Three things the Democrats can do right now
We're in dire times. The opposition party should start acting like it.
When Texas Rep. Al Green stood to interrupt Donald Trump’s address to Congress last week, I had the faint glimmer of hope that maybe — just maybe — the Democrats were finally prepared to meet this crisis with the urgency it demands.
Under the optimistic scenario unfolding in my head, once House Speaker Mike Johnson ordered the House Sergeant-at-Arms to remove Green from the floor, another Democrat would stand up in protest to replace him and persist until Johnson ordered that person removed, too. Another Democrat would then replace that Democrat. And then another. Maybe we’d see a dozen or more Democrats interrupt Trump.
No, that sort of disruption wouldn’t have brought down the Trump administration. But it would have been an emphatic statement that the Democratic Party — or at least a faction of it — understands the threat we’re facing.
But that, of course, isn’t what happened. Instead, the party made clear that Green was on his own. No one followed up when he was removed from the floor. No one backed up him. He was later censured with a majority vote that included an embarrassing number of Democrats.
In the days that followed, the Democratic leadership scolded Green. They also scolded the handful of members who quietly walked out of Trump’s speech. They even scolded those who “protested” by merely wearing pink and meekly holding up signs.
In the alternate universe in which the Democrats stood with Green, Trump’s gaslighting rant was delayed by hours. The country saw the minority party treating the current calamity for what it is. We got a full news cycle covering an opposition party properly sounding the alarm about the Trump administration’s full-frontal assault on our democracy. And maybe the good chunk of the public not currently paying attention started to take notice.
Instead, we got a news cycle in which Republicans mocked and laughed at the crazy old man shaking his walking stick at the sky, then broke into a spontaneous chorus of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” as he was removed from the floor. Instead, the country heard the same Democratic leaders who just months ago properly depicted Donald Trump as an existential threat to the republic show more disdain for their colleague’s breach of decorum than the Trump administration’s reckless saber-rattling at our longtime allies, startling assault on the First Amendment, or full-Boor push toward white supremacy.
It’s hard to even convey how dire things are without sounding like a loon. Here’s just one example: Last week the Washington Post reported that Jack Posobiec has been advising Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. In fact, both invited him on recent overseas trips. Posobiec is a key propagator of the insane Pizzagate conspiracy. He’s a former Alex Jones protege who is fond of sneaking the white supremacist code “1488” into his social medial posts (it means “Heil Hitler”). Earlier this year he told a gathering of conservatives that it was time to put an end to American democracy. He’s also the author of a recent book about how Trump’s political opponents are “unhuman.” JD Vance wrote the forward. The treasury secretary of the largest economy in the world and the head of the most powerful military in human history are both being advised by a guy who has spent the last decade pushing neo-Nazi propaganda and using terms like “white genocide.”
So what have the Democrats done?
Here’s an example: As Trump continues to fill his administration with “race science” promoters, anti-Semites, and people who were too racist to be in his first administration, Gavin Newsom — the Democratic governor of the country’s largest state and a presumed contender for the party’s 2028 presidential nomination — well, he started a podcast. Newsom’s first guest? Charlie Kirk.
Kirk is the guy whose organization bused people to the Capitol on January 6th, who spread nutty Covid conspiracies, who wants to abolish the Civil Rights Act, and who in January of 2024 started a national campaign to discredit the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr..
During the podcast, Newsom sought Kirk’s advice, allowed Kirk to gloat about Trump, lavished praise on the Christian nationalist empire Kirk has built, and only mildly pushed back when Kirk got especially deranged.
As Trump fires inspectors general, dissolves independent offices, obliterates whistleblower protections, and dismantles the remaining accountability checks in the executive branch — and as he and Elon Musk engage in brazen, public, shameless corruption and push to obliterate Congress’ Article I powers — the Democratic strategy appears to be to wait until the Republicans try to cut Medicare or Social Security to really get mad — as if what’s happening now isn’t dissimilar from the same boring budget fights we see every year.
No Democrat has asked me for my advice, nor would they. But I’m going to venture outside my lane to offer some anyway: Stop acting like any of this is normal. Donald Trump isn’t Mitt Romney or John McCain. He isn’t even Dick Cheney. He’s Victor Orban, and aspires to be Vladimir Putin.
I understand the argument that you can’t use authoritarian tactics to stop an authoritarian. And I agree with it. We don’t need competing authoritarian parties.
But it’s also time to end the asymmetrical decency. You don’t owe any deference or reverence to “the office” of the presidency when the man occupying it is a vulgar thug who’s exploiting the office to enrich himself and smite his enemies and whose administration is provoking a constitutional crisis by openly defying the federal courts. You needn’t respect “decorum” during a speech in which the president is blood-libeling immigrants, threatening allies, promising to wreck the economy, and telling lies that everyone knows are lies as a raw display of power. And it is especially craven to scold one of your own for a modest act of defiance against an administration that has threatened to arrest and imprison you over protected speech.
That said, civil disobedience isn’t the only way to convey the seriousness of what we’re up against. The Democrats just need to start acting like the Trump administration is the threat they’ve long and correctly claimed it to be. Their actions need to match their words.
So here are concrete things Democrats should do to better meet the moment.
Opposition town halls
In recent weeks, Republicans have encountered anger and hostility from their constituents during town hall events, including in pretty solidly red states and congressional districts. Much of the hostility has been directed at Elon Musk. Internally, the party leadership has responded by instructing members of Congress to stop holding town halls. Externally, they’ve preposterously claimed that these events have been infiltrated by paid protesters.
As a born-and-bred Midwesterner, I’d say that the folks in this video look pretty Kansan to me.
In the wake of Republicans canceling these events, a few Democrats — including Bernie Sanders, Tim Walz, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have offered to host town halls in districts and states where Republicans are no longer holding them.
This is a terrific idea. I’d imagine the first several would be newsworthy enough to generate earned media, but they should also stream and promote them anyway. The party should send its best communicators to hold these events in red districts and states — in addition to the three above, I’d suggest Pete Buttigieg, Jay Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, and Julian Castro.
Video from these events will make clear that the anger isn’t coming from paid actors, but bonafide constituents, most of them Trump supporters. This is also the sort of triangulation/engagement with the other side that actually works. Common ground is already there to be claimed. You need only show up and listen. Nod when people talk about how they’re now afraid to fly. Listen when they worry about losing their VA benefits or Medicare coverage. Validate their anger when they ask why the richest man in the world just fired their cousin at the FDA and terminated their grandmother’s Alzheimer’s trial. Puzzle with them over why some 20-year-old edgelord hacker just laid off their Gulf War vet brother-in-law with four kids and stellar performance reviews.
The nice part is that this sort of outreach to red districts doesn’t require you to abandon your principles, or to platform buffoons and bigots. You needn’t throw trans people under the bus, abandon civil rights, scold racial justice activists, or advocate closing the border to refugees.
And you sure as hell don’t need to have a sit-down with Charlie Kirk.
Daily briefings
The public craves information in times of crisis confusion, and we tend to gravitate toward the politicians and public officials who provide it. Rudy Giuliani’s popularity soared after September 11 because of his empathetic, straight-talk press conferences. Ditto for Andrew Cuomo during the earliest days of Covid. That both proved to be terrible public servants — and worse human beings — only underscores the point. If even the most unlikeable politicians can earn public trust by simply providing information and making themselves available, imagine what a likable politician can do.
The Democrats should assemble a rotating mix of trusted, high-ranking politicians — in addition to the people already named, I’d suggest popular governors like Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer — to hold regular briefings to inform the public about what Trump and Musk are doing. Stream these briefings on every social media platform. They could be as frequent as daily at first, then adjusted accordingly.
As I think I showed in my previous post summarizing just five days of Trump’s madness, this administration is jamming our capacity to process information with a relentless barrage of destructive policies. They’ve made it impossible for normal people with normal lives, jobs, and families to keep up. It’s all by design.
But this is where the Democrats should be stepping up. There’s no reason why the Democrats couldn’t hire a team of researchers and produce a regular briefing about what’s going on. Break things down so people can understand them. Use visual aids. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and his producers do a version of this every night.
These briefings should be informative, serious, and sober. Steer away from partisan bickering and palace intrigue. No need for personal attacks or to respond to them. But also don’t shy away from the severity of what’s happening. Give a shout out to the large and growing protests we’re seeing each day. Provide a credible and trustworthy recounting of what Trump is doing and what it means for people’s daily lives, and people will start tuning in.
If necessary, bring in an expert or two — a food safety specialist, a retired air traffic controller, an infectious disease scholar — to provide some context about the ramifications of Trump’s latest destructive policy. Once you’ve earned some trust, you can bring in folks to explain why immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens, and contribute far more to the economy than they take from it. Bring in others to explain why the overwhelming majority of economists believe tariffs are destructive job killers. Hire a seasoned television journalist to provide some editorial direction.
At the moment the public is only getting the administration’s narrative. To the extent that there’s a Democratic counter-narrative, it’s been fractured and sporadic. We need an alternative source of information with the built-in credibility that comes with public office. Yes, Trumpists will dismiss it as partisan. There are also some issues for which there’s considerable disagreement within the Democratic Party. But even on those issues, what Trump is doing right now exceeds the the bounds of civil debate. To give one particularly contentious example, you can allow for room for disagreement about U.S. support for Israel while still condemning Trump’s mad dictator plan to build luxury resorts in Gaza, or still decrying the bone-chilling First Amendment implications of disappearing a Green Card holder because of his support for Palestine.
The shadow cabinet
In other Western democracies, the opposition party typically assembles a shadow cabinet to track and monitor what the party in power is doing. The Democrats should adopt this tradition.
Trump’s cabinet isn’t just the least qualified in U.S. history, it is aggressively unqualified. Unfortunately, holding office also lends built-in credibility, whether it’s deserved or not. Designating someone as a vetted expert who speaks for the minority party for a given policy area can help overcome that built-in credibility. In our current hellscape, picking competent, experienced people to talk about these issues would also remind the public of what a credible government — or at least something better than an assertively incompetent one — looks like.
Imagine having Jamie Raskin explaining why Pam Bondi’s order to investigate private organizations for DEI policies is a direct violation of the First Amendment. Picture a technocrat like Pete Buttigieg explaining why you can’t mandate that every air traffic controller have an MIT degree, or why Transportation Secretary and ex-reality TV guy Sean Duffy shouldn’t hand control of U.S. airspace over to a company that blows up a rocket every few months. Put Mark Milley on TV to explain the danger of firing all the Black people, purging Muslims, or whatever other Crusades-inspired policy Pete Hegseth wants to impose on the Pentagon. Or bring in an actual doctor or public health researcher to debunk RKF, Jr.’s declaration that amethyst crystals now cure cholera, or that you can stave off dysentery by sunning your perineum.
Sixty years ago yesterday, John Lewis, Hosea Williams, Bob Mants, and Albert Turner led 600 protesters in a civil rights march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Prior to the protest, Dallas County, Alabama, Sheriff Jim Clark ordered all white men over the age of 21 to the county courthouse, deputized them, then set them loose on the protesters. The resulting “Bloody Sunday” beatings sent 17 people to the hospital, including Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull.
Less than a generation later, the U.S. is under siege by an administration populated with unapologetic bigots. Among their regressive goals is to re-legalize racial discrimination. They’re doing this by targeting Black public servants, waging war on programs designed to boost minorities, and purging federal archives of references to or remembrances of the uglier parts of our history. They want to erase episodes like Bloody Sunday from the collective memory.
Democrats are fond of invoking John Lewis’s name at every opportunity — and understandably so. He left a remarkable legacy of courage and principle. The problem is that they aren’t living up to it. They’re now the only entity with any political power standing between democracy and autocracy. And they aren’t just failing to seek out “good trouble,” they’re abandoning those who do.
Some Democrats have anonymously told media outlets that they’re reluctant to speak up because they fear for their safety and that of their families. Tough. There are a lot of people worried about safety right now. It’s a risk you assume when you run. The power of political office comes with the understanding that there are people who will do desperate things to take that power from you. If you don’t want the risk, resign and let someone with more courage take over.
Our democracy is staggering. It is not the time for cowardice.
One thing the Democrats could do now is make statements of future intent that have present-day implications. For instance, they can respond to Trump's nonenforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by promising future enforcement. This would be a power move against extractive industries, which specialize in suborning governments.
A mere "shadow cabinet" could not issue such credible threats. The DNC could provide such credibility, through its power to limit access to Presidential nominations. Any candidate for the nomination would have to sign the pledge. I don't think you have to worry about Democrats abusing such a mechanism. They're far more likely to do too little than too much.
Trump’s cabinet has never been about competence or reform. This cabinet is simply a bunch of ‘consiglieres’ dispatched to impose The Boss’s will on the business of governing. They are no more than thugs. They are enforcers. They are there to crack some heads and eradicate anyone or anything that smacks of democratic values and governance. Trump and his Muskreants have basically formed a criminal syndicate that is moving-in on this wide-open territory called The Americas,’ and they intend to make it their domain.