Trump's Last Enemy Is The State Itself
He's even trained the smear machine and lawlessness that brought him to power on Social Security, all while Democrats fight the last war.
Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress drove home the point that he is louder, more dishonest, and more gratuitously partisan than everyone else in politics. If you didn’t know that already, I envy you; it’s been his whole thing for years.
Even in his first term, when he would go through the motions with ever so slightly more gravitas, it was hard to explain why Democrats would subject themselves to his abuse rituals. Today, he’s lost all inhibition, and is in the midst of spree crimes against the government and Constitution. He shows open contempt for Congress and the courts and the entire American project of the past 80 years. For these reasons, it seemed obvious to me that Democrats should boycott the speech en masse. Refuse to attend, or stage an early walkout, and use the opportunity to counter-program him—truth, head-to-head with his lies.
It wasn’t to be. Democratic leaders lacked either the imagination or the fortitude to build support within their caucuses for an extraordinary statement of no-confidence. They instead encouraged members to attend and listen patiently, as if Trump were any normal president delivering an unremarkable address. And so members, under weak leadership, had to fend for themselves. A small number chose not to attend. Another small group walked out mid-speech. Rep. Al Green (D-TX) stood alone in giving Republicans a taste of their own medicine, derailing Trump’s remarks briefly with angry reminders that Trump lacks a popular mandate. Most Democrats sat quietly, including as Trump smeared their colleagues by name. Some wore pink for Women’s History Month. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) appeared on Fox News and conceded, “I may disagree with the president, but I respect the office of the president. I'm probably not gonna be jumping up applauding a lot, but I owe him his due as president. The president has made great, great progress on border crossings. That's something we ought to celebrate."
It was a limp response to mounting fascism. To see why, just switch settings and ascribe the same behavior to German Social Democrats resisting the enablement of Hitler: One guy shook his cane, a few others dressed in loud colors. Herr Warner spoke with Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft correspondents and thanked the Fuhrer for the on-time trains.
Even after Tuesday’s spectacle, many in the liberal elite and the Democratic leadership still believe studied submissiveness is the best form of resistance. A “dignified presence,” as Hakeem Jeffries put it.
They theorize that defeating Trump requires capturing the center, which abhors showy antics and partisan rancor. They reason on surer footing that Trump’s historic unpopularity is to some degree an outgrowth of his vitriol and dishonesty.
What Democrats miss in returning over and over again to the same line of strategic thinking is that, unpopular or not, Trump won the election. What Trump realizes, perhaps only instinctively, is that American politics is zero sum—which means his most elemental task isn’t to be popular, but to be less unpopular than the opposition. Defame and degrade them at every turn, and people might grow weary of all the unpleasantness, but so long as his lies seep into mass consciousness, it hardly matters.
This is why I suspect at least some Democrats will come around to the view that attending the address was a mistake, just as they’re saddened to find that their faith in Trump’s cabinet nominees was misplaced.
But as an institutional matter, it’s unclear whether the party understands what Trump’s insight means. What it says about how to oppose him. Whether leaders have the first clue how to drag his approval ratings down further, rather than “play dead” and hope he self-destructs. Trump may self-destruct. But this aimlessness is still a big problem. Because he isn’t just deploying his defamatory tactics against what remains of the Democratic Party. He’s deploying them against the state itself.
FALSE SENSE OF SOCIAL SECURITY
Many of the same Democrats who equate seizing the center with supine politics are on firmer ground when they note that Trump seized the center by renouncing decades of orthodox GOP hostility to Social Security and Medicare.
But as Trump voters across the country keep discovering, Trump didn’t undertake any principled shifts. He just lies a lot. He lied about Project 2025. He lied about opposing a national abortion ban. And Tuesday marked the big reveal: He lied about Social Security.
Trump’s real superpower isn’t moderation, it’s convincing various competitors to underreact to his promiscuous lying. But the plan seems to be to do to Social Security what he’s already done to Democrats: drown the public in propaganda about it, and defeat it by default.
I first suspected this turn was coming when I read a recent interview Ross Douthat—the increasingly pro-Trump New York Times columnist—conducted with Marc Andreesen—the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and right-wing fanatic.
Andreesen’s big thesis was that voters could be made to turn on beloved universal programs like Social Security, and on smaller-but-politically-bulletproof programs like funding for students with disabilities, if the programs themselves were ever “aired in public.”
This was one of those moments where being a reporter and taking an interest in substance paid off, because the ulterior motive became clear to me immediately.