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.
Don’t expect the polls to carry the day.
Bush is a lot smarter than most Democrats, and realizes that polls mean only present support. Once he’s gotten out there and beat the drum for a while, the polls will change.
Unless Democrats respond in kind, with Kristoff’s advice… reject it sight unseen and declare there is no Crisis.
Cranky, Allen and others.
There are big political and mechanical differences between Iraq and pushing Social Security Privatization through. Once the decision is made to go to war the nation is on a speeding train with no way to control the engineer. And all kinds of wells are tapped: general patriotism “we are at war”, “support the troops”. And once you are engaged in combat it is in many ways too late, there is no easy way to extract yourself.
Social Security is different. No one enlisted in the War on Social Security. It may be true that this president has the iron grip over his party and the media that you suggest, and that he will be able to ram some plan through even in the face of productivity numbers that suggest no crisis at all. I don’t agree with the premises, but those are issues for another time.
The problem Bush and the Republicans face is time. Whatever plan is adopted, it will require months to actually put individual accounts into place and then to allow individuals to exercise whatever limited choices in investment vehicles they have. As the actual details of the plan start coming out, mainly the fact that future benefits even with returns on the private accounts will be much less than promised under the current plan, people will begin to murmer.
Now if they were able to maintain the sense of “crisis” they might sell this as being “better than nothing”. But the only way to do this is to stop reporting economic productivity numbers altogether. 4.0% economic growth for 2004, already in the bag, simply blows the doors off the productivity models of the Social Security Trustees, not just the Intermediate Cost (which called for 2.7% in 2004 and 1.8% in 2005) that produces the 2018 and 2042 dates used by all, but all the Low Cost one that shows no long term shortfall at all (2.8% and 2.1%).
By June it will be clear that doing nothing would have been a better deal than doing something, particularly this something. And Republicans will be staring up a hill at 2006. They will be faced with having broken something that never needed a fix, lurching ever closer to that Third Rail of American politics.
The beauty is that there is no downside to cut and run here. There is no way that accounts will be set up by June and the US will have invested probably a few million dollars in staff time. The Republican Congress will have two choices: repeal it, or ride it into the Valley of Death that will be the 2006 midterms.
Bush may not care, he is not running for reelection, but the firmer he grasps that veto plan, the better for Dems in 2006.
And? Not to be rude, but it appears to me that the general public is not going to be given a chance to express its opinion. Transfer of Social Security wealth to Wall Street is already scheduled to happen, and there will be a big “burst” of support at just the right minute to satisfy the media.
Cranky
OK, but since when does this administration need informed public support to achieve its goals? And the goal here of course is not to improve investment opportunities or retirement benefits for retired Americans – it is to destroy a successful and essential government program as part of an ideological crusade to deligitimize all government programs that do not redstribute wealth upwards. They will lie and distort and dissemble to whatever degree necessary unless Democrats stand up and call this for what it is, and contesting the issue on this terrain – what the American people really want – is not what the fight is about.
That is, of course, until they start the lying.
Actually, check out Talking Points Memo – Josh points out that the Post wrote up the poll quite badly and that the numbers look better for the Democrats.
LATEST NEWS IN THE WASHINGTON STATE GUBERNATORIAL RACE
Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire put together a string of victories Wednesday against Republican Dino Rossi. The race, which still isn’t over, has been extremely close.
Permanent Defense: King County reported +59 votes for Gregoire, giving Gregoire the overall lead in the statewide manual recount by 10 votes. This does not count the 725 ballots the Supreme Court said can be counted.
The especially good news about all of this is it shows Democrats are willing to stand and fight. We won’t be intimidated by the GOP….No more stolen elections! Christine Gregoire has held on for almost two months now – and we believe she will emerge from this as our state’s Governor.
He’s hoping to scare the public into supporting his plans, a la Iraq. The advantage he had that time was that a lot of Americans wanted to lash out at Arabs–any Arabs–in the wake of 911, so they were open to persuasion. The advantage he has this time is that the relentless talk of “Social Security crisis” has eroded the public’s support to some extent, since many are skeptical that they’ll ever get benefits. It’s not as strong a card to play as the post-911 anger was, so there’s hope. Given the Democrats’ disarray, however, I’d say he has a decent chance of prevailing. The real test is whether the Dems can wake up and finally start acting like an opposition party, and not get caught up in giving the Republicans fig leafs.