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.
Okay, let us have that “intra-progressive” debate then.
I’ll start. My fear is that the way this legislation is shaping up, it is going to turn out to be every bit as disastrous to individuals in need of health care as The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 — an abominable piece of legislation that turned out to be a gift to the credit card companies and a disaster, a complete disaster, for people who are burdened with massive unmanageable debt due to medical expenses, unemployment, or other unavoidable or avoidable losses. Remember Ted Kennedy offering amendment after amendment after amendment as he stood alone on the floor of the Senate attempting to mitigate the impending disaster this abomination visited upon ordinary Americans. The legislation turned out to be so disastrous for consumers that even the credit card and mortgage banking industries decided it was too much of a good thing.
Two things: have you actually done the math with respect to premiums and co-pays and how they would impact an individual’s actual take-home pay? I have, and I invite you to do it too. My math tells me that for someone earning in the neighborhood of $65,000 to $75,000 per year, with a chronic disease that needs consistent medical care, out-of-pocket expenses look to be in the neighborhood of $20-25,000 per year with the current Senate bill. Already Medicaid share-of-cost can be prohibitive in high-cost areas of the country. You think that is going to make people, i.e. voters, happy about health care reform?
Secondly, you can look to the experience in Massachusetts for how the current proposed model of HCR is going to work, and it isn’t very encouraging. Trudy Lieberman over at CJR has an exceptional series on HCR that explores the impact of the Massachusetts experiment here: Health Reform Lessons from Massachusetts, Part VII : CJR. I encourage you and your readers to read the whole series.
Let’s look at your priorities:
1) “covering most of the uninsured” — in my view, any program that will (affordably) cover most of the uninsured is the whole point. Of course, a public health insurance option is the best way of doing that; we cover most seniors with Medicare; we cover most poor children and pregnant women with medicaid, SCHIP covers most children of working families who earn less than 250% FPL. Fine, but the experiment in Massachusetts shows that even with a mandate, the private insurance industry cannot affordably cover “most” of the uninsured. Instead, they opt to pay the fine for not buying it.
2) “more important than the level of subsidies to make coverage practically affordable” — amusing that you use the term “practically affordable” — like in hand grenades, eh? Let me ask you, why do you think that high levels of subsidies to the private health insurance industry is more acceptable — or a better deal — than a competing public insurance program? The public insurance program is CHEAPER for individuals and in the aggregate than high levels of subsidies. Is the point to save the private health insurance industry? We’d be better off dumping pallets of cash in their lobbies, as we did for the banks. Please look at the Healthy Families program in California for a successful public health insurance program that works.
3) “more important than regulation to end highly discriminatory insurance practices” — if there is anything in the bill to support, it is this, of course. This kind of regulation is badly needed, let’s do it. Let’s do it as a health insurance regulatory bill, then. It would be easier to pass standing alone, wouldn’t it?
4) “more important than how and when health reform is phased in” — I suspect this is just a throw-in, this isn’t really an issue but just nuts and bolts. Do you really think that this particular issue should take priority over the actual nature of health care reform itself? To me, it is almost irrelevant as a substantive issue, and certainly should not take precedence as a priority over the actual reform. Please explain why you think that “how and when health reform is phased in” is more important than the issue of whether there is an alternative publicly funded health insurance program available for consumers of health care.
One additional point: Please give public option advocates credit for good will. I find it patently offensive that the “pass anything” crowd dismisses us as unthinking my-way-or-the-highway rigid ideologues. If you really want to have a debate, it helps to treat the other side as if their opinions are worthy of debate. We can surely disagree on the merits of this legislation without your side being so dismissively arrogant, I would hope.
Cheers.
The intra-progessive debate that needs to begin is about formulating a strategy to reduce the super-majority requirement in the Senate, just as that was the necessary condition for the Civil Rights era. The current 60 vote requirement for passage of anything important is a relic of the incomplete job done in the early 60s to pass civil rights legislation — before that the requirement was 66 votes! But as a nation, we really didn’t want Jim Crow forever.
Similarly, we don’t want the prejudices of 12 percent of the people in rural states to determine the direction of a rich, modern country, but that’s what the current 60 vote filibuster does.
How do we move to end this without destroying all checks on short term majority enthusiasms?