I can hardly believe the possibility mentioned in the headline, but with the 47th president, you never know, as I explained at New York:
Donald Trump’s superpower, if he has one, is to assert wildly counterfactual things over and over and somehow convince people his version of reality is gospel, or at least plausible. His 2024 presidential campaign was a master class in shameless fabrication: He invented a violent crime wave even as crime statistics were falling nearly everywhere; he invented a nationwide crisis of voting by noncitizens despite almost no evidence it was happening at all; he accused his opponents of consciously betraying the country by deliberately herding violent felons across open borders and directing them to rape, kill, and plunder a helpless population of law-abiding Americans, a narrative supported by little more than anecdotes; and he asserted that all his many legal problems, capping a career marked by vast legal problems, were in fact perversions of justice orchestrated by his enemies. Ultimately, his many lies and exaggerations combined to paint a portrait of a nation that had been on the brink of never-before-imagined glory just a few years earlier but was now on its knees and near to total destruction.
This cartoonish version of current affairs was immensely gratifying to his MAGA base of true believers, and didn’t unduly trouble swing voters who were inclined to believe all politicians make stuff up and who mostly just wanted a change of administration. But now that Trump is totally in charge of the federal government and exhibiting every single day his domination of national affairs, he wants the public to acknowledge the astonishingly bright prospects he has given them, and forget all the troubles that led them to vote for him in the first place. That’s the only sensible interpretation of his fury towards the subject of affordability.
Anyone who can read polls or follow off-year election returns is aware that concerns over the steadily rising cost of living, which contributed powerfully to Trump’s 2024 victory, have not at all gone away. There is, in fact, a growing sense of dismay, within and beyond the MAGA ranks, about Trump’s campaign promises that he wouldn’t simply slow down inflation but would actually reduce prices for the most important goods and services. Many voters give him low marks on that front, which is why addressing affordability has emerged already as the Democratic Party’s key message for the 2026 midterms. It was very successfully introduced in this year’s offyear elections, which were a fiasco for Trump and his party.
For a moment, Trump seemed to understand and accept the assignment to look less interested in ending or beginning overseas wars and more interested in “affordability.” He even got chummy with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in claiming a shared focus on the issue during their congenial Oval Office visit on November 23. But as this November 29 Truth Social post indicated, Trump treats the “affordability” crisis as a marketing problem rather than anything he really needs to address in a substantive manner:
“Because I have invoked FAVORED NATIONS STATUS FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, DRUG PRICES ARE FALLING AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, 500%, 600%, 700%, and more. No other President has been able to do this, BUT I HAVE! This is also the answer to much less expensive, and far better, HEALTHCARE! Republicans, remember, this was done by us, and nobody else. This is a revolution in medicine, the biggest and most important event, EVER. If this story is properly told, we should win the Midterm Elections in RECORD NUMBERS. I AM THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT. TALK LOUDLY AND PROUDLY! President DJT”
Americans didn’t need Obamacare subsidies or Medicaid benefits or lower tariffs or regulations on AI to thrive; they just needed to realize how lucky they were to be alive at this time of restored American Greatness, the “story” that needed to be “properly told” to them. As with his fable-making in 2024, Trump wanted to impose his own version of the facts on everyone his voice could reach. But in this case he isn’t talking about overseas threats or large impersonal forces shaping events or elite conspiracies, but the lived experiences of people who won’t easily be convinced their troubles are a figment of their imaginations.
Politically attuned people in Trump’s inner circle must have cringed inwardly during Tuesday’s televised Cabinet meeting when the president denounced affordability concerns as a hoax, as the New York Times reported:
“President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the cost-of-living pains being felt by Americans, declaring that affordability ‘doesn’t mean anything to anybody’ as his political edge on the economy continues to dissipate….
“After ticking off what he claimed were trillions of dollars of investments and other economic accomplishments, Mr. Trump called the issue of affordability a ‘fake narrative’ and ‘con job’ created by Democrats to dupe the public….
“Mr. Trump has tried to claim he has brought down inflation, glossing over the fact that it ticked up slightly in recent months and some of his policies were contributing to high costs, like his tariffs.
“’There is still more to do,’ Mr. Trump acknowledged on Tuesday. ‘There’s always more to do, but we have it down to a very good level. It’s going to go down a little bit further. You want to have a little tiny bit of inflation. Otherwise, that’s not good either. Then you have a thing called deflation, and deflation can be worse than inflation.'”
Trump appears to be making the same mistake his predecessor Joe Biden made: talking trends and macroeconomics to people who just want prices to go back to where they were before the pandemic — conditions for which Trump himself took so much credit. Worse yet, he’s talking down to Americans, accusing them of being dupes by feeling what they’re feeling and seeing what they’re seeing. It’s not a good look for a billionaire president to become visibly impatient with his subjects and their concerns.
Perhaps his advisers will prevail on him to get on the right side of the affordability issue before the midterms. But it’s possible that after years of telling tall tales about conditions in the country, Trump is beginning to believe his own hype, and is spinning himself as well as the media and the country. If that happens, he and his party are in deep trouble.
I agree with the above comments. They are pragmatic and realistic given the current political landscape.
I think the party can moderate some of its views and more importantly, its image, on abortion, guns, and gay marriage while still maintiaining New Deal principles, such as fiscal conservatism,social security and coherent internationalism. Also, we need to distance ourselves from the Hollywood set. It only confirms suspicions that Dems are a bunch of hedonists out to destroy family values. Again, these are image issues, but frankly, image is what sells politics to most voters.
Some call it Republican lite, I call it winning for a change.
Agreed Gabby.
And what I find particularly galling is that even many of the left’s otherwise fairly eloquent theorists and pundits are extremely quick to criticize the Democrats if they diverge even in the slightest way from the New Deal orthodoxy.
Thomas Frank’s book on cultural conservatism makes many good points (particularly about the conservatives’ persecutorial paranoia), but he seems, quite honestly, to be committing the same fallacy he accuses the Kansas Republicans of committing in reverse: he refuses to consider that any person might honestly decide that economics matters less to him than other issues. In Mr Frank’s perfect world, all the rich are Republicans, and all the poor are Democrats.
But this ignores a very basic fact: that it is possible to see the world in terms other than your own advancement. By his logic, I should be a Republican. After all, I’m from a well-to-do neighborhood and would benefit (in the short term anyway) from Bush’s tax cuts. But I’m not a Republican, because to be a Republican I would have to ignore the fact that what’s good for me is actually bad for the rest of the country. While the conservatives’ state of “perpetual victimhood” indeed makes no sense, he refuses to admit that a rational choice may in fact be taking place, albeit in a very strange, prejudicial way.
He also has also been seduced by the far-left myth that the DLC is the Republican Fifth Column in the Democratic party. He seems to blame the DLC for the decline of unions, rather than noting the increasing dissapearance of manufacturing jobs, where unions were most common. He claims the DLC hungers only for the vast soft money in the pockets of the social moderates, despite the fact that McCain-Feingold outlawed this practice even as he wrote the book. He also claims, strangely, that Democrats have backed deregulation and privatization, but offers no examples to prove this assertion. I for one cannot think of a single instance in which Republican deregulation or privatization plans found many friends on the other side of the aisle. Al Gore, if I remember correctly, called the Republican Social Security privatization racket “much too risky.” Hardly the words of a “pawn of business.” Frank also seems content to ignore the failed Clinton health care proposals of 1994, and the Kerry health care proposals of 2004, whose focus on egalitarian access runs strongly counter to the typical corporate line of social Darwinism.
Labor unions were, and still are, an extremely useful engine for progressive change, but to blame their decline on the DLC is simply silly. More likely, it was the oft-repeated right-wing myth of their ties to the Mafia and their corruption that convinced some workers to abandon the unions that had given them so much. The task for the future will be to introduce unions to the service sector, where the vast majority of the working poor are now employed. If this is done, a resurgent labor movement could perhaps wrest some of those blue-collar conservatives from their cultural fears.
I find it rather dissapointing. A brilliant dissection of the far-right’s victimhood fantasies coupled with an inability to see the Democrats as anything but the “union party.” His willfull blindness to the disappearance of manufacturing jobs (coupled with Republican whisper campaigns about unions’ alleged corruption) allows him to blame the “right-wing” DLC for unions’ decline.
The Democrats never left the unions, the union workers just got fired or laid off (manufacturing jobs declined every year after 1960), and the labor movement never really tried to court the new working poor (service workers). That’s changing, thank goodness, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let him say that my party abandoned unions. It’s just not true.
Unfortunately, in the age of television, the cult of personality rules. Anyone who is interesting and good on TV has a shot at being president, provided they have the credentials to be president.
I firmly believe that we do not need to change our policies. We do need to change marketing firms, and we need a new spokesman.
Would Joe Biden have won this race? I don’t know, but I know that if a yellow dog Democrat like me could barely stand to listen to Kerry speak, how terrible must he have been to the middle?
We need the left, we’ve always needed the left, but many of us have been the left. And you know why they call it LEFT? Because you always get LEFT at election time.
Liberals ultimately reject democracy in favor of the elitism which Hannity and Limbaugh allege. That elitism is evident when libs implore that we go left instead of right.
The party has had a Kamakazi wing for decades. That is what we call them. Kamakazi liberals. Always going out in a blaze of moralistic glory.
I’m with Gabby on this one.
Now I grant that I am fairly young (this was my first presidential election), but frankly I think it’s safe to say that purist ultra-liberalism is not a winner in this country. If we stuck to such dogma, we would run the risk of becoming merely mirrors of the Republicans, who blindly trumpet tax cuts and repeal of government aid, even when there is evidence that the tax cuts do nothing constructive, and when the government programs they want to cut are effective.
We should not be about dogma, but rather about what works to get the things we want. The older welfare systems weren’t actually fixing poverty, so we reformed them. The various groups that declare the Democrats aren’t doing enough for them should stop and think: are their interests necessarily those of the whole nation? We should strive for the national interest. My parents, for example, actually would get their taxes raised by the Kerry plan, but voted for him anyway becasue it would be better for the country.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, we need to tweak the message, and that’s all. Ideologically, I think we’re right where we should be. It should be mentioned, also, that with the exception of his anti-war rhetoric Howard Dean was a pragmatic centrist. Just look at his Vermont record. I don’t know how the myth of him as “McGovern II” got started (probably by a right-winger) but it makes no sense.
I don’t recall who it was that said it, but it might have been LBJ.
“To be a politician you have to be able to count.”
It’s a simple thought, and always true. If you don’t have the votes for something, you don’t have the votes for it.
LBJ understood that elections could be stolen, and he also understood that elections could be won, and he did some of both.
To all the young bucks of the party who think the DLC way is selling out, I would remind you that those of us who back the DLC learned our lessons in 1972 and 1984, when we thought we knew better, too. We created the DLC for that reason, because we realized the party had won 1976 by default, meaning in 1984 we really hadn’t won the presidency in 20 years.
We did 1988 your way, and it got us Dukakis.
We did 1992 our way, and it got us Clinton.
Your choice is not DLC or the liberal wing. It is DLC or RNC.
Better wise up and smell the Senate losses.
And don’t talk to me about bona fides. I was a McGovern delegate, and I campaigned with Fritz Mondale. For 20 years now we have fought this battle in the party, and the more the left demands of the party, the further it sinks.
It makes it more depressing in that there is no one to blame like Nader in 2000. We threw everything we had at this and we still lost, and lost solidly.
If this keeps democrats together well I hope thats a good thing because that will mean that the DLC and such types will actually be listening to the new blood once in a while.
I read the article.
So we adopt a right wing Democrat of our own, in order to win. I think this needs to be about presenting the values that Kerry and other traditional, New Deal type Democrats expound rather than putting our tails between our legs and crawling right.
Again…instead of flailing around begging for help from the right of this party, hammer, hammer hammer at the difference between the Republicans and us, as we go through this insane Bush II administration.
If we cannot make our point as Bush takes down the economy, Social Security, the environment, the criminal justice system–not to mention presides over what is turning into an ongoing guerrilla war in Iraq, we are not worth acquiring the office. The point is to embrace the core values of our party, not turn to Republican light, and look at the South as our only hope.