"At Least He Fights"

A brief history of Donald Trump's takeover of the GOP, and what today's Democrats can learn from it.

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

One way to think about the Democratic Party’s predicament—its struggle to regroup after losing the trust of its own voters—is by analogy to the reconstitution of the GOP after the 2008 election.

Likenesses between the two scenarios have occurred to me before, but the tidiness of it didn’t really hit home until I remembered some of the reporting I and others did in 2015 and 2016, during Donald Trump’s rapid march from underdog, to runaway favorite, to undisputed leader of the Republican Party.

I appreciated what we were all witnessing relatively early. Unspoiled by the bad mental habits that mainstream newsrooms tend to cultivate, I’d been able to study the Republican Party longitudinally. I understood its voters, their media, and how they’d curdled into ressentiment. But real-time reporting was useful to. In just a few short months, Trump converted millions of GOP voters who initially viewed his candidacy with skepticism, and if you asked them why they’d come around, they’d explain tersely.

“He fights.”

“At least he fights.”

He may be imperfect, but he fights.

Turns out that’s all they ever wanted. It’s what they wanted from the moment Barack Obama defeated John McCain. You could hear it from the guests at McCain’s election-night watch party, how they booed when he conceded the race. You could see it as McCain-Palin voters rapidly diffused into the Tea Party. You could feel it as they flirted with reactionary after reactionary in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, desperate for a viable alternative to Mitt Romney, the establishmentarian.

Republican officials wanted so badly to believe they could harness this hallucinatory discontent, and redirect its energy toward their long-running goal of devolving the safety net—a project few of their voters cared about.

Trump’s greatest insight was that these officials had deluded themselves. They didn’t need a policy pretext to savage Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, or the liberal establishment. The right’s fire of cultural hatred burned hot enough on its own.

I would like Democrats to speed run a sane version of this revival story. We’ll be better off if their leaders experience an epiphany now, rather than after losing another election on the basis of the kitchen-table delusion.

PALIN COMPARISON

There are, of course, many differences between the revanchist right and the pro-democracy left.

The pro-democracy left has more-than-valid grievances with Trump and his movement. Their crimes are not imaginary. We’d be right to demand a fighter even if MAGA weren’t rapidly extinguishing freedom in America.

But if you recall the hothouse environment of the 2010s, if you put yourself in the shoes of a Tea Party protester cum die-hard Trump loyalist, you can appreciate that—justified or not—they were no-less consumed by dread in the Obama era than we are now.

Sarah Palin and the early birthers convinced millions of Americans that Obama was a foreign usurper and cultural interloper. Right-wing opinion-makers fanned lies about Obama’s designs on their guns, churches, even physical security. They said Obama carried out false-flag operations to control society, and that military-training exercises were precursors to a coup d’etat.

They watched in horror as the Republican leadership and the party’s rising talent tried to make peace with liberal pluralism: both through a doomed effort to reform the immigration system, and by keeping true-believer xenophobes like Steve King of Iowa at arm’s length.

As right-wing fury mounted, Republican leaders tried to appease it. They humiliated Obama during the 2011 debt limit fight, nearly plunging the U.S. into depression in the process. They heeded charlatans like Ted Cruz and shut down the government in 2013, a doomed-by-design kamikaze mission to burnish Cruz’s credibility with the base and help him raise money. They stole a Supreme Court seat that was Obama’s to fill.

In a way, malcontented Republican voters were lucky to have the leadership they did. If today’s No Kings protesters could influence pliable congressional leaders, they might not be so down on the Democratic Party.

POCKETBOOK ACES

Similarities predominate, though.

Mitch McConnell and John Boehner were about as procedurally radical as they could have been without breaking the country, but it wasn’t just that bad-faith actors like Cruz misled grassroots Republicans about the threat to America and the fecklessness of GOP leadership.

The leadership’s aims were also badly out of alignment with Republican voters.

People like McConnell and Paul Ryan had convinced themselves ordinary Americans sat around their kitchen tables wondering which federal policies were to blame for their difficulty paying bills, and that they could exploit this discontent by scapegoating entitlements and other forms of federal support. In reality, what the median voter and the Tea Party voter had in common was a nonspecific desire to throw the bums out.

See the commonality?

Then Trump came along and gave the lie to all of it. He called himself the “king of debt.” He promised never to cut retirement programs, but ran hard against Obamacare. Under his rule, the GOP might devolve the welfare state. But it would not be as part of a bait and switch, in which empty-suited politicians feigned contempt for liberals to win conservative votes, then set about handing Medicare over to Aetna. Tormenting liberal elites, owning them, erasing the legacy of their cherished Obama—those would be primary objectives. The grassroots right’s intense antipathy to the ACA had essentially nothing to do with Hayekian ideas about prosperity and serfdom, and everything to do with their lizard-brained hatred of Obama himself.

The current leaders of the Democratic Party haven’t experienced a similar awakening. They still want to ride economic discontent to power so they can advance an agenda the public only vaguely grasps. They tell themselves that the fight their voters want is for cheaper energy, cheaper beef, cheaper health care. But mostly they just want a fight. To see Democrats do everything legal in their power to stop Trump or slow him down.

The Democratic consultant class, and the pundits whose ears they bend, want desperately to avoid conflict with Trump over any issue that plays to GOP strength. They’ve fully forgotten that Republicans rose from the devastation of the Bush presidency not by ducking the Dem-coded issue of health care, but by throwing everything at it. Democratic voters want to see a similar fearlessness.

Trump was never popular, in part because of his moral depravity, and in part because he pandered to GOP voters with a sadist’s glee. With all of their resentments, perhaps that was the only way to earn their loyalty. But he didn’t need to be popular, he just needed to beat his opponent, and they believed he’d do whatever it took.

My strong sense is that Democratic voters will rally behind whoever can persuade them that they intend to fight for real. Even if it’s an imperfect candidate like Gavin Newsom, or a repeat candidate like Beto O’Rourke, or a billionaire like JB Pritzker. At least they fight. The question before us today is whether Democratic congressional leaders will work with or against them along the way.