The article examines the Democratic Party's initial response to President Trump's policies, highlighting the internal division and struggle to formulate a cohesive opposition strategy. It points to the lack of a clear message and leadership in the face of Trump's aggressive and divisive agenda.
For those who closely followed President Donald Trump ’s personnel decisions in the months following his November victory, not much of what has happened in the past week since his inauguration came as much of a surprise. The Trump administration has so far been exactly as promised, which is to say, horrifying. It’s still early, but many elected Democrats , perhaps still in shock and unable to find consensus, have as a group not been very effective messengers of opposition.
That the party is momentarily adrift is hardly surprising. Having leaned so hard on defending democracy during the campaign only to see voters narrowly choose the autocrats, Democrats were left without a unifying message, let alone a consensus messenger, to describe the new president and his allies. Are Republicans grifting billionaires? Corrupt authoritarians? Violent extremists? Foot soldiers in a plot to effectively reverse the second half of the 20th century, by executive order, of nondiscrimination policies in federal contracting, which date back to President Lyndon Johnson? But with leading Democrats in what the New York Timesdescribes as a state of disarray, the Trump administration, specifically through the Office of Management and Budget, is freezing nearly all federal funds, endangering everything from cancer research and food assistance to small businesses, schools, and nonprofits that rely on the government’s money. Schumer showed the most fight that he has since Inauguration Day in the speech, saying plainly and accurately, “Last night, President Trump plunged the country into chaos,” and calling the move “a dagger at the heart of the average American family in red states and blue states, in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas. It is just outrageous.” “This decision is lawless, dangerous, destructive, cruel. It’s illegal. It’s unconstitutional,” he said. It was a welcome shift in tone from one of distractible and bemused worry to urgent alarm and outrage. But the presser was notable for who wasn’t there: Any Democrat from a swing state who has been trying to present a conciliatory and collaborative posture toward the new administration. Schumer was joined on stage by Sens. Patty Murray, Amy Klobuchar, Chris Murphy, and Andy Kim—all from solidly blue states in safe seats. The minority leader and this group of senators need to get the other, growing camp to join them—so that Democrats can combat the Trump administration with one voice, rather than seem like they are so divided that they cannot possibly offer a coherent alternative vision for the country. The major division in the party today is between swing state Democrats like newly elected Sens. Ruben Gallego and Elissa Slotkin, who seem eager to distance themselves from the party’s more liberal affiliations, and their colleagues in deep-blue states who don’t need to worry about losing their next general election. The purple state crowd seems to think it can diffuse the GOP’s temporary advantage on immigration issues by signing on to legislation that cedes enormous ground on enforcement without any offsetting gains on long-standing party priorities like a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. These Democrats in the Senate spent the last two weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency propping up the effort to pass theand seemed to be in no position to offer resistance once Trump was sworn in. Thirteen Senate Democrats including Raphael Warnock and Slotkinto Majority Leader John Thune on Jan. 22 saying that they “stand ready to work with you” to find “bipartisan solutions for our outdated immigration system.” At least for the time being, Trump and his allies look like they have a working, filibuster-proof majority to pursue draconian border and immigration policies in the Senate. That is a recipe for demoralizing your own voters with very little upside. It is certainly true that some polling supports an enforcement-first approach, even among Democrats, and trying to stay on the right side of public opinion is an understandable impulse for purple state senators. But this capitulation is unwise for two reasons. The first is that party after party on the European center left and center right has tried to capture the zeitgeist by moving right on immigration only to find that the publicanyway. As a political maneuver it has been unsuccessful on its own terms and did not seem to help Kamala Harris one bit in November. The second reason is that while it feels like the nativist zealots have all the momentum right now, polling on immigration is not only volatile and contradictory but vulnerable to emotion-driven shifts
DEMOCRATS TRUMP IMMIGRATION DIVISION OPPOSITION
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