The Democrats' Lost September

You guys awake?

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

With apologies for harshing your Friday, here’s an unpleasant thought: If Democrats lose in 2024, I think we might look back on September 2023 as a squandered opportunity to set the election on a better course and save the country.

Let me qualify that by adding: it’s a big “might.” Thirteen months is far enough off for any number of developments to jeopardize Joe Biden’s re-election. The economy could stop growing or shrink; Donald Trump could be convicted at trial then lose or cede the nomination to a Republican candidate with less baggage; Biden could say “Latinx” on a hot mic and suffer instantaneous, irreversible collapse in the heartland. The future is unwritten. 

But the past few weeks have been inauspicious. If we think of this as the starting point of a year-long campaign, the past four weeks have made two things very clear: 1) Biden will have to build a lead, because—frighteningly—he won’t begin with one; 2) His allies have shown little indication in the past month that they know how to do that.

There have been some bright spots, culminating this week, after a union pressure campaign, in Biden’s Detroit picket-line walk with the United Auto Workers. But by and large the apparatus that should be whirring up to fight back as House Republicans pummel Biden relentlessly is groaning and unable to muster any output.

Here are just a few things that have happened since the unofficial end of summer:

• A judge in New York found evidence of Trump’s fraudulent practices so overwhelming that he deemed a trial unnecessary, and stripped Trump of control over several of his properties.

• In that same fraud case, we learned that Trump boasted under oath that he overvalues his properties because he knows his Saudi patrons will overpay for them—revealing consciousness of and comfort with his value as a foreign bribery target.

• Those same Saudi’s have throttled global oil supply, making gas prices tick upward.

• Trump threatened retiring Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley (a likely witness in the federal January 6 trial) with death.

• Trump leveled similar threats against media outlets, and singled out NBC News and MSNBC in particular.

• Trump tried to seize moderate ground on abortion (that is, relative to the rest of the GOP) by coming out against six-week bans and trashing Republicans for the callous way they talk about reproductive rights.

• Trump fooled much of the media into thinking he supported the United Auto Workers strike more than Biden, then traveled to the midwest to rally at a nonunion shop at the invitation of the company’s executives.

• Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) was indicted on felony bribery charges, filled with evidence of cartoonish corruption.

• Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) wore some ill-fitting casual clothes on the Senate floor.

By my count, Democrats frittered away every opportunity to exploit or push back against these developments. It was almost as though they forgot they are participants in a campaign that will make or break American democracy and instead took a lengthy nap under a tree. A tortoise and the hare parable for perilous times, except this tortoise is rich, conniving, and always cheats.

I’ll return to the Democrats in a moment, but for my money the most revealing development of all had nothing to do with Trump, or the Democratic Party. Instead it was how Republicans reacted to the discovery that Menendez appears to be on the take from foreign interests who’ve plied him with cash and gold bouillon. 

On almost any other timeline, Republicans would’ve tried to make not just Menendez but every Democrat in Washington call to mind sleazy machine pols whose pockets jingle and spill over as they walk because they’re stuffed with bribes. But not on this timeline. Not on the timeline where the GOP has closed ranks around a growing list of crooks, including George Santos and Clarence Thomas, with Trump at the center. The Republican Party has spent years preemptively sanctifying all of its internal corruption, dismissing all evidence as the product of frame-up jobs and media fabrication, because their fealty to Trump is not compatible with upholding the rule of law or accountability for lower-ranking members. And so with the party fully at war with the Justice Department and the old standards of ethical leadership, they can’t now claim to say the feds have the goods in this instance, and that Menendez must thus relinquish public office. 

They’ve thus found themselves actively defending Menendez and discouraging Democrats from pressuring him to retire.

It’s a Chinese finger trap of corruption. They can’t pile on Menendez without raising obvious questions about their tolerance for Trump, Thomas, Santos, et al; but they also hate the idea of a split screen where Democrats clean house on one side, while Republicans bask in criminality on the other. 

In grappling with this dilemma, they have advertised to Democrats that they understand their deep rot of corruption to represent a serious political risk to the entire party. But it’s only a risk if Democrats can bring themselves to exploit it. 

Democrats are not in the exploiting business. 

Most of them by now have called on Menendez to resign, though few with the quick and righteous clarity of John Fetterman. They can not make Menendez resign, of course, but they appear to have made him a political dead-man walking, confronted with a brand new primary challenger, stripped of all institutional support.

But apart from that, they have made almost no use of their official or agenda-setting powers. They have scarcely mentioned Trump’s downward legal spiral, or his related, deepening posture of menace. They have not pressed publicly for repercussions for his pretrial abuses, from his threats against witnesses to his (apparent?) illegal purchase of a firearm.

Over the course of this month, they could have used their official tools—their control of the Senate floor and its committees—to draw attention to the unacceptable risk Trump poses to the lives of his enemies, including Milley, because (as they have surely noticed) the mainstream news isn’t drawn to that story on its own.

They could have divided the Republican Party and exposed the fraudulence of its leader by taking his feints toward workers and women at face value and making Republican senators vote on them. The leader of your party thinks six-week abortion bans are bad? Here’s legislation to pre-empt all of them around the country—let’s vote. The leader of your party wants people to believe he supports striking autoworkers? Ok, let’s advance the PRO Act. 

They could have exposed the corrupt Trump-Saudi ties instead of advancing a highly deferential security guarantee for those same Saudi royals.

With a little creative thought, Democrats might have flipped the storylines that have played out to Trump’s benefit in this opening sprint. They could have served to denude him and pit him against his own party. Instead, they voted unanimously to make Fetterman wear a suit.