Here’s How Democrats Can Expose the GOP’s Dishonesty About Fascism.
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TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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December 18: Democratic Strategies for Coping With a Newly Trumpified Washington
After looking at various Democratic utterances about dealing with Trump 2.0, I wrote up a brief typology for New York:
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.
If you can’t beat ’em, (partially) join ’em
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.
Join ’em (very selectively) to beat ’em
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.
Aim at the dead center
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.
Cut a few deals to mitigate the damage
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.”
Hang tough and aim for a Democratic comeback
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.
Euclid, brown shoe polish is brown and so are feces, but to compare the two because they are the same color is to confess the inability to distinguish shit from Shinola.
(note: the brief comment posted above is intended to be a reply to the Feb 18 comment by Euclid. It is posted in the wrong location)
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Mr. Lawford continues to seem utterly and completely baffled by the concept of how to compare the actions of MAGA/Republicans and Fascists on a scale of 0 to 10 which is what the strategy memo itself discusses.
If I am asked to compare brown shoe polish and feces on a scale of 0 to 10 I would at first probably assign the comparison a 0. If someone then correctly points out that the two things do indeed share the color brown I would probably then revise my rating to a 0.5 or so in order to indicate that in that one minor respect an extremely slight relationship does indeed exist.
But I certainly would not be so utterly mystified by the task as Mr. Lawford seems to be. Setting aside his rather immature attempt at humor, the logical content of his comment is that “if both A and B are brown, anyone who notes this similarity in comparing the two must therefore be completely unable to distinguish between them at all.”
It is, one hopes, unnecessary to explain at any length why this argument is wrong.
In reality, what Mr. Lawrence is actually attempting to do is to ridicule any possible comparisons of the behavior of the MAGA wing of the GOP with events in Germany in the 1930’s as being so utterly and entirely absurd that only a complete idiot would do so.
Well, Dr. Deborah Lipstadt is not an idiot. She is one of the most respected historians of the Holocaust. The following quotation from the strategy memo being discussed makes a preliminary point and then directly quotes her perspective:
“Since most Americans have absolutely no knowledge about Italian, Spanish and post-war Neo-Fascism only extremely vague images of German Nazi fascism in the 1930’s (images based largely on movies) Republicans easily dismiss any discussion of the issue by arguing that all comparisons of Trump and MAGA with fascism represent absurd accusations that they are engaging in mass arrests, torture and genocide. But anyone with even a limited knowledge of the period is aware that that there are more subtle comparisons that are not so easily discounted. ”
“As the leading historian of the period Deborah Lipstadt has noted:”
“I do think certain comparisons are fitting … it’s certainly not 1938,” when Nazis led the Kristallnacht pogroms throughout Germany. “It’s not even September 1935, and the Nuremberg Laws” institutionalizing racist policies. “What it well might be, however, is [the earlier period around] December 1932, Hitler comes to power on Jan. 30, 1933 – it might be Jan. 15, 1933.”
There is, therefore, absolutely nothing at all absurd or idiotic about discussing comparisons between MAGA and fascism.
Indeed, one would certainly hope that Mr. Lawford would not walk up to Dr. Lipstadt at an academic conference and tell her that she is so stupid that “she cannot tell shit from shinola.” If he would be ashamed to say this to her – as one would certainly hope he would be — he should also be ashamed to say it to anyone else as well.
No one with a minor knowledge of fascism in history would take seriously any of Andrew Levison’s accusation of fascism toward the Republican Party. For example, Levison compares Trump’s claim of a stolen election in 2020 to the Reichstag fire. Does Levison realize that after the Reichstag fire, Hitler had all the Socialist deputies to the Reichstag arrested and sent to concentration camps? Trump did nothing of the sort. Quite the contrary, he allowed the Democrats to gain a Congressional majority. Levison compares Fox News and other right wing media to the Reich Propaganda Ministry. The latter was a government office which monopolized German radio and had dissenting newspapers forcibly shut down. Fox News is a private enterprise which is anything but a monopoly and has no power to suppress its competitors. Soon after taking power, Hitler had 150 leaders of the Storm Troopers arrested and shot without trial. How many Republicans did Trump have assassinated? Did Hitler ever run for re-election?
Would Hitler have tolerated being impeached? I have seen many silly comparisons of Trump and the Republicans to Hitler and the Nazis, but Levison’s takes the cake.
The commenter apparently does not understand how comparing two things on a scale of one to 10 works. One can assign a very low number that indicates there is little or no relationship or one can assign a 9 or 10 to indicate a very close relationship. As the author of the commentary notes MAGA and Trump supporters would assign very low numbers to the comparisons suggested while others would assign higher ones.
The commenter seems to think that comparing two things on a scale of 1 to 10 means that they all are automatically assigned a 10.
This is not how comparing things on a scale of one to ten works.
I hope this simple explanation clarifies the commenters confusion. Otherwise, when a doctor asks him to rank his pain on a scale of one to 10 he will shout – “Are you crazy? I’m not in agony.”