The Free Press: Trump 2.0: A Survival Guide for Democrats

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Tuesday, February 4, 2025 23:24
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6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, February 4, 2025 11:24 PM

https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-20-a-survival-guide-for-democrats


You've got people giving you really good advice. Are you going to listen to it?

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Three months after the Democrats’ electoral drubbing, the party is still reeling—leaderless, rudderless, and more unpopular than at any time in modern American history. Only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, the lowest rating since CNN first asked the question in 1992. Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina.

Think party pooh-bahs realize it is time for urgent change? Think again.

Viral video clips from the Democratic National Committee’s election for a new chair this past weekend seemed like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college. In one, outgoing DNC chair Jaime Harrison explains how the presence of a gender nonbinary candidate affected the committee’s gender-balance rules. (“The nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.”) In another, every candidate for chair blamed Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump on racism and misogyny.

The DNC settled on 24-year-old school-shooting survivor David Hogg as its new vice chair. Here is Hogg’s take on why Democrats did badly among Gen Z voters: “We had to grow up worrying about dying in a school shooting today, or dying of climate change tomorrow, and then being crushed by student debt and the housing crisis in between. . . and I think on the issue of Gaza in particular, it was emblematic of the fact that people felt like we were not listening to them—that we didn’t care.”

Hogg is almost as out of touch as the winning candidate for DNC chair, Minnesota’s Ken Martin. He confidently asserted: “We’ve got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”

In short, all the early signs point to a party that has learned nothing from defeat. If only the Democratic Party were wearing lapels, because then someone could grab them, shake hard, and yell: “What part of ‘the voters just rejected your fixation on identity politics’ do you not understand?”

Yet the simple recognition that they lost in November for a reason still seems inadmissible in the party’s deliberations about how to deal with Trump 2.0. Instead, they give every indication of doubling down on their least popular policy agenda items and the resist-everything-all-the-time strategy that yielded disastrous results for them last time.

Unless Democrats acknowledge that much of what Trump says and does is not only popular but also, here and there, good policy, they can never recover. They should seek compromise on issues where Trump holds the policy and political high ground, reserving hard opposition for the areas where voters are least likely to agree with him—such as blanket tariffs on U.S. trading partners, which are neither justified nor popular.

The party should heed the acerbic advice of the great Democratic congressman Barney Frank: “If you care deeply about an issue, and are engaged in group activity on its behalf that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others, you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good".

With that advice in mind, here are four rules of the road to help Democrats navigate the next four years.

1. Avoid the name-calling

Let’s start with something easy: Don’t drop the F-bomb. Democrats must resist the urge to characterize Trump or his policies as “fascist”—as Kamala Harris did in the home stretch of the presidential race. Why? For a start, it’s not true. Trump may have authoritarian tendencies. But—if the term is to retain any meaning—that is very different from being a fascist. A cursory acquaintance with twentieth-century history should make that clear. (If you have any further doubts, please consult Richard Evans’ three-volume

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