Alexander S. Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was a top witness in President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, announced Tuesday that he was running for Senate in Trump’s adopted home state of Florida.

Vindman brings fresh star power to the race as he seeks the Democratic nomination to run against Sen. Ashley Moody, a Republican who was appointed to replace Marco Rubio after he became secretary of state.

In announcing his bid, Vindman also became one of the first Democrats to release a campaign video with footage of the recent shooting of Alex Pretti in Minnesota, a nurse who was killed by a federal agent. The kickoff video also includes the shooting of Renee Good earlier in the month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

“Today our country is in chaos,” Vindman says in the video as clips of those shootings play and gunfire rings out. “Thug militias attacking citizens.”

Florida has increasingly trended away from Democrats, but Vindman gives the party a figure with a national following. He remains a long shot in a state that Trump won by 13 percentage points in 2024 and that has become increasingly Republican in the Trump era. The expense of campaigning in such a large state has been prohibitive for Democrats in recent years.

Vindman first drew liberal attention in 2019, when he testified before Congress about the now-infamous call between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine that led to the American leader’s impeachment.

During the exchange, Trump pressured Zelenskyy to investigate his rivals, including the Biden family. Vindman was on the call as a National Security Council aide, and he later testified that he had been alarmed.

Vindman’s candidacy is likely to be an unwelcome reminder for Trump of his first impeachment. The president has tried to erase that episode from memory. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery recently removed wall text that referred to his two impeachments. Last year, Trump announced that he was firing the director of the gallery.

In 2020, Trump fired Vindman after the Senate acquitted the president. Vindman later sued Trump officials, accusing them of retaliation and intimidation.

“This president unleashed a reign of terror and retribution, not just against me and my family, but against all of us,” Vindman says in his rollout video, which begins with Wolf Blitzer of CNN announcing Vindman’s firing roughly six years ago.

“The last time you saw me was here,” Vindman says, with an image of him raising his right hand to testify while in his Army dress uniform, “swearing an oath to tell the truth about a president who broke his.”

Moody, who served previously as Florida attorney general, was appointed to the Senate last year by Gov. Ron DeSantis to fill Rubio’s vacancy. She has drawn other Democratic challengers, including state Rep. Angie Nixon of Jacksonville; Jennifer Jenkins, a former school board member who won her seat after defeating a right-wing incumbent in Republican-leaning Brevard County; and Hector Mujica, a Venezuelan American who used to work for Google.

Vindman first floated running for Senate last spring, saying he did not see Florida as “too far gone by any means” for a Democrat to win. He has worked with the organization VoteVets, which recruits and supports Democratic veterans running for office.

During the first Trump administration, Vindman’s twin brother, Eugene Vindman, was also removed by Trump from his role as a lawyer for the National Security Council after the impeachment fight.

Eugene Vindman won a hotly contested congressional race in Northern Virginia in 2024 and became a favorite of grassroots Democratic donors. Federal Election Commission records show that he raised the third-most money into his campaign account of anyone running for the House — finishing behind only Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader.

That sizable haul suggests that small donors might also be eager to back his brother.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Shane Goldmacher/Erin Schaff
c. 2026 The New York Times Company