The reaction among Democrats to Donald Trump’s return to power has been significantly more subdued than what we saw in 2016 after the mogul’s first shocking electoral win. The old-school “resistance” is dead, and it’s not clear what will replace it. But Democratic elected officials are developing new strategies for dealing with the new realities in Washington. Here are five distinct approaches that have emerged, even before Trump’s second administration has begun.
Some Democrats are so thoroughly impressed by the current power of the MAGA movement they are choosing to surrender to it in significant respects. The prime example is Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the onetime fiery populist politician who is now becoming conspicuous in his desire to admit his party’s weaknesses and snuggle up to the new regime. The freshman and one-time ally of Bernie Sanders has been drifting away from the left wing of his party for a good while, particularly via his vocally unconditional backing for Israel during its war in Gaza. But now he’s making news regularly for taking steps in Trump’s direction.
Quite a few Democrats publicly expressed dismay over Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, but Fetterman distinguished himself by calling for a corresponding pardon for Trump over his hush-money conviction in New York. Similarly, many Democrats have discussed ways to reach out to the voters they have lost to Trump. Fetterman’s approach was to join Trump’s Truth Social platform, which is a fever swamp for the president-elect’s most passionate supporters. Various Democrats are cautiously circling Elon Musk, Trump’s new best friend and potential slayer of the civil-service system and the New Deal–Great Society legacy of federal programs. But Fetterman seems to want to become Musk’s buddy, too, exchanging compliments with him in a sort of weird courtship. Fetterman has also gone out of his way to exhibit openness to support for Trump’s controversial Cabinet nominees even as nearly every other Senate Democrat takes the tack of forcing Republicans to take a stand on people like Pete Hegseth before weighing in themselves.
It’s probably germane to Fetterman’s conduct that he will be up for reelection in 2028, a presidential-election year in a state Trump carried on November 5. Or maybe he’s just burnishing his credentials as the maverick who blew up the Senate dress code.
Other Democrats are being much more selectively friendly to Trump, searching for “common ground” on issues where they believe he will be cross-pressured by his wealthy backers and more conventional Republicans. Like Fetterman, these Democrats — including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — tend to come from the progressive wing of the party and have longed chafed at the centrist economic policies advanced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and, to some extent, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They’ve talked about strategically encouraging Trump’s “populist” impulses on such issues as credit-card interest and big-tech regulation, partly as a matter of forcing the new president and his congressional allies to put up or shut up.
So the idea is to push off a discredited Democratic Establishment, at least on economic issues, and either accomplish things for working-class voters in alliance with Trump or prove the hollowness of his “populism.”
Colorado governor Jared Solis has offered a similar strategy of selective cooperation by praising the potential agenda of Trump HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as helpfully “shaking up” the medical and scientific Establishment.
At the other end of the spectrum, some centrist Democrats are pushing off what they perceive as a discredited progressive ascendancy in the party, especially on culture-war issues and immigration. The most outspoken of them showed up at last week’s annual meeting of the avowedly nonpartisan No Labels organization, which was otherwise dominated by Republicans seeking to demonstrate a bit of independence from the next administration. These include vocal critics of the 2024 Democratic message like House members Jared Golden, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Ritchie Torres, and Seth Moulton, along with wannabe 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Josh Gottheimer (his Virginia counterpart, Abigail Spanberger, wasn’t at the No Labels confab but is similarly positioned ideologically).
From a strategic point of view, these militant centrists appear to envision a 2028 presidential campaign that will take back the voters Biden won in 2020 and Harris lost this year.
We’re beginning to see the emergence of a faction of Democrats that is willing to cut policy or legislative deals with Team Trump in order to protect some vulnerable constituencies from MAGA wrath. This is particularly visible on the immigration front; some congressional Democrats are talking about cutting a deal to support some of Trump’s agenda in exchange for continued protection from deportation of DREAMers. Politico reports:
“The prize that many Democrats would like to secure is protecting Dreamers — Americans who came with their families to the U.S. at a young age and have since been protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created by President Barack Obama in 2012.
“Trump himself expressed an openness to ‘do something about the Dreamers’ in a recent ‘Meet the Press’ interview. But he would almost certainly want significant policy concessions in return, including border security measures and changes to asylum law that Democrats have historically resisted.”
On a broader front, the New York Times has found significant support among Democratic governors to selectively cooperate with the new administration’s “mass deportation” plans in exchange for concessions:
“In interviews, 11 Democratic governors, governors-elect and candidates for the office often expressed defiance toward Mr. Trump’s expected immigration crackdown — but were also strikingly willing to highlight areas of potential cooperation.
“Several balanced messages of compassion for struggling migrants with a tough-on-crime tone. They said that they were willing to work with the Trump administration to deport people who had been convicted of serious crimes and that they wanted stricter border control, even as they vowed to defend migrant families and those fleeing violence in their home countries, as well as businesses that rely on immigrant labor.”
While the Democrats planning strategic cooperation with Trump are getting a lot of attention, it’s clear the bulk of elected officials and activists are more quietly waiting for the initial fallout from the new regime to develop while planning ahead for a Democratic comeback. This is particularly true among the House Democratic leadership, which hopes to exploit the extremely narrow Republican majority in the chamber (which will be exacerbated by vacancies for several months until Trump appointees can be replaced in special elections) on must-pass House votes going forward, while looking ahead with a plan to aggressively contest marginal Republican-held seats in the 2026 midterms. Historical precedents indicate very high odds that Democrats can flip the House in 2026, bringing a relatively quick end to any Republican legislative steamrolling on Trump’s behalf and signaling good vibes for 2028.
We fight for TODAY, and we always do.
Every election we hear “maybe it would be better if ….” Hell, I’ve said it and thought it myself.
But that kind of thinking gets Reagan a second term, gets us the Supreme Court we have now, the one that crowned Bush.
No, we fight today. And the day after November 2nd, we start fighting for 2006.
Bah, Andrew Sullivan is deluding himself if he thinks re-electing Bush will force him to take responsibility. He never has about anything else, we’d just get more of the same Rovian misdirection, distraction, and denials we’ve gotten for the last 4 years.
I personally think Sullivan, as a man with conflicting political needs (he is a gay, pro-gay marriage conservative) is trying to rationalize a reason to support Bush, so he frames it in the sense of “punishing Bush by re-electing him.”
It is true that Kerry will get the full brunt of the conservakooks wrath when he gets in, but that never stopped Bill Clinton.
Whenever peolle cite the popularity of conservative outlets like Fox News, it’s worth noting that nearly all conservatives (1/3 of the oublic it would seem at least) get their news exclusively from places like this. As Ron Reagan said, conservatives don’t usually like the debate-style news that liberals watch. They prefer echo chambers of their own beliefs. The conservatives’ power only seems greater because all the eggs are in one basket.
“Security moms…” Let’s assume Kerry wins the election. What next? The Republicans have made a big deal out of the fact there hasn’t been a repeat of 9/11 so far. Many observers regard it as mere luck, citing the generally inept handling of homeland security by this Administration plus the huge difficulty of protecting a huge country such as the United States. The likelihood of another attack in 2005-08 is regarded as fairly high.
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Kerry will of course do his best to clean up the mess both at home as well as in Iraq, but we can be sure the usual suspects (FoxNews, Limbaugh, Coulter, WSJ etc.) will blame him for every single thing that goes wrong from the day that he enters the Oval Office. If there is another 9/11, you can be sure these guys will say it “proves” Democrats cannot be trusted to protect America. The Kerry presidency will be written off as another Carter parenthesis, plagued by big problems and a Democratic president who could not successfully solve them.
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Under these circumstances, maybe it won’t be an unmitigated disaster if “Shrub” is reelected… As a consolation prize, we get to see him stubbornly dig an even deeper hole for the Republican party during his second term in office. The credibility of neoconservatism has already suffered a fatal blow in Iraq, and increasingly few voters believe the GOP stands for “fiscal responsibility” anymore. By 2008, it seems quite likely that Iraq will be in a state of near-civil war, there will be enormous budget deficits thanks to his tax cuts, no credible plan to handle the retirement of the baby boomer generation, the “we’re safer because we invaded Iraq” theory will most likely have been disproved in a most violent fashion… And all this while Republicans were controlling the White House as well as both chambers of Congress! Heck, even president Hillary Clinton does not sound like a far-fetched idea under such circumstances…
Andrew Sullivan writes:
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BUSH-HATERS FOR BUSH: Once you’ve absorbed the chutzpah, it’s a pretty powerful argument. It’s a bit like Bush saying, after bankrupting our fiscal future in three short years, that we cannot afford Kerry’s big spending instincts. No shit, brother. So we’re torn between holding Bush accountable and re-electing him. But here’s another brilliant Bush counter-argument: wouldn’t we actually be holding him accountable by re-electing him? For the first time in his entire life, Bush may actually be forced to take responsibility for his own actions if he is re-elected and becomes the LBJ of the Iraq war. I wonder why Bush-haters haven’t thought of this: that the way to punish Bush is to force him to live through the consequences of his own policies. Why, after all, should Kerry take the fall? If he gets elected, can you imagine what Fox News and NRO are going to do to him the minute he brushes his teeth in January? He’ll be destroyed by the chaos in Iraq, whatever he does. The right will give him no lee-way at all. Maybe this is simply another version of the notion that we shouldn’t change horses in the middle of a cliche. But there’s an upside: if Bush fails in Iraq, at least he will be punished for his own failures; if he succeeds (and, of course I hope he does), we all win. Am I persuading myself to endorse Bush? Or am I finding some kind of silver lining in the increasingly likely event of his re-election? I blog. You decide.
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I am certainly not advocating defeat (that would be irresponsible given the magnitude of the problems facing us), but at least there is a silver lining if “Shrub” wins. Sometimes, good things happen to those who wait.
MARCU$
The first time I heard the pubs use “security moms” I knew we were in for this fraud. And I knew it wouldn’t be long before the corporate media lap dogs would be lapping it up.
How many times this week has some pretty airheaded news reader intoned “Are security moms giving Bush a new edge with women? Are they replacing the soccer moms?”
Nonsense. It’s a marketing slogan and nothing more. Like saying our laundry detergent is new and improved.
The Rove machine knows that the modern middle voter responds to repeated phrases, the grist of the marketing mill. As long as the term is used, it helps Bush. The whole point of the term is to make the absurd statement that women are moving to Bush because they are concerned about terror and Bush allegedly makes them feel safe.
Hogwash.