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I don’t want to say I told you so. Because lots of people were saying similar things. But I think I was right when I said that Chuck Schumer didn’t grasp the magnitude or the intensity of the fissure he was opening up in the Democratic Party with his handling of the Musk/Trump continuing resolution. (I said he was like one of those Chernobyl victims who’s already been fatally irradiated but seems fine. Radiation poisoning takes a few days to get you.) They thought it was just the online resistance types acting up and wanting a fight. They didn’t understand the depth of it. I’m pretty certain Schumer didn’t think he’d still be making the rounds of the morning shows going on two weeks later trying to hold on to his job.
In my mind, the real failure wasn’t even so much the one people watched play out a week ago. The real failure was in the preceding six weeks. I still think they should have refused the continuing resolution for all the reasons we discussed at the time. But by that time the Democrats really were in a jam. By laying no groundwork for the coming confrontation, they’d made it a much harder choice. In the internal hand-wringing I picked up in the 24 hours before Schumer’s cave, people were saying, “Yeah, we should be fighting. But it’s basically too late.”
It was crystal clear even well before Inauguration Day that March 14th was the critical and really sole moment of leverage. I wrote countless posts about this. That reality became explicit. It got talked about. The leadership argued that they would make demands. Eventually. But the idea was that they didn’t want to get into it publicly in early February. Why make the story about themselves and a potential shutdown when Republicans and the White House were having bad press day after bad press day? Why own a shutdown in advance? When your opponents are wheezing and struggling, why make yourself the story?
This is a perfect example of clever tactics devoid of a larger strategy. Yes, draw back a bit when your political foes are getting hammered. In general. But that’s tactics — fiddling over timing to let your foes take some bruises, fine tuning and adjustment on the margins. The White House strategy here is to move so fast that by the time the courts and or public opinion catches up with them the deeds are done and cannot be undone. That’s a very plausible strategy and they’re continuing to execute it. If Democrats were going to fight and risk a shutdown they needed to be explaining well in advance why they were doing it. They needed to be explaining that it was the White House that was forcing the matter, that for anyone upset or worried about DOGE, it was the Democrats who were saying no. Each scary thing or outrage that comes down the pike Democrats say: “We don’t accept this. We’re putting the White House on notice: stop this now and, if you don’t, we’re not going to give you the votes you need in March. Someone has to speak up for the people you’re hurting and the people you’re stealing from. Someone has to channel people’s feelings of powerlessness.”
When you’re reacting, you’re usually losing and at best you’re treading water. It’s different occasionally but not often. A couple days ago I was talking to one TPM Reader who was very upset about Schumer and asked if I thought Schumer would be ready to draw some new red lines and stick to them. I told him I thought red lines were irrelevant. We’re way downstream of every red line I can think of. A red line is just marking some new set of actions that if Trump does them Democrats are going to do something in return. As I told this reader, the way I see this, the White House has us on our own 30 yard line. Structurally, the Democrats are on defense, both in my analogy and in reality. There’s no point denying that. Republicans have the executive power. Republicans control the Congress. But in football you can go on offense on the defensive plays. I don’t want to wait until they’re in the red zone, let alone the end zone. I want to take some risks to get some sacks now. I want to get aggressive and force some turnovers. Quite simply, I don’t want to react.
Chuck Schumer’s argument was essentially that the White House is so powerful and so unrestrained that if Democrats forced a fight Trump could hurt us even more. That’s not an idle concern. That’s possible. But going on the offensive involves risks by definition. People around Schumer and a lot of Beltway journalists were portraying this as “activists” just being so mad that they wanted to fight even if it didn’t make a lot of sense and might even have been a self-destructive act. Emotion certainly played a role. But that was ignorant and condescending. If you’re in a fight for your lives and you’re pulling your punches or lying low to slow the pace of the assault, you’re at best delaying getting to the final destination. The only way to change the equation is to upset the apple cart. By definition that involves taking risks. The real division now among Democrats is not principally ideological, it’s fight vs risk aversion and the old proceduralism. They think the left/center and fight/no fight spectra overlap more or less perfectly. They’re wrong.
I’ve made two points again and again. This fight is fundamentally over public opinion. And the actual hard powers the Democrats have are minimal. The one real cudgel the Democrats had was the continuing resolution. That’s gone. It is what it is. I don’t have a lot of patience for rehashing that. I’m focused on what’s next. We found out over the weekend that Trump and Musk are on track to have lost the U.S. government half a trillion dollars by putting the IRS into the wood chipper. On Friday the DOGE-appointed acting head of the Social Security Administration was literally threatening to shut the agency down — all checks stop, immediately. Elon Musk already makes millions a day in federal contracts and he’s going through the executive branch grabbing more contracts for himself. These are mind-bending realities that we know from common sense and new polling a broad swath of the public is upset about. Basically everything the Democrats do right now should be tied to these and other similar outrages.
Final point: Half the articles I read now are about the Democrats’ horrible position and broken brand. Indeed, the loudest voices arguing something to the contrary of the above are saying that what the Democrats really need to be doing is taking stock of what happened in 2024 and/or repairing their brand. This is wrong, both as a matter of priorities and repair. There is only one issue today in American politics: President Trump’s hacksaw attack on the American Republic. Even if you describe it more favorably, no one questions that. The only available position is opposing it. Championing it is taken. If Democrats aren’t aggressively opposing it, they become irrelevant to the vast majority of voters who don’t actively support President Trump. The central part of a party’s “brand,” to the extent there is such a thing, is whether it is able to defend the people or priorities it champions. If it’s priorities are unpopular it loses doubly: it alienates supporters and it suffers loses since unpopular policies are inherently difficult to defend. DOGE’s spree is packed with 80/20 issues favoring Democrats. It’s open political territory and the only territory available. It may be an overstated critique that Democrats got off track by focusing on priorities that didn’t resonate for ordinary working Americans. But if that’s your theory the current moment is the one you would create in a lab to get back on that track.
More to the point I don’t think Democrats should be caring about the Democratic brand right now. Bloody MAGA’s nose, force turnovers and the brand will take care of itself.