Why The State Of The Union Boycotters Have It Right
And what they can teach the rest of the party about winning friends and influencing people.
Don’t look now, but Democrats are divided again—this time over whether to dignify Donald Trump’s State of the Union address with their attendance.
Many mainline Democrats—not just true-blue progressives—will boycott the speech, and I hope that by the time the doors to the House chamber are sealed shut, all or nearly all of them will participate. Even the frontline members.
But they won’t. The Democratic leadership, as it has every time Donald Trump has delivered an address to a joint session of Congress, wants members to show up in “silent defiance.”
“It is my view that you don’t let anyone ever run you off of your block,” Jeffries said, spinning submission as a show of strength.
Jeffries and Chuck Schumer invited Virginia’s new governor, Abigail Spanberger, to deliver a traditional official response to the State of the Union address, and some on the left have interpreted it as a sign that she’s sided with party leadership and the norms police over more righteous party actors.
That’s the divide.
I don’t really want to waste anyone’s time hyperventilating about the Democrats who follow Jeffries’s lead. We shouldn’t treat symbolic gestures as Critical Litmus Tests, particularly when we know many Democrats will fail them. That’s just casting about for reasons to be mad. I’ve wanted Dems to boycott Trump’s speeches since 2017. I wish more of them had seen the wisdom in that sooner. I also know that this isn’t the biggest deal in the world.
But I do want to say a bit about why the boycotters have the better argument—and about how this dilemma, and similar dilemmas, map on to the larger debate within the party over how to become less reviled.
If you agree with the rest of the piece, I hope you’ll share this article with your member of Congress—particularly if they plan to attend.
If you don’t, I’d love to hear why in the comments section. If there are better arguments than Jeffries’s lurking out there, I’d love to hear them. No bad ideas in a brainstorm.
The difficulty with State of the Union in particular is that the audience in the chamber is captive. If Democrats commit to maintaining a “dignified presence” while Trump speaks, as Jeffries requested last year, they will sit there unresponsively absorbing abuse and lies.
That leaves them in an inherently weak posture. The fact of being the out party doesn’t make a party weak, per se, but this particular ritual of minoritarian politics asks the out party to make itself vulnerable. That’s unpleasant enough under normal circumstances, but it’s intolerable when the president is a predator. The only reason to agree to participate in the ritual is to honor a dying and unimportant norm at the expense of one’s own dignity.
But there’s more going on here. I don’t think the Dems who plan to attend think this norm is very important. I think they think “maintaining a dignified presence” is good politics in and of itself.
In this, at least, Democrats are Trump’s polar opposite.
Trump would never willingly submit to being a bump on a log the way Jeffries thinks congressional Democrats should. There’s reason to believe his captivity at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, where Barack Obama mocked him mercilessly, was a fount of the wrath that fueled his electoral ambitions.
Democrats turn the other cheek too much, but Trump never lets anything go.
That’s not to say Trump never backs down. He backs down pretty often. It’s that when he does back down, he immediately begins plotting to get one over on whoever outplayed him. To settle the score. There are rare exceptions. He can’t really “get one over” on anonymous bond traders when they force him to back down, or on every single member of Congress (save one) for voting to compel the release of the Epstein files. But vindictiveness is the rule. He’s assigned his entire administration to harass Kilmar Abrego Garcia for no reason other than that Garcia was rendered to a torture prison by mistake, and waged a successful legal fight to be returned to the U.S. Garcia has volunteered to be deported to Costa Rica; Costa Rica has agreed to accept him; but Trump wants Garcia shipped somewhere much more forbidding. For the crime of beating Trump in court, Garcia must suffer.
This is sociopathic as a principle of public service, but it’s legible as a human instinct—particularly if you’ve been led to believe Garcia is the bad guy.
Why does Donald Trump seem teflon? Because his supporters are numerous and devoted. Why are they so devoted? Because Trump never drops the ruse for long. We know he tried to overturn the 2020 election; we know that when he failed he incited a mob riot at the Capitol; we know that, from there, he hunkered down at the White House, then fled Washington without attending Joe Biden’s inauguration. He still refuses to concede he lost; and, since winning the presidency again, he’s been on a campaign of “revenge” against the people who upheld the law and Constitution.
We can stipulate that this is all very wrong, incompatible with true public service. And we know that Trump had egotistical motivation for doing all of it. He knew he’d lost, but couldn’t accept it, so he threw a tantrum—indeed, he’s been tantruming so long he may have retconned himself. But bracket all of that, and consider this manic conduct from the perspective of people who adore him. Whatever psychic needs he’s attending to, his behavior would make much more sense if he were really the victim of a severe abuse of power. If Joe Biden had mounted a coup, and governed as a dictator for four years, and everyone in Washington and in courts across the country went along with it.
If someone steals from you, and nobody takes your pleas seriously, and you exhaust all your legal options… when suddenly an opportunity arises to set things right—you see the thief riding your bike down the street—what should you do? Well, confronting him might be risky. It might not be worth it. Discretion may be the better part of valor. But who wouldn’t sympathize with you? Who wouldn’t respect your courage?
There’s something respectable about the sort of person who doesn’t take being a victim lying down.
Indeed, in many circumstances, making people pay a price for bad conduct is both righteous and necessary for orderliness in a free society. With Trump, it’s almost always the other way around, where he’s tormenting people (like Letitia James, like Mark Kelly, like Kilmar Abrego Garcia) who were in right from the jump. But he’s acting on an important insight about human nature: If you want people to admire you, stand up for yourself.
Trump rides this insight off the rails because he’s a bad man. Because he fabricates aggrievement. He is both aggressor and score settler. A would-be pickpocket who skulks off after you catch him in the act to go slash your tires instead.
Democrats should not be like that. But they should be a bit more like a righteous version of him. They should abandon the idea that there’s political power in doing the reverse: under-reacting even when in the right. Democrats have been less reactive and theatrical about partisanship than Republicans my whole life, but their stoicism in the Trump years strikes me as an artifact of Barack Obama’s unique influence on the party—particularly in the way he dealt with GOP heckling and abuse.
Obama took everything in stride. Last year, when Rep. Al Green (D-TX) heckled Trump from the House floor, Republicans removed him from the chamber, and censured him. In 2009, when Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) shouted “you lie!” at Obama during a joint address, there were no consequences. Wilson turned it into a fundraising opportunity.
Once upon a time, we understood this aspect of Obama’s persona as a regrettable constraint of racist double standards. Republicans wouldn’t have treated Obama with such disrespect if he weren’t black, and Obama wouldn’t have had to exhibit so much restraint if he were white. He developed monastic self-control because if he spoke his mind, too many Americans would see an angry black man lashing out and nothing more. Remember his anger translator? It’s no coincidence that they wrote this bit late in his second term.
But because Obama was politically successful, we reinterpreted his emotional unflappability as a political superpower.
I used to see this meme all the time.
And I should concede, Obama’s coolness served genuinely useful purposes. Shooting from the hip can be reckless. Democrats are panicky, and panicking accomplishes nothing. But it was also cope: Obama frequently allowed partisan abuse to serve as a drag on his presidency because he believed he had no better option. I tend to think he was correct about this—right-wing backlash to his comments about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the killing of Trayvon Martin constitutes strong evidence that he would have had less room to maneuver if he stood up for himself more often.
But a drag is a drag.
Today’s Democratic timidity is the legacy of learning from the meme rather than from careful study of Obama’s experience. Too many Democrats continue to emulate what worked for him uniquely. The party is filled and staffed with people who took inspiration from him, who see quiet persistence as an elegant shield against dirty tricks, when in reality it was a least-worst option.
It is clearly not a shield. This is a problem in and of itself, but perhaps particularly so in the era of parasocial media: If tens of millions of people follow politics as fantasy baseball or reality TV, taking cheap shots in stride will not serve a super power. Most people will clock it as an indication of cowardice or helplessness.
The purpose of boycotting the State of the Union isn’t just to convey things about Trump—about how low his character is, or how unworthy he is of his office. It’s for Democrats to convey something about themselves and how they will respond in general to being pushed around.
They’re starting to learn. It’s too bad it took 10 years.
Wouldn't showing up...then walking out during his lie fest be more effective?
Great stuff. It made me think, Trump at least always gives his base the SHOW they want. He won’t deliver for ordinary Americans, but he will perform for them. It often feels like our representatives won’t even do the performance part. Not only do Jeffries and Schumer have no ideas, they aren’t even interested in pretending to care about *displays* of resistance that might make their most engaged democratic voters feel seen.