It helped that they had a case: There were legitimate questions about Russia’s influence in the 2016 election—not to mention Russia’s influence over Trump himself—that would soon blossom into a multiyear scandal that eventually culminated in his becoming the second president ever to be impeached. But there were myriad other motivations behind the anti-Trump movement that quickly emerged in 2017, such as his rampant misogyny (roughly a half-million people joined the Women’s March in D.C. the day after his inauguration) and extreme immigration policies (protests against the Muslim ban erupted at airports across the country).
And yet, here we are again. But there’s no sign of a repeat movement against a Trump presidency, when it’s needed now more than ever.
During what will now depressingly be seen as the first part of the Trump era, Trump’s opponents held fast to the belief that he could be ejected from public life—if only they could figure out how to do it. They tried a number of different strategies: Russiagate (which led to his first impeachment); elections (voters rejected Trump himself, and MAGA broadly, in 2018, 2020, and 2022); holding him accountable for January 6 (which led to his second impeachment); and a host of criminal charges, all of which highlighted his innumerable moral, character, and political flaws.
But the focus on Trump himself was also politically convenient. For the last eight years, Democrats have, again and again, run campaigns focused on the existential necessity of defeating and rejecting Trumpism. By rejecting Trump entirely and making every election a referendum on him, Democrats could also conveniently dodge political accountability. Thorny issues like immigration policy could be shunted aside or treated with mealymouthed bromides because there was a fox in the henhouse. That’s not to say that policy issues were ignored completely, but that Democrats consistently made it clear that they thought that Trump was the biggest political problem the country faced, and that nothing else was nearly as urgent.
As Trump returns to the White House, it’s clear that this approach has failed miserably. Trump won not only the Electoral College but the popular vote too—the first Republican to do so since a wartime President George W. Bush in 2004. He is stronger than he has been at any point in his political career. That may change as his administration is beset by factional infighting and voters are reminded of just how insane life under his leadership is. But for now, he has expanded his base while running the most extreme presidential campaign since the advent of the Civil War. Far from ending “American carnage,” Trump is now promising to visit it upon his many imagined enemies.
It’s easy to see why: Democrats have no idea what to do. They missed their opportunity to vanquish Trump and his movement—which has to be the biggest political failure of this century, if not longer. Now Trumpism is the dominant strain of Republican politics for at least a generation, and the task before Democrats is not only different, but what it should always have been: proposing an actual alternative to Trump’s demagogic promises. Not being the party of Trump is no longer enough. Then again, it never was.
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