Greg Sargent, author of An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics, has some valuable insights for Democrats in his post, “Trump’s First Big Fiasco Triggers Stephen Miller’s Rage—Take Note Dems: The Democrats finally started to find their legs after Trump’s spending freeze. The key lesson? Making sheer political noise about something does make a difference.” at The New Republic. Some nuggets from Sargent’s article:

Admitting failure is anathema to the authoritarian leader, who is perpetually in danger of being diminished by those who are resentful of his glory—which is why White House adviser Stephen Miller is frantically searching for scapegoats to blame for the unfolding disaster around President Donald Trump’s massive freeze on federal spending….

What Miller is actually angry about is that the media covered this fiasco aggressively and fairly. Miller insists that the press glossed over the funding pause’s supposed exemption for “aid and benefit programs.” But this is rank misdirection: The funding freeze, which is likely illegal, was indeed confusingly drafted and recklessly rolled out. This is in part what prompted the national outcry over the huge swath of programs that it threatened, Medicaid benefits included—and the media coverage that angered Miller.

All of which carries a lesson for Democrats: This is what it looks like when the opposition stirs and uses its power in a unified way to make a lot of what you might call sheer political noise. That can help set the media agenda, throw Trump and his allies on the defensive, and deliver defeats to Trump that deflate his cultish aura of invincibility.

….Until this crisis, the Democratic opposition has mostly been relatively tentative and divided. Democrats were not sufficiently quick, forceful, or unified in denouncing Trump’s illegal purge of inspectors general and his deranged threat to prosecute state officials who don’t comply with mass deportations. Internal party debates suggest that many Democrats believe that Trump’s 2024 victory shows voters don’t care about the dire threat he poses to democracy and constitutional governance, or that defending them against Trump must be reducible to “kitchen table” appeals.

But the funding-freeze fiasco should illustrate that this reading is highly insufficient. An understanding of the moment shaped around the idea that voters are mostly reachable only via economic concerns—however important—fails to provide guidance on how to convey to voters why things like this extraordinary Trumpian power grab actually matter.

Democrats need to think through ways to act collectively, to utilize something akin to a party-wide strategy, precisely because this sort of collective, concerted action has the capacity to alert voters in a different kind of way. It can put them on edge, signaling to them that something is deeply amiss in the threat Trump is posing to the rule of law and constitutional order.

Generally speaking, some Democrats have several objections to this kind of approach. One is that voters don’t care about anything that doesn’t directly impact them and that warnings about the Trump threat make them look unfocused on people’s material concerns. Another is that if Democrats do this too often, voters will stop believing there’s real cause for alarm.

The funding-freeze fiasco got around the first objection for Democrats because it did have vast material implications, potentially harming millions of people. But Democrats shouldn’t take the wrong lesson from this. A big reason this became a huge story was also that it represented a wildly audacious grab for quasi-dictatorial power. Democratic alarms about this dimension of the story surely helped prompt wall-to-wall coverage. Democrats can learn from that.

Sargent notes that Democratic activist Faiz Shakir has called for a quick response messaging strategy, in which Democrats regularly comment on all the ways Trump betrays “working-class values and your working-class interests.” Also,

Shakir also suggests an intriguing way for the party to act in concert. As chair, he’d aggressively encourage as many elected officials as possible to use the video-recording studio at the DNC in moments like these, getting them to record short takes on why voters should care about them, then push the content out on social media….The goal, Shakir said, would be to provide Democrats with research and recording infrastructure enabling elected officials to find their own voices and flood information spaces with civic knowledge. This also would give Democrats who want to stick to a “kitchen table” approach a way to shape their own warnings around that.

….Nobody denies that the Democratic Party is a big, sprawling, highly varied organism with elected officials facing a huge spectrum of different political imperatives. Of course there will be variation in how they approach each Trumpian abuse. But as Brian Beutler puts it, the answer to this cannot be to “lodge passing complaints about Trump’s abuses of power, but turn every conversation back to the cost of groceries.” This incoherently implies that the abuses themselves are not serious on their own terms.

Of course, it’s not all about messaging. Democrats have to make some major policy changes, as well, particularly regarding immigration and inflation and they must ditch the sillier cultural issue excesses. But Sargent’s TNR column offers a nuanced discussion of possible Democratic messaging strategies in response to Trump’s scorched-earth grand strategy. Read the whole article right here.