On the menu today: Over at that other Washington publication, I participated in a discussion about political violence, and one of my fellow columnists, Shadi Hamid, made the point, “Democrats are so feckless as an opposition party.” I could see a lot of right-of-center readers baffled by that assessment — 255 Trump nominees are awaiting a vote in the Senate, congressional Democrats denounce him daily, and now they’re threatening to shut down the government to “send a message to Trump.”
But I think I concur with Hamid in a way, although it may not be the manner that he intended in that context. As you’ve probably noticed, Donald Trump is not a particularly conservative or consistent-minded president. Which means that a significant portion of the time, Democrats are attempting to oppose him even though he’s enacting policies that, separate from his name, they would generally support.
The Democrats’ Dilemma
Today’s headline might be a little click-bait-y exaggeration, but let’s face it, Trump isn’t a consistently conservative president, he’s a populist. And populism is short on core principles and high on giving the people what they say they want, even if it contradicts other things the people say they want, or what the people said they wanted a short while ago. Trump may be erratic and contradictory, but a lot of American voters are erratic and contradictory, too.
Let’s start with the biggest and clearest example: Donald Trump is the biggest protectionist in the Oval Office since Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.
Up until very recently, Democrats were the more protectionist of the two parties, largely aligned with unions in the belief that imported goods drive down wages and represent unfair competition to American workers. So Trump deciding to take what had previously been an idea associated with Democrats — tariffs — and enact them across the board on just about everything, just about everywhere, all at once, puts Democrats in a dilemma.
As Scott Lincicome notes, “many Democrats are suddenly sounding like libertarians”:
Once ardent defenders of corporate taxes, regulation, redistribution, and activist government, prominent people aligned with the Democratic Party — not just economists and Abundance wonks but politicians, staff, and pundits — are now hitting Trump’s tariffs with arguments that would feel right at home at a Cato Institute event or in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and which contradict longstanding Democratic positions on non-trade issues in fundamental ways.
We’re in a global trade war that is making all kinds of goods more expensive, but at least we can get some bitter laughs about Democrats tying themselves into pretzels to explain that they’ve just now realized that complicated regulations help big businesses over small ones. Senator Ed Markey — opponent of free trade agreements like USMCA and the proposed but never enacted Trans Pacific Partnership — wrote to the Trump administration in April warning, “These [small] businesses simply do not have the financial cushion to absorb price shocks or the resources to navigate sudden changes to an already complex supply chain.” Ed Markey is 79 years old, but when it comes to understanding basic principles of economics, better late than never.
Other Democrats argue that tariffs are good, but Trump is doing them wrong:
[Washington Senate Deputy Majority Leader Manka] Dhingra said Democrats are not opposed to tariffs across the board but rather disagree with the way Trump is carrying out his tariffs.
“We can be thoughtful, we can be methodical, we can have conversations and if there are tariffs that need to be imposed, let’s make sure we do it the right way and make sure there’s predictability there,” she said.
“You’re enacting the policies we want, but you’re doing it too fast” is not really a compelling argument.
It’s difficult for any Democrat who supported the taxpayer bailout of General Motors — “Government Motors” — to argue in principle against the policies that I characterize as the Trump administration’s “light communism”: the federal government buying 15 percent of mining company MP Materials, the government’s “golden share” in the stock and management decisions of U.S. Steel, and the decision to allow Nvidia and AMD to sell advanced chips to Chinese companies, as long as 15 percent of the money from those sales goes to the federal government. Democrats must argue that they don’t think government intervention in the decision-making of private companies is inherently wrong or bad, they just don’t like these particular ones enacted by Trump.
(A little credit to the six Democratic senators who wrote to the president, “The collection of fees appear to violate U.S. statutes and may even be unconstitutional,” but they didn’t dwell on that point, mostly focusing instead on the national-security implications.)
Bipartisan hypocrisy on runaway spending is an old story, but it’s kind of funny to watch House Democrats accuse Republicans of “blowing up the deficit” earlier this year when President Biden and a Democratic-controlled Congress increased the national debt by $3.7 trillion between January 2021 and January 2023. What, are voters upset by the projections of increasing deficits in the coming years supposed to vote for Democrats next year to reduce spending? Democrats don’t oppose ever-higher levels of spending, they just don’t like this particular blueprint for ever-higher levels of spending.
Who loves TikTok? Well, it turns out that 55 percent of regular TikTok news consumers are Democrats, while 39 percent are Republicans. And yet President Trump has flat-out ignored federal law in order to keep TikTok operating. (I keep hearing Democrats arguing that Trump is a Constitution-defying dictator, but they rarely if ever bring up TikTok as an example of that, do they?) This morning, the Editors of NR look at the revealed outline of the new deal to keep TikTok around and conclude, “ByteDance took the position, in challenging the law, that the algorithm simply cannot work unless it is continually given feedback from American user data, and that this function cannot be relocated out of China. If so, then this deal is a sham. If not, then the law should have been enforced months ago.”
Gerrymandering? There is quiet hilarity that the Democrats’ charge against Texas redistricting is being led by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and California Governor Gavin Newsom. Out West, Newsom got a Democratic state legislator to vote to dismantle his dad’s signature accomplishment in politics, California’s bipartisan redistricting commission. Democrats don’t oppose gerrymandering in principle; they just oppose gerrymandering that costs them seats.
And let’s face it, the only reason Democrats can knock Trump around on Jeffrey Epstein these days is because Bill Clinton is in quiet retirement. (White House visitor logs indicate Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell visited the White House 17 times during Clinton’s two terms in office. If Democrats want to argue that “no friend of Epstein and Maxwell should ever be in the Oval Office,” that policy can only go into effect after January 20, 2001.)
Even on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I find myself wondering if Democrats really have their heart in it when they criticize Trump for “siding with Putin.” Democrats were traditionally the more dovish and noninterventionist of America’s two parties, and Russia and Ukraine were a rarely and briefly mentioned afterthought in the Kamala Harris campaign. I would love it if Gregory Slayton is right and Ukraine becomes a big issue in the 2026 midterms, but I just don’t see Democratic constituency groups particularly motivated or jazzed about this issue or much else in the realms of foreign policy and national security, barring some dramatic development between now and then.
This morning the most recent X post from the Democratic National Committee is “Legalize comedy, free Jimmy Kimmel,” referring to Disney’s ABC pausing Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show “indefinitely” after the host suggested, against all evidence, that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was carried out by a right-wing extremist.
Other recent DNC posts on X are about the Epstein files, the plight of black farmers under tariffs, and FBI director Kash Patel allegedly having an enemies list, along with the usual touting of Democratic candidates and voter registration. As far as I can tell, the DNC hasn’t mentioned Ukraine on X in about a month. Again, it’s not that Democrats agree with the way Trump is handing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s that the issue just isn’t that high a priority to them.
This doesn’t mean that Democrats don’t have a bunch of issues that they disagree with Trump on — abortion, illegal immigration, etcetera. But we’re used to having a mostly conservative Republican Party facing down against a mostly liberal or progressive Democratic Party in U.S. politics. But we’ve now got a mostly populist Republican Party facing down against an increasingly openly socialist Democratic Party. (As discussed on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, CNN polling finds that self-identified Democrats are now a net +36 on socialism and a net -13 on capitalism.)
The ideological differences between Trump populism — with shapeshifting abilities that a T-1000 would envy — and socialism are less stark and clear than the ideological differences between conservatism and progressivism.
Why are Democrats so feckless in their opposition to Trump? A bunch of reasons, but a big one is that a decent portion of the time, Trump is trying to enact ideas they supported in the past.
ADDENDUM: As noted yesterday on X, there’s a 2023 chart from The Economist about politically motivated cases of mass violence in the United States floating around on social media a lot in the past week. If I were in the fact-checking business, I would argue that even if the chart has accurate data (which I would dispute), it presents the data in a highly misleading way. (The chart counts the number of events, not number of people killed/injured.)
Problem one is that the chart indicates that there was only one “mass killing event” in 2001 and it is characterized as “right wing.” Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I seem to remember a really big “radical Islamist” “mass killing event” in 2001 that would dwarf just about everything that’s happened since, and yet that one isn’t on the chart.
Second, the chart indicates that the most “mass killing events” were in 2015, mostly right-wing, with some radical Islamist ones thrown in. I’m sorry, guys, but this is where you should have scrapped this format and started over with new form of data visualization. Any terrorism chart that makes you say, “Huh, I guess 2001 wasn’t that bad a year, compared to 2016” is not conveying information in an accurate or effective way.