It’s a clever but manipulative strategy.

With the progressive demand for Washington’s powerless Democrats to “do something” approaching a crescendo, Democratic incumbents are bracing for a wave of primary challengers.

Some insurgents have already declared their candidacies against sitting Democratic lawmakers. One, Michigan Representative Shri Thanedar, has already drawn two challengers, one of whom has attracted the support of the progressive activist network Justice Democrats. The party’s voters are “fed up with a Democratic Party overrun by do-nothing career politicians who are totally unequipped to lead in this moment,” the group’s executive director said of Thanedar.

Faced with overwhelming demands to perform some theatrical gesture for the benefit of apprehensive progressive activists, Thanedar did just that. If negative partisanship is the primary animating force in American politics today, this Democrat’s cynical maneuver may prove effective.

Just hours after Thanedar found himself in Justice Democrats’ crosshairs, the representative introduced no fewer than seven articles of impeachment against the president. In case anyone was laboring under the delusion that this was anything other than a political stunt, the representative let them down hard:

Thanedar’s allegations against Trump are tendentious, and the representative’s somnolent delivery in announcing them won’t allay progressives’ concerns that the man is ill-suited to meet the moment. But while Thanedar’s sop to the underserved “resistance” in waiting may satisfy a handful of activists, it’s not the left’s reaction to his impeachment initiative that might save his career. It’s Trump’s and MAGA’s.

“Today they did it again,” the president remarked jocularly at a Michigan rally on Tuesday. “Some guy that I’ve never heard of,” he continued. “Is he a congressman?” Indeed, the representative’s name was probably known primarily to his constituents before this week.

“They want to impeach me,” Trump continued. “This lunatic.” The president clearly welcomed the indication that Democrats will attempt to impeach him for a third time if they reclaim control of the House. “What the hell did I do?” he asked jokingly. “We’re getting good at this, though.” Trump said of his pursuers: “They’ve gone totally crazy.”

With Thanedar’s national name recognition experiencing a sudden surge, the representative received another gift from the president’s more enterprising acolytes. “Indian immigration is importing Indian ethno-politics into the United States,” Breitbart’s Neil Munro wrote. “It is also importing Indian office politics into white-collar jobs and Indian caste politics into the retail sector.” The journalism accompanying the allegation outlines efforts by Thanedar and other Indian-American Democrats to increase H-1B visas to augment the number of Indian migrants in American white-collar professions. “Thanedar would import millions of Indians to take those jobs,” the piece alleged.

The rest of the MAGA-verse has been no more circumspect in the effort to anathematize Thanedar and his impeachment initiative:

This is the sort of stuff on which Democratic lawmakers dine out, and Thanedar is not above leveraging the appearance of racial hostility to his advantage. “Just read the replies to any recent post including H-1B, deplorable rhetoric targeting Indian-Americans,” he wrote late last year in response to critics of his policy preferences. The representative spent his New Year’s Eve brooding: “To the MAGA Republicans telling me to go back to India, I’m not going back, and I’ll fight this racism and xenophobia everywhere it presents itself,” he wrote.

With these flourishes, Thanedar managed to distract progressive critics of his pledge to work with Trump and Elon Musk to reform the visa system to import more skilled labor. The representative probably hopes to repeat the trick, marshaling sympathy and anti-MAGA sentiment to avoid a defeat in next year’s primaries.

It’s a clever but manipulative strategy, one predicated on the assumption that every actor in American politics will play their predictable roles and respond thoughtlessly to emotionally manipulative stimuli. So far, it seems like a sound wager.