Democrats Still Have No Idea How to Respond to Donald Trump

It shouldn't take this long to come up with a coherent message.

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Last night, Donald Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress for 100 minutes straight. He was interrupted only once, when Texas Rep. Al Greene stood up and shouted until he was removed from the room. Trump’s speech was notably light on the impact of his first days in office, but he rattled off accomplishments and deeds, secure in his understanding that if he had Said and Done them, they must be Good. This is his way, it is all we should expect. And yet, it’s unclear if the opposition party in the room with him knows how to counter it. Based on what we saw last night, Greene notwithstanding, the Democrats are still deciding on a response.

Here’s Elissa Slotkin, the newly elected senator from Michigan, in her official response to the not-State of the Union speech:

President Trump loves to promise "peace through strength." That's actually a line he stole from Ronald Reagan. But let me tell you, after the spectacle that just took place in the Oval Office last week, Reagan must be rolling over in his grave. We all want an end to the war in Ukraine, but Reagan understood that true strength required America to combine our military and economic might with moral clarity.

And that scene in the Oval Office wasn't just a bad episode of reality TV. It summed up Trump's whole approach to the world. He believes in cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and kicking our friends, like Canada, in the teeth. He sees American leadership as merely a series of real estate transactions.

As a Cold War kid, I'm thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War.

This line of thinking is not uncommon among Democrats. But it shows that they still haven’t learned one of the core lessons of Trump’s enduring success: His fans like his foreign policy. They do not like, or do not think about, the foreign policy of the 1980s — to the extent that they compare Trump to past presidents at all, they point to the disastrous War on Terror that George W. Bush started, the Obama era of surveillance and clandestine assassinations, and Biden’s global neoliberalism punctuated by a spectacular collapse in Afghanistan. Americans yearn for an era where America was strong — not one where it was applying that strength. That this kind of global dominance without having to fight a world war never existed is immaterial; we’re going off pure vibes.

Other parts of Slotkin’s speech suggested the Democrats may finally be arriving on an economic message that could work: namely, that Trump is making stuff cost more. This is good, but it’s only one part of the equation — the delivery is important. And everything else the party has been doing only furthers the impotence displayed during Trump’s first months in office. Matching t-shirts? Little auction paddle signs with slogans? The immediate reaction to those tepid displays is all you need to know, regardless of how brave it made the participants feel.

Earlier this week, Minnesota governor and former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz went on The New Yorker Radio Hour and gave, I think, one of the more coherent gameplans for the Democratic Party going forward. You can listen to the episode yourself, it’s not long, but Walz’s general point was that the Democrats’ most effective form of resistance at this point is going to be setting up something of a “shadow government,” similar to those deployed by opposition parties in parliamentary democracies like the UK. But the crucial step would be to get each of those shadow officials on message and on the air, constantly. Democrats have to learn what is going to stick and they HAVE to start saying it on every platform available to them.

You cannot beat Trump with one speech of zingers, with rationality and reason and carefully-constructed metaphors about the honorable nature of American under Ronald fucking Reagan. We’re going to have to outwork the guy. We’re going to have to, as Walz said, “flood the zone.” As we’ve been saying for years, Democrats have to take off the bumpers, let the dogs off the leash. It remains to be seen if they have any “dogs,” as the kids say, but they’re not going to find out by letting Slotkin’s measured response and a few protests speak for the entire party. The best thing Walz said was an off-handed suggestion that Pete Buttigieg should be going on TV every day and talking about the plane crashes. Why not! It certainly can’t hurt to point out on a daily basis that Trump took office and planes started falling out of the sky. Instead, what we’ve gotten is what the Democrats did with Walz himself: find something that feels almost subversive and sharp — like Walz’s plainspoken ‘these guys are weird’ message — and then get scared and back off.

You can’t be the adult in the room when the fascist kids treat you like a particularly anxious substitute teacher. Sling some mud. Hammer it home. Things are about to get very, very dark for a lot of people in this country. If the Democrats can’t find a way to pin that on the man making the decisions loud and proud behind the highest pulpit in the land, they deserve every humiliation that comes to them.