As a former House communications staffer: this is the wrong approach.
Every Trump outrage is an opportunity to communicate core messages to different constituencies. But House leadership cares more about controlling the message than reaching the widest possible audience.
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— Aaron Huertas (@aaronhuertas.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 7:31 AM
This is a conscious decision to abandon transgender people under assault by a monstrous administration who just nominated a serially abusive alcoholic to command the military, and is now issuing a blatantly illegal order attempting to erase transgender people from the military altogether. All of this is an attack on America, you can’t pick and choose which things people are allowed to be upset about. Democratic leadership’s moral fiber has long proven to be rotten, and the only part of them that’s more rotted is the part of their brain that houses their pathetic analysis of politics. This is the diametric opposite of how the Republicans have taken power in our broken media and political ecosystem.
They flood the zone and throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks. While their overall message is one of utter disdain for every American’s general intelligence, the GOP does respect them more than Democrats do in that they provide a choose your own adventure story that anyone can construct for themselves to explain why our empire is crumbling. Republicans and the billionaires with their hands up their asses don’t know what people may care about, so why not make noise about all of it and see where it takes you. Democrats subtly tell you what you should care about while furrowing their brow and saying how they want to hear your concerns over [insert focus group-tested term that normal people don’t say here].
The idea that what undid the Democrats last time was a lack of focus is absurd. Or that they were even undone at all. It is utterly batshit insane to think that the first resistance against Trump wasn’t successful. Literally ahistorical. The type of thing that could only be believed by people whose brains are mostly soup and can’t remember what they had for breakfast this morning, let alone what happened six years ago. Democrats won the third-largest change of seats in the House in the post-Watergate era in 2018. The raw vote margin between the parties was the largest in the history of midterm elections. By any definition, 2018 was a wave election. Not only did the Democrats succeed in rebuking Trump right away, but they changed the dynamic around low turnout special elections. They once favored Republicans, but since Trump have favored Democrats who live to vote against him any day of the week.
Hakeem Jeffries and other people in leadership are flat-out lying to themselves about what happened the first time around. Democrats won in 2020! They weren’t supposed to hang on to the Senate that year but they did! Nearly every incumbent president ever gets smacked in their first midterm elections, but in 2022 the Democrats enjoyed one of the four greatest performances for an incumbent party in the last century as Biden became the first president since 1934 to see his party gain governorships in its first midterm. There is empirical evidence proving that a fervent opposition to Trump works and they are telling themselves that their victories in 2018 and 2020 and 2022 never happened because the party’s gerontocracy committed a world-historic own-goal in 2024. Democratic leadership is either too stupid to govern or they flat-out want to lose.
Trump is a man currently at the peak of his powers who can’t even eclipse 50% favorability, and he entered office with the second-lowest net-favorability rating of any president in the polling era, second only to himself in 2016, along with the smallest House majority in a century that will enable some of the most broken people ever created to be their absolute worst selves. Anyone who knows how to read and understand third-grade math can see how thin Trump’s current support is, and a real political party that wasn’t overflowing with the most cowardly people alive would see the precedented political opportunities to fight back against this sheer and utter lawlessness that will hurt millions of people.
As Timothy Burke noted, some Democrats’ absences from the fight right now can be explained by them trying to fill the void that the federal government has created for their constituents, providing services to them and doing the kind of small-d democracy so romanticized by our founders. Plenty of people exist in the party who want to help and fight back. Many of them were elected in that historic wave in 2018. There is a real opposition party hidden somewhere inside this paralyzed husk of incompetent consultants, cynics and gerontocrats which showed its face during Trump’s first term. This is a problem that is concentrated among a small group of powerful people who have built a self-serving infrastructure around an organization now dedicated to ensuring that every presidential election is decided by 75,000 people across three states in the Midwest who hate their guts.
Because of the abject failure of this generation of Chuck Schumer et al’s “leadership,” the Democrats have ceased to be a real political party. It’s a social club for out of touch gerontocrats who betrayed the advancements made by previous generations of actually competent Democrats. Real Democrats like LBJ and FDR would surely be ashamed of the untold damage these feckless boobs have done to their mighty machine that put Jim Crow in its place. The only logical explanation left for why Democratic leadership isn’t doing more to oppose and make noise about Trump’s all-out assault on the very concept of government that will kill and impoverish people is because they are who they have proven themselves to be these last few decades: idiotic cowards.
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