A man who once testified on behalf of the convicted terrorist behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing just won a Democratic congressional primary in New Jersey. If that sentence reads like satire, it isn't. Adam Hamawy's victory in New Jersey's 12th Congressional District is real, and it tells a story about where the Democratic Party has landed, and who steered it there.
Liel Leibovitz, editor at large for Tablet and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, laid out the case in a New York Post column tracing the party's transformation back to one man: Barack Obama. The argument is not that Obama personally recruited Hamawy or endorsed his candidacy. It is that Obama remade the party's internal logic, its incentives, its coalition, its tolerance for radicalism, in ways that made a candidate like Hamawy possible.
That argument deserves a serious look.
Hamawy's primary win in New Jersey's 12th Congressional District drew attention not for his policy platform but for his past. Leibovitz reported that Hamawy testified on behalf of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheikh, who inspired the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The column did not specify the proceeding or the date of that testimony, and no primary documents were cited. But the claim itself, placed in the context of a winning Democratic primary campaign, is the kind of detail that demands scrutiny.
The 1993 World Trade Center attack killed six people and injured more than a thousand. Abdel Rahman was convicted in 1995 of seditious conspiracy and related charges. He died in federal prison in 2017. That a man who spoke in his defense now carries a major-party nomination for Congress in New Jersey is a fact worth sitting with, regardless of what the testimony contained.
And Hamawy is not alone. Leibovitz pointed to other Democratic figures whose records raise similar alarms. Graham Platner, identified as a Maine Senate candidate, was described in the column as someone who "seems to have never met a Nazi he didn't wish to emulate." Zohran Mamdani, another Democratic figure, was described as having "kicked off his public career by rapping lovingly about terrorists." The column's language was sharp, Leibovitz called Hamawy a "jihad-fancier from Jersey" and Mamdani a "creep", but the underlying point was structural, not personal.
The column's central thesis is that Barack Obama fundamentally rewired the Democratic Party. Before Obama, Leibovitz argued, Bill Clinton's party "allowed candidates in some parts of the country to be pro-gun and pro-life and still consider themselves Democrats in good standing." It was a coalition party, messy, moderate in places, tolerant of internal disagreement.
Obama, in Leibovitz's framing, replaced that model with something different. He described Obama as having taken "Bill Clinton's party" and injected it with "a lightning bolt of radicalism." Under Obama, Leibovitz wrote, "the Democrats became a gorgeous mosaic of victimized minorities." The column further stated that Obama "encouraged what is now known as the Red-Green Alliance", a term used to describe cooperation between progressive-left movements and Islamist political currents.
That framing is Leibovitz's own, and readers can weigh it accordingly. But the observable trajectory of the party lends it more weight than critics might like to admit. The Democratic coalition of 2008 and the Democratic coalition of today are not the same organism. The shift did not happen by accident, and it did not happen without leadership.
Obama's influence on the party extends well beyond elections. His continued political activism during and after the Trump years kept him at the center of Democratic strategy and messaging long after he left the Oval Office.
Leibovitz's column described the Biden presidency as effectively "Obama's third term," with Joe Biden serving as a vessel for the policy direction Obama set in motion. That characterization is opinion, not established fact. But it reflects a view widely held on the right, and not entirely dismissed on the left, that Obama remained the party's gravitational center even when he held no office.
The institutional footprint supports the argument. Obama-appointed judges continue to shape legal battles across the country. One Obama-appointed judge blocked the removal of an anti-Trump flag near the National Mall, a ruling that drew sharp criticism from conservatives who saw it as judicial activism cloaked in First Amendment reasoning.
Another Obama-era appointee ordered Trump's name removed from the Kennedy Center, a case that raised questions about the boundaries of judicial authority and political motivation. These are not isolated incidents. They form a pattern that conservative voters recognize and resent.
Nor has Obama's political endorsement machine delivered consistent results. Obama-backed Democrats lost big in Georgia Supreme Court races despite pouring millions into ad spending, a reminder that the former president's influence has limits, even if his institutional reach does not.
Leibovitz opened his piece with a literary reference, Mary Shelley, "two hundred ten years ago this summer," sitting down at nineteen to write what would become "Frankenstein." The analogy was deliberate. Obama, in Leibovitz's telling, built something he could not fully control. The party he reshaped now produces candidates and officeholders whose records and rhetoric go far beyond anything Obama himself would likely endorse in public.
The column's closing phrase, "Welcome to the Democratic Party of 2026", was not celebratory. It was a warning.
Whether you accept every link in Leibovitz's causal chain or not, the facts on the ground are hard to wave away. A man who testified for the Blind Sheikh won a Democratic primary in a New Jersey congressional district. Other candidates with records that would have disqualified them a generation ago are running, and winning, under the Democratic banner. The party's tolerance for these figures is not a bug. It is a feature of the coalition that was built, deliberately, over the past two decades.
And the judiciary Obama shaped continues to generate rulings that conservative Americans view as politically motivated. Recent decisions by Obama-appointed judges have reinforced the perception that the former president's influence operates through institutional channels long after his time in office ended.
The most telling detail in the Hamawy story is not the candidate himself. It is the silence around him. Leibovitz did not report any Democratic Party official distancing the party from Hamawy's win or his record. No condemnation. No clarification. No public discomfort.
That silence is a choice. And it is the kind of choice that defines a party more clearly than any platform document or convention speech ever could.
The Democratic Party of Bill Clinton would not have tolerated a congressional nominee who testified for the man behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The Democratic Party of 2026 apparently can. The distance between those two facts is the distance Barack Obama traveled, and took his party with him.
When a party can no longer tell the difference between a big tent and an open door, voters eventually notice. They usually notice at the ballot box.
