Republicans who are in a runoff to oppose him. Instead, speaking to a crowd of more than 1,500 at a downtown concert venue, he blasted the self-dealing of Donald Trump and his “Mar-a-Lago mafia.”

“He’s trying to put his face on the money,” Ossoff said. “Did you see that? He’s building a monument to himself. But see, Atlanta, he’s doing these things now because no one will honor him when he’s gone, because he’s a failed president and a national disgrace.”

The scale and reach of the Trump family’s self-enrichment is so astonishing it can test the limits of human cognition, so when Ossoff talks about it, he usually picks one example to zero in on. In that kickoff speech, he focused on tungsten mining rights in Kazakhstan. Ossoff described how the president of Kazakhstan granted a U.S.-backed company the right to mine the world’s largest known undeveloped deposit of tungsten, an element used in semiconductors, lightbulbs and warheads. Six days after a company backed by Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. took a 20 percent stake in an American mining group, that group’s parent company received $1.6 billion in federal financing. “One-point-six billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project in Kazakhstan, all the while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care,” said Ossoff.

As often happens with Ossoff’s speeches, clips from the one last week went viral online, where people from across the Democratic ideological spectrum have been buzzing about a possible Ossoff presidential candidacy. If Ossoff wins re-election, wrote the progressive journalist Mehdi Hasan, “he immediately becomes one of the favorites for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.” Sarah Longwell, a former Republican strategist who now publishes the anti-Trump Bulwark, posted a photo of Ossoff with the words, “President-maxxing so hard.”

If you were cooking up an ideal 2028 candidate in a lab, he — and let’s face it, it’s probably a he — would look a lot like Ossoff. He’s young and handsome, with a picture-perfect family: a beautiful wife who works as an obstetrician-gynecologist and two small daughters. He’s a Southerner from a reddish state with a history of wooing Black voters. And he’s a Jewish critic of Israel who, as much as anyone in politics today, has the potential to bridge the Democratic Party’s agonizing divide over Zionism.

But the excitement Ossoff is generating is about more than demographics. It stems from his skill in eviscerating Trump’s gluttonous profiteering, his brazen attempts to turn this country into the most squalid sort of kleptocracy. In his bid for re-election in a state Trump won in 2024, some expected Ossoff to tack to the center; last year JD Vance predicted that he’d start praising Trump’s agenda. Instead, Ossoff is excoriating Trump and his systemic corruption in a way that transcends the Democratic Party’s progressive-moderate divide.