Your Rectitude Isn't Helping

To heighten the contradictions, you must first expose them.

Gavin Newsom is getting a lot of attention for something, and it pisses me off, because frankly I deserve credit for it.

Or, okay, here’s a humbler and more constructive way of putting it: Gavin Newsom is doing something leading Democrats could and should have done a long time ago, but they were too busy listening to the wrong people.

Newsom is doing this:

He’s doing it over and over again.

And in so doing he’s providing a good template and setting a good attitudinal example for other Democrats. But he’s also teaching us a lesson about the mistakes of the past. Democrats should have adopted an approach like this years ago. I don’t mean in the sense that hindsight is 20/20, but that they actively chose not to do this. They chose to let Donald Trump’s volatile temperament and general ridiculousness speak for themselves, in implicit contrast to their buttoned-up normalcy. It was a mistake.

So I’m writing now to encourage Newsom to dismiss liberal critics who helped set the tone for Democrats during Trump’s first term. Don’t listen to anyone who says dial it back. Ignore the strained contrarianism of The Atlantic, which scoffs, “What political project [these posts] serve other than entrenching Trump’s style is obscure.” Ignore the dead-enderism of liberal rectitude politics, the consultants who imagine celestial referees will stand before the electorate and declare Democrats winner of the decency contest.

Satirizing Trump in this way, by essentially holding up a mirror, serves the express purpose of startling people out of their desensitization. It works, and is working, on two levels: First, by demonstrating that Trump can be effectively mocked. Second by exposing the inconsistency or bad faith of everyone who’s given Trump a pass. Newsom is also holding a mirror up to establishment figures who only expect comity from Democrats, and to Republican propagandists—like Dana Perino—who pretend to be outraged, while simultaneously cheering Trump’s depravity.

The absurdity is the point, you might say. And it is absurd. But it’s also valuable. If there’s a problem with m̶y̶ Newsom’s innovation it’s that it comes late, and we need much more of it.

PLAYING BIDEN BOOK

The most hope I ever had for a new dawn of assertivist liberalism was in 2020, before the election, and it was because of things like this. Joe Biden, who at the time could still extemporize, was about to debate Donald Trump, and Jill Biden—serving as a campaign surrogate—rightly pre-empted all false equivalence between her husband’s “gaffes” and Trump’s total indiscipline on every front.

Biden went on to win the debate, and then the election. But after that, this spirit just disappeared.

Instead of keeping memories of the Trump catastrophe fresh in the public mind, the administration encouraged forgetting. Instead of governing confidently, and shaming the press for holding the parties to different standards, they chose to hide from the press as much as possible.

When disaster first struck red America under his watch, Biden would have been well advised, and well within his rights, to insist on a reckoning. He could have withheld money, or vetoed supplemental relief on purely partisan grounds. When Republicans caterwauled hypocritically, he could have come in for the kill: Trump did this to blue states, and you applauded it. Under my watch the federal government will be there for every state, but Congress must now change the law so that Republicans can never betray their fellow Americans again.

This, again, isn’t 20/20 hindsight. It was a point I pressed with Democrats, publicly and privately, throughout his presidency.

They either never considered it, or they dismissed it out of hand for its lack of high-mindedness. And now look where we are.

WALKING CONTRADICTIONS

Spoiler: We’re in the midst of a dictatorial takeover of the country. And yet just a single high-profile elected Democrat has gone out of his way to heighten contradictions, both within MAGA, and between MAGA and our free society.

Plenty of other Democrats should get in on Newsom’s mockery game, but they should go much farther.

One idea I had early on, as Trump set about unraveling democratic alliances and forging new ones with gangster regimes, was for Democrats to borrow a page from Tom Cotton. In 2015, when the Obama administration was on the cusp of a nuclear disarmament deal with Iran, Cotton got all 46 of his Republican Senate colleagues to sign a letter to the leaders of the Islamic Republic, hoping to subvert the negotiations. They promised (credibly, it turns out) that a future Republican president would simply tear up any agreement.

Two can still play at that game—not just in the realm of diplomacy, but wherever it’s possible to limit damage, or change the incentives of Trump’s counterparties.

The closest today’s Democrats have come was when Elizabeth Warren wrote this letter to Paramount chair Shari Redstone warning her that settling a frivolous lawsuit with Donald Trump in exchange for merger approval might constitute bribery. Only two other senators signed the letter. Redstone and Trump went on to complete their corrupt transaction.

It’s a shame, because if Democrats could maintain a united front, they could make all kinds of people and entities think twice about getting into bed with Trump. They could shoot across the bow of:

• Qatar, which bribed Trump with a fancy airplane;

• Law firms that caved to Trump and are now working for him for free;

• Individuals, investors, and companies funneling money to Trump through crypto, stock purchases, and real estate;

• Red states participating in the occupation of DC;

• Lawyers, administrators, and partisan goons working in federal law enforcement.

Trump may have convinced all of these actors that they have a lock on permanent impunity. Soon there will be no more politics. Democrats will never be allowed to return to power. It’s certainly what he wants them to think.

The Democratic counter-message to them should be blunt: You will learn just how wrong you are the hard way. When the time comes, there will be turnabout, or another kind of reckoning, and you will regret your complicity.

Democrats can assert themselves in other ways, too. I wrote about some here; and talked about others here. But where they choose to assert is in some sense less important than that they choose to assert. If they wait until election day 2026 when masked ICE agents have swarmed polling places in California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and New York, it will likely be too late.