Democrats Need to Stop Letting Trump Set the Terms of Engagement

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: As an aggressive MAGA policy initiative lurches into gear, Democrats fret over a just-so messaging response and generally dither over the prospect of alienating an increasingly mythic political center. As the initiative in question sows fear and terror, steamrollers the separation of powers, and generally disrupts whatever remains of normal life under conditions of authoritarian siege, it becomes massively unpopular. So the Democratic political leaders who once flattered themselves with the faux-savvy conceit that they were keeping their powder dry for a deferred moment of confrontation are once more at a loss to harness growing anti-Trump sentiment in real time.

That’s been the grim dynamic preventing establishment Democrats from putting forward a serious alternative to the second Trump administration’s mass-deportation regime, a despotic and unlawful undertaking that has rendered the president’s immigration stance—once held to be one of his central political assets—a huge polling liability. It was the saga of the DOGE rampage through the executive branch, which created zero meaningful fiscal savings and leveled basic federal initiatives such as public health, weather forecasting, and foreign aid, while Senate Democrats continued rubber-stamping more government-shredding cabinet appointees. But the only thing approaching the ugliness of DOGE’s track record is its polled public support, with the agency’s approval rating at just over 40 percent and its billionaire godfather Elon Musk well below that. The same old saw was also a fair description of the bankrupt logic that prompted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to fold like a cheap suit in the first budget showdown of the second Trump term. That particular show of Democratic inertia directly led to the debacle of Trump’s signature spending and taxation bill, which now has the president’s polling numbers so far underwater that the GOP is frantically trying to rebrand the whole thing as something that it decidedly isn’t—a working-class tax cut.

Now, in an accelerated news timeline, it’s the same old song and dance in response to the Trump administration’s fascistic mobilization of federal and National Guard troops on the streets of Washington, DC. Democrats were once again leery about endorsing any response to this brownshirt offensive against a nonexistent wave of violent crime. In fear of appearing “soft on crime,” they largely tried to depict the Trump action as a “distraction” to direct public attention away from the simmering Epstein files scandal. This maneuver was so bereft of substance that it earned a blistering denunciation from reformed neocon William Kristol as “a rare trifecta of intellectual failure, political stupidity, and moral obtuseness.” And sure enough, Data for Progress is now out with poll findings showing that the MAGA siege of Washington is unpopular, with a 51 percent majority of respondents opposing the crackdown and 57 percent agreeing that Trump is “being authoritarian” in his bid to federalize DC law enforcement.

The pattern is by now so well established that it’s long past time to ask just what the hell Democratic leaders think they’re doing. Having granted the overarching premises of a MAGA putsch, they’re trapped in a brutal regress of faint-hearted policy accommodations that reinforce the Democrats’ image as a status-quo party with vanishingly little interest in, or capacity for, altering the fundamental terms of political engagement. It’s the reason that, for all of the GOP’s polling woes, congressional Democrats suffer from dramatically lower approval ratings.

To this day, establishment Democrats remain in blind thrall to what’s arguably the last major political innovation in their Beltway habitat: the woeful Clintonian cult of “triangulation.” This three-decades-old reflex was Bill Clinton’s effort to outflank the 1994 Gingrich revolution during his 1996 reelection bid; it basically positioned Democrats as meek dissenters to Republican power grabs and policy boondoggles so that they could make the pitch to voters that the party had outgrown its putative New Left excesses in favor of bipartisan difference-trimming. The inventor of the tactic was political consultant Dick Morris, who has followed its core logic to its inevitable conclusion, becoming a hard-right merchant of MAGA persecution narratives. The same fate has beset another well-heeled, Clinton-bred triangulation apostle, Mark Penn.

You’d think that these dismal career arcs would render triangulation a cautionary tale for Democrats—but you would, of course, be wrong. Triangulation remains the venerated, savvy move for an opposition party that scorns its own base and fawns on big-money donors. There’s a reason, after all, that its two most notorious devotees in the last congressional session were the now-retired Senators Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, arch foes of the Build Back Better legislative package that might have staked a claim to visionary long-term governance in the party. It’s far from a coincidence that both lawmakers also ranked among the Democrats’ biggest recipients of corporate campaign dosh. The triangulating impulse is also why the 2010 Affordable Care Act emerged from Congress without a public funding option, and why the Democratic Party elite is smitten with regressive measures like the privatization of public education and the means-testing of social welfare benefits. These are all pet Republican causes that Democrats falsely believe can be negotiated into passably humane form. The party’s position on many major GOP policy aims is roughly that of the fictional insurance company that continues agreeing to cover the perennial effort to reopen doomed upgrades of the Jurassic Park resort.

The other thing to note about the legacy of Democratic triangulation is that, throughout the played-out maneuver’s death grip on the party establishment, the Republican Party has moved ever further to the right. It’s not hard to see why that’s the case; once your opponents grant the basic premises of your political agenda, you don’t go to the bargaining table—you go in for the kill. The GOP’s last feint toward reciprocal moderation in the triangulation mode came in the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat, when the Republican National Committee produced a postelection autopsy urging the party to become more moderate on divisive issues like immigration, and to improve its outreach among African American, gay, and Latino voters. I assume I don’t need to remind you how all that worked out.

The triangulation regime was already an unforced capitulation to the forces of political reaction in the Gingrich years; in a Trump regime that’s actively dismantling the rule of law and savaging the institutional foundations of our formal democracy, it’s an act of civic suicide. So, with the continued decline of the Democratic Party’s reputation in the public eye, let’s start calling triangulation by its true name: appeasement.