James Carville is wrong. This is no time for Democrats to “roll over and play dead,” as he advised last week in The New York Times. Sure, the veteran operative has a point that “the Republican Party flat out sucks at governing.” But standing back as Donald Trump and company completely screw things up, in hopes of making the American people “miss” Democrats, is a dangerous course of action.
If Democrats don’t protect norms and intuitions, no one else will. You can’t count on Senator Ted Cruz to defend free and fair elections, or Speaker Mike Johnson to stand up for LGBTQ+ rights. And it’s unlikely Senator Susan Collins, despite her many concerns, will hold the line. The fact that Trump was able to muscle through controversial Cabinet picks like Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Pete Hegseth shows how the party will do whatever he wants. While there is no serious resistance in the Republican Party, there is the pathetic hope that if you give Trump what he wants, he’ll spare you a primary challenge. GOP elected officials seem to care more about keeping their seats in Congress regardless of whether the institution loses its constitutional authority.
Maybe wealthy people can stomach a period of playing dead, but try convincing Americans who will bear the brunt of the economic “hardship” Elon Musk warned about before the election. For them, a “strategic political retreat,” as Carville suggests, looks more like abandonment in a time of need.
Republicans go on offense and play to their base whether in power or not, while Democrats seem hostile to their own. Think of the 2024 election cycle when Kamala Harris’s campaign bet big that support from Liz Cheney was going to draw significant numbers of disaffected (non-MAGA) Republicans, even as there were warning signs about diminished support among core Democratic constituencies. In the end, Harris won about 75 million votes, a drop from Joe Biden’s 81 million in 2020 (all while nearly 90 million eligible voters stayed home). As The New York Times noted in December, data suggested “that most voters who turned out in 2020 but stayed home in 2024 voted for Biden in 2020—but about half of them, and maybe even a slight majority, appear to have backed Trump this year.”
The base of the Democratic Party is mad. They aren’t going to be satisfied with cringe nicknames and punching left. They don’t want to see leaders lying down, but out there making noise on TV and social media. Sure, there are electeds pushing back, like Senator Chris Murphy; governors Maura Healey, Janet Mills, and JB Pritzker; and representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, and Maxwell Frost. And billionaire Mark Cuban is out there offering support to laid-off government tech workers. But party leadership isn’t meeting the moment and speaking to the deep frustration across the country.
This past weekend saw protests at national parks in response to job cuts and layoffs. Between 1,000 and 3,000 people protested in the Vermont ski town that JD Vance was vacationing in, according to protest organizers. Nine people were arrested at a Tesla dealership in New York, while there were protests against Musk at a SpaceX facility in Hawthorne, Texas.
Democrats seem more focused on getting their message right and then getting a message out—even as there’s clearly a desire for the party to be more adversarial. According to a CNN poll, “Nearly three quarters (73%) of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents surveyed said the party’s caucus in Congress is doing too little to oppose Trump.”
It’s not enough to put out a statement, either, as Democrats need to break through in today’s fractured media ecosystem. Trump floods the zone with everything from social media posts to attention-grabbing moments on camera, such as last week’s fight with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while Musk posts nonstop on X. Why aren’t Democrats holding daily press conferences to spell out exactly what Trump and DOGE are doing to the federal government? (Andrew Cuomo found success on this front in the early days of COVID.)
It’s striking to see who is out there these days. Take Chris Kluwe, a writer, activist, and former NFL punter, who says he was fired from his high school football coaching job after protesting a MAGA slogan on a plaque at a local library. “I think there is an undercurrent of righteous anger running through the country right now because as Americans, we see our elected representatives (from both sides of the aisle) unable to meet the moment, and we expect better from them,” Kluwe texted me. “They are the ones we’ve elected to hold power, and if they are unwilling to use that power to defend our democracy from a would-be tyrant and his petty thugs, then it is incumbent on us as citizens to stand and deliver.”
We haven’t even started to fully experience the hardship that Musk has promised, but the public markets can already tell how unpopular this is all going to be. Tesla stock was down 28% for the month of February. Meanwhile, CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten highlighted last month how Musk’s popularity had plunged, with the majority (53%) opposing him. “They don’t want this! The American people don’t want this!” Enten said. “No, no, no! Just 36% of independents support the idea of Elon Musk having a key role in the Trump administration.”
Democrats need to flood the zone with facts, with possible solutions to these cuts, and with an honest appraisal of what’s happening right now. Rolling over and playing dead, even if considered as a short-term solution, could be seen as the opposition party giving up—and essentially giving a green light to Republicans to do long-lasting damage.
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