On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed the Laken Riley Act, which would allow Homeland Security to detain and deport undocumented immigrants who have merely been charged—not convicted—of minor, nonviolent crimes. If the bill also prevails in the Senate, where it is expected to advance later this week, Donald Trump would sign it immediately upon taking office—at which point we could see people deported without due process, simply because a cop alleges that they stole, say, a tube of toothpaste from CVS. It’s also easy to imagine how MAGA-friendly law enforcement and prosecutors could take advantage of such a law, exaggerating or even fabricating charges in the hopes of nabbing an “illegal.”
Despite this, 48 Democrats joined Republicans in passing the bill. One of them, Representative Tom Suozzi of New York, recently wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which he argued, “Only by working together to find compromise on parts of the president-elect’s agenda can we make progress for Americans who are clearly demanding change in the economy, immigration, crime and other top issues.” Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is undoubtedly in agreement. Not only is he a co-sponsor of the Senate’s version of the Laken Riley Act but in the past couple of months he has been promoting himself as a supposedly “responsible,” “reasonable” Democrat intent on finding compromises with Donal Trump and the Republicans. After the House passed the bill, he joined Republican Senator Katie Britt on Fox News for a Bret Baier segment titled “Common Ground,” during which he repeated Trump’s lies about migrants, declaring, “We have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of migrants here illegally, that have [been] convicted of crimes.… I don’t know why anybody thinks that it’s controversial that they all need to go.”
We’ve seen a similar tone from many other Democrats since Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump—and not just the usual moderates, but also progressive torchbearers like Bernie Sanders. He has been offering to work with Trump to cap credit card fees and raise the minimum wage (good luck with those). He told Business Insider last month that Elon Musk is a “very smart guy” whom he’d like to work with on cutting defense spending. Though he criticized Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiratorial thinking and views on vaccines, Sanders seemed eager to work with him on other health-related issues.
It’s as if Democrats have become accomplices in their perceived fait accompli. Many of them have taken it as a given that defaulting to an oppositional stance is antithetical to democratic principles and that it is incumbent upon them, following an election loss, to find compromises with Republicans in order to achieve progress where possible. They’re ignoring, however, the actual dynamics of the situation—namely that, by helping Trump achieve victories, they will only increase his power and influence and thereby advance Trumpism. This is the Trump paradox.
The list of Democrats who are falling into this trap grows by the day. As Mica Soellner and Melanie Zanona reported Wednesday for Punchbowl News, “House and Senate Democrats are actively weighing ways to work with the Trump administration.… Several Democrats told us they’re open to teaming up with Trump but made clear they’re picking and choosing their spots. Some potential areas of common ground Democrats listed include the border and immigration, economic issues and the so-called ‘DOGE’ effort, which will aim to root out wasteful government spending.” This is a worrying list of issues. It suggests not that Democrats and Republicans will compromise but that Democrats will capitulate to the Republican position out of deference to what they imagine the public sentiment to be on those issues.
“We should pursue every opportunity around border security and immigration reform,” Representative Greg Landsman of Ohio told Punchbowl. “That’s number one, and number two is getting costs down.” While the border is an important issue, no doubt, more walls and more guards won’t solve the problem; what the country needs is more legal infrastructure, starting with more judges, to process the massive backlog of cases. Moreover, immigration pales in comparison to problems like health care and gun violence, not to mention the threats to free speech and democracy posed by Trump and his acolytes. As for getting costs down, that should be pretty easy, since they’re already down, real wages have generally outpaced inflation, and the economy left to Trump by Biden is extraordinarily healthy, especially compared to other industrialized nations.
We might expect such rhetoric from a Democratic congressman in southwest Ohio, but even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that working-class pugilist from the Bronx, opined to Punchbowl, “The reason why I think oftentimes Democrats occasionally lose elections is because we’re too reflexively anti-Republican, and that we don’t lean into an ambitious vision for working-class Americans strongly enough.” It was the Democrats, mind you, who included $83 billion under Biden’s American Rescue Act to shore up pensions for American workers, including over a million Teamsters who then largely turned their back on Kamala Harris in November. As for her contention that Democrats are too reflexively anti-Republican, well, there’s much to reflexively oppose. Republicans are the party of bigotry, sophistry, and cruelty. And they’re certainly reflexively anti-Democratic (not to mention antidemocratic).
Ocasio-Cortez is not out of line with other New York pols, by the way: As Politico noted on Wednesday, Governor Kathy Hochul and numerous state legislators have backed away from confronting Trump, mistakenly calculating that voters will respect them more if only they cower and kowtow a bit more.
What a difference four years—and an election decided by fewer than two and a half million votes—can make. So long, #Resistance. Hello, #Surrender.
I’m not arguing that Democrats should be as uncompromising and unreasonable as Republicans—just that they should recognize that every victory they achieve and every compromise they make under a Trump administration comes with a surcharge, and that surcharge is that they’ll be making Trumpism more acceptable and further embedding it in our political system and collective psyche. A couple of weeks ago, Fetterman said to ABC News, “If you’re rooting against the president, you’re rooting against the nation.” But what if (as is the case) Trump is truly bad for the country? Why, then, would we root for him?
Many Americans have already been convinced by the right-wing media echo chamber that January 6 was just a “protest” rather than a coup and that Trump has been the innocent victim of “lawfare.” According to The Washington Post, only 51 percent of Americans think Trump ordering his supporters to march on the Capitol threatened democracy. Seventy-two percent of Republicans said it’s “time to move on,” as if it was really no big deal (compared to 14 percent of Democrats). It demonstrates the power of right-wing drumbeating. Any victory you give to Trump will be similarly echoed. Democrats have taken it on faith that the American people understand basic facts and know what’s best for the country. The truth is closer to what political writer Kurt Andersen has concluded: “Being an American means believing absolutely anything you want to believe. We’ve now taken that to such an extreme that a lot of us are unhinged from reality.”
The Democrats took from the election that they weren’t effective messengers to the American people, and although there’s truth in that, they haven’t considered the possibility that, in order to defeat the Republican Party and Trumpism, they have to change tactics and more aggressively counter the right-wing disinformation machine. Democrats are still suffering from unchecked faith in the system and the belief that the American people are informed and capable of making wise decisions. From that belief they conclude that, if they appear reasonable enough, or if (as Sanders is trying to prove) Trump appears hypocritical enough, the American people will reward the Democrats and punish Republicans.
No such reward is waiting. The only Democrat whom Trump and the Republicans have any use for is one who is completely subservient to them. And if the vast majority of Americans truly understood the politics of our time, Trump would’ve lost in a landslide. He won because uninformed Americans bought into narratives about inflation, migrant invasions, and governmental ineptitude. The election said more about voter gullibility than voter desires.
Rather than start off in a position of weakness, the Democrats have to learn a bit from the Republicans—especially from the Obama era onward—and figure out how to be disruptive and obstructive. You may not have control of Congress or the White House, but you still have a decent bully pulpit and can rally your supporters and raise some bloody hell. Stop seeking common ground, and start seeking the higher ground—or even, hell, the lower ground, if that’s what it will take to defeat Trumpism. Above all else, don’t capitulate before the fight has even begun.
